Girls Know Nothing - S2 Ep26: Rachel Harris | Accountants For Influencers, HMRC & Apprenticeships

Episode Date: August 2, 2023

GKN is a female-focused podcast hosted by  @SharonNJGaffka GKN Social Channels:  Https://linktr.ee/girlsknownothing  Instagram: @girlsknownothingpod  Tiktok: @girlsknownothingpod TikTok: @girlsknownothing

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Oh, it was yes rachel harris is disrupting what it means to be an accountant a business owner and an employer in 2023 she is a tedx speaker a content creator an author a business owner and most importantly an accountant rachel adds value to her audience of 30 000 followers by creating completely free long and short form content delivering financial education rachel is extremely passionate about providing free financial education as the founder of instagram account accountant she the founder of strive x accountants and now the founder of strive x mortgages so welcome to the studio rachel now i've got sidetracked with other things i was thinking about then like viral boob jobs yeah boob jobs Botox and all the wonderful things that stereotypical accountants never have to deal with but you somehow have made it like your niche and

the thing that you I guess thrive off of I guess it makes your little job a little bit more interesting right 100% I'm a 90s kid like this is how i consume content right like i watched on love island now you're a client so i i feel like it's such testament to one of the best bits about working in finance or specifically becoming an accountant is that you can choose who you work with like you could pick any industry in the world from formula one all the way through to content creation and influencers and say, that's what I'm going to do. That's something they don't teach you in school when you say you want to become an accountant. I was literally told by a careers advisor not to become an accountant because it was boring.

Why do I feel like careers advisors really aren't that good at their job? So why did you want to become an accountant? Because, you know, it's quite obvious you're not what I would stereotypically picture an accountant to look like yes we call them the stale pale males and they have brown carpet and like that's very much what I thought being an accountant was and I guess the short answer is I did loads of those you know when you're at school the careers advisors make you do like a personality test oh god yeah all of them came out as accountant like if you google ISTJ which is basically an introvert they tell you to become an accountant so I'm just an introvert who's pretty good at maths

and every single thing came out and told me to become an accountant and so I literally picked off a list and was like sure is it hard to be introverted if you're very client facing though I also feel like I'm an extra like an introvert in disguise and I actually more recently feel like I'm not an introvert I actually feel like as I've grown and the business has grown I've been surrounding myself with the wrong people yeah cool because I was gonna say you're like obviously I follow you on social media and you do not come across like an introvert at all with all of like the pink and like it looks very flamboyant yes so that's why i was like really surprised when you when you said that um but it's very much about how you lose or drop energy right like i can do all of those things and have a personality and do them all just need

to sit in a dark room afterwards we've all been there where you need to recharge that social battery but um you know i've did like a little bit of research on you and things and i was really surprised to know that you didn't go to university straight away because when you think about like your career path you automatically assume that you must have gone to like some big russell group university at the age of 18 or that you came from a wealthy family that of accountants and things like that but for you that's not the case at all not the case no so i really wanted to go to university i was very bright at school did really well at school I was a young carer so I'm an identical twin I have always actually since birth been a carer for my sister and so going to university was not on the cards for me and so

yeah I did my a levels I wanted to get good backing I knew that some sort of like further education would probably be on the cards for me in the future if my personal circumstances ever changed and so I did A-levels and then went straight from A-levels into an apprenticeship and so I was definitely an apprenticeship baby so started my first ever accounting exams I was like going to night school at the same time as doing a business admin apprenticeship at my local council and I was paid the apprenticeship minimum wage I was paid three pounds 23 an hour and so what that meant was I wasn't actually able to put 100% into my day job because I was working in pubs clubs night clubs evenings and weekends like I literally used to do nine to five go to night school five

till seven and then work from like eight till two a.m you know three four nights of the week to be able to afford to get the bus to work that's insane but like that's not sustainable for many people right how long did you manage to do that for yeah and this is the thing like I literally did it I think 18 18 months two years and then that was a huge huge motivation for me to just like pass my exams faster work harder do more like I was finishing apprenticeships that you're supposed to be on for like 18 months and six months, literally because I was so financially motivated. Like I literally used to say to the people, like, can I do it faster? Like how many exams can I take in one go? Like how can I do this as fast as possible?

