Michael Graham: Partner at Cutcher & Neale

In this episode of the NewyTechPeople podcast, we sit down with Michael Graham, a partner at Cutcher & Neale. Michael shares his journey from labourer to accountant to systems consultant, highlighting the importance of adaptability and continuous learning in the ever-evolving world of technology and finance. He discusses the shift from traditional accounting systems to cloud-based solutions, the impact of AI on various industries, and the importance of understanding core business processes. Michael emphasizes the value of communication skills, problem-solving abilities, and the need to stay abreast of technological advancements. He offers insights into effective team management, the balance between remote and office work, and the future of data integration and AI in business decision-making. This conversation provides valuable advice for both seasoned professionals and those just starting their careers in the tech and finance sectors, underlining the importance of understanding the ‘why’ behind processes and the ability to explain complex concepts in simple terms.

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Please note: this transcript has been auto-generated and may contain some errors.

Welcome to another episode of the NewyTechPeople podcast. On today’s episode we have Michael Graham, our partner at Kutcher and Neil. Welcome, Michael.

Thank you. For those of our audience who might not know who you are, I always try to open up with who is Michael Graham? And then we’ll go into a little bit of your career background as an individual. My first passion is surfing, always has been.

So I’ve been doing that since I was a kid. Basically got a couple of kids. Well, the, they’re one of them’s now 19, about to turn 19, so they’re not really kids anymore.

Yeah, and I just have a passion for the outdoors, beach, you know, and basically if there’s a surf there somewhere, that’s, that’s, that’s typically me. Beautiful, mate. From a technology perspective, you’re a partner, you’re obviously on new tech people podcast from an accountancy firm, mate.

Talk to me about that. How have we got to this conversation today? Well, it’s been an interesting path for me. I’ve been at Katrina 26 years.

So when we talk about how many jobs have I had, this was my third job. I was a labourer whilst I was studying at tafe. I then went labour market program business, Mayfield Skillshare, did that for a few years.

Sort of cut my teeth as an accountant, doing tenders, budgeting, all that sort of stuff. And then at some point, I think it was Amanda Vanstone decided she didn’t want to have a lot of little, little players in the labour market anymore. So she, she shut us down and I got a job at Kutcher and Neal as a systems cons consultant and slash bookkeeper, just doing basic bookkeeping and putting systems in for businesses at the time, which it was an interesting time because at the time there was, there was a lot of change going on.

A lot of old DOS based systems were being moved along and myob, which was mind your own business was, was the new kid on the block and it sort of. So we started rolling that out and that’s sort of where I cut my teeth, mate. Nice.

We’ll get back in and we’ll get into the systems part in a second. But I like the idea of just trying to figure out people’s paths so labor into accountancy, into using that, accounts into the systems. What made that mindset change? What led to that career decision? Well, I mean, if I’m perfectly honest, I didn’t love school, I went to tafe, couldn’t get into uni, and that was perfectly fine for Me at the time because I think TAFE sort of suited me.

I did an associate Diploma of accounting which I think changed names a couple of times, but basically majored in accounting at tafe. And then so labouring was just to sort of get a bit of cash as I was studying full time. And then obviously once I found position that sort of got me into what I was trying to get into, which was bookkeeping and accounting and using accounting systems.

That’s sort of how that first job sort of came along. I think it’s always interesting to have a look at, you know, young people making career decisions or life decisions in year 12, now, year 10 earlier and how that isn’t the be all and end all. Like you don’t have to make that decision right then that might not.

And very high chance will not be the career that you choose and stay with life. And just to see people that have ended up being successful 26 years with the same organization but never set out that path, I think it’s just, it’s quite refreshing, I guess. I mean I worked hard.

I knew at the time I only had a diploma so I had to sort of prove myself. I guess the thing I’d say to anyone is that you need to be a sponge. Cause I was lucky.

I’ve had two fantastic mentors. The first one, Peter Taren, when I worked at Mayfield Employment Training and Development. I mean he gave me every opportunity to learn to tender, to learn how to work out some of the cost rates, do all the budgets and then get into adult education and actually deliver adult education.

It was, it really gave me a huge grounding, I guess and made me a all rounded person to be able to eventually become a consultant. I guess because I’d learned how to deliver training to people, how to communicate to people, but then also learning all the financial and stuff underneath. It was a great opportunity.

It’s probably then I realized I didn’t want to do tax at all if I was ever going to be a traditional accountant. Yeah, that just wasn’t me. Yeah, man, I like that, the communication piece there.

Right. You’re obviously in come from that finance background, our system. So very technical.

Technical. But yeah, you’ve mentioned communication as your key skill there. How important is that for.

It’s huge. And I must admit I see it in a lot of it jobs where they can be technically brilliant but simple things like getting back to clients and talking to clients and even if you go, oh I’ve got nothing to tell the client but that you actually do have something to tell the client that is you’re still working on it. And it’s just that whole constant communication and knowing which, which piece of communication to use.

