Developing accountancy trainees: Simon Deane’s Story

So how did I, Simon Deane end up being both a Chartered Accountant and an accountancy teacher?

I undertook my ACA training at TMcL, in Bristol, primarily involved in auditing a range of business from small charities to large, well-known PLCs. TMcL was founded by Thomson McLintock in Ayr, on the west coast of Scotland 100 years before I joined them and, soon after I left, merged with Peat Marwick Mitchell to become KPMG. Partly because of their roots, their national training courses were often held in Scotland.

During my second year, the training partner asked me to be a group leader on the firm’s internal training courses.

The Training Partner explained that he thought I had an aptitude for explaining things to the new intake. He saw something, he believed in me, and he took a chance on me, Simon Deane.

I enjoyed training accountants…

A couple of years after qualifying and having moved down to Devon, which is where I was born, an opportunity came up to join SWAT, a Plymouth based training company supporting a small consortium of Chartered Accountants.

At that time, it only had only 2 staff. They had been asked by four Taunton based firms to extend their support to them and they needed an extra member of staff to support this growth. This was in 1984. Two of those firms are still clients of mine.

… despite my stammer!

Teaching? Training? Public speaking? Eek. I had a terrible stammer. When nervous, I struggled to get the words out. As a youth, I took lessons on breathing to control this. Why would I want to subject myself to this level of stress? Although I never wanted to “teach”, I enjoyed training.

I enjoyed helping people develop. I also enjoyed the technical aspects of my work and the SWAT role included a high level of technical advice – on audit and company reporting.

VP for Individual Training and Development

I had 5 years of 100% audit experience on both small and substantial businesses – more audit experience than the partners in the firms SWAT acted for. I thought “Bollocks – I can’t let a stammer get in the way of pursuing a career that would suit my aspirations so well”.

I took the job, I swatted up further on the new Companies Acts (1980, 1984). I joined Exeter Junior Chamber (which had 150 members) and become VP for Individual Development (i.e., training) and subsequently became President and then Regional Chairman.

Focusing on my own development, becoming President of the Chamber.

I wanted to become President as I knew that, at the end of my year, I would need to stand up and give a speech at the annual dinner. During the year, I would need to lead our monthly Committee Meetings and introduce training sessions.

The years as VP and President were my training programme to build up the confidence and skills to allow me to stand up and do that speech at the annual dinner, with a couple of hundred people present. It went really smoothly. Phew! I had invited two guest speakers, both very humorous – they were the main attraction, not me.

My job was to thank them, thank all those present for coming, thank my team – and make gentle jokes at the expense of my friends in the room, which always elicits good audience engagement!

My first big speech

By then, I had realised that listeners, delegates, learners didn’t want you to fail. They willed you on, they wanted you to succeed and they wanted to learn from you and be entertained by you. Humour always helped but you needed to know what you were talking about and what you were talking about needed to be relevant to the people you were talking to.

It was therefore essential to keep technically up-to-date, to properly know your clients and their business, to know your audience so that what you said was both relevant, helpful and technically correct.

Technical skill runs in my family – albeit nuclear technology in my dad’s case.

My father was a Captain in the Royal Navy, which he joined at the age of 13. Until he married, he had a stammer worse than mine. He had a passion for the Navy and for engineering. He learned nuclear physics in his 40’s so that he could become project manager for the refit of our country’s first Polaris submarine, for which he received the OBE (Yes – he was brighter than me!).

Although I didn’t realise it at the time, he inspired me to want to achieve, despite physical barriers to that achievement. That training partner at TMcL saw something in me and trusted me. I most definitely was not the finished article, but he saw the potential to become it.

Inspiring others to want to learn

Double entry bookkeeping is not a natural skill that we are born with. Most of the new staff that you recruit will have never come across it before.

It is our duty – ours and yours – to attract and identify those candidates with the potential to learn, and then it is our duty to provide them the training resources and support so they have the opportunity to learn and develop those bookkeeping and accounting skills and we must try to inspire them to want to learn and develop those skills and we must trust them to do their best, whilst doing so.

Goal setting, support and trust – the three cornerstones of teaching for me.

Certainly, we must set them goals against which they and we can measure achievement, but we must inspire them to strive to achieve those goals and we must give them support and feedback along the way. We should first trust them and then give them the opportunity to prove that they were always worthy of that trust – to prove it to themselves as well as to us.

Simon Deane