And it literally was, I was miserable. All of my mates went off to university. They all had like hoodies with their uni name on. And I was not in a club. Like I was going to night school and they were doing Jager bombs on a Tuesday night two five pounds it was rubbish um do you know what actually like there's very few people that I've actually been able to like say that I have I relate to that too I mean I was very fortunate I wasn't on an apprenticeship minimum wage um so I didn't have to like go work in pubs and clubs but you know people don't realize that

sacrifice you make at 18 to do an apprenticeship but when you're older oh my gosh yeah it was like the tortoise and the hare right like i was pretty miserable uh not not not doing egg bombs on tuesdays go to night school doing all the exams and for the three years that all my friends are at uni it's pretty rubbish and again that's a huge part of my mission now is like turn it into a club not going to university and but suddenly they were all graduating and suddenly they were going into jobs that i was in three years ago suddenly yeah my career was like my salary was three times what they were on they were earning graduate graduate money and i was earning actual real life adult money i had a great car i understood how to save because I was in the financial industry and I didn't come from privilege I was a free school

meal child neither of my parents worked in professional services and only one of my parents worked that wasn't the background that I came from but suddenly I had exposure to I was competing with the kids that came from privilege all of a sudden it was amazing because I think a lot of I've always I think one of the reasons why i started this podcast is because i'm not able to physically answer every single question that i get in the dms right and loads of people were like you know i'm really worried about how i'm able to be successful or be in certain positions at work if i don't go to university or if i do an apprenticeship and things like that and there are times where yeah it will suck

like i said not doing i mean i wouldn't i can't stomach jager anyway but doing jager bombs on a tuesday or like my friends are going on making new friends yeah you're like in that phase of life right yeah my friends are still playing sport going out and all these things and i was sat in a really dingy office in london people way older than you that you're like what did you do this weekend karen what have you got for lunch someone explained to me what the menopause was on my 21st birthday and well i mean i know what it is but like yeah really 21 but they really went in depth and i was like i'm absolutely terrified please let me go out so i can drink but like no i think and it's um but even though you didn't go to university and you had to like manage all of these commitments and and as well as being a care you still ended up training at a really big accountancy firm right yeah um i didn't

even know these things existed i literally knew about the magic circle law firms and that was it but it would make sense to have all these big accountancy firms competing against each other on a big list every year right rate I mean it sounds right like it sounds self-explanatory but how did you go from working a minimum wage apprenticeship job into ending up into like the top 75 accountancy firms yeah really good question so I I tried to with every single job role I was like collecting job titles so I literally made my mission from the word go like can you look down my CV or or even now like my linkedin profile and see growth and progression with every single jump up so like i was grabbing job titles as fast as i could get them so apprentice to junior to accountant to senior

accountant i once had the job title of a semi-senior used to get called the semi it was awful but i literally was like get me the next job title even if it's half one i'll take that like get me on it and um yeah that led me to a top 75 practice which is where I did the majority of my training that's where I met my now husbands we're life partners and business partners we do run the business together and yeah that was a whole experience on its own and again the timeline and the series of events that led me to being self-employed has driven a huge amount of core values and the reason I run the practice the way I do now is I guess like well when you think about these big firms and the stereotypical people that are there you also think about the young boys

club so there must have been an element of young boys club in these in these firms you were working drinking culture yeah honestly yeah I'm Tito and I'm four and a half years sober wow congratulations thank you very much um and I actually drank when I was at the top 75 and I would say the toxic drinking culture there actually played quite a huge part in me wanting to go sober wow it was because like I don't do well under peer pressure and actually for me sobriety is a full stop yeah i tried saying oh i'll just have one but then that it never happens yeah it's not one um so for me yes sobriety was a full stop that i think i needed in that sentence but again that toxic drinking culture is huge and it's very very much that's how promotions are fed up that's how

pay rises are like that's how really key decisions are made. And so it's really difficult to navigate that in your 20, especially when, if you've not gone to university, you're three, four, five years younger than anybody else that you're with. You're still trying to keep up and make the right decisions through doing that. It's really difficult.

