Harris Black is a member of the Brentnalls Affiliation. The affiliation is a network of like-minded, independent Chartered Accounting firms across Australia and New Zealand. Member firms are in Brisbane, Sydney, Melbourne, Adelaide, Hamilton VIC, Perth and Auckland NZ. Harris Black has been part of this dynamic group of professionals for 25 years. Each of the firms in the affiliation have a similar passion for improving client service and striving for best practice in all areas of business.
On Wednesday 19 October 2022, 3 Harris Black Directors (Brendan, Renee and Nathan) attended the 51st Brentnalls’ conference at the Doubletree Hilton overlooking the Swan River. It is only our second recent in-person conference after we held 3 virtual conferences during Covid. It was so good seeing each other face-to-face.
Each practice provides an update of the last 6 months, and as we all know each other so well there are many honest success and failures disclosed, which is an amazing learning experience for all attendees. We also benchmark each practice’s financial and human resources circumstances against each other to gain insights into our strengths and weaknesses. These provide great discussion over our evening dinners and a glass of wine (perhaps).
A particular highlight at this conference were 2 external speakers.
Samantha Jackson spoke brilliantly on personal health and had some great stories about some of her client successes including being the Health Coach for Mel Gibson for the last 3.5 years. There was a lot of ferocious notes taking as she pushed us all to improve our eating and fitness habits.
Gihan Perera is a Futurist, and he spoke informatively about the changing world, with very simple examples of the massive changes that have occurred in the last 20 years, and possibly what to expect in the future. In particular, the different mindsets of the different generations (Millennials, GenY, GenX, Baby Boomers etc) and how they react and absorb change.
As always, we ate very well each evening, and the noise generated at dinner was an indication of the great camaraderie and discussions about what we had heard during the day. We are very lucky to be able to meet and share our resources across the Brentnalls group and learn much more quickly based on other practices wins and losses.