Mention KYC to Lissy Gray CA (above, left) and it’s likely to bring a wry smile to her face. “Know your client?” she says. “We know all our clients. We know their parents. We know their grandparents. We even know their cousins.

“At least half of our clients are farmers. Farming is everything here and without agriculture there would be no Castle Douglas. The bakery, the garage, the hotel – they all rely on the farming economy to some extent. The closeness of the community is what makes everything so special.”

Indeed, Bell Ogilvy is such a locally focused practice that the firm won’t take on any clients without a strong connection to the Castle Douglas area. Yet while Gray and her fellow Partner, Eilidh Harman CA (above, right), have become well-known figures in the local community, neither originally hails from Dumfries and Galloway.

Gray grew up in Fife. After enjoying economics at school, she went on to study the subject at the University of Aberdeen. “Part of my course was accountancy,” she says. “That meant you got put into the ICAS milk round, meeting all the accountancy firms. I was offered a trainee job with Scott & Paterson in Edinburgh, where I wanted to return to. Then I came down here one weekend, with a girl I shared a flat with, and met the man who became my husband.” A series of posts followed, initially with Manson & Partners in Dumfries, before she joined Bell Ogilvy in 2003.

Meanwhile, Harman grew up in Ayr. “I liked accounting at school,” she says. “But I was also a passionate ice skater, so I thought about being a skating coach. However, my dad pointed out that if I wanted to coach I’d need to get up first thing in the morning, and be working at 6am on a Saturday when all my friends were off for the weekend. So I decided to become an accountant.”

Harman graduated in accountancy and finance from the University of Strathclyde and, not being keen on joining a large firm, secured a trainee position with Dumfries firm Carson & Trotter, which offered the variety of work she sought. “My geography wasn’t great though,” she says. “I didn’t realise I couldn’t travel from Ayr to Dumfries every day, so I ended up moving there.”

Harman also reveals that she almost appeared in a CA magazine profile of the firm around that time, but left just before it happened. Romance with a colleague had blossomed into marriage, and she felt it would be healthier if she and her husband worked in different practices. It was then, in 2013, that she joined Bell Ogilvy, becoming a partner in 2017. Harman and Gray have been the sole partners since 2020, when Eileen Tweedie CA retired after almost 24 years with the firm.

100 and counting

The origins of Bell Ogilvy are lost to history, but the practice is thought to have been founded in the early 20th century and, based on the best guesses of previous partners, Gray and Harman celebrated its centenary in 2021. Yet the firm’s focus on close client relationships and flexibility is long engrained. “Most of our clients like dealing with us face to face,” says Harman. “And we don’t force clients down the digital route if that’s not for them. We have a mix of people who still like everything on paper and those who want everything electronic.”

Frequency of contact is another feature of the practice, with Bell Ogilvy often performing a business advisory role on a week-to-week basis – an approach that Gray and Harman are keen to continue building on. One topic that has featured regularly in client conversations since 30 October is the reform of agricultural property relief (APR) for inheritance tax (IHT) announced in the Budget.

“Hundred per cent APR only came in from 1992, so we are confident that we can help the farming community pass their farms down through the family”

Eilidh Harman CA

“We will be helping our clients to plan well ahead because the sooner they act, the better their chance of mitigating or reducing their exposure to IHT,” says Harman. “Hundred per cent APR only came in from 1992, so we are confident that we can help the farming community pass their farms down through the family. Plans can be reviewed and updated, but it’s important that they don’t keep putting it off. We are looking to meet with all our clients early this year to help them prepare.”

There are currently around 20 people in the Bell Ogilvy team, all based at the one office in Castle Douglas. One challenge of running a rural practice is that it can make staff recruitment even harder. “It’s tricky trying to encourage people to move to Dumfries and Galloway,” says Harman. “It’s such a nice place to live and bring up kids, but it doesn’t have a Costa Coffee on every corner, and that puts some people off.”

However, the duo are looking forward to welcoming an ICAS trainee to the team in March, bringing fresh thinking and knowledge to the workplace. And the new recruit is likely to discover an enjoyable environment in which to develop their career, with the partners placing an emphasis on a positive work-life balance. For instance, all full-time staff now have the option of taking Friday afternoons off, and Harman and Gray hope to move the practice to a four-day week.

When we speak, the pair also admit to being placed on the naughty step for unspecified misdemeanours by Bello, the office elf. The pre-Christmas antics of Bello on the firm’s regularly updated Facebook page certainly point to an office culture that allows space for people to let their hair down. “Communications are a big thing here,” smiles Harman.

It’s this outlook that has helped Bell Ogilvy notch up its first century and rise to challenges such as heightened regulation, technological change and the pressures of the pandemic, on both the practice and the community it serves.

And then there’s another critical factor – the mutual trust between partners. “There’s never been any doubt about reliability,” says Gray. “I’m never thinking, ‘Did Eilidh get that right?’ There’s full confidence in each other’s ability.”

bellogilvy.co.uk