Would you say that was like the biggest challenge for you going into those firms? i think imposter syndrome was huge the biggest thing for me in the top 75 was there was no female leadership okay like no female partners there was one woman who was management um and no female partners it's one of those things isn't it like i always get asked all the time why do young women not pursue careers in politics and it's because you don't see you can't there's no one that looks like you always taken a path similar to you and you do i firmly believe as young people you can only be what you can see and i really i literally left that firm because i couldn't see what progression looked like and not just

progression like blow the doors off grab that job title progression which is very much my personality type yeah and yeah I couldn't see it do you think that's why one of the reasons why so many big firms lose such untapped talent then oh yeah and they now work for me well going on to that I'm about to ask you how you grew your accountancy firm from your dining room table onto was it a team of 18 you said now yes i just had our 18th job offer accepted yeah i i don't know if i you're obviously a better woman than me i couldn't deal with the pressure of knowing 18 people were relying on me for their livelihoods but like how did you go from that dining room

table to all of a sudden having this big team so we actually have an employee waiting list so wow okay I woke up this morning and just checked it's literally just like a google drive it's nothing fancy I'm really stingy um yeah we have this employee waiting list and I woke up this morning and the 99th person joined the employee waiting list oh wow yeah so we have an employee waiting list of 99 people how do you filter that list we like it is literally a constant filtering process so as soon as somebody joins we're sort of like scoring them to understand where they would sit in terms of priority levels and again like we are accountant running a business it's very strategic growth it's very measurable yeah it was predictable now like I can measure the pipeline that's coming into the business so on an average month we would

take in like 110 000 pounds worth of new work every single month that is therefore like between two and three brand new members of staff every single month but because i can leverage that pipeline through social media content creation all of that combine that with i've got a waiting list of unhappy people at rubbish firms yeah on the waiting list who have consumed every bit of content that i've ever put out there from a day in the life of their colleagues all the way through to us doing tiktok tuesdays and fun fridays and they know that we go on an all-inclusive holiday to new york every year and like they understand the benefits package and they've watched this content most frequently asked question we get when we're interviewing is

is that reality like is it yeah I have never heard of any business having an employee waiting list like I'm actually like my brain has just gone but you did send me a video of you guys painting candles on your lunch break so I was like god can I join I want to paint candles on my lunch break I had to just sit at my desk and eat prep that was literally my reality but I mean being an award-winning employer sounds easy but when did you know it was the right time to take on your first employee good question so and it's worth noting our first employee who's still with us now joined at our dining room table and I remember saying to James family vibes literally like us the black labrador cat asleep on the table and i remember saying to james i think we need to get employers liability insurance because he's gonna hurt his

back like slumping over our dining room table like it's not always been a vibe and the reality is very different to to what it is now we had shed quarters we converted our shed into an office and we had six of us working like this was during covid as well our oh wow our driveway looked like a car park like we were pretty sure like neighbors reported us to the council it looked like we're having a party there's just so many people and so yeah for us it was very very much so i did i didn't go to university i did my accounting exams i qualified and then i always knew like I always had that imposter syndrome of not going all of these people I was comparing myself to wrongly now I look back but like I was comparing myself to them

and it really felt like I missed I think because I desperately wanted to go and it the decision not to go felt outside of my control yeah it was always something that was on my list and so I went to university and said I didn't go to university. I am an accountant. Yeah. Would you accept my accounting qualifications in place of a degree and let me onto a master's? Would you let me do an MBA, which is a master's in business?

And first of all, they said no. And I was like, can we try again? Like, can you ask, can I speak to the manager, please? Like, can you just ask again? The Karen of universities. Yeah, literally like, please, can I try again? And they said, yeah, okay, sure.

