Belief matters, instinct matters and courage matters, but there is a difference between following a considered instinct and simply reacting to whatever pressure happens to arrive next. The Logical Bystander lives somewhere inside that distinction, asking whether the passion is still carrying the business forward or has quietly taken control of the steering wheel.
There is a character who has followed me through much of my working life, although for most of those years I never gave him a name. He is the bloke standing slightly to one side of the conversation, listening to the enthusiasm, urgency, certainty and excitement before quietly wondering whether any of what is being proposed actually makes sense.
I have come to think of him as The Logical Bystander. There is probably a little bit of Spock from Star Trek in him, not because he is devoid of emotion, but because somewhere beneath the noise he keeps searching for the logic of what is happening and becomes increasingly fascinated when there appears to be none.
Business gives him plenty to think about because business is an arena in which otherwise intelligent people can make decisions that seem perfectly reasonable in the heat of the moment, only to look considerably less logical once the emotion has passed and the numbers have had their say. Perhaps that is because business, for all the spreadsheets, forecasts, budgets and strategic plans wrapped around it, is strangely romantic.
We do not often describe it that way, particularly those of us who have spent careers around balance sheets, tax returns, cashflows and compliance, but there is an enormous amount of romance attached to the idea of owning and building something of your own. There is the dream of independence, the satisfaction of creating something from nothing and the hope that effort today might produce freedom tomorrow.
There is excitement in a new idea, pride in the first customer and satisfaction when somebody recommends you to somebody else. There is also something deeply personal about watching an enterprise grow from an idea that once existed only inside your own head, particularly when that business begins carrying not only your livelihood but a little of your identity with it.
That romance is part of what makes business wonderful, but it is also part of what can make business owners do some extraordinarily illogical things. Emotion moves quickly, while logic generally wants a little more time to look around, check the facts and ask whether the direction of travel still resembles the destination.
Enthusiasm wants to say yes, fear wants to say no, ego wants to prove something and competition demands an immediate response. FOMO adds another voice, insisting that whatever everyone else appears to be doing must surely be where we should be heading as well, and suddenly a decision that did not exist yesterday has somehow become urgent today.
The Logical Bystander tends to become uncomfortable at about that point. He begins wondering why the decision has suddenly become urgent, what changed overnight and whether the opportunity apparently demanding immediate action will still look quite so attractive after a decent night’s sleep.
He also wants to know whether the numbers support the enthusiasm, whether the customer actually asked for the new idea and whether the competitor we are suddenly chasing is genuinely doing better than us or merely making more noise. Most importantly, he wants to know whether what we are about to do has anything to do with where we originally intended to go.
That question has become increasingly important to me because one of the recurring patterns I have observed throughout more than four decades around business is how easily people can be pushed away from their own path. It rarely happens through one catastrophic decision, because more often it happens through a series of perfectly understandable reactions to whatever happens to be making the most noise at the time.
A competitor lowers a price and we immediately consider lowering ours, while somebody introduces a new piece of technology and suddenly we need it too. A seminar tells us our business model is obsolete, a social media guru explains that everything has changed and an economic commentator announces that the world as we know it is either about to boom or collapse.
Somewhere amongst all that noise, the business owner reacts, and having reacted once another reaction becomes easier. Before long, a business that once had a reasonably clear sense of direction can find itself following a path it never consciously chose.
The owner may still be extraordinarily busy, perhaps busier than ever, yet activity and direction are not necessarily the same thing. Motion can feel like progress even while each decision takes the business another small step away from the reason it existed in the first place.
That is usually where the Logical Bystander begins looking around the room and asking the question that has followed much of my writing: How did we get here, and when did this become the path we were supposed to be travelling? It is not a new question for me, although different books have approached it from very different directions.
How Did We Get Here? asked the question on a much broader canvas, looking at the economic and social systems we have built around ourselves and wondering whether the outcomes still bear much resemblance to the intentions. It came from a frustration with the contradictions that can emerge when systems designed to create opportunity begin producing outcomes that leave us wondering whether somewhere along the way the purpose was overtaken by the process.
