Helping Gloucestershire businesses thrive for 145 years
Helping Gloucestershire businesses thrive for 145 years
In a conversation ranging from AI to the health of the Gloucestershire economy, we talk to the firm whose role is making county businesses tick - and which we reveal as our latest Founding Partner!
Dear Readers,
Welcome to the first edition of the week. Today is another very special day for us here at The Raikes Journal as we reveal yet another Founding Partner - one of the businesses and backers that have come together to make this community interest company and digital magazine for Gloucestershire possible.
It is a firm we have been fortunate enough to get to know over a number of years, reported on, admire and are thrilled and immensely proud to be able to say we now work with - as we are with all our Founding Partners.
You’ll have to read below to find out just who it is, but like everyone who has stepped forward to back what we do - including our Founding Members, paid for subscribers and all our subscribers - we cannot thank any of them enough.
On another note entirely, the weekend just gone saw us run our first ‘Saturday big read’, in which we published an article that perhaps sits outside our usual remit of business supporting, the third sector and education and training - and that was written by a third party (thank you Ian Mean, MBE!).
The in-depth interview was with the former boss of the NHS in Gloucestershire, Deborah Lee, who opened up about the challenges faced by the county, the value of the NHS and her own near-death experience which led to an infamous Tweet about the impact of the pressures on the ambulance service.
If you have an idea you think would make for a big weekend read, we’re open to ideas! If you are a corporate, we might have to talk money - but otherwise the space is open to all. Email andrew.merrell@raikesjournal.co.uk.
Editor’s note: If you would like to learn more about becoming a Founding Partner of Raikes, and the benefits that will bring, please do get in touch. And if you are not yet a paid-for subscriber please do consider signing up. If you join for a year it will cost you £2.30 a week (more of the benefits are outlined further down this edition), and you will be helping to make sustainable what we do - reinventing community journalism and keeping it alive in Gloucestershire, and trying to establish a sustainable digital magazine to support the business, charity, education and training sectors and to promote community as we go.
And please do send us your story ideas to andrew.merrell@raikesjournal.co.uk. Or telephone 07956 926061.
Not exactly a charity - but it needs our help
We usually reserve this spot to introduce you to county charities, but Raikes is very pleased to say it has agreed with Cheltenham Paint Festival to run a series of its stunning images from around the town in the hope it helps make this year’s event happen after its Arts Council funding was cut.
Andy Dice has been bringing street artists from all over the world to Cheltenham since 2017 to work their magic on an agreed number of spots as part of a much-loved event, generating interest, excitement and drawing attention to the town.
Five hundred applications have already come in from artists from 50 different countries for this year’s event, but Dice heard earlier in April the Arts Council would not be funding this year’s festival afterall.
Undeterred, and egged on by popular support, the he’s launched a GoFundMe page to raise the £20,000 the event needs – the key to which is a headline corporate sponsor (£15,000).
The payback is not just the joy you’ll bring, and the cudos, but the chance to reach several million viewers when you are interviewed as part of an interview Dices has pre-arranged interview with BBC The One Show.
“A 30 second commercial on prime-time TV costs £20,000 but for a fraction of that you could be the hero in an eight-minute segment on BBC’s The One Show. Reaching a whopping five million viewers, the show will be filming at this year’s festival and they want to focus on the community aspect of The People’s Paint Festival. Now we just need a hero to complete the script!” said Dice.
To find out email: director@cheltenhampaintfestival.co.uk
* Everything you read on The Raikes Journal is made possible by our incredible Founding Partners: QuoLux, Willans LLP, Gloucestershire College, Merrell People and Randall & Payne; our sponsors Hartpury University and Hartpury College; our Founding Members and all our wonderful paying subscribers. If you upgrade to paid too, you’ll be able to see beyond the paywalls we place on many of our second and third email editions of the week and that lock our archive after two weeks. You will be able to view our rolling Top 100 Businesses in Gloucestershire series, comment on our stories and you’ll be helping to make possible this community interest company dedicated to supporting the county, its businesses, charities and education and training providers — all for just £2.30 per week!! For commercial opportunities visit our About us page or email andrew.merrell@raikesjournal.co.uk.
Your Monday briefing notes
✈️ Those of you who have followed the story of the Gloucestershire-based aviation start-up ZeroAvia will know it is backed by Bill Gates and on a mission to develop hydrogen-powered flight on a commercial scale. It has now announced it will make available some of its powertrain components to other “clean aviation innovators” to help maximise profits. Its new Propulsion Center of Excellence is in Washington State, in the United States of America. According to the ZeroAvia’s ceo and founder, Val Miftakhov, it intends to transform from an “ambitious start-up into a clean aerospace manufacturing powerhouse”.
