Fletcher joined BHP as Tax Partner in 2021. With 20 years’ experience of working in Corporate Tax, he is one of the most highly regarded tax leaders in the Yorkshire region.

BHP provides specialist advice to support businesses with their tax obligations, ensuring that every aspect of business tax compliance is dealt with. The firm also provides first-class tax planning advice, which is driven by clients’ commercial aims and needs.

Born and raised in the North East, Fletcher graduated with a Masters in Mathematics from Christs College, University of Cambridge in 2002. Since then, his career journey has included:

• Training at EY in London, with stints in New York and Manchester
• Grant Thornton in Leeds
• BDO in Leeds

We first met Fletch seven years ago during the judging for the YFL Awards and have kept in touch since. His name comes up regularly with the other advisors across our network – always in the most positive terms. We were delighted when he agreed to share his insights with us and our network.

Tell us about your Tax Career experience. Was it always the plan to specialise in this area and what has kept you focussed in it?

I'd be lying if I said it was always a childhood dream to be a tax advisor! Young people in the job market today often get a rough ride, but I will say they are, in general, far more informed and focused on what they want to do than I was when I started my career.

I moved to London to start a career in professional services, attracted as much by the qualification as anything else. I fell into tax through a summer placement I had at EY and have never looked back.

Working in tax, and particularly the sub specialisms that I got involved in, provided a unique combination of intellectual challenge, solving real world issues for businesses and personal interaction with clients that I think many people may not appreciate. It's this variety of work and people, both colleagues and clients, that keeps me engaged – even 20 years down the line!

There is a really strong progression in your CV – building up knowledge, staying at each employer for a good period of time and achieving a Partnership role at BHP. What have been the most important lessons that you learned from your early career and how important have they been?

I've learned a lot from each role I've taken on, whether that’s within the same firm or when I’ve moved to a new one. Every time I think I’ve got this cracked, something comes along that makes me realise I'm still learning – usually from a technical, old person perspective! I think I'll probably get to a place where I finally feel sorted just in time for retirement!

One of the key things for me, which it probably took me too long to realise, is that there’s no one way to be a tax partner. Everyone has strengths and weaknesses, and I think that sometimes we fall into the trap of thinking that the ‘be all and end all’ of career progression is highlighting those weaknesses at all costs!

We tend to focus on the person who naturally does all those things really well. But actually, there is a huge amount of power in being able to say: “that's not me, I'll never be like that. I have different strengths and I'll play to those”.  Sometimes I made the decision not to do the things that would have accelerated my progression through the ranks, but I always did things that I enjoyed. Looking back now, I genuinely think I wouldn’t have had it any other way.

As with any professional career, relationships are absolutely key. When people hear that, they often think you're talking about client relationships, but those relationships with colleagues past and present are massively important too. I still regularly keep in touch with people I worked with way back from when I was an intern and having some people that you can bounce things off, even if they are technically competitors, is extremely healthy.

Many young accountants associate the Corporate Finance and Transaction Services departments with the deal activity, but have less of an understanding of the critical role that the Tax Department plays. Break it down for us and give us any examples of the most exciting deals that you have been a part of.

Tax is definitely not the first thing that comes to mind when people think of corporate finance deals. But it is an absolutely crucial component of them. It's the one cost that, no matter how well you run a business, how good corporate financiers you have or how great a deal you strike, it’s always going to be there. And it's often not something people get excited about until it has the risk of going wrong!

Tax advisors on transactions add value in two key ways. Firstly, in helping to drive the structure. Tax rules are complex and the tax cost of getting to the same end can be quite different depending on which way you do it.  Most people wouldn't give a huge amount of thought to this in the throes of agreeing a deal – getting the right headline price is quite rightly a key priority – but the earlier a tax advisor can get involved to recommend the best way to deliver a commercial deal the better for all parties.

The other aspect of it is around risk management. Invariably when you’re working on transactions specifically for midmarket entrepreneurial businesses, historic tax issues will come out of the woodwork. Finding ways to manage these by balancing technical robustness with commercial pragmatism is a crucial skill for the tax advisor.

Over the last 20 years, I have worked on deals ranging from half a million to half a billion in size, with a huge variety of different structures and sectors.

Sometimes it's not the most glamorous deals on paper that are the most interesting or satisfying. I've worked on several transactions with football clubs right from non-league level to Premier League – and that's certainly a sector that has its own unique quirks!

The most exciting deals for me are always those where you can make the most tangible difference.  I’ve worked with one particular entrepreneur for about a decade now, and seen them through a small reorganisation, to initial PE investment, to an eight figure PE buy out to ultimate exit and cash out.

In terms of challenging deals, I acted for PE investors who completed one of the few deals which happened in the initial COVID lockdown when people were just adjusting to life with Teams and Zoom. It was a tax-heavy deal and needed some creativity both in terms of approach to technical and commercial problems, and also practicalities, at a time when people really didn’t know how you were supposed to actually do a transaction without getting around a table.  It was incredibly challenging, but these are the thing you want to be part of, and you really felt like you were covering ground no one else was which, at the time, we were!

We have referred to your strong and positive personal branding and reputation a couple of times already. How have you achieved this?

There is no substitute for being good at what you do. There are a lot of advisors out there who are unequivocally good at tax. But what I would like to think has contributed to my reputation in the market is not just delivering, but how I deliver.

I've always made it a mantra to talk to people how I would like to be spoken to. Accountants and tax advisors can be accused, often fairly, of blinding people with complexity and, instead of giving people an answer, giving them 10 different options along with several risks and caveats and leaving them to work it out for themselves. I strongly believe that an advisor should advise and that's our primary skill. We should not just be showing that we can understand complex tax law but that we can convey it in a way that others can also understand.

Specifically in the world of transactions, you need to speak corporate finance language. That doesn't just mean understanding particular technical terms, but understanding what everyone's commercial priorities are and the expectations around what needs to be delivered and when. You will always come across tax issues on a deal, but it's absolutely crucial to understand how these fit into the overall process. For example, is this going to be important to the client? What will the purchaser think, and can we help them get comfortable? What are the lawyers / lead advisors / insurers going to care about?

I use the phrase ”Don't let the tax tail wag the commercial dog” at least once a week, and colleagues and people I have worked with for a long time always give me stick for this, but I make no apologies for it.  Understanding the bigger picture and making sure that you’re always working towards that, rather than being focused on your own little niche, will make people want to work with you, rather than you just playing a role in a process.

Tell us about Fletcher outside of work.

Like many people my age, much of my time outside of work is spent with family. I have a daughter (12 going on 18), who is now finding better things to do after school than hang around with her parents – so I definitely need to get some new hobbies!  

I'm a keen, if extremely amateur, indoor rock climber – something I took up with my daughter about six years ago and fell in love with. I enjoy a range of creative arts without actually being particularly artistic. I dabble in photography and writing, and I have the highly cliched ambition of getting a book published at some point. My inner teenage geek lives on through an interest in game design, both computer and table-top variety, although the main challenge is keeping the clutter of my half-finished projects out of the sight of my wife!