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Mark started his career at Ernst & Young writing transaction reports for corporates being sold, then walked away from big-business M&A to work with his dad in the family accountancy practice, the one his dad had spent 30 years turning into a growth-focused consulting firm for entrepreneurial SMEs. Years on, Mark has taken those big-firm disciplines pricing analysis, forward forecasting, Michael Porter's competitive strategy and applied them to a corner of the market where most accountancy firms rarely go beyond filing tax returns. In this conversation, he unpacks the "consulting accountant" model, the frameworks he brings to every founder, and why forward-facing beats historical every time.

In this episode:

• Why Mark walked away from Ernst & Young's transaction services team to join his dad's accountancy practice, and the reverse psychology that seems to have worked
• The "consulting accountant" phrase, borrowed from Rick Payne, and Mark's blunt take that most SME accountants are great historians but poor strategists
• The full-day (or half-day) in-person planning session that starts every client relationship, with personal objectives before business objectives
• Why he treats costs as resources: renaming the P&L, spotting the areas where founders are chronically under-investing training, marketing, people
• Peter Drucker's line that the purpose of a business is to create results outside yourself, and Michael Porter's two-part framework: create value, then capture value
• Why pricing is one of the biggest untapped levers in SME businesses, and Mark's simple rule for choosing clients if they can't get 10x the value back, don't work with them
• Michael Gerber's "the boss doesn't have a boss" problem, and why the accountability of a monthly meeting with an outsider often does more than any tool inside the business
• OKRs (courtesy of Measure What Matters), cascading business plans, and the client who has every single person in the organisation present their own mini business plan at an annual day
• Rick Payne's shift from Key Performance Indicators to Key Predictive Indicators, and the "desert island" test for how few metrics you actually need
• The Harkham property client (Mark's own brother-in-law and brother) that grew from six people to 30 by taking the process to heart, and the dental practice founder who stepped out of clinical work and eventually sold with far less stress than she expected
• The "Draw Toast" TED Talk exercise Mark uses to visualise how a business actually serves customers, and the moments of innovation that fall out of drawing rather than talking
• HIPPO the Highest Paid Person's Opinion and why Mark's first question in a strategy session always goes to the person with the least equity and the least influence in the room
• The mini MBA programme Mark runs with Paul three topics (leadership, finance, competitive strategy), ten business owners a year, three hours a month, and a business simulation game that has founders running a fake company on eight decisions a month
• Working alongside other accountants rather than poaching them, and why Mark's firm trains 60 other accountancy firms in the same approach
• Mark's definition of true wealth: having choices, and never playing with scared money

A conversation about the forward-looking discipline that almost every SME accountant leaves on the table, and why the founders who get it done tend to end up with far more optionality than the ones who don't.

Book and resource recommendations: The Go-Giver by Bob Burg, What is Strategy by Michael Porter (Harvard Business Review), The Goal by Eliyahu Goldratt, Measure What Matters by John Doerr, and the Happiness Lab podcast.

This podcast is produced by Tribunista

Sponsored by Capital Partners