Imtiaz Lorgat

A few weeks ago I built an app. In my new role, I regularly have calls with people in Australia, Africa and other places around the globe. With one click, the app finds the best meeting time across time zones anywhere in the world, so nobody on the call has to be awake at 3am. I described what I wanted, and I had it working in just a few minutes. No developer. No spec doc. No sprint or code review. Just me, describing a problem, and getting a solution. So here's the question I actually want to ask: whose job did I take to do this? I recently watched a video that broke down 60 years of Census data on automation. In that time, exactly one job title has been fully eliminated by technology: elevator operator. Everything else adapted. ATMs didn't shrink the number of bank tellers, they increased it. Cockpit automation didn't shrink the number of pilots, it increased it. Call center agents, often called out as mostly likely impacted by AI, have also increased over the years. About 60% of jobs that exist today didn't exist 50 years ago. The pattern isn't "technology destroys jobs." It's technology makes things cheap enough to build that were never worth building before. Economists call it competing against non-consumption. I wasn't going to hire a developer to build a niche scheduling tool for myself. That job didn't exist. Now it does, and I did it myself, in an afternoon, for free. AI didn't take anyone's job to build my app. It let me do something nobody was ever going to get paid to do for me. That's the real story here. Not job loss. Capacity nobody had before.

Dream big. Then start small. At 22, I was unemployed with a desk in my parents' garage and a plan to write a book. I wrote to 80 remarkable Australians. Thirty-four said yes. That became Collective Wisdom, a Sydney Morning Herald top 10 bestseller. In 2006, we opened Kelly+Partners in one office in North Sydney. In 2017, Rebecca and I rang the bell on the ASX. This morning, Nasdaq put my new book, Progress, on its tower in Times Square. None of it happened at once. Every big dream started as a small step we kept taking. Progress is how Kelly+Partners works. Our values. Our operating system. It is how we pass our culture on to every new team member and every new Partner. To our people: it's a big dream to build Australia's global accounting firm, but we are doing it one step at a time! We wrote a book and put it on a screen in the middle of the most important city in the world. Next, we keep building Kelly+Partners, Australia's global accounting firm that is world class at what it does every day! And we get it listed on Nasdaq, the world's stock exchange for challengers rewriting the rules of their industry! All of it is about making a difference for our people, our clients and our communities. One person adds. Teams multiply. Partnership compounds. #Progress #KellyPartners #Nasdaq #TimesSquare #DreamBig #BeBetterOff

What a Big Data LDN. 🦀 We introduced the world to the Aiven Data & AI Cloud, launched Aiven Runtime and Aiven DataHub, and spent two days talking to builders about what it actually takes to get AI from a working pilot into production. A few highlights: 🎤 Dojo took the stage to share how they built a trusted data foundation for AI 🏃 Live demos of Aiven Runtime and Aiven DataHub 🍳 Crabby's Kitchen kept the booth busy (and fed) Thank you to everyone who stopped by, asked great questions, and shared what's actually slowing your AI projects down. Missed us? The launch blogs are still live 👉 https://lnkd.in/dsUWMXXA

Another day taking technical inspections to new heights. 🌬️ High-altitude inspection work comes with incredible views, but safety and precision always remain top priority. Ready for the next challenge! #NDT #InspectionLife #WindEnergy #RenewableEnergy #SafetyFirst

Last month, a financial institution let me down. They sent a survey. I gave them the truth. Nobody called. My response probably moved a number. That number probably looked fine on a trend line. Here's a test for any exec: if sales came in soft this month, would you wait and hope? No , you'd be in the pipeline within the hour. Deal by deal. Stage by stage. Owner by owner. CX is the same. A score is just the sum of customers who did or didn't get heard. Back to basics: one customer at a time. Every customer counts. My negative response should have triggered an owner and a clock , the CX version of a stalled deal. Instead, nothing. The best CX organisations don't have the highest scores. They have the shortest gap between a customer saying something's wrong and someone acting on it Next time the NPS trend comes up, ask the sales question instead: who moved that number, who owns them, what happens next? If no one can answer -> you don't have a score problem. You have a system problem. #CustomerExperience #CXLeadership #CloseTheLoop #ResonateCX

Sarah gave four weeks' notice on a Tuesday. By Thursday, the partner had written a list. It wasn't her jobs. It was the things only Sarah knew. 👉 The Hendersons want their BAS call before school pickup, never after. 👉 Mark at the joinery business says "cash is fine" when it isn't. 👉The trust restructure was parked in March, not dropped. And you're wondering why Sarah is the only one who knew this? None of it was in the practice management system or the file notes. It was spread across six years of client calls, and it lived in Sarah's head. Four weeks isn't long enough to hand over six years of listening. Every firm has a brain. It just lives in your best people's heads. When they're on leave, so is the brain. When they resign, it leaves with them, and your clients start again with a stranger. AI won't fix this on its own. You can't ask a model about a conversation nobody wrote down. The firms pulling ahead are doing the unglamorous part first. They capture what gets said in client meetings, so the knowledge belongs to the firm and not to one person's memory. Most firms run on memory. The intelligent firm runs on infrastructure. That's the idea at the centre of 'The Intelligent Firm', a book I've been writing for accounting and bookkeeping firms hopefully live this year. It's also shaping what we're building at 🔴 Vinyl right now. We're building client intelligence that reads a client's whole meeting history, not just the last call. It tells you what Sarah would have known: who's drifting, who's ready for more, and what was promised and never done. If your best manager resigned tomorrow, what would they take with them? Stay tuned for more details on 'The Intelligent Firm' coming soon to you.....

