Choosing an accountant for WandD

How much fun can you have in one day?

I spent all day yesterday meeting accountants. Following the advice from Business Link and others, I met three kinds of accountant / accountancy firm:

• 8 partners, 30 employees, nice offices near Embankment
• Smaller firm based further out from the centre of London
• Michael Austin, of blue dot consulting

As you will have guessed from the descriptions, we've chosen Michael as our accountant. The main part of the decision was a gut-feel trust of him and the enthusiasm he has for helping our business succeed. Even in the first (free) meeting, he was brainstorming ideas to help us succeed and suggesting ways of maximising our chances.

In addition, he will help us set up our systems to handle most of our own bookkeeping and offers advice and regular meetings for a flat-rate. It didn't hurt that he laughed at me for bringing my checklist of 10 things to ask your prospective accountant and any time I lapsed into consultant speak and said things like 'vertical segment'. I told him I was meeting other accountants on the same day and he asked 'how much fun can you have in one day?'. A big part of the reason for choosing blue dot consulting is that the meeting with him was fun.

Another interesting part of the day was that one of the other firms may actually become a client of ours, which would be an interesting sales pitch, but more on that later.

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