# How Paul started MAP at 27, riding the cloud accounting wave

- **Episode:** [127](https://agents.truthliesandwork.com/episodes/127.md) (2024-09-12)
- **Type:** other
- **Tags:** entrepreneurship, cloud-accounting, startup
- **Time:** 4:25–7:15 (start 265s)
- **Listen:** [https://truthliesandwork.com/127?t=265](https://truthliesandwork.com/127?t=265)

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[4:25] Al Elliott: So Paul, take us back to the beginning. What you said, it was 11 years ago. How did you start MAP? What happened? It was really weird, actually. I used to work on the High Street in Levenshulme, uh, near Manchester, and I worked for an accounting firm there. And it's like a fishbowl, so it was all glass windows. It was meant to look like a shop front, so you'd literally get like walk-in trade, which is weird for a professional services firm. And would have all sorts of walks of life, you know, people at different stages in the business, different types of businesses. And, um, more and more people, business owners, were coming in and asking, have you heard of this Xero thing? And obviously started to research it. I was like, what's going on? Why are business owners telling me as a qualified accountant about accounting technology and getting excited about it? So people often ask, you know, whether it was always in my blood or in my desire to set up a business. And the truth is it wasn't. Looking back now, I think I that, you know, I was designed for it. I think I suit it, I enjoy it. But it was never my intention leaving uni, it was never my intention going through my qualifications, post-qualification. I never really saw myself being a business owner until that started to happen. And then I saw that there was enough interest in something that I could get up to speed with very quickly and be able to give value in. And I could either try and convert the existing firm that I worked at into the vision that I wanted and the opportunity that I saw, or I could start and do it on my own and, you know, uh, start from a blank slate and build it how I wanted to. And I, I just started to get really excited about build my own brand, build my own processes, recruit my own people, and doing things exactly the way I want to without any limitations. So, um, once you qualify, you need 2 years of experience to get your practicing certificate, and the day before that 24 months was up, my application was off in the post to get my practicing certificate, and I was handing my notice in that day, um, and setting up on my own. So, um, that was the start really, and it was about being able to use cloud accounting technology to be able to get much closer to our clients. So I always say that unfortunately when you're leading a portfolio of clients, you can't be in their business every day physically, but you can be in their finances and in their accounts every day thanks to cloud accounting. So that was the real opportunity, is how can we have visibility of lots of different businesses at any moment in time using live data? And then the niching came soon after that as well, because I knew that the cloud accounting bandwagon was only going to gather more and more pace. And Amanda, you started a few months when— after Paul had got things off the ground. So what was your experience of seeing the company from its— basically its birth to today?