Why are we making advisory sound like it’s this big, scary thing that no one can properly define? Why are we kind of ostracising compliance? Compliance is still a very important task; it’s a connector to advisory.
— Ben Richmond, President & CEO, Wagepoint.

Why the Future of Accounting Is More Exciting Than Ever

When I sat down with Ben Richmond, I expected an insightful discussion about accounting technology, payroll and artificial intelligence. What emerged was a much broader conversation about careers, leadership, customer relationships and the evolving role of accountants in a rapidly changing world.

Ben’s career has taken him from regional accounting practice in New Zealand to senior leadership roles at Xero and now to President and CEO of WagePoint in Canada. While the journey appears deliberate in hindsight, Ben was quick to point out that it was anything but carefully planned. Instead, it was shaped by curiosity, opportunity and a deep understanding of small business.

Growing up in New Zealand, Ben saw first-hand the realities of running a business. His family included farmers and small business owners, and he witnessed the challenges of bookkeeping, payroll and cash flow management long before entering the profession himself. Those experiences created a lasting appreciation for the role accountants can play in helping businesses succeed.

One theme that emerged repeatedly throughout our conversation was the importance of relationships. Ben believes the accounting profession often underestimates the value it already provides. Accountants and bookkeepers are frequently trusted advisors, yet many firms struggle to fully leverage that position. In his view, technology has removed many of the barriers that previously prevented practitioners from offering broader support and advice.

Interestingly, Ben rejects the idea that advisory services should be presented as some intimidating transformation. Instead, he sees advisory as something accountants have always done. The difference today is that technology makes it possible to deliver those conversations more efficiently and more consistently across a wider client base.

That practical approach has influenced much of his work in accounting technology. During his years at Xero, Ben played key roles in expanding the platform across New Zealand, Australia, the United States and Canada. Along the way, he learned that successful growth requires more than simply exporting a proven model into a new market.

One of the most fascinating parts of our discussion centred on localisation. Ben explained that many technology companies assume success in one country automatically translates elsewhere. In reality, every market has unique requirements, behaviours and expectations. Understanding those differences and listening carefully to customers often determines whether expansion succeeds or fails.

Public speaking was another topic we explored in depth. Ben has spent years presenting at conferences and industry events around the world. While many accountants may assume public speaking is reserved for executives or professional presenters, he strongly believes it is a skill worth developing.

His reasoning extends beyond conference stages. Whether communicating with clients, presenting recommendations or navigating difficult conversations, accountants increasingly need confidence in expressing ideas clearly. Public speaking also develops the ability to think on your feet, adapt to different audiences and build stronger relationships.

The conversation naturally shifted to artificial intelligence, a topic dominating discussions across the profession. Ben takes a balanced view. He acknowledges AI will be significantly more disruptive than previous technology shifts, but he also rejects the recurring narrative that technology will eliminate accountants.

Instead, he sees AI as an accelerator.

The profession already faces talent shortages, increasing complexity and growing client expectations. AI can help automate repetitive tasks, improve efficiency and create capacity for higher-value work. However, Ben emphasised that firms cannot afford to take a wait-and-see approach this time. Unlike cloud accounting, which evolved over many years, AI is advancing at extraordinary speed.

His recommendation is simple: become AI fluent.

That doesn’t mean mastering every model or chasing every new tool. It means developing enough understanding to use the technology effectively, evaluate opportunities and adapt as the landscape evolves. Equally important are the human skills that AI cannot easily replicate. Empathy, communication, judgement and emotional intelligence become even more valuable as automation increases.

One particularly interesting insight came from Ben’s work at WagePoint. Rather than measuring AI success purely through revenue, the company focuses on impact. For accounting and bookkeeping partners, that means helping them support more clients without proportionally increasing staff numbers. The goal is not replacing professionals but amplifying their capabilities.

As our conversation drew to a close, Ben returned to a subject he is deeply passionate about: the future of the accounting profession itself.

He believes accountants need to do a better job telling their story. Too often the profession is associated with compliance, tax returns and regulation. Yet the reality is far broader. Today’s accountants work in technology companies, advisory firms, startups, global enterprises and leadership roles. They help business owners navigate uncertainty, make better decisions and build stronger organisations.

That message matters because future generations are making career decisions today. If the profession fails to communicate its opportunities, purpose and impact, talented people may never discover the possibilities available to them.

After speaking with Ben, I was left feeling optimistic. Change is undoubtedly accelerating. Artificial intelligence will reshape workflows. Technology will continue to evolve. Yet the core value accountants provide remains remarkably consistent: helping people make better decisions and build better businesses.

The tools may change, but the opportunity to make a meaningful difference remains as strong as ever.

Apps & Tools Mentioned:

Ben Richmond: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ben-richmond-ca-b8794220/

WagePoint: https://www.wagepoint.com/  

Xero: https://www.xero.com  

Stripe: https://stripe.com/  

QuickBooks: https://quickbooks.intuit.com

Welcome back to the Accounting Apps podcast. I’m your host, Heather Smith. Today, I’m speaking with Ben Richmond. He’s a chartered accountant with CAANZ, an accounting technology leader, and now president and CEO of Wagepoint, a Canadian payroll solution.

You may know Ben from his time at Xero, initially in New Zealand, and then in North America, where he helped lead the business and worked closely with accountants, bookkeepers, and small business communities through a period of huge change in cloud accounting. I’ve been fascinated by Ben’s global career trajectory for some time now.

I first met him in real life in New Orleans in 2022, and then I was very grateful when he asked me to join him on stage in Nashville for a global leaders panel in 2024. I’ve wanted to interview Ben for some time, and I’m delighted we finally made it happen. In this conversation, we explore Ben’s career journey, what he has learnt from working across different markets, how accounting technology is evolving, and what accountants and bookkeepers need to pay attention to next.

As always, I encourage you to stay up to date with the curated content I’m sharing by signing up to the Accounting Apps newsletter at accountingapps.io and joining the Accounting Apps Mastermind Group, and of course, subscribing right now to this podcast, so you don’t miss an at the span. Welcome.

How’s your day been?

Ben Richmond
Yeah, it’s been a busy one, actually. I was in Calgary last week in Canada. I’m off to Calgary tomorrow again, so it’s nice to be home for a bit with the kids and catching up with a bit of allergies, but I’m so excited that we can finally. I know we’re talking about making this interview happen for a while, so super pumped to be able to catch up.

Heather Smith
Fantastic. So, Ben, I’d like to start out sort of by getting a bit of an overview of your career for our people who don’t know you. So, you started in public accounting, you moved into commercial accounting, you then went to Xero, a global accounting software platform. Now you’re at Wagepoint, a cloud-based payroll software based out of Canada.

Can you briefly talk us through your career arc and share what sort of threads connected these moves?

Ben Richmond
Yeah. It’s kind of funny because when you sit down now and talk it through, it sounds beautifully planned, but it certainly wasn’t, and for me, it goes right back to my family. So half of my family were actually farmers, along with sheep and beef farmers in New Zealand. So I got to see what the trials and tribulations of sheep and beef family farm, which is a big part of the New Zealand economy. The other half of my family were all small business owners, and so, like, I watched my grandparents had a big part of my life growing up.

