S1E54 · Andrew Van De Beek: Keeping people out of jail

Hey Legends, welcome to week 54 of Avertis Performance Podcast. We've got Zeek on guitar, doing stuff. Do more stuff. Oh wow. Oh wow. So guests for today, we have Andrew Vanderbeek, the thought leader of the year, the misfit with a cause, the ideas man, the face behind Illuminate Accounting, someone who's chosen the most boring job in the world and kind of made it cool. We had a really cool chat about teams, about culture, about business, about growth and just about enjoying what you do and waking up in the morning and going to bed at night and doing whatever the hell you want to do in between.

So really cool chat, I hope you enjoy it. Please like, share, subscribe, do all that kind of stuff. Now that we're past 50, I'm worried that we'll have more episodes and people listening, so please share away. My personal and business goal is to be just a little bit better every day. I believe everyone, especially normal people, have a story to tell. The Virtus podcast exists to help us all find small ways of consistent improvement by discussing the journey and experiences of each of our guests. Andrew, mate, welcome to the podcast. Thanks for having me buddy. It's been good to finally meet you after Sammy Keck's been trying to get us to catch up for a little while.

I've been paying him to try and promote me around the traps and I think, well, this is the first. I think you're getting your money's worth. Yeah, this is good. I like it. First question for you. What gets you out of bed in the morning? This is a great question. So there's a bunch of us on Twitter, like through someone's account, there's a bit of an accounting community, they have this pre 7am club and it's just, what are you doing at 7am? I don't get out of bed at 7am, I get out of bed as late as I possibly can.

What gets me out of bed? I've never been able to answer that question properly. I enjoy what I do as a business and I enjoy my family, but probably the best thing in the morning I have is I get to cuddle my four year old and my one year old and I think that's what actually ends up getting me out of bed is I need to change the nappy. Your nappy or their nappy? Yeah, well, if only. Imagine if we could all just cruise around with adult diapers and it was okay. I think that's one of those socially acceptable things that will never be socially acceptable.

Never. No. Just the smell. We can dream though. Yeah. It's 2018, surely we can find. Why don't you start a thing? I'm not going to start a thing. You could do it. I'm not going to do that. I'm not going to do that at all. Talk to me about what you do with work, what you do, what is it, why do you, yeah, just what is it? Introduce it to a run. Yeah, cool. So I'll start with the, I guess the basic thing that everyone probably understands and connect to and then I'll probably go into a bit more detail on what I see it being.

So we're accountants, we lodge tax returns and what I call we keep people out of jail. We lodge the document on time accurately. But for us, it's greater than that. So business is called Illuminate, it's been around for six years and we affectionately call ourselves misfits who give a shit. So our whole purpose for existing is we want our clients to get out of bed every day and devote their time to what they value the most. And that's because I see so many businesses that are just running that are hiring more people, earning more money, getting bigger factories with having no purpose behind it.

They don't actually know what they want to achieve and they're like, "Well, sure, let's just keep doing it because that's what business should be done." And so we ask, we have a golden question. We say, "If you could do one thing tomorrow morning, regardless of time, money or location, when you get out of bed, what would you do?" So it's kind of like a bucket list question and for us, the answer to that question is what we want to do as a business. We want to help people make decisions that get them there. We're not

financial advisors, we don't tell them what to invest in, but we work specifically with businesses and we help them to grow and we help them realize that through a bunch of different stuff. That's really cool. That's really, it's nice to, it's probably like a breath of fresh air for your industry and for accounting because it's like, I'm very fortunate to have an amazing accountant that I've got a personal relationship with and I know he gives a shit about what we do, but I assume a lot of people don't have that and that's probably what you're trying to change.

Well, absolutely. I think the accounting profession historically is just, it's a transaction-based thing. You are forced to lodge a tax return to the government and if you don't, they'll eventually knock you on the door and maybe take you to jail because of it. Which is all well and good, but people are forced to work with accountants. What would it look like if you wanted to work with an accountant? What would it look like if it changed differently and instead of being a transactional-based thing, it became a relationship-based thing and all of a sudden someone actually

gave a shit about what you're trying to do and journeyed with you through that, that you could be open and honest about where things are at. But they also understand what you're trying to do so they can believe in you as well and they can encourage you to maybe make that decision that other people don't quite understand because they know what you're trying to achieve. That's a, it's nice, it's nice to be able to sit back now and I will talk about how you got to this point, but it's nice to be able to sit back now and know that you're actually doing that day in, day out.

Look, there are definitely days I wonder what the hell I'm actually doing. Absolutely, definitely. I agree both. But I think more often than not, we've got a good team of people that are working with us. We've got a number of clients we're dealing with and when you start hearing the phrases that you've been speaking out for a few years coming out of other people's mouths without you initiating it, that makes you realize that maybe it's actually working. Maybe actually what you thought was a bit of a pipe dream that let's give it a crack is actually starting to happen and we're starting to see that over the last couple of years which has been really cool.

On the days where you question whether you're doing the right thing, question whether you're making a difference, what are the things you do or tell yourself to kind of get yourself out of the slump, I guess? Oh, look, it's hard. I'd love to say that every day is easy and you face trials and tribulations and you just get over it and you move on and you refocus but I take people's opinions too closely. I wouldn't say I get offended but I care too much about others and I question what I do all the time. I feel like I'm a failure a lot sometimes and then other days I don't.

But I guess in the midst of where that is, I went through some stuff a couple of years ago that wasn't particularly enjoyable that had my character attacked and our business's character attacked. And the biggest thing that I learned there is that you're not defined by what you're going through but how you go through it. And for me it was this whole revelation of cool, what I'm going through is just something that I'm going through. It's not what I'm about, it's not who I am, it's not my destination but if I can maintain my character whilst I go through that, then that's going to define who I am.

That's really cool. And then you come back to why you started in the first place and all the hard times and all the slop that you got to wade through, you eventually come out the other side and get to that happy place and then you got to go through more slop and then happy place and repeat. I think sometimes we forget, when you're in business and whatnot and sometimes you forget how much of a difference you're making or how far you've grown because I had this whole thought a little while ago of like, wouldn't life be so much easier if we just lacked ambition?

Would we just not enjoy the day more often because we're never thinking about what we're not achieving? And I'm always thinking so far in the future, my answer to our golden question, what would you do is I'd open a whiskey bar in a heartbeat. So I'm constantly thinking of that moment and I'm not doing it right now. So you can be thinking, "Oh, I'm a failure, I'm not doing what I'm doing." And then for me it's just the kind word of a buddy or someone, a new client you've met or someone that you bumped in the street who's heard of you and goes, "Oh, illuminate, you guys are amazing.

I heard," and you're like, "Oh, okay, cool. Yeah, we actually are doing good stuff." And you lose perspective because you're so far focused. So I'm trying to work on at the moment, how can I have that, the future, the ambition, what I want to achieve, but appreciate the moment at the same time so I don't lose perspective. It's a juggling act and it's a really hard one because I think when you just focus on the now, you lose that forward thinking, that ability to plan and that ability to go, "Well, here's where we want to be," but it's really important to focus on the now and actually make a difference in the moment that you're in.

And then on the flip side, if you just focus on the future, all the stuff that needs to happen every minute of every day, you can kind of forget about that. So what are the things you do to balance between the two? I think it's always important to have a perspective on the future. To know if you're heading in the right direction, you've got to have that. I have some good people around me that I can check in with. So I've got four people that sit on a board with my business that are friends, but also people that I've given authority to speak truth and life into my business.

So as a result of that, I can come with issues and they can then feed back the truth within it, as well as then outside of that having people in my world like a couple of my team have been a lot close, I'm very, very close with and they've been able to experience some of the shit that I've got to go through and they've been able to shed light on that. So I think that's really important is that you have good people around you that can help to highlight whether there's any truth in what you're struggling with, what you're dealing with.

But I think also the matter that you've got to find a way to celebrate the wins. As corny and as crappy as it sounds, we have a bell that I have drilled to the wall in our office and every time we start a relationship with a new client, we ring it. Now we don't do it all the time because we always forget to, but you ring that bell and everyone's head goes up, everyone gets a smile on their face, everyone's wondering who's just jumped on board, what is this and you share that and I think those little things are good.

And the other thing for us, for me personally and as a business is that we have a huddle every morning, we stand up, we share what's going on in the world, but I went away recently when I came back that introduced something new and the new thing was, what was your win from yesterday? And it was just a little thing, not a big thing, what's the one thing that happened yesterday? So for me, I'm hearing all these things about my team and my people as well as what I'm reflecting myself and it reminds me that we're progressing forward and we're not being stagnant.

