Making an Unordinary Accountant Chapter 10 - Mentors & Me

MAKING AN UNORDINARY ACCOUNTANT

Chapter 10 — Mentors and Me

By the time my world had expanded beyond the front door and into committee rooms, breakfast meetings, and the oddly sacred space of community halls with bad acoustics and worse coffee, something else was happening beneath the surface.

I was no longer trying to do everything myself. Not because I’d suddenly become enlightened. But because scale has a way of forcing humility on you.

The move into community-based groups, business and otherwise, wasn’t accidental. It was, in hindsight, a continuation of the same instinct that had driven everything else: to belong, to contribute, and to grow. Visibility mattered. Not in a shallow sense, but in a “you can’t help or be helped if no one knows you’re here” way.

It was through Pittwater Business Limited that I met Jon Dale, the President before me.

Jon didn’t arrive with fanfare. No sales pitch. No hard edges. Just questions, the dangerous kind, and an ability to sit quietly while you answered them badly.

Jon was a business coach, yes. But more importantly, he was a listener. And listeners are rare in rooms full of business owners who are used to talking their way out of discomfort.

What made Jon different wasn’t that he knew the textbooks. It was that he knew when to throw them away. At some point in our conversations, the prescribed models stopped appearing on the table. The neat diagrams. The universal pathways. The “this is how it’s done” logic that assumes businesses behave like obedient case studies.

Instead, Jon leaned back and asked something far less comfortable: “What do you actually need?” Not what the business was supposed to need. Not what the industry benchmarks suggested. Not what the all-knowing textbook would insist was missing.

What we needed, given the clients we served, the risks we carried, the personalities in the room, the energy we had left at the end of the day, and the lives attached to the decisions.

That distinction mattered.

Because there is a dangerous assumption baked into most business advice, that “more” is always the goal. More staff. More revenue. More systems. More growth. More complexity dressed up as progress.

Jon understood something subtler. “More” only makes sense once you understand the beast you’re feeding.

Like me, he recognised that information is power, but only if it’s the right information. Not the most data. Not the loudest insight. Not the trendiest idea doing the rounds at breakfast meetings.

The power lies with those who have the best information. And the best information doesn’t come from dashboards. It comes from listening until patterns emerge.

That’s when listening stops being passive and becomes active. You don’t just hear words, you hear strain. You don’t just note answers, you sense hesitation. You don’t just collect facts, you hear the quiet cries for help buried underneath competence.

Jon was very much like me and my approach to client issues, he not only listened, he heard those.

He heard where we were compensating instead of building. Where we were coping instead of designing. Where success was masking fragility. And in doing so, he did something profoundly validating.

He named what I had been practising instinctively for years, but had never given myself permission to own.

It was Jon who first articulated something I’d felt for years but never named. “You’re not your ordinary accountant,” he said one day, almost casually. “And you shouldn’t pretend to be.”

That wasn’t branding advice. It was behavioural truth. And once spoken out loud, it couldn’t be unheard.

“You’re not your ordinary accountant,” he said one day, almost casually. “And you shouldn’t pretend to be.”

That line landed harder than he probably realised. Because until then, Not Your Ordinary Accountant had been instinct, not strategy. It was behaviour without language. Care without branding. Depth without permission.

Jon gave it permission, and then asked the harder question: why. Why did clients trust me? Why did they stay? Why did conversations drift beyond numbers into lives, fears, marriages, succession, failure?

Once you ask why, you can no longer hide behind what.

That moment mattered. It reframed the practice not as a compliance machine, but as a thinking business, one built on translation, interpretation, and consequence. Accounting as context, not just calculation.

There’s a moment in most accounting practices where philosophy collides head-on with billing.

Traditionally, we price what we can measure. Time spent. Hours logged. Six-minute units. The comforting illusion that effort and value are the same thing if you can slice them finely enough.

Jon challenged that, quietly, almost mischievously, by introducing us to something called the Flat Rate Calculator.

On the surface, it looked like a tool. A spreadsheet. Rows, columns, assumptions. Another model in a world already drowning in models.

But buried inside it was a column that made me pause.

Faffing time. Not chargeable time. Not productive time. Not “billable” in the traditional sense at all.