🔋 A company that specialises in developing, building and operating what it calls “renewable energy projects for the good of people and our environment” has been given planning permission to build a 20 megawatt battery storage facility in Brockworth, next to the A417 and close to junction 11a of the M5. Tewkesbury Borough Council has granted Exagen permission to go ahead with its plans for 16 lithium-ion battery units on the five acres site north of Brockworth Road.
☀️ In another story about renewable energy, Barnet-based Padero Solar Ltd has won permission to build a 16-megawatt solar farm on 64 acres of land west of Twigworth Court Farm, north of Gloucester, off the A38 Tewkesbury Road. According to the developer the site will have an operational life of 40 years before being decommissioned.
🏗️ Will a new hotel be built in the middle of Cheltenham? Commercial property auctioneers Acuitus is about to put up for sale the parade of shops on Winchcombe Street, with a guide price of £1.8 million to £1.9 million. It suggests there is “potential for a change of use to a hotel”, although the 11 shops and upper-floor offices currently produce an annual rental income of £187,000, which it describes as “an excellent return on investment”. The auction is due to take place on May 9 at 1pm.
It’s been helping Gloucestershire businesses thrive for 145 years
In a conversation ranging from AI to the health of the Gloucestershire economy, we talk to the firm whose role is making county businesses tick - and which we can now reveal as our latest Founding Partner!
By Andrew Merrell
Something about artificial intelligence seems to have caught the mainstream imagination and we’ve run wild with scare stories about it taking our jobs and worse, when - as with most crises - what is needed is a calm head.
You might have thought that with the rapid encroachment of AI and the sweat from apprehension would be most apparent in a business with numbers at its heart; accountancy, for example.
Maybe, but Tim Watkins, of Randall & Payne, doesn’t see it like that at all.
“AI is just another tool. It can help us do what we need to do for our clients quicker, so we can focus on what they want,” said Watkins, the managing partner of the Gloucestershire headquartered business.
The firm will keep your tax compliant, plan it effectively, handle the day-to-day accounts and obligations for businesses, deliver both expert audit and corporate finance services and give advice to well-established companies and ambitious SME through to up-and-coming entrepreneurs. It can help you grow a business, buy one, sell one and even coach your leadership team to be more successful. Clients range from start-ups to organisations with turnovers in excess of £100 million.
And today, it is with great pride and excitement that we can also reveal Randall & Payne is one of the Founding Partners that have come together to make The Raikes Journal and what it does possible.
“People have different wants. You can sit down with a set of numbers and AI can quickly tell you about this and that increase in profits, but it can’t tell you that the business owner might want steady growth. It can’t tell you they might want more time with the family.
“The person can have other needs outside of the pure data.”
In fact, Watkins could not have looked more relaxed about the idea of AI – or open to the idea of continually bringing it in-house, as long as it helps his staff improve outcomes for their clients.
And that is perhaps one of the biggest insights you will get into how the Shurdington firm sees modern accountancy and its role; people are the priority, and those people are its clients.
“A lot of our clients have been with us a long time. They become friends as well as clients. Which is good for all sorts of reasons,” he said.
“We can’t do our job properly unless they trust us and tell us what is going on, and linked to that is finding out about what they want personally too – rather than just providing them a set of accounts.”
It’s a long way from 1981 when as a school leaver Watkins, who was born in the Forest of Dean, arrived at the firm his dad already worked for and began his own career.
“Back then a profit and loss account was something you produced every year and by today’s standards the figures could be out of date by the time you looked at them.
“Today the data is live. You can see things as they are. But our job is still to interpret and present that in a format our clients want so they can understand it in order to make the best decisions.”
AI might not intimidate him, but he admits that in his near decade as managing partner the business has witnessed some challenging times.
“We have had Brexit, of course, Making Tax Digital, and changes to legislation – annually - changes to the Companies Act, changes of leadership of the country, and the impact of all that on our clients and the economy.
“The last few years have been something of a perfect storm. But while I am the managing partner, I have seven partners here at various stages of their careers and many talented staff. If something comes along that I have not seen, I can talk to them. It is about all of us working together.”
Shaun Pegler is one of the youngest partners at Randall & Payne. He was also born and bred in the county (Whiteshill near Stroud) and also followed in the footsteps of family.
“I used to play in the Randall & Payne football team when I was 14 or 15 because my brother worked here. Although he had left by the time I started,” said Pegler, who has now been with the firm two decades.
