Houston Partnership Case Study
The Houston Partnership
How we have used our App to create interest in our firm
The Houston Partnership is a medium-sized Scottish chartered accountancy
practice based in Glasgow. The partners’ extensive personal experience of
running their own businesses, combined with their professional qualifcations as
accountants, gives The Houston Partnership a big advantage when it comes to
ofering advice to today’s small to medium business owners. Whether it’s advice
on all the complexities of management and compliance, or providing insight into
business improvement and advancement, The Houston Partnership can be trusted
to provide all the right answers.
We spoke to David Houston about their experiences and, more
importantly, how they now value the App as a working tool.
MFA: Do you see your frm as ‘technologically advanced’? What
was the principal reason behind your investment in an App?
DH: As accountants with an entrepreneurial focus, I guess
we are perhaps a little more open-minded than many
accountants. Our experience has not been solely in ‘the
profession’ – we’ve run our own businesses and gained a lot of
experiences from that. We are open to marketing ideas too, so
when we frst ‘discovered’ the concept of Apps for accountants
we readily accepted it. It was then a question of ‘how much’
and ‘how soon’. We don’t see ourselves as technologically
advanced, but it’s not difcult to see that if all our clients and
prospects use Smartphones and tablets in their businesses,
then we would be foolish to ignore them. Using an App to do
so seemed to be the logical next step.
MFA: Why did you choose MyFirmsApp?
DH: Once we started gathering information about Apps, MFA
quickly came to the top of our attention. They were being
endorsed by ICAS so we went along to a 1:1 demonstration
at the ICAS ofces last year. They explained everything clearly
and gave us many great reasons to go ahead. Once we had
made the decision, it all happened surprisingly quickly and
we soon had our App available for free download in the Apple
and Google stores. We saw it as a low cost way to be ‘diferent’.
MFA: And since you have had your App, how efective has
it been?
DH: Let me give you 2 specifc events that have driven home
the very real benefts of having our own App. The frst was
at a regular BNI Chapter meeting in Glasgow, shortly after
we took delivery of our App. I gave a 10 minute presentation
about the App; how it worked and what we hoped to achieve
with it. There were 70 business owners in the audience and
my presentation was assessed as ‘the best they had ever
seen’! What’s more, every one of those 70 business owners
downloaded the App right there! Talk about being highly
targeted… we couldn’t have wished for a better response and,
better still, it has resulted in a number of new clients.
The second case is a little less focused – but equally efective.
One of our clients met a friend – let’s call him John – in the pub
on a Friday night and after the usual ‘how’s business?’ chat, the
talk turned to accountants. John was clearly dissatisfed with
his frm so our client showed him our App on his iPhone. John
was very impressed and immediately downloaded our App.
We all know that talk about accountants in a pub on a Friday
night is usually wiped from the memory by Saturday morning,
so we were very pleasantly surprised to receive a call from
John on Monday morning asking to meet us for a chat. He is
now a client.
All accountants say they are ‘diferent’, but it’s hard to explain
why they are any diferent from the rest. Yet having an App has
given us something tangible that clearly demonstrates we are
diferent. There’s no hard sell, no sales or marketing spiel, just
an App that can be quickly and easily downloaded onto their
Smartphone or tablet and immediately opens communication
between us and the potential client. It’s very simple, but highly
efective!
