The decision to sell wasn’t emotional. It was practical. Almost administrative. When a business no longer recognises your authority, staying becomes theatre. And theatre is expensive.
MAKING AN UNORDINARY ACCOUNTANT
Chapter 12 — The Cracks Start Appearing
There’s a moment when chewing harder stops helping.
You’ve taken the bite. You’ve committed to swallowing it. Everyone around you is nodding, encouraging, telling you how impressive it is that you’re even attempting it. And then, quietly, your jaw starts to lock.
That’s where this chapter lives.
Because growth doesn’t usually announce its danger with drama. It whispers instead. It disguises itself as momentum. As opportunity. As proof that you were right all along.
By this point, the doors were open, and people were walking through them in numbers we’d never seen before.
New clients arrived daily. Not tentatively. Confidently. Referred. Pre-sold. Ready to go. They came with expectations shaped by what they’d heard: “You’re not like other accountants.” “You actually explain things.” “You look forward, not backward.”
It was flattering. And intoxicating. It was also relentless.
Phones rang constantly. Email queues thickened. Staff calendars filled weeks ahead. The work wasn’t just more, it was harder. More complex. More demanding. More emotionally loaded. These weren’t compliance-only clients. They wanted advice, structure, reassurance, confidence.
And advice takes time. Time we no longer had.
The obvious answer was staff. So we hired. And hired again.
On paper, it made sense. Workload up? Add capacity. That’s how it’s meant to work. But people don’t arrive as blank slates.
They arrive with histories. With habits. With ideas about what “a proper accounting firm” looks like. How time should be recorded. How clients should be charged. Where the line is between service and scope creep.
Some had been trained in firms where billing was the product. Six-minute increments. Billable targets. Recoverability meetings. Others came from environments where the client relationship stopped at the tax return.
They weren’t bad accountants. But they weren’t this accountant. And I didn’t see it early enough.
I was seduced by the gloss, the CVs, the confidence, the promise of relief. I saw competence and assumed alignment. I saw experience and assumed shared philosophy.
What I didn’t interrogate deeply enough was persona. Not who they were technically, but how they saw the profession. Whether they believed accounting was a transaction or a responsibility. Whether “Not Your Ordinary Accountant” was a slogan to them, or a burden they were prepared to carry.
Under pressure, people default to what they know. And under growth pressure, those defaults began to surface.
It didn’t happen all at once. Small things at first.
A client billed in a way that didn’t sit right. A conversation framed around “recovering time” rather than solving a problem. An internal discussion that leaned toward what’s billable rather than what’s right.
None of it was outrageous. None of it was confrontational. But it was directional. And direction matters.
While the client list exploded, the internal narrative fractured. Different staff were telling different stories about what mattered. Some leaned into advice. Others retreated into safety. Some embraced ambiguity. Others resented it.
And in the middle of it all, Robyn absorbed the impact.
She always did. It was she who allowed me to be me. The face of a business that cared. For a long time, there was a perfect partnership at the heart of Banks Consultancy.
Not perfect in the glossy, brochure sense. Perfect in the way machinery works when every moving part understands its role. I was the face. The voice. The one out front, speaking, explaining, reassuring, challenging. Comfortable with ambiguity. Willing to sit in half-formed conversations and let clarity arrive in its own time.
Robyn was the back room. The anchor. The one who made sure the promises made at the front could actually be delivered at the back.
That division wasn’t accidental. It was earned. We trusted each other completely in those roles, and that trust created space. Space for me to be visible without becoming reckless. Space for the practice to stretch without snapping.
While the client list exploded, the internal narrative fractured.
Different staff were telling different stories about what mattered. Some leaned into advice, curious, engaged, prepared to wrestle with uncertainty. Others retreated into safety, into rules, time sheets, and precedents that had protected them elsewhere.
Some embraced ambiguity as the price of meaningful work. Others resented it as inefficiency. And in the middle of it all, Robyn absorbed the impact.
She always did.
She translated vision into workload. She softened edges before they cut. She caught the emotional fallout that never appears on a P&L. She took the heat so the room didn’t combust.
When staff felt overwhelmed, she steadied them. When clients felt anxious, she reassured them. When I pushed forward, she checked the ground beneath my feet.