Yeah, I talk to my team all the time about it and say like your first response really should be the phone. Have that conversation and I guess get all the ambiguity out really early. Once you arrive at what you think is probably the troubleshoot or the solution, then there can be a bit of an email chain and that’s okay.

And it could be a vendor email chain, could be incorporating the client, whatever it might be, but at some point it’s just regular contact. And I guess I learned really early to present. I can still remember the first time I presented to a room of 120 practice managers.

It was quite a few years ago now, hate say how long ago that was probably 15 years. And it was a huge room and remember thinking, right, okay, I’ve just got to imagine it’s one person again. Like it’s.

I’ve sat around boardrooms many times, have no, no problems doing that. And I guess when you go to a huge room, you’ve just got to think about, is this the same thing? They’re there to listen to you and to not get too nervous or worried about those sorts of things. Yeah, I think presentations are big skill, especially as people go up the career chain.

It’s something that is often overlooked. Hey, I’m going in a technical role. I’m not going to need to do that or need to present whereas technical roles.

And we’ll get into AI and machine learning in a little bit. But I think with the advancements in technology, more and more of those roles will be taken off our plates. And that communication piece and whether it be communicating and just having conversation or presenting actually becomes a really valuable piece on top and being able to communicate what’s happening from the technical perspective, it’s knowing your audience.

Yeah. That’s the critical piece. I mean, I’ve got team members at the moment who are extremely technical and awesome people, but every now and again I’ve got to talk to them about, remember, your audience like that client doesn’t need to know that level of detail.

They don’t want to know that level of detail. They, they just want to know holistically what’s the solution and how you’re going to get me out of this or if it’s a new solution, you know, what’s the value in that solution as opposed to the nitty gritty nuts and bolts, how you’re putting it in that doesn’t matter. They just assume you can do that.

Yeah, no, I clearly agree, mate. All right, let’s get the technical side. So you’ve moved through the career, got to that point where you’re starting to work out of that tax more into the Systems integration pieces.

MYOB’s coming on the world and becoming more of a player. That’s pre 0, right. That was probably pre 2000.

So the two big fish in the pond then were QuickBooks, which was reckons product, which was from America, and then there was MYOB. I’d probably say MYOB won that race. There was probably for us about 66 to 33.

So 2 third, 1 third going in and both still excellent products and they were doing really well. But then unfortunately Zero has come along much flashier, Beautiful gui, a different way of doing, I guess, banking and bank reconciliations and coding. And then they actually had the AI creep in much, much sooner than people probably recognized.

And then I think it was 07. They put payroll in for the first time. And then if you look at any curve around Zero, that’s when it just shot up.

And a great success story. Came out of New Zealand to start with, right? Yes, yes, came out of New Zealand. There was actually a lot of xmyob people went to Xero and did a lot of the, I guess getting the partnerships in place and all those different bits and pieces.

And I think it’s about then Reckon started to sink. Obviously they lost their license to QuickBooks. They were left with the desktop application which they tried to go to Cloud.

So it was hosted there, but that was probably the end of it. NYB made that weird decision to sort of do a semi hybrid solution. I still remember the CEO making that call in Brisbane at a conference years and years ago.

That did not prove to be the right outcome for them. And in anything, I feel like they’re now probably where Reckon were five years ago and they’re starting to sink. Yeah, Zero’s just taking everything on and I guess the next fish will come along.

Yeah, and a quality product, right. It’s a really good product. It’s a different way of doing things and it has its limitations.

And as long as you recognize that, I think it still frustrates a lot of people, I guess people like me anyway, that like to do really good management accounting. And I look at it and go, so you still can’t do budgets at the financial category level at the moment, but you can put other systems on top like Fathom and Cruxer and a whole stack of Other stuff to make it sing and dance. But no, it’s a brilliant product.

This is starting to get in the more technical side of things. So your role now is looking more at how you can help your clients with different systems integrations. Let’s go into that more data side of things for you, because obviously coming from that finance background or accountancy background, data’s, you know, the whole world.

When you’re looking at multiple different systems, what’s. What’s your viewpoint? Where are we currently at. If you’re a business of substance, and let’s say you’re probably turning over more than 5 million, but you’re probably doing less than 150 million for the most part, I find you can’t run the business on one system, like everyone will try.

But the more you dig into your operational stuff, you’ll probably find there is actually another system there. And that system’s called Microsoft Excel. We all know it, we all love it.

We have internal jokes and call it the accountants love tool. But Excel’s typically there supporting your accounting system in some way, whether it be operational or whether it be reporting. So that’s usually so.

I would argue most businesses probably have two systems. Where I come from and where my team comes from is we like to ensure that if you put a piece of data in that it can be used and flows throughout all your systems and it’s never dead. So by that, I always say to people like, you’re putting it into Excel.

