Deb Halliday is a qualified trainer, author, and co-founder of APX Training & Development, where she specialises in helping accounting firms build advisory teams that deliver beyond the business owner.

After over 17 years in practice, Deb founded and scaled The Accounts Ladies, an award-winning accountancy, bookkeeping, and financial coaching firm, before successfully stepping away from day-to-day operations in 2025. Her focus now is on helping accountants, bookkeepers, and financial professionals transition from technician-led businesses into scalable, advisory-led firms.

Deb is the co-author of Advisory Teams, written with Tim Seymour, which introduces a new model for delivering advisory through a team, not a single individual. Together, they show how firms can remove the owner as the bottleneck and create consistent, high-value client relationships across the team.

Through APX Training & Development company, Deb provides practical training, structured programmes, and ready-to-use resources that help firms embed advisory into everyday delivery, building capability across their teams, not just at partner level.

With a background in both accountancy and professional training, including earlier experience in a Central London training company, Deb is known for her straightforward, no-nonsense approach. She focuses on making advisory practical, scalable, and achievable for firms at every stage.

Tim Seymour is an experienced accountant, business advisor, and mentor to accounting professionals transitioning into advisory.

After a 17-year career running his own accountancy practice, Tim built a strong foundation in compliance before recognising the far greater value of strategic advisory. He successfully transitioned his own firm away from pure compliance, before going on to support accountants and bookkeepers in building advisory services of their own.

Through this work, Tim identified a consistent challenge across the profession: advisory was too often built around the business owner, creating a bottleneck that limited growth, impact, and scalability.

Today, Tim is focused on solving that problem.

As co-founder of APX Training and Development, he helps firms move beyond the “advisor as the hero” model by building structured, team-based advisory approaches. His work centres on developing clear frameworks, training advisory capability across teams, and implementing proven delivery models that enable firms to scale without relying on one individual.

Tim is also co-author of Advisory Teams, co-written with Deb Halliday, a practical guide for accountancy firms looking to evolve from compliance-led businesses into scalable advisory-led organisations.

Alongside his work in accountancy, Tim brings experience from financial management roles across multiple industries, as well as leadership and coaching expertise that underpins his approach to developing high-performing teams.

His work is driven by a simple belief:

Advisory should not depend on one person. It should be built into the team.