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We are delighted to announce that today is Key Business Consultants’ sixth birthday!
How It Started
From humble origins with just two staff, to a growing accountancy and consultancy firm with offices in London and Kolkata, this is the story of Key Business Consultants.
The LLP was founded on the 20th November 2013 as an SEIS tax specialist firm. Gary Green, a chartered accountant who trained in a Top50 practice in the City, and his wife Ruth began working with clients out of their home office in Boreham Wood. Gary explains:
Lots of small businesses don’t have the budget for a full-time chartered accountant, but they need help with their bookkeeping and tax returns. So a lot of my early clients would bring me on for one or two days a week.
He also noticed an opportunity to develop what’s become known as Disaster Recovery Accountancy:
I found I was often asked to help when the company was facing difficult circumstances. Sometimes the previous bookkeeper had left at short notice, or the company realised that they were going to struggle to get their paperwork sorted in time.
Early Growth And Expansion
In the early years, Gary spent most of his working week on-site at the clients’ offices. This allowed him to build strong relationships and really understand the needs of the business. And this led to a lot of satisfied clients:
The very first client I signed up had just moved to London. He wanted to work with an accountant he could meet with in-person. After a couple of years, he moved back down to South England, but we continued to work for him and still do today. It gives me a lot of satisfaction that our good relationship has overcome the geographical distance.
With satisfied clients came great word-of-mouth and lots of client referrals. Soon Gary had outgrown his Boreham Wood base and had more work than he could handle on his own.
New Staff And New Homes
2014 saw a couple of milestones for Key Business Consultants. Kim Tran was brought on as the Practice Manager, and the firm moved offices to the King’s Road. Soon after, two more staff were added.
Gary explains how he managed to retain the service quality and feel of a small firm even as his client base grew:
Because I was a small practice, my fees were often the most competitive charged by Chartered Accountants. This meant that clients received a high quality, partner-level service for the price that other firms might charge out their junior staff.
Towards the end of 2016, it became clear that a larger office was needed, and on the 1st January 2017 Key Business Consultants moved to its current home in North London.
2018 – An International Office and a Sister Company
The need to bring on a number of new team members in a short time led to the opening of our Kolkata office in May 2018. Gary says:
After seeing rapid growth in 2017, particularly among larger clients, it was clear that we needed to grow our depth of staff to meet the demand. Opening the Kolkata office allowed us to recruit and train half a dozen new team members at the same time.
You can learn more about the new office in this article.
In September of the same year, Gary founded sister company Key Business Marketing. It was a natural fit:
Having worked with a huge number of small businesses over the last five years, we were well-placed to understand their marketing needs. The team at Key Business Marketing are dedicated to offering the same level of care and professionalism to clients, as well as a rigorous and quantitative approach to growing their business.
Read more about Key Business Marketing.
2020 And Beyond
So what does 2020 hold for Key Business Consultants? We asked Gary:
Everything we do at KBC is focused on helping our clients overcome their obstacles. We take great pride in being the trusted advisor to business owners, from bookkeeping and tax planning to representing them well with the authorities.
Has the growth of the company led to a different client mix?
With a greater depth of staff, we now have a number of larger clients. But we still work with businesses from my first few days of running the company. We love helping everyone, from start-ups to multinational corporations.
The financial future promises to be uncertain, from Brexit to budgets, elections to recessions. Fortunately, Key Business Consultants has always been forward-looking. Says Gary:
My passion has always been looking at future trends and advising clients on how to be agile to stay at the front of the market.
So if you’d like to work with an experienced, approachable and entrepreneurial team of accountants (or just wish us Happy Birthday!) please get in touch.