My grandfather owned an engineering business, so did my father, very customer-focused, and I saw that I got to experience that pain of bookkeeping countless times. Remember waiting to get the car packed to head up to the lake, and my grandmother and grandfather having an argument because they hadn’t got the invoices out, and if the invoices don’t get out, you don’t get paid by the 20th of the next month, so whenever they travelled, and they ended up, they did pretty well for themselves, so they ended up getting a nice place on the Gold Coast that they would take off to for three months of the year, and I got to take on doing their bookkeeping while they left, so I did their payroll.

It was a desktop software called Ace Payroll back then in New Zealand. They used the software called q5 which was actually DOS-based, so that was pretty horrific to try and figure out. So, I got the like the pain of what small businesses went through. And then I watched my mother. My mother started lots of businesses. She ended up going bankrupt there for a while.

She business grew too quickly, and one thing that always, you know, she built herself back from that, but one thing that always sort of stuck out to me was like her relationship with her accountant was always about tax, which for me kind of baffled me, because I’m like, when you’re not making any money, it’s not really a big problem. Needed some earlier advice on on that, and so it’s kind of interesting. I’d always done a.. I come from Hawke’s Bay in New Zealand.

I did this big marketing campaign with Young Enterprise to get Hawke’s Bay on TV nationally and globally to promote the region, and won Hawkes Bay Young Entrepreneur of the Year, and that sort of got me all excited. And then I ended up going into an accounting tradition, and so they were quite common in the regions of New Zealand, where you could go into an accounting firm straight out of high school, and you were simply would work in practice while doing your degree extramurally, so actually managed to do three years of full-time work while doing two years of study, and had a great time, everything from auditing, payroll, and what I kind of learned from that period was again for the big large regional firm, six partners had been around for generations, and what I kind of realised again was immense trust that the small businesses and the farming clients had in the firm, but how much weight was put on the end financial statements that we would, you know, produce when I started, we still had typists, we would still write checks for payroll and deposit.

Then the online banking was just coming in, and I tried to help push the firm to do an Excel set of work papers, which I remember when we were trying to launch the Excel work papers, you know, there were people, a couple of the staff, I think, at the time, threatened to quit if they were forced to use the Excel work papers. I got a real touch of how hard it was to drive change in accounting practices, but also the immense care that accounting practice has taken, the care we did have for customers.

So did my time in public practice, decided to go off to uni and do two years as a full-time student, while still working for the Fairmont contract, just to get a bit of fun mixed in there. And so that was super exciting. I got deep experience with agricultural accounting as well, and all the fun tax things that go with that.

Ben Richmond
Then I jumped into corporate telcos, so a company called Telecom in New Zealand – it’s called Spark now. It’s basically the Telstra of New Zealand, and that was going through.

Got a chance to be on a probably one of New Zealand’s biggest corporate finance project was we were demerging, basically splitting the company up, what it was listed on the New York Stock Exchange, the Australian Exchange, and the New Zealand Exchange, so you had to learn US GATT MZ refers, and we were demerging the retail business from the Lions business, which was a huge uncoupling to make, you know, as the government had regulated that the ex-government, telco had to split to split to create a competitive market, so lot of fun stuff there. Got exposed to socks, and it was there. I got involved.

I was always passionate about young enterprise. It was one of my favourite topics at school, and we started doing a lot of work with I got on the board of the Telecom Foundation, which is all about encouraging Kiwi kids and getting them ahead on a technology future, and also encouraging New Zealand’s generosity, and so we acquired it. We essentially acquired a crowd fundraising platform to allow peer-to-peer giving and set that as free for all New Zealanders, and we, and again, big focus on children as well.

And so we were, we did a lot of work with Young Enterprise, and that’s where I met Graham Shaw, who was one of the early chairmans of Xero, and he, we sort of started catching up. Love Telecom had a great run there across different departments, and, and he just, we got talking about Xero, and I got really excited, you know. It’s sort of tied together for me, you know, the pain of running your own accounts as a small business owner, the what, what my pain of like what accounts and bookkeepers could actually be to their clients with the right technology, so I could start to see all the stuff emerging.

Got pretty excited about it, and made the jump. And at the time, it was pretty played out in the New Zealand media about Xero was this loss-making company, and we had these global ambitions, and was still very early, and it was a really cool time to join. Like, it was such a fun time to jump over the New Zealand market was in scale up. We kind of won the T-shirt wearing accountants, and we were going into the true mass market. The Aussie market was starting to take off, so I jumped over there. That was super cool.

It was for me that was like scaling growth of the New Zealand market into being a true mass market player, and that was when we were maturing our practice management offerings, we were maturing everything from the reporting infrastructure we had, because you know, v reporting took a long time to come, but it was quite game changing once we got it out. I got to lead the lead our farming, our approach to farming.

So, in New Zealand, if you’re an accounting firm outside of the main cities, you generally got more than 10 to 15% of your client base will be a farmer, and a lot of those firms didn’t want to use Xero because it couldn’t work for agriculture, so you know, found a rod said, “You want to pick up this project and have a crack at it? It was really fun, and it pulled on my farm accounting experience coming from a farming family to help really get how would we approach the farming sector, working with the ecosystem and the unique approach Xero has. That was cool. We launched that, and that ended up, I think, now the leading solution now down in New Zealand, and it’s expanded globally.

Ben Richmond
So, after about four years in the New Zealand business, there was this opportunity to go to North America, and as a young New Zealander, like young, obviously everyone likes to travel the world, and so it was pretty exciting, seeing the dominance and the growth that we had in New Zealand, and then North America was this big, as a proud Kiwi, seeing this company go global, a chance to go and help out with our US market, and so got up, got up into the US market, and we’d gone on pretty early, and the analogy I kind of use is, I think we launched a Tesla into the US market with the steering wheel on the wrong side, and, and, but it was way ahead of the competition at the time, you know.

I would probably call QuickBooks a Chevy Volt. This is going back a long, long time, and I think we mistook that excitement for let’s go big early, and probably underestimated a little bit of the how long would take to localise the product for the US market, so by the time I got up there was like, how do we, how do we get this product in the game and make sure that it, you know, speaks speaks the language that US accountant started to reconciles the bank in the way US accountant does, and and those core foundation I kind of use the analogy of Xero.

Xero is this global platform, but there’s some core basic things you have to have working for it to work in your country, right? The bank feeds can’t get the bank data, and that’s a problem.