So unless you got queries behind that and probably using Excel to its limit and querying it and doing refreshes and things like that, for most people it’s drop the data in, add it to a model, make some changes, but it’s dead data at that point. So what we try and do is have people think about that entry point for that piece of data. But more so why do you need it? So is it adding value and can you resource it? Because we put in ERP systems all the time, but what we find is we might have a team there that might be two people in finance, one person in production, and there’s just not quite the team there to actually deal with the data to get the management outcomes or financial reporting outcomes that they’re trying to get.

So it’s really important, I guess, to counsel business owners in terms of what they can get out of it. But then what it takes to actually do that in terms of the data entry. Because I think different people would have different needs.

Right? Like, so you could overcook that as well. I imagine for, you know, we’ve got, I don’t know how many different systems we’re using and bolted together with various APIs, but I think you can over overcook system. We’ve definitely done it internally where I’ll bolt this on and bolt this on and how we’re not actually getting use out of that.

And the. There’s some pretty good vendor salespeople out there these days. How do you come in from that perspective where you’re consulting with business owners on like, is it, you know, is it.

This is a bare minimum, let’s start there and then build upon. Is it. Strip it back.

Like what’s, what’s sort of your approach. I always start at the very top and work backwards. So I want to understand what are the key drivers of a business.

And once we understand that, we go, okay, so how do we get that information? And then working backwards, do we have the data to support that information? Yeah. And then often we find there’s a couple of missing pieces or we find that they’re getting that data, but they might be putting it into something like an Excel or something else where it can’t actually be used again or it’s been constantly collected, unable to give you any trends and things without continually massaging it, manipulating it. And then we all know there’s.

You only gotta google how many errors are in the typical Excel model and I’ll tell you there’s a raft of them. Regardless of whether someone thinks it’s perfect, we just top down and then go, okay, so what do we need or what systems can we actually use to support that information to get to it? And then you sort of touched on it when you said so how many different systems do you have? And what we’re finding is that a lot of these subscription products that you’re getting, if you think of a Venn diagram, a lot of the functionality overlaps and you might just want that little piece, but you go, but everything else it offers already get that out of the other system. So then you gotta decide which system gives me the best bang for my buck and I may actually need to put one on off the table because it just doesn’t add enough value for that little 1%.

Otherwise you’re probably moving towards maybe 10, 15, 20 million. And then you start to go, okay, well at what point do I invest in a full financial ERP that has operational functionality as well? So I’m putting my data in and I’m getting all outcomes being operational outcomes, and then typically then financial outcomes at the same time. And you think about that, that marks about that 10 to 15 mil mark before you start and have that conversation.

It is a bit of industry based. A lot of people go, okay, so if you’re in jobbing, so I think of job fabrication, it’s probably one of the hardest businesses in terms of getting information because job fabrication usually given a drawing, quote the drawing, send the drawing off. It’s often been in the Hunter Valley.

Here it’s mining service type business. So therefore it’s, here’s your PO number, off you go, blah, blah, blah, you do it. But then you got to throw labor at it, you got to throw other costs at it.

Everyone wants to know, like, how much margin did I make on that job? You know, so you’re doing job costing at its micro level all the time. So that’s for some businesses, they could be doing sort of 3 to 10 million, but that actually gives them the insights they need. Yeah, they actually have to do that to some extent or they’re doing it in Excel anyway, so they’re running another system regardless.

Wholesale distributors can get away with it a bit before they become too complex. But then some, as soon as they want to have some sort of handheld, sort of wholesale distribution, mobile product in place, then you’re really, you’re jumping pretty quickly into that space. But there’s lots of options for price points.

But then you’ve got the ones who manufacture, they distribute, they import, they do jobbing as well. Job service, job equipment, service businesses like that, once you get to probably a bit over five, you’re already moving into a space where your growth is probably going to continue. You need to start putting, laying the foundations now, getting the change management in place, getting the processes, controls and systems in place.

Because first thing that typically gets out of hand is purchasing. When you’ve got so many moving pieces and you may already have a dedicated purchasing role and that person, there’s a lot of pressure on them. So they really need that history.

But also vendor pricing and all that sort of, I guess, micro data that enables them to do their job and do it well. Obviously when we’re talking about Data and it’s 2024 and we’re talking about data, we’re talking. It was machine learning now AI, obviously with the rise of ChatGPT, everyone’s sort of on everyone’s forefront at the moment.

Yep. What’s the biggest changes have you seen so far in that genuine ML AI space? Are we still at the forefront? Is there genuine benefits? People that you’re Seeing realize from AI yet or are you still just sort of playing with it at the outskirts? I think it’s. I’ve seen lots, I’ve seen every extreme I guess to give you our own internal examples.

Yeah, beautiful. Content writing like often if marketing is slightly under resourced at the time, my PA now will just punch it straight into ChatGPT. We run the teams version so it’s all fenced off and then we just essentially get it to write it for us and then get someone seeing you just to quickly review it and our slant on it, things like content writing.

If you’re not using it for that, you really should consider it. It certainly speeds things up quite quickly. I guess the other big area for us technology wise is coding.