R480 000... CAPITAL GAINS TAX ATE MY INVESTMENT? Six years ago I bought an investment erf for R1,3 million. On purchase I first paid transfer duty and transfer costs. Then for six years I paid municipal rates every month on a piece of land nobody lives on. Last year I sold it for R4 million. A healthy gain of R2,7 million... until the tax was calculated. Almost R480 000. Tax when you buy, tax every month while you own it, and then tax again when you sell. And that is before I even mention the risk, the bond that has to be paid off, maintenance, levies and so on... SARS carries none of the risk, yet holds a silent stake of up to 18% in every one of our hard-earned gains... with no risk, no responsibility and no support! And no, the R2 million exclusion everyone talks about did not help me at all. It only applies to the home you actually live in. First, the good news. If it is your primary residence and it is registered in your own name, the first R3 million of gain is now excluded (since 1 March 2026, previously R2 million). Most homeowners therefore pay nothing. The surprise is in the second property: the holiday home, the rental flat, the investment erf, or your own home if the gain exceeds R3 million. And here it makes a big difference in whose name it is registered. Had the same R2,7 million gain been held in a different name, the tax would have looked roughly like this: In my own name: about R480 000 In a company: about R583 000 In a trust: about R972 000 (An illustration only, based on current SARS rates. Your own figure depends on your income and circumstances.) Nearly a million rand... on an empty erf. And here is the part that costs most people dearly... The transfer duty and conveyancing fees on purchase, the commission on sale, and every improvement you made over the years, the extension, the new kitchen, the swimming pool, can reduce your gain. But only if you can prove it. No invoice, no deduction. And note: improvements, not ordinary maintenance. How many of us still know where the invoices are for a kitchen we had done 12 years ago? The tax itself is not the biggest problem. The problem is that nobody tells you to keep records and plan ahead, until the day it is too late. I am not a tax practitioner, so sit down with yours before you buy, to identify the best structure (entity) and the right time to sell... not afterwards. Have you ever worked out what you will pay one day when you sell your primary or second property... and do you know where your invoices are? I would be interested to hear your experience. #CapitalGainsTax #PropertyInvestment #Homeowners #SouthAfrica

Ten years ago, the cloud accounting community felt like a movement. Today it feels like a customer base. I think that's on us, the software vendors. I've spent 14+ years in accounting tech, and the shift is hard to miss. A decade ago, a bookkeeper who'd bet their practice on cloud software was the most valuable person in the ecosystem. They were the early adopter. They talked sceptical clients off desktop. They tested betas on live files, answered questions in the forums and ran the meetups. And vendors showed up. Product teams were in the room. Feedback got a reply. A partner badge meant something. The deal was never written down: you give us your time, we give you a seat at the table. Then accounting vendors scaled. Once you don't need early adopters to grow, partner programs stop being growth engines and become cost centres. Account managers became sales reps. Certifications got renamed and downgraded. Feedback queues went quiet. Some vendors built advisory teams that now compete for the clients their partners won. Nobody announced it. The deal was just quietly repriced. Practitioners are still testing and still answering. But it's with one eye on the exit now, because trust doesn't snap. It wears away. So when a bookkeeper writes "They once listened, until suddenly they didn't", that's what she means. I sell software to the accounting profession and we consult with 100s of accounting vendors as well, so I'm not writing this from the sidelines. It's happened. But there's still time to undo it too: pay for their time, answer their feedback, don't compete with the people who built the market. That's what we want to be about at 🔴 Vinyl and Journey. I wrote the practitioner's side of it here based on comments blowing up in a few online forums: https://lnkd.in/gx2nBR-b

Things you thought would take 5 minutes… •Send one quick email to a client → 3 follow-ups later… • Get one simple form completed → “Just following up on this one…” • Find one document → Search inbox. Search folders. Search everywhere. • Get one payment sorted → Email. Follow-up. Another follow-up. • Get one piece of information from a client → “Sorry, just one more thing…” And suddenly, it’s 4:47pm and you’re wondering where the day went. It’s easy to overlook the little things because none of them take that long. But 5 minutes here. 10 minutes there. Another 15 minutes chasing something up. It all adds up. And getting that time back matters. It means more time for your clients. More time to get through the work that actually needs you. More time to finish your day without taking half your to-do list home with you. That’s what we’re trying to do with OnboardMe, take care of the little things that quietly eat away at your day, so you can get more of your time back. Because your time is valuable.