Baranov Associates was born in October 2017.

In April 2015, there were a lot of positives – we had a rapidly growing, award winning Accountancy firm with a great team of 17, turning over in excess of £1m, with a great reputation for fantastic service and a friendly way of doing business.

But we’d come to realise that it wasn’t what we wanted any more. We’d had enough of the sacrifices, the constant push for growth and the need to put the business first. We wanted to do more away from the office and to have more freedom, but that didn’t fit with the business that we’d built.

Something needed to change, and, knowing already that there were other firms out there who wanted to buy the business we’d built, we decided the easiest option was to sell.

Baranov Associates is us, Chris and Liz Baranov. The sale of our previous business went through in October 2015 and we’ve spent the intervening time, until 1^st November 2017, working out the answer to ‘what comes next?’.

We went to work for our oldest friends, formerly our largest clients, for just under a year to help with key projects but knew that working for others long-term wasn’t likely to be for us, and we missed the variety of working with lots of businesses. We also wanted to achieve one of our long-held dreams by spending some time travelling in a motorhome, so spent eleven weeks of 2017 doing exactly that, and had a great time!

Over the last twelve months though, we’d received an increasing number of approaches from people that we’d worked with in the past, former clients, who wanted to know what we were doing next.

Were we going to set up a new firm? Could we help them again?

Though we’d been adamant when we sold the previous business that we wouldn’t return to accountancy, the passage of time and the benefit of hindsight had given us a different perspective:

• We knew that the sale hadn’t raised enough for us to be able to retire permanently, yet hadn’t found another option that fulfilled the criteria we’d decided a new project had to fulfil.
• We knew many of the areas where we’d do things differently to the past so would be able to avoid replicating the original firm.
• We knew that we love helping clients and working closely with them.
• We knew, from the range of comments that we’d heard, that the service levels we believed should be standard still weren’t ‘normal’ within the area, providing us with an opportunity.
• We knew that we want to retain the ‘life’ that we’d found since selling, so knew that whatever we decided to do, it had to fit around that.

Baranov Associates was born!

Why ‘Baranov Associates’?

Though it has been described as ‘sounding like the Russian Mafia’, the name reflects exactly what clients will get, which is us, and our associates.