If you consider GMAT which is the admissions test for a master's we'll let you in and so I did it passed it got in and then did a master's program and so for us the growth the positioning the market segmentation the reason we create the types of content we do in certain pillars directed towards certain like target markets that's all very very strategic and so for us the scaling has been very strategic from day one we took every single thing that we learned from being a top 75 and internally almost franchised the business from the word go which meant that it was just this movable object that we could scale from one man band dining room

table three years later we're documenting the journey to hitting a million pounds for the first time payroll bills half a million pounds like wow do you know like it must be it must have been really scary for that other person to like come on to work for you he had offers from top 10 he was so because I was an apprentice I was an apprentice baby I knew from day one like apprenticeships and again loads of stigma and misconceptions around what an apprenticeship is um so we knew we always wanted to like fully fund everybody's training programs and whilst not paying the apprenticeship minimum wage like paying them we pay 10 above market rate so we always knew we wanted that embedded into the firm and he's working in waitrose before he started with us and he was going to night school he was doing aat and he's in his 30s and

again i was really keen for it not to be a stereotypical i wanted to prove to people that apprenticeships don't just mean gen z school leavers it could be whatever you want it to be and so yeah he walked in and he literally had offers from top 100 practices and like he chose us he literally turned up in a suit and we were in hoodies and jeans on dining room table like you all right mate that would have been me on my first day as well i'd have been like heels tailored dress and you guys would have been like yeah comfy clothes i really missed the mark on this i guess for those 99 people on your waiting list what would be like the advice you would give them when it comes to like sending an application into work with you guys we are core values driven

okay very very core values driven okay very very core values i can teach you debits and credits i can teach you tax rules i can teach you how to be an account an accountant but i can't teach you to be one of ours and for us it's very very person driven person centered a lot of the people because of the content we create actually lean into us because they either have very serious anxiety like financial anxiety yeah trauma they're scared of someone knocking on the door maybe there's been like some sort of financial literally financial trauma in their life or they sit somewhere on a neurodivergent spectrum like because we create content in the places that we do we attract people who are doing

non-stereotypical jobs okay yeah but taxes don't discriminate everybody has to do a tax return from we've got clients who want bake off all the way through to our local village beekeeper like we don't specialize it's core values driven inwards but also internally as well and so if you're on the waiting list if you're looking for a job in 2023 to be an accountant it's so much more soft skill focused i want to know can you sit in front of a client who you have followed on instagram and not be weird like just make them feel really comfortable make them feel like we see inside people's businesses in a way that very often they don't even let their friends and family inside it's so intimate and so making sure that people feel comfortable they

trust you you're communicating with them in a way that makes sense like if your inbox is a hot mess i'm not going to email you you know yeah it is a hot mess um yeah and so it's so much more about soft skills and that's that's it for us there's um it's really strange that you say that because when you think of accountants you don't think of them as having any sort of skills skills whatsoever yeah or like people that are good at stuff like that and then that's like the people that i went to school with that became accountants or worked in banking and finance stereotypically didn't have soft skills when they were younger oh most people literally imagine them as like autistic yeah what they just want to sit behind a computer and not talk to anyone all day i mean to be fair sometimes that does sound like the dreamless yeah i would sit there with earphones in and just be like please

no one speak to me and i was never i was never good at maths despite the stereotype it's never it was never in my plan but um I was gonna say I was like with that was that tips for clients was that tips for your employees then because yeah do you also need like can you be selective with your clients now that you get so many so when a client accepts a proposal they also accept core values okay so that's very much us just being like this is the way that we work and one of the best bits of being self-employed is that you get to choose who you work with too right yeah and it's your opportunity to drive your values up and down the supply chain and so if you've had an experience with an accountant that wasn't great like spend your money somewhere else spend it somewhere that you're like if i'm gonna have to

pay money to get my tax return done yeah I want to spend it somewhere where like this ecosystem makes me feel really good. And I know that you treat your team really well. And I know that they're happy and I love them. And I'm building really sustainable long-term relationships with them. There are certain things in business that you have to spend money on for a lot of people accounting is one of them. And it's basically my job to make sure that you understand

