Mid-Tier Power Index Profile: Wilson Partners

In September, Accountancy Age proudly launched the inaugural edition of the Mid-Tier Power Index (MTPI): a brand new ranking designed to highlight excellence in the accounting industry’s mid-market.

The MTPI seeks to go beyond typical, financial metrics. While Profitability & Growth was taken into account, the entrants were also assessed on Strategic Planning, Professional Excellence, and People & Community.

Securing 22nd place in the ranking was Berkshire-based Wilson Partners. During a conversation with Accountancy Age, the firm’s director, Allen Wilson, outlines how a laser focus on culture, professional development and strategic hires has proved to be a recipe for success.

Strategic Planning – ‘The power of technology’

AW: As a business, we took some investment around 12 months ago with a view to really accelerating our growth ambitions. As a firm we’ve grown strongly and organically for the last 14 years since we started, but this was intended to really accelerate that and basically build a top-25 tax, accounting and advisory business.

So from a strategic point of view, we will now compliment the strong organic growth that we’ve enjoyed and will continue to strive to enjoy, with making some acquisitions of like-minded businesses along the way.

And we’ve got some pretty clear revenue, profitability and personnel metrics for reaching that top-25 status, in addition to things like technology capabilities. We’re big believers in the power of technology, not just from an efficiency point of view, but to make doing business really easy and enjoyable.

People & Community – Becoming ‘the employer of choice’

AW: I think a key part of the success we’ve enjoyed to date has been about creating a really strong culture within the business and putting people at the center of everything we do. And that was demonstrated 12 months ago when we decided to take on a head of employee experience for the first time.

For me, that hire was about much more than HR. It’s about every element of the employee experience so that we can be the employer of choice, retain our top talent, continue to attract top talent, and make sure we’re continuing to build a place where everyone can develop and have a purposeful role.

An in the six months she’s been with us, it’s been absolutely fantastic – one of the best hires we’ve ever made. And I think we can really see how that platform we’re building will have some real benefits in the future.

We’ve also taken a lot of action around the professional development and training of our team. So whilst we have the usual continuous professional development that all other firms have, we’re committed to going a lot further than that.

So one of our current projects is the ‘WP Academy’, which is intended to bring much more structure around L&D for our team. And that’s from trainee level right the way up to future managers and leaders of the firm.

And that encompasses everything from sales, soft skills, and personal development, in addition to supplementing that with one-to-one coaching sessions for anyone who wants them.

So obviously that serves the business in terms of clients receiving a better service, but it also helps our staff to better themselves and their career progression.

Professional Excellence – ‘Disciplined’ approach to new business

AW: As a firm that provides a significant amount of value added advisory services, we’re often meeting or exceeding challenging objectives. That means we’ll turn down work where we feel we don’t have the bandwidth to ensure the highest service levels and professional integrity.

As an example, in the last 10 months we have chosen to turn away over £350k of work within our financial due diligence team to ensure service levels are met at all times.

Being in the fortunate position of generating a consistent level of opportunities, we can be disciplined about the work we take on and where we feel an existing client, or potential client, isn’t aligned with our values and the way we work. In this situation, we’ll look to disengage and direct them elsewhere.

As part of this, our professional staff are provided with the core training they need to maintain and enhance their skills. This is where the WP academy is coming into play – it’s providing additional training in areas such as sales, client account management and a monthly session on personal development topics. This contributes to making our professionals more rounded advisers and

Profitability & Growth – ‘Not profit for profit’s sake’

AW: Historically we’ve enjoyed really strong revenue and profit growth year-on-year. So over the last year we’ll be 25% up on the previous year, and we’ve enjoyed that kind of strong double digit growth since the entity started.

Obviously we’ll now be supplementing that with our inorganic growth. So in the year to August, we will have gone from around £4.4m in revenue to just short of £8m, through a combination of organic growth and acquisitions.

Doing that profitably is obviously a key consideration. It’s not profit for profit’s sake, but it does of course drive our ability to invest into the business, our people, technology, and being able to serve our clients much better.

So I’m always keen to stress this – profit is not some kind of dirty word – it’s just what we need to continue to invest in ourselves.

What are the firm’s biggest challenges right now?

AW: The recruitment of more senior talent has been and will always be a challenge. And everyone you talk to at the moment says how difficult it is to recruit good people, but I don’t think it’s actually ever been any different. It may be slightly more acute now, but I’d say that’s a fairly everlasting issue for this industry.

So we’re expecting that, as part of our growth ambitions, we’ll be able to compete more with other firms when it comes to that. We’re hoping that by building our employer brand, which we are quite focused on, that will help with attracting talent.

The other one will be finding quality, like-minded businesses that want to come on our journey with us. But in a similar way to our clients, we’re quite disciplined and discerning about who we want to bring on that journey with us – we’re not trying to build a bag of bits and slap a logo on. We’re trying to build a truly integrated firm that looks and feels like one business with one culture.

What are the firm’s plans for the near future?

AW: It’s that continue acquisition activity – so throughout the next year we’ll look to add two or three acquisitions.

We’ve also got a lot going on in terms of the WP academy and the people side of things.

We’ve also mapped out a five-year plan which has a roadmap of various projects split into the different years that we want to try and achieve. So, a lot of that is around people, but there are also elements around technology improvements and the M&A activity.

And we’ve actually just added an operational improvement manager, which again we wouldn’t have done previously if we weren’t looking to ambitiously grow. So having that kind of resource in-house to consistently and continuously look at how we can improve the way we do things will be really important.

The full rankings for the Accountancy Age Mid-Tier Power Index 2022 can be viewed here.