Buyers and Builders
00:00:00 · Mikk
[00:00:00] S0: Today's guest is Brett Kelly, founder and CEO of Kelly Partners Group Holdings, an accounting firm which has completed more than 90 acquisitions and built one of the most distinctive consolidation stories in professional services. Over time, the company has compounded revenue at more than 30% annually. In 2009, Kelly Partners generated roughly 400,000 of EBITDA. For 2026, projected EBITDA is expected to reach 50,000,000. Thanks a lot for coming to the Buyers and Builders podcast, Brett. We're going to go through the past, the present and the future, obviously starting from the past. And I found something you've said. I lost a job at 22. I didn't know what I wanted to do. I was an advisor in an investment bank and it taught me that I wanted to do my own principle based deals. So a lot has changed since then as you've gone from being absolutely confused to to now being world class focused and having this clarity. But take us back to this period of of your life, Brett, at 22.
00:01:11 · Brett Kelly
[00:01:11] S1: Yeah. I was... I just consider myself to have been very lucky and very blessed. At 14, I was washing cars and mowing lawns and blower vaccing people's tennis courts for pocket money and then I was coaching sport and getting paid and then I went into accounting at Pricewaterhouse as an undergraduate at 18 because two years before that a financial controller had embezzled money in my father's business. And so I saw how important it was and how much that had impacted my dad. He always thought if he'd been an accountant that that wouldn't have happened but you know, I later understood that even when your company's audited, fraud is difficult to detect. So I went into accounting. I did four and a half years and then I went into an investment bank in corporate advisory. And while I was at Pricewaterhouse I was involved in the EVA group, the Economic Value Added group, reading books like Creating Shelf and Value by Alfred Rappaport and starting to understand capital allocation. From the age of 17 I've been sort of reading everything that had been written on or by Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger and so I had those sort of you know first book I read on investing was Philip Fisher's book of common stocks and uncommon profits and so I thought I'd be an investor build a global business that was kind of my vision of what was possible. The businesses in Australia that were most successful that were global, that I could see were Westfield Shopping Group built by Frank Lowy and News Corporation built by Rupert Murdoch and they were both Australians who had built these global businesses. So in the back of my mind, I thought that's what you were meant to be when you grew up. And, you know, I lost my job in investment banking. Everything had been a bit of a straight line. And, you know, the feedback I had was that I didn't get old and old people, which wasn't really true. It was just that I hadn't found my people. You know I wasn't a natural advisor because I like to make things happen. I'm very energetic. I'm thoughtful and you know fast brained and what I found difficult was if you said to a client, they asked you for advice, you gave them advice and maybe they didn't get up very early, they didn't stay up very late, they didn't make things happen.
00:03:45 · Brett Kelly
It was frustrating so I lost the job and there was a great sense of relief that now I could do whatever I wanted. So my dad gave me two books How to Win Friends and Influence People and Think and Grow Rich and Think and Grow Rich says find people that have been successful and ask them what they did. So I wrote to 80 prominent Australians. I came up with 11 standard questions and I said my name is Brett Kelly. I'm 22. I'm unemployed but I'm keen to learn. If you'll answer my 11 standard questions in a face to face interview, I'll put it in a book. I'll get it out to other young people who also want to learn. During that process I learned that I had no money, no experience, no publishing expertise, no connections and really no idea of what I was doing. But I believed that through doing that I could get ideas about what I wanted to do. What I really learned was that everything you want to do, you do within a hub through people and that being able to lead people and get on well with people is the most important thing. But I also learned that you could put a team together and get a huge amount of experience if you could work well with people. And in none of my university degrees I have an undergrad degree in business and a master's degree in taxation and I'm a chartered accountant in about five countries. I, you know, the emphasis was on technical skills not working well with people. And so in that team I went to publishers, asked them to help me publish the book and they said, You're not famous. Who will read your book? And I said, But I'm 20, so I'm unemployed. I've got a good story. And the story I believed was more important than being famous. And I bought Out of American, a 24 tape series by Mark Victor Hansen who'd written the Chicken Soup for the Soul book series and they sold 500,000,000 books and he told you how to self publish a book, how to promote your book and sell your book. And I just did exactly what that said. Was now reading a book a week. I bought the whole Simon and Schuster self help tape catalogue and I put them in a bookshelf and I thought I'm going write this book and I listened to the tapes and I read the book and it convinced me that learning is the most important thing and that my natural talent anyway was learning so that was good And so I started I made you know I have a think it was 3,000 phone calls in twelve weeks.
