Making an Unordinary Accountant Chapter 7 - Time For a Life

MAKING AN UNORDINARY ACCOUNTANT

CHAPTER 7 – Time for a Life

Somewhere in the middle of working seven days a week, studying at night, pretending I knew what “career trajectory” meant, and trying not to drown under the weight of other people’s expectations, life decided to throw in the one thing I wasn’t even looking for: Clare.

I met her at TAFE. Not in some cinematic moment where papers flew and our eyes locked over a shared textbook. No. It was quieter than that. She just appeared in the periphery of my life, soft-spoken, thoughtful, steady in ways I wasn’t. And in a world that felt like it was always demanding more of me, more hours, more ambition, more compliance, she was the first person who didn’t seem to want anything from me. She simply saw me.

Her parents saw something too. Academics. Proper academics. The kind of people who had libraries instead of loungerooms. People who’d adopted Clare and her brother, poured everything into giving them opportunity, and somehow decided that I, this half-formed country boy with a chip on his shoulder and FOMO thrumming in his bloodstream, had potential.

No one had ever used that word about me before.

Potential.

It was both a compliment and a burden. Because once someone labels you with potential, you begin to fear not living up to it. The word becomes a mirror you’re constantly checking: Am I good enough yet? Have I done enough yet? And I never believed I had.

But she took me in anyway. Fed me. Encouraged me. Treated me like I could actually become something. Maybe that’s why the relationship barreled forward the way it did, not reckless, but rapid, like two people holding on while life was already moving faster than either of us had planned.

We didn’t exactly wait for the textbook “right time.” There was no “establish your career first” or “build a foundation.” We were building the plane mid-flight. And somehow, in the middle of accounting exams and tax seasons and second-hand furniture and rent payments that hurt every week, we had two children.

Beautiful, chaotic, unplanned, perfectly timed children.

And having a family didn’t pause the rest of life. If anything, it turned the pressure dial up another notch. The fear of failing wasn’t just mine anymore; it would land on tiny shoulders. So I worked harder. Longer. Smarter when I could manage it. Dumber when I was exhausted. Every night I came home feeling like I had to prove something, not just to the world, not just to Clare’s family, but to the version of myself I was terrified would never be good enough.

Scrimping, Saving, Surviving

Our first place wasn’t glamorous. Renting was all we could manage, week to week, juggling coins between groceries, fuel, and that quiet dream of owning something, anything, that couldn’t be taken away by a landlord or a missed payment.

We saved the way people do when they have nothing but determination: coins in jars, skipping meals, saying “maybe next month” more times than I can count doing tax returns by hand at the kitchen table to save fees and still feeling like we were running behind

Eventually, we scraped enough together for a tiny unit. Nothing fancy. But it was ours. And owning something, no matter how small, lit a fire under me that hasn’t gone out to this day. Once you have equity, you learn the game: borrow against it, leverage it, grow it. But back then, it was simply a lifeline.

When the equity grew, we mortgaged it. Of course we did. FOMO runs deep. And with a bit of help from my dad of all people, we managed to upgrade to a house. A real house. A place with walls the kids could put posters on and a backyard that didn’t echo.

It should have felt like stability. But for me, it was proof that the next thing was possible.  Then the next. And the next. I wasn’t chasing wealth, I was chasing safety. Control. A way out of the chaos I grew up in. And whenever I caught one milestone, I’d already be looking ahead to the next.

Somewhere in the middle of all this, I was still trying to cling to pieces of myself, sport, competition, that need to be part of something. So I played cricket for Sydney University.

Premierships, even. On paper it sounds impressive, but the truth is: I never fit in. I was older than most. I turned up after night classes instead of at training. I learned quickly that you can be part of a team without ever really belonging to it. The boys respected my ability, but I was the outsider, the bloke who came through the side gate, not the front door.

Rugby league wasn’t much different. St George Sub-Districts, Kingsgrove Colts. Tough football. Good community. Same result. I worked too much, trained too irregularly, and arrived at games looking like someone who’d sprinted from a job interview. These weren’t failings, they were signs of the life I was living. But back then, I took it personally. I thought fitting in was something you earned. Now I understand: sometimes your life simply doesn’t leave room.

