If Kevin Valenzia had to give his brother David a mug inscribed with a few words of wisdom, what would they be? He paused for just a fraction of second before answering: “Pay attention to the detail.”

That is easier than it sounds. In a few weeks, Kevin will be handing over the reins of PwC after eight years as territory senior partner of the Big Four firm, which now employs nearly 700 people in three main sectors: advisory, assurance and tax.

It is a far cry from the audit and accounting firm that Kevin joined 43 years ago, and looking after the details is no small task, he explained.

“There are lots of different things going on all the time. This role involves ensuring that everyone is moving more or less in the same direction and drawing the strands of everybody’s initiatives together. To be able to do that, you need to be able to focus on what is going on. You are the only guy in the organisation who knows what is going on in every little space. I told David that he had better get used to waking up a little earlier because there is a lot to do,” he smiled.

Kevin is still too busy tying up the strands of various projects at PwC to think about his own future – at 61, he still has plenty of energy and plenty of insight that could be put to the service of the country – but he is also still too busy about what his legacy will be. He is a member of the newly set-up Malta-UK Business Promotion Taskforce chaired by Joe Zammit Tabona, but beyond that, he is politely putting off any other offers that come his way.

He is reluctant to take sole credit for the company’s growth, even though one of the first things he had told the other partners when he took over was that he wanted to double the size of the firm, achieved two years ago.

However, when it comes to his beliefs, he believes he made the right choice: he always put what was right ahead of growth at any cost, something which is not always a given: “Sometimes you achieve growth perhaps not in the most appropriate ways. I would like to think that at PwC, we achieved tremendous growth but we did it in the right way,” he said.

I am ready and prepared to handle all the aspects of the business- David Valenzia

He stressed that the important thing was to look ahead and create new revenue streams to ensure that when one stream drops, the other is there to make up for it.

“That is what running a successful business is all about. You have to constantly reinvent yourself,” he said.

The latest venture – the 2,000-square-metre PwC Academy, due to open by 2018 – is one part of his vision for planning ahead, and one that has the full backing of the other partners.

Another thing that sets PwC apart is its determination to main­tain a balance between local and international business, which it does not by putting any brakes on taking on foreign clients but rather by taking pains to grow the Maltese portfolio concurrently.

“Our strategy has been very different to that of the other firms. Only now are they changing theirs to fit into ours. We are a local firm and most of the blue chip Maltese organisations use us. That is because we have always focused on local business. Inbound business – foreign business, which is perhaps a little more lucrative – has always been there and we are the largest in that sphere. But we ensure that our local market footprint grows at the same speed as the inbound business.”

This local flavour is very much at the heart of his successor’s experience. David, 53, has been with the company for 30 years, and has been a partner for 20. His clients are mainly the local family businesses, and internally he has handled finance and human capi­tal. The broad needs of his clients across all PwC’s pillars mean he has equally broad skills, he said: “I am ready and prepared to handle all the aspects of the business.”

David will be taking over at a time when the company is facing operational challenges that mirror those of the country as a whole: “Finding people, finding the right people and retaining them”.

He is clearly concerned, seeing a growing trend that could turn far more serious, and one which he can – to an extent – empathise with: “Why would I want to spend five years busting a gut to get a qualification when I can just leave school and go straight to work for double what I would earn? I think there are fundamental issues we will be facing over the next few years which will make the situation possibly worse than it is today,” he said.

When you are doing well, plan for the time that the market around you will change- Kevin Valenzia

A leading economist has already warned that the island will need to import thousands of workers if it is to maintain the same pace of economic growth. However, he fretted that the influx would need to be planned for – and managed – from having enough accommodation to having enough schools.

The mention of schools prompts an immediate reaction from Kevin: “Then we want to build a new school on land that is not even outside the development zones…. And we make a fuss,” he said, shaking his head, a not so veiled reference to the controversy over Chiswick’s new school in Pembroke.

“We are trying to attract new business that will require resources. Where will we get them? A whole plan is needed. We cannot just continue growing without having a comprehensive plan on how we are going to achieve that.

“It is great that we are doing so well but if we want to continue it needs more people, and if we get more people, we need more schools, new roads, etc. It is a major challenge and it needs to be not only planned but also managed.

“Life is all about cycles. When you are doing well, that is the time you need to plan for times when you are not doing as well. That is the other advice I would give to my brother. When you are doing well, plan for the time that the market around you will change – which is hopefully a long time away. History is always a guide to the future.”

David is taking over at a time when the Big Four are also having to come to terms with more abstract pressures: the expectation gap when it comes to the limits of duty of care, and public demands for forensic accounting, the moral dimension that has blurred the previously clear distinction between tax planning and tax cheating, and the regulatory pressures to increase compliance to the point where it is obstructing the ease of doing business.

It helps that the company’s ethos has always stressed the importance of reputation, and David stressed that PwC’s bar was already very high before the new rules came in.

“PwC’s acceptance procedures were always extremely onerous,” he said. “This is one of Kevin’s legacies to the firm but also to the market in general and to financial services in Malta – a lot is down to him, his drive and his energy. And that is also reflected in what he has done for PwC.

“I have inherited a PwC that has an extremely strong reputation in the market. We are by far the largest professional services organisation here and the challenge is to make sure that I retain that and grow it.”