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Bram Lagrou: Welcome back yet to another episode of the Commercial Leader podcast. My name is Bram Lagrou. Let me start with a story that already happened to one of you or to a firm like yours. Last October, one of the Big Four handed the Australian government a report. Workforce compliance advice commissioned for a government department close to $440,000.
And when someone actually went and checked the citations underneath it, the academic sources, the legal references, the footnotes, the whole thing was built on, a chunk of them simply did not exist. Invented, generated by AI, never checked by a human being, delivered anyway on a government contract under a Big Four letterhead.
The firm ended up handing [00:01:00] back part of the fee in public, and here's the detail that should actually keep you up at night if you are a partner in this industry. The firm's entire pitch to that department, and to basically every client on their books right now, is, "Let us help you get ahead of AI." Well, they got caught by the exact thing they were selling.
I'm not telling you that story to pile on one firm. I'm telling you because it's the cleanest example I've found of something much bigger happening across this entire industry right now, and almost nobody's naming it correctly. That's the industry you're operating in today.
So before I get into the why and what to actually do about it, quick word on where this is coming from if you are new to the show
Now, why am I bringing this straight to you? Well, six years as a commercial leader myself, and 16 years as a management [00:02:00] consultant, so 22 years in total inside commercial teams, even the Big Four, across 25 countries. A master's degree in psychology, postgraduate in learning and development behind that, and a methodology called Communication Mastery that I've personally spent the time building and that I license into corporate clients as training, coaching, and soon to be, technology.
Normally on this show, I'm talking to sales leaders. Today, I want to talk directly to a different audience, the partners running audit, tax, and advisory practices, whether Big Four and also mid-tier, both of them it does apply. Because I think you're living through exactly the problem this show exists to unpack, and almost none of the commentary about your industry right now is framing it correctly.
The two forces squeezing your industry right now. Here's the frame. Your industry is being [00:03:00] squeezed from two directions all at once, and everyone's covering them as two separate stories when they're actually the same.
The first force is trust, and it's not abstract. It's showing up in the numbers. Take PwC Australia's tax leak.
A senior partner sharing confidential government tax drafts with colleagues who sold that intelligence to multinational clients cost the firm a 26% revenue drop in a single financial year. Partner headcount went from 882 down to 655. Staff turnover hit 32%. And as I'm recording this, KPMG Australia is in the middle of its own version.
A whistleblower alleging its auditors used confidential board papers from one client to help win audit work from others. The firm's CEO, its head of audit, and its chair have [00:04:00] all resigned within weeks of each other. ASX is now running a formal investigation. A 68-year audit relationship gone, just like that.
That's not two firms having a bad year. Zoom out for a moment, and it's the whole tier. Ernst & Young alone paid the SEC 100 million US dollars for employees cheating on ethics exams and misleading the investigators looking into it. Every one of those headlines chips away at the exact thing your entire fee structure has always assumed clients are paying for, that your judgment can be trusted without them checking it themselves.
Now here's force number two, and this is where that Deloitte story from the top comes back in. AI isn't just making your competitors cheaper, it's dismantling the logic your fee model was built on in the first place. The pyramid [00:05:00] works because partners leverage cheap graduate hours, juniors doing the research and the first-pass analysis, whilst partners just review and sign off.
AI now does a growing share of that research and analysis directly, faster, at a cost your pyramid can't match without shrinking itself. Clients who've noticed this, are starting to ask an uncomfortable question out loud: "Why am I still paying yesterday's rates for work AI does today?"
Even the firms with the resources to fix this from the inside are struggling with it. EY tried to split its audit and consulting arms apart back in 2022 specifically to solve this kind of structural problem. The plan collapsed a year later when the partners couldn't agree on where to put the tax practice, and EY walked away carrying more than 700 million US dollars of debt from the attempt.
If the firm best resourced in the [00:06:00] world to solve this from the org chart down couldn't do it, it isn't getting solved that way anywhere else either.
The one asset neither force can touch and the technician's trap. Trust is compressed. Fees are compressed. Two forces squeezing in from opposite directions landing on exactly the same point.
And here's the insight I actually want you to leave this episode with. There is exactly one asset in your business that neither force has touched. AI hasn't automated it. None of the scandals have burnt it. It's the individual partner's ability to be trusted by the specific human beings on the other side of the table and to convert that trust into more scope.