Yeah. And it's really important to be able to stop and actually look back and actually see how far you've come because like you said, you lose perspective and you realize that, well, that goal that you set two years ago, you hit 12 months ago and if you told yourself 12 months ago that you would be where you are now, you probably would have been like, fuck yeah, that's going to be amazing, I'll be happy and I'll be content then. But then you get to here and you're like, well, I'm happy but I'm not content, I still want to be there.

There's always another hurdle, there's always something else that you're going to set and if you're not celebrating those moments, you're not really going to appreciate them and you'll forget them and you'll just get down, you'll think about what you're not achieving and then who knows where that takes you. What difference does having that board to bounce ideas off make to you as an individual but you as a business owner? Oh mate, I think for me that's been like my sanity check. So I do that for other people and other businesses as well, I'll sit on

the board and help to provide that but it was only until about 18 months ago that I actually started doing that for myself and what I call it is it's the high five when things are going well, it's the cuddle when things aren't and it's the smack around the cheek when you're misbehaving. It's the accountability and someone that's journeying with you and on top of that, for me, the people on my board are four individuals who I admire and respect in their own right. Some of them run their own businesses, others don't, some are young,

some are old but they've all got different perspectives so it means that they can call bullshit when bullshit needs to be called and it means that they can reflect and kind of like go and check in on things maybe when I'm just kind of smoothing over and trying to ignore certain stuff. So I think that's been really good. The other great thing about having a board is it means that every, like we meet on a quarterly basis, every quarter I'm making sure I'm on top of what's going on in my business otherwise I'm going to look like a dickhead when I sit around with them.

So like last quarter we did some things and they're like come on buddy, what's going on here? I need to be prepared, I need to understand what's going on. Yeah, do you find those conversations are more positive than negative or a bit of both? Yeah, I'd say it's 90% positivity, there's probably 10%, I wouldn't say it's negative, sorry, 50% positivity, 50% challenging and the challenging is it's not a negative, it's not a you're an idiot, you're doing the wrong thing but like for example like it's May at the moment, you know, I'm starting to kind

of look at what does the next financial year look like because I'm an accountant, I'm trying to do budgeting and forecasting and I'm going where are we at now and what is the growth percentage and all these kind of things and they're like stop doing that, you're working, you're limiting yourself on what you're doing, why don't we set a number and then you tell us how you can achieve that as opposed to you providing a reason why you're not going to achieve it. So that was really challenging for me recently so now I'm running around

trying to collect as much information from my team and what we do as a business to say well can we even achieve this and okay, what needs to happen to do that and so therefore my thinking has changed and I'm operating hopefully on a higher level than I was before. Yeah, talk to me about your team, what is, what's it like having, you've got 10 right? Well yeah, nine at the moment, we'll have 10, we've got a bit one person in transition that we'll play soon but yeah, a team of 10 really. Team of 10, what's it like being the leader and being the figurehead of a team of 10?

Look I love working with people, like I'm a people person, I care too much about other people's opinions, I want to be everyone's mate. So I've had some lessons that I've learned as being a leader, you know it's good to be everyone's buddy but when you need to kind of bring accountability and all you do is wear the mate hat, it's really hard to do that but for me like trying to create a culture and an environment where everyone is involved, everyone has a voice and everyone can participate in conversation, I'm eventually the person that makes the decision but if you don't create that space, you're never going to make good decisions, you're going to make your decisions.

So I think working with a team of 10 people is great, I get different opinions, I've got some fantastic, I mean every single person, I went away recently and I came back and every time I take maybe a day or two off, I'll often think about the people that I work with and I don't, they're not staff, they're team, they're my family and I always kind of go okay cool, if I had to start again, who would I keep and who would I get rid of and what do we need and I think for the

first time ever when I got back from a recent trip, I was like nah we're good, the people we have are the people I want to have on board, yeah I mean yeah there's growth and we'll eventually need more people but we have the right people on the bus at the moment which is cool. - Yeah, yeah that's really cool, one of my mentors made me do that, do that activity while I was away, he's like I want you to fire everyone and then I said would you rehire them and you as well and it's

a really confronting thing to do because I think you get comfortable with the people you have and I guess what's acceptable and even for yourself like what you do and what you think what is acceptable and it's like it's a really good way to give yourself a kick out the butt, look in the mirror and go alright so here's where we're letting ourselves down and here are the areas where we as a team need to improve. - Well you put up with underperforming people, sometimes they're underperforming because they don't know what they should be performing to because you're not communicating.

- You've made it hard for them to succeed because you don't give them the right expectations. - Yeah absolutely, I mean I want to be everyone's buddy so I often will avoid confrontation and I'm much better at that now but it's being able to have honest frank discussions about what are we trying to achieve here and like as a result of that how can we encourage you to be that within there but if you're not going to be that within there how can we encourage you to be what you need to be elsewhere because heaven

forbid I've got someone who's working my team for four or five years and all they want to do is something different but they just start doing it because they feel obliged or they feel like there's no other option for them. I'd rather release them and allow them to pursue them. - No one wins in that situation because you don't get the best output from them and they're not loving what they do and you setting them free is probably the best thing that probably could happen for them. One of the books we were talking about before is Principles by Ray Dalio which you are yet to read which is really upsetting but you'll get there.

- There's a lot of books I'm yet to read. - This is the one you have to read, it's amazing but like a really simple thing he talks about is an idea meritocracy so the best idea always wins, it doesn't matter whether it's a janitor or whether it's a first year grad or whether it's the CEO of the company, if the idea has merit and it's the best idea for everyone then that will always win out and they come to those conclusions through radical transparency and radical truth. I think in an environment if you can

share all the good stuff and the bad stuff and have open honest frank conversations you're going to get the best outcome for everyone and there's not going to be that person that's silently resenting what you're saying or what another team member's doing for a period of time because that just creates dissonance, there's going to be an environment where people are challenging each other, having those confrontational conversations but it's all ending in you coming back to your wire and you actually finding those things that you can all do to help your clients achieve their dreams and achieve their bucket list items.

- There's also a catch with that stuff as well, so we hire people who care about our clients who have opinions and who participate but it also means that sometimes when you ask one question you've got 10 people with opinions when all you want to do is make a decision and so there's a catch and sometimes you've got to have this really neat balance of saying okay cool, at the end of the day if something goes bad in this business I'm the one that goes to jail or loses my house or I'm the guy that

takes the fall so everyone respects that at the end of the day I have to make the decision so sometimes I'll come in and say I'm about to make this decision, I just want to gut check, is there anything crazy that someone thinks we shouldn't make the decision about, okay cool we're happy, away we go but there's other things, I think it's about choosing the right, when's the right time to involve your people in your decisions and when is it their business or when is it just your business to be involved in it? - It's

a really hard thing to decide because I think there's certain times where you need to involve your team from a transparency point of view but there's certain times where if, I find it sometimes where I'll involve certain people in my team around a decision and then the decision will take another week to get made where it's something that I could have maybe just pulled the trigger on and explained why initially but that's just the balance I think you'd deal with. - I use that as an excuse sometimes, I haven't been able to make a decision

because I'm still waiting for so and so to get back to me when I say buddy just make the call, you don't have to have everybody involved on every single thing and it's kind of like a safety defence. Technically I'm not stuffing this up because it's someone else's problem, I've delegated the problem. - How do you hold yourself accountable on that? - I think I'm really, I'd like to think I'm pretty good at taking the blame for things, possibly too good to it in that once again conflict and not being able to call bullshit and point the finger if it needs to be pointed in a positive way.

So I think I can definitely kind of take the blame and take the fall for those things but I guess you've got to assess the facts, where are things at, what are we trying to show you, what's happened, what caused it, so it's not what's the effect but what was the cause of those things and trace it back and then create a better process and hopefully next time it doesn't happen again. - Are you good at delegating? - Getting better. - Yeah. - Yeah, so went away on this trip, six weeks, didn't work at all, came back and the business hadn't blown up and we'd picked up.

- It's a good feeling. - Yeah, it was a great feeling. I came back, I almost felt left out, my team went so close, they'd bonded so much whilst I was away and hearing stories of them going out for lunch and all these kind of things. I was like, "Oh, you're missing out." But all of a sudden I realized I didn't have to be the guy, I don't have to be the man anymore, I want to create an environment and equip my people to do those kind of things. So at the end of the day,

if you're not prepared to let your people fail, you're not going to grow because I know I will fail, I will either fail at things or I just won't get them done. So why don't I let 10 things get failed or attempted at any one time as opposed to one thing and then everyone learns and everyone goes and that means the next time that person has the opportunity to participate, hopefully they do a better job at it or as a team we've learned and away we go. Yeah, that's good and I think being able to

fail and fuck up is so much more important, so much better for the business than not trying and not doing something most of the time. What got you into accounting in the first place? So I was good at maths at high school, I naturally was able to do it. I kind of went, I originally thought maybe what I'll do is I'll become an actuary, which is like effectively forecasting and predicting and they do a lot of government based shit and then I read up on it a bit and apparently you can end up in jail a lot because if you're incorrectly predicting things and people make decisions based on that, you can have some massive...

