Paul Glossop: Welcome guys to Pure Property Investment one on one. Today we’re joined by Munzurul Khan. Munzurul is the principle of Keshab Chartered Accountants and he’s joining us today to talk about something that’s a little bit left of field, which I’ll position it this way: What is the difference between a so-called traditional accountant and, probably a lot of the time I hear now in the media are, or potentially people talking about, using a modern accountant? Now I don’t mean it’s the cut of your suit, or it’s the haircut that you choose, or the car that you drive, or where you live and what you eat. It’s probably really more so, how do you differentiate a traditional accountant versus a modern accountant in this day and age?
Munzurul Khan: It’s a very, very interesting question. Very interesting question. Because the traditional accountant or the fundamental of an accountant is their scorekeeper, right? So we have always been the scorekeeper. We used to keep the score, and there are some accountants who keep the score very, very well. We do the accounts, we do the management accounts, we do the bass’s, we do all those sort of compliance activities. That is given, and that is what all accountants do and, that is what we are supposed to do. That’s a traditional accountant.
A modern accountant I suppose, in my view to some extent, is an accountant who is a scorekeeper but at the same time the accountant is more of a coach as well. So more of a coach with the game that you sort of get involved with the proprietors, you understand what their goals and objectives are, you understand the cash flow of that particular business, you understand the business plan, you understand the exit plan, you understand the long-term strategies as such, and how do you structure the business, how do you build that business in a way where the score is what he would like to see.
So on the same sort of a token as far as when it comes to the investment property, exactly same thing. A modern accountant sits down with the property investors. What are your goals? What are your objectives? Not a financial planner. But quite distinctly is what your goals ,what your objectives, and what you’re planning to do, and how does one structure oneself into reaching into that goal and objectives in the modern period of time. That in my view to some extent is a modern accountant. You still need to keep the score. But you sort of build the score with the client.
Paul Glossop: Absolutely. Brilliant analogy mate. And that’s funny, the moment you said a scorekeeper, all of a sudden my mind went to a basketball team. I don’t know why. I’m not a basketballer. But it is something that I think of as the difference between a basketball game happening, and you’ve got literally the panel of people either keeping score, keeping score of the fouls, etc. And then you’ve got the coach plus the statistician that’s sitting next to the coach. And you’ve got the people who say, “I know the stats, I understand who’s scoring, where the fouls are, how long is left in the game”. However you got the coach who’s saying, “Now we need to do this to better our outcome”.
And that for me differentiates if you’re going to see two people sitting in two different places, you want someone who’s proactively going to be asking questions. It’s fundamental that people should be asking questions of you saying, “Sure I can give you all your numbers and talk about where you’re at and do your returns, etc. But I also want to understand where do you want to get to? What can we potentially do differently? How can we pivot to change the outcome, to make sure we maximize where you can get to?” And those questions are absolutely vital and I think that sounds like that’s where the differentiation is between someone who just says, “Give me your information, I’ll give it back to you in a nice concise format”, and tell you what you’re going to get as a return, or what it’s going to cost you this year. As opposed to “Let’s talk about how we can maximize what you can do next year and the years thereafter”.
Mate, great to hear from you again. I really appreciate your insights, as always. If you’d like to get in contact with Munzurul or anyone from his team, his details will be at the bottom of the screen.
And likewise for myself at Pure Property Investment and our team, you can contact us as per the details below and we’ll catch up soon. Cheers!