The recruitment business he founded turns over more than [pounds sterling] 750m a year. One of his many charities has raised over [pounds sterling] 20m in the past four years alone. FM talks accountancy, philanthropy and the future of talent with the knight of social entrepreneurship.
| Author | Payton, Scott |
| Position | Q&A - Interview |
You qualified as a management accountant in the sixties. What drew you to the profession?
When I left school at 16 my mother marched me down to night school, where I signed on for a course that I don't think either of us understood. It turned out to be the Institute of Chartered Secretaries' qualification. I struggled with the exams, failing a number of times, but eventually passed. I got a job at Gillette and started studying to become a certified accountant. Then, aged 26, I started my business and wrote to my institute to inform it of my change of details. It wrote back, telling me that I couldn't be a student if I was self-employed, and threw me out.
In 1961, I decided to focus my business on recruiting accountants. This was when I realised the real value of the qualification provided by the Institute of Cost and Works Accountants (CIMA's original name) and embarked on the course myself. It was clear that management accountants were in high demand in the recruitment market.
Why did you set up your company?
During my time at Gillette I was desperate to be self-employed. It wasn't about earning more money. I was earning [pounds sterling] 900 at Gillette; I simply wanted to be self-employed earning [pounds sterling]900 a year. So I started Reed Employment in Hounslow - and it grew. I soon had three branches with a manager in each. It wasn't a full-time job to manage three managers, so I devoted my spare time to starting Reed Executive. Our unique selling point was that all of our consultants had to be qualified accountants After the business went public in 1971 we repositioned it as a multi-branch operation, having previously concentrated solely on the City of London. Today, we have more than 400 branches, as well as reed.co.uk - the biggest recruitment website in the country.
What have been the biggest changes to the role of management accountants, and to the environment they work in, since you qualified?
CIMA has had a fantastic opportunity over the decades, because management accounting is much more important than financial accounting. A lot of chartered accountants are focused on tax, as that's where their biggest fees come from, but management accounting is a much broader, more varied field. We have a lot of CIMA members in our company - we all talk the same language. Yet I still believe that the accountancy profession across the world has a long way to go. I don't think it's fully kept up with the changing world around it.
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