That's insane. So okay, we'll be an accountant and I can remember to this day sitting on a bus talking to a buddy of mine about going okay, I'm going to be an accountant, I'm going to do this and this lady in front of me turns around and goes, "Did you know that our accountants in the top five professions where suicide rates are high?" And I was like, "Oh, thanks, Dale, thanks for the vote of confidence and I'm going to go and that might be my future." What a ray of sunshine. Yeah, absolutely, she was gorgeous.

But thankfully, I haven't, that's great, you know, positive, but yeah, I picked up a gig at a high school working with a large accounting firm in Sydney. I had my claim to fame that I was Australia's first ever public school kid from Frankston that managed to work with a big four accounting firm straight out of high school. I also think that it may be because of me, they've stopped doing the program as well. But I learned very early on that whilst I was really good with numbers and I could be a really good accountant, I

didn't quite fit the mold, you know, working in this large corporate environment, suit and tie, like I was a, you know, punk rock kid, you could call it emo, but I think it was before emo was really a proper thing and I had the bleached hair and the fringe and I took my eyebrow piercing out, I had the ears pierced and I just didn't fit. I still was a great accountant, but culturally I didn't fit in. And I was still there for six years before I eventually moved on, but I just, every step I took,

I could sense there was like, whether it was like the organization pushing back against me or me pushing back against the organization, there was always friction, there was always a lot of friction. Why did it take you six years? Because when you are young and inexperienced and uncertain of what your future looks like, I guess you just commit to something and it looked, to be honest, you know, where I worked was a fantastic organization, it trained and skills you up really well, I learned a lot of really positive things. I also learned a lot of

things that were quite negative and as a result, I'm sure they don't happen in my organization, but, you know, I finished a university degree, pretty much got my post grade, yeah, straight out, pretty much got a post grade kind of qualification on that as well as a chartered accountant, I got a lot of exposure to things. And then the global financial crisis hit and I got made redundant, which is code for, like, we have to get rid of someone that's, I say this, and this is, to be honest, this is probably just me and my,

like, you know, I'm not good enough kind of thing and, you know, they chose me because I didn't fit in or I wasn't good enough and therefore I was let go and so I was kind of like this, oh, fuck you, like, I'm not good enough for you, like, how dare you even say that, like, yes, you'll say that it wasn't, it wasn't a personal thing but it is at the end of the day, I've had to let people go and eventually you have to choose who is the lowest performing person and that's what it is and so, yeah, okay, cool.

All of a sudden I got cut free but then they slid a piece of paper across the desk and said, we're going to pay you this much to, because of the redundancy, I went, oh, sure, I'll go because I was engaged, we wanted to buy a house, effectively that piece of paper I paid for a wedding allowed us to buy a house, not all on one, that would have been sweet but it just made it achievable and then I all of a sudden had this freedom of, like, for the first time in my life, I

went, I've got a great qualification, like, I finished my course with distinction, I had this history working at a very prestigious accounting firm, I could pretty much walk into most places and pick up a job because I can talk, where do I want to go now and what do I want my career to look like, do I want to stay in this large corporate, do I want to go smaller, am I going to go city and I'm going to go suburban, what do I do here and I remember, we went to Bonny Doon, good old Bonny Doon with, like, my best mate.

What a place. Yeah, best mate and my girlfriends and we went and I remember I had, like, no money at the time and I went in the bottle shop because I'm like, I'll buy a six-pack of beer and I quickly checked, like, to see what my balance was, I think this is before internet banking was really a thing and I put my card in and it said, like, multiples of dollars and I was like, all right, we're going to slam this and I remember that it was kind of like this realization of, like, it's going

to be fine, like, you're going to be all right, like, you are skilled, you're good at what you do, like, you just need to have confidence and believe in yourself and there are opportunities all over the place and just because this global financial crisis meant that this one organization couldn't fit you in doesn't mean that no one else wants you. Yeah, yeah, where did you go from there? After you finished all the tinnies? Yes, after we finished all the tinnies, had a bit of fun at Bonny Doon, a bit of forward driving, it was a bit of times.

So I had a couple of us from some city firms and decided I didn't think that was the right thing for me. A couple of them were, like, incredibly low balling thinking they'll get me for free effectively because I got made redundant, I was like, that's not going to happen. But I actually ended up picking up a job in Frankston of all places. So I did work experience. Beautiful part of the world. Beautiful part of the world, that's where I grew up, it's where I did work experience at this very accounting firm. So when I

was in Bonny Doon, I remember talking to the, like, you know, mate and the girls and kind of going, you know what, if there was one place I'd like to work, it would be this accounting firm. You know, I did work experience there, I had really positive experience, like, it kind of was one of those catalysts for me maybe going, maybe I will become an accountant. And look, to be honest, all I did there was probably like, you know, a bit of data entry crap and fetch coffees for people. But at the same time, I didn't mind it.

Nice environment. So I kind of spoke this out and kind of left it as is and then got back from Bonny Doon, rejected these couple offers, and then got a phone call from someone saying, "Hey, look, I'm a recruitment agent, been chatting with my client," so on and so forth, "they'd like to meet you." Turns out that client was the accounting firm that said, "I wouldn't mind me working there." So I think my decision had already been sealed, like I was going to work there anyway. So I went through and picked up the gig and

then, yeah, then that was my next kind of three odd years there working in a, you know, a suburban small business accounting practice in Frankston. What was the difference between the big one and the little one? Yeah, it's pretty big. So like the big one is like an office in Melbourne with 2,000 people kind of thing and divisions all over the place. The small one is an office in Frankston with 20 people. You're a lot more closer, you're working a lot more side-by-side with people, there's more opportunities to meet and spend time with your clients.

Additionally, you also probably see a lot of the negative side more because when you're in large organizations, they can hide some of that from you, whereas in smaller organizations you get caught up within it. Yeah, and look, there's probably more opportunity to grow in a large organization because there's more ladders, rungs on the ladder where there's less in a smaller, but at the same time in a smaller, you can probably separate yourself from the pack quite easily. If you're very good, which I'd like to think I was at the time and still am, I was able to then pick up some extra roles and responsibilities and kind of progress further there.

And connecting with the clients is probably more your jam. Oh, I love people. I love understanding people's stories and what makes them tick and then why they do things and decisions and then what I can learn as a result of what they've done. And that kind of ticked me on this journey of what that looks like. And don't get me wrong, it still wasn't what I thought the industry should be. It still was, I wouldn't say miles apart, but it was still very different. But it just gave perspective on what, because I was working with smaller businesses, whereas at this larger accounting firm, I was kind of doing a small piece of work on large businesses.

So I got to see the whole thing at this small firm. That's really cool. And I think a lot of people see how their industry works and bitch about it and moan about it and don't actually do anything, but you actually started taking steps towards changing it. Yeah. And I think my bitching and moaning about the industry happened after I finished up at that small firm as well. I got to this point where I was realizing that the accounting industry is just transactional and I massively stereotyped this. But it's like fat blokes in suits speaking jargon and charging way too much money for something.

I'm sure a lot of people could relate that to their accountant. Oh, absolutely. So I was like, I'm just fed up with this whole idea of we're not delivering value. I'm fed up with not understanding and helping people achieve their goals. I'm fed up with giving someone a report like 12 months after something happened that doesn't help them at all. Like yes, they have to do it by law and yes, there may be some learnings that they've got, but how can they apply that learnings when it's happening so far away? So what would it look

like if all of a sudden, instead of being transactional with relational, what would it look like instead of working 12 months in arrears, I was working one day in arrears or one minute in arrears? What if we could all of a sudden have data at our fingertips and provide answers for our clients before they even knew that they had questions? And what would it look like if we start to understand what they're trying to achieve and take that further? So it kind of led me to a point of just, okay, so I'm in this accounting

firm and the next step would be to move into partnership, but I'm 26 at the time, which is a good probably 10 to 15 years before most people would kind of run or own an accounting business. So that may take a bit of time and I wasn't sure whether it was the right environment for me because it was a partnership, but there was one, I think, particularly controlling individual within there and I just wasn't sure whether I was going to have my voice heard and I value communication and sharing as I do with my team.

