This week I had the opportunity to chat to a Melbourne accountant, who was talking about his decision to outsource work over to Odyssey.
Interestingly, he used the words that he had a “toxic inhouse SMSF work culture”, to which I asked him to explain a little more as this is an unusual word to associate with inhouse employees.
The accountant, in his early 30’s, explained that he had a legacy business. He’d been forced to “exit some employees” (his words, not ours) due to what he phrased as “toxic work culture”.
For these employees, the toxic culture existed at several levels in the business.
The accountants working on the SMSF’s, who were doing basically “data entry” (his words, not ours), were charging up the hours on the job in order to meet their monthly targets, and when their monthly targets were met they were out the door promptly at 5:00 pm. There was a basic lack of commitment to the firm and the firm’s probability.
For the managers, the accounting owner was seeing a review of an SMSF taking 15 minutes, but the SMSF manager charging 1 hour on the clock, and being comfortable with making their monthly targets.
As the accounting owner explained, SMSF’s are a reasonably specialized area, and the SMSF staff were comfortable in that they had surplus resources, and so spread the slack around the SMSF department.
The accounting firm owner had explored the Philippines, but came to the conclusion that he “was just taking crap processes and exporting them to a lower cost jurisdiction” which effectively was just putting off the inevitable need to fix the systems.
His decision in approaching Odyssey was that compliance was just data entry (a commodity), and he’d prefer to be monitoring clients from a higher level on real time data, advising them, and doing the clever stuff in Australia.
Needless to say the conversation finished with Odyssey shooting over a services agreement.
If you need help with overcoming toxic inhouse cultures, then drop Odyssey a line and we’ll show you how Outsourcing your compliance work can assist
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