I’ve got four developers in my team because we run a product Ostendo. It has a bit of an older scripting language in practical script. So the guys are brilliant at coding and obviously with Microsoft SQL and different bits and pieces they can code in all those languages.

But if we have to move to something like JSON or JavaScript or something else, they can quickly apply their skills and have it generate it and then because they’ve got that mindset to read it, they can quickly and easily have it interpreted and then drop it in and then just keep refining and asking questions and get it to refine the code. So I think code writing like it’s, it’s really good. I think that part there, it’s quite interesting.

For a software development perspective, there was a time where everyone’s looking at let’s talk front end or just JavaScript in general. People are learning to code online, doing well and then jumping into a junior software development role. I think the big difference and what I’ve heard from a lot of software developers is actually the understanding of good software development practices is the key and learning that from the start because then as you said you’re going to be able to use something like a chat or you can easily pick up other languages.

Once you understand the really solid practices to begin with as opposed to hey, I can make something move around or I can make something look a little bit different. Understanding those really solid practices and having that as your base level, then you can use these other tools to actually write more code for you. You can go back and send, check it, yada yada yada.

It’s unbelievable. And you got to remember I’m no coder, I’m just a self taught coder and if I can get it to write in a language I don’t know. And I come across that like we use a product called SoligoStegrator IO and I had to fix something the other day for something we had.

No one’s got any experience in it. I thought, look, I’ll just jump in, have a bit of a go. I read some help.

I then told ChatGPT to go and have a look at that help. Gave it the URL and said, look at this and you know, understand that? Do you understand it now? Yes. What are you trying to do? I told what I’m trying to do and then it gave me the syntax I needed.

Wasn’t quite right. Yeah. I then dropped it into Soligo’s AI because it’s got its own built in AI and said I need it to do this.

It’s not quite working. What would you change? And it changed it for me. I dropped it in and it worked.

So that took me an hour. Yeah. I otherwise probably spent three days in support trying to get that sorted out.

Coming back to your one on coding though, a big one, I went to Microsoft, had an AI symposium that was earlier in the year and they had a guy there from, I think it was the Commonwealth bank, from memory. It was one of the big, big banks. Their team use Microsoft’s, I think it’s called GitHub or one of those.

They were saying they used a six week cycle. So it was two cycles, which was 12 weeks. They had the AI write 80,000 lines of code for their team.

So what they did was they had it write a lot of the preliminary stuff, the stuff that’s no brainer. Yeah. And then their guys then focused on the stuff that did require thought, did require consideration and structure and things like that.

So it saved them a third. They said, yeah, and I think that’s the jobs in danger if I ever look at it. It’s the same as what we went through five, 10 years, maybe 10 years ago with outsourcing to overseas.

It happened in the call centers. So a lot of call center work was going overseas. Now we’ve got a lot of AI bots, voice bots now that can actually do a lot of that for us.

So not actually having to outsource overseas happened with software development. Software development got really expensive in Australia so there’s a lot of outsourcing overseas again to cheaper labor. A lot of the time when I seen that work, we’d have a software development team here based in Australia.

You’d have some seniors here, you’d have the junior or the grunt work being done by some People overseas coming back, the sense check here, the checking, testing, you know that as you said, the thought process on what are we trying to do, what do we want this code to do, et cetera, et cetera, what business problems are we solving that’s done here at that higher level. But that grunt work was being outsourced. Yes.

Then we went through an issue where everyone brought it back onshore and now we’re seeing that again starting to be outsourced to AI. Absolutely. And I guess the thing in history that I’d probably point out to you is that one of the reasons why I got into ERP Systems was myob and other vendors opened up all their partnerships to bookkeepers and I thought, oh, I’ve got to get out of this market, like it’s not going to help.

So. And a lot of them came in, they upskilled a lot of bookkeepers and different bits and pieces. And then I, so I moved up into ERP systems thinking, okay, well I can value add at that level.

But then I guess Xero really came into the market, hit it hard and then they had bought out bank coding. And I think everyone sort of sat back and went, okay, well where’s the bookkeeping industry at now? So what are, what do they do? But I think you’ll find they adapted. But at the time, I guess I’m old school and I learned, learnt accounting, debits and credits, I learned with T accounts.

I can still do them in my head. So I guess my fear was the new trainees coming in because Kutcher and Neal, we’ve always bought on trainees every year and have done so every year. I’ve been at Kutcher and Neil.

I’ve often wondered like, how do these new kids learn debits and credits and how are they able to then learn those fundamentals in accounting if. If we got zero just coding stuff for you and you never then quite understand it. So then you got to do journal entries, but you’re not, you having so had that foundation and fundamentals.

So they seem to have got. Got over it somehow. So I don’t know what the answer is, but all I can say to your previous comment is that people still have to learn the foundations.

I came back to that software development before. I think the understanding actual core software development principles and the foundations is the key for good software development practices. Yeah.

