Banging the drum for Birmingham and preparing for the tough times
The professional services have been hit hard by the economic downturn, in what some are calling the first “white collar recession”. Tom Scotney spoke to John Hardbattle, managing partner of the Birmingham office of Grant Thornton, about what the credit crunch really means for the people working through it.
John Hardbattle got into the professional services earlier than most. As a teenager in his dad’s grocery shop in Leicestershire, he dreamed of being a professional footballer. But then a chance remark from a visiting customer set him on a completely different career path.
“Somebody came in and said ‘you want to get your son to be an accountant, you’d make a lot of money doing that, and it's a good business to be in’,” says the office managing partner of Grant Thornton, at the offices of his firm on Edmund Street, the heart of Birmingham’s financial district.
“I didn’t choose accounting like a career where you consider this and consider that, my dad just said so and I did that.”
But after leaving school in the middle of A-Levels to pursue a career as an accountant, Mr Hardbattle soon found himself embroiled in a successful career that would take him right to the top in Birmingham’s professional services.
After a traineeship in Leicester and a brief spell in London, Mr Hardbattle was back in the Midlands after applying for a job as assistant manager at the Leicester office of Thornton Baker, a prototype of what’s now Grant Thornton. But on the day he arrived to take up the role he was told the previous manager had already left, and so was promoted to the top spot on his first day at the offices.
After building up at Leicester and becoming a staff partner, the higher-ups decided he would be the perfect person to take over at a previously unfashionable corner of the Grant Thornton empire - Birmingham.
He came to Birmingham 12 years ago, when the office in Britain’s second city was something of a backwater, overshadowed by the high-profile competition from the banks and financial giants like his former employee KPMG. But he was soon struck by the city, with the exception of the traffic.
“I came here 12 years ago, and I wish I had come here earlier,” he says. “I like it here. It’s bright, things are changing and people give you a chance if you’re an outsider. I particularly like promoting Birmingham, it’s great to see someone like Digby Jones doing that, and obviously I don’t do anything like that. You find a lot of people from Birmingham get run down, but people don’t realise what it’s really like. I love the people here and there’s a great community. There’s a good spirit, particularly in the professional services community, and people support each other a lot.
“The problem has been just letting people know you can get things done in Birmingham. Our sort of work always favours London, and people always have the view you have to get things done there, but you can often do things better and cheaper here. There’s just a bit of prejudice. I was talking to one of the partners here, who’s worked in Birmingham all his life, and he told me we hadn’t got a contract because we were Birmingham - he really meant it with heart.”
When he moved to Birmingham, turnover at the firm was only £3 million. But the figure has grown more than eight times over in his time there, currently riding high at £25 million even with the credit crunch beginning to bite in the firm’s last financial year.
Mr Hardbattle says: “Our office now is a key one in the firm whereas before it was nothing to shout about. We’ve recruited from outside but also grown within and its very satisfying when you see someone come up through the ranks. I am proud of my achievements - it’s been rewarding to find the office has progressed so well.
“I think growing the office and building it up into one where it has some standing within the community has been one of the proudest moments of my career. When we started our client base wasn’t very strong, we’ve improved on that and we’ve got some very good customers that we wouldn’t have had before. Also, growing in people has been something I’ve particularly enjoyed - taking it from a small organisation to something substantial.”
For many of the new people in the Birmingham office, the past decade had been ten years of constant growth. So when things took a turn for the worse in 2008 the new hands turned to the older ones for help.
Things deteriorated financially at the firm, particularly in legal advisory work and transactions, as the market froze because of the drop in consumer demand and the drying up of available credit.
And he says: “Things are more challenging but I think we all ought to have recognised everything was going to go pear-shaped so maybe we should have been more attentive to that. I think it’s a lot more challenging now, especially dealing with the outside clients.
"We need to spend more and more time with our clients now because everyone else is trying to take them off you. Some of our clients are suffering and you need to spend more time with them than you have done before – you need to get people out there because clients appreciate that. But we have got people who are loyal clients who need protection.
“Work is more challenging now, particularly dealing with banking institutions, but it’s just about honesty and being up front with people. The banks have made mistakes like everyone else but you have to help them because without them we’re just going to get nowhere.”
During the last recession, in the early ‘90s, Mr Hardbattle was in charge at the office in Leicester. He said the experience has helped over the last year, adding: “At that time we rode out the recession quite well. In Leicester it was very different because there were a lot of industries just shutting down.
“I think the recession’s more difficult this time, there’s a lot of youngsters we’ve got who have no experience of recession. Things are difficult now, there are problems right across the spectrum with people working out how to respond to it.
“The younger people here do listen to me but also you need to listen to them – its a two-way thing, you learn a lot off people. Dealing with the recession is a combined effort really – you don’t want to chuck out all your experience but you have to change. I just think a lot of people have never seen anything like it before and are a bit shocked.”
The recession led to what he says was one of the hardest parts of the job – making job cuts at what was previously an unqualified success story of an office. Towards the end of last year Grant Thornton announced the East and West Midlands corporate finance teams would be merged, resulting in the loss of 18 members of the transactional advice team in Birmingham.
As office managing partner, the decision often fell to Mr Hardbattle. “I have to say people I have dealt with where that’s happened have been very realistic and have a positive approach,” he says. “It is difficult, even with the minor reduction we’ve made to our people. I’ve worked as an HR manager and it hurts. You want to be doing things that are positive but you’ve got to be honest with people.
“Our HR manager who had to let one of the secretarial staff go was quite affected by it, but then he got a card from the girl to thank him for the nice way he went about it.”
