Humanise The Numbers - for ambitious accountants in practice

Alasdair McGill, Managing Director of Ashton McGill

• Doug Aitken and Alasdair McGill

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When you have a background in the big four accounting firms, a background in design thinking and a background with a deep desire to be curious and  ask lots of great questions... 

…how does that all come together when you set up a firm later in life with your son? 

In this wide-ranging conversation with Alasdair McGill, of Ashton McGill, we cover a lot of ground. 

We discuss the education system and how it often seems to stifle our natural curiosity and diminish our ability to ask questions. 

We talk about the future of the profession, and we talk about how Alasdair is very intentional about everything that he does within Ashton McGill. It's a great conversation. I really enjoyed it and I’m sure you will too. 

Go to humanisethenumbers.online or wherever you get your podcasts from to listen to this episode. Oh, and better still, if you like it, please hit the subscribe button. 

You can scroll down the podcast’s episode page for the contact information for Alasdair and for the additional, downloadable resources mentioned in the podcast.

Paul Shrimpling:

Welcome to the Humanize the Numbers podcast series. Leaders, managers, and owners of ambitious accounting firms sharing insights, successes, and issues that'll challenge you and connect you and your firm to the ways and means of transforming your firm's results.

Alasdair McGill:

Because if you think about it, people set up a business usually because they have learned a skill or they've been an expert in something and they've reached a frustration point within that business they worked in. And they've thought, I could do this better, I'm gonna take control of my own destiny, I'm gonna build my own business. And off they go on that journey. And the reality is that the majority of them are not accountants. I think across our entire client base of 230 or so businesses, we might have three accountants. The rest aren't. But they're brilliant at PR, or they're brilliant at making beer, or they're brilliant at whatever that thing is that has been their passion that they've turned into a business. Like we can never teach them that. But what we can teach them are the business disciplines, because often they don't have that. They've worked somewhere, they've seen someone that frustrated them as a manager or a leader, and so they've decided to take control of their own destiny.

Speaker 2:

How do you make a positive impact on your client's business? And what does that actually look like? How do you get buy-in from your team and your clients? Well, on this podcast, you'll hear Alistair McGill of Ashton McGill dive into these topics along with design thinking and what the future holds for accounting. Let's go to that podcast now.

Alasdair McGill:

I'm Alistair McGill. I'm co-founder and managing director of Ashton McGill. We're an accounting and consulting firm based in Dundee, Scotland, working with 200 or so ambitious business owners across the length and breadth of the UK. And today um I'm wearing my Dundee Football Club uh sweatshirt. I'm the CFO at the football club as well, who are one of our clients. So um, yeah, any football fans out there, that's the uh that's the tenuous link.

Douglas Aitken:

Fabulous. Um well welcome to the podcast, Alistair. Thanks for giving up your time. Um I did actually see the the crest earlier and thought I wondered what that was. Yeah, so you've answered that.

Alasdair McGill:

It was a new kit day at the club on Friday, so I came off with like a carrier bag full of stuff. So uh had to be worn.

Douglas Aitken:

Okay, we'll delve into um uh a little bit more about the firm and due course, Alistair, but we're starting with our time on our tradition of asking you about uh this is called the humanize the numbers podcast. So, what does that phrase actually mean to you?

Alasdair McGill:

I love it, first of all. It's what I've spent most of my career trying to do without perhaps having the language that you so beautifully use to describe it. For me, you know, numbers are just numbers and and and sometimes words on a bit of paper. And I've always felt that our job as accountants is to try to bring those to life for the people that we work with and all of the stakeholders really in the process. Um, and and you know, it's something we talk about a lot within Ashton McGill. It's been a part of our core purpose about making business and finance easier for business owners to understand. And one of the examples I often give, Doug, is when you look at a PL and you just see black and white words and numbers, it's hard for that to mean a great deal. It's you know ultimately it's the measure, right, of success of our businesses, of our organizations, but but that's just one thing. And uh you know, payroll is one of the numbers I always jump into because I think that tells so many stories. And you can look at a PL and you know, and that maybe has a um uh staff cost and employee cost of stuff, let's just say £250,000, which is good, is bad, is indifferent, who knows? But actually, if you dig behind that, what £250,000 means is possibly eight people, eight families, and all that that money does in their lives and in their communities. And I think when we start to think about numbers in that way, then it brings them to life, it changes things. So for me, that's really what humanize the numbers means is giving those numbers life.

Douglas Aitken:

Yeah, brilliant. Yeah, it's made me think about uh a firm we worked with um where they insisted on having a photograph of every client at the front of the file. Just so that people knew that's who you're working for today. And it's really simple, isn't it? But just we things like that start putting a human element to completely, you know, and uh most of us, like our peers, if you like, within the types of businesses we are.

Alasdair McGill:

We work with ambitious business owners, change makers, we call them, we like to call them, and they're maybe running businesses that are two million to five million revenue, they're not corporate organizations, and so actually what we're really doing is we're looking after, we're serving people, and those people happen to own businesses, and it's not the business that's our client, it's the people that own the business, the people behind the business, the people that work within the business. So I love that putting a picture of the client, um, and and just that brings it to life for everybody, doesn't it?

Douglas Aitken:

Yeah, definitely. Um, tell us a bit about your background, Alistair, um, early days and your way.