So all those foundational basics that the other countries had were missing, and so we’re really focused on getting that right, because then you kind of unlock all the other innovation that sat in the platform, and that’s kind of where the Canadian piece came, because we kind of knew Canada was super interesting, it was growing without having any feet on the street up there, and we kind of looked to Canada as a place, and so some of the early names, like Will Buckley and myself, and went up, went up to Canada, met lots of accountants and bookkeepers up there, and Canada is more similar to Australia and New Zealand from the way accounting is done, you know, the, you think, GST, and things like that, and the way the reporting frameworks work, so it really suited the platform quite well, and so it made sense to kick off Canada as part of that, so we’re excited about to kick it off, and both the US and Canada need to be watching it grow out, and obviously, you know, will and fame, and keep it on to the next level, and then had it all back at the at the end there, which was super exciting, and for me, you know, the North American market for zero, to get, I mean, Canada is the size of Australia, New Zealand put together, it’s the largest Commonwealth market outside of the UK, and the US is the size of every other Commonwealth market put together by some, so to have a true global SaaS platform, you’ve got to play there, and if you’re going to play there, you’ve got to play to win. And so it was like super exciting to watch the journey of Xero, like many other Australian and New Zealand companies that go over there as they establish their footprint, get their fit right, and then start to accelerate.

It’s been super exciting to be a part of that journey. I’m still very addicted to it, and super excited to see the momentum that the team has, and then more recently was early last year, when this, you know, some of the investors of Wagepoint reached out, and I’ve been at zero count 13 years, so like maybe it’s time for change, chance to own something in 10. This sounds interesting and exciting. It’s a channel that’s very near and dear to my heart, like I’ve spent probably best part of a decade and a half, travelling around some of the smallest towns you could mention in New Zealand and US and Canada, meeting accounting and bookkeeping firms from small to big, and helping them go on their digital transformation journey.

Ben Richmond
So I sort of learned a lot, good, bad, and ugly, of that, and it’s super rewarding and super exciting.

I kind of take a different approach to it than I think spending a lot of time with my grandparents growing up, I kind of learned that fear is not the best way to drive change in people, and so I remember I’ve got a lot of conferences in the accounting space, it was always like blockchains coming, the millennials coming, they’re going to kill you if you don’t get on with it, your practice will be dead, and my I took a slightly different approach to it, because I was like, actually, I think if we, if we scare people and make this jump seem too far, they’re not going to make it. And actually, let’s not.

Why are we making advisory sound like it’s this big scary thing that no one can properly define? Why are we kind of ostracising compliance? There’s like, compliance is still a very important task, it’s a connector to advisory, and so my, my take, which I learned from my time in New Zealand and the US and Canada, and I’m using now with Wagepoint, which is, you know, is to take firms on that journey to actually go build them up with a bit of confidence. Yeah, I say to most firms, the most important part of advisory, you’ve actually always done, you’ve done it for years.

You just haven’t been able to do it on all your clients, because the technology was never there. So, how do you make it less scary and take in and get alongside them? And I think that there’s my advice to all technology vendors out there, is if you can be a true partner and get alongside your clients as they go on that journey, you know, they’ll look after you and you’ll look after them. So, for me, jumping to Wagepoint was a chance to take that, all those learnings.

It felt like Xero was a giant MBA for what’s, you know, Wagepoints was one of the early cloud disruptors in Canada, very strong in the accounting and bookkeeping channel, which is, you know, many of the same partners I’ve worked with at Xero, and it wants, you know, it’s going through a platform shift, and you know, so many software businesses don’t make the hard call to rebuild the platform and just bolt on Frankenstein until you can’t do anything with it, and so what drew me to Wade, but was they built the whole platform again from scratch with all the learnings from the first thing, and they’d had some, they had some hiccups taking longer than they thought, there’s still some experience things that still, you know, is still getting right, but the chance to help drive the partners through that migration onto this new code code base, which really sets us up to be future-proofed and drive it forward, and sort of an exciting AI futures, exciting and terrifying at the same time. Felt in a channel that I really love, so the chance to be the full have a whole crack at the Indian role in a space, space that I love, the channel I love, and a country that I love, which is Canada.

Heather Smith
Wow, Ben, I, as you know, I’ve always been quite fascinated by your career, and I just learned so much more about it then. So I’m very appreciative for you taking us on that journey and what an incredible journey.

I love, I love that you’re talking about your grandparents and the actual emotion behind what running the business was, and I know myself, I’ve walked into some change management projects, and staff have literally quit and walked out as I walked in the door, and I had that happen to me twice, and I learned to walk in with muffins, hot muffins, because people are never going to quit if there’s muffins coming in the door, because my goal is never to have someone quit, it’s to try and improve their life, and I love that you articulated you don’t want to make the leak too big, you don’t want to make the leak too big, and I’m one of my philosophies is always it’s kind of twofold, but one is I just want to give you the next step, I don’t want to give you everything, I just want to give you the next step, but also, and I always, when I talk to people, I always say to them, when Rod Drury stood on that stage, his vision was Mars, and people could see the vision, but give them the kind of, give them the steps, but and let people give them the vision, but let them break down all the steps, so they can just do it very easily and calmly. So very much enjoyed.

Ben Richmond
Should mention that, because we used to spend a lot of time, you know, Rod, Rod would tour New Zealand, and meet a lot of his firms, and explaining the Mars vision, and I, and a few of the other people, were the ones that got to go on the day afterwards, and go right now, bring your feet back to earth, and we’ll talk about getting wheels on the suitcase, and then getting the moon as the first next step, but…

Heather Smith
Yeah.

Ben Richmond
But I think you had to paint that, like, like I do think there’s the balance. If you have to paint that there is a really exciting future if we go down this path, and it doesn’t need to be jumping in the deep end tomorrow, but let’s now let’s back the truck up and get it to step one,

Heather Smith
Yeah, absolutely. Look, and, and having that sort of relationship with Rod, painting that vision kind of, I don’t know, kind of eases the way in there to have those conversations, and they both work. I know that Tim Munro, who is changed GPS account, it’s here in Australia. He said he bought into Xero before it had payroll, before it had inventory, because he knew it would come, and he, so he and I just really hear that sentiment in him. Yeah, so what I’m keen to go on and explore is from the outside moving from an accounting firm into sales, into growth, into market expansion might look like quite a pivot.

Now, I recently was in a chartered accounting meeting, and they had – they had a survey of about four or 5000 accountants. There were 600 different career titles in that survey, which I kind of always go, wow, that’s a lot.

Do you think accountants sometimes define their career options too narrowly, even though the underlying skills of being an accountant are highly transferable?

Ben Richmond
100% like, and it’s interesting, like a big driver for me doing it was I had very entrepreneurial family members, but like even in my mother’s case, like she couldn’t probably work through a balance sheet or a PNL to save herself, right? And so she didn’t have that strong financial foundation, which she’s got, you know, she went and got herself afterwards.

But so for me that was a drive, was let’s go get, I want to do some bold things in my life, and how can I get a foundation in something like accounting, which you know, it’s the beautiful, like the process of it, the like, you once you learn the way, for instance, like I had to do tea-ledgers and spreadsheets, you learn the way the whole thing works was incredibly powerful, even when you, when you look at a business or an opportunity, and I found it exciting. I’m probably quite weird, because, like, I loved audit, because audit for me was, you got to leave the office, you got to go out, and, and I was like, I’m going to make myself a mission where I’m an auditor that I’m not, you know, a lot of auditors will walk in the door, like I’m here to find a mistake, I’m here to find that you’re guilty, like I think a true audit, you’re there to help find better process improvement, and so I love the..