Faffing time was the allowance for reality. The pause while waiting for information. The interruption when a file can’t progress because something is missing. The mental re-start after you’ve put a job down and picked it up again three days later. The invisible tax of context-switching that every accountant knows exists, but no textbook ever acknowledges.

At first, it felt like sleight of hand.

Almost too clever. Too generous. As if we were padding the numbers under the guise of honesty. Accountants are conditioned to distrust anything that doesn’t reconcile neatly, and this felt like a rounding difference masquerading as philosophy.

But then we started using it. Not just to quote clients, but to observe ourselves.

Suddenly, we could compare production rates across the practice without pretending everyone worked in a vacuum. We could see where bottlenecks really lived. Not in competence. Not in effort. But in dependency. In waiting. In fragmentation.

The calculator didn’t inflate our pricing, it explained it.

It forced a conversation we’d avoided for years: Why does this job actually take this long? And once you ask why, you can no longer hide behind what.

What we charge. What the task is. What the engagement letter says.

The Flat Rate Calculator did something profoundly uncomfortable, it exposed that the real cost in accounting isn’t time. It’s interruption. Uncertainty. Incomplete information. Human friction.

Instead of pretending those things didn’t exist, Jon gave us permission to design around them.

That was another quiet expression of Not Your Ordinary Accountant. We weren’t selling hours anymore. We were selling outcomes, clarity, and continuity.

That moment mattered.

Because it reframed the practice not as a compliance machine, churning inputs into reports,  but as a thinking business. One built on translation, interpretation, and consequence.

Accounting as context, not just calculation. And once you see your work that way, you can never unsee it.

From Jon, the door opened wider.

It was through that same expanding network that we met Dale Beaumont, and by extension Business Blueprint, though not in the way people often imagine.

There was no grand epiphany. No cinematic moment where the lights dimmed and the path forward revealed itself.

Dale came to us the way most meaningful things do: sideways. He was invited as a guest speaker to a Pittwater Business Limited breakfast. One of many mornings where business owners gathered around lukewarm eggs and polite optimism, hoping for something useful to justify the early alarm.

Dale arrived with energy, clarity, and a gift.

Tickets. An invitation to his New Rules of Business presentation, the lead magnet, though we didn’t call it that back then. The front door to a much larger ecosystem.

The Board of Pittwater Business Limited decided to attend. Collectively curious. Open, but not yet convinced.

I came home that morning to Robyn bouncing off the walls. Not figuratively. Literally.

She was animated in that way she gets when something has cut through the noise and landed squarely in her thinking. She talked faster. Her hands moved more. Her sentences overlapped.

“This could matter,” she said. “This could really matter.”

She could see it immediately, not as a silver bullet, but as an adjunct to what we were already trying to build. A framework that might help organise instinct. A language that could align effort.

I was enthusiastic, but tempered.

Because beneath the inspiration sat the spreadsheet. The subscription cost was real. Tangible. Impossible to ignore. And like many business owners who pride themselves on prudence, we hesitated. Not because we didn’t see value, but because value always feels clearer in hindsight than in the moment it demands commitment.

So we delayed. And then, exactly one year later, we found ourselves walking into another presentation. By choice this time. By invitation of our own making. And somewhere between the opening slides and the familiar cadence of the message, we began kicking ourselves.

Not violently. Not emotionally. But quietly, the way disciplined people do when they realise caution has slipped into procrastination.

We didn’t regret the money. We regretted the time.

That twelve-month gap became instructive in its own right. Because nothing dramatic had changed in our business during that year, but nothing had sharpened either. The problems were the same. The questions were the same. The effort was still there.

Blueprint wasn’t a lightning bolt.

It was a mirror.

The program reflected back what we were doing well, and amplified what we were avoiding. It didn’t invent flaws. It illuminated them. It didn’t create ambition. It clarified it.. And if you have been in the prgram for any length of time,, you already know that many of the mistakes documented there weren’t theoretical.

They were lived. Observed. Sometimes repeated before being learned from.

Blueprint didn’t hand us answers. It handed us exposure. To patterns. To behaviour. To the quiet ways good businesses drift when discipline softens and intention gets diluted by busyness.

That first year we delayed wasn’t wasted, but it was revealing.