That balance held until the pressure exceeded the system’s tolerance. Until growth outpaced understanding. Until people began mistaking her presence for interference rather than protection.
When Robyn was removed, the business didn’t just lose a role. It lost its counterweight. And without that, the face kept speaking, but the structure behind it no longer knew how to carry what was being promised.
That’s when the cracks stopped being theoretical. That’s when they became structural.
Karalta Crescent had been our statement. The house that said: we’ve arrived. But almost as soon as it was full, it was clear it couldn’t hold what we’d created. Growth has no loyalty to sentiment.
So Narabang Way entered the story, an industrial unit owned by a client. Practical. Spacious. A solution.
Except space doesn’t fix strain. It amplifies it.
More desks meant more conversations we weren’t in. More rooms meant more parallel interpretations of direction. The practice looked bigger, but felt less connected.
Pressure, when left unresolved, doesn’t dissipate. It inverts. And eventually, it finds a release point.
The revolt didn’t arrive as anger. It arrived as resolve.
Decisions were made. Alliances formed. One staff member quietly left for “greener pastures,” though even that phrase felt borrowed, optimism applied where conviction had already thinned.
And then the real fracture occurred. Not in the office. Not in a meeting. But behind closed doors.
Staff went to our HR consultants. Not with concerns framed for resolution. With accusations.
Spurious ones.
Stories shaped by pressure, grievance, and misinterpretation, but presented with enough confidence to trigger process. And once process begins, truth becomes secondary to procedure.
The consultants acted. In doing so, they lost all credibility with us. Because at that moment, it became painfully clear they no longer understood who they were working for, or perhaps had never truly understood it at all.
Robyn was removed from her role. Not eased out. Not supported. Removed.
The glue that held the practice together was taken away under the guise of care. Sent “to the bench.” In reality, sent home. Told to “get better.”
As if she were the problem.
As if the pressure, the misalignment, the growth pains, the structural strain, the philosophical drift, all of it, could be resolved by isolating the one person who had been absorbing it quietly for years.
So she sat at home. Stewing. Not resting. Not recovering. Watching from the outside as the practice she had helped build tried to justify its own actions.
And failed. Without Robyn, the cracks widened rapidly.
Output dropped. Communication stalled. Resistance hardened.
The Flat Rate Calculator, a tool designed to bring accountability and clarity, became the line in the sand. Conveniently, it was Dale Crosby who used it to hold the team to account.
And the numbers didn’t lie. They simply couldn’t keep up.
What had been defended as principled objection, revealed itself, quietly and unavoidably, as incapacity.
What had been framed as cultural concern exposed a deeper truth: without Robyn buffering, translating, smoothing, and steadying, the system didn’t just wobble, it faltered.
Deadlines slipped. Decisions stalled. Confidence drained from rooms that had once hummed with momentum. And still, the narrative tried to hold.
Conversations continued without us, as if proximity to authority might restore legitimacy. Justifications were rehearsed, repeated, refined. Positions hardened not because they were correct, but because retreat had become too costly emotionally.
This is what denial looks like inside a growing business. Not chaos, choreography. Everyone moving, everyone busy, everyone committed to the story that this is temporary, that equilibrium is just one more adjustment away.
But systems don’t respond to stories. They respond to numbers. And the numbers didn’t lie. They never do.
It wasn’t me who finally said it out loud. By then, I was too close to it. Too invested. Too emotionally entangled to cut cleanly.
It was Dale Crosby. Detached. Clinical. Fair.
He didn’t raise his voice. He didn’t moralise. He simply laid the data on the table, output against expectation, capacity against structure, intent against execution. And then he said it. Clearly. Finally. Without cruelty, but without hesitation:
This business no longer sees itself as yours.
Not as an accusation. As a diagnosis. Because once the numbers confirm that leadership influence has been neutralised, the question of ownership has already been answered.
And once that happens, you’re not fighting to stay. You’re just deciding how, and when, you leave. You’re already standing in the doorway, just waiting for the moment you admit it to yourself.
Not long after, we sat down with Dale Crosby. By then, the exhaustion had settled in deeply, not burnout, but disillusionment. The kind that comes when effort and outcome drift too far apart.
We spoke plainly. About the practice as it stood. About what it had become. And most importantly, about what it was worth and what steps would be required to make it saleable.