Dumbing It Down approached a similar problem from a much more personal direction, examining intelligence, communication and the curious difficulty of expressing complicated ideas in a world that increasingly seems to demand shorter answers. Somewhere within that story sits the tension between understanding something deeply and recognising that being right is not particularly useful if nobody is listening.
Other works have come much closer to the accounting desk. The Little Blue School Book, What the Accountant Saw and 20 Days Too Late each grew, in different ways, from the accumulated experience of watching businesses make decisions, postpone decisions, misunderstand decisions and occasionally discover that the most important advice arrived shortly after the moment when it could have made the greatest difference.
Those books are not prerequisites for understanding this one, nor is this collection intended to repeat them. They are simply different branches of the same tree, grown from decades spent observing people, businesses, numbers and the often surprising distance between what we say we are trying to achieve and what our actions eventually create.
This collection sits somewhere amongst them, but perhaps with the accountant taking one small step further back from the argument. The Logical Bystander is less interested in proving that somebody is wrong than in asking what we actually know, what we are merely reacting to, and when the noise became more important than the direction we originally intended to travel.
That distinction matters because business is intensely human, and human beings are not entirely rational creatures. Owners bring ambition, optimism, fear, pride, insecurity, hope, exhaustion, competitiveness and sometimes sheer bloody-mindedness into decisions that are later described as though they were based entirely upon rational analysis.
The accountant eventually sees the financial consequences, but the decision itself may have been made months earlier in a moment when logic was nowhere near the room. By the time the numbers expose what happened, the emotional decision that created them may already have become part of the story the owner tells himself about where the business is going.
None of that makes emotion the enemy because business stripped entirely of emotion would be a miserable thing. Some of the greatest enterprises ever created probably began with somebody becoming irrationally excited about an idea that everyone else thought was ridiculous, and passion has taken people to places spreadsheets alone never could.
Belief matters, instinct matters and courage matters, but there is a difference between following a considered instinct and simply reacting to whatever pressure happens to arrive next. The Logical Bystander lives somewhere inside that distinction, asking whether the passion is still carrying the business forward or has quietly taken control of the steering wheel.
He is not there to destroy enthusiasm because a business without enthusiasm would quickly become little more than an administrative exercise. He is there to ask whether enthusiasm has run far enough ahead of reason that somebody ought to check the map before everyone celebrates how quickly they are travelling.
Perhaps that is also where the accountant looking in from the outside can sometimes be useful. For much of my career I have occupied that strange position of being close enough to businesses to understand their personalities, pressures and ambitions, yet sufficiently removed from their daily operations to occasionally notice something the owner cannot see from inside the storm.
The numbers certainly help because they are wonderfully dispassionate things. They can be inconvenient, irritating and stubbornly unimpressed by enthusiasm, but they have a habit of stripping away some of the romance when reality eventually arrives.
Cashflow does not become less important because a strategy is exciting, and margins do not improve because a competitor appears successful on Facebook. Customers do not necessarily value something merely because the person selling it believes they should, and a business does not become stronger simply because its owner is working longer hours than ever before.
Logic has a habit of being irritating like that, yet the longer I have worked around business the less interested I have become in simply telling people they are wrong. Advice delivered from a position of superiority may make the adviser feel clever, but I am not convinced it achieves very much if the person on the other side of the desk stops listening before the message arrives.
That thinking was eventually distilled within Banks Consultancy into four simple principles that became the foundation of how I believed an accountant should work with clients. Speak in your language, reduce tax legally, drag you kicking and screaming to compliance, and act like a silent partner were not slogans created to decorate a brochure, but lessons accumulated through years of seeing what clients actually needed from an adviser.