Alasdair McGill:

This could take the whole podcast. Um, I left school in 1986, grew up in Perth, which is about 30 minutes down the road from where I'm sitting just now, and um uh careers advice was very different back in those days, Doug. And I happened to be good at numbers and I was interested in business, and so I was kind of nudged towards an accounting career. I actually originally applied to Dundee, well, it was Dundee College of Technology, it's now Abertay University, but I had a place there to study accounting and economics. But 17-year-old Alistair liked the idea of earning money, and uh, there was an apprenticeship that came up at a firm called Turnbull Kemp in Perth, and I applied for it and was lucky enough to be offered that job. Um, I think it was my my starting salary was £3,600 per annum. Um funny thinking back on that, but that for me that was that was kind of the route into the world of business ultimately and and finance. And um, I left there after a couple of years to join Arthur Young, the precursor to Ernston Young. Um, and that was that was the best thing I ever did. It was great um career development, great training, being part of a I think at the time big six firm uh who had an office in Perth, and I moved through to their Dundee office not long after joining. Brilliant training. Um quickly qualified, passed all my exams. I was the only non-graduate in my whole team of you know 80 people, uh, which kind of makes you fight for everything, and that's always been a part of who I am. I suppose that's that talks to the sport side of my life. Um, left there in 93 to join a client. I'd gone there on secondment as their financial controller, and within well, by 95, I was the MD of the group uh working with the chairman. And we built that up through the 90s to um with I think half a dozen different businesses. We had a construction business, single ply roofing for any um any roofing geeks and specialists. I can still tell a single ply roof um from a distance, spot them all over the place. You're in a hotel, you look at a flat roof and it's generally a single ply roof. Um, we owned one of the first data cabling businesses in Scotland, um, which was based in Livingston, and back in those days, we installed the first electronic ticketing systems for Rangers and Celtic and also the first wireless network in Livingston. It was at St. John's Hospital in Livingston. And in those days, believe it or not, um, the way a wireless network worked was you had little nodes, they were little things that stuck on the wall. That was where the wireless signal um throughout the building worked, and then you had a basically a desktop computer. Young people will not know what that was, but you and I were all we're of a certain vintage, so we'll we all know that. But you so you had this desktop computer with a big screen, you know, the big screen that was the size of a table, um, and you wheeled that about the hospital, and you got close enough to a node and you could access the information on a server, it was like magic. Um we did that. We bought in 1996, 97, we uh we bought a bakery business. Um, we were making gattos and cheesecakes at an industrial scale and selling them to hotel chains all over the UK. We bought a snooker club business in Falkirk in 1997, which we then built out into a group of snooker clubs and American pool bars across central Scotland, all sorts of things, Doug. I mean, from a learning business, an entrepreneurship point of view, it was just the best fun. And I think around the end of that was when you and I first met, the early 2000s, perhaps, 99, 2000 or so. And um uh to cut a really long story short, moved on from that organization. The chairman and I had differing views on the way forward, and um, so we parted company. And I spent the 2000s doing a few different things. I'd uh I left that group with one of the companies, which I ended up selling to a business in Aberdeen, moved to Aberdeen in 2004, um built a couple of other things and came back to the world of accounting in 2008, um, when I was brought in as an interim CEO of one of the big contractor accounting businesses. Again, our paths crossed back in those days. We had 130 staff in Aberdeen, two and a half thousand clients. We were one of the larger contractor accounting businesses. My job wasn't to be an accountant, it was to turn that business around. It's the time of the managed service company legislation to date myself again. Um fascinating period, and we were working with uh Ernst and Young in London and QCs in London. So I was up and down the country on planes doing all of the work with them, understanding legislation, trying to build a new business model effectively. It's one of those cliches, you know, but the roadrunner when he's putting the the track down as the train's battling down, we were doing that and and having to figure things out on the fly and create a profitable business model once again. Did that till about 2013, and that was the point where at that point my kids had left home, they were both at university, college, and um I was working on a project in Brighton that summer, um, related to that company, and my wife was in Inveruri, the other end of the country, and just made no sense. So we decided to move back to Berthshire where we now live. We both have family, um aging family close to here, and it just was the right thing to be closer to them and and also just to be able to spend time with my wife rather than travelling all over the country. I then did uh so had come out of that contracted accounting business and spent a couple of years as this is the most fun I've one of the most fun things I've done. I I was the head of entrepreneurship at the University of Dundee for two and a half years. Um so my job was to come in. Um they didn't that was this was a new role. Scottish Government were putting funding behind entrepreneurship within higher education, and Dundee University were one of the pioneers at the time in this field, and and I was asked and then appointed, uh I was asked to be and then appointed as their head of enterprise and entrepreneurial strategy. So my job was basically to figure out what the university's strategy should be. It was great fun. I mean, I was travelling around the world getting to go and visit entrepreneurial universities and trying to cherry-pick the best of what people were doing, bring that back and design a strategy for Dundee, and and uh we did that. We built the strategy around design, which probably will lead us shortly into Ashton McGill. But Dundee is as people may people may know, it's the only UNESCO city of design in the UK. We also have the only, well, I think there's maybe now one other um VA museum of design outside of London, but at the time Dundee was um building our VA museum, and also we have one of the top art and design schools in the country at Duncan of Jordanston. So, with all of those things, it made sense for us to try and build a strategy around design. And what that meant in reality was that every student that came through the University of Dundee, and it endures to this day, would learn the principles of design thinking, how to think differently. Um, whether you're studying design or medicine or life sciences or accounting or law or computing, every student is introduced to the concept of design thinking. And then we created a whole structure of modules throughout the curriculum, both both um uh what do they call them, elective modules and also modules you have to do. Um, it was just great fun. I still do a bit of teaching back there to this day. Um but one of the things I found of with working inside of a university is that they're quite slow-moving based. And I was used to the world of entrepreneurship, and you know, in the the world of entrepreneurship, short term means tomorrow or next week, whereas in the university, short term is next next um academic year or a five-year sort of window. And so that pace of implementation began to be quite frustrating. And I was doing this three days a week, and the other couple of days a week, I was doing some non-exec work, a bit of CF work within uh businesses across the country, and really enjoying that. Um, and also I guess what I didn't mention was I have a background in all of that period in what's called service design, um, which is really the manifestation of design thinking and bringing that to services and how can we create services that are enjoyable for humans to interact with. Um and I was doing a bit of consulting in those days. People will still use the terms customer experience. That really is what service design is in the business world. And we were doing customer experience work with people like RBS, St. James's Place, Volkswagen. I was part of the team that created the VA Museum of Design's Design for Business programme. We created a design for business master's programme at Dundee University. And about that time, my son Andy, who by now would be at that point maybe 22, 23, um, was and Andy's background is advertising and PR. Um and he's also studied a bit of graphic design. We were starting to do the odd project together. I still don't remember now, it's terrible. I should know the origin story of how we started doing that, but I don't have it. But we started to do a few projects together, and and Andy's design skills, the graphic design skills, but also the PR advertising angle, just worked really nicely with what I was doing in customer experience. And so we started to run, uh started to deliver projects together. And in 2016, Zero brought us in. So this brings us back to the world of accounting. Zero brought us in to run Mike Day, was the education director at the time. Mike asked us to come and run a masterclass. Uh well, it was first of all, it was their summer education programme, that's what it was called. Um, they don't do that anymore, but in those days they did. They had about 4,000 accounting partners back then, 2016. So it's dramatically different now, nine years on. But they had recognized that one of the challenges Zero had was their marketing was really um exciting, and often people's experience of accounting wasn't. And so Zero were selling this vision of what accounting could be, but people's experience was somewhat different to that. And so our remit from Mike was could we create um a webinar series and then a masterclass program by beyond that, which would help accountants better understand the dynamic between the user and a deliverer of a service, bring service design to the world of accounting essentially. And so we embarked on that in 2016, and I'll be honest with you, it was one of the most frustrating things I've ever done because our profession isn't great at that. And the way I like to describe it is that and it goes back to how we're trained, uh, and our whole training and education as professionals. We're trained to deliver services to people rather than for them. And that tiny word shift.