And then the truth surfaced, calmly, almost kindly. We hadn’t failed. We’d succeeded.
We had built something others wanted. Something structured. Profitable. Independent enough to be acquired. The very systems that once required us had matured beyond us.
That should have felt like a triumph. Instead, it felt like standing on the edge of something irreversible.
Because once your business can thrive without you, especially without your values being actively protected, the question isn’t about growth anymore.
It’s about identity. And that’s when the real choking starts. Not because the bite was too big. But because you suddenly realise you’re not sure why you’re still chewing.
Once that truth was spoken, there was very little left to debate.
Not because we were defeated. But because clarity had finally arrived.
The decision to sell wasn’t emotional. It was practical. Almost administrative. When a business no longer recognises your authority, staying becomes theatre. And theatre is expensive.
Dale already knew a practice.
Aligned, he said. Philosophically similar. Strong systems. Ambitious. Willing to pay top dollar for the client base we’d built. From the outside, it looked like the best possible outcome, value realised, continuity assured, dignity preserved.
What it really became was “frying pan into the fire” type stuff. Because alignment on paper is not the same as alignment in the room.
The acquiring practice was MW Lomax, a combined accounting and financial planning entity. Integrated. Structured. Confident in its model. And for some clients, that was immediately a problem.
Several didn’t like the dual role. They were business owners themselves, financial planners, advisors, and the overlap made them uneasy. Conflicts they didn’t want to explain. Relationships they didn’t want blurred.
So they left.
Others stayed briefly, then drifted. They didn’t like the feel of it. The bigger-firm cadence. The sense that they’d moved from being known to being managed. From conversation to process.
No scandal. No outrage. Just quiet attrition. And attrition matters when there’s an earn-out clause.
The contract required turnover to be maintained. The value we’d been paid assumed the clients would stay. That assumption tethered me back to the very practice I had just let go of.
Not as owner. As custodian. I was forced back into the business, not to lead it, but to protect the investment. To monitor. To smooth. To reassure clients who hadn’t asked for change but received it anyway.
It was a strange purgatory. No longer mine. Not fully theirs. And yet, still my responsibility.
Watching something you built operate under a different rhythm, with different priorities, is a peculiar kind of grief. You recognise the structure, but not the spirit. The name remains, but the voice has changed.
And all the while, the clock ticks on the earn-out.
This wasn’t freedom. It was transition disguised as closure. And like most things in business, it came with a price you only fully understand once you’re already paying it.
But the MW Lomax people didn’t realise the drive behind Jeff and Robyn Banks.
They thought they had acquired a client base. What they had really acquired was momentum still in motion.
I was still speaking from stage. Still presenting. Still telling stories that resonated. Still articulating a philosophy of accounting that cut through the noise for business owners who were tired of being processed rather than understood. And people kept coming.
More introductions. More enquiries. More “we heard you speak and…” conversations. Without intending to, I became a funnel. Not for Banks Consultancy, that chapter had technically closed, but for the turnover that underpinned the earn-out.
It wasn’t strategy. It was instinct. Protecting the investment meant staying visible. Staying relevant. Staying credible. And credibility, once earned, doesn’t switch off just because ownership has changed.
So despite client losses, despite those who left because of MW Lomax’s financial planning arm, despite those who recoiled from the big-firm mentality, despite the erosion of the deeply personal service that had once defined Banks Consultancy, turnover held.
At purchase levels. That fact still surprises people when they hear it. Because what was lost in intimacy was temporarily replaced by volume. What slipped in relationship was offset by inflow. The engine kept running even as parts of it were quietly removed.
It held, right up until it couldn’t. And that line wasn’t crossed in the office.
It was crossed in the car. One morning, Robyn and I didn’t drive to work. We drove to Royal North Shore Hospital. Pain down my left-hand side. Not sharp enough to panic, but persistent enough to refuse to be ignored. Not heart-related, as it turned out, but serious enough to serve as a warning.
The body, unlike a business, doesn’t negotiate. It doesn’t accept justification. It doesn’t care about earn-outs. It doesn’t wait for convenient timing.
That drive marked the end of something, even if I didn’t yet have language for it.