And I think that will continue to ring true whether it be in accounting or software development or many other jobs. Right. It’s like understanding the core principles to start with.

Having that base level and then you can do the core, the interesting stuff on top. But it’s really hard to just jump in over top of AI or over top of some machine learning that’s going on and actually be able to add that value without knowing what’s happening behind it or why things are happening. Oh, absolutely.

And I make the point. I put on two new trainees this year and I guess I could have just had one and then probably tried my hand at a. Because I have built a few custom GPTs now for help and support.

Beat up our ticket system and our service delivery back to clients when we deliver support. But I made the decision to put two on because I thought we still need to communicate. People want to talk to other people.

So things I was observing was that my clients want people to talk to them. They don’t just want email exchanges and they don’t just want stuff just fed back. That’s pretty generic either.

They want to know that that’s. That’s going to actually solve my problem, my specific problem. Well, this has gone backwards to go forward as well.

Right. You made mention before using ChatGPT for content writing and I can understand that the content is getting bastardized across the Internet at the moment. There’s so much of it out there and so much of it is written by a bot that the actual value of content is being lost.

To an extent, yes. It’s the same happening from a communication perspective. You can get automated like emails.

Everyone’s inbox is getting shredded every day. Right? Yeah. Getting that phone call, that personalized approach, that going back to the old school approach.

And I think it’s happened with remote work and also people going back to the office, everyone went remote, everyone went completely electronic from a communication perspective. And now people are valuing that face to face or the phone, the actual phone call to say, hey, I understand your problem. This is what we’re doing.

And I think there’s that real. It’s a bit of a 180 switch over what we’ve gone through the last few years. Yeah, I just recently this year made the change to some extent with remote work.

I allowed my team members to decide what they felt was right. And then I felt like I got a bit out of hand. It sort of went three, two.

So three at home, two in the office. So I guess you could say as a leader, I reign that back in. I went, okay, at minimum.

Now it’s got to be three in the office and you can do two at home. My expectation, I guess, of My leaders in my team is that it’s four one, so four in the office, one at home. My reason for that is with Zoom or teams or whatever your platform is, people won’t just ring someone as if they’re sitting behind them in the, in the, you know where we sit.

So I’m going, okay. So it’s just not straight away. You’ve got a productivity loss and you got a collaboration loss, you got an information loss and a communication loss.

So it’s so much easier when you’re sitting in the same area that you just spin around and go, hey, what do you think of this? Or how would you approach that? I mean, and we’re in technology like we’re solving problems all day, every day. And typically, unless you’ve been doing a long time like me, and I can assure you I still collaborate all, every day, you haven’t got all the answers. I think my gut feeling for a lot of the, my personal gut feel and also what I’ve seen of a lot of our clients that we have worked with, the people that struggle most, the juniors that have come in, especially if they started maybe fresh out of university or fresh out of TAFE or first job in and you started fully remote, you learn so much just vicariously being in the office and being able to bounce off one other.

I think when people are senior and some people work better remotely and there are some people that do that and when you’re a senior you can do that and they know how to communicate with the rest. But I think the really people that struggle will struggle to sort of have that career growth without some face to face time of the juniors. My deal with my team was I put two trainees on, but that means we must have two people in the office every day.

And they’re in five, so they do five in the office. I’ve just changed that to four, one for one of them. But that’s a part uni day for them.

So I go, that works, that’s okay. But that was the deal with my team. I said we must invest in these people and must invest in teaching them how to communicate and being there for them so that they’re not sitting there procrastinating or anything like that, because they need to be able to get answers quickly and they need the senior people to do that.

And you’re right, I guess they could have, they could ring and do different things. But I just, I feel, I felt for the first 12 months we need people there with them all the time, talking to them, supporting Them and investing in them. It’s the only way they’re going to learn quickly.

Yeah, and I think that’s a big part of training juniors as well, is that investment you may mention of that juniors are going to struggle unless they’re actually invested in. Right, yeah. There’s a lot to be learned.

The technology will take parts of it, but understanding those core fundamentals I think is a big training piece. Well, I certainly haven’t lost sight of the fact that just to employ new people is difficult and especially in the technology space. You know, when I put out an ad, I’m looking for someone who hopefully has learned a bit about accounting or has been exposed to accounting in some way, shape or form.

They’ve got an IT bent, they can work with computers, they might have an interest in information technology, might have an interest in business applications and that they’re a good problem solver, they’re a good communicator, hr and I have a bit of a battle is to go which, where do we put that into seek or how do, where do we categorize that? My last few senior people, I mean, I think Chris going on eight years, Hannah’s on eight years, maybe six years might be the other way around. But yeah, they were hard find. You know, I really need a person that’s quite rounded and different.

Not that they’re different, it’s just that they’re a different type of skill to get the best people that you found then is there a core trait? You mentioned the word problem solving before and I think problem solving or back to these, communication, presentation, problem solving. I think these are the core skills that will continue to follow the great people through their careers. But is there any other personality traits or work traits that you found in people that you’ve had in your teams as juniors that have succeeded? Three of my top people, one of them started with me 19 years ago.

