Could you specialise?

There are various ways to take your career. Here, we discuss the highs and lows of being niche.

In 2018, Ria-Jaine Lincoln MAAT was working as a nail and lash technician in Milton Keynes. She was on a training course when her fellow learners discovered she had previously been a Deloitte tax accountant.

“That’s when the questions came,” remembers Ria-Jaine. “They were asking me, ‘How do I register my business? When do I need to start paying tax?’ Many people training in beauty are doing it as a side hustle and need advice.”

The question of whether to specialise is one most accountants will have considered at least once in their careers. Whether it’s managing incomes for athletes, having a portfolio of SaaS start-ups or focusing only on capital gains tax, specialising can help practices grow quickly thanks to having a more targeted sales pitch and referrals within a close-knit community. But it’s not for everyone.

Why specialise?

Within months of the course, Ria-Jaine founded a practice to serve those working in the UK’s £30.4bn beauty industry. Today, The Beauty Accountant has more than 60 clients spanning salons, self-employed nail technicians and beauty influencers.

Specialising has also helped Ria-Jaine build her business beyond her wildest dreams. The Beauty Accountant now offers business coaching and mentoring, while Ria-Jaine advises French skincare brand Guinot, speaks at beauty shows and has a column giving financial advice in nail magazine Scratch.

“The most surprising thing about specialising has been the ability to scale,” says Ria-Jaine. “I didn’t realise that good news really does travel fast.”

Sector experience

Like Ria-Jaine, Sinéad Pratschke FMAAT worked in her field before specialising. During her 20s, Sinéad was an opera singer performing oratorios at the Royal Albert Hall and Birmingham’s Symphony Hall. She decided to retrain as an accountant after a career wobble in her late 20s (“I was getting so stressed by the quality expected of me, it got nerve-racking. I stopped enjoying it and didn’t have the ‘bottle’ anymore”) and given her desire to start a family. She eventually worked as a financial controller at the Royal Opera House.

Since 2015, Sinéad has run the Musicians’ Tax Advisor, a London-based consultancy for those in the music industry. Clients include several household names.

Although working in a sector beforehand isn’t a prerequisite for specialising, it can give you an edge. As Sinéad says, it provides a pool of ready-made contacts who can become the practice’s first hard-to-obtain clients.

For the past decade, Sinéad has supported her musician clients during a “brutal” time in which Covid-19 restrictions, post-Brexit bureaucracy (which makes European touring more costly) and poor streaming royalties have decimated revenue streams.

“We know inside out what the financial concerns of musicians are,” she says. “Although musicians have a good instinct for how their business is doing, most are disinterested in record-keeping. They want somebody who deals with their compliance and looks at any tax issues.

Our remit is to take as much of the admin burden off the artist as possible. I genuinely think they benefit from having somebody who knows how it all works.” Musicians’ Tax Advisor also runs the tax helpline for the Musicians’ Union’s 36,000 members.

“A generalist practice would struggle to run a helpline like that because they’d constantly be looking up stuff,” says Sinéad.

Being the go-to accountant for specialist advice also helps attract and retain clients. “They get a much more detailed response than a tick-box answer or gov.uk link,” says Ria-Jaine.

Clients also know they won’t be judged by their accountants when unusual sector-specific items pop up on statements or balance sheets. Ria-Jaine remembers buying huge amounts of glitter in her nail technician days. “A traditional accountant might not understand why their client is spending lots of money for glitter for no reason, but a specialist adviser would approach this conversation differently,” she says.

Niche accountants can often command higher fees, too, in the same way customers will always pay more to see an authoritative expert such as a specialist lawyer or medic who provides tailor-made advice.

Small world, big stakes

Starting out as a specialist can be tough. “You do need some audacity when starting out,” says Ria-Jaine. “It’s not just about going to the Facebook group where your ideal clients are. If your niche is fitness, where are the fitness events they attend or fitness media they consume?”

As difficult as launching a specialist career might be, one big benefit is that word-of-mouth referrals can come thick and fast. Neither Ria-Jaine nor Sinéad have ever struggled finding clients. At one stage, The Beauty Accountant was fielding 16 enquiries a week from Instagram (so many beauty employees use the platform that Ria-Jaine says “scrolling social media is like constant CPD for me”).

The biggest downside of having a narrow focus is the same: word spreads quickly. “Not every practice is perfect, so when something goes wrong, such as a software issue, you could have a whole Facebook group [complaining]. You need a thick skin when you’re niche,” says Ria-Jaine.

“When you are niched in one industry, people talk. It’s always imperative to work to a high-quality standard, but even more so if you’re working in a bubble where any slip-ups are communicated. It means you must hold yourself to an even higher standard, which can be stressful,” says Sinéad.

It also means not taking sides during community disputes. “Sometimes there’ll be industry debates or passions stirring up,” says Ria-Jaine. “We have to remain objective and remember our code of conduct because you don’t want to get drawn into things which shouldn’t concern us as accountants.”

Passionate about the profession

Staying neutral doesn’t mean losing enthusiasm. When a specialist accountant has a passion for the sector, it rubs off on clients, too.

“When I started working [in accountancy], I just wanted to pay the wage, but now the irony is I really love what I do,” says Sinéad.

“I was speaking with a client recently and thinking, ‘You were an idol of mine at music college. Now I’m your accountant!’”

Ria-Jainehas a similar view. “I enjoy seeing clients develop a beauty-related product from a little idea and helping them get this off the ground by advising on KPIs and cash flow,” she says.

To gain credibility with clients, Ria-Jaine suggests ensuring all communication and promotional material is “in a language relevant to the industry – we have to be careful of which words we use”.

It also helps to “understand what the client’s day-to-day life is like”, she says. “You don’t have to train in the sector, but it’s worth spending some time at a client site for a week or two.

“The stakes are higher when niching. You’re only as good as your last meeting or set of accounts. It sounds harsh, but you’ve got to remember positive feedback spreads, too. Plus, you’re working with your passion. I’m obsessed with everything to do with beauty. It really makes the job feel different.”

Christian Koch is an award-winning journalist/editor who has written for the Evening Standard, Sunday Times, Guardian, Telegraph, The Independent, Q, The Face and Metro. He's also written about business for Accounting Technician, 20 and Director, where he is contributing editor.