the value proposition, that you understand how I treat the team, and that you understand that every single person that you speak to is not only insanely qualified and a great person but also happy well safe and financially looked after inside and outside of work I say that like I don't actually know like I didn't read my own proposal like I should have already known that to be fair but um I guess when you were saying about how in three years you're about to come up to a million pound turnover you're still in your 20s right that must be like terrifying to know that there's that much money like coming in and out and I mean if you're an accountant it's I always find accountants not necessarily good at managing their own money

or okay I was gonna say we're like two accountants married to each other who also run a business we are like is it hard to like live and work and be married to somebody all of the time like you're with each other 24 7 literally the best thing in the world ever ever i find it like there are two types of couples in the world it's definitely my mic and some people say like oh i could never do it i'm like well i do actually like my husband so that's probably the difference Karen that's probably why I said that oh I couldn't do it because I actually don't have a husband yeah so like but like I know I have friends that like live and work together and stuff and I'm always like but that must be a challenge in itself because how do you keep personal things personal and

professional things professional I guess for us's about because we met at work. Okay. We've almost always had some sort of like overlap and we've sort of had to have really, really good boundaries. But it really makes it long-term. You're building something that's yours. It's very, very much one of the best bits

about being self-employed is that you can't sell a job. You can't pass a job down to your children, sell a business, pass a business down to your children. And when you're sharingemployed is that you can't you can't sell a job you can't pass a job down to your children sell a business pass a business down to your children and when you're sharing that with someone that you love that wealth that tangible thing that you're building is for both of you and it almost removes a lot of the sacrifice I actually can't imagine doing it without my husband because I'm not actually sure I'd have one like I am so driven so driven I work almost toxic amounts and actually that's for us but if it didn't work with him I feel like that would breed other things oh when you put it like that sounds really sweet and romantic and I'm kind

of like oh why am I such a like toxic like no nobody speaks to me I my job is for me like stay away from everything I do but i mean like you know you've come from an apprenticeship and we never talk about finances in school i did an economics a level apart from some weird bell curve couldn't tell you anything else yeah and how we worked out the economics of a country by the price of a big mac yeah that's the only thing i can tell you about numbers and finance so like why is it that you don't think we're taught these actual life skills when it comes to money in schools my short answer is i'm really really working on it um so because female representation and lack of it was a really strong part of my journey i am now a director and trustee

of aat which is the governing body for accountants in the uk and again that you can be what you can see is really important i was the youngest ever person to do that and i feel like that's very similar to a lot of things that you've done and i feel like you do it and you don't mind being the first in the hope that you won't be the last this year there was like record numbers of submissions for people coming into the program to also do the same thing. And within AAT, there's a lot of government lobbying to get this stuff taught at school. And I can't even, we've taken on 700 clients. Up until today's day, I have onboarded every single one of them.

So I've spoken to a lot more than 700. We don't have a 100% acceptance rate. Nearly every single person I've spoken to in the last three years has mentioned a feeling or an emotion before they've ever mentioned a number. We as British people do not talk about numbers. We don't talk about finances. And that's because it's not taught in the curriculum.

So we're taught that either it's not relevant or that it's so awful. We're just not talking about it. and so even pay matrixes so one of my biggest icks about the top 75 was very inconsistent pricing on gender on whether or not you went to university even if someone had a degree in like geography they would get more they'd be on more than you managers based on age were paid less love that and so we have a completely transparent pay matrix and so our own internal payroll team do our payroll every single person could literally by going down qualification and experience work out how much every other person in the company is on it's one of my proudest achievements because

that's where we remove all of that stuff is by saying look at this we onboard people and we show them our pnl because we're about to hit a million pound turnover yeah but it's actually relevant because we could be running at a loss you know yeah and we're not but we could be and so that transparency only comes from being shown it by great role models in your life and i really do believe that starts with education because generationally we struggle as well but so many people that i have those conversations with will say an emotion will they ever say a number i bet your um employee retention rate is great so from our employee waiting list we have a 100 yeah because like it's um i mean i talk about pay matrix and scales and

stuff all the time and lack of pay transparency people list jobs they don't include the pay in job adverts it's like my biggest annoyance when it comes to job applications and like and even in finance change as well like it's a candidate market i what i wouldn't waste my time applying for a job if it didn't have a salary move on next i have openly told employers that. And funny enough, they don't like. They don't take very well to it. Because LinkedIn did not like you.

