He’s been a butcher, a bingo hall worker, a casino croupier, a postman, served on supermarket tills…..and now he’s at the helm of a near £500,000 turnover accountancy business with over 400 clients. The life and times of Wayne McCormack is quite a story……
Apparently slightly reserved at first encounter, Wayne is nothing if not eminently quotable when he gets into his conversational stride. A chat with this engagingly enigmatic character has more twists and turns than his very own business career, which began as a teenage glass collector in a bar on the back streets of suburban Birmingham around three decades ago…..the quotes just keep on coming…
“I enjoy working, I want to buy the world, see the world, do everything…….. it’s like Rudyard Kipling said: ‘If you can dream, but not make dreams your master.’
“I went to three different secondary schools. I really struggled, I think I had a problem with authority. It was a real journey, it’s part of what moulded me into the strange person I am today, I do not look at myself as a normal person. I wake up at 3.30 am with ideas for the business, I do not switch off.
“Accountancy is the less interesting part of the job….all the strategy meetings with the clients are the best, where they take your advice, do something and watch it have an impact. Anybody can be an accountant, the key thing is looking at numbers, and being able to come up with a strategy. “Zeta Hewings (his co-director and accountant at Zoo Accounting) is the real boss, she is the practical one. Two-thirds of the crazy ideas I get, she just jokes ‘stop dreaming’……Zeta is the first person I have trusted in business, and that took a good few years.
The Winning Accountant Formula
“The business would not work without Zeta at all. The way myself and Zeta are so opposite makes the winning formula.
“I class myself as reasonably bright. I didn’t do A Levels, the academic world was not for me. Why should everybody be judged on all their school life on three weeks of exams? My accounting qualifications came later in life, studying around work.
“I do not really have friends. I only need four hours’ sleep a night. Any job, I have always been the first one in and the last one out.
“I have always been very good with numbers. I do not class myself as an accountant, I class myself as an entrepreneur.”
He freely throws out colourful anecdotes from a remarkably varied working life which have helped mould the refreshingly character sitting at his desk in the accountancy firm’s new offices in Alcester into the determined entrepreneur of today.
He talks with some regret of the day he was head-butted by a colleague at the butcher’s shop in Northfield where he worked at his first full-time job. “He was late and I had a bit of a go about his timekeeping but I could have been more tactful. I was 17, he was 29….he lost his job, I could have handled it better. It was a good life lesson, it was all down to respect for your elders.”
He recalls helping out with bingo sessions at his parents’ favourite working men’s club on Sunday afternoons. “It was ‘five and nine, the Brighton line’, all the pensioners joining in….it’s about moulding us, all these experiences. I was 23, I felt that I had done every job on the planet.” With all those jobs/experiences on his CV, a significant clue to Wayne’s extraordinary work ethic lies in his own father’s background. The McCormack family grew up in working-class Birmingham in the suburbs of Weoley Castle and Northfield, at a time when Rover still employed many thousands at the giant Longbridge car plant just up the road. It was a gritty environment which gave a young Wayne a few insights into the business world he would utilise to his own advantage in the fullness of time…..
“My dad Patrick had his own businesses, a kitchen fitter, an ice cream van, a car showroom, cafe owner, running a car wash. He had a very colourful life, he is from Dublin and my mother is from the Forest of Dean.
“He moved across here when he was very young…there was an anti-Irish feeling when he was growing up in Digbeth. He always worked – when he was doing the car wash, he was there seven days a week when he was 69, often in freezing temperatures. “I used to go and help him at weekends. For five years, I was working Monday to Friday in other jobs and Saturdays and Sundays with him…..I did that to help him out. But my dad never re-invested in his businesses, which has been one of the biggest lessons for me.”
Jon Griffin | Business Works
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Zoo Accounting