Zen and the Art of Accountancy – Life, Loss and Leadership with Saj Sharif of Zen Consultants

In this episode of Scale HER Up – The Female Entrepreneur Show, I’m joined by Saj Sharif, CEO and founder of Zen Consultants Limited, a multi-award-winning accountancy practice supporting around 700 clients with everything from self-assessment and VAT to payroll, CIS and management accounts.

Saj shares a powerful, very human business story. Once a stockbroker, she was signed off with ME/chronic fatigue and told she would never work in finance again. While recovering, she helped with her partner’s stonemasonry business, doing the accounts from home. After he passed away she closed the business – but the subcontractors kept coming back for their tax returns, and word of mouth quietly grew into a real firm.

While raising three children, fostering, and managing a growing client base, Saj went back to college and then university to qualify as an accountant, graduating in 2013. She took on her first part-time employee in 2014 and has been scaling ever since, now leading a team of 11 (soon to be 12). She talks honestly about the loneliness and responsibility of being a solo founder, and the reality of having to keep going when “life happens”.

We also explore what makes Zen Consultants truly “zen”: incense, plants, colour, hoodies instead of suits, plain-English communication and morning meditations in busy season. Saj shares how she has deliberately created a calm, compassionate culture where people can be themselves, talk about what is really going on in their lives and grow in confidence.

As a woman of colour in a male-dominated profession, Saj has heard “I thought you’d be a man” more times than she can count – but she no longer feels the need to prove anything to anyone. Instead she focuses on service, values and building a business that creates jobs, supports apprentices, works with schools on financial education and gives her children a powerful example of what’s possible.

This is a rich, honest conversation about resilience, culture, scaling a service business and staying grounded through it all.

In this episode, we cover

1. What Zen Consultants actually does and how it grew from a handful of subcontractors to around 700 clients
2. Saj’s journey from stockbroker to ME diagnosis, interior design student and eventually qualified accountant and founder
3. Growing a business while raising three children, fostering and studying at college and university
4. Taking on the first employee, then building and leading a team of 11 and counting
5. The reality of being a solo CEO: responsibility, burnout scares, grief and carrying the weight of salaries, leases and client obligations
6. The perks of business ownership: flexibility, financial rewards, travel and the pride of creating jobs
7. The five foundations she relies on: structure, transparency, team bonding, reward and budgeting
8. How she builds a “zen” culture in an accountancy practice: meditation, music, colour, plants, hoodies and no jargon
9. Recruitment lessons: skills and personality tests, culture fit, banter, inclusivity and trusting your intuition
10. Being a woman and an ethnic minority in a male-dominated industry, and how her response to bias has changed over time
11. Handling mistakes and client loss as learning opportunities while always backing her team
12. Saj’s parallel passion project, Zen Community: coaching, hypnotherapy, sound healing and shamanic work to help people release trauma
13. The role of networking and support networks: chambers of commerce, HR and legal helplines, boards and advisory groups
14. Her advice to women considering starting or scaling a business: do not hesitate, find your people and remember it will work out