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Coaching and mentoring for improving and growing Australian accounting firms.

29/10/2026

Most firms have a spreadsheet comparing AI tools. Few have one for how the team will learn the winner.

The tool gets a budget line. The training gets whatever is left of a Friday lunch, and a few months later the logins sit unused and the software takes the blame.

Ben's pick is the team, not the tool, and the skill he'd train first isn't the one most people assume.

28/10/2026

The first AI project in most firms is the most interesting one on the list. It's almost never the most valuable.

Sort last year's hours by type of job and one pile dwarfs the rest. It's the pile nobody wants to talk about at a conference, which is exactly why it's the place to look.

Ben's answer to "where do we start" is boring on purpose. The part firms get wrong is the second half: how much of it to take on at once.

26/10/2026

Every AI vendor has a number for the time their tool saves. Almost no firm has its own.

A sense that something was quicker is worth nothing when a renewal lands or a partner asks what the spend actually bought. It also can't tell you when a change made things worse.

Ben's method needs a notepad and a start time, nothing fancier. And the thing he says to count isn't the hours.

26/10/2026

Ask your team which AI tools they used this week. Then ask which ones the firm knows about.

The gap between those two answers is rarely someone doing the wrong thing. It's a rule nobody wrote down, and the honest answer is usually that the free one was quicker.

Banning it closes the gap on paper only. Ben's fix is one page long with four things on it, and the last step has nothing to do with writing.

23/10/2026

There's a bottleneck that never shows up on a workflow report, because it's the person reading the report.

Hire the sharpest builder you can find and they'll still end up queued at the same door. What they need from the owner isn't technical, and the owner is usually the most willing person in the building, which is what makes it hard to see.

Ben has been that bottleneck himself. His fix changes the owner's job rather than adding to it.

21/10/2026

A grad starting this year may never build a workpaper from scratch. Fine, right up until they have to review one.

The bottom rungs of the ladder are the ones AI takes first, and they're the rungs most of today's managers learnt on. Nobody enjoyed them. They worked anyway.

Ben doesn't think the fix is keeping the dull work around for training's sake. His answer starts earlier than most firms would expect, and it won't happen on its own.

21/10/2026

Most firms come out of an AI planning session with a longer to-do list than they went in with.

That is the wrong direction. Automating a full week gives you a slightly faster full week, and the team feels every extra thing that got piled on.

Ben starts somewhere else, with three questions for the team, none of which mention technology. The third one is the uncomfortable one, and the honest answer is usually not a tool.

19/10/2026

Every hour AI takes out of a job lands somewhere. Most firms haven't decided where.

Nobody invoices the client for the evenings spent building and testing the thing. But the first faster job goes out the door and the saving can go with it, before anyone notices there was a decision to make.

Ben's view is that the saving has more than one home, and leaving it to default is the expensive option. He ends on a question about fees that most owners haven't answered out loud.

19/10/2026

Ask who owns AI in your firm. If the answer is a name plus "when they get a chance", you know how this ends.

Enthusiasm was never the problem. The calendar was. Client work comes with a deadline and a client attached. The AI work had neither, so it lost every time the two collided.

The firms that break the pattern don't do it with better software. They do it with four decisions written down, and most firms have made none of them.

13/10/2026

Plenty of firms now using AI haven't mentioned it to a single client. Saying nothing is still a choice.

Clients notice when work comes back faster. If nobody explains why, they fill the gap themselves, usually with "so why hasn't my fee dropped?"

Ben's take is that this isn't an announcement. It's three short things to say, and the one clients care about most has nothing to do with the technology.

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