Ian Gorbould, Group Finance Director/Company Secretary at Longcliffe, chats with Andy Irvine, Audit Partner, Ian Robinson, Senior Audit and Accounts Manager, and Emma Mosley, Audit and Accounts Supervisor ; discussing their experience transitioning from large international advisers to a regional firm, emphasising the high costs and lack of personal attention received from the larger firm. Longcliffe were looking to source a more local, value-for-money adviser that aligned with their company’s ethos.
Since making the move Longcliffe have been highly satisfied with Shorts’ service, integration, and ‘working in partnership’ approach. Ian Gorbould highlights the importance of consistency, knowledge transfer, and personal relationships in maintaining a successful audit partnership, and advises other businesses similar to Longcliffe to consider the smaller, local firms, who focus on quality of service, over prioritising the size of the firm when evaluating new advisers.
Read the full conversation below
That they were not at a big firm! We’ve been with the big accountancy firms for quite some time but really, it didn’t work that well in practice and they started to price us out. We didn’t hit their sweet spot, we were in the bottom slice effectively and so the fees kept going up disproportionately. We felt we didn’t matter to them and we became sort of ‘peripheral’. We wanted to feel that we were a significant client for our advisers, so they would make sure they provided a good service.
The big firms started to price us out. We were in the bottom slice and the fees kept going up disproportionately.
So we decided it was a good time to refocus and look again at a more regional adviser; someone we could work with, somebody more akin to the ethos of Longcliffe. We looked around, saw that Shorts acted in this area, within this market, which was a good fit as we always try to source locally. All our people are within a very close circumference from the quarry, which helps us with planning, and everyone locally knows and understands what Longcliffe is all about.
The main criteria were to find local advisers, at a more reasonable price, and obviously value for money. We would have had a hard job taking the idea of moving back to the shareholders, if we said we wanted to change from firm X to Y, and it was going to cost us more. So we were looking for the savings and definitely value for money.
You show interest in what we do and our challenges, and have helped us overcome them.
But the integration and closeness that we looked for, and we have I believe, (and far better than we had previously), is very much part of that value for money ticket. And over the five years we’ve been with Shorts so far it’s gone swimmingly as far as we’re concerned. And it’s not just the Audit, we’ve been introduced to the wider Shorts team – David Robinson and the tax team, which has been really good for us.
And most important, we’ve felt that you’ve been interested in what we do and our our challenges, and have helped us overcome them.
Consistency is important, and yet we appreciate there’s a mechanism within all audit or accounting firms, that people are going to move up or move on.
Consistency is important so you don’t have to reinvent the wheel every year.
So you’re never going to get exactly the same people every year, but you will get a thread that stays. That’s essential and very useful, because you don’t have to reinvent the wheel every year. People who come in aren’t walking through the door and having to learn about your business for the first time. So the knowledge of the business is always passed down, and you get off to a much better start each year, which improves the relationship over time.
It has been a partnership in all the different projects that we’ve worked on; not just Audit, but a number of other areas where we’ve used Shorts. It’s been the same all the way through, definitely a partnership – never adversarial.
The service they provide is more important than whether they’re a Top 10 firm.
These days, so many of the larger firms carry out their audits remotely from the office and I just don’t understand how that works. When I worked previously in the audit industry myself, we always got out onsite, on the shop floor, and I did a lot of stock takes. In fact that was probably one of the most interesting parts of the businesses. Learning what was really going on in the business. How can you give the best advice if you’ve never even been on site? – it’s much easier to put the company in your mind when you actually have a relationship with them and regularly visit them.
Go through the process and consider alternatives. Meet as many people as you can, but do your homework on it first before you pick who to meet, and make sure that there’s a chance of a good fit. And, go externally to see if there are other references or referees available to you. We talked to the bank for instance, and others who maybe provided a limited testimonial really, but anecdotally, it was still useful information to have and helped us form the views that we took into the decision making process. So I would definitely advise people to take it on.
Go through the process and consider alternatives. Meet as many people as you can and make sure of a good fit.
It’s not something that we never intended to do, and we still don’t intend to look at making the change on a regular basis, because the relationship gets better as it gets stronger and older. There’ll probably come a point where we probably think it’s it’s right to look at it again, but not yet, not after only five years.
Partner / Trustworthy / Reliable
Long may it continue. I wouldn’t say any more, but long may it continue, and in the same vein. I think it’ll be a good relationship for both sides going forward, as it has been in the past.
Longcliffe is a leading supplier of high purity limestone powder, granules & aggregates. As one of the few independently owned industrial mineral processing companies in the UK, Longcliffe quarry over one million tonnes of carboniferous limestone (calcium carbonate) and dolomitic limestone each year.
The business contributes £20 million a year to the local economy through wages, rates and other spend with local suppliers, playing an integral role in the local community, and contributing around £80,000 annually to a wide range of projects and organisations including schools and grass roots sports clubs.
As a family owned business we are proud to have been providing this essential mineral for almost 100 years, and look forward to servicing the needs of our customers for the next 100.
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