I think there is actually a real relationship element of accounting that gets missed, and it’s when I made the jump, so it was kind of like Strong Fit Techno Foundation. Xero was like this amazing, because I want a chance to bring in my thing I’m passionate about, which is small business, and this profession that I grew up in, that I feel like, even though I was in the profession, it used to frustrate me a little bit, because I’m like, we just, we know that we hear with a trusted advisor at every conference we go to, we hear all this stuff, and we, we just don’t capitalise on it, and it’s since we’re not, and I saw it in a.

Search when we got to the US about, like, who should help a small business with this challenge, and a small business would say, well, you know, right now I ask a mate, should it probably should be my accountant or my bookkeeper, and what do you ask them? Well, they’ve never really offered it, and are they too expensive? Would they be too expensive? And you ask the same question to the partner, and it’s kind of like, well, it probably should be us, but they’ve never asked for it.

So I’m like, we’ve got this weird dynamic of those two groups that actually they kind of know they should be together and doing it together, they’re doing it on their own, but somehow not missing the connection. So it was really cool to, like, as I jumped into, made that pivot, like the understanding both those sides made it pretty powerful for me when I was helping firms change, because I could walk into an accounting firm in Invercargill, which is right at the bottom of New Zealand, and you know that they used to, again, they’ve often been tarred by the software vendors that send sales people in that are kind of like this is the main thing, it’s going to change the game, it does that.

Don’t worry, that’s on the roadmap. And our migration is really easy. We’ve got a tool that’ll just take it all automatically, and you’ll be, you know, and I’d always give it to people straight, right? Change is hard. Firstly, is the reason we want to do this change, and let’s be transparent on what it’s going to take to get there. So, I found, like, being in practice was actually so they’re in that, like, that was a smart pivot, but actually, there’s a lot of things. Take sales, for instance. Sales is just a big number game. It’s the concept of a funnel, and it’s some of the easiest math you can do. It’s not algebra, and so I think there’s a lot of discipline.

Ben Richmond
I think accountants need to back themselves harder, because that foundation you have, and actually, in the world we’re in today, the relationships that we need to have and the things we help our clients navigate actually set us up for some pretty interesting career pivots, if we’re brave enough to make them maintain my chart, I’m a CA today, I still maintain it, and it’s been incredibly powerful, and it’s a great network as well.

Heather Smith
Yeah, absolutely, absolutely,and I think I really liked how you talked about relationships there, and the importance of relationships, and it’s sometimes in terms of advisory and in terms of relationships, sometimes it’s those side conversations or those adjacent conversations that can actually draw out what really needs to happen, but you ask them directly, and they don’t know, or they freeze up, but having that relationship is really, really important. Yeah, so your first US presentation was in Alabama with a thick Kiwi accent in a room full of executives. It always seems quite odd, if not paralysing to me, that people land a job in a software company, and then they’re supposed to perform on stage to hundreds, if not 1000s of people.

Can you talk through how you developed your confidence as a public speaker and how you learned to adapt your message across different cultural markets?

And the third question, do you think public speaking is a skill an accountant should pursue? How did you develop that skill as a public speaker?

Ben Richmond
Yeah, I think you’ve got a cons, it puts yourself out there, so like you’ve done a huge amount of it, I’ve had to do a huge amount of it, it’s still nerve wracking, it’s still, you know, I’m still incredibly nervous in the run up to to any event. Zero client, I love them, but they’re incredibly draining, right? And so I think it’s that idea, like you’ve got to put yourself out there and make sure what you’re speaking..

I think there’s a lot of people that are out there, you know, the cereal box endorses that are speaking on topics that I’ve always set myself a rule that was like, hey, if I write an article, even if someone’s helped me write, or if I do a speech, like, you know, I did one at their kind of national, but before I left on rebranding the profession, it has to be something I actually believe in that I’m passionate about, and then if a stranger stopped me on the street and wanted to have a debate on that topic, that we could have a good debate on the topic, because I do think a lot of executives end up getting thrown into speeches on topics they’re not really either passionate about or knowledgeable about, and so I think authenticity is really important, because that’s going to show through, you know, if you are, it’s a topic you’re really genuine about, it doesn’t matter whether you’re a nervous speaker, once you get your flow going, it’s something you can speak about. The cultural shift is the big one, right, and I think I mean I suffer from imposter syndrome, and all the things that everyone does.

I mean, you imagine rocking, you know, I went up to the US, we’d had the complexity of the US product roadmap, and this is going back nine years ago, right, and maybe some product up there, more up here now, but just showing up to a lot of customers exactly like the accounting firm you mentioned before, that have bought this vision with the same passion, except no motive. There was very slow progress to that vision, so many firms had bought these things, because a lot of those early meetings were fronting firms that we’d let down in the early days, and but that’s tough, and I think.

And I took the same approach in drawing, like my grandparent was very customer orientated, which you show up, you know, and so a lot of people said, well, you’re in, you’re in New Zealand, and you can’t be going to Alabama, like it’s part of the reason we’ve had this issue, is the platform we’re localising it, and again, this is it’s a much different platform now, it’s very exciting where it’s at, it’s a very competitive US product now, so which was part of the work we did to get it there, but you show up, you know, you front up to the partner and say, look, yep, we, we are here’s where we’re at, reset the expectations, and what’s pretty exciting in that particular Alabama visit, that partner is still a partner of ours today, the accent is a tough one, so it’s funny, even just being on with an Australian accent of making me slip back into my, my Kiwi Kiwi accent. My US team used to always say, we hate when you go home for a week or two, because when you come back, you’re like back into the sick Kiwi accent, and it’s kind of a weird thing.

So, I actually did, I got some, like, there was, there’s certain words that New Zealanders and Australians like, we have any Kiwis, and all these, we have a strange relationship with vowels, like we don’t really do them, and Americans do vowels.

Ben Richmond
They very well have been announcing at the general ledger, and so, yeah, I had a coach help me out for a little bit, not to change my accent, but to help identify like key terms that we speak about often, like advisory, general ledger time tracking, you know, don’t bend, don’t say time shooting, because they’re hearing time shooting, say time tracking, so you, there was, you know, when you say decade, they hear something else, and so, like, it was actually useful to try me a different cult, and then the other thing, like the other thing I noticed too, was it’s very, it’s very easy to run into a new country, and I see a lot of Australian and New Zealand technology companies that I help advise that are coming into the US or Canada, and you know, we do things differently, like there’s things the US, I would say, do these things I love about the US that I think they do a way better job than Australia, New Zealand, there’s things I love about Australia that they do way better than New Zealand, like there’s every country’s got its strengths and weaknesses, and you actually get it to play the strengths.

I think two people often rock in and go, you know, at the time I came to the US, there was kind of this narrative going around that, you know, American accountants were so far behind, the Australian and New Zealand accounts were leading the charge on advisory.