Up until then, I had been propping up outcomes with willpower and momentum. Speaking. Showing up. Carrying the weight of a business I no longer owned, to protect value that existed mostly on paper.
That day, the body called time. Not dramatically. Not catastrophically. But clearly. And once your health enters the conversation, everything else, growth, turnover, alignment, investment, starts speaking much more quietly.
The funnel was still working. But the cost of standing at the top of it had just changed.
At the same time, the ground beneath MW Lomax was beginning to shift.
Quietly at first. Then unmistakably.
At the shareholder level, expectations weren’t being met. Forecasts missed. Promises deferred. The kind of underperformance that doesn’t announce itself publicly, but corrodes confidence internally.
The model looked solid from the outside, scale, integration, alignment with large investment planning houses. In theory, that alignment was meant to deliver stability and returns.
In practice, it hollowed the centre. The profits flowed upward. Management fees extracted value efficiently, predictably, relentlessly. But by the time the numbers filtered back down to the grassroots shareholders, the ones who had built relationships, carried risk, and stayed close to clients, there was very little left.
No dividends. No upside. No reward for patience. Just explanations.
The irony wasn’t lost on us. We had sold a practice born from personal connection into a structure optimised for aggregation. What worked beautifully for institutional partners bled the life out of those at the coalface.
And inside that environment, MW Lomax itself began to implode. Not through scandal. Through attrition.
Shareholders disengaged. Trust frayed. Conversations about when returns would arrive quietly shifted to if they ever would. It became clear that the very alignment that had once seemed reassuring was now the anchor dragging the ship down.
From our vantage point, still tethered by earn-out obligations, it felt like watching a vessel take on water from below deck, nothing dramatic, just the steady, irreversible loss of buoyancy.
And that’s when Robyn and I made the call. Enough was enough. Not in anger. Not in panic. In recognition.
You don’t stay loyal to a structure that no longer serves its people. You don’t keep feeding energy into a system designed to extract it. And you don’t sacrifice health to preserve value in a sinking ship.
We stepped back. Not heroically. Not noisily.
We stepped away because clarity had finally overtaken obligation, not to mention we had been paid every piece of our sale price despite the challenges. And sometimes, the bravest decision in business isn’t to push harder, it’s to stop rowing when you realise the boat isn’t heading anywhere you’re prepared to follow.
What lingered after all of that, after the sale, the earn-out, the health scare, the slow implosion we watched from a safe distance, was a quieter, more uncomfortable question.
Why had we built Banks Consultancy the way we did in the first place? Not how. Why.
The answer was never scale for scale’s sake. It wasn’t about domination, aggregation, or exit multiples. Banks Consultancy was built around four pillars because we believed accounting carried responsibility, not just utility. Advice before compliance. Relationships before transactions. Courage before convenience. Stewardship before extraction.
Those pillars weren’t marketing. They were costly.
They required time. They demanded judgement. They asked staff to think, not just process. They placed emotional labour right alongside technical skill. And they worked, as long as the people inside the business understood the price of carrying them.
MW Lomax believed they were building something similar. On paper, it looked aligned. In language, it sounded aligned. In presentations, it was certainly aligned.
But alignment isn’t declared. It’s absorbed.
Their model was built for efficiency, scale, and upstream profit flow. Ours was built for depth, trust, and downstream impact. Those two things can coexist only if everyone involved understands what must be given up to make that happen.
They didn’t. And that wasn’t malice, it was a misunderstanding.
They believed alignment was about shared vocabulary. We knew it was about shared sacrifice. That gap, between talk and action, is where most mergers and acquisitions quietly fail.
You can say cultures are aligned. You can promise values will be preserved. You can insist the client experience will remain unchanged. But unless you truly understand the cost of delivering that outcome, the time, the patience, the discomfort, the margin you willingly forgo, the plan will never survive contact with reality.
Banks Consultancy wasn’t broken by growth. It wasn’t undone by staff. It wasn’t even ended by sale. It reached its limit at the point where its values could no longer be carried intact by those who held the wheel. And that, more than anything else, is what this chapter is really about.
Not failure. But the price of building something real, and the danger of assuming it can be transplanted without consequence. Because alignment isn’t something you announce. It’s something you live. And if you don’t, the cracks don’t just appear.
They become the story.
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