REFLECTION ‐ 20 YEAR ANNIVERSARY

Twenty years ago, after months of agonising, I finally stepped out alone and created Peter E Caunt & Co. It was a big step taken with Dev and Ingrid helping as accountants, and an IT person, a secretary and a junior assistant. In the lead up I wondered how many of our 150 or so clients would leave. Only one did!

It was the best and scariest move of my life other than emigrating alone to Australia. I was now my own boss and I could run my practice my way with the values of trust, honesty and integrity that were important to me.

By nature I am a collaborative person and missed the ability to bounce ideas and problem solve with more colleagues. So John Lowbeer and Paul Hareb entered the practice, later becoming partners. Caunt and Lowbeer followed as John blended his clients into the practice.

A university student, studious and diligent, joined around this – Mark Williams. These were the days before internet marketing and we were not networkers by nature, but clients arrived by word of mouth and we tripled in size as did our staff. We prided ourselves on training our staff well and employing highly skilled accountants, who rarely left once they had arrived.

As we grew to what is now twenty three staff, Mark became a partner and it was time to modernise our practice and take on cloud based systems. Changes were taken on carefully, two practices were acquired and Imagine Accounting was born.

How lucky that we were able to consolidate and stabilise Imagine before COVID‐19 hit. How fortunate that we had developed our teams, systems, leaders and management to a point where we were able to
relatively smoothly slide out of the office and continue home based working, fully supporting our clients with their JobKeeper and other needs.

And now we move forward with some deep leadership training so that we can continue to offer our clients the very best of our accounting knowledge and skills. I would like to thank everyone at Imagine Accounting, and you our clients, for helping to make it a great practice and a warm, friendly, collaborative and supportive company to work in for these last twenty years.

Peter Caunt – Senior Director