Family is a theme throughout our chat, which takes place in one of the meeting rooms on the ground floor of the firm’s Chargrove House headquarters off the Shurdington Road. The real engine room is upstairs.
For Pegler - who considered university but was attracted by the opportunity to earn as he learned - it is that learning, which encourages staff through the ranks, the depth and breadth of the team and its collaborative approach, that helps make the firm so strong. That depth of knowledge, he says, becoming most apparent when it wins new business.
“I sometimes think it is amazing so many businesses have not been told about some of the benefits they can gain by doing things in certain ways.
“I do sometimes sit there and think ‘how have you not been told that before?’. They might have been missing out on years of pension contributions, for example,” said Pegler, who became a partner in 2023 and heads up the accounts team.
He was promoted at the same time as the now head of the firm’s corporate tax team, James Geary (pictured above), who has worked in his specialist field since 1998. Geary moved to the Gloucestershire firm in 2014 after working for what the accountancy sector calls a ‘Top 10’ firm.
And in what was a trio of promotions, Nikki Cairns also became a partner as joint head of the accounts team. Cairns was promoted while she was on maternity leave - not a bad way all round to celebrate her 21st year at the firm!
Like Pegler she joined post A-Levels. At the time the Randall & Payne was just 22 members of staff and its headquarters were at Rodborough Court, Stroud. Today it is 60-strong – and recruiting (you can find our more about the vacancies at he firm here).
And like Pegler the firm supported her through her AAT and ACCA qualifications and beyond.
So, is there a Randall & Payne way, a culture?
“There is a feel. As a firm we are coming up to 145 years, so there is a lot of history, and that does say something about where we have come from and our commitment to the county,” said Watkins.
Some of that ‘feel’ for how things are done comes from formal training, but the firm still places great value on how much new staff can learn from working alongside experienced colleagues.
“We have an open plan office. Partners do not sit off in private offices. They work with their teams,” he said, to underline just one what that culture and process of learning by osmosis worked.
What does Randall & Payne look for when it hires its very youngest staff?
“You look at the personalities when you are looking at the school leavers. You know they have not got much of a CV yet, but what you are looking for is someone who is willing to learn. You can teach the technical side,” said Pegler.
That focus on personality refers back to the earlier talk about AI that led onto the importance of being able to build relationships and to enjoy that part of the role.
“People still buy from people. You send the people out into the field that win the work,” said Watkins.
When we ask for an overview of Gloucestershire PLC, from a firm with its finger on the pulse of so many companies in so many sectors, he describes the county economy as having performed well.
“There have been lots of challenges, but it has been resilient. I think we are strong – especially in areas like aerospace, cyber, agriculture (his own specialist subject). I think it’s done okay,” he said, before acknowledging we are in an election year and a cost-of-living crisis and everything remained subject to change.
We can’t let it go without raising AI one more time. Is he sure it will not harm the business?
“It is about working smarter. If you can give the staff more skills and tech can remove a task – which together enables staff to do more - it is something to be excited about.”
In other words the irony of AI is that it actually puts people – both their ability to use AI effectively and their ‘people skills’ - front and centre and makes the human element even more important, as well as productive.
Will he say where Randall & Payne sees itself in five or 10 years’ time?
“There is a plan, but it is an evolving vision. Things change so quickly, you have to be able to change too,” said Watkins.
And while there may officially not be ‘a Randall & Payne way’ – that last comment, and everything above, probably goes a long way to explaining why the firm is still here, serving the county, sought-after and looking to the future after nearly 145 years.
Diary Dates
Wednesday 1 May 2024
Growth marketer, training and seo specialist Henny Maltby is due to stage this business-focused event from 10am to 1pm. This is all about helping you get the most out of Linkedin, networking with potential customers, landing contracts and increasing brand awareness. Due to take place at Stroud Growth Hub. Find out more here.
This promises to be an extraordinary gathering at Hub8. The event, called Securing The Future of Defence Tech Talent, will see cybercrime espionage author, Geoff White, interviewed by author of The Missing Cryptoqueen, Jamie Bartlett. Plus Illyana Mullins, founder of Witch (Women in Tech & Cyber Hub), will be diving into diversity within the digital defence landscape. Find out more here.
Thursday 2 May 2024
Kirstie Salter, an experienced therapist and coach, will be leading this event - Navigating Menopause in Business - aimed at business owners, entrepreneurs, executives and professional women experiencing menopausal or peri-menopausal symptoms, or those interested in understanding the impact of stress during menopause. Due to take place at Stroud Growth Hub. Find out more here.