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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”
Terry Truran - Partner, Keith Robinson & Co

Keith Robinson & Co are a two partner firm based in Middlesbrough. Their client base ranges from start-up businesses through to large companies, many requiring audits. With fees exceeding half a million pounds the firm has to attract and keep experienced team members. In addition, over a third of fees are based on value added work such as business development and management consultancy. This means that the practice needs to stay abreast of the latest business information and tools as well as keeping up to date with compliance legislation. To help them achieve this, Keith Robinson & Co choose Mercia Group Ltd as their preferred training provider.

Terry Truran, a partner at the firm, explains their training requirements, in more detail. “We have two partners, three experienced, qualified managers, three qualified seniors and two graduates in addition to secretarial and administration staff. Whilst we have many established clients we also have many first generation entrepreneurs who are looking to grow and develop their businesses quickly. This means that we need to be able to provide our team with the skills that enable them to deliver a pro-active and “commercially aware” service. Using Mercia, as our training provider, enables us to harness and develop these skills whilst keeping abreast of the latest technical knowledge through their comprehensive update programme”.

Mercia’s annual training programme provides Introductory, Intermediate and Advanced courses which helps Terry and his team plan their training days well in advance. Says Terry “the comprehensive programme available from Mercia allows us to route the appropriate staff through courses at the right level. Mercia also make it very easy to plan ahead by delivering their courses schedules well in advance and in a format which allows us to make decisions on our training requirements very quickly. In addition we enjoy a friendly but professional service from the Mercia team at all times, when we are choosing and booking courses.”

The practice spends a minimum of 5% of fee income on training and says Terry “training is the lynch pin to the success of the team development at the firm and we place extremely high importance on it. We find that Mercia know their customers well and seek to find appropriate and professional speakers in their respective fields when offering their courses. We have absolute peace of mind knowing that the course content will be up to date, accurate and interesting, and also that course notes will be easy to follow and course administration will be impeccable”.

Of course time is always the biggest problem for any practice which wants to embrace training and personal development and this also applies to Keith Robinson & Co. “We try to make as much time available for training as possible and whenever feasible, send as many people to one course at a time. Mercia also recognise the impact that time out of the office has and are helping us to balance off-site courses with other options such as Internet training using their new web based training courses, courses on CDROM and video conferencing. This is still new, but we believe has real possibilities for the future and demonstrates that Mercia are ahead of the game looking at new technologies that help alleviate the time burden and improve the flexibility of training.”

In addition to using Mercia’s documentation for corporate and specialist industry accounting and auditing assignments, Terry also uses Mercia to produce budget summaries and tax cards and buy into many of their standard letters, which fulfil a wide range of client communication requirements. Says Terry, “as well as courses and tools we also attend the Mercia partners’ conference each year which really helps to focus the mind on value added opportunities and business development issues. All in all, we find the services available from Mercia really help us to develop our own firm and believe that they cannot be beaten by anyone else in the marketplace. They provide excellent value for money combined with a personal and professional approach. We are more than happy to recommend Mercia to other accountancy firms.”

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