I remember that. Remember. Yeah. Whoops. My bad. Oh, what? From the TikTok? Yeah.

Because it went mad on LinkedIn as well. Did it? Yeah. I did not see that. For anyone that doesn't know, I did to aunties two years ago and wasn't your most one of your most viral tiktoks ever yeah it was like at 1.5 million views on tiktok and people were seething and foaming at the mouth that i thought it was not rude to discuss pay between employees or like creatives or whatever so you knew that you weren't underselling yourself

and i think it was beneficial for women people of color people from disabilities like the lgbtq and people were fuming funny enough the people that were most fuming were men i literally just wrote an article for a magazine which was about why gen z's make great employees all the men in the comment section there's a lot of tiktoks on it as well about gen z were having gen z employees and then being like but being very good at setting work life balance boundaries and like when people be like i've got a really good development opportunity for you and they're like are you gonna pay me for it yeah then i'm not gonna do it and i i love watching those because i think i would i wish

i was like that when i was younger because i used to be such a yes man which is weird you would not believe it now talking to me that i would i was like literally the biggest yes man but like you know what is the like wow because we're not taught it in schools there's so many misconceptions about what it's like to be self-employed parents didn't want me to do it because they didn't think i could get a mortgage there was a whole thing about like you know paying in your pension and job security there i don't think there's any such thing as job security in 2023 and if you can make it for yourself then why not but why is there so many misconceptions about how self-employed people can't have the same access to finances that employed people can have again

i think it comes down to lack of education so as well as our practice we also have we do mortgage advice because if you can have one conversation with your accountant who can also do your mortgage like in in your financial year and say sharon if you slam it between now and the end of the year this is your search criteria for zoopla that's all you want as a self-employed person right that's the only sentence I want to hear yeah it's like and that is the only and I think for a really long time lots of people have built financial services yeah up to be this massive thing that's really unattainable and inapproachable whether it's for me as a young person trying to decide my career or somebody as a consumer that needs to do it and that's why we're dominating the market i listened to the episode that you did with your manager about being a hld girl and i was like

that's what i want people to say about me i literally want the best and most creative talent in the industry to say she's my accountant because we're breaking it down it's pink it's approachable it's friendly it's like using actual words not scary words like dividends and corporation tax and it's making it feel really approachable and one of the biggest things for us was how can we bring in more and more and more financial services to make sure that these people are having one conversation with one person that they know like and trust and getting every single need met and the reality is that so many professional services have been like this for so long people don't talk

to each other accountants aren't saying how can we bring all of this in and make it this really holistic person-centered service it's almost been like an attitude problem within the financial services sector itself do you know what when I said to people that my accountant was coming on my podcast they were like oh a good one they were like what or what I said oh yeah I'm going for dinner with my accountant afterwards they were like is that supposed to be some sort of euphemism I was like no like do people not do this but then that's like that's what I mean about you guys you changing stereotypes because I think you know when it comes to big things like that I get anxiety because it's a lot and like you know because I wasn't taught it and I wasn't

taught like no one else taught me it how am I supposed to manage it and then when I saw your viral tiktok clip which probably also riled a lot of men up um about um people getting their boob jobs was it tax deductible yeah still my favorite clip to this day that's how i actually found you it was wild so what did you think i'm really interested what did you think when you saw it i i get it and i don't even think i get i understand it because um of what i do now i think i've got it because it's part of their job the same way that you know if you'd paid for a qualification like if you paid for your aat and you're a self-employed accountant that's tax deductible right same way

if i needed to if i was a taxi driver my taxi is tax deductible only fans content creators and boobs just make sense that's makes sense and this is the thing right and i think it was scary it was really scary especially when you've worked so hard and like this is very very much we don't specialize in the type of clients that we work with we don't exclusively have a portfolio of only fans creators and so like it was scary to go viral for like such a and people have so many opinions on it and it was so we knew that hook would go viral like me and gabby went for lunch before we recorded the podcast and she said like can we talk about it um and so we we very much knew it had it had the potential to go viral before before we even spoke about it and so it was very very scary and I think what a lot of people didn't see is as an accountant

