Most accountants don’t get their work shared by HMRC. Sam Mitcham did. Earlier this year Craig Ogilvie, who heads Making Tax Digital at HMRC, picked up one of the videos we’d filmed together and shared them himself. It’s the most recent step in an arc that began in 2020, when Sam was filming her own Tax Tip Tuesdays on her phone.
Worth telling the whole story, because there’s a lesson in it for any accountant thinking about video.
2020: a one-person practice and a small budget
When Sam first got in touch, SJCM Accountancy was new. Budgets were tight. She was making her own video content for social media, filming on her phone in her own time, because she couldn’t justify paying anyone to do it for her.
What she could justify was a small ask. She wanted me to make a beginning slide and an ending slide for her videos and to tidy up what she’d self-recorded. So that’s what I did. I also helped her get the videos onto YouTube, which was a platform she didn’t know.
That’s worth saying out loud. The first thing I did for Sam wasn’t a brand film. It wasn’t a campaign. It was slide design and platform support for someone who’d already done the hard part herself, which was deciding to put her face on camera and start talking about tax.
Tax Tip Tuesday and the slow build
The series Sam was making was called Tax Tip Tuesday. Short videos, weekly, answering the questions her clients and prospects actually had. It wasn’t designed to go viral. It was designed to be useful and to keep showing up.
The YouTube channel has gone from zero to 647 subscribers, and is still growing. 647 isn’t a huge number on YouTube, but it’s a huge number when every subscriber is a small business owner who might one day need an accountant. The work wasn’t about audience size. It was about being the person who showed up consistently with answers.
By 2023 Sam was being invited to speak.
2024: Accountex
In 2024 she was speaking at Accountex, the biggest accountancy networking event in the UK, and booked me for a full day to follow her around. The brief was simple. Capture the day. Come back with as much social content as we could.
Sam’s own words from the testimonial we recorded afterwards: “I’m so proud of what came out of that full day’s filming. I could probably exercise that content for a full year.” She was right. Clips from that day are still earning her work today.
The shift between 2020 and 2024 is worth noting. In 2020 the only thing Sam could afford was a top-and-tail edit. By 2024 she could justify a full production day, because the videos were directly bringing in business. The investment matched the proof.
2026: HMRC shares the Making Tax Digital series
This year we filmed a series specifically on Making Tax Digital, the new HMRC reporting regime that’s about to land for a lot of self-employed people and small businesses. Sam’s view was that there’s a real gap in plain-English explanation of what MTD actually means for ordinary taxpayers, and she wanted videos that closed it.
When the videos went out, Craig Ogilvie at HMRC picked them up and shared them himself.
That’s not a vanity stat. For an accountant, being publicly endorsed by the HMRC team running the very policy you’re advising clients on is about as strong a credibility signal as exists in the profession. It moves a firm from competent local accountant to the go-to expert on this thing.
What this means for other accountancy firms
There are two things in this story I’d want any accountant reading to take away.
The first is that authority on video isn’t built in one shoot. It’s built by showing up consistently and letting that work add up over time. Sam’s first videos were filmed on her phone. The HMRC moment came six years later. They’re part of the same body of work.
The second is that you don’t need a big budget to start. Sam’s first job with me was slides and editing for self-recorded content. That was where she was at, and that’s what made sense at the time. The full production days came later, when the videos had earned them.
If you’re an accountant thinking video might be worth exploring for your firm, the only real question is what’s the smallest useful thing you could start with. For Sam it was Tax Tip Tuesday on a phone. Yours might be different. But the principle holds: pick the thing your clients keep asking you about, get on camera, and keep showing up.
