A country practice

Passage to India: Sending some tasks overseas means local employees can choose their work

Scrapping the tedious, bookkeeping tasks that consume most accountants’ daily workload has been a pipe dream of many large firms over the past decade.

However, Matthew Bourke, a 28-year-old accountant from country Victoria, has done just that, sending his small firm’s “non-essential” paperwork nearly 10,000 kilometres away to India.

Cobram-based firm, Bourke Group – a BRW Fast 100 company – attributes much of its rapid growth to this decision to send some tasks to India. The move was difficult to explain to staff at first, but is now beginning to pay dividends to both employees and management, Bourke says.

The idea of sending paperwork, such as BAS statements and data-entry tasks, to India started as a joke between Bourke and his co-chief executive and director Paul Rae two years ago.

“Paul and I were looking at our data processing and profitability in 2008 and I half-jokingly said, ‘we should just send this stuff to India’,” Bourke says. “You constantly hear big accounting firms say, ‘accountants are more than just bean counters’, but they don’t do anything about changing how things are done.”

Before joining the business of his father, Peter Bourke, in 2008, Matthew Bourke worked for mid-tier Melbourne accounting firm Pitcher Partners. He returned as part of his ailing father’s succession planning, to learn the ins and outs of the business before taking it over with Rae. Peter Bourke died later that year.

Overrun by paperwork and costs, Rae and Bourke heard through a business contact about a company in India that could handle its paperwork and data entry work. Suddenly, Bourke’s suggestion to send the firm’s paperwork overseas didn’t seem such a crazy idea.

Six months of due diligence later, Bourke Group had signed with an Indian company in Pune, near Mumbai, to do its paperwork and “non-essential” work.

In hindsight, Bourke says the small size of the firm made partnering with an Indian company relatively straightforward. “Large companies don’t have the agility to move as quickly and easily as small ones do and I guess that really worked in our favour,” he says.

Going overseas has had more than a cost-cutting benefit, according to Bourke. In fact, no real cost-savings were felt by the business until about a year into the exercise, he says.

Reducing staff numbers in Cobram and explaining to remaining employees why the company had chosen to go to India was tough, Bourke says.

A lot of people were sceptical of the business’s plans and it has taken time to prove that the model works.

“The problem is, if an Australian company does something wrong it can be quite easily passed off as a mistake. But if an Indian company does the same thing, it is a different matter,” Bourke explains.

There’s also the fact that the staff in Cobram are now doing the type of work they want to do rather than mundane tasks.

It has also meant that the management team could spend more time working on the business rather than in it, although Bourke Group’s connections with India are not something the firm readily promotes to clients.

Another reason for the move was to improve staff attraction and retention. Attracting experienced accountants, or even graduates, to a town with a population of around 5500 people is a hard sell, Bourke says.

“It can be next to impossible to recruit quality [qualified] people to the country.

“With the changes, our people are doing far more interesting and appealing work and our graduates are free to work on more complex things than just BAS statements,” he says.

“Accounting does, however, tend to not attract the real star performers, who tend to prefer investment banking and those kind of arms of the financial services.”

Despite the benefits, Bourke admits that working with India still presents challenges. For this reason, he is in discussions with several businesses to offer advice and contacts for working with Indian companies. Bourke Group also has clients in India – an area that Bourke is keen to develop.

“We would also like to have a similar arrangement in China, given the way the economy is growing there,” he says.

The Bourke family has connections in various industries, including hotel and gaming and farming throughout country Victoria. Peter Bourke founded Bourke Group in 1994 and involved Matthew in all of his businesses from an early age. While Matthew wanted to run his own business, working outside the family business was something that Peter viewed as crucial for his son.

“Working outside the family business was something Dad saw as important. He wanted me to do it to validate myself … and there are things you can learn working for a larger company that you can’t do working within a small business,” Bourke says.

“I always saw accounting as a fairly good profession to be in. It has recurring revenue, which is something that other sectors don’t all have.”

Bourke Group was ranked 16 on the BRW Fast 100 list in 2009, with turnover in 2008-09 of $3.38 million, almost 100 per cent up on the previous year. While figures are still being finalised, turnover is expected to be about the same this year, mainly due to the impact of the economic downturn.

Bourke and Rae plan to expand the business through mergers and acquisitions during the next five years. They have also had some interest from the big four accounting firms in their business model. However, Bourke says he is not ready to sell the firm.

“I am only 28 and I think there is a lot more we could achieve,” he says. “Paul and I see this as being a $20 million company.”

Bourke will consider moving the business’s head office to Melbourne, but he will always keep its Cobram office.

“You’ve got to remember where you came from,” he says. “That’s very important.”

Company:
Bourke Group

Based:
Cobram, Victoria

Chief executives: Matthew Bourke, Paul Rae

BRW Fast 100 ranking: 16

Turnover 2008-09: $3.38 million

Year-on-year increase:
99.82 per cent

BRW

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