We weren’t poor, but we weren’t thriving either. Every step forward cost something, money, time, energy, opportunity. I was juggling: a growing family, a fledgling accounting career, night classes, sport, debt, ambition, fear, and a relationship stretched thin by the pressure of all of the above

It was survival disguised as progress. But slowly, painfully, it was working.

Until the Waller & Co partnership broke.

That was the moment the bottom dropped out. The safety net I thought I had disappeared, and suddenly we were on our own. No mentor buffer. No shared risk. No steady hand on the tiller.

Just me. A  mortgage. Two kids. A wife watching closely, wondering if “potential” was a curse. And the terrifying knowledge that the next step would define everything that followed.

And that, right there, is where the entrepreneur in me was born. Not in confidence. Not in belief. But in necessity.

After the partnership at Waller & Co cracked open and the pieces scattered across the floor, I did the only thing I knew how to do: I got back up and created something out of whatever fragments I could still reach.

It wasn’t glamour. It wasn’t strategy. It wasn’t some entrepreneurial epiphany. It was survival.

I ended up renting a small office above a real estate agency in South Hurstville. A place that smelled like old carpet, stale coffee I didn’t drink, and the ghosts of failed auctions. The building itself felt like a metaphor, past its best, but still standing, still trying to be useful.

It was Colin’s old stomping ground, which was comforting and uncomfortable all at once. Familiar footsteps, familiar neighbourhood, but now I was the one lugging the briefcase up the stairs, trying to pretend I belonged there as much as he once did.

Next door was Bob Benjamin. Good bloke. Loyal. One of Colin’s clients originally, but he followed me during the separation, along with several others who had quietly worked out where the real work was being done. It wasn’t betrayal. It wasn’t politics. It was simply people deciding that if their financial future was on the line, they wanted the person who was actually turning the gears.

So that’s where we started again. No signage worth noticing. No reception desk polished to a shine. Just me, a desk I probably shouldn’t have spent money on, and the unspoken pressure that every dollar earned now had to feed the family, keep the lights on, and prove that I hadn’t misread my entire capacity as a human being.

We made it work, sort of. It was never comfortable, but it was motion. And sometimes motion feels like success when you’re too frightened to sit still and look at the truth. But of course, I couldn’t stay small. Not with FOMO wired into my DNA.

The moment I had a hint of stability, that old itch returned, the one that whispered that staying put meant falling behind. That someone else would outgrow me, outpace me, outmanoeuvre me unless I ran faster.

So when the opportunity came to amalgamate with two other accounting practices, forming something bigger, Small Business Spectrum, I leapt at it.

Three practices under one banner. A bigger client base. A bigger footprint. Bigger invoices. Bigger possibilities.

It felt like momentum. It felt like progress. It felt like the kind of decision “successful” people made. But here’s the truth I didn’t want to admit: It wasn’t a business strategy. It wasn’t an entrepreneurial vision.

It was fear.

Fear that if I stayed small, I’d disappear. Fear that I’d never be taken seriously. Fear that success was always just one more merger, one more opportunity, one more sleepless night away.

And fear, dressed as ambition, makes you reckless.

But it wasnt recklessness that created the next curve in the road. There was a mistake buried back in the Waller & Co days. A quiet oversight. The kind that doesn’t bite immediately. It lurks. It waits.

And just when you think you’re finally climbing out of the hole, it reaches up and drags you back under.

That mistake surfaced. It was significant. Costly. And under the structure I was in, the financial and legal consequences landed squarely on me. I had signed a personal directorial guarantee for a client of Colin’s at his request to give a client a second chance at success but influences change as they often do, and walls cave in.

I can still remember the moment I realised I couldn’t outrun it. I was thirty years old. Thirty. Too young to have built anything real. Too old to pretend I hadn’t tried.

And bankruptcy became unavoidable. Bankruptcy. Even now the word feels radioactive. Like it has its own gravitational pull. It wasn’t just money. It wasn’t just a business. It wasn’t just paperwork.