He’d worked front counter in a chemist whilst he was studying. So, you know, he’s already good at people skills and communicating. And another one was an assistant manager for a, or a store manager, sorry for a reject shop or something like that.

So he was used to doing a bit of understanding business processes, understanding purchasing, understanding stock and different, you know, things like that and putting data into a system. And the other one I’m thinking of, she had already worked, she was a bit of a front desk service coordinator for an air conditioning company. So she understood, you know, process communication, different bits and pieces.

So for me I typically look for someone who’s probably doing a Job like one of the trainees I’ve just taken on, he ran a small team packing shells at Coles or Woolies, I can’t remember which one like, but he had eight people that he used to help him every night and he ran that team. So I go, you know, even at that age. Yeah, because he’s what, 19 or 20 or something.

Yeah. You know, he had that skill set of at least he’d sort of led a team. He understood get people organized, he could communicate with them.

So they’re the things I like to find in people. Even though they may not have all the skills under the sun on paper. Well, skills going to be learned, right? Oh yeah, I completely agree.

And I think the way technology changes and advances, you know, the code language you’re your old guys were writing in very different what they’re writing in these days. AI wasn’t around back then. A lot of the machine learning, like a lot of even the software they’d be using wasn’t around five years ago.

You’re going to have to pick up new software, pick up new skills. So I think that’s one of the keys that I’ve seen in people hiring is actually looking for core fundamental skills. Like the skills can be learned but the personality traits and the core traits are the things that you can build upon.

Oh, absolutely. A bit of a business process rounding. I think if you can get that just from doing basic work in anything that you’re doing while you’re supporting yourself, while you might be studying whatever that study might be and then I guess the practicality of the study that you’re doing, you know, uni is still very good for a lot of people.

But like I said, that’s just not. That wasn’t going to be for me at the time, but for others it is. But if you can get some sort of work based learning, I think and couple that with your study and if you’ve also worked in other areas that sort of give that foundation, I think that they’re the types of people that really do excel.

So from a training perspective you’ve mentioned uni works for some people, TAFE works for others. Anything outside of the box from a uni or TAFE or anything else. Any other thoughts that you’ve got around really solid training platforms or principles? Not necessarily.

I think if you were to move into my space, for example, which is more application, business process implementation type work, I just think a grounding through vendors is always very good understanding, but probably more process controls. Learning how a typical business process Happens. I was a bit surprised and I had to remind my team when, when we brought our trainees on, they were just going to go bang, bang, bang.

This is how you do a sales order. So customer will send in a po, you knock out it, do a sales order, pick the product, you know, Australian invoice sent it out. I’m saying.

So I talked to them afterwards and I said, so did you understand all that? And they go, oh, yeah. But I wasn’t sure why we did it. You’re exactly right.

So learning business processes and why we do things, why does a customer send in a purchase order, you know, and then what’s the importance of that purchase order, you know, because you won’t get paid at the end of it if that business says, must quote my purchase order back to me. So just having a grounding in all those business processes, any training, anything that gives you that grounding, I think is that, to me is a really key trait. I think it’s a common theme that you may mention today.

It’s understanding the fundamentals, the whys behind it. Yeah. If you understand that part, building upon that can be, you know, very successful.

But the other part, yeah, you’re. I would say in a small percentage of people that have stayed with one company for a significant period of time. Yes.

Was that by design or just continual opportunity? New opportunities have presented themselves because it’s a career decision that some people will say, oh, and you put some people, look at a cvr, you’ve been with one place too long, they’re stale, people have jumped around. Oh, they’re not, they won’t stick. There’s different thought processes and I don’t think there is one answer.

But really keen to understand whether this was by design or just opportunistic. I guess I was just fortunate before I came to Kutcher renewal. So that was in 98, but I think in 94 was when they started the division within Kutcher Neal, which was Kutcher Neal Information Technology.

So I came along, I think it was in 98. And then I just think I was fortunate that at the time my manager left not too long after that. And then the decision was made to bring it back into Kutcher and Neal.

And then I was just afforded the luxury of, you know, where do you want to take this, Michael? And I said, well, you know, MYOB is really taking off. We’ve obviously got. The year 2000 was coming up at the time GST was coming up at the time.

There was lots of opportunity for me to developing skills in that area and I really enjoyed it. But then like I said, I then wanted to make a move to ERP and they supported me in that. So I was just once again lucky.

I had a partnership at the time that saw value in that and I guess and saw that as a additional service line to the client base that we had. And then they’ve just afforded me the opportunity to keep growing that business. So at the time it went from about three of us in the team down to two and then to one, and then I’ve basically built it to a dozen that it is today of really highly skilled people.

