Steve's LinkedIn profile

I came from a very working-class upbringing, and I didn't go to college because I didn't want to. I did not enjoy school, and my dad made me choose accountancy as an option and I absolutely hated it. I just didn't understand the whole double entry thing and I vowed I would never become a chartered accountant.

When it came to leaving school, I didn't want to go back to college so I got the only job I could as a junior accounts clerk working for a plant hire business. They sent me on day release doing BTEC business and finance and after that I started AAT. After a while I dropped out of that - I just wanted to earn money and go out at weekends with my friends. I didn't want to do all this studying bit. A few years later, I began to realise that to make something of your life, you're going to have to work at it. 

I still didn’t enjoy accountancy, but I worked for two years at a DIY business and part of my job was dealing with the auditors at the year end. One of the auditors explained what they do as auditors, and I thought I would absolutely love to do it. She told me that I needed to leave that job and get a training contract, and that's how I ended up coming into practice at LWA Ltd at the age of 23. I found that I was really good at accountancy once I grasped the double entry side of everything - I’m quite good at double entry now!

I came here as a junior and I got through my AAT this time round, then I went straight onto ACCA and failed the first couple of exams because I underestimated the difficulty of them. Once I realised that ACCA was on a completely different level, I got my head down and sailed through the rest of them all. 

Since then, I’ve written several books and countless articles and that has opened up a lot of avenues for me – I’ve even won a couple of awards along the way. I do a lot of training and I work with ACCA writing technical factsheets. I also spent five years on the UK GAAP technical advisory group at the Financial Reporting Council. 

LWA is a mixed practice with 18 staff, two offices, and it's headed up by myself and Les Leavitt. In any successful practice you need two parts to the circle to complete the regulatory and commercial aspects of client relationships. Les and I dovetail exceptionally well. Les’s role helps clients with many commercial aspects including growth planning, merger and acquisitions as well as tax planning opportunities. We use a number of trusted third parties to flex up and down for more complicated transactions.

We have a tax department, and a team that specialises in all the apps available, so the clients aren't left behind with developments in technology. In terms of audit clients, we don't have any public interest entity clients - I don't feel that we're big enough to take on those sorts of clients. My biggest clients have a turnover of about £60-£70 million a year. Our smallest clients can be businesses like sole trader window cleaners, so we have a great portfolio of clients that have mostly come to us via referral. 

We have several specialisms including sports tax and we act for a lot of sports people - including rugby players and Premier League football players. Sports people don't have accounts as such because of the way that they are remunerated. High profile sports people can have very complex tax affairs – they often have high salaries which can come under the radar of HMRC because of contentious issues like agent fees. They may also have other forms of income such as income from image rights, many may have involvements in other companies, some may have property companies which need accounts - so there are quite a lot of complex areas in sports tax. It isn’t just an employer/employee relationship that a sports person has with their club – there are all sorts of agents in the background, contracts to look at, and tax planning issues to deal with. It is a niche area, and one that we have seen expand quite a bit for our practice.

I think the most pressing issue for practitioners is increased regulation - particularly for auditors. There is a huge responsibility now - there are so many rules and regulations, ethical standards, quality management standards, all the ISAs (UK) are constantly being updated and it's trying to keep abreast of all these changes. Alongside the increased regulation is increased scrutiny from professional bodies and regulators in the form of monitoring visits. So I think the regulatory side is a particular challenge on top of clients’ never ending demand to have things immediately. The technology side of our job has created a bit of a problem for us in that we're expected to do things much faster, and while tech does help to expedite things quicker, the job itself is very demanding so there are countless requests to deal with during a typical day.

To the untrained eye it might seem like I constantly have my head in an accounting standards book but I like going on holidays, watching Warrington Wolves, socialising, skiing (if you can call it that), and I've got a big birthday coming up at the end of this year as well, so there's lots of parties on the horizon that will keep me out of FRS 102 as well.