Now, if you look statistically at the overall percentage of accountants and how many we use in cloud, that statement probably held true, but when you actually unpicked it, another layer, you know, I don’t walk in and say, “Look, I’m from Australia and Zealand, you know, we know how to do it better than you all, so let me tell you, because that gets them off, you know, as you know, at the US, you don’t want to take that approach, but yeah, I would kind of come on with a softer approach, was like, you know, I’m really excited to learn every country is different, every country’s got, I mean, you know, there’s 9000 banks in the US, you know, Australia, New Zealand were kind of used to have big five, and the big five, New Zealand, the kind of babies of the big five and Aussie, so the whole lot of unique challenges, and so, How do you overcome that? How do you overcome scale?

You know, the scale of the US is insane. You know, you can pick. We had an accounting firm in Xero that was a partner of ours, adjusted campground accounting, like talk about extreme vertical niche or niche, depending on where you’re from. And so, for me, it was like you come in and learn and go, ‘Hey, I want to share things. Yeah, and then if you made it safe and you kind of let them started with what have you learned, what challenge are you facing, as opposed to coming in with the “we’re awesome” and let me tell you how to do it.

It opened up a much different conversation and helped me understand where, like, I found firms in the US, and you knew you’ll know a lot of the names, like the likes of Kenji and Acuity and Matt Mainland, like that. They were doing stuff way beyond what I’d ever seen, like, yes, I think Australian and New Zealand firms had widely adopted cloud practice management about GL. They were doing lots more budgeting, and GST, the regular GST processing, helped us with that. Some of the advisory work I see in these firms up in the US. Yes, it wasn’t like not everyone was doing it, but was it blew me away.

So, there was definitely, there was definitely a lot to learn from different countries, and so whenever I spoke around the world, I made sure I was sensitive to that culture. It wasn’t coming in and going, I’m coming from a country where we’re like way ahead of you all, because that gets us a great way to get people offside straight away.

Heather Smith
Yeah, absolutely. I love that, and I do think that, as someone who has travelled the world, everyone loves New Zealanders, so you do have that. Oh, let’s, a New Zealanders walking into the office, and New Zealanders walking on stage, and they kind of think about travelling there, and the mountains, and the clean air, and the sheep, and so they’re always happy to have a New Zealander come and visit them and have a conversation with them, I imagine, and I do think the approach of what can I learn from you, and as you know, I travel a lot to these conferences, and it’s about me learning, like I can say things, but it is about me learning.

Do you think public speaking is a skill accountants should pursue?

Ben Richmond
I do think it’s because you’re going to be doing. More and more, particularly if you want to get into, like, be one of these firms that’s going to stand out from the pack, because you’re going to be doing more if you’re picking a particular vertical, you may be speaking at industry events around that, and you’re knowledgeable, right? So, like, how do you get that knowledge? It’s, yeah, there’s different roles, but regardless of whether you’re speaking at the client’s office, whether you’re speaking in front of the firm, like it’s a good skill.

I mean, I personally think everyone needs to have, if you take life, there’s some, you know, there’s public speaking that happens in your life, some very hard moments, as you know. So, I think it’s more important than ever, and more than ever, as accountants, we’re becoming more of the like one stop shop for a small business to get more than just tax, and we’re helping them with technology, we’re helping them now. How often are we helping them navigate tough changes in their life? And then, so it’s not, it’s not just public speaking, also from a..

and it probably lends itself into strong public speaker, but also I think emotional intelligence and the soft skills are as more important for accountants than ever in the AI world, that becomes more important. I saw your CANS and ARCPA building much more technology into the curriculum, but I’m like, more and more soft skills, more and more soft skills, because that is the, that’s what’s going to help you stand out. Like the random chatbot that’s giving Heather advice doesn’t sit with the empathy that I have, that might know she’s managing through a difficult time at the moment, yeah.

And how do you filter that advice to not, not trigger, and things like that?

Heather Smith
Absolutely. And I completely agree with that, and I think that I did. I was very heavily into Toastmasters, and I, you talked about how even in life you have important talks to give, and one of the gentlemen who joined, he was like a bricklayer, but he joined because he, he couldn’t give the eulogy at his best friend’s funeral, and he just said, “I feel bad every single day, and we went through the arc of him, we was two years, you meet every two weeks, giving the eulogy at his father’s funeral, and how that was sad, but wonderful, because it’s such an important thing to do. Yeah, so it is important.

I also think it helps you think on the spot, just like I’ve got to think, I’ve got to be able to think and respond coherently and articulately, and I do think that in a world where AI creates so much of the content, actually hearing people on a stage or at, or even at a small intimate event, or a thought leadership thing is far more valuable, and that’s why I love doing this podcast, and I love hearing from you. So, you’ve helped grow, you helped grow Xero in New Zealand and the US and in Canada.

What travels well between the markets, and what advice do you have for other accountants hoping to work abroad?

It’s kind of a bit of a mixed-up question there.

What worked well across all of that? You did talk about relationships and public speaking, but is there anything else you can touch on that?

Ben Richmond
Yeah. I think so. One thing’s your approach, you know, particularly to me if you go from the smaller country to the bigger country. It’s very easy to get imposter syndrome and get starstruck, like back yourself, right? Like, you know, like people have to say this: New Zealand, a sad lot, we’re punching above our weight, and I’m like, no, no, don’t just go and like be great and win like you’re playing in the big league up there, so you kind of got to behave that America is very bold, every country’s got that sort of unique different cultural element about it.

So for me it was when you, when you first walk into the market and you see a lot of companies, for me when I walked into Xero, I think it had been in the US for five years at the time, and so, like, there was, there was lots of noise about any cut, it’s like, you know, we should just do it like they did in Australia, like, it’s like, look at, look how well we’re doing in Australia, why don’t we just do that, and that again, that doesn’t exactly resonate with the US team in any business, see what I, my first thing was, like, let’s flip the narrative on its head, right. So, like, what is..

let’s talk about, like, we keep talking about what’s different first, right? Which, anyway, we can sit down and go, “Here’s what’s different, here’s what’s different. And don’t get me wrong, there are differences, and the difference in stock, but if you’re expanding globally, you’ve got finite resources, so you do want to find out what is the same first, right? So, what is actually the same? What do we think is similar challenge or similar solution? And let’s start there first, because that’s that’s going to give us some really quick places to accelerate, and then we can free up the horsepower, focus on the things that are different.

So, let’s flip it on its head and not start with this. Here’s why we’re different. Let’s talk about whether it’s the same, and there was a lot. There was, we could see. Very much, that that our approach to partnership was a competitive advantage, right? I always say zero, like we show up, you know, and if something went wrong, we would show up in the firm’s office through the toughest part of a change management.

We’ll be there with you through it, and even, and so, like, like taking those core principles that you have as a person and values you have, like I do think you know, make sure don’t change those, because they’ll, they are what they are, what is your superpower, and so I do think taking a lot of those magic things that we saw from how we scaled in other countries, love the love of accountants and bookkeepers, and the way we engage with them, you know, you can make an accounting event fun, even if it’s a happy hour type thing, like the type of approach we, so there were elements like the, the kind of Aussie Kiwi approach, I think people do like it’s it’s like, yeah, we can do serious things like accounting and tax, but have a laugh at the same same time, and so I think there’s cultural elements of work, but then also you got to challenge yourself. There’s things where you’re like, actually, that’s we probably shouldn’t.

