Business beaver (From Wiltshire Business Online)

Business beaver

10:50am Wednesday 4th June 2008

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NOT the easiest sympathy card to play, but you know accountants really do have a rough deal.

Now before you start shredding this column to confetti please hear me out. Newly-qualified, starry-eyed accountants soon learn to dread that question at a business or social gathering, "So what do you do?". Why? Because the stock answer. "I'm an accountant", will meet with one, if not all of three, responses.

You'll get roundly abused as the pariah of the business world living off the lifeblood of the hard-working business owner, be asked for free tax advice, or be totally ignored as your questioner wanders off to find someone far more interesting.

This stereotypical view was brought home to me again through an incident a couple of months ago. Like many other businesses, Morris Owen had an issue with emails, both from a global security angle and also from the commercial cost of linking emails to client records.

We came across a solution from a small software house which effectively resolved both issues. As our initial meeting drew to a close, the business owner ("John" for the purpose of this tale) admitted that it had been a long development slog but sales were now taking off and they were starting to struggle with the demand. I told him I'd welcome the opportunity to work with him.

John got back in touch and we fixed another meeting. At the start I tried to make it clear that I wanted to explore the market opportunity and sales channels with him but he kept drifting back to talking about management accounts and Sage!

Finally I told him I didn't want to discuss his accounts, I wanted to talk about the commercial pain that his product could help relieve in his potential market. From that point on the focus changed and we started exploring how he could exploit the opportunity. After an hour, John sat back and said "You're not really an accountant, are you?" I think I knew what he meant.

The moral of the story is yes, of course your accountant can do your accounts but he or she will almost certainly have a wealth of commercial expertise to tap into, so don't be afraid to use it. After all, if a commercial proposition isn't fully exploited we all know what the accounts are going to say!

• Contact Rob Harman at Morris Owen on 01793 603900

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