Douglas Aitken:

Yeah.

Alasdair McGill:

If you deliver services to people, you're pushing it down the way. If you're delivering services for people, it's about listening, it's about understanding, it's about having empathy, it's about recognising that maybe your client doesn't really understand what you're talking about, but they just say yes anyway. And and so there was all of this tension that's at inside of that relationship. There were some accountants that absolutely got it. Fantastic firm called Full Stop down in Cardiff. And Lauren and her husband, um, who were running the firm at the time, they absolutely got this concept and it doubled down on it, but the majority just didn't really get it. And at the time we were working with an accountant ourselves because Andy and I had a company by this point in time called Ashton McGill. It wasn't an accounting business, it was a consulting business at that point. And the accountant we were working with was the they were good accountants, they were technically competent accountants, but everything was last minute. Andy's not an accountant, so they were communicating with him in a language he didn't understand. And he would say to me from time to time, Dad, what do you think? Why don't we set up an accounting firm? You're an accountant, you've run an accounting business before. Why don't we create the type of accounting firm we'd want to work with? And I was like, no, no, I was enjoying being a designer, Doug, because you went to parties, not that I went to many parties, but you went to an event. Someone would say, What do you do? And and you could say, Well, I could say in those days, I'm a designer or I'm an the head of entrepreneurship at the University of Dundee. And that would spark a conversation. What does that mean? What do you do? What does a designer do? When you said an accountant, the thing is, people have a stereotype in their mind. Yep. They have this image of a man in a suit that's introverted, that's not going to say a lot to them. And I guess I had a chip on my shoulder about that. And I didn't really want to be an accountant again. I was enjoying this designer life. But February 2017, we're running a big project for Volkswagen. We're working with their all of their dealerships. There were someone like 194 dealerships across the UK. So we're working with them, or we were working with their customer service center in Leeds. That's where problems get escalated to. And we were trying to help them. There's five floors, one for each brand. We're trying to help them use design principles, service design principles to manage that interaction with customers better, with users better, to manage complaints. And ideally, at the dealership level, avoid them being escalated to the customer service centre. It's a great project. Andy and I were busy on that, delivering a huge amount of value and getting results. And I was due to go to Leeds where the customer service centre was in February 2017 for I think the best part of a month to deliver workshops across each of the different brands. And Andy Tennant from Volkswagen called me the Thursday before I was due to go down on the Monday and said, Alistair, some has come up. I'm afraid we're going to have to postpone this for a couple of months. And at that point, that's when I realized that we weren't building a business, Doug. We were just earning an income. And much as it was enjoyable work, when your big client is your sole project, calls up and says, We're going to postpone for a couple of months, you've got an empty diary and no money coming in. And I remember coming off that call, and Andy and I were in a this we're in our third office now where I'm sitting today. We were in a Wii office back in those days, just the two of us. I remember turning to him, coming off that call, telling him what just happened, and said, See that accounting idea of yours, do you think we should still do it? And he said to me, I've been telling you for months we should, can we just get on and do it? And so that was the genesis, that shift of earning an income, building, effectively building, but not really delivering consultancy work to shift in our whole mindset to let's build a business, let's design an accounting service in the way that we would want to experience it.

Douglas Aitken:

Yeah. Well, loads to unpack there, Alistair. Um first of all, I'm curious about the design thinking part of it. How is that impacted on what you do at Ash and McGill?

