Paige Collins and Warren House Chartered Accountants

International Women’s Day celebrates the achievements of women the world over, but it is only one day. Every day women achieve great things, they are kind, brave, and bold, as they change the bias that has existed without challenge for centuries. How fabulous is that for every woman?

Women’s voices are getting stronger and the rhetoric behind them ever more compelling, women supporting women, collaborating rather than competing, with strength in numbers.

Paige leads the Warren House Chartered Accountants team (“WHA”), a small, perfectly formed, and agile firm of Chartered Accountants. WHA prides itself on helping its clients to manage their business and financial affairs. They benefit from the wealth of experience that Paige and her team bring, by influencing the future, and through helping clients engineer their business objectives.

The WHA team is 12 strong with a diverse range of experience, from corporate and personal tax to accounting and banking, and includes a team that helps clients manage their payroll requirements.

The team is keen to embrace Paige’s some 40 years of experience and vision, but they also develop their own skills by the continued investment in a diversity of opportunities. This can range from attending courses such as the Virtual Finance Director to learning new technologies, all with the aim to assist WHA clients.

The most important part of the team’s engagement with clients is meeting them, being with people, and being business curious. And, if they are not able to meet clients in person, they use the latest technology to engage with clients wherever they are, through virtual meetings across 10 different countries, from as far a-field as Australia and New Zealand to near home, in Europe.

Paige gains her diverse experience by being involved in roles outside of the traditional accountancy sector and from having been involved in family businesses, even carrying out a company reorganisation before being qualified.

Paige is also a long-standing governor of Brighton Girls, an independent day school for girls based in Brighton, which is part of the UK’s largest educational charity, the Girls Day School Trust (‘GDST’). Her role includes promoting the ethos of the school and supporting the leadership team to develop the girls to be resilient and strong and able to stand up and make a difference. In addition, Paige is a trustee of a locally based charity, Project Eileen (www.projecteileen.co.uk), which delivers a multi-media programme into secondary schools. This is designed to help young people tackle the topics of death and grief and enables them to develop the skills to deal with these.

Brighton Chamber of Commerce is an important part of the business community that WHA is part of, and Paige is a proud member of the Chamber Ambassador Team, having been an advocate of the member engagement for several years. WHA is also a sponsor of the Brighton Chamber book club. The business books reviewed are thought-provoking and lead to a diversity of thoughts among the Chamber members.

WHA has recently started to support the Dame Vera Lynn Children’s Charity, DVLCC (dvlcc.org.uk) which started with sponsoring Bernie Bear, the charity’s newest team member and a real favourite with the children.

Recently Paige was ‘arrested’ by the Police on the alleged charge of fixing the company’s bake-off competition after Paige won the prize she had donated herself (a bottle of English sparkling wine). The bail was set at £999, and Paige used her business and sporting connections to raise the sum required. The final figure raised was more than £1,350 in just a little over five hours (a big thank you to all who supported Paige in raising such a large sum in such a short space of time, and meant she was eventually released!). The DVLCC was started by Dame Vera Lynn herself and supports children under 5 with cerebral palsy in a wide range of activities. Outside of WHA Paige enjoys several hobbies, ranging from Cricket, Hockey, and Golf (with a handicap of 12). She also holds a motorsport race licence and recently took part in the Goodwood Sprint meeting and the Brighton Speed Trials, which is the oldest organised motorsport event in the UK. Paige was proud to finish second in class on her first attempt and she followed in her father’s wheel tracks who won the trophy in 1936!

Always, remembering that: You cannot change history, but you can influence the future. Paige and the WHA team are helping clients influence their futures.