OMB Tax Director in Shrewsbury

The Role

As an OMB Tax Director, you provide strategic leadership on tax matters, overseeing client portfolios and ensuring compliance with UK tax regulations and providing strategic tax advice and planning. You will drive business development, offer expert tax planning advice, and mentor senior team members. Your role focuses on delivering exceptional client service and advancing the firm’s growth and reputation within Shropshire and North Wales, leading further into offices in the North West.

Client Focus

• Take the lead on managing and building client relationships with Azets clients, with responsibility for developing relationships with key clients.
• Identifies and delivers service improvements.
• Demonstrates a deep understanding of the client's underlying future needs.
• Understands current & future forces that will shape and influence clients' needs.
• Uses a variety of influence approaches for strategic impact.
• Makes decisions based on maintaining long‑term relationships.
• Delivers excellent client satisfaction as measured by relevant KPIs.
• Takes the lead on cross‑service line delivery on multi‑office client bases.

Technical Excellence

• Recognised as a technical expert.
• Provides oversight and takes responsibility for ensuring that team members possess the necessary skills, knowledge and behaviours required to deliver accurate, high‑quality work for our clients.
• Assesses the team’s ability to deal with future technical or regulatory developments and takes steps to address any skill gaps, including managing talent/resource and software planning.
• Have a broad knowledge of the more technical aspects of other service lines – be able to spot and talk at a high level about matters outside of one's own service line.
• Thinks beyond their own area to develop capability.
• Ensures that quality is beyond a minimum level, with adherence to key processes and ensures appropriate training is undertaken.

Commitment

• Proactive leadership of tasks to achieve the business plan.
• Creates and maintains a positive environment.
• Able to look holistically at the department to promote wellbeing, and a collaborative environment.
• Can pick up on the ‘mood’ of the business and take steps to raise team morale as appropriate.
• Leading by example and consistently setting high standards for professionalism and ethical behaviour.
• Champions the Azets brand, building on our portfolio of services, values, reputation, and market profile.
• Supports the continued development of a consistent and unified Azets brand, strategy and values and is able to challenge colleagues and clients who are not demonstrating these behaviours.

Attention to Detail

• Encourages the team to raise standards and eliminate errors.
• Tracks and acts on quality issues.
• Is transparent and shares information with colleagues, which could benefit the business, working with the partners in the team.
• Is aware of the skills and abilities of those around them, communicating tasks clearly with deadlines and supporting them through to completion.
• Communicates to the team the bigger picture and objectives of an assignment, and is able to strike a balance between seeking further detail and an efficient and commercial output.
• Actively takes part in and contributes to the development of Azets' quality monitoring processes in their own part of the business.

Efficiency

• Deals effectively with conflicting objectives, priorities and agendas.
• Draws upon organisational data, understanding of market trends, and latest thinking to identify and take forward ideas for improvements and efficiencies.
• Leads the way with digital transformation initiatives through a clear understanding of the program and embedding throughout their team.
• Can critically assess effective use of time, for example, ensuring all meetings have a defined purpose and agreed output.

Decision Making

• Takes a dynamic and flexible approach to decision making, using live data to recognise when different approaches are required.
• Holds genuinely open discussions, listens to others views, and shows a willingness to compromise.
• Is able to present a range of possible decision making options to stakeholders, highlighting the positive and negative implications of each to reach a decision.
• Is able to identify and extract relevant data to support a decision from a large volume and wide range of sources.
• Consistently demonstrates awareness and sound judgement on decisions which are able to be made autonomously and escalates those that cannot to more senior stakeholders.
• Actively reviews and adapts past decisions where data suggests original expectations are not being met.

Leading People

• Communicates direction clearly and brings colleagues along on the journey balancing business priorities and people priorities with respect.
• Trusts and appropriately empowers team members.
• Promotes a culture of openness and trust.
• Actively looks for opportunities to develop others, gives responsibility to others and willingly delegates as appropriate.
• Comfortable in voicing opinions that may conflict with the status quo.
• Builds empathy and support to ensure buy‑in and ownership of ideas.
• Always upholds and demonstrates integrity.
• Has oversight of wider team’s development and their future career progression and leads the support strategies.

Leading Yourself

• Is able to lead a team to achieve resolution of complex challenges.
• Stays true to leadership style even when under pressure.
• Can step outside comfort zone and actively pursues new challenges and opportunities that support the business.
• Leads by example by openly pursuing continuous personal and professional development and demonstrates self‑awareness.
• Demonstrates resilience but is able to recognise own limitations and draws on and is accepting of support from own network when required.

Driving Business Growth

• Strategically develops and refines own external network and shows evidence of winning work from this network for own team and for Azets more widely.
• Able to critically assess the value of business development efforts and takes steps to refine own and team strategies that are under performing.
• Leads and builds own client portfolio, demonstrating fee growth from existing services and evidence of successfully introducing new services.
• Can identify the commercial realities of a client engagement and is able to seek agreement across service lines on approach to fee setting and fee growth.
• Is able to articulate the value proposition for the services the team delivers to support fee growth.
• Uses chain of indirect influence. This may include the use of technical experts to help sell a concept by adding credibility.
• Is comfortable in preparing and presenting tax tender documents, specifically demonstrating the tax advantages to the client.
• Supports offices in identifying and implementing client tax strategies.

Living Our Values

• New to Azets: Shows good understanding of our company values, and making good progress towards consistently demonstrating required behaviours.
• Existing Colleague: Consistently ‘lives our values’ - demonstrates expected behaviours in line with our company values.

Technical Skills

• Acts as an engagement lead on most tax assignments, including some complex and larger assignments with limited support from the tax partner.
• Able to anticipate issues and risks with tax engagements and take timely action to address these.
• Works with tax specialists and other service lines seamlessly to provide a joined up service to clients.
• Demonstrates appropriate oversight and responsibility as one of the main leads of the client relationship team, showing strong project management skills when required to coordinate teams to deliver projects.
• Proactively keeps on top of key developments across both the tax service line and the wider firm, to identify cross‑selling opportunities for existing and new clients.
• Confident to discuss most areas of taxation with clients, bringing in appropriate tax specialists as appropriate and maximising cross‑selling opportunities.
• Actively involved in supporting peers and partners with department strategy and future planning, having responsibility for a specific area within the department (for example, finance or people).
• Leading the way for change, innovation and technological advances within the tax department, by using the most appropriate technologies and processes for tax assignments, and demonstrating where they can improve quality and efficiencies.
• Responsible for promoting quality controls within the tax department at a regional level.
• Works with the managers to identify higher performers and supports development in line with Career Pathways to help retain key team members.
• Supports managers in addressing underperformance or inefficiencies within the team, and if required, performance improvement consultations.
• Actively supports the tax partners with recruitment and building a team to fit the requirements of the service line.
• Is able to forecast resource and development requirements and identify possible solutions.
• Continuously looking for opportunities to expand both internal & external networks, both in terms of potential referrers but also opportunities to showcase the team’s service offerings (for example, presentations to external firms).

Holds an accountancy and/or tax qualification or qualified by experience (e.g. ATT/CTA/ACA/ACCA/CA). It is expected that the above core and technical skills will have been developed through study alongside work experience in an accountancy practice.