we have scaled really rapidly I do have a great team. I'm also a great accountant. And I'd never, ever risk that. And so what people don't see behind the scenes is we literally had the internal standards team of our governing body investigate and do a start to finish audit of that tax return before we ever spoke about it publicly. We were speaking to the PR team and the press team of ACCA and AAT to say, can we speak about this publicly? I know you've done loads of work about the FCA regulations and making sure that the people who are talking about this stuff online is regulated, and that's something that I take very seriously as well. So the actual story was that we had an OnlyFans creator as a client, we still have, and she wanted to expense a boob job.

And she said, can I expense a boob job? And we said, absolutely not, obviously not, no, you cannot. And she said, i expense a boob job we said absolutely not obviously not no you cannot and she said well i've read the rules because we said this does not wholly and exclusively relate to your business yeah you get personal use of your boobs and she said i've read the rules and actually if i can prove like you say a degree is a great example of that or extra qualification i can prove that my income will go up as a direct result of spending this money and therefore i want to make the claim and they say people that do only fans are not that intelligent yeah that is something only a smart person would think yeah she's like i've read the

t's and c's and so we were like okay we need to talk to hmrc so we worked with hmrc um to understand case law reference it how can we interpret that because tax laws weren't written when people did even what we do as jobs right like i make money from content creation people that wasn't a job that wasn't a career when we were at school it wasn't a career when the tax law was written and so we do need change we do need reform and it's my job as an accountant to interpret rules that were literally written 50 years ago and apply that to an OnlyFans creator expensing a boob job. My boob job was far less complicated than all of it. And I'm so glad the HMRC did not have to get involved when it came to my boob job. When I listened to it, I was like, but I get it. It just makes sense. Like without even having to read the T's and C's, but you know.

And that was, it was scary. Like as, as I don't tell myself too seriously, and that was, it was scary. Yeah. Like as, as I don't tell myself too seriously, but that was, that was pushing the boundaries of like things that you want to go viral for. Um, and again, resulted in being interviewed on TV by Jeremy Kyle. Like it was, it's stressful.

And I feel like there was so many, we had such a phenomenal positive response from people that said, I didn't actually care what you were talking about, but you listened to her. Yeah. Like she came to you and said, I know your default reaction was no, but look at this. And so many people don't feel heard. So many people who do OnlyF fans work or even content creation like imagine if you were an asmr slime content creator would you walk into an accountancy practice with a brown carpet

and say this is what i do for a living no but you see me on tiktok talking about this stuff and creating content and saying i make money like every single month i share how much money i make as a content creator online and if you saw me doing that you'd probably think oh yeah like you get it I don't even need to explain that I probably have 17 forms of revenue and I get gifted stuff I don't know what to do with you don't need to explain that stuff yeah do you know what actually because I was going to come on to about how you had written an ebook about tax guide to influence to for influencers and people or when I get it all the time on a certain publication online there are comments about how being an influencer isn't a real job to some extent i get it because you don't

get up and go to whatever and you don't have to do a really extreme physical intensive job it depends what you do but if you're an only fan screen that's a very different story but for me personally you don't have to do anything that's massively labor intensive um but there are i would say so many rules regulations things you have to look out for you still pay your tax just the same as everyone else and but why did you specifically want to write a guide for influencers so the guide actually came from i'm quite like a strategic person and so i understood market segmentation I understood I'm a 90s kid. I consume TikTok, Instagram, YouTube content.

