NEVER AGAIN!

After 15 years of working in marketing agency life I had had my fill. I was going to do something new, something different. Anything but another agency with the characters, the WIP, the POs, the Timesheets…

I can’t remember anyone at school saying that they wanted to be an Accountant or Accounts Payable Supervisor when they left. Be very wary of anyone you meet in life who professes to “love accounting” — I have interviewed a few of these freaks in my time and they confounded me.

But somehow we land in these jobs and careers. Probably because we liked Maths at school and working in an interesting environment should make it better…right.

So you join an agency and everything is great. Wear what you want, start a bit late, lots of drinking, seemingly interesting people who have even more interesting job titles…

And then it starts.

You start noticing little things like your desk being miles away from any other department, everyone celebrating without you, no one ever coming to your department unless something has gone wrong, the MD giving a big talk to the whole company and the Finance Department never being mentioned…

You have now entered what I like to call the agency “Boxing Ring” which of course is actually a square. Odd that.

• In the Red Corner is Account Management
• In the Blue Corner is Creative Services
• In the Yellow Corner is the Creative Department
• In the Grey corner is Finance.

Sound familiar?

After a couple of month ends, job reviews, meetings and chats with your boss, it’s pretty clear that everyone just hates everyone else. I know some M.D.s will see this competitive quadrangle as healthy, good commercial strategy; putting departments against each other may put more cash in the bank. But the truth was that the constant in-fighting and back stabbing quickly wipes out the enthusiasm you had in the place. I was exhausted.

Finance people in agencies need to be more self-motivated than most other people. Why? You’re working in an environment where potentially everything is your fault.

And no-one is more disliked than The Finance Department in agency life. They mess up your job bags, introduced that ridiculous Job Costing system, pay your friends late and stick to the absurd Financial Procedures they have to follow. However, we are necessary. The secret of course (so we are told), is to help people reach their Bonus targets. We can help with that. They should love us! Dream on…

It’s our job to tell Creative Services they can’t get in any more Freelancers, or Designers to do their time sheets, or Account Management to get that Purchase Order in so we can bill it. It’s all negative stuff. Our job is to be a moaning Policeman and no one wants that…no wonder we are not liked!!

Or you may be. I made the change. Even the recruitment process was different this time.

I was told they wanted someone different, tick. Someone Commercial, tick. Flexible hours, big, tick.

The interview.

The strangest interview I’ve ever had. Mainly consisting of arguing over how many chairs there are in the UK and reviewing a dating web sites forecasts. Weird and a bit unsettling. BIG tick.

The follow-up interview.

Drinking. Sitting around a big rectangular table getting pissed with everyone. I had to leave after 3 glasses of very good wine (its best to have interview booze limits). I think I spoke to everyone, and they actually smiled and seemed genuinely interested in me. Me? A mere Bean Counter?

I went home with a feeling more like buying a new car, or being at a great gig, than meeting a new employer. Especially an employer in a Marketing Services. I’m in.

Of course the reality could have been the opposite of what I first encountered, but I had no reason to fear. With this environment it was the perfect chance to try and do something different.

When I joined Finance sat away from everyone else. Very near but at fixed desks and separate. We moved offices and I wanted none of that. We now sit with everyone else on hexagonal desks and a different one every day. Finance (only 2 people) don’t even have to sit together, sure sometimes it makes sense but the point is to not sit together every day.

Yes we do payroll and some HR stuff. All those other things that freak people out when paperwork is left around. We can’t be totally P&C, so we aren’t and why should we be?

Most people in most companies know how their salary compares to others. Most know roughly where they live and really, what is there to hide?

As we are all business owners at Independents United we all need to be Finance “savvy”.

We share everything with everyone in our company, and everyone has the knowledge to make decisions without asking Finance every five minutes.

We share cashflows, overheads, P&L, budget vs actual etc. We also share the bad stuff like who’s behind with their timesheets. We share it all with everyone. If you don’t adhere to any of our core values, financial or not, you will be “called out”.

You could say it’s like a family. If someone doesn’t take the rubbish out they get “called out”. They know what they’ve done wrong, they correct their behaviour and then we all get on with life. It’s not taken personally and at IU you need to be able to give and receive criticism in a “loving way”

The only thing we are not yet totally transparent on is salaries, but that could still happen, and why not?

We give everyone in the company access to live Finance KPIs via shared documents. On here they can see current cash balance and when it’s going to get low, how much of our time is billable, and where we are on our targets. Yes we still have targets.

Having a flat structure means no one’s really going to check your work in detail. You don’t really have a boss. You have to care enough to get it right in the first place.

Month ends? Who needs them!? We don’t. Really, what a pain it is to rush numbers that are normally incomplete to produce long reports no one usually reads. With profits and cash-flow info on hand for all, everyone knows where we are all the time. Everyone has their own budgetary areas of responsibility and there is simply no need for formal monthly meetings.

We have purposely not introduced a proper job costing system like Paprika or Maconomy. They cause more admin and work for everyone and, being mainly fee based, we raise no POs. Our Cost of Sales are written to P&L when they arrive and none of our projects are WIP heavy. There’s not much to lose sleep over, like any small to medium sized company we have occasional HMRC and seasonal cashflow issues, but that is shared, it’s all of our responsibility to be aware and act accordingly.

So with so many formalities gone what they hell do we do all day?

Firstly all the nuts and bolts are done and up to date. If people want real-time info then we have to provide real-time accounting. We strive to be completely up to date. No one checks and we don’t have to prove to anyone that everything is done, but we put that pressure on ourselves. As business owners we know how important it is.

Part of our role is to ensure everyone is a fully knowledgeable business partner. Everyone should leave IU with the knowledge and tools to start up their own business. They need to understand balance sheets, cashflow statements and can spot errors in a P&L. We spend as much time as possible working with our colleagues to make sure they understand this (and there no point in giving someone shares if they can’t also behave like a Business Owner).

Anyone can open up a job on our system, we have told them what to do and we trust them to do it.

Having a flat structure, there may not always be a person to turn to for help so we have to trust the person will make the right decisions. We have to trust that our colleague who is working from home is actually working. We have to trust everyone is working towards the same shared goal.

Yes we do have to be a policeman occasionally, and sometimes we need to say no. The difference is that everyone understands why we have said no.

The future is to be as revolutionary in Finance as law and common sense allows. We want to make more time to be available to help colleagues, train them, and for us too to do something different, from running projects for clients, to writing for our Medium blog, to choosing what music is played in the office, we poke our nose in areas that other Finance staff wouldn‘t and our intrigue is welcomed.

So in the end we do everything you do, just in a different way; a better way, we believe.