As an experienced commercial professional speaker, Mark is able to adapt his talks to fit the occasion and the organiser’s time slot. Mark always finishes on time!

You can book Mark to present his talks in-house for a single firm or for wider audiences of accountants and tax advisers. Each talk can be presented as a half day course, a shorter session perhaps as part of a conference or as a 45-60 minute keynote.

Over the years Mark has been commended for his keynote speeches at conferences for professional bodies, associations, banks and professional firms.

Mark’s current talks are listed below with further details beneath. If you have something specific in mind it’s always worth getting in touch as Mark’s repertoire is always developing. For example in 2009 he was commissioned to speak about firms of the future, benefiting from web-based technology, social media and the virtual client.  More commonly he is engaged to present the following talks:

• Partnership tax – tips traps and news
• Protecting your practice – from negligence claims and worse
• Make more profits from your smaller clients
• Surviving the credit crunch – your practice, your advice, your future
• Topical tax practice management matters
• Practical tax issues for general practitioner accountants
• Incorporation and Disincorporation – tips and traps
• Dealing with difficult clients
• What to do when your NetWorking is NotWorking
• ‘Social media’ – Should accountants ignore it or explore it?

Further details of each of these talks are provided below.

Partnership tax – tips, traps and news

This seminar will cover dozens of practical and commercial issues relevant to partnerships – be they trading partnerships, professional firms, LLPs or family limited partnerships.

Presented by Mark Lee FCA CTA (Fellow) who spent much of his professional career focused on this area. He has advised dozens of professional firms and has written extensively on partnership tax and related subjects. Mark is  Chairman of the Tax Advice Network and a past Chairman of the ICAEW Tax Faculty.

Coverage includes:

• Profit sharing options and issues
• Personally incurred expenses
• Partnership expenses being challenged by HMRC
• When partners join a firm without a fiscal year end
• When partners leave a firm without a fiscal year end
• Partnership agreements – tax issues that get overlooked
• Choosing between the 5 alternative business structures – commercial and tax issues
• The best option for start-up businesses?
• Can you move from a company structure to a partnership or LLP?
• Tax pitfalls to be avoided
• Lessons to learn from recent partnership tax cases

Protecting your practice – from negligence claims and worse

This is a unique and valuable talk highlighting many of the ways that professional negligence claims arise and what you can do to avoid them.

Mark Lee, FCA CTA (Fellow), Chairman of the Tax Advice Network and a past Chairman of the ICAEW Tax Faculty, shares tips and lessons drawn from his extensive experience in practice and from acting as an expert witness in court.

Mark starts by putting such matters in context and identifies the all too common scenarios that can lead to professional negligence claims. What is it that can and does go wrong and what can ambitious professionals do to minimise the risks of a successful claim?

Amongst the topics addressed are:

• What needs to be proved when a claim is made?
• Tempting but typically poor defences
• Tax issues and topics that can so easily lead to claims
• Dozens of tips and practical advice to minimise the risks of a claim
• Why you need to think carefully before suing for unpaid fees
• How to dump the duff d-list clients who cause most problems

Make more profits from your smaller clients (without fancy schemes)

This unique session has been highly rated by over a thousand accountants and tax advisers around the country since it was first presented in 2001.

Mark Lee, FCA CTA (Fellow), Chairman of the Tax Advice Network and a past Chairman of the ICAEW Tax Faculty, shares tips and lessons drawn from his extensive experience in practice. He also distils much of the best advice he has collated from a variety of other sources over the years.

Amongst the topics addressed are:

• Innovative billing strategies that work
• Adding value to compliance related services
• Understanding your tax service matrix
• Avoiding the loss of high value clients
• Easy high impact tax business strategies that really work

Surviving the credit crunch – your practice, your advice, your future

Whilst many accountants may feel that they can ride the present financial turmoil, your clients may not be so lucky.

Mark Lee, FCA CTA (Fellow), Chairman of the Tax Advice Network and a past Chairman of the ICAEW Tax Faculty has created this unique course to help you survive the credit crunch and the impact that it might be having on your practice, your advice and your future.

Amongst the topics to be addressed are:

• Tax advice for clients suffering in the crunch
• Credit control tips, techniques and traps
• Protecting your firm when a client goes into receivership or liquidation
• Key business planning advice topics and resources
• Marketing messages that make sense in the current climate
• Avoiding the tax traps on redundancies
• Negotiating fees when times are tough
• Succession planning in the current environment
• Sources of capital for accountancy firms

The tax stuff accountants need to focus on

Ideal for general practice accountants keen to keep up with day to day tax developments and worried about the impact of these on how they run their practice.

