Growing from acorns: Lewis Brownlee’s Whiteley office celebrates its first year in business

In the first week of May last year, Lewis Brownlee launched its Whiteley office with experienced accountancy professional Andrea Todorov at the helm.

Andrea, who was born and raised in Hampshire, has worked in the accountancy industry since the age of 18.

She has built up a number of contacts in the area from her time with a range of different firms in the county, most recently working for Azets.

Andrea said: “When the idea of working for Lewis Brownlee was put forward I was initially unsure as they are based in West Sussex and all my contacts are in Hampshire.

“However, speaking to her Managing Director it became clear her idea was to build on the foothold in Whiteley created by one of their sister companies in financial services.

“I realised that as well as my existing knowledge of, and presence in, the area, the challenge of setting up a brand new office and starting from scratch really appealed to me.”

One thing which came across while we spoke to Andrea was her passion for people and building her team.

“We recruited lots of new people, including some real youngsters who are right at the start of the career. We’ve been really lucky to recruit some great people straight out of university, who we’re training up to be accountants or chartered tax advisors.”

 This gives Andrea something of a blank canvas to work with, both in the sense of finding the people she needed to run the office and the opportunity to mould the next generation.

The learning has been by no means a way one street, however.

Andrea explained: “The younger people keep us who have been in the industry for a long time on our toes. It can be very easy to get stuck in ways of doing things, but they come in and challenge you.

“This generation have different behaviours and expectations than we did when I joined the industry.

“I spent my first four years or so being scared of talking to the boss, which is ridiculous, so it’s great that they’re happy to ask questions like ‘Why do we do things this way, why not that way?’.

“This wasn’t really something I had necessarily planned, I didn’t recruit younger people so that they would help us to think differently, but seeing the way it has worked out has been fantastic, and it has helped to build a collaborative work environment.”

Andrea also pointed to the opportunity to show her younger workers the careers they can have.

“There’s also plenty of us here who have experience, so it’s nice to have that variation. To see people starting their careers and knowing they can succeed because you’ve been through it and can show them the possibilities ahead of them.

“This is also one of the real positives of having a physical office to work from. While we do hybrid working, we are seeing a lot of people wanting to get come into the office.

“There’s lots of plus points to working from home and I don’t want to take that away from anyone, but as we’ve got into training and learning, people like having that person next to them who they can go to for advice, particularly among our younger staff who like having the support around them.

“Naturally over the year we’re finding we’re in more than we’re out, whereas before we were out more than we were in.”

Looking to the future, Andrea plans to grow the office. “We started out with only four staff, pretty much as an acorn, and while it’s not necessarily that we’re looking to become a massive oak tree, we do want to become a tree.”

This metaphor is particularly apt for Lewis Brownlee’s Whiteley office. While the firm is based in West Sussex, the office’s roots are planted firmly in Hampshire soil, with all its individual staff bought up and living in the county.

“We’re very much a Hampshire business. All of my network, pretty much everyone I know, are based in Hampshire. We really want to be part of the Hampshire community.

“That said, we do have a very large firm behind us, so we can pack quite a punch. If I heard of an accountancy firm down the road with four people working there, in the world of accountancy firms I would think that was quite small.

“But actually we are part of a larger firm which has 60 people, and we are really into our teamwork and collaborative working – we’re all there to support one another, not just a little silo out on our own.

“We are established, but we’re also very much here. We located here because we want to work with Hampshire businesses.”

• Accountancy firm Lewis Brownlee has offices in Chichester, Midhurst, Whiteley and London.