So I sought some mentoring and caught up with a bloke and then a month later started up Illuminate kind of out of the blue as a 26-year-old with no money, no savings, no clients, nothing. What was your, I guess, mindset like right at the start before you kind of started the ball rolling? As in before I sought the mentor or once you've made the decision to start the business and you were kind of all in, what was your mindset like? Well, the original mindset was like, "Cool, I can charge clients 200 bucks an hour and

I'm going to make millions of dollars," which I learned very quickly was wrong, which was kind of a really good early lesson for me to learn because I set out on the journey to help people not to make money. So it would have been very bad if all of a sudden I started making money straight away because I would have lost that. I would have lost the whole purpose behind it. But I think the mindset for me was just get to know people, build a reputation. I read a book a while ago called So Good They Can't Ignore You and it was a fantastic book.

I don't read very much at all. It's one of the very few I've been able to get through. And I think I developed enough career capital that I was good at what I did, but not many people knew that. So thankfully my business partner is a top bloke, he's not a lot of my partner, but he sits on my board, one of those members, but he had a bunch of strong relationships and I got to meet a lot of people and I got to kind of grow and network through there. And all of a sudden I started to kind of, in my own right, be recognized amongst...

Now I'm not saying that like people say my name and they know who I am, like I'm not Sam Keck. Yeah. Who is that guy? Oh, the badger. The badger. The old badge. Quick sidebar, can you give yourself your own nickname? Is that, is that allowed? Look, I feel like, I feel like the badger can, cause that's who he is. I don't think I've ever, I haven't been able to give myself a nickname. I think I've tried in the past. I know a couple of people who have. Yeah. That's worked. Yeah. Look, they've been called it.

I'm not sure whether it's been like a respected nickname or not or whether it's just called it. I think the badgers clocked that. He's done pretty well. I'm not sure how many people actually greet him as the badger though. I think I talk about him as the badger. Yeah. Yeah. When he's not around, you refer to him as the badger, but when he's around, it's Sam. Yeah. Call him badger every now and again. Yeah. One of our coaches, Cam, has been trying for years to get people to call him the Wiz. The Wiz. The Wiz. It's never, it's not going to happen.

Nah. Sorry mate, it's not going to happen. It's not going to happen at all. It's not going to happen at all. Unless he like, I don't know, pisses all over the sidewalk or something and has something specific that you can take into being the Wiz. Yeah. But, yeah, he'd put different connotations on the Wiz. Yeah. What were you talking about before I really interrupted? That's a great question. I've lost track, mate. I don't know. I think we talked about money and your influence and meeting people and networking and things like that. Yeah. So, it's just creating, so like, yeah, I don't profess to be the badge.

I don't profess to even think that people know who I am with my names. But I'd like to think that people know that about my business. But what I learned is that you have to network. You have to connect with people. And I hate that because I've always been this kind of thing, like I don't want to have to do it the way everyone's done it. Yeah. Like I'm a bit of this rebellious, just because that's always the way doesn't mean it's how it should be. Yeah. But I've learned that you still have to network. You still have to get to know people because at the end of the day, you work with people.

And especially in my industry, if they don't trust you, they're not going to work with you. 100%. They're not going to trust with my clients, and then they will then maybe talk and say, "Hey, you should come and work with Andrew and his team." Or I have to be able to find a way for people to understand that, yes, we've got what we do. Yes, we really give a shit. And yes, we can make a difference. So, I think that was early days. That was the biggest thing was just following Jason, my business partner, because

he had some clients, getting to meet a whole bunch of people, and then all of a sudden being able to provide a bunch of services to clients that was done at a little bit of a different tangible angle. But it went beyond that. So that was just, "Oh, cool, how do we pay the bills?" Because we had no clients. Like, you know, Jase kind of bankrolled me in the early days to make sure I could, you know, pay my mortgage and eat. But we had to pick up clients, and then all of a sudden, we went, "Well, how do we make sure we're, like, connecting and working well together?"

Like, we don't have an office space. We don't, you know, Jase was often at clients. I was often sitting at home. So, well, we just had to use technology to do that. So we, like, ran a cloud-based business utilizing remote servers and all these kind of things six years ago. And early days jumped on the bandwagon with Xero and all the other kind of cloud app softwares that we've gotten. We ran our business, and then we started consulting other people and helped them do that with them. And it just kind of snowballed that all of a sudden, like, it wasn't just about relationships.

It wasn't just about caring and that kind of stuff, but it was about helping people to build a beautiful business at the same time. That's cool. And then all of a sudden, if we can utilize some of this technology, and we can give a ship, and we can then journey and provide accountability, maybe we can actually help them to achieve their goals. So it started happening without us realizing, and then all of a sudden, you look back, and you're like, "Oh." But you had the right, like, reason for it. Totally. At the start. Yeah. You weren't doing it for the cash or for the quick fix or anything like that.

Yeah. Don't get me wrong. There would have been moments where I would have been doing it for the cash. Like, I'm definitely not the... I'm not a righteous person. Like, there are too many people in my world that are just good humans, but I'd like to think that the core purpose of what we're trying to achieve is not to make money. That's a result of what we do. It's a buy a product when you do that. If we do it well, and we have good people and good prices, and people can value what we do, then that's great.

Yeah. I think things like networking and just running a business, like, there's networking for networking sake, which is what we kind of taught at uni or whatever. It's like, you've got to network, you've got to meet people, but then there's networking because you genuinely give a fuck about the person you're talking to, and you genuinely want to learn from them, and try and add value where you can, and it becomes this beautiful symbiotic relationship where everyone's singing hallelujah, and dancing around, and then like... I always avoided it because I was just like, "It's going to be this BMI bullshit of like, you have to refer, and you have to rock up, and you have to do all these things."

I'm like this guy, "Don't tell me what to do. If you're going to try and pigeonhole me, I'm not going to do it because I'm going to fight against it, because I'm going to think of a better way to do it, and you don't want me thinking of better ways to do it. You want me on your side. Yeah. Yeah. Let me be on your side. Let's do this together because I'll just be annoying, and it won't be enjoyable." So I've now started doing a bit of some proper networking, and for me, it's all about just getting to know people.

And whether I work with them or not, whether they work with me or not, that's not the objective. It's understanding my community and understanding what's going on out there, and going, "Oh, well, cool. I didn't even realize that." There's heaps of people doing really cool stuff. There is so many people doing cool stuff. Like, I met this guy recently at a networking thing, and they're in kind of a website and technology. They do a whole bunch of really cool stuff, and he was teaching me stuff about accounting. Yeah. I was like, "What the hell?" He's talking to me about these things that he's been doing with this software and this and that.

That's what I've never even heard of. I'm like, "Shit, man. We're the award-winning cloud accountants out there, and you're teaching me this kind of stuff." If you don't open yourself up to other people, you're not going to grow, and you're just going to think you're amazing, but it's in your own lunchbox, and you're actually not all that good. Yeah, that's really cool. You asked me this question before, but where do you want to take it? Where do I want to illuminate to go? I have a personal perspective on this, and I have a business perspective. For me personally, I want to create a business that doesn't require me at all.

Now, that's not because I just want to sit back in my bathtub with money and drive around a Ferrari, but I want to create freedom so I can pursue the things within the business that is valuable but not be forced to do anything. Yeah. Additionally, I want to open a whiskey bar, so all these things. I want to create a business there, but I also want to create a business and an environment that encourages and equips our team to be amazing, that our clients don't require Andrew to come in and be the superhero with Kate, which I learned recently I don't have to be anymore.

I want to create that environment, so for me personally, that's what I want. As a business, where do I see us taking us? We want our clients to get in bed every day and devote their time to what they value the most, so I want to be able to celebrate on a regular basis the people that are doing those things. A great example I had with one of our clients was, he said he'd surf, he's a tradie, and I'm like, "Cool. Well, if you're going to surf, mate, you're getting up at 5 a.m. every day to work, you're getting home at 7 p.m.

from work, there is no time for you to surf. You've got family, you've got kids, all these kind of things, you're going to have to put a few things in place. Either you've got to find someone to fill a role for you, which will cost money, you'll have to work less, which means you won't make as much money, but you've got to have perspective. We only really had a very brief conversation, that was about it. Then I reckon maybe nine months ago now, I was talking to him on the phone and he's like, "Oh, sweet. Hey, look, I'm just about to go on this trip to," I think it was somewhere off Indonesia to some island.

He's like, "Oh, sweet. What are you doing?" He's like, "Well, some dudes from a footy club are building a surf camp out there and they've got me to come and help to do all the building for my side of things. I'm not getting paid to go, but they're covering my flights and accommodation, I get to surf every day for two weeks." I'm like, "Dude." - It's a dream. - That's the dream. You're doing what we want you to do because you've created perspective. Where do I want to go? I want to be able to have

stories like that and I want to allow my team to hold hands of our clients and not have to have me hold their hands and they can celebrate that with them as well. - It makes the important point in the realization and the reminder that filling the bank count's only a part of it, having those experiences and being able to do all that cool shit. - I mean, look, there's numbers behind all of this. I personally and the board are challenging me that there needs to be numbers that need to be achieved and there needs to be business value that we need to be worth and we need to be generating revenue because I want to pay my staff well.

