The Values of our Business

Hi everyone, I’m Nishi Patel from Northants Accounting, and I started this business five years ago. So, in that time, a lot has changed, but one thing that’s always stayed the same is the underlying values that this business is built upon, and in today’s video I just wanted to talk you through what those values are and what they actually mean. So, the values in this business, very conveniently, spell the acronym ISEE, so that’s I-S-Double E, and there’s four main values.

The first one is integrity. So, to us, what that means is doing the right thing no matter the cost. That often leads us to actually recommend courses of action that create more work for us but are better for our clients in the long term, and we don’t usually charge for that, and in the very few and rare instances where we’ve actually made a mistake, we hold our hands up, admit to it, and then fix it as soon as possible regardless of the cost to ourselves. So integrity’s been a huge part of our success.

Our second value is sustainability. We work with various partners, and especially in terms of marketing where we’ve got marketing agencies we work with and other suppliers, and we have a team of staff, and one of the most important things for us is to work in a way that enables other people to have long-term aspirations in their own businesses and their own lives. What that means is, in terms of staff, we pay a competitive rate and we make sure that there’s a good level of development going on with our suppliers. That also means that we’ve gotta pay them fairly, we’ve gotta be easy to work with, and we’ve gotta look after the long-term health of their businesses. So, sustainability has been a huge part of getting people to buy into this Northants Accounting dream. As part of that as well, it builds on the integrity side of things because with our own clients we want to build relationships that last 10 years rather than trying to make a quick buck in the next few months. So, we work in a way that provides long-term business health for everyone involved.

Our third value is empathy. So, when you’re running a business it’s not easy. Sometimes you’re the finance director, the marketing director, operations director, everything rolled into one. So, the viewpoint we have to take and we work with is that finance isn’t the most important thing going on in a business. We know that there’s loads of other challenges facing a business owner, and we work in a way which tries really hard to understand that and be as flexible as we possibly can. So when business owners are under pressure, they get the support they need from us rather than us being another one of their problems. So empathy has been a huge part of actually getting people to want to work with Northants Accounting ’cause we understand what they’re going through.

And our final value is excellence. What excellence means to me is we wanna be the best. We don’t try and do everything in accounting, and, a lot of the time, if a client’s not right for us or if it’s not something that we can do well, then we don’t take that client on, and that’s really important ’cause the things we do do we wanna be the very best at. That means staying up to date with our tax knowledge, coming up with the best tax planning strategies that are not only gonna save our clients money, but also protect them from HRMC in case there’s an inquiry. We obviously don’t believe in doing anything artificial. So we help our clients keep as much evidence as they need, and it generally means being a market leader. We look at what other accountants in the area are doing and then we say, actually, how are we gonna improve on this? How are we gonna do something so unique and valuable that we’ll be the only accountants small businesses wanna work with? So, excellence has driven us to actually get to the level of performance and customer service that our clients experience at the moment.

So those are the four values that underpin Northants Accounting. It’s not always easy to stick to them, but we never deviate because they are who we are. So if you wanna find out a bit more about those values, if you wanna experience what it’s like to work in that environment where we stick to those values and benefit from that yourselves, then please get in touch, and we’d be happy to help.