Because it showed us something Blueprint would later confirm again and again: Insight is only powerful once you act on it. And awareness, without commitment, is just another form of comfort.

Blueprint didn’t change who we were.

It forced us to look, honestly, at how we were behaving when no one was watching. And that, more than any keynote or framework, was the beginning of the real work.

Blueprint exposed patterns: the seduction of growth without structure, the temptation to chase tools instead of discipline, the false belief that inspiration can substitute for systems.  But it also introduced something else: shared language.

Suddenly, Robyn and I weren’t having parallel conversations, we were having the same one. With frameworks. With benchmarks. With an external reference point that wasn’t emotion-driven.

Blueprint didn’t replace thinking. It demanded better thinking.

And then came Dale Crosby.

Where Blueprint was broad, Dale Crosby was surgical.

Accounting practices are peculiar beasts. You don’t just manage staff, you manage liability, regulation, ethics, legacy, and client dependency. Dale understood that in his bones. He spoke our language fluently, without romanticising it.

He didn’t ask how big we wanted to be. He asked how stable we wanted to become.

With Dale, the conversation shifted from ambition to architecture. How many decision-makers can a practice sustain? Where does authority sit, and where should it sit? What happens when founders don’t let go soon enough… or let go too early?

It was through those conversations, layered, sometimes uncomfortable, often unfinished, that something quietly radical happened.

The practice stopped being run by two heads. It became five. Not five egos competing for airtime. Not five voices pulling in different directions.

Five perspectives. Five centres of gravity. Five points of resilience.

Each mentor brought a different discipline to the table, and none of them tried to own the beast we were building.

Jon Dale didn’t try to redesign the practice. He listened until the practice revealed itself. His contribution wasn’t structure, it was clarity. He helped articulate who we already were, and just as importantly, who we were never going to be. Jon bought into Not Your Ordinary Accountant by refusing to normalise it.

Dale Beaumont, through Business Blueprint, brought scale of thinking. Exposure. Pattern recognition. He didn’t tell us what to do, he showed us what was possible if discipline matched ambition. Blueprint didn’t overwrite Not Your Ordinary Accountant; it stress-tested it. It asked whether our instincts could survive growth without losing integrity.

And Dale Crosby grounded everything in the brutal realities of an accounting firm. Regulation. Risk. Capacity. Succession. He didn’t romanticise what we were building. He asked whether it could last. His buy-in came not from enthusiasm, but from respect for the craft, and from ensuring the monster had bones strong enough to carry its weight.

None of them tried to direct Not Your Ordinary Accountant.

That mattered.

Because the fastest way to kill something distinctive is to standardise it. To polish the edges until it fits a framework. To explain it away using language that makes sense to everyone but the people it was built for.

Instead, each mentor chose something harder. They listened long enough to understand the animal. They accepted that “more” didn’t mean bigger, it meant truer. They added capability without diluting character.

That’s how the five heads worked. Not as hierarchy. Not as instruction.

But as balance.

When one perspective leaned too far into caution, another reminded us of courage. When ambition threatened to outrun capacity, structure pulled it back. When instinct dominated, data grounded it. When data became blinding, humanity re-entered the room.

All five locked into the same core idea, Not Your Ordinary Accountant, not as a slogan, but as a lived operating system.

That mattered more than any revenue milestone. Because revenue can spike. Growth can stall. Markets can turn.

But resilience, real resilience, only emerges when thinking is distributed, belief is shared, and the monster you’re building is understood by everyone who feeds it.

Five heads didn’t make us faster. They made us harder to break. And in the long run, that proved far more valuable than anything we could bill for.

Because businesses don’t fail from lack of intelligence, they fail from concentration of it. Too much thinking locked in too few minds. Too much risk tied to too few hands.

Mentors didn’t replace instinct. They refined it. They didn’t remove responsibility. They redistributed it. Jon helped name who we already were. Blueprint challenged how we behaved when no one was watching. Dale Crosby helped build a structure that could outlive us.

And somewhere in the middle of all that, I learned the most uncomfortable lesson of all: Growth doesn’t come from knowing more. It comes from listening longer.

This chapter isn’t about gurus. It’s about permission, to think differently, to share control, and to accept that the best version of a business often emerges only when its founders stop trying to be the smartest people in the room.

Five heads beat two.

Every time.