Yeah, we should probably dial that down here, because, and the biggest learning with the US is, you’re going into 51 different countries, like the how you, how you take a business to market in the US, particularly a channel business, you’ve got the digital all across the country.

Ben Richmond
Yes, but if you’re playing that sort of channel relationship strategy, how you do business in New York is so different to how you do it in Alabama, the best California, and so yeah, I think kind of one of the things really helped out was New Zealand and the South Island, for instance, so regions is very relationship driven, which translate a lot to the southern parts of the states, right, it’s very relational, like we need to get to know each other first, we need to have lunch, and we need to do all this before we do business, whereas New York is like a bit more like the big cities, like give me a pitch in two minutes and let’s get this done.

So I think just being curious, being willing to challenge yourself, but also back yourself where there’s things, and I think the other thing, when you’re going into the big countries, particularly for software vendors, it’s very easy to do the math, particularly on the US market, and go, well, there’s like 30,000,030 9 million small businesses, so we just have to win 5% of that, and we’re huge, and if only it was that easy, but you hear it in the way accounting firms talk, pick your vertical niche, or niche, depending on which part of the states you’re in.

You know, you can pick something like campgrounds and run an accounting firm often in the US. And there are many accountants and bookkeepers that have run, you know, I look back to Bruce from, you know, HPC, got bought by April, and he built a really thriving practice travelling the world, zero comps, building relationships with different firms at the zero comms, and there’s so many businesses now that are global. I was at a conference with Stripe a couple of weeks ago, just with the amount of sole traders forming companies is exploding with the advent of AI, and the number of them getting to $100,000 of revenue is exploding.

People used to think of sole traders as the small end of the market, but they’re actually growing faster than ever, and they’re going global faster from day one. I mean, you know, Zerus to push this in the early days, and so with that, you’ve got small businesses now that are going global faster than ever, and they need, they need accounts and bookkeepers that can support them on that, and so there’s a huge opportunity for accounts and bookkeepers that want to do that, and again, the other thing I would say, when you go into, you don’t have to do everything yourself. So, accounting is very specialist.

If you’re going to go into the US, you know, if I would say, if you’re going to go into the US, you’re going to show up with boots on the street, like you can’t, you can’t be do it from afar, but just remember, you don’t have to do it all yourself. Partnership is, you know, particularly in a bigger partnership, is a smart strategy. So, find a great partner that’s similar to over there and share work backwards, but I’m sure they’ll have companies that are coming down into Australia, for instance, and doing work and need someone down there, and that’s kind of what some of the early partners did.

So, I think the big opportunity, and it’s exciting, because, you know, I think a lot of.. I mean, I’ve met.. actually, fun story.. I was, I was at an accounting conference in Orlando, and one of the early firms we sold on Xero in the early days, the Finlay brothers. You know, we spent a lot of time with them in the South Island, and you know, Wayne is doing all.. he’s been doing work with outsourcing all around the world with the practice, and then doing supporting firms, doing outsourcing, and so he travels the world now, and so I think back to our discussion on ever from accountants, I think there are accountants now that that have got great with this technology, they’ve got awesome global careers now that you know you probably wouldn’t imagine that 25 years ago sitting in a regional accounting practice.

Heather Smith
Yeah, absolutely, absolutely.

You mentioned earlier that you are actually consulting for businesses or tech firms considering moving into the US and Canada. Is that correct?

Ben Richmond
That we save a lot, we obviously Xero too. Originally landed in Denver. It’s got big presence down New York and selling both. So we had lots of Aussie companies, New Zealand, which is pretty cool. If I’ve had hearing everyone’s, you know, where do you land? Why did everything from why did you pick that city?

And then even just working with another advice to give to a lot of Australia, New Zealand technology companies coming to the US is the common theme, and a lot of companies that I’ve either been doing some coaching for, or chatting with, is, you know, they put, they put the, they’ll put the either the Kiwi Aussie crew come over, and it’s like a fun OE at the same time that gets dropped in on the ground up here, and then often like the product has been built out of the southern hemisphere, and it’s really important to create that true empathy to the to the US customer, and the number, the amount of times I’ve heard from customers from the New Zealand or the Australian sitting here in the US who’s frustrated with the mothership, going, “Hey, you know, like we keep saying we need this feature for the market, and this is everything, Ross, you know, software logistics software, ag tag, like we keep saying we need this feature for us farmers, but back home they’re saying, well, why are they farming that way, or why are they doing it this way, you know, why they, they shouldn’t, like we do a bit, and it’s like you’re asking that person in the new country to not only change the software they’re using or their process, but also get it’s a hard sell to walk in and go, well, like, hey, there’s a way you, the way you manage your trucking business is actually wrong. You should do it the way we do it.

And so I do think, like, often one of the missteps is that you know whoever you put on the ground up here listen, and sometimes I call them bridging features, and actually you laugh, but the zero example for this was the bank reconciliation.

Heather Smith
Yeah.

Ben Richmond
right. There was two examples: checks and bank reconciliation, and everyone reconciled the bank live, and as I give it in the US, it’s still much more after the fact. So the excitement when Xero launched the bank reconciliation and the formal traditional way that all US accountants do it. Why would you build checks? Aren’t checks dying? Well, a lot of us people still write checks wrongly or rightly. And so they’re just features that you’re going to play here. You kind of got to get, you see, so many businesses will go, oh no, we don’t have to do that. You’re putting a hurdle in front of yourself. You don’t really need to.

So that’s number one advice, is just like, listen to the customer, then you can’t change, just be realistic on how much you can change the way your customers do your business, right? So, I call it bridging software.

Heather Smith
Yeah.

Ben Richmond
you know, sometimes you build a feature in there that helps bridge someone that you know, market them, maybe a little bit lagging, and how they use technology. You just want to get them into the software, and then you can take them on the journey. But back to an early point, that the step that you take,

Heather Smith
yeah, and building a global bridging feature demonstrates to them that you’re listening to them as well, rather than just like, well, if you’re never, it’s so much easier to buy into software that you can see strong support on the ground and they’re listening to you when you say this is not working, this is not working, and they some, they somewhat come to the party and build something in there, so yes, so the accounting and bookkeeping profession is being told simultaneously that AI will replace them and that they’ve never been more valuable,

From your vantage working with both the software and the profession, where do you land on AI? What are your thoughts on the current accounting technology landscape?

Ben Richmond
I mean, I think, I mean, I’ll start by saying, like, we’ve been here before on the this AI revolution is coming fast, and will be way more disruptive, but I think you know, for many accounts of bookkeepers out there in the profession, we’ve heard the whole, you know, Excel was going to kill the profession, desktop was going to kill the profession, cloud was going to kill the profession, and we still haven’t managed to scale advisory to the level we should probably have it at, right?

So I think it is going to be pretty challenging for a big chunk of the profession, but don’t embrace it, but I think it’s hugely exciting for the ones that do and do it in a meaningful way. The only thing that’s scary about this time is it’s coming a lot quicker. So, with the cloud, for instance, firms kind of maybe had the luxury of sitting back for 10 or 15 years and letting it emerge and seeing what other firm you let some of the followers go first and skin the knees, I don’t think we have that luxury. So, if technology AI fluency, just knowing what it is is not good enough, you have to be fluent AI.

