I became AAT qualified and set up a sole trader bookkeeping business.

I took on my first employee on work experience (my daughter Heather who also studied AAT and over many years’ experience, has now become my Practice Manager).

Took out my first office – one room in Goat Mill Road and took on another employee.

Moved to Navigation Park, which was an excellent move – we are near to Blackwood, Bargoed, Aberdare, Caerphilly, Merthyr and not too far from Cardiff either.  It’s easy to get to with plenty of parking.  Our client base increased steadily.

The economic depression began, and many businesses struggled. We decided to start a training company to teach new skills to students who had been made redundant to run alongside our accounts practice. This was good marketing for the accounts practice and found us new clients.

I partnered up with the University of South Wales and started teaching as a university lecturer to local businesses. This was a great opportunity for marketing our accountancy practice.

We doubled our office size and increased our staff to 6. Since then, our client base has continued to increase, and our accounts practice has become well-established.

JDH was proud to be included in a published book called ‘Putting Excellence into Practice’ which focuses on accountants in the UK and how they run their accounts practice. (We are in chapter 63.)

COVID hit the UK. We quickly arranged to work from home and continued working hard to take care of clients and their COVID grants and JRS grants. We didn’t lose any clients.

We downsized our office, as we preferred to continue working from home for most of our week and moved onto the cloud to make working even easier.