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Counting on mother’s advice leads to success for Wende
Wende Hubbard will have had plenty of business advice and commercial tips during her four decades with accountancy firm Burgis & Bullock – but the one idiom which has determined her career is the age-old “Mother knows best”.
The teenage Hubbard had eschewed ambitions – fuelled by watching episodes of TV drama Quincy – of becoming a forensic scientist but decided to move into the legal profession and was offered articles by Leamington law firm Wright Hassall.
But there were doubts. She had performed well in the accountancy part of her business studies course at what is now Warwickshire College and it was her mother who suggested she explored accountancy before pinning her sails to the legal mast.
Wende explains: “My mother was an accountant and had previously worked for Burgis & Colbourne – the local department store which became House of Fraser – and the Burgis was the same family as Burgis & Bullock. She suggested I just explore the accountancy route before making up my mind.
It not only proved a wise move – but also started a strong working relationship which was to serve both parties well.
Once Hubbard had qualified, which took five years in-house, she began to move up the ladder.
“They were very different days. There had been no female partners in the firm, as was typical in the profession at the time, and it was very formal with partners referred to by their initials or formal titles
She worked in audit and progressed quickly, becoming a manager just a few years later and worked under Francis. The forensic nature of auditing perhaps satisfying the original desire to become Quincy!
“John – along with Jim Lord at Wright Hassall – was very much a senior figure in the Leamington business scene,” said Wende. “John was a director of the Leamington Building Society and was chair of governors of King’s High School and those outside interests served me well because it meant that I picked up the void that he was leaving.
Times have clearly changed since those days in the late 80s, and Hubbard’s elevation came at the perfect time for her to push forward the transformation of Burgis & Bullock, both attitudinally and structurally.
“From when I started, really through to becoming a partner, there was very much a culture of them and us in the professional world,” she said. “Partners were predominantly male and usually came from the same sort of background and there was still some resistance to me becoming a partner in the 90s.
“I vividly remember having to go for lunch with a partner of the firm who was based in our Banbury office to prove to him that I was suitable to be a partner.
The mid to late 90s saw the professions transformed, throwing off many of the “old-school” attitudes and practices, and Wende was at the forefront of change at Burgis & Bullock.
She said: “By that stage it was clear that firms had to change. They had to be less top heavy, more commercial, and have the ability to flex and react to meet client needs.
“Partnerships are actually one of the world’s worst structures to run a business. Trying to get 15 partners, as we had in those days, to agree unanimously on something can be tortuous. Even getting 15 people together was logistically very difficult and slowed the whole process down.
“The then managing partner asked if I would become his deputy, which was a new role, and he realised that change was going to happen and it was for a younger person to drive it forward.
“It had to become a more commercial operation. The old model had everything led by individual partners working in isolation to each other.
Part of that change included the spinoff of the Banbury office, and meant the partner who had vetted Wende over that infamous lunch no longer fitted in – news she had to deliver.
Change was helped by a move to open-plan working at a new base in Chapel Court in Leamington, although the firm recently returned back to its original roots in Waterloo Place. It now also has offices in Nuneaton, Stratford, Rugby, Leicester and London.
“That time was quite scary for those involved, because we, along with most other professional services firms, were having to change generations of working practices and that level of change is never easy,” she said.
“You can see it early. For example, we have taken on a trainee in September of this year which, as you can imagine is not easy in the circumstances, but already we know she is going to be a star. That is purely through her interaction with colleagues, albeit remotely, and they know that she will progress.
“We want ambitious people. There appears nowadays to be a shortage of people who want to work their way to the top. I don’t know if it is complacency or if people are more easily satisfied when they reach a certain level, but we need, as partners, to have people knocking on our door. It’s how companies evolve and progress.”
The firm operates in all sectors but has a long-established expertise in manufacturing and charities.
“Some of the clients I work with now, I started on as a junior and it is immensely satisfying to have seen them go through so much change and to have hopefully helped them thrive,” said Wende.
“By and large, touch wood, last year was not too bad business-wise. We’re getting good feedback from clients and some feel the new way of remote working is actually more productive so some of the changes will undoubtedly stick when we hopefully return to more normal times.
“We are very lucky with the spread of our client base and we have never had many hospitality or retail businesses, the sectors which have suffered the most. It is just awful to see how many firms in those areas have been decimated.
“Like most people in the first few days and weeks of the pandemic, I wondered what this would do to business and whether there could be anything other than a bad ending, but things did settle down. We had invested in technology and that served us well, and the team embraced all the changes superbly well and we made sure we constantly communicated with clients.
The same could be said of her mother’s advice all those years ago.