Alasdair McGill:

Yeah, I mean it's everything that we do, Doug. It's our DNA. It's our our everything we do is built, or everything we do for our client is built around that design thinking process. And really what that so what does that mean? Design thinking is a methodology for us to be able to better understand problems, issues, design services, and processes has four component parts to it, there's four stages to it, if you like, a discovery stage, a defined stage, a develop stage, and a deliver stage. And and those are really important. And the principle behind it is that let's just say we have a problem or an idea that a problem we want to solve or an idea we want to develop, then actually the discovery stage is just about expanding our lens out of the way and looking at it from all sorts of different angles. Because one of the things that you and I will have experienced many times over in our careers is that people often set about solving their own problem. They dive in too quickly, and this is one of the hardest things in the whole design thinking model is that we naturally want to go and solve problems. But design thinking is about being comfortable, being uncomfortable, and sitting in that space at the outset of learning and listening and trying to deeply understand that thing that you think is the problem, that thing is the thing you think you should deliver. But going and talking to lots of different people and getting their perspective on things, doing your research, doing analysis, and spending a good chunk of time in there. Oh, normally once you've done all of that, you feel like you've analyzed the issue from all different angles, you've thought about the impact it has on people, you've thought about the emotion, for instance. That's something that often we forget about. How does it make people feel? Only then do you then define what the actual problem is. So stage two, we're going to define this now. So we take all of that data that we've captured, all of those conversations we've had, all that we've learned, analyze it, synthesize it, and then write that problem statement. What are we actually trying to solve? Because it might not be the thing we started with. Then we move into the third stage of developing ideas for how you might solve that problem. And again, that's that divergent stage where it's great fun because you're just coming up with all sorts of ideas. Um, and then that final stage, and the fourth stage of delivering, where you take all of those ideas and again you try to get down to one or two that might be your solution, prototype them, test them. And it what's fascinating with all of that is you can apply that to the services of accounting. You can look at payroll through that lens, you can look at VAT returns through that lens, you can think about management accounts, year-end accounts, tax returns, everything that we do as accountants, you can put it through that process. As you can with the service of coffee, as you can with the service of a nursery or a museum. It's fascinating. And so that was that that's been the genesis of Ashton McGill, and it sits within everything that we do. It's the DNA, as I say, of who we are.

Douglas Aitken:

Why do you think accountants don't apply that thinking to what they do at the moment? Is it is it just a teaching thing? Is it um the way they think, or you know, what do you think?

Alasdair McGill:

I believe it's a teaching thing, Doug. Um you know one one of the very great um privileges I've had is working is being able to work with some amazing people at the University of Dundee. And as some people, if you're in Scotland, you'll know that Dundee University hasn't had its problems to seek of late. But that's that's at the governance and financial management side of the university, not the research and academic side. And just some brilliant people there. And one of the things I learned there was around how we learn as children. And at the age of five, 98% of children have the capacity to think divergently, they're naturally creative. And anyone listening to this that has children will know that what do your kids do from the moment they get up in the morning until the moment they go to bed at night, they ask questions. And what's the most common question? It's why.

Douglas Aitken:

Why?

Alasdair McGill:

It's how they make sense of the world. And then what happens at five years old or so is your kid goes to school. And and in the early days, teacher will ask questions, and kids are just shouting at the answer, and kids are asking, they're shouting the questions at the teacher. But as the kids get older and get to maybe seven or eight years old, then self-awareness begins to kick in. What happens is the teacher now is asking more and more questions, and there's fewer and fewer hands going up because we're self-aware at that point. We don't want to look stupid in front of our peers, in front of the other children. And so if you put your hand up and you give the wrong answer, that feels awful. And so, and so the ironically, the education system designed out of us the curiosity, the natural curiosity that we had as a five-year-old. And so, what do you think that percentage, Doug, might be by the time someone gets to 20 years old? That percentage of the population that can think divergently.

Douglas Aitken:

Yeah, you you've made me think about psychological safety in the workplace. And it's a similar idea. People not wanting to speak up for fear of reprisal in some shape or form, not a beating, but the peer you know, the peer pressure idea, it it's a very similar concept, isn't it? Um but similarly damaging in terms of how the way that the organization works. Yeah, yeah. Sorry, so to directly answer your question, very small number, I would guess.

Alasdair McGill:

Yeah, two percent. So by the age of 20, 2%, and this is this is academic, I could I can't quote, I can't quote the actual study for you today, but uh I've got it on a slide deck somewhere, it's two percent. By the age of 20 can think divergently because it just gets taught out of us. But the thing is, so by the time so let's say you go to university and accountants are naturally introverted, we're we're a bit risk averse, we don't like to put our hand up anyway in the first place, right? So we're we're we're a small percentage of the 2% that can think divergently. So there ain't many of us that have that capacity, and then our training, uh one of the things we looked at when we set up Ashton McGill was how do we train accountants in 2017, so this is 2017, how do we train accountants in 2017? And bear in mind I did my training in 1986, 1987, not a great deal had changed. We're still trained to be technicians, which is fine. We need to know how to do these complicated things, however, we're not teaching any of the software skills. Now, slowly some of the professional bodies are beginning to do this, but we're not doing it as a core part of your training to be an accountant, we're still teaching people to be technicians. The the very real danger I see with that is the advance of AI.

Douglas Aitken:

Yeah.

