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“We find the training services available from Mercia really help us to develop our own firm and don’t believe that they can be beaten by anyone else in the marketplace. They provide excellent value for money combined with a personal and professional approach”.
Brian Carruthers FCA - Partner, Thomas May & Co

Thomas May & Co are an established accountancy firm based in the East Midlands, with offices across Leicester, Peterborough and Syston. The practice has over 80 staff who look after a whole range of clients from large unquoted companies through to owner managed businesses both large and small. The firm also specialises in a number of niche markets such as Charities, Solicitors and Clubs. In order to constantly keep their staff skill base up to date and to capitalise upon their specialist skills, Thomas May & Co choose to use Mercia as their training and marketing support provider.

Brian Carruthers is a partner at the practice and explains firstly how Mercia help them with their marketing needs. “Mercia provides a range of marketing support tools which help us to achieve the three key marketing objectives we have. One is client retention, the second is winning new business and the third is to capitalise upon the specialist skills we have in certain industries. We use their quarterly newsletter service to help keep our clients informed about what we are doing as well as providing an update on a wide range of business topics. The unique thing about Mercia is that they offer a choice to our firm about what goes into the newsletter and are able to design the look and feel of the document to suit our own style. We have recently merged with another firm, and have used the newsletter as a tool to introduce ourselves to the new clients and as a way of letting our existing clients know that we are growing”.

Brian also uses Mercia to provide legislative updates, which if handled in house would take up valuable resources. “We choose to buy in the Mercia prepared budget summaries and tax cards. We could do our own but this would take away fee earning time from the tax team. In addition we regularly purchase letters and ad-hoc client bulletins which are constantly added to and updated by Mercia. All in all, when you weigh up the cost of buying in and doing it yourself, Mercia’s rates are always very favourable.”

Brian has been impressed with the quality of materials supplied by Mercia and has always been able to receive tools such as the newsletters and bulletins in a timely fashion. Says Brian “we want to create name awareness in our catchment area and promote our services both to clients and potential clients. The best way of doing this is to capitalise on the good relationships you already have and generate client referrals. Ensuring that we keep our clients and intermediaries aware of our services and our name using the Mercia marketing tools means that we achieve these objectives very successfully by continually adding value to our work”.

Brian also uses Mercia to provide the majority of training requirements for the firm both for senior staff with CPD courses and non-qualifieds, with introductory and intermediate courses. And says Brian “we spend approximately 5% of fees on training per annum and find that Mercia provide good value for money in their courses. The course content and materials are very good and most importantly the speakers are of a very high calibre. This means that our team benefit from quality content every time they attend a course. In addition Mercia can bring in specialists when they need to, which helps us to stay abreast of the changes in the more complex legislation that surrounds some of the niche markets, such as Solicitors.”

For the future, Brian has very clear ideas about the direction Thomas May & Co are taking “we want to market more services and specialist skills to our client base by constantly identifying and adapting to their needs. One area we have recently focused on is running client seminars, whereby we have helped our clients to make better use of their IT. Again, Mercia were able to support us with this course and provided an excellent course leader to handle this for us. We are very happy with the marketing support services and training provided to our firm by Mercia. We receive good quality client communication tools and can tap into a good range of back-up services designed especially for practising accountants. Mercia constantly recognise and adapt to the changes in the market place with their services and have certainly helped us to develop and promote our own practice.”

Click here for more information about the Mercia marketing support