I want to, if I'm working my butt off, there should be a reward at the end of that for it. That's more than just nice warm fuzzies. - Like we were talking about before, you can have all the philosophical bullshit but if you don't actually deliver on the things you're talking about, then it's just talking rubbish. - If we're not making money, how can we actually make a difference? Because at the end of the day, I'm going to have to say to that client, "I can no longer do this for you because I'm going broke."

- And it's a hard balance because when you focus on one, you're probably not as focused on the other and then you shift and do you feel as though you go ebb and flow between the two? - Oh yeah, absolutely. So we do what we call value-based pricing. So we don't charge by the hour, we charge like, "We're going to do a thing for you, it's going to cost this much." Or like, "Hey, we're going to look after you for 12 months, it's this much per month and you will never get a large bill out of the blue, it's just all looked after."

Which is cool. So I reckon that thing's worth this much and my team will go, "Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. You said that's worth $1,000, I reckon that's worth $100." So then we have this back and forth of me going, "Hey, value-based pricing means that we need to be able to communicate what it's worth and what our clients are willing to pay for it." But if I'm just sitting there going, "Well, to hit budget, I need to charge $1,000 for that thing," I'm losing a plot and we need to then reassess what we're delivering. Maybe we shouldn't be doing that thing because if it's only worth $100 and it takes me 10 hours to do it, it's not worth it.

Definitely. Yeah. Let's change tracks a little bit. Why whiskey? Can we do an entire podcast on this? Yeah. That'd be great. Yeah, we got time. Oh, man. So I used to live in Germana and for those who live down there will know Ray from Seabury Cellars. Great man. He opened his shop, which was five doors down from my house. He's putting a card right here. Oh, I love it. I love it. So Ray and I have a great relationship. He bought the bottle shop there, which is five doors down from my house about a year before I moved.

Yeah. And I remember walking in one day and I didn't drink whiskey at the time. I was just beer, maybe a bit of wine. Not really. Probably just Jack and Coke. Yeah. Good old. And then I remember walking in, I was like, "What the hell?" He totally fitted out the shop, gotten rid of all the bottom shelf stuff or properly put it on the bottom shelf and all of a sudden there's all this quality, interesting stuff. And he's like, "Do you drink whiskey?" And I'm like, "Not really." He's like, "Cool. Turn around." I'm like, "What do you mean?"

He's like, "Turn around. I'm going to pour you something. I'm not going to let it see you." Fucking blow it away. I'm like, "Okay. Fair enough." And for those who've had the experience, it's probably the greatest moment of your life. It's up there. And then you turn back and then there's like three little kind of plastic shot glasses that are kind of half filled with some kind of liquid in it and he's like, "Cool. Try that one." Yeah. And I'm like, "Are you going to tell me what's in it?" He's like, "No. I want you to figure out.

You tell me what you think." And all of a sudden I started to like, "Okay, we'll try some whiskey," and some I liked and some I didn't like. It was all different kind of spirits as well, the gin and tequila and everything. And whiskey just kind of stuck with me and I don't know what it was about. I don't know if it's just I'm a dickhead wanker who likes to look cool and so therefore he drinks whiskey or whether at the time actually- The Mitchell effect. It's quite possibly the Mitchell effect. It's quite possible. But I just fell in love with it, man.

And then like, yeah. I've got a problem. That's no problem. It's a passion. I have so many bottles of whiskey at home that it's not funny. I've got to build another entire shelf to fit it on and I've got my office and it's like- You'd keep your bottles too, wouldn't you? It's all the way around there. Yeah. None of them are empty. They're all like maybe like a tiny bit to full- I hate them dinner. I hate finishing that last little bit. Yeah. Yeah. I went overseas and brought back another five bottles and there was another two bottles that had already been delivered during the month when I got home.

So I had seven bottles all of a sudden and then I went and bought another 15 for work functions which ended up being maybe three that may end up at home as a result. I think for me whiskey is about community and it's like a lot of people love whiskey, a lot of people don't love whiskey. But for me what it is, is you sit around a table, a campfire, wherever it is and you bring a bottle out. It's not like with beer where you just can drink it by yourself and you can smash through a six pack and there's no one's ...

You're going to drink whiskey with people and you're going to bring one bottle, you're not going to share that and everyone's going to have opinions and perspective and it opens conversation and gathers people together and you can have a wanky approach. There's a group of us called the Whiskey Wankers that ... There's a few of us doing it and we do some cool shit and we talk silly stuff about whiskey and we recently did a night where it was like, "Is it single malt or is it a blend?" So I had decanters filled with whiskeys

and you didn't know what you were having and everyone will like to know that Sam Keck didn't get one of them right, which was fantastic so as a result he won a bottle of Johnny Walker Red. Good. But those kind of thing, I just love it. I love the experience, I love learning, I like ... It's just ... Oh man, there's just something about it. Any time you find a bottle of Highland Park, just send it my way, I love that shit. It's really interesting because if we had this conversation 12 months ago, I would have thought you were fucking crazy.

I was like, "What are you talking about?" It's just whiskey but probably towards the end of the last year Tommy T introduced me to gin properly and I found the same kind of feeling with gin. I could sit down with two, three, four, five people and taste the gin neat and then taste it with tonic and taste it with different tonics and taste it with different garnishes and have a conversation and connect over what is just a liquid, but have some really good conversations and ... Sometimes it's the science that goes behind it because it just becomes so interesting, the whiskey reason in Scotland versus a single malt from Australia or bourbon with ...

I used to hate bourbon and I was in Salt Lake City a couple of years ago and I wanted to get a whiskey and they're like, "Why don't you try bourbon?" They're like, "I don't drink bourbon. That's for boggins. What are you talking about? Try this." I was like, "Holy shit." I'm like, "Well, bourbon is a whiskey." All of a sudden, now I like bourbon. It's just this weird ... It's kind of like a trap that you just fall down, I think. Once you start liking something, it goes, but there's so much within it, oh, yeah.

Yeah, it just gets deeper and deeper. I kind of look at it as when you first try gin or try whiskey or whatever, you're looking through the keyhole of a house and then you open the door and you realize this house has got fucking thousands and thousands of rooms with thousands of more rooms and you can just keep going through and you can go to different ranges, never-ending. That's really cool. My daughter thinks that I have ... I've got a beard for those who haven't Facebook stalked me. You'll be able to check on the podcast photo.

Oh, sweet. That'll be awesome. You'll send me your favorite photos of your lid. Okay. I'll do that. Yeah, so my daughter, who's four, thinks that I drink whiskey and that's how I grow my beard. So she thinks that I go and I drink beard because she heard me say beer once and she thought I said beard. So she thinks I drink beard and grows my beard. Oh, that's the cutest. It's outstanding. I imagine that was a thing. That'd be cool. Yeah. There'd be a lot of people who would be drinking a lot of beard. Yeah. Yeah.

That's super cool. How does that love for it translate to wanting to open a whiskey bar, though, because that's a big step. Yeah. So it's probably a combination of stuff. So I love people. I love conversations. I love all that kind of stuff. I also kind of like the idea of like, so I'm in professional services and I give advice. As much as I know I'm paid to give advice, not force people to take it, I can take things to the heart when people disagree or don't do things or don't pay bills and all those kind of things.

So I kind of have this desire of like this freedom of like being able to like connect with people over something that maybe they don't have as much knowledge or experience or maybe they have more and provide an environment where people can feel comfortable to sit and just connect. Yeah. That's right. And over whiskey is a good thing. I have this, "Oh, well, you're running a bar, you have a bunch of drunkards and how do you make sure that it doesn't just become a massive piss up?" Because whilst that might happen, that's not what you want it to be about, but I'm like, "Nah."

For me, it's just this whole like connecting people over a passion that someone has and allowing people to understand more of it. And all of a sudden, I don't know, you just let it go where it goes. It sounds so stupid because it's just whiskey. It's whiskey, but it's more than that, like it's a connection, like common folk is just coffee. Yeah. But it's so much fucking more than that. It's so much more than coffee. You guys just lift some weights, but it's just more than lifting weights. I love the tax return, it's more than launching a tax return, there's purpose behind it.