We turned over nearly 2 million this year, which is, you know, not a huge number, but it’s, it’s something that’s taken a long time to grow and develop and keep good people and then continue to diversify. So we then got into things like custom reporting, power BI system scoping and different bits and pieces. So bringing, looking at a holistic ecosystem around what systems are running and rationalizing that.

And I guess I find all that really interesting. Like you walk into a business, they’ve got 26 systems and you bring that down to about 13, it’s a huge change. That’s some pretty significant savings there and efficiencies.

Yeah. So I’ve just always found the work I’ve done really interesting and then I’ve been able to hand off some of the work I used to do to other team members who find that now challenging and interesting as well. So.

And then just kept building and building and building which is, I guess made it an interesting work life. So is there any advice you give to others when they’re considering, you know, career, staying alone? Is it just obviously there’s a little bit of a luck element that you found some really good partners to support you. But is there any advice you give to others? Well, you’d want to hope that any organization you’re in has a, what I call at least a formal performance review or career review every year.

I guess I wasn’t one that shied away from those. I was never worried about them. I had what I’ll call some pretty high end partners at the time that handled my review.

So I could be pretty open and frank with them and tell them what I thought, where I should take things and where things should go. And they were pretty frank and open as well as to whether they thought that was a good idea or not, or whether that could be supported. So I think for anyone, if you’ve got ideas, have the courage to Basically put them on the table.

When you have those career reviews, don’t sit back and go, oh, I probably should have told them about that or maybe I should have talked about that because they might be thinking it as well. So there could be an opportunity there. But I guess I always remember one partner saying, don’t come to me with problems, come to me with solutions.

So if you’ve got an idea, try and round it out a bit. And then when you do have that opportunity or maybe have the meeting and enforce the meeting and say, hey, I’ve got this thought, what do you think? I’ve always encouraged my staff to tell me what they think. If you’ve got ideas, let’s get them on the table and round them out and think about whether they’ll work or not.

Yep. I mean, I like it, I like it. And I think encouraging people to have those conversations is a big part, right? Yeah, oh, absolutely.

The other thing I always do for myself, but also my team is having 360 degree reviews, which can be a bit confronting for some people. But I don’t do them every year, but say every sort of three years or so because just a bit of self evaluation as well. And are you listening and are you listening to your people and reminding yourself of that? One thing I learned very early about myself is I’m a high D.

So I’ve had to understand the rest of my team and having had I got a few is few S’s and a couple of C’s in there is how to flex and work with different style types. So it’s really about that understanding your people and knowing that you might have someone sitting there who you know is never going to tell you what they’re really thinking. So you might have to encourage that and they might have a fantastic idea.

Now you mentioned earlier on today about you picked up some chatgpt, you started playing with it. How do you stay abreast of technology? Is there a book, is it training courses, is there a podcast or is it just playing? Is there any advice for others? Where do you go for your sources of continual learning? I’m definitely a hands on person. I’m visual and hands on, not very auditory.

So that’s just been me. I do like to get in and break some things but also know my limits. So I’ve got a few people in my team where I go, hey, what would you do here? Do you want to have a look at that and come back to me and show me what you can do? And then usually I can place an idea on it or keep them moving forward on it.

But I guess with AI I subscribe to Microsoft’s Copilot stuff because I run Copilot as well just to keep abreast of it. It’s sort of not moving as fast, but it’s getting there. And there’s digest emails like AI tools and a few different things that I certainly have them coming into my feed every day.

I don’t get to read them every day. I think the other thing is if you do have emails coming in from different places just. And if you stop reading them for a while, you probably got to ask yourself are they relevant? And just unsubscribe and then go and find something else.

I’ve been pretty strict on those sorts of things myself. There’s a few things now I don’t bother reading because I just go, it’s really not, not. It’s not cutting edge anymore.

Yeah, you’re falling behind. I now need to sort of jump on that or jump on that. And there’s lots of good stuff out there.

How important is it for somebody at your level, obviously the senior level now to stay reasonably technical? Not as important. Like I said, I sit probably more in the holistic view around. I mean I do like to get my hands dirty every now and again, but I get the luxury probably to pick and choose a bit.

But certainly holistic systems in businesses, total processes and controls, that sort of stuff. But the technical stuff in our ERP systems and things, I can still use them. I can navigate and work, work my way around.

But I’ve got team that don’t do that now. Yeah. And I do like the technical part sometimes.

But I think more important for me is to explain it in terms that our clients can understand. And that’s, that’s probably where I’m best at. I completely agree.

And I think that comes back again to that communication piece and then understanding how the technology actually influences the business or the problem. The business problem then coming to that solution approach. Yeah, yeah, it’s.

It’s so important and I guess that’s also mentoring my team and I guess the leadership comes along there where just reminding them that potentially sometimes depending on who you’re talking to, might want to know the ins and outs of what you’re about to do. But for the most part talking to business owners and things, they just want to know in layman’s terms what was the problem, how did you solve it and will it happen again? Just need to explain that in very easy to understand terms. So that they understand the value that we put into that without having to understand the technical part of it.

