Thank You

Writing a book is a strange thing to do alongside running two companies. It happens in the gaps. Early mornings, long flights, late nights after the team has logged off. And it only makes sense because of the people around you who make the gaps possible.

I want to start where this actually started. Not with accounting technology, but with the people in it. I have spent fourteen years working alongside the accounting profession without being part of it. Sitting with firms, understanding the pressure of compliance seasons, watching good people carry too much and still show up for their clients every day. I am not an accountant. I have never been one. But I have been in enough rooms, on enough calls, and across enough kitchen tables with practitioners to understand how this profession actually thinks. That is the lens this book is written from. Outsider who gets it.

Alongside that work I completed my MBA by correspondence, full-time, while keeping everything else running. That is a particular kind of discipline that I do not talk about much, but it taught me how to think about business, strategy, and systems in a way that has influenced every framework in this book. You learn differently when you are building at the same time as you are studying.

To the accounting and bookkeeping community I have spent the last fourteen years working with, across Australia, New Zealand, the UK, the US, and Canada. Thank you for trusting me with your time, your firms, and your honest assessments of what is working and what is not. This book is yours as much as it is mine.

To the practitioners who sat with me for recorded conversations, conference hallways, and early morning Zoom calls: every story, observation, and example in this book came from those exchanges. I wrote the words. You built the argument.

To the team at Vinyl: Nick, Liss, Jordan, KC, Elle, and Jack. You built the thing that proved the argument. Every one of the 70,000 meetings sitting behind Chapter 37 happened because you built something firms actually wanted to use. That is not a small thing and I do not take it for granted.

To Liss. My wife, my co-founder, my first read on almost every decision. You have shaped more of this book than you know and more of Vinyl than most people see. None of this exists in any honest form without you. Thank you for the time, the patience, and the quiet sacrifices that made the gaps possible. This one is for you.

To Jordan Vickery. You took the argument to the UK and ran with it before anyone had written a playbook for how to do that. The line in the sand is visible from every timezone because you proved it could be.

To the firms that started before it felt comfortable. That named an AI Champion before anyone had written a job description for it. That captured the first meeting and sent the summary to the client and discovered the client had been waiting for exactly that. Thank you for going first.

And to every client who sent back a reply that said this is the best communication we have ever received from an accounting firm. You are the reason the starting point is one meeting.

A note on sources and permissions

Every practitioner named or quoted in this book has been contacted prior to publication. Where direct quotes appear, they have been reviewed for accuracy against recordings, written communications, or published content. Where stories are told, they have been shared with the individuals involved before going to print.

Errors in attribution are the author's responsibility and will be corrected in subsequent editions. Contact details are at theintelligentfirm.com.

Trent McLaren
Co-founder, Vinyl · usevinyl.com
Co-founder, Journey · letsjourney.io
Founder, The Intelligent Firm · theintelligentfirm.com
Sydney, Australia, 2026