And the cool thing is, the more I meet more people and meet more business owners is everyone's kind of doing the same thing, just in different fields. Everyone is trying to make the world a better place, everyone's trying to bring people together and grow community and connect and everyone's just got their thing or their way of doing it and their thing they love. And I think that's a really kind of cool thing that I think the Peninsula does really, really well. I think there's a heap of local business owners that love people that just want to help.

They want to communicate, they want to connect. And all the superficial stuff that comes with being successful or success becomes less important when you realize how much you love just doing what you do. I think that's a massive Peninsula thing too. I'll ask a controversial question in a minute, but I think the Peninsula in itself, it's the type of people that it attracts, the people that either move here or decide to stay here. They have this care factor, they care about the environment or they care about people more. They just seem to care a bit more.

They're not as fast paced, they're not as stressed, or they might be stressed, but it's just not there. But the question I was going to ask is, what percentage of people that you hear care and create a community do you think is actually bullshit and they say it to make themselves look good? I could be sitting here just saying, "I care about my clients so I can go and build my mansion." Who knows? I could have a stupid drug addict. That's a really, really, really good question. Because that's a great marketing thing, so compassion. You look at the big four banks and they'll put all this, "We care about you."

I'm like, "Mate, I'm an accountant." What was the profit they posted last year? I work with so many businesses and I have not seen one bank care about any of my clients ever, except for, "Make sure you pay your bill, thanks." Thank you for paying your bill. As a percentage, it's probably hard, it's probably the same as most of the population. Because you want to trust. I'm the guy that trusts people initially and then lets them prove that they're not, which is good and bad. I'm the same. I'm the same. It bites you in the ass sometimes.

Yeah, when I recommend someone to go talk to someone and realize that was a bad call. Yeah. I think that I'd rather be that way, I'd rather give people the chance and have them prove or have them go the other way than not give them the chance at all. It's positive versus negative outlook. I'd rather think the best of someone than think that they're a wanker until I prove it. What it means is I'm walking around with a smile on my face more often than not. Yeah, that's it. We had this conversation in the birthday podcast with all the guys with Tommy and Sammy and Grant and a few other guys.

We did have the optimist versus pessimist discussion. We realized everyone in the fucking circle was an optimist, even Tommy T who hates everything. He's still an optimistic person because it's always about being the best and doing the best you can and things like that. I think when you surround yourself with people like that, and that's why I probably struggled to answer your question in a percentage because the people I surround myself with are all the people that I know are doing things for the right reasons and the people that I continue to surround myself with because I'm a big believer that like attracts like.

If you do the right things for the right reasons, then the right things will end up happening. I hate the things happen for a reason sentiment, but the more I do things, the more I start to realize that things happen for a reason. Yeah. I think it's like, yeah, you're going to trust people and it may mean you let down a little bit here and there, but I trust people implicitly to begin with, but I'm also really good at challenging stuff. I think if you're going to be the person to trust them, you also need to be the person who can ask the questions early.

If you don't ask the questions early, you don't challenge something like an advisory council for some software out there. We had some conversations yesterday with something and we challenged something like me/the group were challenging what it was and we were calling bullshit on something that they were talking about and visit needed to happen, but if you're not comfortable to do that and you trust people implicitly, it's going to hurt over and over again. So you got to have that fine balance between like being an optimist. Or having those safeguards or having those tripwires. I believe my business is great, I'm still going to put a budget together.

I'm still going to make sure my cash flow is okay. I'm still going to do all these things that's fine, it's stupid. It's like I've got a cold, I know I'll get better or I could take some cold medicine and it will speed it up a bit. Yeah, I like that. Talk to me about travel, you've been around the world a little bit? Yeah, a little bit. Yeah, more than I think I ever thought I would and I haven't exactly done much. So my first overseas trip was with my honeymoon to Bali when I was

24 and I never had the travel itch, never thought I'd do it and then I went to Bali and that was cool, as everyone, you have fun in Bali, good times. I haven't been yet. You haven't been? No. Look, I'd like to say you're missing out, but I'd like to also say you're not missing much because it could be either or for you, just depends on what floats your boat. What kind of trip you do, I guess. Yeah, so we went to Bali and that was cool and then my wife's best friend got married, but she met someone over in the UK and instead of getting married in the UK or Australia, they got married in Hawaii instead.

Tricky stuff, how'd you do? Yeah. Well, if we're going to disappoint someone, we might as well disappoint anyone and I wasn't disappointed at all. We got to go to Hawaii. Only to a wedding in Hawaii a couple of years ago. Yeah, and that was me. And then all of a sudden, we travel through America and I was like, "Hey, this travel thing is pretty cool." Yeah. I mean, since then, I've done Bali again, America again, Sri Lanka, and most recently Europe and UK. I think I describe myself as an adventure junkie. I'm not an adrenaline guy.

I probably wouldn't necessarily fit in at this point in the current state with most of your blokes at your gym pushing weights and those kind of things. Yeah, we're very different in that regard. We got a lot of guys that just want to be happy and healthy and not do anything stupid. But the cool thing that we realized a long time ago and we're starting to teach everyone is that between the elite athletes and the crazy people versus just living and being strong so that you can do all the shit that we need to do in daily life like play basketball on Monday nights without doing your medial, it's not that different.

Yes, there's some intricacies in between the different kinds of training and yes, there's an intensity and a volume aspect to it. But at the end of the day, it's the same stuff. I guess it's what you want to get out of it as well. Exactly. So yeah, I'm an adventure junkie. I like experiencing new things. I like going down the alleyway and seeing what's at the end of it kind of guy. And I've gone to China too. Yeah, I did that for a... What was that like? Pretty cool. I was there. So I've got a social enterprise that I've started with bamboo toothbrushes and giving all our money away for Aboriginal communities, which is cool.

And we were there for like three nights. On the morning of the last night that our door was knocked on and there was two policemen asking for our passports. However, the night before we went out with our guide and left our passports in a baggies car because we didn't want them to get accidentally pinched or lost because we were going hungry. So he still had one. He was on the way to pick us up in a couple of hours time and we had these Chinese policemen who didn't speak English. So I had to pull out Google Translate and try and like say, "I don't have my password."

We called the guy. He spoke to them. Apparently, and here's a hot tip that anyone goes to China. If you're not staying at a hotel and you're staying like Airbnb and you're staying more than I think it's like two nights or something like that, or it could even be, I'm not sure exactly how many nights, you have to report to the local police office. There you go. And you have to fill out a form to let them know that you're staying there. And I'm assuming it could be something to do with making sure that you're not drugs or whatever it is.

So they saw two white boys in a very non-white boy area. And I remember like one night some security guard just asked us, "Oh, what are you here for?" "Oh, we're staying here." "Oh, yeah, yeah. We're just up there, room number this." And they're like, "Okay, cool." And they left there. We're like, "Oh, that must be fine." They were just checking to make sure it was okay. And then the next morning, we have these guys. That's an accident. Yeah. But China's cool. I think I realized, and I'm very cautious about to say this because I've said this to people I know well.

I think it realized, I'm not a racist, but I realized maybe there's some racist tendencies that were within me that I didn't realize. So I went to China expecting it to be a communist country because that's what Hollywood had told me. Yeah, that's what it would have been. And it was just a bunch of Chinese people living life, going to movies, eating food, having fun. And I was like, "Oh, this isn't what I was thinking." Yeah, maybe there was some weird and wacky things that you kind of go, "Oh, yeah, that's just the Chinese thing." But it was still a cool place.

Really cool. We found a whiskey bar and we chatted with some Chinese dude who lived in Adelaide for six years. And it was mad. So it was really cool. Love China. And we're hopefully going back again this year to go visit bamboo plantations and check some more stuff out too. Talk to me about the social enterprise. Yeah, cool. So it's called Big Little Brush. And one of my best mates, Joel, about four years ago now, one night we were chatting after a conference that we both went to and he was telling me about this idea

of how he's had some issues with his teeth over the years and to an extreme part of where he almost passed out in the shower from an infected abscess in his teeth. So he went to the dentist and he realized he could go around the corner to a dentist. It wasn't an enjoyable experience, not necessarily the cheapest thing, but he could do it. It can happen. There's a public system that can support that it can happen. And he did a bit of research and I'm not sure if the facts are consistent now or whether they've changed, but I think the idea was there's one dentist to 5,000 adults in Australia, somewhere like Kenya, it's like one to half a million.

That's crazy. And I think something like some of the other kind of really minor African countries is like one to maybe five million. They just don't have a dental care. Even as you dig further, apparently dental hygiene is like number two behind clean drinking water and preventable things in emerging communities. So what can we do? And he had this idea of what would it look like if we sold toothbrushes and we took the profits of those toothbrushes and we invested them into sustainable projects that supported dental care in emerging communities and kind of fast forward about three, almost four years I think, and big little brush has been around for almost 12 months now.

