Fairwise Partners

Professional services have become an integral part of commercial society and personal life, so I do not doubt that our accounting/tax profession will have an optimistic future. Like the medical profession, some of our practitioners will be specialists, whilst the rest become generalists. The involvement of specialists or generalists may vary depending on different levels of client service needs. However, both types play critical roles in business society. The success of accounting/tax firms partly lies in whether they have adopted appropriate specialist or generalist business strategies based on their strength and capabilities.

In the past years, we have always defined ourselves as a client-oriented boutique firm, and we will continue to adopt a generalist style to serve most of our SME clients. Marketing-wise, we will stick to the peer/existing client referral initiative, as we have found this to be the most effective marketing strategy we have ever had. Therefore, we will continue to be more active in international association activities and interact more closely with existing clients.

We expect more experienced client service partners with notable client portfolios to join our partnership, and more interactions across different service lines will echo our generalist-biased service style. I’m also expecting more cross-border cooperation, especially in the Great China Region. Lastly, I hope our integration of Shanghai and Hong Kong teams will go well and we can fully integrate business across mainland China and Hong Kong.

Our biggest internal challenge will be the talent shortage. It is easy to hire staff to support your work, but it is challenging to develop them to be more self-motivated, self-disciplined, and work with more ownership, which is essential to our professional team.

As international cooperation is one of our partner team’s strengths, nearly 50% of our assignments could be labelled as “international” prior to the pandemic period. Due to the limitation of the pandemic period, currently, roughly 1/3 of our engagements are labelled as “ international.”

We offer financial/tax/commercial due diligence, valuation, sell-side financial advisory, capital market readiness advisory, tax advisory, etc, under our business advisory service line.

We offer financial/tax/commercial due diligence, valuation, sell-side financial advisory, capital market readiness advisory, tax advisory, etc, under our business advisory service line.

I believe we have a high potential client portfolio. 1/3 of our clients are MNCs in smaller size, next 1/3 are investment institutions and their portfolios and the last 1/3 are start-ups with high growth potentials.

Our Shanghai and Hong Kong combined team has a group audit engagement for a fast-consumption product group with a complex group structure. The reporting entity is a HK domiciled holding company, so our HK CPA firm will be the signing firm. However, the head office of the group is based in Beijing, and the major business sector is based in mainland China, so our Shanghai team is responsible for the substantive audit work of mainland China operations. In the meantime, the group also has different businesses in some overseas countries, some of which have become significant components in recent years. Therefore, our HK team also performs site visits to those overseas significant components. Our combined team cooperated smoothly in the fieldwork and reporting stages, and our service is well-recognised by the client. In the future, there will always be significant overseas components year by year; we will consider involving BOKS members in those regions to improve our audit quality in the overseas areas.

We usually pay attention to potential clients whose management (especially the finance head) has Big-4 experience, so these companies may become familiar with our firm much more easily. Our ex-colleagues in Big-4 firms and our schoolmates are also major client sources. Of course, currently, more and more existing clients are willing to introduce our firm to other companies they know because we can offer satisfactory services to them.

As we mostly adopt a generalist style in our service delivery, we build our internal teams to cover a comprehensive range of services. We also have leading partners for each major service line, so I can say that at the partner level, we have partners specialising in particular assurance and financial advisory, tax, or valuation services. But firm-wise, we offer a full range of services like other typical accounting firms do.