Those Four Pillars sit quietly behind much of what follows because each of them says something about the way knowledge should be used. Understanding is more important than showing off expertise, intelligent planning is better than clever shortcuts, obligations ignored today generally become larger problems tomorrow, and the best time to discuss a business decision is usually before its consequences appear in a set of accounts.
The articles in this collection have therefore not been written as commandments, nor are they an attempt to drag anybody kicking and screaming towards my version of the truth. I have lived long enough, made enough mistakes and watched enough supposedly certain ideas disappear to be wary of anyone who claims to have discovered the one true way of doing business.
Instead, I would rather ask questions and encourage others to ask their own. Why are we doing this, what problem are we actually trying to solve and is the evidence supporting what we believe, or are we simply collecting evidence that agrees with what we had already decided?
Are we changing direction because circumstances genuinely require it, or because standing still for five minutes now feels dangerously close to falling behind? Does this decision take us closer to the business we once intended to build, or has somebody else’s urgency quietly become our own?
Those questions can be uncomfortable because modern business does not appear particularly fond of hesitation. We celebrate speed, disruption, innovation and action, while reflection can sometimes be mistaken for indecision and patience can look suspiciously like a lack of ambition.
Yet there is a substantial difference between procrastination and consideration. Stopping long enough to understand something is not necessarily falling behind, because there are occasions when the person charging hardest towards the horizon is making magnificent progress in entirely the wrong direction.
I have watched business fashions come and go, management theories acquire impressive names and disappear, economic predictions fail spectacularly and new technologies promise revolution. I have also watched consultants confidently announce the death of things that stubbornly continued living for another twenty years, usually long enough for the next expert to explain why their survival should never have surprised us.
Through all of it, some surprisingly ordinary principles have continued producing extraordinarily useful results. Customers still appreciate being treated properly, reputation still takes years to build and remarkably little time to damage, cash still needs to arrive with sufficient regularity to pay the bills and people generally prefer dealing with people they trust.
A business that understands why it exists still seems to have an advantage over one perpetually searching for the next shiny thing. None of that sounds particularly revolutionary, which may be precisely why it is so easily overlooked.
We have become so accustomed to being sold transformation that simple ideas can begin looking unsophisticated. There is considerably more excitement in being told that everything has changed than in being reminded that some things probably have not.
The Logical Bystander remains suspicious of excitement for excitement’s sake, particularly when excitement is being sold as a substitute for evidence. He watches the stampede and wonders what frightened everyone, but he also wonders whether anyone stopped long enough to check whether there was actually something worth running from.
He sees businesses competing furiously on price and wonders whether anybody remembered to ask what customers actually value. He watches people adopt systems designed for businesses entirely unlike their own and wonders when imitation became strategy, while the constant demand for growth leaves him asking a question that seems almost impolite in some business circles: growth towards what?
Those are not cynical questions because cynicism tends to assume the answer before the question is asked. Curiosity leaves open the possibility that there may be a perfectly good explanation, and the Logical Bystander is curious enough to keep looking until the pieces begin to fit.
That curiosity is probably the common thread running through these articles. They wander through business, economics, taxation, competition, service, technology, discipline, abundance and the endless white noise surrounding all of them, seeking less to provide rules than to create moments in which a reader might stop and reconsider what has become accepted without examination.
At times the articles may wander further than some readers would prefer, but not every worthwhile idea fits neatly into four lines. Not every complicated issue becomes clearer merely because somebody insists upon a shorter answer, and sometimes understanding requires us to remain with a thought long enough for its implications to become apparent.
Sometimes we need to slow down, not because the world has stopped moving but because it has become increasingly difficult to see clearly while running with it. We need to look past the headline, past the sales pitch, past the guru, past the algorithm and occasionally past our own excitement to ask whether what we have just been told is true, relevant and useful to the particular journey we are actually on.
That sounds almost embarrassingly simple, which is often the problem with logic. Once somebody points something out, the conclusion can appear obvious, even though an extraordinary amount of noise may have been required to hide it in the first place.
