Just about every podcast I’ve been a guest on starts with my story.
How did I end up running a marketing agency exclusively for accountants? How do those two qualities – creativity and accounting – come together, and how do they work now?
It’s my origin story. It’s the one everyone cares about: not just me, but all of us as business owners.
People care about where you came from, how you got started, and how it all adds up over time.
Many of us didn’t “set out” to be what we are today. I didn’t set out to be a qualified accountant, and when I moved to Scotland I didn’t do that so I could build a marketing agency and eventually move to a remote Scottish island. The way I moved into things was slowly, one at a time, and the pattern only becomes evident later.
That’s why we love stories.
At this time, you might be in a tough place. Your business isn’t growing as quickly as it was, or your clients are struggling and so are you. You’re starting a new business. Everything is changing by the second with AI and it’s hard to keep up. You want to see patterns, believe it’s going to work out. Listening to someone else’s origin story reminds you how it does.
Here’s mine. (To hear more of it, listen to the Accounting High podcast for a fuller version, and this Jason Staats podcast for a more concise version.)
1. I didn’t grow up wanting to be an accountant
When I was younger, I saw myself as a creative person. I loved photography and drawing, was often reading and writing, and loved crafts. When I went to university, I therefore assumed accounting would be boring, and not for me. I did what most people do and presumed I knew what accounting was (without actually knowing anything about what it was).
And then I found myself taking an Introduction to Accounting course at university, which I was required to take. And the class fed right into my presumptions, my stereotypes: I didn’t understand it. This stuff was hard. Loads of numbers, none of which made sense. But I needed to pass the class, so I decided to try reading the book and…it all clicked. There was logic to this. There are debits and there are credits, and they must balance. It worked!
I also had a professor (Dr Nancy Wilburn, thanks Dr Nancy!) who made accounting real by connecting financial statements to actual businesses. We did a case study on Pepsi and I discovered how many other companies were connected or owned by it (Taco Bell, KFC, etc.). She helped me see how numbers in a profit & loss statement or a balance sheet connected to real life.
This is what accountants do: you help your clients see how their numbers connect to their business, their life. You make it make sense.
After two years, when I had the opportunity to stop taking accounting classes, I realised I didn’t want to. The accounting ones actually challenged and intrigued me most. I wasn’t sure how I’d use it, but I decided accounting was a useful foundation, and began studying it in earnest.
2. I kept doing the next thing
From this point, I didn’t think, “Okay, so this means I’ll graduate with an accounting degree, get an accounting qualification, work as an auditor,” and so on. I simply…did the next thing.
First I got the degree, and then I looked around at my friends who also graduated in accountancy and saw they were getting their CPA qualification. Okay, I guess I’ll do that, I thought. It ended up taking several years, four attempts, two years of being supervised by another CPA, and finally I had my qualification. I had gotten a job as an auditor so I kept doing that, until the day I decided to take a trip to Scotland.
People often want to hear that was a career move, or a calculated plan of some kind. It really wasn’t. I was bored as an auditor. I was young and didn’t have any reason not to. So I…went to Scotland for six weeks.
As it happened, I fell in love with the country. I don’t know if I even recognised that at the time: i just knew I wanted to come back and stay longer. So I did. And I got a job at a local accounting firm just for something to do. (It so happened that they had been looking for an auditor for about nine months and had finally given up looking: so they were very surprised to get a call from a qualified auditor who wanted a job!)
They applied for the work permit, it got approved, and I worked there for nearly five years. At first as an auditor, but very quickly they spotted that there might be potential to move me into another role, and they asked if I was interested in this new “business development” thing they were getting into.
I had no idea what that was, but it involved going to a conference in Stratford upon Avon for three days, so I said yes – and discovered what marketing and business development was. It meant taking everything I knew about accounting, and translating it so that business owners could understand how it affected them. It meant running workshops with those business owners, and being in sales meetings, and eventually leading all the sales meetings and building a system around it.
This part I really started to enjoy.
3. I spoke both languages: the accounting side, and the business owner side
I set up a business development division within the firm, with its own office. I set up monthly live seminars for business owners, and did all the marketing to get them to come, and to keep coming. I followed the processes from a business development network we were members of, and I made them my own. (I do feel now, looking back, that being 25 and having the guts to stand in front of a roomful of business owners and tell them the things they needed to do was…something.)
But I was genuinely good at connecting concepts, and helping people see the bigger picture. This is where the glimmer began of what I would end up choosing to do: I could speak both languages. I understood the accounting side, and I could look at it from the client’s perspective too. I could help business owners with the creative part of marketing, and I could understand when they talked about operating profit and net assets and balance sheets.
