Success stories:
McSwan and Hunt

McSwan and Hunt offers accounting and advisory services to their clients, with a philosophy of finding ways to add more value, at a fair price.

Their friendly team of eight people is focused on building strong relationships and clear client communication. They offer tax planning and tax compliance services, as well as a wide range of business advisory services and government grants that most accountants will usually not touch.

 

A lack of standardisation

McSwan and Hunt were experiencing an issue common to many firms, as one of the firm’s two partners, Oliver Hunt, explains:

“There were some things happening in our firm which made me realise we needed ChangeGPS. I'm very fortunate. I've been able to work in a lot of different accounting firms because of the consulting I've done and because of the business that I've owned in the past.”

“What I'd see is in a lot of firms is often not a lack of standardised practice. You go from one accountant to the next accountant and there'll be different materials and different ways of working.”

“So, the first thing that jumped out when I started at the firm was we didn't even have corporate structure maps for everybody. One of the big projects was to get in and build the maps to make sure that every single client knew how they should be operating their business. Such as, which entities were meant to be buying assets, which entities are meant to be trading, which ones are meant to be employing staff, etc. Being able to put that down for the clients and explain how they should be operating their business was useful for us.”

As Oliver explains, it can be very difficult to explain new structures to clients without the right tools in place:

“You're talking about different tax brackets, you're talking about asset protection, you're talking about how the money moves through the year and after the year. And they don't get it, even if you write it down on emails. And then if you've got to try and build that in Excel, it's ridiculously time consuming.”

Using ChangeGPS to minimise the technicalities of advice

With the goal of standardising corporate structure maps for the firm, Oliver took to embedding ChangeGPS within the firm’s practices. His previous life as a consultant had exposed him to this solution:

“I'd known about ChangeGPS before I got involved with this practice. I used to consult two accounting groups for a couple of years. Before that I used to own a large accounting franchise group. So I'd already decided I wanted to use it before I even started with McSwan and Hunt.”

McSwan and Hunt started off using the Core app for their large standardisation project, saving valuable time in the process:

“I knew how it could help and I knew it could standardise things and help us scale. And that was one of my big objectives when I started with the firm.”

“Just being able to go into ChangeGPS and go to our admin staff and say ‘Hey, can you get me a map that looks identical to this client?’ means I can be giving advice in very, very little time with very little work behind the technical explanation, which was a massive time suck for me.”

More time to add value to clients

With ChangeGPS successfully in place, McSwan and Hunt’s team now have more time back to focus on what matters:

“I get to spend all my time on bringing in new clients and adding value to my clients,” Oliver says. “Without ChangeGPS my worst nightmare would be a reality, with three different clients getting different advice from three different accountants for the exact same problem. We serviced our clients better with ChangeGPS, it has allowed us to pack in a lot more value in very little time.”

“Since I started just under six months ago, we’ve grown our practice by 50%. ChangeGPS has been so helpful for scaling and growing the firm faster.”

Oliver mentioned that the firm plans to use all four apps, which will be fully integrated within the firm within the next 12 to 18 months.

“There’s a lot of work to do, and things aren’t probably going to slow down anytime in the next few years. I'm not going to be sat on any beaches, sipping cocktails, or spending too much time on jet skis, but ChangeGPS is very much going to facilitate everything that's genuinely important to us and all the ambitions that we want to achieve.”