Insolvency: the new rock 'n' roll

Insolvency’s where it’s at. If you work in a large accounting practice and find yourself with time on your hands and yet wonder what’s keeping the guys down the corridor busy I’ll tell you – insolvency. business recovery corporate undertaking. It’s an accountancy business that is currently going bananas.
I switched on the BBC ten o’clock news and saw Nick Hood of Begbies Traynor getting airtime with dire predictions of big retailers going to the wall in the New Year. Another insolvency guy tells me he will only be taking Christmas day off and then he’ll be back in the office Boxing Day because insolvency among SMEs has exploded.
Ernst & Young are administrators at Zavvi, the record store, and Whittards, the tea and coffee merchant, Deloitte gets Woolworths, Mazars get The Pier, PwC the Officers Club and Lehmans. But there’s so much more to come. Sadly.
There was once a time when the meek and mild mannered newly qualified accountant might aspire to moving on to the glamour of corporate finance after a stint auditing, but now, if they have any sense, everyone who is anyone will want to get into insolvency. It’s where the action is. It is therefore the new accountancy rock ‘n’ roll
Let me have a go at a prediction for 2009. There are two lots of professionals who are going to dominate the TV news. People who value houses, because prices are still falling. And the business recovery specialist. They will be our sentinal through the coming economic storm, and we’ll use them as a weather vane indicating when the winds of recession have changed. Watch out for when they start to reveal a drop off in work.
Fortunes will be made in insolvency, reputations made and the revenues of significant firms bouyed up because their insolvency departments have got more work than you can shake a creditors register at. People will be clamouring to get in on the act.