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After more than ten years of sustained growth, most economists are predicting a slowdown in 2008. That presents new challenges for Irish business. Accountancy Ireland asked Ronan Murphy, recently elected Senior Partner at PricewaterhouseCoopers, what this will mean for his firm and clients in the coming year.
Tell me a bit about your role as senior partner.
The role of senior partner has a lot of aspects. Firstly, there is the management of the firm, then there is the leadership aspect and thirdly, and probably most importantly, there is the client aspect. To explain each of those; on the management side you really are running a very big business. We have 91 partners and over 2,100 people in the Republic of Ireland and the scale of operations requires a full time management team. Part of the senior partner's role is to give direction to the various service lines and also the support areas, such as HR, Finance, IT. The senior partner also provides strategic direction to our client-facing businesses - our audit practice, our tax practice and our advisory practice.
Prior to being appointed senior partner, you were head of Audit and Assurance which would have involved a lot of interaction with clients. Do you have any time for clients in your new role?
My job has changed somewhat in terms of clients. Now it is more about contact with clients from a relationship perspective - such as meeting with the chairmen of audit committees, the chief executives, the members of the board, and the chief financial officers of our clients to make sure that they're satisfied with the service we are providing and with the way in which we are interacting with them.
Do you have much interaction internationally?
We have a huge amount. Our client base is very international and we have a lot of what we call 'referred-in work' - where we work with subsidiaries of international companies. Also, many of our Irish clients have operations overseas so we deal with PwC firms in other countries.