It was identity. It was pride. It was the story I’d been telling myself, that if I worked hard enough, fast enough, smart enough, I could outrun the shadows of my childhood.

But there’s no outrunning bankruptcy. You sit in it. You drown in it. You lose things you didn’t think could be taken.

And along with the business, the reputation, the sense of self… but on this case I had taken steps to ensure the real estate assets could not be touched, using my wife as the owner. There was only one issue with that.

I lost my wife.

There’s no easy way to write that. No elegant sentence that cushions it. Marriage doesn’t break all at once. It frays. It exhausts. It gives ground one compromise at a time until finally, something inside says no more.

For Clare, it wasn’t the bankruptcy itself. It was everything the bankruptcy represented: 

the pressure, the uncertainty, the instability, the fear, the constant forward momentum with no oxygen left for the present

She’d ridden the rollercoaster with me long enough. Through night classes, rented rooms, crying children, shifting jobs, shifting dreams. And now here we were: two people standing among the rubble of a life we’d tried so hard to build.

She walked away. And I don’t blame her.

Back then, I wrapped it in anger and confusion, because that’s what you do when you’re thirty and everything you’ve built has fallen apart. But with distance, I can see what she saw: 

a man running faster than he lived, a man driven by the fear of being left behind, a man so wrapped up in potential and failure that he didn’t know how to stop And when you don’t stop, eventually someone else does.

Bankruptcy doesn’t happen with a bang. It’s not a dramatic collapse where papers fly through the air and someone yells “Cut!” like in a courtroom film. No. It’s quieter. Slower. More insidious. It arrives like a slow leak under the floorboards, unseen at first, then suddenly the whole structure gives way and you’re standing in the wreckage wondering how long the rot had been there.

For me, it felt like putting boxes inside boxes. Every time I thought I had dealt with one issue, I’d open it and find another box inside, another complication, another obligation, another consequence of decisions made under pressure and fear. Boxes within boxes within boxes, each one smaller, each one darker, each one tighter. Until finally, the last box closes around you and there’s nothing left to unpack except the truth.

I was broke. I was thirty. I was alone.

And just to finish the job properly, my body gave out. Glandular fever, the kind that knocks you sideways and keeps you there, hit at exactly the moment everything else had collapsed. Depression settled in behind it, like an unwelcome lodger dragging a mattress through the front door and announcing it wasn’t going anywhere.

I couldn’t afford rent, so I lived with friends for a while. Kind, generous people who offered me their spare rooms, their couches, their patience. But when you’re that low, kindness stings almost as much as cruelty. It reminds you of how far you’ve fallen.

Eventually I ended up in a caravan park on the Hawkesbury. A place that wasn’t home, not really, but held me in a way nothing else could at the time. The river on one side, the highway on the other, and in between, me. A man rebuilding from the ground up. No wife. No house. No business. Just a caravan, an illness, a debt that felt like a shadow, and a stubborn refusal to give up.

And here’s the strange thing: even there, even in that lowest point, something kept me moving.

My children.

The thought of them was the only light that cut through the fog. Not in a grand, heroic way. Not as some Hollywood revelation. Just in small, human flashes, wondering what they might draw at school tomorrow, what story they might tell me on the phone, what new smile or new word or new moment I might miss if I stopped pushing.

I didn’t know if I deserved to be part of their future. But I knew I wanted to be. Desperately. Fiercely. And that wanting became the engine that kept me going.

Because no matter how deep the hole was, no matter how heavy the boxes were, no matter how hard the fever or the depression pressed down, there was always this quiet, stubborn belief:

Tomorrow my children might surprise me. Tomorrow, they might need me. Tomorrow, they   might look for me. Tomorrow, they might do something beautiful, and I wanted to be there, if not physically, then at least as a man still standing.

Bankruptcy closed one door. It slammed it, really. But as painful and humiliating as it was, it cleared the space for something else. Something unplanned. Something raw. Something that forced me to rebuild not from ambition, not from FOMO, not from fear, but from the simplest, strongest truth I had left:

I wasn’t done. Not yet. Not while my kids still had tomorrows I might witness. And that was enough to make me start again. That and the thought of working for someone reminded me of working for my father – not happening