Brett Kelly

The firm did not begin with a strategy. It began with an injury. Brett's father, raised poor in England and out of school at 13, moved to Sydney and built a business importing European kitchen equipment for bakeries and hotels. In 1990, in the middle of a recession, an accountant recommended by a large firm embezzled from it. His father and his business partner had to let a third of their team go. Many had been with them for more than 20 years.

"If I'd been an accountant, I would have known."Brett's father, 1990

Brett was 16. He had planned to read law at Oxford. Instead he took a cadetship at Price Waterhouse and spent four and a half years learning what Warren Buffett calls the language of business. He had started reading Buffett at 17. Those two facts explain most of what followed.

At 22 an investment bank told him he did not fit in and let him go. He set up a desk in his parents' garage, wrote to 80 of the most prominent people in Australia and made more than 3,000 phone calls. Thirty-four of them said yes, among them former prime ministers and a future one. He self-published the interviews as Collective Wisdom in 1998. It was the number one bestseller in the country within a week, and he launched it live on national television from the National Press Club in Canberra. He was 23.

He has gone back to the same question every seven years since.

In June 2006 Brett and his wife Rebecca, also an accountant, started Kelly+Partners: two small offices in Sydney, three founding partners, one team member and a $50,000 loan. The idea was simple. Private business owners deserve an accounting firm built around them, run by partners who own their own firm. Revenue grew sixteen-fold in the first year.

He set the firm one goal: to last 100 years. He studied the organisations that had, from Beretta to the Benedictines, and wrote down a system so the firm could run the same way in every office without him in the room. That system is now a book, Progress: Ideas for Life + Business, and it is how every Kelly+Partners firm is run.

Twenty years on, Kelly+Partners has 105 partners, 711 team members and 43 businesses across Australia, the United States, Hong Kong, India and Ireland, and looks after about 25,000 private business clients. Brett moved from Sydney to Los Angeles in January 2023 to lead the United States in person. His father's accountant is still the reason the firm exists.

Funds have spent the last five years buying accounting firms, and the principals who built them are becoming employees of the businesses they founded. A fund has to sell inside three to five years. The partner you chose may answer to a new owner before your next return is lodged.

Before 2006 a principal in an accounting firm had two exits. Sell to a larger firm or a consolidator and become an employee. Or stay in a lockstep partnership and hold a sliver of the whole firm, diluted by everyone else's performance. Brett built a third thing. Under Partner-Owner-Driver™ the group takes 51 per cent of a firm and the partner who runs it keeps 49 per cent, permanently. The upside is theirs, and it is local. Partners sign a ten-year commitment. When one retires, the share passes to the next partner, so the firm never loses its local owner.

Brett tells the story through Australia II's winged keel, the advantage below the waterline that won the 1983 America's Cup. From the surface Kelly+Partners looks like an accounting firm. Underneath, 105 partners own their offices, and the whole group is built so that they stay.