So, the people going into the profession, the people you bring into your practice, that needs to be a core hiring skill, and you need to also change, you know, we have a risk aversion of the profession for the right reason, but you take, like, even adopt. Now, I’ve seen a lot of stuff that you’ve been writing about, right, like the models that the arms race between the models and the landscape that changes so quickly. You can’t sort of pick one and say we’ve made that decision after a six month RFP, and we’re going to stick with that for 12 months, like it’s not going to – you’ve got to be willing to.

Pivot, luckily the change costs aren’t too hard, so I actually think it’s exciting for the profession. I think we’ve got a labour shortage, we don’t have enough people to get through all the compliance as it is, and this will finally unlock true advisory for the people that do it right. I do think there will be more experience, it’ll be more scary for the ones that don’t, because there was a small cohort of the cloud generation that kind of got to sit back and not do it, and they kind of still did okay. I don’t think you’ll have that same luxury in regards to technology landscape. It’s going to be super fun to play, watch player.

I don’t, I’m not the big believer of the SaaS pocalypse that’s out there. I do believe the SaaS pocalypse is going to be very real for the big companies that do not embrace it, right? I kind of, you look at, you look at the cloud shift. I probably should be careful which brands and logos I mentioned, but you know, there was obviously players like Zero, which were cloud native, and there were other players out there that were very slow to adopt it, almost dismissive at the start.

You know, there were vendors out there that were like the county won’t go into the cloud, and spent more time trying to scare the market on, is your data secure in the cloud? And if I look at a player like, you know, one thing I will say about Insuit QuickBooks is like they disrupted themselves, and like they were like the non-cloud native player,

Ben Richmond
probably led the pack in going, we can see where this is going, and we’re going to hit it head on. We’re going to disrupt ourselves, because if we don’t, we won’t be here. And they leverage their scale, the distribution, you know, the advisor channel they had, and the scale of their balance sheet, and they were able to leverage that and basically jump a technology trend shift and remain when you’re one of the global leaders, so I can’t use that as a proof point. I think the story will be the exact same as we think about AI.

So, yeah, if you’re a large player in the tech space, that’s like I’m gonna, I’m gonna launch a glitter, a glitter bang feature, like a little, you know, little thing over here, and that’ll be enough for two years, like you are probably going to find yourself coming under what pressure. So, I think the big companies that embrace it head on, that put their money where their mouth is, and use the scale of their embedded workflows, their data sets, their distribution channels, and go fast and hard into AI. I think we should be able to make the jump. I also think we’re going to see some really exciting startups challenge the space, right?

So, I do think, and I think there’s.. there are.. there are.. I don’t know how many medals there are for who’s going to win and survive the jump, but I think you’re going to see a chunk of the incumbents make it and do well with it, and I think you’re going to see some really exciting startups that are going to end up scaled as well, because we saw that in the cloud transition, as well, so the thing that I look for, when, if I’m thinking about the vendor I want to be with, is, is this vendor, if it’s a long, tried, true, established player, are they, are they going fast out of them, and are they being mindful with it, and measured?

Yes, is it one of their key bits, because if it’s not one of their key bets, if it’s a round the fringe, and same thing in my world, right? You know, like it’s when you’re a vendor, and I’m in the same space in payroll, right? You’ve probably got this feedback for every software you use. There’s, there’s like, I call them quality of life features. So I’m very cognizant when I talk to our partners and our small business customers that you could make this one shift on one of your reports here and completely save us two minutes of client if you did that, and I don’t want to ignore that, right?

I also could build a co-pilot over here, where you have, which we’re doing, which you can have better conversations with the software, and maybe even negate the need for that report long term, but I think it’s important you balance that, and the big plus. So, for me, it’s like, how do I make sure we’re carving out and ring fencing a chunk of time to work on quality of life features that the customers are asking for, while balancing real innovation that matters. And then my approach to AI is like, yes, we have to get some stuff out there, but how do we measure success going back?

So this is the thing I can’t be looking at a lot of the vendors and going, so when I spoke with our team, I was like, I want AI principles, but I want, like, how we’re going to measure success, and I, and by the way, it’s not how much money we make from it, because if we do this right, we can get to those targets in a minute. The number one thing is, what impact do we have?

So, at Wagepoint, as an example, like two thirds of our volume goes through our accounting and bookkeeping channels, and a half of that is accountants who manage the payroll on behalf of the client, which is quite a difference than supporting a client or having a client doing it on their own. So, our success metric for the AI journey we’re going on is, how can I help? How can I help Heather grow her managed ARL business?

Ben Richmond
So, if she’s got x amount of staff looking after x amount of clients, how do we double that, so she can look after doubly amount of clients with the same amount of staff, because then we start to scale again. Go back to one of the conversations we had. Small businesses don’t really like accounting or payroll, they’re not good at it. And so I’d try to build an army of great advisors out there with great technology that they can outsource it to, and to do that, I think the technology is the enabler, but so like for AI, say, hey. Those like, what are those impact statements that you measure if a small business is using payroll on their own?

Well, most small businesses think they’re compliant, but they’re not, or they’re not expensive payroll. So, how do I use our AI to make sure that small business just knows they’re compliant? You know that British Columbia just changed the minimum rate. Like, how do I make sure that you go to run payroll, and I’m basically saying that you can’t do that, you should be sure you want to pay, then under that road. So, yeah, I think it’s exciting. I think it’s going to be. I’m more excited. There’s terrifying moments of it. I think a lot of the big players will come through strong.

I think we’ll see some epic new startups that will change the game, that will ultimately help make the mean. I remember, you know, one of the first partners I met in the US said to me, if Xero hadn’t come to the US, QuickBooks would not be where it is today, because you know you put the fire underneath them, and so both products are better for it today. So I do think that true competitive market is great for us, right?

And so these, these startups that are out there building AI native accounting, they’ve got their own challenges to scale, and having scaled accounting software for 15 years, you can have a great product, but it’s change is hard. But they are going to do some really awesome, disruptive things, they’re already doing it, and I do think that’s also going to keep the large players moving fast as well. So, I think it’s great for everyone.

Heather Smith
Yeah. No, it’s absolutely very exciting times, and adjacent to all of the tech evolution that you’re talking about, there I see the accounting firms, like we know the micro firms, the small firms, the medium firms, they have limited people to get through approval process, so they can adopt fast, and I think that they are going to get, they’re going to be able to embrace and adopt and move further ahead, potentially than the larger firms that have a lot of partners that need to approve, like, as you said, we need to approve which model we’re going to use, and six months to approve it, and like I’ve walked into AI training sessions, and we walked in the door, and they’re like, Claude is now the number one, we’re dropping everything we’re doing with this one, and we’re going to teach Claude, and then two weeks later it’s flipped again.

