TaxCalc is proud to sponsor the Mid-Tier Firm of the Year category at the Accounting Excellence Awards. Ahead of the ceremony, we spoke to Ashlee Cooper, CMO, and Mitch Hahn, CEO of London firm Nordens, about the thinking behind their nomination.
Nordens has been shortlisted for Mid-Tier Firm of the Year at this year's Accounting Excellence Awards, its first time in the running for the firm's top category, after wins and finalist places in marketing campaign of the year and client services in previous years. Founded more than two decades ago by Mark Norden, the firm has grown from a three-person office into an 80-strong team built, its leaders say, around a simple conviction: clients come to their accountant for accountancy support, and should get business support in return.
"I think business and accountancy are two different things," says Ashlee Cooper, the firm's CMO.
"A lot of accountancy firms are so focused on the accountancy, rather than actually helping the businesses. Until accountants realise that they're two different things, I think they're always going to struggle providing that strategic advice."
What sets Nordens apart, Cooper argues, isn't just an ambition to offer business advice: it's who is in the room deciding how that advice gets delivered. Rather than the traditional partner-led model, Nordens is structured as a limited company, run by a leadership team that reaches well beyond the profession's usual accountancy background.
"We're not a partner-led firm, we're set up as a limited company, so we are run by business people, entrepreneurs. We've got a director of operations, a CMO: you don't see that in other firms. We've got a department that are specifically consultants for businesses, our advisory department. That is what they live and breathe. They aren't accountants that are trying to do advisory." - Ashlee Cooper, CMO, Nordens
That distinction, advisers who specialise in advisory rather than accountants stretching into it, runs through the firm's core sectors too, which include construction, property, professional services, sport, media and entertainment, recruitment and tech. Clients range from ex-professional footballers building a business for the first time to established property developers, each needing a different kind of strategic support. Cooper credits the breadth of personality and background across the leadership team with giving Nordens the agility to flex between them, rather than applying a single accountancy-shaped template to every client relationship.
Among this year's Mid-Tier Firm of the Year finalists, Nordens is notable for standing alongside a run of independent practices, at a time when private equity investment continues to reshape the top of the market. For Cooper and Hahn, that independence isn't incidental: it's central to the pitch.
"You go to a family-run pub and they make the roast with love. When you taste it, you feel that the food is made with love. That is what we wouldn't want to lose. Whereas you start becoming a chain, and you start losing that and everything becomes balance sheet and profit and loss." - Mitch Hahn, CEO, Nordens
It's a theme Cooper returns to with some care: she's clear that private equity backing can work well for some firms, and that acquisition sometimes brings better systems and a genuinely improved client experience. But she points to a pattern among Nordens' own new clients: several have moved to the firm after their previous practice was acquired by a larger, PE-backed group, and found the personal touch didn't survive the transition, different faces, new systems, less continuity.
Nordens isn't ruling out external investment altogether, but Hahn is clear about the terms: any capital would need to come without compromising the culture and client relationships the firm has spent twenty years building. "I think there is a way to take investment and keep the love there," he says, "but you really need to be tight on your systems and processes, and have the right characters to work within them."
Nordens is also investing in AI, cautiously and largely off the record for now. The firm is in a testing phase, helping build a tool it expects a partner to eventually take to market, but AI is already freeing up Nordens' small marketing team for more strategic, creative work, a factor they credit, in part, for last year's Marketing Campaign of the Year win against firms with far bigger budgets.
On advisory specifically, though, the line is firm: "AI can probably give you a form of advisory. It's just not made with love. It's not genuinely caring about the business and building a relationship with someone that can actually help." For a firm whose whole model rests on that relationship, AI supports the work; it doesn't replace the people doing it.
Asked to sum up the case for the award, Cooper points back to purpose rather than numbers, citing the firm's award-winning work supporting neurodivergent business owners, developed with a business psychologist and industry partners, as evidence of a wider commitment to the profession, not just to Nordens' own client base.
"In truth, everything we do is to make business better, and that's not just our business, that's the entire industry. Being as independent as we are, our decisions aren't just made on numbers. Our decisions are made on purpose, and I think that's really important." - Mitch Hahn, CEO, Nordens
TaxCalc is proud to sponsor the Mid-Tier Firm of the Year category, and wishes Ashlee, Mitch and the whole Nordens team the very best of luck at the Accounting Excellence Awards.