Business Profile: A cricket fan with a good innings in accountancy

Dec 31 2010 By Tom Fleming

Tom Fleming speaks to a senior partner about his unexpected rise to the top.

Joe Hancox reckons he would struggle to get into the accountancy profession today.

Yet he did so well with what is now Crowe Clark Whitehill that he ended up in a national role – instead of the half-expected sack, he got promoted.

And now he has gone full circle, stood down from the main board, and it is back to basics, looking to drum up business as the senior partner at the Kidderminster office he originally founded.

He has stayed loyal to the one firm, albeit it is now on its fifth name – metamorphosing from Haskew Twist & Co to Fryer Whitehill & Co to Clark Whitehill to Horwath Clark Whitehill and now to its current embodiment.

Joe Hancox is something most accountants aren’t – he doesn’t take himself too seriously and on occasion he is not afraid to be controversial.

He notes: “I probably wouldn’t get an interview as an accountancy trainee these days.

“Not just my lack of a degree, but the A-levels were only just adequate. I spent too much time playing cricket.”

Ironically it was through cricket – the family home backed on to Old Hill Cricket Club – that, despite failing and having to retake his O-level maths, he decided accountancy was for him.

Running the score box or doing the scoring itself brought an affinity with numbers. “I earned five bob on a Saturday and a Sunday, got free teas and got to bowl at the players knocking up.”

So, on leaving Rowley Regis Grammar School at 18, he knuckled down to a nine-month course at Birmingham Polytechnic, four-year articles and at 22 earned his spurs as a fully-fledged chartered accountant.

Upon qualification, he created a completely new arm of the firm – launching a tax department. Hard to see a youngster getting that level of responsibility first up in 2010.

He said: “It was largely due to the then senior partner saying no there was no such thing as being a ‘general practitioner’ which is what I wanted to be.

“I was given three choices – audit, IT or tax. And if I did tax for at least five years I might then be able to claim to become a general practitioner.

“I chose the latter. Tax was never full time but it presented a tremendous opportunity for on the job training while still involved in producing clients’ management accounts, cash flow forecasts and year end accounts.”

At that stage he was working out of Birmingham– CCW had an office in the city until 1992 but left in 1987 to open a new Kidderminster office, which has grown to more than 50 staff and five partners.

It focuses on businesses in the Black Country, Worcestershire and the M42/M40 corridor towards Leamington and is now part of the firm’s Midlands practice which also takes in the Walsalloffice.

Offices elsewhere across the country are London, Reading, Maidstone, Tunbridge Wells, Cheltenham and Manchester.

Indeed, with its origins dating back to 1843, Crowe Clark Whitehill is a leading national firm offering audit, tax and advisory services, specialising in corporate, not for profit, pension funds, private client and professional practices.

It claims number one spot for auditing both charities and schools, and has a diverse client portfolio.

As a member of the Crowe Horwath International network, Crowe Clark Whitehill is able to offer a seamless global service.

He went on: “In October 2001 I wrote a very curt memo – emails weren’t used in those days – to the then chief executive about cost saving measures that were being implemented across the firm. I thought a tremendous opportunity had been missed – they were targeting small things when they should have been pursuing big stuff, and I said so. It struck a nerve.

“The chief executive rang me up a few weeks later and said he wanted to come up from Londonto see me in Kidderminster.

“On the day he arrived I was partly expecting the sack … but he asked me to become national finance partner and a member of the four-man executive running the firm.”

That role lasted nearly nine years – he combined it with two years as regional managing partner – and only recently has he passed the baton on to a younger partner, London-based Mike Hicks.