Alasdair McGill:

Because we already in our business here, we're using technology to do a huge amount of the work that in 1987, right, when I became a young accountant or trainee accountant at Turnbull Kemp, and it was, you know, manual cash books and 14-column trial balance pads. You know, so you prepare someone's set of accounts by having a 14-column. If you don't know what that is, folks, Google it. 14 column trial balance pad. You'd you'd down the left, you'd write all of the account, um, all of the account codes as we would call them today, all the general ledger codes, if you like, they have in zero. We'd then the first two tabs would be open and balance, then we'd have the cash book, and then we'd have the sales day book and the purchase day. And that's how we built a set of accounts. Because and so we had to be taught to be technicians because we needed to know how to do those things. But by about, I mean, I remember by the time I was at UI, we had our Apple Macs. Uh, it was so cool. I mean, the the original classic Mac, I used to have one, and and uh that's how it was my that was my portable computer. And if you've seen a Mac classic, it's really not portable, it's about 10 kilograms of weight. Um but beautiful, it was beautiful. Um but we had computers that could begin to do some of that work, and and software like Sage on the desktop was probably coming to its infancy in those days. And what's interesting, 2017, looking back to 1987, the training hasn't changed. There's technology now that does some of it, but we're still teaching people to be technicians. We're not teaching what I believe are important skills for accountants in 2025. We're not teaching curiosity, we're not teaching empathy, we're not teaching listening skills, we're not teaching communication skills. I think these things are really important. And that's actually that they're the areas over which we can still have a level of um influence that AI can't have, might catch up with us in the future. AI can certainly do a lot of the technical stuff. And so if we're not training our teams and we're not training our colleagues and other accountants, if it's not part of our education systems, then there's a very real danger for many accounting businesses that you know you're gonna be here in 10 years' time because that tech is there's a there's a guy here in Dundee, his name's Chris Van Der Kyle. Some people will have heard of Chris, he's one of Scotland's top entrepreneurs.

Douglas Aitken:

Yep, I've met him.

Alasdair McGill:

Yeah, super guy, he's about six foot eight as well. Yeah, and you know, and he's his company is behind things like Minecraft. Um, so phenomenally successful entrepreneur, and Chris has a mantra that the pace of change that we have today that we all think is hectic, that's the slowest it's going to be for the rest of our lives.

Douglas Aitken:

Yeah.

Alasdair McGill:

And so we kind of have to think about that and then, well, what does that mean for us running accounting businesses? Because the world is changing and it's changing faster than ever before.

Douglas Aitken:

So, what has all this meant for Ash and McGill, Alistair? You because I can clearly tell you want to be a different type of accountant, and I know from working with you that you absolutely do. So, what what particular things have you brought into Ash and McGill that speak to the opposite? Of what you've just said?

Alasdair McGill:

Yeah, it's a good question, Doug. I think one of the so we've been intentional from day one. We launched in September 2017. So we're we're almost eight years old. We've been intentional about what we do, who we do it for, the type of businesses we want to work with, the type of people we want to work with, and the type of people we don't want to work with. So that's the first thing, you know. We're not just opening our doors and saying everyone's welcome. Like we want to help people. Ultimately, I want to help everyone, but sometimes we are not the right people to help. So there's an intentionality behind who we are, what we do. And then in the early days, it was me and Andy and a couple of freelancers, and as we gradually built the team, um, we had thought very carefully about the service design of what we do. And so, what does it feel like? What is how do we deliver something like a VAT return or a P11D or a self-assessment tax return? And and so what does that mean? Well, it's thinking about it from a user's perspective, who's probably not an accountant. So, first of all, what does a P11D mean? What is it? And so often the way we'll tackle that in a design context is to create an artifact, create a document. Let's call it a PDF. But nicely designed, in simple plain language, that explains what P11D is, maybe has a couple of graphics of what they look like so people can just understand the purpose of this thing that we're chasing them for. Um, same with the self-assessment tax return. I remember in the early days creating timelines of what that looks like. And Andy, in his in his absolute element, thinking about how can I graphically and visually show this. So again, we're not just sending a document out or sending an email that's got eight lines on it back to our black and white words and numbers. Visually, because a lot of people are visual thinkers, it turns out. Um, and so if we can create a document that supports that, um, one of the things we did in the early days was create what we call a journey map. So if you're a client of Ashton McGill back in 2017, you've probably still got a copy of one of these things, but it would show the life cycle of everything that we do, January to December, for instance, or your financial year, we probably started to iterate it too. So here's the different things that are going to happen and the different rhythms in the year. And so there's a rhythm around payroll, it's monthly. There's a rhythm around VAT returns, probably quarterly. It's a rhythm around management accounts. For us, it's either quarterly or monthly with every client that we work with. There's a rhythm around the review meetings we hold, it's either monthly or quarterly. There's a rhythm around the annual accounts, there's a rhythm around the tax returns. It almost starts to feel like music, doesn't it? It's like a score that you're building. But it's in a way it's its own symphony, right? So, and actually you can start to have fun with that, you can start to play with that and think about things that as it builds towards a crescendo, that's your end of year accounts. You know, we took uh we've done some daft things and crazy things probably over the years of celebrating people's year ends. We used to send them celebration packs at the end of the year. Congratulations, you've just finished another year in business. You know, little things like that, but people loved it and appreciated it. And and you might think that's a bit flippant, but but is it? Because if you have empathy for the business owner, the one thing we all know, like every one of us will know, is it's hard running the business. And especially for people that have been doing that in the last five, six, seven years, you've come through COVID. And I think everyone thought that by the end of 2021 we'd have just gone back to normal. And it's very rare for me to find a case where there's an industry that's done that. It's continued to be hard because we've had Ukraine and we've had the price, the the impact of things like Ukraine and cost of living crisis on materials and so on. It's it's not an easy thing to do. So that's that's kind of how we try to bring design principles into Astronaut Girl. The last thing I want to do, Doug, is bamboozle people with design speak. That's just as bad as bamboozing them with accountant speak or business jargon. And uh somebody once said to me, a fantastic mentor and and and uh ex-colleague of mine, a wonderful lady called Professor Louise Valentine. I've been really lucky to I met Louise on my first day at the University of Dundee. She was head of enterprise at Duncan of Jordanston. And we've just been on a journey together. We were just speaking the other day, and and Louise has been a brilliant mentor for me, but she said to me at some point on our journey there's an elegance and simplicity. And it's lovely. I just love the language of that. That actually how do you f it's hard sometimes to do things in a simple way.