Yeah. And I think that’s at the end of the day, what people are looking for. What’s the solution? We don’t need to know the ins and outs and the weeds of it.

No. What are some of the key problems that you’re trying to find or that you’re finding at the moment and key solutions that you’re working with your clients on? Is there something that’s common that a lot of businesses are struggling with at the moment? I think at the moment what I’m seeing is that everyone’s sort of dealing with, I guess, a central accounting system, not necessarily a financial ERP, but it could just be like the 0 of the world and then they’ve possibly got another CRM tacked on. They might have Excel tacked on, or it could just be that they’re using an add on that’s more operational and then it’s feeding into Xero and then they still might have a CRM that’s separate to the operational system.

I guess what we’re seeing now more so is that people are saying, well, how do I report all that and how do I get information out of one system into another system? So we’re finding that we’re using integration a lot now with open APIs and that’s becoming a lot more common and it’s still what I’ll call quite a niche skill to be able to do that and write and communicate with the APIs. They’re all very different. So everyone would think zeros is it should be wonderful.

It’s not. It’s hard work. There’s lots of little nuances in it, but then you’ve got to feed that back into another API which then have its own little nuances.

So I think that’s. That’s been a difficult thing. So what we’re seeing is that people are potentially firing up Microsoft Azure SQL databases and just bringing all their information out of all their systems into the.

Into a cloud database, overlaying with some common keys. And then typically we’re finding is they’re then running other reporting tools off the top of that, whether it be a power BI or friturally or just other reporting tools and extracting and combining information to make it more useful there, rather than try and get it into the one system as a source of truth. Now once you move to a bigger ERP system, you can possibly put some of that information into that system.

But, but we’re still Finding businesses end up being hamstrung by having the need to have multiple systems. So therefore the common solution is just to place it all now up into a cloud database. I guess where I see everything going now is the next step is that people are just going to overlay the various generative AIs across that data.

And essentially what we’re now seeing is it will now be predicting future information and forecasting at that point because it then has access to all data. Yeah. And where they’re sort of suggesting is, and people I’m talking to and things that I’m reading is that will essentially have your twin sitting there.

It will suggest to you how have you thought about this? Because this is what the data is telling me. Had you thought about that? And it’d be like your twin keeping you in check and forecasting what it thinks you’re going to need moving forward based on the data it’s seeing. How far do you think we’re off this? It’s already happening.

Yeah. So I’ve already talked to one provider in the last two years. They’ve gone from about a dozen staff to 80 staff and they’re literally just overlaying gen AI across data lakes that have systems feeding information into it.

And the suggestion there was that systems will almost become redundant in 5 to 10 years unless they actually do something very, very, very specific like integrate with the ATO portal or some sort of, I guess something that’s forced upon you that you have to do and only that system will do it. Otherwise, potentially the data’s going in somewhere else now to be into a lake and then Genai deals with it and can sit over time. Yeah.

So it’s not, it’s not that far away, I think, but you’ll still need systems to do certain things. I think the vendors there, it’ll be how relevant they are. And you already see this now.

I mean, I come across every now and again a product and the vendor is a closed API. They won’t let you access it. Yeah.

So it’ll be interesting to see how long they can maintain that before they become the dinosaur and everyone just goes, well, you’re too hard to deal with. I can’t get my data out so I’ll go and put it into something else. Yeah, mate, that’s a really nice insight.

Any advice for a junior wanting to get grow a career similar to yours? If you’re working in any working environment in the moment, I think just understand some of the, I guess, processes that are going on along around you Some people might just do things because they know that’s how I’m told to do it. But perhaps think about why you do it that way. You either need to have a love of applications and systems and data that’s flowing around you or have an understanding or a lack of accounting, I guess is the other one as well.

Because ultimately we’re trying to get good financial outcomes and non financial outcomes as well. So they’re just as important than non financial outcomes to ultimately provide information that businesses can make decisions on. So that’s, that’s, that’s the ultimate thing.

So it’s, I guess it’s, it’s just understanding all those processes and data around you and not just, I guess, going about it because that’s what you do. No, I appreciate it. And I think that’s been a common theme of today is that really understanding, understanding the why, understanding the core principles at the start and then being able to build upon that with really strong communication and problem solving.

Yep, that’s exactly it. So helping business make informed decisions, I mean that’s, that’s my why, that’s my team’s why. Yeah.

What we do is provide multiple solutions to be able to deliver that. And that’s, that’s keep it. People are key to that and good communication, mate.

For any of those listeners of ours today that, you know, heard something they might find a little bit interesting or wanted to sort of pick your brain on and think a little bit more, where’s the easiest place to find you? Kutcher and Neil. So certainly ww.kutcher.com yeah, and by all means reach out email address and or phone and just get in contact with myself and I can certainly point.

Happy to take any questions and point you in the right direction. Appreciate it. Thank you.

Yeah, thank you.