00:06:27 · Brett Kelly
I tracked down the people. I got the interviews. But when I went back to the publishers they said, we didn't think you'd get the interviews but now you have, you know, who's going read your book? So I had to self publish the book. And so that book became part of a series of books. That was this book. And when I did it people thought it was going to be a but it was a proper book and then every seven years since I've done another book so for twenty eight years I've published this series of books of wisdom Now we're reading all these books about what life was about life turns out to be about wisdom to be about growing in deep understanding so no matter what you do you should really try to be a deep person in a shallow world, a long term person in a short term world and that is sort of Charlie Munger invert, invert, invert. So I am there having done the book and a lot of professional speaking. I went back into chartered accounting. I worked in three different firms and I was so frustrated. I went home. We had a nine month old child. Three months before that I'd started a firm for a friend of mine because he was having troubles in the firm he was in. And the big insight, Mikk, is that often other people see talent in you that you don't see in yourself. So my friend Scott had worked with me at an accounting firm and he rang me up. I'm the godfather of his son and he said, Brett, you're so good at running businesses and you know so much about it. I'm a really good accountant. Could you run the business and I'll do the accounting? And that's where our partner owner driver model came from. He said, You have 75% and I'll have 25%. And then when I did the numbers, I was like, No, Scotty, I have 51%, you have 49 because I think I can help you run the business at twice the profitability of the industry. And then you'll still be making the money you would if you worked for these other idiots. But your life will be good, we'll be doing something great together. And the financial law will work. So I read about 3,000 books on this journey over many, many years. At least a book a week for years and years and years.
00:08:52 · Brett Kelly
You know Manga talked about being a book online so I just am a voracious sort of consumer and integrator of knowledge from wherever I can find it and so then in June 2006 my boss Rebecca my wife and I had just had our first son Thomas and my boss he had promised when he recruited me the year before particular undertaking and then when I said to him well what's happening with me becoming a partner He said, Well, the problem is if we do what we said we would do, you will own half the firm and we want you to own 10%. And I said, Okay. And I couldn't understand why that made sense. So I rang two of my good friends who are very successful entrepreneurs. I had worked when I did my first book in a software company that made the first software for EVA valuation of companies. It was a valuation tool that linked to the Bloomberg data source and it produced 32 different versions of a valuation of a public company. And so I was very deep in valuation and Anthony said to me, Brett, I thought you'd already have a company of your own firm. I don't know what you're doing. So I oh okay. So I read my other friend and he said, yeah, why don't you have your own firm? Okay. But again, two men saw in me things I didn't see in myself. I was really trying very hard to be a good employee and do the right thing by my boss, but I couldn't get the boss out of bed early. I couldn't get him to stay up late. He didn't really have a passion for what he was doing. So I felt like I didn't fit in again because I am really twenty four hours a day, six days a week and I want to be very much world class at anything I do. So when I did my first book, I made sure that book looked as good as any book in a bookstore, even though it was self published and it became a top 10 bestseller. When I did my professional speaking, I hired the best professional speaking coach and he helped me structure my presentation and taught me how to present the presentation so that I was the youngest accredited professional speaker in Australia at 22 years old. I spoke at the National Press Club in Canberra twice launching two of my books. So it was always if you're going to do it, do it the best it can be done.
00:11:20 · Brett Kelly, Mikk
You know my dad had a saying if you aim for the Rolls Royce and you fall short you drive a Mercedes if you aim for the Mercedes and fall short you drive a Ford and if you aim for the Ford and fall short you know, hopefully you like walking. So it was like really aim for the stars and if you fall short you get the moon, you know. So that was the journey. I turned around to my wife and I met Rebecca working in an accounting firm and I have to credit Bec for her confidence in me because again you know it is important that people that have confidence in you when you don't, that see things about you that you don't. And Bec is like why don't you just start her own firm? You are really good at this and you can just build a company and I was like what are you talking about? This is annoying. Our industry is terrible. It is full of these people that say one thing and do something else. Why do I want to do this? She's like, get great at this. Just do that. So that was I thought, oh, Okay. So I started Kelly Partners in 06/12/2006, and I had a very, very clear plan as I always do, Mikk. And that was to build a better accounting firm for the [00:12:38] S0: people