I was like, actually, if I can choose who I get to work with, I want to work with you. I want to work with people who are in boy bands, people who just want to bake off, people like you. That's who I would absolutely love to work for. And so the problem there is that influencers are incredible and content creators do everything themselves because very often they start it as a hobby so they have no money no budget there is no budget they are the talent they are the lighting department that the editing

department sound department tax team everything they do everything yeah because they have to start like i made content for free for two years before i ever monetized it that's no different to anybody else ever everybody normally starts doing it for free and so they have to learn how to do everything for free and so the problem for me was that lots of them don't want an accountant until they absolutely have to get one or until that like time cost benefit pays off but that means that they're making really good money and so i had to find a way and build and develop a product that served that market that actually wasn't me. And for me, that was the tax guide for influencers. And so since then, we've taken on huge content creation agencies who literally gift it to their talent as part of their welcome package. with your manager people aren't taught it people aren't talking about it and actually if we're able to build strategic relationships with management agencies that say we'll take you on but again one of our core values is making sure that you are well happy and safe inside and outside of your

work have you thought about speaking to an accountant why don't you speak to ours that is us passing our core values down to our clients and making sure that they are doing the good work and having those conversations for us do you want a very random thought that just popped into my head this is so bizarre when I don't think many people know this but when you leave the Love Island villa it might be the same with a lot of reality tv shows they sit you down and they show you lots of videos one of them is financial planning and accountancy and I said I cannot watch this for half an hour because it's the most boring video i've ever seen if anyone needs a new person to record it because then i might actually watch it i literally sat there and was like i was still in a bikini in my york i was

like i can't watch this i'm sorry i really tried and it was just literally brown carpet vibes with a weird whiteboard talking to me about dividends and stuff and i'm out i think that's it's so much part of the problem and it doesn't matter if you're a business owner you want to be an accountant or you want to start your own practice it is so it just feels stiff and horrible and like almost clinical yeah in a way it's not about you it's not about you and so even making sure that our our team are literally kpi'd on touch points how they can add value every touch point and literally the relationship that they have with clients yeah because that's all you care about you care about how we make you feel yeah and you trust us to do everything else we'll do tax

we'll do your accounts we'll do everything else put it this way i much preferred getting a smear test than watching that video like it was it was that painful so you know maybe you should write a pitch to itv and be like i've heard your video is extremely painful if you need someone to actually make it a little bit more pink then i'm your girl but um no i've honestly really enjoyed like how transparent you've been about your career and like i love consuming your content mostly because it's pink and it doesn't make finances and listening to people talk about money scary even though it does scare me that you get up at 5am every morning like every single i was like oh i get up at six i'm really go-getter and i look at your story and i'm like no but i can't get up at five i've tried i really have but um i've got a final question

and i did tell you at the beginning so maybe you've thought about an answer but it always catches people on edge um so what would you say to people that doubted your ability to be a successful accountant based on the fact that you are a young woman who didn't initially go to university two words watch me well she's gonna say someone else no I mean to be fair yeah you've pretty much proved them all wrong yeah and it's just it's yeah it's insane what you've been able to do but I guess it means you've just tapped into a market and showed the finance industry that they don't have to be so clinical traditional and boring in order to be successful and there's no stopping it right like you can't stay still and talking about lists like the top 100 the top four that's where we're going i firmly believe there is space for us in the top 100

like you move out the way you know i feel like that is the trajectory that we're going in financially and how they score it like we're not far away from it um we're launching audit later this year so we can work with some of the biggest companies that have like 10 million pound turnover plus and that's next step onto top 100 and it'll be pink i can't wait for that local beekeeper that you do the account books for to be like my accountants 100 and top 100 accountancy firm because that would just be the most wild thing ever just selling his honey on facebook it's great so cute i love that you know i'm so many wholesome businesses nowadays i bet that come from a lockdown thing just really randomly so so when i meet people who are employed and self-employed at

the same time it's a side hustle my favorite thing to do is say to them i'm going to challenge you i want to know the difference between your day job and your side hustle he is the one to beat he is a police officer by day beekeeper by night it's like a really fun superhero that is so random yeah beekeeping i bees terrify me so that's enough i love honey but bees terrify me but i mean i guess if you're a police officer you can't really be scared of them but yeah like no that is i'm like my mind's blown it's at least like with my old day job there is some correlation between what i do now and my old day job that is just that was just a hobby that got out of hand isn't it really yeah just loves bees no that's fair enough but like honestly thank you

so much for being so frank open honest and pink you've literally coordinated with the cushions and i'm here for it thanks for having me