I am conscious that there will be people who disagree with much of what follows, while others may dismiss some of these observations as things everybody already knows. That is perfectly reasonable because I am not writing these articles under any illusion that thousands of business owners are waiting impatiently for an accountant standing on the sidelines to explain where everybody has gone wrong.
In fact, I suspect many of the ears these words are intended for will not listen, and experience tells me that people often hear advice most clearly after circumstances have already demonstrated why it mattered. Perhaps that is simply part of how human beings learn, and perhaps the accountant’s frustration with that reality is another reason the Logical Bystander exists.
That does not particularly trouble me because I am not trying to create followers. Perhaps somebody will read one article and disagree with almost all of it but find a single question that follows them into tomorrow, while somebody else might recognise something happening inside their own business and stop for half an hour before making a decision they had previously considered inevitable.
That may be enough because good advice should not create dependence upon the adviser. It should strengthen the person receiving it sufficiently that, eventually, they begin asking the questions for themselves.
If anything within these pages causes somebody to look at their business with fresh eyes, question an assumption they had stopped noticing or reconnect with the reason they began the journey in the first place, then the Logical Bystander will probably consider his work worthwhile. He may even allow himself the smallest sense of satisfaction, provided of course that it can be logically justified.
The question will remain because I suspect it always will, and perhaps that is why it has appeared in so many different forms throughout my writing. How did we get here, and does where we are going still have anything to do with where we once wanted to go?
That, ultimately, is what this collection is about, and it is why the Logical Bystander keeps watching. He is one accountant looking in, trying to separate movement from progress, noise from knowledge and reaction from decision, while remaining endlessly fascinated by the wonderfully romantic, emotional and occasionally completely illogical thing we call business.
Jeff Banks has spent more than four decades looking at businesses from a position few people outside the accounting profession ever get to occupy. As an accountant, taxation adviser and registered tax agent, he has worked alongside business owners through the good years, the difficult ones, the ambitious expansions, the uncomfortable restructures and the moments when the numbers finally revealed something the owner had suspected but perhaps did not particularly want confirmed.
For much of that career, Jeff ran his own accounting and advisory practice, Banks Consultancy, working predominantly with small and medium-sized businesses and the people behind them. His role frequently extended well beyond preparing accounts and tax returns, because the conversations that mattered most were often about why a business was heading in a particular direction, whether the numbers supported that journey and what needed to change before a problem became considerably more expensive to solve.
That experience shaped a view of accounting that has followed him throughout his professional life. Numbers are important, but numbers without an understanding of the people, decisions and circumstances that created them rarely tell the entire story, and Jeff increasingly came to see the accountant as someone who needed to understand the business as much as the balance sheet.
Over time, that thinking developed into what became known within Banks Consultancy as its Four Pillars. They were not created in a marketing workshop or borrowed from a management textbook, but emerged gradually from thousands of client conversations, years of mistakes and successes, and the growing realisation that technical knowledge alone was never enough to make an adviser genuinely useful.
The first pillar was simple: Speak in your language. Jeff had seen too many occasions where accountants, lawyers and advisers used technical knowledge almost as a barrier, explaining matters in a way that demonstrated their own expertise without necessarily improving the client’s understanding.
That approach never made much sense to him, because advice that could not be understood could hardly be described as useful. If an accountant could understand complex taxation legislation but could not explain its effect to a business owner in language that owner could use, then something important had been lost between knowledge and advice.
The first pillar therefore grew from the belief that communication was not an optional extra to technical competence. It was part of the competence itself, because good advice only became valuable when the person receiving it understood not just what they were being told to do, but why it mattered and how it fitted within their wider business.
The second pillar was Reduce tax legally. That principle developed from a career spent working within one of the most complicated parts of the commercial landscape, where the difference between intelligent planning and reckless behaviour could sometimes be obscured by enthusiasm, misinformation or somebody promising a result that sounded too good to be true.
