Young accountants aiming for the top want to become partners in their practice. But what are the real qualities that are needed today. What do the big firms really look for?

The Accountants dream?

When you start in the accountancy profession you are told that the ultimate aim is to achieve partnership. Pass your exams, keep your nose clean, put in the hours and eventually you will make it and be able to sign on behalf of the firm. Then untold riches will be yours.

I am a writer, not an accountant, but many of my friends and relations are accountants and from them I have pieced together a very strange picture of the role of the partner in the big accountancy firms today.

The brightest?

First of all I always thought that it was the brightest who are appointed to the partnership. This may have been the case at one time but now isn’t necessary. Most large professional firms invest considerable resources to have departments full of senior managers with the sole task of to reviewing other professionals work. These are people whose whole lives are devoted to ensure that all work leaving the firm has a consistent high quality and thus protect the firm from litigation. In the olden days, that is 10 years ago, partners did this. It was the partners who were responsible for reviewing the quality of everything that would go out in the name of the firm. Partners would be chosen primarily for their technical ability and their personal quantities would be a purely a secondary factor. The professional reviewing department frees today’s partners from needing to have the ability to do this work and so they are free to concentrate on the nitty-gritty of drumming up new business and office politics

PR role?

Read more in Accounting
« Time to Prepare for Next Year’s Taxes
Funding a New Business »

Increasingly a partner’s role is seen as developing client relationships. This includes wining and dining and also giving overall direction to the work of the managers under them. Partners may not necessarily be competent to give detailed advice to clients: they may just be glorified P.R. referral points who get one of their specialist managers to get back to the client with an answer. Partners no longer become industry experts as today’s auditing pattern means that they will only develop a relationship with the client for a few years before the partner responsible for that client is changed.

Boosting profits

Conflicts often arise between the need for client care and the firm’s self- interest. In years gone by it would be that the client would be put first and the firm’s interest would not enter the equation. This situation is now reversed and many newer partners are primarily motivated by self interest – linking their self interest to the self interest of the firm. Consequently we should not be surprised when we hear of a partner of a well-known firm saying in a meeting with other professionals “Stuff the client. We want to get the deal done”.

Salesmanship

Thus the way to become a partner is not through technical excellence but by developing the personal qualities and style of salesmanship that fits the corporate ethos of the particular large firm concerned. If your firm has just appointed some young, loud-mouthed lad, full of bull to the partnership, who is not technically very bright, you now know why!