Mark Lee, FCA CTA (Fellow), Chairman of the Tax Advice Network and a past Chairman of the ICAEW Tax Faculty, shares topical tips, lessons and advice drawn from his extensive experience, gathered from his discussions and research amongst general practitioners and his role on professional body working parties and committees.

Amongst the topics to be addressed will be:

• Practical consequences of recent tax changes and announcements
• Forthcoming changes to your compliance workload
• The need to help clients evidence ‘reasonable care’
• Key elements of tax engagement letters
• HMRC toolkits and spotlights
• Updates to the Guide to Professional Conduct
• Managing and resolving ethical issues and challenges
• Dumping your duff d-list clients to reduce risks
• And plenty more!

As ever, Mark will be focusing on the practicalities of each subject and will encourage attendees to share their views and experiences should they wish to do so.

Practical tax issues for general practitioner accountants
Dozens of real day to day practical issues, drawn from the weekly tax updates published by the Tax Advice Network.

Mark Lee, FCA CTA (Fellow), is Chairman of the Tax Advice Network and a past Chairman of the ICAEW Tax Faculty. He is quite happy to leave the heavy technical talks to other speakers. His focus is on the practical day to day issues that impact the lives of general practitioner accountants.

The topics to be addressed will be determined close to the day as they will depend on current developments. On past experience they will include matters related to:

• Completion of tax returns;
• PAYE; Tax credits, NICs, VAT;
• HMRC announcements you may have missed;
• Changes in law, practice and interpretation;
• And much more

Incorporation and Disincorporation – tips and traps

For over five years the tax system seemed to invite tax motivated incorporations. Now it has all changed and the choice of business structure needs more informed advice than ever before.

Mark Lee, FCA CTA (Fellow), Chairman of the Tax Advice Network and a past Chairman of the ICAEW Tax Faculty, shares tips, traps and lessons drawn from his extensive experience and his authorship of Tolley’s Guide to Incorporation, Disincorporation and related matters.

Amongst the topics addressed are:

• The four basic choices of business structure
• Key comparisons (beyond the simplistic ones)
• The implications of PBR 2009/10
• Tax issues on incorporation
• Tax traps on disincorporation
• Dissolution and ESC C16
• Alternative approaches
• Extraction of cash

Dealing with difficult clients

In an ideal world none of us would have to deal with difficult clients. Sadly though we cannot easily dictate their behaviour or sack them all – especially if we don’t have responsibility for sacking difficult clients.

Mark Lee, FCA CTA (Fellow), Chairman of the Tax Advice Network and a past Chairman of the ICAEW Tax Faculty, draws on his extensive experience in practices of all sizes and shares tips and advice as to how you can deal with difficult clients.

Amongst the topics addressed are:

• The different types of difficult clients we encounter
• The options – realistically speaking!
• Relationship strategies
• Specific situations that arise and how to overcome them
• Seven key steps that will help

Net…ing: Taking the ‘work’ out of Networking
Or ‘What to do when your networking is not working’

At last! A Business networking talk by a professional who has put all of the theory into practice and who knows what works in real life scenarios.

Mark Lee, FCA CTA (Fellow), Chairman of the Tax Advice Network and a past Chairman of the ICAEW Tax Faculty, shares tips and lessons about business networking drawn from many years of successful networking experience in practice. He also distills much of the advice proffered by other ‘networking’ experts.

Amongst the topics addressed are:

• Key things to do before you attend a networking event;
• Ways to maximise the opportunities during the event;
• Critical actions to take afterwards
• The 5 things you must A.V.O.I.D. when networking

‘Social media’ – Should accountants ignore it or explore it?

The papers and even some professional publications are constantly talking about social media such as twitter, facebook, LinkedIn and various online forums that seem to proliferate almost daily. Some accountants are experimenting, others are wondering and still more think it’s just a fad. Is it? How relevant is all this really to accountants in practice? And how easy is it to to get started if you should choose to do so?

Mark Lee has been active within the social media space for over 3 years and has spoken and written extensively about the subject for accountants and tax advisers. Unlike many so-called social media experts Mark has a deep understanding of what really matters to accountants and he talks about social media in a way that ensures it is relevant, commercial and practical.

Amongst the topics addressed are:

• What is online ’social’ networking and how relevant is it to accountants?
• How you can utilise social networks to benefit your practice
• All that strange new terminology – saying what you mean
• Clarifying common misconceptions about twitter
• Do you need a twitter strategy and how you could start to use this communication tool

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You may also have heard Mark speak on a number of other topics. Please contact Mark to discuss any special requests that you might have. You can access his speaker profile here.