From Scottish isles to sunny Sydney: a globetrotting accountant’s career journey

When Morris MacIver took his first high-school accounting class in Callanish, the Scottish village he grew up in, he could have hardly predicted that his newfound interest in business management would take him across oceans and see him working on some of the largest deals in Europe.

Speaking to Accounting Times, MacIver said he studied accounting and finance in Glasgow with the vision of starting his own business one day. He spent his summers working for a local accounting practice on the small Scottish island he grew up on, the Isle of Lewis, learning the ins and outs of bookkeeping and honing his business knowledge.

However, when he landed a grad role with KPMG’s Glasgow deal advisory team, MacIver realised he could apply his entrepreneurial streak to helping businesses navigate deals and make the most out of their acquisitions.

“I just enjoy talking to people, learning about businesses, working out the facts and figuring out whether the numbers stack up in the way that we're told they do,” MacIver said.

“I find that really interesting as well and helping people form a growth thesis on, you know, if we're going to buy this business, where do we take it next?”

Since then, his career with KPMG has seen him working on deals from London, Paris, Melbourne and Sydney. For him, the deals advisory work tapped into his passion for figuring out what made businesses tick and how to make them better.

“I was working in a team [in London], basically focused on advising private equity funds. We were working on some of the biggest deals across Europe, funds that were growing really quickly buying out these businesses,” MacIver recalled.

“It was complex deals, cross border elements. I was down in London for six months. I spent a month of that working in Paris. … And I was just like this little kid from a Scottish island, working in Paris, working really hard during the day and then going out for nice dinners every night. It was really fun.”

After moving halfway across the world to work in KPMG’s office in Melbourne, Australia, MacIver also fell into being an “occasional” correspondent for the BBC’s Scottish Gaelic program, due to his Gaelic roots.

“I'm a proud speaker of Scottish Gaelic which is an endangered language spoken by less than 1 per cent of the Scottish population,” he said.

“Because it's a really small community, largely based in the islands where I'm from, I know a lot of people who work in the industry and who work on these shows.

“I came to Australia for the World Cup and someone in the BBC … wanted to do some commentary on it. And so they asked me to do a live report on the cricket while I was at the MCG. So I'd been at the MCG all day in the sun, and the phone rang and all of a sudden I was live on the BBC.”

Since then, MacIver has been a go-to Gaelic-speaking correspondent for the BBC for nationally significant events in Australia.

“They called me about anything to do with Australia. So when elections happen, you know, I think when the Queen died, those types of things they were calling me about. Like the bushfires, those types of nationally significant events,” he said.

“It's very important to me, like I'm really passionate about keeping the language alive and doing my small bit to do that.”

Aside from his unexpected foray into news reporting, MacIver said his work in deal advisory continued to deliver fresh and exciting challenges.

“I just found the work really engaging and find the variety of the work has been really interesting over the years as well. There's always something new around the corner,” he said.

“You work on deals for six weeks at a time on average and you'll have multiple things going on at once. So multiple different deals and projects and every day in my life is very different.”

Reflecting on his career and all the unique places it had brought him so far, MacIver said his accounting background had provided him with transferable skills that gave him a swathe of travel opportunities.

“The skills are very transferable, especially in advisory,” he said.

“Being an accountant, you learn all the basics in terms of professional stuff, client management, tech management, all the real basic stuff. But you get the technical skills as well, and that's very transferable cross-border.”

Aside from the work, MacIver said that his experiences working and travelling with KPMG had helped him forge lifelong friendships.

“Being part of a big firm was really good because … you've got all the benefits of being part of a really good group, and you hang out together outside of work and yeah, it's a good place to make friends,” MacIver said.

“Yes, the work that we do is interesting, but actually, it is very much about the people.”