Rachel Harris
Most founders can build a small business. Few can turn it into a structured firm that survives their own attention. The gap between a sole operator with a strong personal brand and a multi-division business with paying clients, regulated divisions and a real team is where most growth stalls, and where most accountants, advisors and consultants quietly give up on scaling.
Rachel Harris is a chartered manager, MBA and founder of striveX who helps service-business owners build firms that scale beyond the founder.
Full Profile
Why organisations work with Rachel Harris
- She has built a seven-figure UK accounting firm with multiple regulated divisions, not advised on one. Her commentary on growth comes from an operator with payroll, clients and audit obligations.
- She runs a financial education platform with an audience over 150,000, which gives her unusual fluency in translating commercial detail for a non-specialist room.
- She sits as a Director and Trustee of AAT, which signals institutional credibility inside the UK accounting profession, useful for any audience of practice owners or professional services leaders.
- Her bursary scheme, the first of its kind in UK accounting, gives her a substantive position on widening access to professional services careers, beyond generic DEI talking points.
- She was named Accountancy Personality of the Year 2023 by PQ Magazine and Breakout Star of the Year by Accounting Excellence, two named industry awards from credible bodies.
Biography highlights
- Founder and director of striveX, a UK accounting firm with regulated divisions in tax, audit, mortgages and HR.
- Founder of @accountant_she, a financial education platform with a combined audience exceeding 150,000.
- Accountancy Personality of the Year 2023, PQ Magazine.
- Breakout Star of the Year 2023, Accounting Excellence Awards.
- Director and Trustee of the Association of Accounting Technicians.
- Credentials: MBA, CMgr, MCMI, MAAT. TEDx speaker. Media contributor on ITV This Morning, BBC Radio 5 Live, LBC and Times Radio.
Biography
The accounting profession has a structural credibility problem with small business owners. Founders need commercial advice, but most accountants are trained in compliance, and most growth advisors have never run a regulated firm. Rachel Harris built striveX to close that gap, and now uses the experience as the basis of her work with founders elsewhere.
striveX is one of the UK’s fastest-scaling accounting practices, with divisions across tax, audit, mortgages and HR. It is a regulated, multi-disciplinary firm with clients, staff and operating constraints, not a consultancy or a content business dressed up as one. The operator perspective is what audiences buy.
Alongside the firm, she runs @accountant_she, a financial education platform with an audience above 150,000. The dual track matters. She has translated commercial substance into language that lands in a non-technical room, which is rarer than the credential stack of professional services speakers suggests. Her work is recognised inside the profession: Accountancy Personality of the Year 2023 from PQ Magazine, Breakout Star of the Year 2023 from Accounting Excellence, and a Director and Trustee role at the AAT.
Her bursary scheme, the first corporate bursary fully funding students through AAT levels 2 to 4, started with one placement and expanded to five in its second year. It is a concrete commitment to widening entry into a profession that has not historically welcomed outsiders, and it gives her a credible position on access that is grounded in something she has built.
Key speaking topics
- Scaling a service business beyond the founder
- Practice and professional services growth
- Building a financial brand online
- Entrepreneurship and operating discipline
- Personal finance for business owners
- Widening access in professional services
Ideal for
- Founders and owners of professional services firms scaling past the first hire.
- Accountancy and finance audiences: practice managers, partners, AAT and ICAEW member networks.
- Conferences for small business owners, entrepreneurs and creator-led businesses commercialising an audience.
- Leadership audiences in financial services or professional services HR considering widening-access programmes.
Audience outcomes
- A concrete account of how a UK service firm grew from a single founder to a multi-division, seven-figure operation, with the decisions made along the way.
- A working model for combining a regulated professional services firm with a public-facing personal brand without the two undermining each other.
- A perspective on widening access to professional services careers grounded in an operating bursary, not an aspirational diversity statement.
- A view of how to translate financial substance for a non-specialist audience, useful for any leader who has to talk to staff, customers or media about numbers.