Giving — an Accountant takes a stand

An accountant takes a stand

Disclosure — I admire Steve Pipe.

I first met him in 1994 when he was starting Added Value Solutions which morphed into the Added Value Network. Since that time he’s absolutely been at the forefront of moving an entire (and often hard-to-move) Profession in the United Kingdom to new standards of excellence in every facet of their work.

The profession is the Accounting profession —not exactly one that rushes to the forefront of your mind when you start thinking about innovation, great service, radically different working and team models.

Yet thanks to Steve, more and more Accountants in Public Practice are moving with amazing speed to serve their clients in new, effective and truly valuable ways.

And now, Steve’s adding giving to the mix — as he put in in an email recently, “my B1G1 goal is to get to 1 million personal givings and 1 million leverage givings* by December 2012.” And a quick look here shows you that he’s well on the way after just 5 months of being a B1G1 Business Partner.

And if anyone can do that, it is surely Steve — right now, according to LinkedIn Steve is the most highly recommended accountant in the world.

Steve’s a regular contributor to the UK-based AccountingWeb where his straight-from-the-shoulder comments get literally thousands of readers and hundreds of comments. “Sometimes I need to wear a tin hat because of those comments,” Steve jokes. His blog is a veritable treasure-trove of great insights, opinion, strategies and outstanding information.

Here’s the main point of all of this: Steve does something important — he takes a stand.

Yet interestingly, he does that not at the expense of other values — he works just 90 days a year and devotes as much time as possible to his rapidly growing up University-aged children.

Yet that does not diminish his passion — as he puts it on his BusinessesThatGive listing at B1G1, “I’m working to make the UK's owner managed accountancy practices the most successful and enjoyable to run in the world.”

And he’s doing it well — his new best-selling book, ‘The UK’s best accountancy practices’ lists 42 fantastic firms doing wonderful things wonderfully well with their teams and their clients. It’s a must read for anyone in the profession anywhere.

I suspect the next version of the book will go even further as Steve helps many leading-edge firms discover the power of B1G1 giving. He explains it this way:
 

I believe that accountancy is a noble profession. And I believe that clients deserve to be really well served, and that their accountants deserve to be really well rewarded. On a personal level, I also believe that as human beings we are here to do good.

Or, as we put it at B1G1, businesses have the power to change our lives.

Steve adds,
 

When you set out to do good and to serve people outstandingly well, the rewards are wonderful in both a financial and emotional sense.
B1G1 is such an incredibly joyful thing. It is an honour to be able to play a very small part in both supporting it and spreading the word about it.

Thanks to the power of leveraging, the part Steve plays is actually anything but small. Like all B1G1 Partners around the world, Steve is ‘out there’ actively recommending B1G1 to his Accountant clients and they in turn are recommending it to their clients.

And yes, they in turn are recommending it to their customers and so on. It's what we call, *Leveraged Giving Impact. And again, you can see more about Steve’s Leveraged Giving Impact here.

Even better perhaps, you can start your own! Come and join us. You’ll love the experience AND, just like Steve, you’ll be making a stand for making a real difference.