“Creating dreams worth fighting for” is more than just a tagline for Shepparton accounting firm Perta Thomson Partners; it’s the very essence of what it strives to achieve not only for its clients but also for its staff.
Celebrating 20 years in business as this financial year comes to a close, one of the firm’s two founding partners, Brian Thomson, says the journey has been a varied and enjoyable one.
Along with Lou Perta, Mr Thomson opened books to clients in 2004 at their first office in Nixon St, Shepparton.
Within four years, they had outgrown the space, and the business took up residence in what is still its current office in Welsford St.
As their clientele, and, in turn, workforce grew, they encroached further into the office building.
“Every time we found a bit more space in the building, we took it over and filled it up,” Mr Thomson said.
They started with one location and a handful of staff and now employ around 35, with six partners and one associate at the helm of four locations in Shepparton (head office), Melbourne, Geelong and Cobram.
In the beginning, their business focused mainly on tax compliance, but these days, it offers a full suite of business services from advisory to wealth management and bookkeeping.
“It just seemed like a natural thing to be able to help clients with those next stages,” Mr Thomson said.
“We’d like to think these days clients aren’t coming to us like a trip to the dentist once a year, thinking they’ve got to go and hoping it doesn’t hurt too much and worried they’re going to get a tax bill from us.”
He said if they knew where they were financially, clients would see their client managers as more their partners in business helping them get to where they wanted to be.
“We want to share those successes,” Mr Thomson said.
Technology seems to be the most popular answer for everyone about what has most changed over the course of their long-standing businesses and for Perta Thomson Partners, it’s no different.
“I wouldn’t want to be doing it the way we did it at the start; it’s just gotten easier and easier and it’s made that connection with clients a lot more streamlined with the cloud,” Mr Thomson said.
“It’s just allowed us to move from being plain number crunchers to fulfilling the tax office needs and being able to sit with clients with current data and talk about their futures and what’s getting in their way causing problems for them.
“It’s changed our conversations to be much more meaningful with them and impactful.”
He said most businesses they dealt with were run by people who were great at what they did, but had never been taught the “business side” of running a business.
Perta Thomson Partners’ role is helping business owners to stay on top of their challenges without getting consumed by them.
“We’re trying to make sure they get home to their families at a decent time and have balance in their life,” Mr Thomson said.
“When you ask them if the business is working for them, most of the time you hear ‘I work twice as long now, can’t take holidays, cash flow financially scares me’.”
He said it was all the things they didn’t wish on anybody, so their role was to try to alleviate that pressure.
Mr Thomson said that for about the first 10 years, he and his partners ran with an “old-school model” of accounting but had adopted a more modern approach to processes and managing their team throughout the past 10.
Staff are encouraged to train further if they’re interested in learning something they’re not qualified to do in the firm. It has (gladly) lost several of its administration staff to accountancy and other roles within the business.
They are also supported to move between the business’ four locations if they seek a change of scenery.
“As the younger team are coming through and wanting to move to Melbourne, they can stay with the firm and move down there and then we’re not losing talent either,” Mr Thomson said.
“We work on the basis that with our team, for everyone, we’re developing career paths for them; where we go to and how big we grow depends on the team.
“If they’re passionate and they want to really reach out and do things, it will just naturally grow.”
Mr Thomson said there weren’t any current plans to open more branches, but it wouldn’t be off the cards if an opportunity presented.
"We use systems that work in all the offices, so people can work remotely on different files,“ he said.
“We would see no reason why we wouldn’t pick up another firm anywhere in Australia.
“If a client manager decided they wanted to move to Queensland and we thought they had the talent to look after a firm, we would have a look at what’s up there and ask them if they’d be interested in doing that.”
The team will celebrate the 20-year milestone by spending a weekend together at a central location to all offices at the end of the month.