Professional practices

Strategies for talent-led businesses including law and accountancy firms, consultancies, patent attorneys, surveyors, actuaries and architects must skillfully weigh opportunity and risk against an increasingly uncertain future.

Ambitious or cautious, professional practices need an advisor who understands the complexity and dynamism of their often mature, highly regulated, business environments.

Whether you are ambitious or cautious, your advisor must be focussed, knowledgeable and close to the issues and markets that matter to you.

Aspiring boutiques and mid-market practices have repeatedly benefited from the expertise of our dedicated, multi-disciplinary team. We marry expertise for tackling broad strategic issues with exceptional technical execution on challenges including:

• Aligning business planning to strategic goals
• Structuring and restructuring for growth
• Performance enhancement
• Talent retention and management
• Succession planning and retirement

How we can help

• Accounting and assurance: Providing accounting advice and comfort on your firm’s financial reporting.
• Tax compliance and advice: Preparing and submitting your firm’s and partners’ annual tax returns, along with advising on the tax impact of various transactions and structures.
• Regulatory: Satisfying regulatory reporting requirements.
• Funding: Advising on finance options, including optimal partner funding, improving lock-up and working capital management and securing external investment and disbursement funding.
• Performance enhancement: Advising on profitability improvements, including margin maximisation, operational efficiency, cost reduction and achieving post-acquisition integration synergies.
• Partnership disputes: Acting as expert witness and mediating on disputes
• Employee benefits: Retaining talent by enhancing your employee benefits offering.
• Partners’ finances: A full range of financial planning and investment advice to provide enhanced financial security.
• Profit sharing: Advising on profit sharing strategies to drive desired behaviours.
• Incorporation: Assisting with the incorporation of a partnership as a company or LLP.
• Investigations into rogue partner activities: Assessment of scale of inappropriate behaviours and prevention measures
• Data identification post cyber attacks: Investigation into impact of hacking activity
• Administration of insolvent professional practices: Formal appointments and solutions for firms in financial distress
• M&A: Assisting with mergers and acquisitions, including target due diligence, sources of funding, structuring and post-deal implementation.

Our credentials

Dedicated

Your firm will benefit from a co-ordinated, cross-discipline service from our specialist professional practices team. We have more than 50 partners, directors and staff, providing all-round accounting, tax, business, financial planning and investment advice tailored to your needs.

Experienced

With experience of more than 100 professional practice clients across the UK, we have the expertise to help steer your management team through your firm’s unique challenges, to enable you to effect change successfully.

Connected

Our active involvement with influential trade and industry bodies such as the Association of Partnership Practitioners ensures we are closely connected to the issues and concerns of professional practices and can innovate to address them.

Forward thinking

We seek not just to solve, but anticipate the challenges professional practices face. Our insight programme condenses these issues and shines light on solutions for clients, meeting the challenges together.