Airbourne

A love of flying helps Andrew Hoholt CPA combine business and pleasure.

It was while Andrew Hoholt CPA was driving to visit a client that he experienced an epiphany. Hoholt is director of the Hoholt Financial Group, which has offices located in Tamworth and Armidale in rural New South Wales.

The client in question was located in Goodooga, about 100km north-west of Lightning Ridge. It was a seven-hour drive from Hoholt's Armidale base.

And it was summer; the heat was punishing and the sun's bright light unremitting.

'With seven hours in the car you get a lot of time to think,' Hoholt says. 'And one of the thoughts was, ‘There's got to be a better way than this'.'

There isn't much at Goodooga, which is located in north-west New South Wales and is home to an indigenous community.

'It's just a little town,' Hoholt says. 'Probably the best thing about it is the airstrip. They've got this fantastic airstrip so that the flying doctors and the air ambulance can get in there.'

The very next morning following his return, Hoholt signed up for flying lessons. Seventy flying hours later he was ready for his private pilot's licence test.

A lifelong fan of all things aviation-related, Hoholt saw how he could combine his love of flying and make a strategic business decision at the same time.

Perhaps even more acutely than the rest of Australia, regional areas have felt the impact of the skills shortage. Simply put, there are not enough finance professionals to adequately service remote locations. That's where having your own plane comes in handy. Hoholt can organise to see several outlying clients, and then service them in a 'loop' over a couple of days.

The mainstay of the group's business is working with indigenous organisations — an association Hoholt, 40, began in 1995.

Raised in Sydney, Hoholt attended university in Armidale and fell in love with life away from the city.

After graduation he worked for a second-tier firm in Sydney before moving to Tamworth. A year later, after having a 'gutful' of public accounting, he was encouraged to apply for a job with the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission (ATSIC).

Employed there for three years, he became familiar with the Aboriginal communities based in the area. 'What became clearly apparent to me was that many of the accountants in the region didn't want to work with the indigenous organisations,' he recalls. 'It was almost like a lot of the accountants up there treated the Aboriginal people and their organisations as second-rate clients.'

Then one day a client with whom Hoholt was dealing said, 'You should set up your own firm and you can come and look after us'. A seed was sowed.

Hoholt Financial Group started in 1998 as a one-man operation.Within two years Hoholt had more work than he was comfortable dealing with alone, and was forced to expand.

Now employing 12 staff, the group offers services in financial planning, taxation, general accounting, auditing and consulting. It handles government contract work managing indigenous grant funds, and Hoholt also performs administrator duties.

The objective, he says, is to build capacity within an organisation so that eventually it is capable of handling its own financial affairs.

Hoholt had an early lesson in understanding the indigenous community's way of seeing things. In the first week of his ATSIC assignment he attended a meeting that was due to start at 11.00 am. At 11.15 am a few people started wandering in, and 45 minutes later the meeting began.

'One of the very first lessons I learnt was that indigenous people, generally speaking, don't run their lives by their watches,' he says. 'Understanding that, I've adjusted my expectations.

'Dealing with Aboriginal people is dealing with a different culture. The more that you work with Indigenous people, the more you come to understand how things are done, and the more you come to accept the differences with the way things are done.'

Another area that's required a change in mindset over time is appreciating that as his business expands, Hoholt must be less hands-on.

'Initially when my business grew — because there was a period when it grew very quickly — I was getting very frustrated that I was working my butt off all day,' he recalls.

'But then I'd get to the end of the day and think to myself, ‘What have I achieved today? What have I done?'

'I'd actually done a hell of a lot, but much of what I'd done wasn't hands-on-the-tools, physically punching out the clients' work.

'I had a bit of an ‘a ha' moment and realised I just couldn't be on the tools as much as I was. Somebody needed to be responsible for driving the ship, and that person was me.'

So it seems whether its piloting conceptual ships or flying real planes, Hoholt is in control.

Reference: February 2008, volume 78:01, p. 75 – 76