And it's morphed into the toothbrushes are bamboo toothbrushes, so they're biodegradable. So every toothbrush that's plastic takes 600 years to biodegrade. So just imagine the waste, it goes even worse when you think of glad rat and how long that takes to go. Yeah. Straws. Straws and all the kind of crazy stuff. So we've got biodegradable bamboo toothbrushes with biodegradable bristles on it. We sell them and we make money and then we have partnered with a couple of Aboriginal communities or organisations that support that. So we're not the guys trying to do the groundwork, we want to support that.

And then the idea is we take our profits and we reinvest them in. So social enterprise, it's not all of our money going to it because we need to reinvest into the business to be able to generate that. But yeah, you're about 12 months through, we've sold a buttload of toothbrushes. We've learned a lot of lessons. There's a really cool team behind it. There's five of us involved. And yeah, big little brush. That's cool. Yeah, it's pretty cool. Get around it. Get around it, big little brush.org. And you can buy toothbrushes and they will get sent to your door and you will look like a rockstar.

Amazing. Cannot guarantee if you look like a rockstar. Rockstar's a good word. Yep. Great. Great word. Love it. Solid. I've got a bunch of short, sharp questions for you. Go ahead. You can dive into a deep answer if you want or you can go service level. Service level. All right. Have you had a defining moment? Okay, I wrote a blog about, when I say defining moment, this is probably not a negative defining moment, but it was like a realization. I was sitting on the couch one night after working my ass off, getting home and my wife was crying in the kitchen.

And I realized after like going, "Hey, what's going on?" I realized I wasn't present at home. I was so focused and committed on what I was trying to do with my business that I just wasn't present. And I had kids and I wasn't caring. So I think for me, that was a big defining moment in purpose. So yeah, that's probably one, not a positive one, but it was also positive. It's come out of it. Growth isn't always positive at the time, but I think when you can be aware of that, then all the shit stuff, it ends up being a good thing.

If it doesn't hurt, is it really doing much? Definitely. What's your favorite fun fact? About myself or just in general? Just in general. Oh, far out. Fun fact. It's funny. This is the least deep question I ask, but everyone struggles with it. Because it's like- It could be anything. Unless you're someone who has fun facts, you wouldn't actually think of fun facts. Like Eliza K? Yeah, Eliza K could know fun facts. There's a couple of people in my office that would be very much about fun facts. Talk to me about the ingrown hair. Oh, shit. I shouldn't have told you about that.

No, you shouldn't have. It's something that I learned a fun fact today. Cool. There's something that's called a polynomial sinus, and it's not necessarily an ingrown hair, but it's where hair, for some reason or another, tunnels under your skin, typically at the top of your butt crack. It can happen in your fingers if you're like a hairdresser as well, and it creates infected tunnels of skin and puss in hair. Lovely. When I was around about 24 years old, this happened to me, and I had this lump around my coccyx bone, and I thought, "Oh, what's this?"

Maybe I'll just hurt myself with basketball, that's weird. And I went to the beach, and it was like rock hard sand, lied down, I felt like this pop. I was like, "What's that?" And then I realized there's all this puss and blood, and it was gross as. I'm like, "Oh my gosh, I've got cancer, I'm going to die." So it turns out that it's a polynomial sinus, and you have to get it operated, because if you don't, it can infect your bloodstream, you can go septic, and you can die of a hardcore. So they had to cut out about a mobile phone and a half worth of flesh out of the top of my butt crack.

Like a 2018 iPhone 7 Plus mobile phone? Oh no, we're talking Nokia 3350, probably like one of them, maybe a little bit more, and because it was so- That's still pretty big. Because it's so big, they can't stitch it up, because it's open, it looks like that. So every day for two weeks, I had to have a nurse that came and had to take the packing after we were going to clean it up, I was like dosed up on drugs, biting a pillow, and I think my girlfriend, who's now my wife at the time, I'd been dating for like three months, and she got to see that.

Maybe that was my defining moment. Good way to be vulnerable. If you ever want to marry the girl of your dreams, let her see your ass crack in all its glory. Yeah, yeah, that's insane. That's a crazy story, I love that. Why do you write? Why do I write? Yeah, because you were talking about blogs a couple times. Yeah. I really like sharing experiences with people on the hope that it will help them. One of the big things in my industry as an accountant is that I feel that everyone keeps things to their chest, they're all thinking about themselves, and they don't want to share on the off chance that they may lose a client or something like that.

I'm upset. If it wasn't for people that I connected with when I started my journey, I wouldn't be where I'm at now. So I want to give back to that. So as a business, everyone on the team writes blogs, whether it's about accounting things or about life things, it's about that, and then I have, I guess, a side shit that Andrew's going through. So I tore my MCL on Monday night playing basketball, and I was sitting in the hospital, and I just jumped on LinkedIn and just kind of punched out this whole, "When is enough enough?

When do you say that the pain is too much, I quit," in life, in business, in sport. So I just like to share, and it's just cool. LinkedIn is this environment where you can throw something out there, and 30 people you've never ever met, all of a sudden start talking about that topic. And for me, yeah, it's cool, I like it. That's really interesting. What was your conclusion to that? When is enough enough? It's still up in debate. If you're my mother, enough enough was maybe six years ago when I've already had six surgeries, but for me, it's like the combination of passion versus pain, and when does the pain go past there.

I've got kids now, and I want to make sure that I don't have to be in a wheelchair when I'm 45, so I have to take that into account, but I know that my mental state, if I don't play basketball, will be significantly less. So it's a balance. Yeah, one of the biggest nuggets I think someone shared on there was he plays footy, his body's starting to get a lot sore, and he's transitioning to more of a coach who still plays, but he's not going to play a coach, and so I take that from a

sport and from a business perspective of when you're not the best at it, you need to let other people take that role, and you can transition into a role when you're mentoring and guiding them and steering them, and you need to be able to do that, otherwise you're filling a spot for someone. Yeah, yeah, and if you just keep letting your ego drive it, you'll eventually end up with needs that don't work. I unfortunately have a giant ego, and I feel like I'm 18 years old in a basketball court when I'm 32. You know when to check it, there's nothing wrong with it, but when you don't, I'm super competitive.

This is playing in like the, so Common Folk, my business, Illuminate Common Folk co-sponsor a team called The Bean Counters, it's amazing, but this team's gone through a few different iterations, and Benny Hogue's played on that team, and Snackney's Achilles with that team, so it's now had a couple of injuries that have come through, so I'm wondering whether Sammy Kext is trying to take people out. Maybe we need to sponsor the physical preparation for The Bean Counters, I think we might have to do that. We could have an on-site pre-game game room loaded up, we could make that a thing.

We could definitely make that a thing, that's a good idea. What advice would you give a 15 year old version of you? Be true to who you are, don't pretend to be something else, don't just do something because that's what everyone expects you to do, check yourself and be who you are. There's too many people that are just copy pastes out there, and whether it's businesses or individuals, we just say the same things, we do the same things, and the independent thought is getting lost deeper and deeper, and as a result, I feel like as a society and a community, we're not able to proceed further.

There's this bloke called Rob Bell, wrote a book called The Velvet Elvis, he was like a Christian pastor, now he's more of just like a public speaker, and like the Christian movement kind of shunned him a bit, he wrote this book called Velvet Elvis, and the premise of what I get of it is, imagine someone painted the most amazing painting you've ever seen in your entire life, and what they did is they held a press conference and said, "Everyone behold, look at how amazing this painting is, you can all stop painting, it is the best painting ever," and all of a sudden, art would not proceed, and I feel it's the same thing.

If all we do is we go, "Tim Ferriss," or think of all of those guys out there who are fantastic speakers and they've got great ideas, and we go, "I'm just going to be them," we're never going to progress further, and all we're doing is we're creating replications, and I think from within business as well, if I keep hiring Andrews, I'm just going to have a drive by Andrews, we're never going to become better, but if I've got Andrews and Shanes and Micks and Sarahs and Cates and Beths and Brooks and Naomi's- Don't miss anyone. Christie's.

It's hard to do, I tried to do that for ten months and I was like, "Ah, shit." Yeah, I think that's everyone. Yeah, very good. I like that. If you were remembered in one sentence, what would it be? If I could be remembered in one sentence, what would it be? I think the phrase that came out a little while ago is just, "The misfit who gives a shit." I think that fits well. I've never really fit in, particularly in my industry, but sometimes in other social circumstances, but I feel like I really give a shit, and as a result of that, it works well.