Douglas Aitken:

Yeah.

Alasdair McGill:

But investing time, listening, taking doing that design thinking process, those four stages, and really trying to make something as simple as it can be, but still as effective as it needs to be. There's a beauty in it.

Douglas Aitken:

Yeah, absolutely. Please forgive this as a brief interruption. You secure the future profitability and future growth of your firm when your clients become more loyal to you, buy more from you, are happy to pay more and also recommend you more. These four important outcomes depend entirely on the behavior and mindset of one group of people, your client managers. When your client managers improve their skills and mindset, your firm results naturally improve too. If you think that you can do more to build your client manager's capabilities, please click the Remarkable Client Manager link in the show notes. When you do, you'll be able to complete the client manager diagnostic. It won't cost you anything, and you'll discover the six elements that can help your managers unlock greater success in your firm. What's your own passion, Alistair? Because when we started working, I remember you using a phrase two or three times, there must be a better way. And and in in in the context of accounting generally, it always seemed to come from there's got to be a better way. Do you want to elaborate on that?

Alasdair McGill:

Yeah, yeah. I guess so. You know, I've said a few times started working in 1986. I'm 57. Um, and in many ways this still feels like the start of a journey, but I just happen to have 30 years of experience now behind me. Um, more than 30, but 30-ish years of experience behind me. And I think that I've been lucky enough to work in lots of different industries with lots of great people and learn from many of them. And you know, people like Louise or one of my other mentors is a brilliant young woman by the name of Lauren Curry, OBE. Lauren was she was given her OBE for services to design when she was like 30 years old. She's still only about 35, just brilliant. It inspires me every day. Um and Lauren has this phrase, and I've probably stolen mine from her, but she has this belief in better. Like how and I think it's probably a part of the design education that things can always be better. Yeah, things can always be better. And so when I apply that lens to the world of accounting, and go back to that conversation with Andy 2016-2017, and me saying, I don't want to be an accountant, I don't want to talk about being an accountant. There's a there's a whole load to unpack from that, which we won't do just now, but a lot of it was because of the stigma or the stereotype that people associate to accountants. So the way our profession often delivers services, and and we've seen the bad sides of that since we've started Astro Miguel because we take clients on, and just the other day we started work with a new client. They are uh 35 people business turning over the guts of three million pounds, and when we opened up zero, there's a single sales account, which to me is just you know, and I'm sure their accountant will have if they've done anything to set up zero, it's very little, it's zero vanilla out of the box, enough so that they can import it into their accounts prep software and buy out set of accounts at the end of the year. And I'm sorry, but that's not good enough. Yeah, it's really not good enough, it's not good enough for the client, it's actually not good enough for the people that work inside that accounting firm. We all deserve better. And so if I've got any um what's the word? If I want to leave a legacy, I then that I don't like that word, but but it's a how can we make this industry better? How can we make accounting a better experience for young people that want to come into it? I can I don't want I don't want the the 2025 version of me to have that chip on their shoulder, to feel that this stereotype is a weight on your shoulders. I want people to be able to say, I'm an accountant and be damn proud of that. And proud of the work that they do, the impact they make on society, the things that they because we're in such a privileged position. You know, here we're working with someone like 230 businesses. And again, if you think about that, right, if every one of those employs seven or eight people, before you know it, you're talking about 1,500 families. And then we work out the revenue, and we did this at the start of the year, and the revenue for for that it's into the hundreds of millions, the number of people that we support. Um, like that's a privilege to be able to influence them. And so I think it's beholden on us as accountants and those of us that are fortunate enough to have a voice in this industry to be able to challenge the industry. And I'm not here kicking at the industry, it might feel like it sometimes, but it's only so we can pull it forward, we can make it better, because everyone deserves it to be better. And also, if we want to avoid what AI might do to our industry, and and you know, the same conversations are happening in other industries as well, then we have to pull it forward, otherwise, there's a whole host of us are going to be scrambling about, wondering what the heck we're gonna do in the future. Yeah, so it comes from that that there's a there's a deep um desire to help make our industry better, and I know that's keep using that same word, but for all of those reasons that let's create a a different world for people to come into, that also means that I mean one of our core purposes, Doug, as you know, is helping the people we work with to thrive. Yeah and it's a word intentionally chosen. And um we're not if someone wants to pay as little tax as they can and make as much money as they can from their business at the expense of everything else, they'll never be an Ashtonigu client. But if they want to build a sustainable organization that flourishes, that can thrive in the future, we're your folks. Because they're two very different choices, and I'm not going to judge someone's decision of what they want to do. We just know we work best with those organizations that want to build something that enables everyone to benefit from it.

Douglas Aitken:

And I've loved your phraseology that I've heard you use before, Alistair, around making an impact with people. We want to make an impact. What's the what's the backstory to that and how does it show up?

Alasdair McGill:

