A Note From Trent
How an unlikely path through Yarragon, eWAY, Intuit and Ignition led to a book about the future of accounting.
I nearly didn't finish high school.
I grew up in Yarragon, a small country town in Victoria, Australia. Population not much. Main street, one pub, a bakery where I would pick up the overnight pastry shift at sixteen, and paddocks in every direction. The people in the bakery called me Dough Boy. My mates called me T-Mac, after Tracy McGrady, one of the greatest to ever play the game. It started on the basketball court and the footy field. My dad still uses it. A few people in the accounting industry do too. I liked English and public speaking, and spent more time thinking about music than anything resembling a career plan. I had a large vinyl record collection and no particular ambition beyond the next weekend.
The pastry shift started at 11pm and finished around 5 or 6 in the morning, once a week. I was playing state-level basketball across Victoria at the time, which meant I'd sometimes come back from a game in Melbourne, go straight to work, sleep for five hours, play AFL footy, then go back to bed. Nobody called it a work ethic. It just felt like life.
After that I worked labour-intensive jobs for years. Nothing glamorous. Nothing that pointed toward a future in technology or finance or anything adjacent to either. What it gave me was a very clear understanding of what I didn't want to do forever, and an equally clear understanding that I could outlast most things if I had to.
The turn came when I met Liss. We became best friends quickly, started dating six months in, and within a year I knew I'd found my person. When we got engaged, I made a decision. I needed to build something real. Something that could support the life we wanted together and the ambition we both had to see the world and make something of it.
That's how I landed at eWAY in 2012. A payments company. My entry point into the accounting technology industry, entirely by accident, and one of the best accidents of my life.
From eWAY, I worked my way across some of the firms and platforms that shaped how this profession thinks about technology. At Intuit I got hands-on with cloud accounting adoption, sitting alongside accountants as they moved clients from desktop to cloud, watching what worked and what didn't, and competing against Xero in their home market in a way that taught me more about this industry than any market research could.
At Ignition I was employee number 19. By the time I left, the firm had grown from under 800 firms on the platform to nearly 4,500. I was responsible for driving community, running large events, the biggest topping 1,200 attendees across two venues. Someone once called me the Van Wilder of accounting events. I was paid to travel to Xerocon and Intuit Connect and help accountants feel like they were part of something. Like the SF tech scene before it was cool. That was the cloud accounting wave. I was lucky enough to be inside it.
Through Journey, the GTM agency I co-founded, we have helped more than 70 accounting technology brands go to market across APAC, EMEA and AMER. That work taught me more about the gap between good products and real adoption than anything else I have done. Through Vinyl, the platform I co-founded with Liss and Jordan, we now serve more than 5,000 practitioners across 350-plus firms in 16 countries. Building it meant sitting with hundreds of firms before we wrote a line of code, and hundreds more as we built. The firms in this book are those conversations.
I am not an accountant. I have never been one. And yet here I am, writing the playbook for where the profession is headed. Make of that what you will.
I have since completed an MBA with a specialism in finance and a mini-MBA in marketing. I am 37. I drink too much coffee and do not always get enough sleep. I am a jack of all trades and genuinely proud of it. I get into the technology, try to understand the use cases, and attempt to break things before practitioners do.
The record collection is still growing. The company named after it is too.
This book is what fourteen years of doing that produced. It is built on interviews with practitioners across four countries, on the conversations that happen when you ask someone what actually goes wrong rather than what they wish would go right.
I hope it is useful. More than that, I hope it changes how you build.
