YP business profile: Suzanne Robinson, EY managing partner for Yorkshire

The newly installed EY managing partner for Yorkshire & Humber has spent a career working all over the world, delivering the results that have led to her being put in charge of 450 members of staff and 20 plus partners following the retirement of her predecessor, Stuart Watson, earlier this year.

During that time she has helped build two entrepreneurial teams, one in London and the other in Yorkshire and work with some of the professional service giant’s biggest clients both at home and abroad.

However, she has done this from an approach that is fairly atypical in her profession, having taken two significant career breaks, one lasting more than a year, and at one stage working a four-day week.

“I feel like my career path is not really like a straight line,” she says.

“Over time I have learned that it is fine to be me. You can only enjoy being you.”

Despite her varied career, Ms Robinson has only ever worked for one firm, remarking that: “I have been at EY forever”.

Having joined as a graduate in Bristol she spent three years there before moving to London.

She spent a couple of years there working in audit before being posted to Moscow in 1997.

“It was a slightly crazy place to both live and work” she says.

“Putin took over just as we were leaving. It was late enough into the nineties that a lot of the early 90s real change and when the oligarchs had made their money had happened. Halfway through my two years was when they had an almighty economic crash, literally overnight the whole country changed, some of my poor colleagues lost everything they owned. It was just astonishing.”

Ms Robinson then returned to London for another four years working with big interesting clients. She was very happy in her work but one day decided that, as she puts it “I had had enough”.

“I felt I didn’t have enough hours in the day to do what I wanted to as well as I wanted to,” she explains.

“I got to the point where I felt ‘Is this really what I want from life?’ So we made a decision to go and spend 12 months travelling around the world.”

The firm offered a sabbatical but Ms Robinson was adamant that she did not want commit to something she would later have to renege upon.

The ensuing months saw her and her husband travelling around South America, Australasia and South East Asia, with occasional visits to internet cafes their sole contact with home.

It was on one of these trips whilst in the Cook Islands that would bring her back into the world of work.

“It was an email from one of the partners that I used to work with and really got on well with, saying that there was a new team being set up and if you are interested let me know.

“All my career at that point had been in audit and this was to provide accounting advice to non-audit clients.

“It meant, working on clients in a different way if you like, working on their side of the table, helping them get it right first time, that sort of thing.”

Before she knew it Ms Robinson was back in London doing her dream job.

“It was proper empowerment,” she said.

“We were completely entrepreneurial, we could do what we wanted. We had huge amounts of freedom. In some ways that team feels like my third child, my first child in some ways because it is older than the other two,” she laughs.

She spent the next two-and-a-half years working on the team during which time it grew significantly.

After the birth of her first child, she and her husband made a conscious decision to move away from London and began the process of setting up a similar kind of operation in Leeds.

“We started with the view that it needed to be somewhere where we could bring up our family but equally somewhere I was going to find it rewarding to work with interesting businesses and lots of opportunity to grow a team around me.”

Following the birth of her second child she resumed work with the team. Even today as the firm’s managing partner for Leeds, Ms Robinson still refers to it as “my day job”.

“I was absolutely ready to take on a new role,” she says.

Ms Robinson splits her objectives into three distinct areas.

“The first is to make sure that EY is really playing its part in the local business community,” she said. “So very visible and engaged to our clients and to the wider business community of Yorkshire.

“Second there is to be a piece about specific clients. My role is to make sure that these clients are well-observed in terms of the service that they deserve, and to ensure that we are listening.

“The third piece is around the team, making sure that those 450 staff are having the opportunity to fulfil their potential and letting them do that in a way which is meaningful to them.

“I want people to be able to map out a path that works for them.

“It is about recognising at different points in your life, whatever is important to you, you can make your work and home life really work together well.

“You have to be realistic about it. Science does not allow for us to be in two places at once, so there will be times when you need to make a compromise.

“I try really hard to be at sports days and assemblies. But there will be some days when I can’t, so you have to accept that. I couldn’t be me if I wasn’t at work. So I want to replicate that for the rest of the team.

“I am not painting a picture that everything is really fluffy, because it is not. I can be a pretty hard taskmaster.

“But it is about understanding about what both parties want from the deal.”