EP174: Nick Sinclair - The Power of Having A Global Team

Michael Palmer: You're listening to The Successful Bookkeeper with your host, Michael Palmer. Listen each week as inspiring guests share their secrets of success to help you increase your confidence work smarter, and build a business you love. This episode of The Successful Bookkeeper is brought to you by purebookkeeping.com, the proven system to grow your bookkeeping business. Welcome back to The Successful Bookkeeper Podcast. I am your host, Michael Palmer, and today's show is going to be a good one. Our guest is the founder and chairman of TOA Global, which is a professional accounting outsourcing partner that helps build and grow offshore teams. Nick Sinclair, welcome to the show. Thanks for having me, Michael. Really excited to be on the show. That's great to have you, and I'm looking forward to learning more about you and also how you're helping a lot of bookkeepers and accountants right around the globe. And before we get into that, Please tell us your career journey leading up to this point.

Nick Sinclair: It's been an interesting ride, might be to say, might be the easiest way to say it. So growing up, I didn't really know what I wanted to do. I thought I wanted to be an environmental scientist, so I started studying that and then pivoted, got into the financial services world, worked at banks for a while, and then I fell into financial planning, which was really my passion for about 12 years. And, um, at the age of 21, I was a young, um, not, not a millennial, but I had this simple attitude where I didn't want to work for my employer. So I went and set up my own financial planning business and I built and grew that over 12 years. And as the journey went on, I built in a finance business as part of that, a property buyer's agent business. Um, and then the last aspect of it, which I had for about 4 years before I ended up merging the whole business and exiting, um, was an accounting practice. So we were an early adopter of Xero. So I bought an accounting firm, converted the whole firm to be a Xero-based business. This is when cloud was early days in Australia. So we had 100% Xero practice, we were a Platinum Partner, and I ran that business for about 12 years before merging it and then exiting out of it. But the merge and exit really was driven by TOA, what is now TOA Global, wasn't meant to be a business. It just happened by default. So I had a team of 38 staff in Australia and we were struggling day to day with keeping up with capacity. We were