Ben Richmond
Well, I think the other two is for those bigger films, like you want to have guardrails, and you want to have principles, but you also want to have reality, which is, you know, I’ve got friends that work at many different places, and the ones that are working in places where it’s blocked, where you’re not allowed to use it, guess what, they’re all using it, but just what if you don’t give them the access to do it, they’re doing it, and your data is going into personal versions of those things, so you’re much better to be like move fast, be at the front of the pack, because then you do at least have some form of control over it, but if you’re blocking people from using it, I mean, we as consumers are using it in our personal lives everywhere again, so we’re not going to accept the workplace where I can’t, hopefully for in the military they’re not, but but I think you’ve got to, if you block too much, people will find a way to use it, and that’s actually not a great outcome either.

Heather Smith
No, absolutely, absolutely. So, Ben, you moved from a globally recognised, high-profile brand to leading Wagepoint, a Canadian payroll business.

What drew you to Wageooint, and what does the CEO seat look like today?

Ben Richmond
Yeah, it’s super fun. Like, it’s a business that’s in scale-up mode, so it’s gone through the startup phase. It’s got a decent mode, and a really exciting for me. What drew it makes is one, they’ve built this new platform, they had the final mile of doing that.

Two, then they had the challenge of how do we get all our customers and partners to migrate onto the new platform, that’s a challenge I’ve lived with for a huge part of my career, so that found like a fun challenge and a channel that I know and love, and so when I looked through that, I was like, this is a really exciting opportunity, it’s a really strong business financially, it’s got it’s got a lot of similar things to what Xero had around, like the human, human-centered, like the love for the customer and the role of the accounting and bookkeeper play, and clean, because you built the platform clean, you’ve kind of got this clean code base that allows you to go, so once we get through this year, which is the kind of migration year, next year gets really exciting, because we’re going to be running fast on one platform across, and I think the cool thing being the CEO was like, for me it was, you know, it was super cool working. I mean, I worked for Murad, I worked for Steve, I worked for Anna, Rachel Sikinda, Ashley, it’s like lots of different people, and learned so many different, like the Chrome from the very early days, so lots of it’s like a chance to put, like, I mean, you learn all great things different leaders do.

You often learn from some of the bad things they do, but like, even the chance of working with Sikinda was the absolute powerhouse. Like, I think really I learned so much from her in the two years and the conviction that she has, and how fast she goes. And so I’ve been able to take a lot of that and your own in my own piece and bring that and own the whole thing end to end has been exciting, so like the scale up phase is fun, right? So that kind of like it’s big but it’s not too big, so we make decisions quickly, and it had some missteps, right?

The new platform that they built took a couple of years, they tried to get everyone onto it a bit early and they didn’t have their migration processes sorted, so I went out and listed all our customers. I emailed every customer on the platform for feedback, which was, yeah, and I didn’t use AI to read those emails. Someone said, “You want us to build something for you to respond to them? I said, “No. I said, “I want.. I want to respond to the 250 emails I got with bad grammar, so they know it’s from me, not a bad AI. You know, listening to customers…

Heather Smith
Typo shows me it’s not AI.

Ben Richmond
Exactly. None of those dashes coming on through. So it’s been really fun, like a chance to, you know, I think it’s, it’s, it’s a great business, it’s come through a tough period, but it’s got a really exciting next few years ahead of it, and it’s got the accounting and bookkeeping channel right at the core, and it’s the same thing with accounting, like most small businesses are not passionate about accounting or payroll, they’re scared of it, and that’s not why they went into business.

And I actually think, if you know, set a team, we can make this platform really good for accountants looking after lots of clients, then we actually build a bigger network of accounts and bookkeepers that small businesses can rely on, and actually they can, you know, so many think it’s not a cost-effective service, like, you know, I’m too small to have a bookkeeper doing my payroll. Well, I think a lot of people would be quite surprised at how competitive a lot of these outsource payroll, you know, partners that they have can do it for. So that’s kind of what drew me, drew me to it.

It was like, obviously, I’m a sucker for a challenge, so migrating over 30,000 customers onto this new platform, but just seeing the investment we’re making in the product, and we’re right at the start of AI journey, which is super exciting. So Xero felt like this, amazing, like all the things that I’ve been through at Xero over the years in different countries and different phases of doing things, kind of like the ultimate training ground for what you know, what’s going to help make Wagepoint successful. So, yeah, yeah, and Canadians being in Canada is like being a step closer to home, because Canadians and Kiwis and Aussies are very similar.

Heather Smith
Love it. I think I don’t know if you’d know. I once wrote a payroll book as well, and I think that small business owners want to get payroll right, but it is complicated, and I made the decision, probably six or seven years ago, not to touch payroll anymore, because there was so much I needed to know, I either needed to specialise in it or outsource it to someone who did specialise in it, and I think if you’re sitting in the accounting and the bookkeeping space, I think that we talked about niching into camp to camp, niching, or niching into campgrounds, I think niching into payroll inventory or e-commerce are all things that you could build a really robust, strong, profitable, like, like earn above the average if you’re just a general accountant or bookkeeper wage, and it’s, I really think it’s so important, as you said, even though I say they can specialise and earn a lot of money doing it, they, the micro business and small business, can still tap in and use them, because they know they’ve got everything in place, they can just run, they know that was it,

Has British Columbia just changed their rules? Was that what you said?

Ben Richmond
Their minimum wage has gone up, so yeah.

Heather Smith
And as a normal punter, it’s easy to be like just day to day, people just miss, they’re just not aware of what’s going on, because they perhaps want to not be aware of what’s going on, because there’s a lot going on. So, thank you, Ben, so much for joining me. It’s been such an interesting conversation. I wish we lived closer, and I got to catch up with you for coffee every so often, but I have so much enjoyed hearing more about your life and more about your story.

Is there anything else that you’d like to share with our listeners?

Ben Richmond
Yeah, I think the big thing for me is comes back to the profession, which is like my absolute passion, right? Like, like it is like we we need to rebrand this, and I think people like yourself are doing, helping us get the word out there, like the accounting profession I left when I jumped onto the software side of the house, like, if I knew it could be what it is today, I’d probably still be on the other side of the fence, right. And so I think there’s more to be excited about with this profession than the doom and gloom we often have to hear.

Yeah, the like, and if we are going to change that high school student who’s working out what should I actually do, and just imagine how scary that would be. With this current world, like, we need to really do a better job of telling the story of what this profession is and highlighting what people are doing with their careers that stand beyond practice, and with then some of the awesome careers within practice that we’re seeing, because I think we just don’t tell a story as well.

It is exciting, and it is a service that small business need, and too many small businesses are still doing it on their own, and it’s way smarter for them to be doing it together, and it’s to stop the, you know, small business of young couples that don’t speak accountant jargon, right? So, like, we can, you’re seeing this, this totally different accounting practice emerge. So, I just think there’s, there’s a lot to be nervous about, there’s a lot to be scared about, there’s a lot of change coming at us again, as there is within the industry, but I think there’s a whole lot more for us to be proud of and excited about, and I think more accounts and book, you need to get out and tell that story.

Heather Smith
Yeah, absolutely, it is an impactful and purposeful career, and with our skills we can help so many people, thank you, Ben, for joining me on the podcast. Really enjoyed our time together.

Ben Richmond
Thank you.