This duality would eventually become the marketing agency I built. But first, I left the accounting firm, to work with more accountants.
4. I spent years working with accountants, seeing the same problem
After about five years of working in the accounting firm, the partners decided they didn’t want to do the business development/advisory thing anymore. They wanted to return to just compliance – doing the accounts, taxes, and payroll. No problem: to each their own. But what was going to happen to me, to my role?
“You can be an auditor again”, they told me. Hmm, no thanks. I was really enjoying the business development work. At the time the firm was a member of a network of accounting firms – the organisation who built the processes and systems we used to deliver advisory work. Boxes of CD’s became downloadable software, and eventually an online app. When I told them what was happening with the accounting firm, they offered me the role of running the European division of their network of accountants.
I really enjoyed that work, and helped a lot of accountants: but over time I kept seeing the same gap.
Accountants got lots of good advice about marketing: they needed a good brand. Their website needed to improve. They needed to create content, run webinars, do consistent marketing.
The accountants agreed. They knew they needed these things. And still, they were left wondering how to do it. Who to hire. They had to find a branding agency, then a web developer, then somebody to write the content, then somebody else for email, video, events, and so on. Every time, they had to repeat the same story, the same strategy.
And most of the time, none of the people helping them really understood accounting. So they had to explain that, too. Over, and over.
The accountant ended up being the orchestra conductor when they didn’t even know the song.
5. Enter PF, the marketing agency for accountants
From working with hundreds of accountants I saw the missing piece. What if accountants could work with one agency that already understood accounting AND marketing, and could connect all the pieces?
Not merely tell them what to do, but help them actually do it.
I saw that I was unusually placed to build that because I was a qualified accountant myself. I qualified as an accountant, worked as an auditor and in an accounting firm. I understood marketing. And I was someone who naturally thought creatively and communicated well.
So in 2012, I set up The Profitable Firm.
The original idea was simply to help accountants with marketing. To bridge it all together: the strategy, the brand, the website – and also the emails, blogs, social media, video, and content.
I wanted to help as many accountants as possible, so I accepted any accountant who wanted to work with me.
Sometimes I did consulting, advising them about what marketing might be best to do. Other times I’d go to the firm’s offices and work directly from there a few days a week. I built websites from scratch (including my own). I wrote blog posts and emails and ran webinars on behalf of firms. I remember dashing off a social post late at night because one of my clients won an award, and helping them write the blog post early the next morning.
I learned a lot about what it feels like to be a business owner doing marketing, too. The name “The Profitable Firm” took about four minutes to decide on. The original branding was thrown together based on another company originally connected to mine. The blues and greys were borrowed from that logo – very traditional, very “classic accountant”.
Over time, things changed. I parted ways with my business partner because we wanted different things. I marketed The Profitable Firm as more of a “creative agency”, rebranded, and followed our clients’ lead to simply refer to it as PF.
6. Accounting + creativity were never opposites
At the beginning, I thought I was creative, so therefore accounting wasn’t for me. My career showed me those things actually fit together extremely well. And now, a big part of my work (including my new book, “Accountants, You Are Creative”) is about helping accountants see the same thing in themselves.
Ultimately, my skills are in connection, and translation.
I naturally connect:
- Numbers to real life
- Accountant to their client
- Technical expertise into human language
- Strategy into implementation
- Creativity into structure
My favourite definition of marketing is:
Try shit.
If it works, do more of that shit.
Do less of the shit that doesn’t work.
And keep trying shit.
This is what I’ve done, from origin to now. I try something, notice what happens, follow the interesting bit, and do more of what works. Even my first book, The Accountant Marketer, came to be when I gathered all the content I’d written in 12 areas of marketing and discovered I had 60,000 words.
I genuinely like accountants. You’re good people, who care about your clients. And I get frustrated on your behalf by the stereotype that accountants are boring, uncreative or poor marketers. And since I can see the gap between how good you actually are, and how effectively you communicate that to the world (often a big gap), I want to help you close that gap.
7. The next five years
I remember a business coach who pointed out that my career seems to have gone in five-year blocks.
Work as an auditor.
Work in an accounting firm doing business development.
Work for a network of accounting firms.
Set up PF with a business partner.
Pivot to making it a creative agency I fully owned.
Hire a full team of employees.
And now… run the same agency with a smaller core team and a bank of outsourcers.
Each of these blocks was at least 4 to 5 years.
Which means, I’m currently in the midst of building a new block. I have some ideas, more books, some work on the PF model, and some extremely exciting things I’m in the middle of testing, so… stay tuned. Because I keep staying alert for interesting shit, doing more of it.
What’s your origin story? Where have you told it?
