Karen Groves can see her industry changing before her eyes. The question she's constantly asking herself is how she can future proof her business.Karen Groves can see her industry changing before her eyes. The question she’s constantly asking herself is how she can future proof her business. Karen Groves is no stranger to hard work and reinventing herself. After growing up helping on the family farm in the lush Hunter Valley wine region in New South Wales, the avid net baller left school at 15 to join the Commonwealth Bank, where she worked her way up to manager level.Nearly two decades later, Groves was one of the Commonwealth Bank’s first mobile lenders. It was in that job that she got a taste for what it might be like to run her own business. And there were other considerations, too. “I had children and working really odd hours [as a mobile lender] didn’t suit me,” she explains.A chance meeting with a client in the bookkeeping industry sparked the idea of branching out on her own. In 1999, she founded Canberra bookkeeping and consulting business Successful Alliances.
What started out as a home business is now a small firm with five employees, including one who is based overseas.In 2013, Groves was named ACT Business Woman of the Year by Canberra Women in Business, and last year she was a finalist in the Telstra Business Women’s Awards. She says the accolades are testaments – for both herself and her dedicated staff – to being adaptable. This is a trait that will stand Successful Alliances in good stead, as the accounting industry changes.Already, the fast uptake of cloud-based accounting and automated add-ons that do everything from reconcile bank feeds to convert handwritten receipts into expense claims is having an impact on Groves’ traditional bread-and-butter data entry work. This was something she foresaw several years ago and has spent the past year preparing for.“The Tax Office is ultimately going to be able to prepare business and installment activity statements – they are just going to suck that information out of the accounting file,” she says. “The ATO is going to automate small business tax reporting, so small business tax returns won’t be done by accountants anymore.“I can see that the next thing that the Tax Office is going to take will be PAYG summaries – it has already slated payment summaries as part of the evolution.“You can see that the landscape of our industry is absolutely changing. I felt I was on top of it for a while, but it has swept away a little bit faster than I anticipated.”One of Groves’ approaches has been to boost skill levels across the business. “I spent a year upskilling my staff, so they could take on more responsibility and I could then take some time off to complete my Graduate Certificate of Professional Accounting and my Master of Commerce (Professional Accounting) through the IPA Program,” she explains. “I started studying when I was about 46. I was always terrified of university up until then. So you can change; you just have to do things when it’s right for you, rather than when the norm is.”Upskilling has allowed Groves to re-frame her business, to offer new and broader services to her clients. “All of a sudden, we’ve turned from being a data entry bookkeeping business to one where we have to be a reviewer,” she says. “We have to change our spots and do different things to remain relevant.“The minimum requirement now to be a BAS [business activity statement] agent is a certificate IV in bookkeeping and even that is not going to be enough, because clients will expect more. That’s why I went on to study, so I feel like I am up on top of the wave of change.”Initially, Groves thought she would reshape her business to provide management reporting. However, she’s come to the conclusion that doing that would put her head-to head with accountants.“The accountants who were doing the small business tax returns will actually be squashed down into our area, because they will suddenly have extra time,” she says.“What we’re doing now is focusing on the extra add-ons that you can do to make a business more efficient. So, we’re training our staff and we’re hoping we’ll be a small business consulting firm that does bookkeeping as just one of the things we do.”So far, the change plan is going well. “I’m really fortunate that I’ve got a team behind me who are adaptable to change,” says Groves. “I have been speaking about this for two or three years and they’re kind of waiting for it; they are expecting it.”
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