I'm Oliver Grills.

I run J A Fell & Co, a firm of Chartered Accountants in Southport, and I have spent more than twenty years working with financial services businesses.

Why advice firms

Because I know how they work, and most accountants have no particular reason to. An advice firm's income does not behave like a shop's or a builder's. Initial and ongoing fees arrive differently, clawbacks land in the wrong period, and what the platforms pay rarely matches what the back office says it should. None of that is difficult once you have seen it a few hundred times. It is just not something you learn from one client.

The other reason is that advice firm owners are unusually good at putting themselves last. You spend your working life telling clients that the decision made ten years early is the one that matters. Then your own firm gets whatever attention is left at the end of the week, which is usually not much.

How I work

The team handles the day to day. The advice is mine, and I am the person who stays with your firm as it changes. That matters more than it sounds, because the questions you have three years from now will not be the ones you have today, and the value of knowing a business builds up slowly.

I am not a financial adviser, and I have no interest in becoming one. You are the expert on your clients' money. I am the expert on the tax, the structure and the numbers inside your business. The division of labour is the whole point.

"Oliver acted for us from the day I set up the business to the day I sold it eight years later. In all that time I never had a surprise. I knew what tax was due and when, so I could plan around it. When it came to the sale, he worked through the deal with us and structured it in a way that saved a significant sum in tax."

The details

The firm

J A Fell & Co, a trading name of OJG Limited. 40 Hoghton Street, Southport.

Qualification

Chartered Accountant, and a Fellow of the Institute of Chartered Accountants in England and Wales.

Regulation

Regulated by ICAEW and a member of the ICAEW Practice Assurance Scheme. Full details on the legal and regulatory information page.

Software

Xero Silver Partner. Every client runs on Xero, and the licence sits inside the fee.

Where

Southport, working with advice firms across the UK. Most of the work happens wherever you are.