My fellow Audit and Assurance (A&A) Partners and I, representing the PKF Australia firms and a growing contingent of our New Zealand colleagues, have for some years worked together as the A&A Leadership Group. Our purpose has evolved over time, but throughout we have been conscious of our obligation to work as a collegiate to serve our clients better, be of consistent quality, and represent our PKF brand as one, with our success represented by our growth.
We meet regularly, face-to-face and via video-conference. Our strategy is focused on four pillars:
- Service and Delivery – developing our systems, processes, and methodologies to be the best possible
- Markets – developing our processes to better interface our capabilities with our market
- People – our most important asset, supporting delivery of a broad range of services and underpinning our growth
- Quality – maintaining consistency of our processes and improving them as necessary to meet the wide-ranging expectations that our clients and the market have of our products.
The stand out to me of the quality of our forum is the commitment of all to our agenda, and the responsiveness of our people to the actions that we agree to maintain at least, but better still, improve our client relationships and build our opportunities to broaden our reach in the marketplace.
We strive to achieve this promise to our clients: your local Partner will always work closely with you, tapping into national expertise that delivers new and innovative ways to address problems and create solutions.
As examples:
- Through Hayley Keagan, PKF’s Sydney & Newcastle based Technical Director, we have a great access point to address technical accounting questions – no matter from where in our network the advice is sought. Additionally, Hayley is providing support to the Australian Accounting Standards Board on its far-reaching project to revise the Conceptual Framework for Financial Reporting, which in the Australian context will see the removal of the ability to prepare Special Purpose Financial Statements.
- Upcoming in our calendar are events aimed to get most of our professional staff together in either of two formal team building events:
- Our major training program, focused on three formative levels of our peoples’ development – graduate, senior, and new manager
- Our A&A Conference.
Each of these events are important elements in fulfilling our obligation to ‘stamp’ the Career Passport for our team members at all levels.
The objective of opportunities and events such as these is to develop our teams’ expertise and in turn enable our unified PKF approach to the way we do business while continuing to deliver value and insight to enhance local client relationships.
As clients and prospective clients – the above discussion does not necessarily represent a change in our approach to service delivery, though if you recognise change, I do hope it is positive! In all instances, you should expect to see our relationship with you characterised by PKF’s five values: Passion, Teamwork, Clarity, Quality, and Integrity. We ask and expect our clients to hold us accountable to each of them.