Yeah, I think I mean for me, making an impact, and as you know, we've gone through a bit of a journey of of talking about what these things mean, what's the purpose behind AM? What's the measure ultimately for what we do? And you know, do we set a revenue target and we want to get to five million pounds and we want to or we want to support X number of businesses? Um, and that's fine, but uh me I don't feel it that motivating, it's just a number right back to where we started today. So, how do we bring that number to life? Because that to be honest, there's still a there's still an ambition to get Astro Miguel to have five million of revenue, but but no one's gonna get excited about that because what does it actually mean? And so we spent a long time with your guidance and help um and with the input of our team thinking about this. And you know, the most important thing we do, if you think about some of the language I've used through this conversation, is that we make a difference to people's businesses, we make an impact, and so we settled on that term impact because we thought, well, first of all, if we want to get to um five million of revenue for us, that's probably about a thousand businesses. So we talked about maybe we our our aim should be to support a thousand businesses, but even then that's it's just another metric, yeah. But actually, the work we do through the stories that we've told and you've helped to bring to life with our team of the work that we do, well, the word we settled on was impact because we make an impact on those organizations, whether it's taken a brilliant client up in the northeast of Scotland, husband and wife-owned media business, and they transferred into us from a traditional accountant up in the city of Aberdeen, and they'd been asking that accountant if they could get some management accounts, and the accountant said to them, You're too small, you don't need management accounts. And that was for them the let the final nail in the coffin. And so they they were introduced to us by one of our clients in Aberdeen, and and I remember having my first meeting with them, they're loved super, super family, super people, and um, but they just they're not they haven't got a background in business and finance, so they just didn't know what they didn't know and they didn't know what they needed to know. And so with them, we set out on a journey, and I never mapped this out for them. That's I suppose my job is to understand where they're to learn where they're at and take them on a journey, just gradually build their confidence, build their knowledge, build their um ability to read financial statements. And it's fascinating, two and a half years on now, they're a client that so we obviously we start preparing management accounts for them, but they don't really know what they were, they just thought they needed them. We've taught them what they mean, and and we've become made them more nuanced as we've got to know them and got to know their business more. And fast forward to today, these guys we now spend a half a day once a quarter just on the business. I'm up there in two weeks' time, in fact, two weeks today. We'll spend the afternoon together, they understand the financial aspects of their business brilliantly. They can dig into their utilization rates and they can build up the charge rates, and they just didn't know how to do any of that, didn't even know they were things before. Yeah, and so that for me is making an impact because they now have a much better understanding and can ability to control their business, whereas before their business was controlling them. And so that to me is an impact. And I think being able to measure the success of what we do by the impact that we deliver, and as you know, it's still for our teammates, still kind of clunky language, right? Because in our team meeting on a Monday, we ask everyone to tell impact stories. It's not we don't make them, it's just we have a section in our team meeting on a Monday to tell impact stories. And today there was a couple of lovely stories told about impact colleagues telling stories about each other and the impact they've made either on each other or on the client. And it's lovely, it kind of just you know, Kira today on our team call said something that really poof, I was just quite super proud. And Kira's just started her journey as an account manager with us, so she's got a small portfolio of clients that she'd and she's come through our training programme and our coaching programme, and she had her first calls with clients last week, and she'd had brilliant feedback from the clients on the calls and with the coach who's supporting her on that journey. And she said on the call today that she had absolutely loved it, and it was the reason why in her 30s she had retrained as an accountant was for moments like that, been able to have days like that where she can make a difference to people's lives.

Douglas Aitken:

Oh my god, it was beautiful, yeah, brilliant. And I I'm always curious, Alistair, and maybe you can offer a view on this because there'll be no right or wrong answer. But you made me think when you were talking about that couple in the media business, they didn't know what they didn't know either, so they didn't know what impact the accountant could have on them. How many business clients are out there in a similar place? Because look, you know, there are some who just want their financial statements, that's all I want, and it's full stop. But I would have thought there's a significant percentage in the middle who don't know what they don't know, who've never been supported like that, and until we provide it to them, they've no experience, so they're still going around in ignorance. Do you know what I mean?

Alasdair McGill:

I do, yeah. And what's the number? I mean, there's a we've been trying to get data on the number of SMEs in the UK, and it's it's it's a big number. Um, people that employ less than ten people is a big number. People employing less than I think people with a turnover of less than a million pounds is still a significantly large proportion of UK businesses. And there's a good percentage of them that are in exactly that place, Doug, where they don't know. They because if you think about it, people set up a business usually because they have learned a skill or they've been an expert in something, and they've reached a frustration point within that business they worked in, and they've thought, I can do this better, I'm gonna take control of my own destiny, I'm gonna build my own business, and off they go on that journey. And and the reality is that the majority of them are not accountants. I think across our entire client base of 230 or so businesses, we might have three accountants, three clients that are accountants. The rest aren't. And so they're brilliant at PR, or they're brilliant at making beer, or they're brilliant at whatever that thing is that has been their passion that they've turned into a business. Like we can never teach them that. But what we can teach them are the business disciplines, because often they don't have that, they've worked somewhere, they've seen someone that frustrated them as a manager or a leader, and so they've decided to take control of their own destiny, yeah. And you know, the reality is that speaks to a great number of UK businesses, and and people will, through their own efforts, be able to get that work to a level, whatever that level is, um, but to get it to the next level. And for us, one of the key questions, so in our discovery process, we use design thinking all the way through that journey, and then a lot of people talk about discovery calls these days, but ours is a genuine discovery part of the design thinking process call. And one of the questions that we always ask is why? Why are you doing this? What's the goal? What's the objective? And people, it's fascinating, really fascinating the way people answer that question because they've rarely been asked that. And sometimes I've seen people who co-own a business that don't know each other's answer to that question.

Douglas Aitken:

Yep.

Alasdair McGill:

And I've we've had all sorts of answers, you know, I want to sell it for X and do Y. Um, one particular lady that always comes back to mind, she told me about her dream to have a villa on the banks of Lake Como in Italy. That's what she was doing this for. I want to do that. I want to be able to retire to there, maybe work a bit, but that's what I want this business to do for me. And so I think like we need to know the answer to that from the outset of working with somebody. Otherwise, all you're doing is something transactional.

Douglas Aitken:

Yeah.

Alasdair McGill:

Yeah? Yeah. But if you understand that the vision is that home on the banks of Lake Como, or for my folks in Aberdeen to build a great life for their family, whatever that looks like for them, then we can design and deliver our services in a much more nuanced way to support them on that journey.