Jeff’s view was always that taxation should be managed, planned and legally minimised wherever the law allowed. There was no virtue in paying more tax than necessary, but there was equally little wisdom in pursuing aggressive schemes or artificial arrangements that placed the business, its owners or their assets at unnecessary risk.
That distinction became another important part of his professional knowledge base. Tax planning was not about finding clever tricks, but about understanding legislation, understanding the client’s circumstances and bringing the two together in a way that was both commercially sensible and capable of surviving scrutiny.
The third pillar was expressed much more bluntly: Drag you kicking and screaming to compliance. It was a phrase that carried a little humour, but underneath it sat a very serious professional belief that compliance was not something an adviser could simply mention once, note on the file and then quietly ignore when a client found it inconvenient.
Jeff had seen too many situations where perfectly capable business owners allowed taxation, record keeping, lodgements, superannuation, company obligations and other compliance matters to drift because the immediate pressures of running the business always seemed more urgent. The problem was that yesterday’s inconvenience had a nasty habit of becoming tomorrow’s crisis, often with penalties, interest, lost options and unnecessary stress attached.
The phrase also reflected Jeff’s belief that an accountant occasionally had to be prepared to become unpopular for a while. Telling a client what they wanted to hear might preserve a comfortable conversation, but it did little to protect them if the issue being avoided was only going to become larger with time.
Dragging somebody kicking and screaming to compliance was never about lecturing them or treating them as incapable. It was about caring enough about the long-term consequences to keep pushing when it would have been easier to shrug, record the warning and let the problem belong entirely to somebody else.
There was also a practical reality behind the humour, because many clients did not resist compliance because they were dishonest. More often, they were overwhelmed, disorganised, distracted or convinced that the next week would somehow be less busy than the one they were currently surviving.
Jeff came to understand that part of the accountant’s role was therefore to keep the issue alive until action occurred. Sometimes that meant explaining, sometimes reminding, sometimes cajoling and occasionally it meant metaphorically grabbing the client by the collar and dragging them across the line despite their protests.
The fourth pillar was Act like a silent partner. Of all the principles, this was perhaps the one that most clearly demonstrated how far Jeff’s view of accounting had moved beyond traditional compliance.
The accountant, in his view, should not merely appear once a year to report what had already happened. A genuinely useful adviser should understand enough about the business, its people, pressures, ambitions and financial position to help the owner consider decisions before they appeared as consequences in the accounts.
That did not mean running the client’s business for them, nor did it mean inserting the accountant into every decision. It meant being close enough to ask the right questions, independent enough to challenge assumptions and experienced enough to recognise when enthusiasm, fear or fashion might be taking the business somewhere its owners had never intended to go.
Those Four Pillars were not separate from Jeff’s accumulated knowledge; they were the product of it. Each one represented a lesson learned repeatedly through experience and then refined until it became part of the way Banks Consultancy approached its work.
Together, they also explain much of the thinking behind the articles in this book. The emphasis on understandable language appears in the way the articles attempt to make business ideas accessible, while the focus on legal tax reduction reflects a broader preference for intelligent planning over shortcuts and clever-sounding schemes.
The determination to drag clients kicking and screaming to compliance became part of an even wider philosophy about discipline and responsibility. Jeff became increasingly interested in the idea that strong businesses are usually built not through dramatic gestures, but through the consistent execution of ordinary things that owners sometimes find boring, inconvenient or easy to postpone.
There was a lesson inside that third pillar that reached well beyond taxation, because the things we most resist are sometimes the things we most need to do. Businesses are often harmed not by a lack of knowledge, but by failing to act upon knowledge they already possess.
The silent-partner principle developed further still and eventually became part of the character Jeff now describes as The Logical Bystander. The accountant standing slightly outside the emotional centre of the business is often in the ideal position to notice when the direction of travel and the original destination are beginning to separate.
