Future profession: Emily Coltman recommends others if she can't help

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Emily Coltman is a walking talking example of the next generation of professional accountants. She’s on Twitter, runs two blogs, makes videos and now provides specialist services for home based businesses. If she can’t help you for one reason or another then she can recommend colleagues. This is what her web site says:

Want a friendly accountant whose aim is to save his clients as much tax as possible? Go ye to Shaun McGuinness at Tax-sorted.

Want another friendly accountant who’s keen to help home-based businesses? Go ye to Alan Young at 1st Additions.

Like the look of FreeAgent, but don’t want to do your own bookkeeping? Go ye to BFCA.

Based in North Cumbria and want a local accountant? Go ye to Dodd & Co.

Based in the Lake District and want a local accountant who also uses FreeAgent? Go ye to Stuart Jones.

Emily’s invention amazes me. She may not know it but she’s tapping into a general thought that others are having but which is rare in the profession. Check out what James Governor said about collaboration among industry analysts and consultants using Twitter:

Collaboration traditionally has a cost, but Twitter collapses that cost to near zero. Got an idea? Say it in 140 characters! At an event- share your thoughts with everyone else using a #hashtag. No need to gather your thoughts on blogs, and then wait for feedback. What do we think now? Anyone can comment. And they do. Twitter also, for good or ill, encourages a certain honesty. The immediacy of the service lends itself to unvarnished opinion, which also tends to encourage collaboration. Its a lot more fun to help fill out a partial thought, than deal with a completely polished one…If you work with analysts, or are interested in their thoughts and opinions, and how they formed them, all this chatter can be invaluable. The mystique of analyst omniscience is crumbling, which is all too the good. Peer review by Internet is the most powerful way to test ones ideas.

I’m seeing that from my network of consulting colleagues. It is changing the way ‘we’ work and all for the good. This is exactly what should be happening among professionals generally because everyone wins.

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