Blu Sky Chartered Accountants | Why we’re taking our entire team to Xerocon London
The story behind Blu Sky Chartered Accountants began in 2005, when one of its co-founders, Dave Gibson, set out as a sole trader with no clients, no offices and no people. Then, two years on, Jon Dudgeon met up with Dave – and the concept for Blu Sky kicked in.
“We didn’t want to be traditional accountants,” explains Jon. “So we started with fixed fees 10 years ago when not many other accountants were doing this. And we embraced technology from day one. This helped us to attract start-up tech clients who were like-minded and progressive in their thinking.”
Fast forward to 2017 and the Blu Sky team, based in the UK’s North Shields, is 17-strong, winning awards, and growing quickly. They have over 360 clients across the north east region of the UK, and in London and Manchester.
And the start-ups who came onboard all those years ago are now creating their own success stories. “A recent client just sold their business for close to £3.5 million,” says Jon.
Our focus on people progression
Blu Sky’s own success story is about staff engagement as much as anything else; something they say Xerocon helps to achieve.
“The average age of our team is below 30, apart from us as co-founders,” says Jon. “So we’re working with a team of millennials. And we’ve done a lot of work around this engagement piece and around retention. For millennials, it’s all about progression, development, being listened to and understood.
“Xerocon is a really good fit with these goals.”
This is partly why the entire team are headed to Xerocon London on 4-5 October this year.
“Yep, we’re closing the office for two days and hiring some apartments. Being cloud based it means we don’t have to be out of contact with our clients. But it’s still a huge investment for us,” says Jon.
The strategy behind the spend
The return on investment is really clear to co-founders Dave and Jon.
“Xerocon matters a lot to us. Firstly, it helps us not only from a CPD perspective, but because we’re also hearing about all the new ideas being formulated. It shows us what is happening in the next 12 or 24 months, and we can see how this dovetails with our firm’s strategy.
“This is invaluable,” says Jon.
“Secondly, when we put the offer out there, everyone came back saying that they wanted to go to Xerocon. They jumped at it.
“It was at that point that it made sense to bring everyone, for the sake of the development of the team, our ethos, and working relationships as much as anything,” he says.
Make ROI matter
Beyond these two key reasons, other ROIs also come into play when the whole team is involved.
“By taking everyone it is great for the junior members of the team,” says Lead Client Account Manager Steve Robinson. “It can be a hard development curve for junior members and Xerocon helps to get them out of the office and experience a first-class learning opportunity with their peers.”
Jon agrees. “If you look at it solely from a recruitment level, we know if we can help to engage our team and retain them, then we don’t have to go through the pain and expense of engaging a recruiter to find a replacement, and go through the entire onboarding process.
“Straight away this increased engagement gives us ROI. And if the team are more efficient because of one, two or even five things that they learned at Xerocon, then that is brilliant,” Jon says.
Building the buzz across the firm
“Two or three years ago when we went to Xerocon it wasn’t senior management who went along; it was our account managers. Back then we saw it as more of a simple knowledge-gathering exercise,” says Jon. “But our account managers came back with a real buzz saying, ‘Wow – that was really, really helpful.’
“It just makes a lot of sense to us to go too, and to extend that experience to the entire Blu Sky team. In fact it would be counterproductive not to.”
Xerocon London will be held at ExCel London, 4-5 October. Register for tickets today.
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Source: Xero Blog