Douglas Aitken:

Yeah.

Alasdair McGill:

And the thing I keep saying, like one of my team will get frustrated with me on this, but I keep saying it's not rocket science. None of this is rocket science. And this is the to your point from a little while back about how we train accountants. Like we're we should all be, we're qualified accounts, we should all be technically good, we should all be technically capable. But what makes one accountant different to another is these softer things, the curiosity to want to know the the answer to those questions, that desire to not just deliver services to people, but deliver them for them. And they're tiny little subtle distinctions, but to me it's everything.

Douglas Aitken:

Please forgive this interruption to the podcast. You've heard Alistair McGill talking about the importance of core purpose. You'll find a link in the show notes to a business breakthrough that will tell you more about that and how it's so important in your accounting for let's get back to the podcast. Alistair, the time's flown by and really enjoyed our discussion. Two questions that um I'd like to ask before we close off. One is what does the future hold for Ashton McGill? And the second one is um, and you've kind of partially alluded to this already, but I'm just interested in your view on the future of accounting generally, given everything that's coming. And you can choose to answer in whichever order you are. Okay.

Alasdair McGill:

Um, future for Ashton McGill, more of the same, Doug, make more impacts, help more people, um, make the continue to drive and push to make the industry better. Uh I was I was interviewed for AAT magazine again a couple of weeks ago, and really I take every opportunity that comes that way, whether it's speaking at DAS or XeroCon or being interviewed for magazines, Jared was interviewed for iCast magazine last week. We keep telling our story and keep trying to pull the industry forward, then you know, in our own small way, we can try to make things better. And we know that we do make an impact on the people that we work with and the organizations we work with, and the people that work inside of our organization. The biggest challenge that this industry faces at the moment is recruitment. It's so difficult to hire and find good people, and that's the thing that you know, if we want to achieve what 57, the things I still want to do in this industry, then we need to keep finding a steady pipeline of great accountants who want to do this kind of work in this kind of way. And so that's a really important strategic focus, as you know, for us, of continuing to um to build the team. And that excites me. Um, continuing to build the team and continue to do great work for great people. Yeah, I don't think it's radically different. We're not going to change overnight and do something massively different to what we do today. We're probably going to double down on it, make it better. Um, get more our team, four of our team have just come through a service design course. If it's brains blown with this one, um because they because they've studied accounting, right? They didn't know what service, they'd heard me talk about it, but but with with our partners at Dundee College, Dundee and Angus College, our guys have just gone through a month-long course on service design. So it's great. I've been listening to them come back in uh to the office after that session. Now everyone's just absolutely buzzing with ideas, and and so that better thing will continue to, but it's not about me driving it ever. Like my job is just to light the touch paper and and let the team crack on with it. So I don't have any doubts and fears about the future of Ashton Miguel. We just need to keep finding great people to continue to do work with the great clients that we're able to bring in for the industry, Doug. I think that one of the things that I'm really excited about is the number of other people that are also um trying to make it better. And you know, I've listened to many of them on Humanize the Numbers, and I look forward to that. This is a great episode with Stuart Clark the other day. No idea he was a physio before, so next time I see him, I'm gonna get him to fix my shoulder. Um but that's what I think one of the things you do beautifully is you let people tell their stories. Um, I I think Jessica was on as well from Pillow Me a while back, and and um it's just lovely hearing about others doing these things. And from time to time we meet each other at events, but I think one of the things that you that that you and Paul have the ability to do is to be a catalyst as well. And I think within your community and with the wider community of people you have on the podcast, there are other great minds, and so you know, I think as long as we all keep doing that, we can help to pull the industry forward. Is everyone going to want to go in that direction? Absolutely not, but but between us, and we've probably covered the length and breadth of the UK, if you think about all of those firms, then we're all doing good work, we're all doing we're all supporting great people and and and importantly creating good jobs. Uh, and I think that the type of people that we all are as a group, we're not, you know, one of our um one of our old values is never settled, and we manifest that now as curiosity, but never settle for us. It was the name of our podcast back in the the early days. Um uh it speaks to an old Steve Jobs um phrase, and uh for it really is about never settling, not just saying, right, that's it, that's it, accounting sorted. Um we're all trying to make it better, and if we continue to do that, we'll pull others along, we'll continue to make the industry better for the clients that we serve and also for the folks that work within our organizations, and that feels like a worthwhile thing to do.

Douglas Aitken:

Yeah, absolutely. Um, Alistair, it's been fabulous to have you on the podcast today. I really enjoyed the discussion. Um and uh we hope to interview you again sometime.

Alasdair McGill:

It's been my absolute pleasure. I've thoroughly enjoyed the talk. Thank you. Thanks a lot.

Speaker 2:

You just heard Alistair talk about a wide range of subjects, including the importance of purpose and how to get buy-in from your team. If you want to learn more about this in an environment with other like-minded accountants, you should check out the Accountants Growth Academy. You can find information about this in the show notes or head to Remarkablepractice.com.

Paul Shrimpling:

You'll find more valuable discussions with the leaders of ambitious accounting firms at humanize the numbers.online. You can also sign up to be notified each time a new podcast is made available.

Speaker 2:

This is a short snippet of a podcast with Miranda Kendall from Spotlight Reporting. If you'd like to hear more, you can find out on your usual podcast platform or visit humanized numbers.online.

Miranda Kendall:

Actually, someone I was we did an event actually a few weeks ago, and someone in their presentation had turned around and said, um, act like a robot, be replaced by a robot. And I it's it's true because of AI coming on now, it's not gonna replace us as humans. I don't agree with that, but it certainly is for things like the compliance work and other stuff that can just be run by AI, but you should be taking that as an advantage to go and spend time with your customers, go and hear them, listen to them.