There is probably a little bit of Spock from Star Trek in the Logical Bystander, although the comparison is less about being devoid of emotion than about continually searching for logic. Jeff has spent a lifetime watching emotional decisions eventually appear in remarkably unemotional financial statements, and that experience has made him curious about the reasoning behind what people do.
Business provides endless material for that curiosity because it is intensely human. Owners bring ambition, optimism, fear, pride, insecurity, hope, exhaustion, competitiveness and sometimes sheer bloody-mindedness into decisions that are later described as though they were based entirely upon rational analysis.
Jeff has seen intelligent people make extraordinary decisions, cautious people suddenly take enormous risks and successful businesses lose direction through a series of reactions that each appeared reasonable at the time. He has also watched struggling businesses rediscover themselves simply by returning to principles they once understood but had somehow lost amongst the noise.
Those experiences reinforced one of the central lessons behind the Four Pillars, which was that technical knowledge matters enormously but is never enough by itself. Technical knowledge without context can still produce poor advice because the right answer to the wrong question remains of limited value.
Over the years Jeff’s work has involved taxation, business structures, cashflow, asset protection, succession, superannuation, business sales, acquisitions, restructuring and the endless practical issues that arise when people’s financial lives collide with legislation. Yet some of the most valuable discussions around the accounting desk have had remarkably little to do with tax and considerably more to do with understanding what the client was actually trying to achieve.
That distinction became increasingly important as his career progressed, because there is little value in recommending a technically perfect solution if the person sitting across the desk does not understand it. There is even less value if they cannot implement it or discover that it takes them somewhere they never actually wanted to go.
The Four Pillars grew from that realisation and, in many ways, became a framework through which Jeff tested his own professional judgement. Could the client understand the advice, was the strategy lawful and sensible, was somebody prepared to push them towards compliance when necessary, and was the advice being given from the perspective of somebody who understood the business well enough to care about the outcome?
Those questions became more valuable as the business world became noisier. New technologies arrived, new management theories became fashionable, economic cycles changed, social media created entirely new forms of commercial pressure and an expanding population of gurus began offering certainty in areas where Jeff’s experience suggested certainty was often difficult to justify.
The underlying lessons, however, changed far less than the surrounding noise. Customers still valued trust, businesses still needed cashflow, reputations remained fragile, margins still mattered and owners continued to benefit from advisers willing to ask uncomfortable questions before rather than after decisions were made.
That is why Jeff’s writing has developed naturally from his accounting career. Rather than presenting himself as the person with all the answers, he prefers to examine the assumptions behind the question, look beyond the noise surrounding modern business and ask whether apparently accepted wisdom survives a little logical scrutiny.
After decades spent watching businesses rise, struggle, adapt and occasionally lose themselves, he has become increasingly interested in the difference between movement and progress. He has also become suspicious of the suggestion that every new business problem requires a new business philosophy, particularly when many of the old principles of service, reputation, discipline, relationships and understanding the numbers continue to work remarkably well.
The articles collected in this book therefore come from an accountant’s perspective, but they are not accounting articles in the traditional sense. They are observations from somebody who has spent a lifetime being invited behind the curtain of other people’s businesses and has had the privilege of seeing not merely what happened, but often why it happened.
Semi-retirement has given Jeff more opportunity to write about those experiences and the lessons buried within them. It has also given the Logical Bystander considerably more time to stand at the edge of the modern business world, watch the rush towards whatever comes next and continue applying the lessons that eventually became the Four Pillars of Banks Consultancy.
Those pillars were never intended to make business complicated, because if anything they emerged from a lifetime spent discovering that the better answers often came from making things clearer. Speak so people understand, reduce tax legally, drag them kicking and screaming to compliance when necessary, and remain close enough to the business to act like a silent partner.
Perhaps that is the best description of Jeff Banks as an author as well as an accountant. He is still looking in, still asking questions and still wondering whether the logic of where we are going bears any resemblance to the reasons we started the journey in the first place, which leaves one question hanging over both the writing and the career behind it: How did we get here, and are we certain this is where we wanted to go?
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