Often talked about it in relationships, sometimes I find I'm the front door, not the couch. I wish I was the couch guy, the one where you get to know someone, you hang out, you become best buddies and whatnot, whereas on the front door, I'm the happy-go-lucky bloke who sees you and says, "Now go over to that person, you can have an everlasting friendship with them." It's cool to know that. I've got a couple of close friends, but I'm more of just that vibe is where it fits, so that misfit doesn't quite fit in, but does. Really cares.

That's good. What are you most proud of? What am I most proud of? I've got a wife and two kids who love me, so I'm thinking in my head, "Am I just saying that because that's what you should say as a parent, or is that actually what it is?" I think without a question or doubt, I've got a pretty sweet family. I don't really deserve them, but that's cool that I've got them, and don't ever leave me. I think they're four-in-one, my girls are. I'm proud of them, but I haven't really seen enough to be proud of them because they haven't spread their wings.

I'll check with me in 15 years' time, and it'll be totally different. If I go outside of the family realm, what am I most proud of? I've got a pretty sweet beard. That's true. Yeah, that's deep. That's true. I tried to grow a longer beard while I was away, and I get a little health here, and it doesn't feel out there, but we'll get there. This happened. I remember, I did Movember for many years because my birthday is the 29th of November. It fits perfectly. I remember one month, halfway through, way back in the early days, Grilled would give you a free burger if you were doing Movember, which they would have lost so much money.

I remember going in there on the 15th of November, and they wouldn't give me a burger because I didn't have the mustache, because I'm blonde, and you couldn't see it, and they're like, "No, no chance." I tried to grow my eyes. It would never work. Then for some, I don't know, it's like, I don't know, the nectar of the gods was blessing me. Maybe I drank enough beards like my daughter thinks, went camping, and all of a sudden, you could ... It just worked, and it's been two and a half years now, and I cannot see any reason why I would take it off, for fear of ...

I'm a pretty pale white boy, and I've put on a couple of kilos over the last few years, so I feel like I'd just be this pudgy-faced baby kid, and it would just not work. That beard works. That's how it works. Keep going. Coming out of the proud question, what are you most ashamed of? The moment I shared beforehand about my wife crying, I'm not happy about, but I've learned about that. Your growth. It was a massive growth one. It was definitely a massive growth one. Yeah, you know, if I go lighthearted, I can't drive a manual car.

I never learned how to drive a manual. My first two lessons were. I'm ashamed of that, probably, but yeah, I'd say that there's definitely been moments, I guess as a husband, where you kind of go, "Mate, you pull your socks up, come on." I can be very me-focused about what I want, and as well being the front door kind of bloke. My wife told me one day that I didn't know this, said, "You'll often be in a conversation with someone. Someone else will walk up, and you literally will stop talking to them, turn your back, and talk to someone else."

Yeah. Like that's normal. I'm like, "No." She's like, "You do that. You get over conversation." I think one of the things, that's an aspect which I'm not overly pleased with, but at the same time, I don't realize I do it. That's just nature and the natural, so you've got to be aware of that to actually change your behavior. Correct. Without being made aware, without my wife crying and telling me why, without people pulling up and holding you accountable things, so how can you change? I'm lucky that I have people in my world that are willing to do that.

Yes. Give a kick on the bum. Yeah, I can be pretty stubborn and pretty controlling and try to force and explain why that's not the case, but give them credit. There's some good people out there that are willing to speak, and I'm glad they do. That's cool. What do you look up to? I've never really had a mentor in my life. I appreciate my folks. They're awesome people, but I wouldn't say they guided me through things. There was never a family member or an old dude from church or any of those kind of things that I connected with, so I guess I look up to its moments for me.

There's people sitting here and having a conversation with someone like yourself. I'm like, "Dude, this is amazing. Someone wants to have a chat." I look up to those moments where people are willing to give of themself, so whilst I wouldn't say there's one person I sit here and I look up to. I think it's a combination of a community-based thing, so without community, I wouldn't be where I'm at. I learn in conversation-based learning, and it's people that are willing to give of themself in those moments, and I may never meet that person again, but I

think that's what I look up to, people that do that, and I probably couldn't even tell you half of their names that I've had those moments with over the time. Cool. That's a really cool answer. All right, the last couple of favorites to finish off, favorite movie? So as a kid, it was the Green Mile, good old Tom Hanks, the big dude and the tears and the mouth thing. I like a bit of James Bond, pretty big fan of that. The polling dynamite, let's go deep, love a bit of that. So yeah, probably kind of float around there, I'd say, yeah, yeah, definitely.

Good. But I'm probably more of a TV show guy now, though. Yeah, favorite TV show? The Office, by a mile. UK. The US, I like the UK, but the US, it's just got more to it. Brooklyn Nine-Nine was rest in peace and then revived again recently, very happy with that. In the world we live in, that was never going to stay dead. And then as a kid, it was Scrubs, as like a 14, 15-year-old like J.D. and Turk man, that was the thing. That's my jam. It was the jam. Now, other stuff I like out

there, that's pretty cool, but I think if I'm going to the classics, it's Scrubs, The Office and Brooklyn Nine-Nine and I am a happy man. It's a delicious trio. Absolutely. Favorite travel destination that you've been to? It's a tie between Scotland and Sri Lanka. So I went to Sri Lanka for three weeks a few years ago and it's just a mesmerizing place. And I went to Scotland at the end of our trip just recently and man, that place is amazing. And the whiskey, it helps, but just incredible, incredible place and the polar opposite, literally the polar opposite kind of countries.

Favorite book that you haven't mentioned already? Oh, see, I'm not a reader. Couldn't tell you. Cool. I reckon in my adult life, I've read maybe five books and I'm 32. Nothing wrong with that. I'm not a reader. That's all right. You get your information for conversation, right? Yeah. Yeah. So I'll talk to people about the books there, but then I'll glean those kind of things and I'll have... That's why networking for me is something I realized, actually, this is where you should be going because this is how you learn. But yeah, books never been a thing.

Cool. Favorite place in the world? Bed is pretty cool. Good answer. Bed is very solid. Like I said, there's this group of people that do this before 7 a.m. club and often they'll share photos and I always take a photo of the blinds at quarter past eight. I think I did this morning, quarter past eight, I shared it with my team. One of them was at Common Folk already at 7 a.m. and they're like, "Oh, I'll be in at work at 9.30, taking a photo with a couple of other people," and I'm like, "Yeah, you guys are doing...

You're too early, guys. It's 8.30." Bed is a big one. I really like... So Bright, in terms of location, is just a beautiful town. I've gone there a few times. So there's nothing like going there. I'm an outdoorsy kind of person, but I'm not someone who's going to go trek into the wilderness, I think. Cool. Yeah, happy with that. And then there's nothing like a good shit on the toilet at the end of the morning. Yeah. Great call. It's like this nothing box, right? And there's this... I remember watching this video a while ago of this kind of relationship kind of dude and he talked...

Talking about the difference between men and women, and he talked about blokes have this nothing box, and it's where you can literally sit and nothing is... Nothing is going... You're not thinking about anything. Nothing is happening. And I'm sure that women and men have the same kind of space, but it's predominantly men that he reckons, and it exists and it's glorious. And my wife doesn't really do it, but often will be like, "What are you doing?" But at the end of the day, I'll have dinner and I'll be like, "Do you mind if I just check out for like 15 minutes?"

Because I've been thinking all day long and I've come home and this is cool. I need to either sit on the couch or I need to go do a turd and I need to do nothing. Not thinking about things. So I think for me, it's just that reset space. I like that. It's good. Great answer. Last question. Favorite whiskey? The best whiskey I've ever had was from Lark Distillery in Tasmania, but my favorite whiskey is Highland Park, which is the northernmost distillery in Scotland up in Kirkwell on the Orkney Islands. I've got many, many bottles. I've got one bottle I bought back from Scotland that I probably may not ever open, which is called the Highland Park Fire.

They did a fire and ice edition and it cost me way too much money, but it's definitely worth it. You just can't get it anywhere. So I've got that. But if I'm going to go on a regular drink, Highland Park Dark Origins is probably one that I've had a few bottles of over my time and it's just a perfect amount of pee. It's warm. It doesn't burn. It's just delicious. Good. How can people get around Illuminate? Get around us. Yeah, absolutely. So we're all over the socials. You can find us on Facebook. Look for Illuminate Partners.

It's probably going to be easier. We're on Twitter. We've got a pretty strong kind of gif game on Twitter, Insta. We're all over that. Good. We've got some pretty strong game on Insta. Jump on our website, Illuminate. So it's with the number eight, I-double-L-U-M-I-N, number eight, because we wanted to make 75-year-olds confused. Yep. Other than that, we're in Mount Eliza just cruising up. We've got lots of whiskey. We can have a chat. Do life. Love your work, mate. Thanks for coming on. Thanks for having me, man. Good chat. Pleasure.