A happy accident
Aitchison says her job is "rewarding", through she has slipped into tax planning “by accident”. A student of English and German, after graduating she went to a recruitment agent who referred her to one of the big four accountancy firms for a graduate role that needed to be filled.
“It was entirely by accident but my first job was three years doing just trust work, so I didn’t deal with any individual, any businesses, it was just trusts,” she says.
But it was during a time when the trust rules changed in 2006, so “actually it was a really interesting time when legislation vastly changed and there were lots of planning aspects coming out of that.”
Changing legislation has been an unwelcome companion ever since.
"The best thing to do [in tax] is to plan and to plan ahead and it’s very difficult to plan ahead because the rules could change next month, in six months’ time, next year – they could change in all three," she says.
“It’s quite difficult when you’re talking to people about scaling businesses for sale or succession planning, and all that kind of stuff that is future focused, to not know what rules are going to look like. [It means] you can’t give a definitive answer.”
This means her job is mainly problem solving. “We can only really advise on what we know, what the rules say today. You can implement, but there’s always a risk."
After her training Aitchison moved into the middle market segment, involving entrepreneurs, owner-managed businesses, and established family business, and finally joined RSM.
“It was a mix of career progression and just the client bank at RSM, because it is very much a middle market focused firm and that’s the kind of clients that I enjoy working with and it’s rewarding,” she says.
Neat planning tool
Aitchison started the day the Covid lockdown began, which meant she was meeting her new colleagues virtually and holding client meetings online.
This changed the way meetings were held, she says, with people more likely to get straight to the point, cutting out the chit chat in the beginning, which can often be the most revealing part.
“Often in the work I do it’s the comments at the start and end of a meeting – it could be something like ‘how’s the family?’, 'well, Johnny’s marriage has gone wrong’. It’s that throwaway comment that can often be the more important bit of the meeting.
"And there’s a bit less of that on a Teams call because it’s very much, ‘we’ve called the meeting for this purpose and this is what we’re going to talk about’.”
