Canberra advisory firm BellchambersBarrett pushes past 100 professionals
Canberra-based advisory BellchambersBarrett has had a particularly busy two-year stretch, with the firm’s headcount now ticking beyond the 100-mark following its recent ten-year anniversary.
Established in Canberra in 2014 by former PwC pair Shane Bellchambers and James Barrett with a team of just four and its staff meetings held around a home dining table, the accounting and consulting firm has now grown to more than 100 professionals, including eleven additional partners.
Two of those – former PwC managers Sart Spinks and Jamie Glenn – joined the fledgling firm in its earliest days before being elevated to the partnership in 2020, while another pair, Brandon Brown and Phil Sands, came on board at the end of last year after both had previously spent upwards of five years as partners at KPMG and altogether two decades at the Big Four firm.
The quartet neatly bookend a rapid period of growth for BellchambersBarrett, including an especially busy past twenty-four months, with the firm moving into a modern new office at 14 Childers Street on the Canberra city fringe in the middle of 2023, in part to accommodate the acquisition of longstanding local business Accrue Chartered Accountants.
The addition of the Accrue team, including associates Don Di Placido and Mark De Bortoli, has helped the firm to practically double its headcount since the start of 2022. The period since has also seen the promotion of two more founding employees to partner – Kathleen Buckley and Russel Livermore – and the recruitment of Miranda Garnett to lead a newly-launched social advisory services practice.
Of the remaining four partners, Vicki Sofatzis and Aaron Froud both joined in 2021, respectively from Deloitte and KPMG, while Jamie Lucas and Sean Michelle are both pushing towards their own ten-year anniversaries with the firm, the latter who arrived via its merger with Deborah Poulton & Associates, with Poulton retiring from the partnership in 2022.
Rapid growth
Such rapid growth has seen BellchambersBarrett become one of Australia’s top 60 largest organisations of its kind, climbing into 59th spot on the AFR’s latest annual rankings on the back of a massive 48 percent revenue jump in 2024 towards the $20 million mark – making it the third-fastest growing accounting and advisory firm in the country.
That trajectory doesn't appear likely to be slowing up anytime soon either. Last year, BellchambersBarrett won a significant Department of Finance audit contract off the co-founders’ former employer PwC, while the firm was also noted as the biggest Defence department consulting contractor in the first half of last year, beating out the likes of the Big Four, Accenture and Scyne Advisory.
Ironically, in an in-house interview from 2021, Bellchambers said part of the motivation for establishing the firm was a desire to return to a smaller team environment, after joining future PwC acquisition WalterTurnbull in 1993 when it was a seven-person team and watching it grow to more than 300 (among those Barrett, who crossed from EY) before then becoming a partner at PwC.
To counter the potential drawbacks of its own significant growth, the co-founders have placed a huge emphasis on people and culture from day one, and continue to espouse such an approach: “We try to put people at the forefront of everything we do. Internally, we treat each other as equals, and we strongly encourage a healthy work-life balance. We know people are our assets.”