Person to person, one relationship at a time, independent of how many graduates you can throw at the [00:07:00] file.
That asset has never had to carry this much weight before. And here's the uncomfortable part. It was never selected for. I call this the technician's trap. Every partner in your firm got to where they are by being right. Technically rigorous, methodologically sound, across every review point along the way.
Now, that's what got promoted. That's what got rewarded. Nobody in that promotion process was ever seriously assessing whether that person could read a room, build trust fast with a skeptical stakeholder, or recognize when a client's silence in a meeting means something other than agreement.
For 20 years, that didn't matter because being right was the differentiator. Clients paid a premium for certainty, and the brands did a lot of that trust-building for a partner before they'd even walk into a room. Both of [00:08:00] those covers now are just gone. Being right is what AI does for a fraction of the cost, and the brand halo has taken hit after hit after hit.
So the thing that's now the simple biggest lever on whether a client stays, expands, or quietly starts a tender with a boutique down the road is a skill most of your partners were never trained and never assessed on, and don't know they're missing.
if you've listened to this show before, you've heard me talk about what I call the "Brain Elevator". The idea that every stakeholder's brain moves through three floors up or down before they actually commit to anything, and you cannot skip a floor.
Floor one is pure threat detection. Is this safe? Is this person trying to take something away from me? Floor two then is trust and rapport. Will working with this person cost me my credibility if it goes [00:09:00] wrong? Floor three then is where the actual rational evaluation happens. The technical merits, the numbers, the thing every audit and advisory pitch is built to sell.
What's different about your industry right now compared to almost every other sales conversation I coach on this show. Your floor one just got a lot more sensitive industry-wide, and it's not really about your firm individually. A finance director who's read one more headline about a Big Four exam cheating scandal or an AI-generated report walks into your next meeting with their threat detection already half triggered before your partner said a single word.
That's not paranoia on their part. It's a completely rational response to what this industry has spent the last few years doing to its own credibility.
Which means the floor [00:10:00] one work, the pure no pressure, I'm not here to catch you out or oversell you signaling, matters more for a partner walking into a room today than it did five years prior. And most partner development skips floor one and two entirely and goes straight to floor three because floor three is the part that looks like actual expertise.
Now picture this. Let me make it concrete because I see a version of this constantly. This one's a composite with the details changed, but if you're running an audit or advisory relationship right now, tell me if it doesn't sound familiar.
Picture a technically excellent audit partner, let's call him David, running a relationship with a mid-cap client that's been technically flawless for six years running. Clean opinions, no adjustments, every deadline hit, and yet the client's been [00:11:00] quietly moving advisory work, the higher margin work, over to a boutique a third the size.
David's read on it, understandably, is that it's about price. It rarely is. Nine times out of ten in a story like this, what's actually happened is that somewhere in that relationship, on the client side, one stakeholder or more didn't feel heard, or felt talked down to in a technical review, or watched David walk into a room in the middle of the industry's headlines acting like nothing had changed.
And that stakeholder or multiple is still stuck on trust no matter how good the technical work is. You cannot logic your way past a trust problem.
Now, why the same message lands differently depending on who's in the room. Here's what makes it harder still, and this is where I [00:12:00] want to get specific with numbers, because the scale of this problem is bigger than most partners realize. DISC splits behavioral style into four rough buckets. D for dominant and fast. I for warm and story-driven. S for steady and conflict-averse. C for analytical and detail-driven.
Now, by most published breakdowns, one in eight Australians, around 12%, is a genuine high C. Now, think about who becomes a tax accountant or an audit partner. That role selects hard for exactly that profile. Being precise, detail-obsessed, uncomfortable moving until every number reconciles. Most technical partners I meet in this industry score high C, and that's not a criticism.
Here's the problem it creates. When a high C partner sits across from a CFO, it [00:13:00] usually works beautifully because a lot of CFOs are high C too. Same pace, same appetite for detail, same instinct to want it in writing before deciding. Two C's in a room read each other natively.
But the CFO is rarely the only person in that buying committee. There's a CEO, a COO, a chief commercial officer, sometimes a board member, and those roles skew disproportionately toward the other three styles. D and I especially. Which means that maths is working against your partner by default. If genuine high C's are only around one in eight of the population, then on any stakeholder they haven't specifically profiled,
Your partner is statistically more likely to get the read wrong than right. Not occasionally wrong, more often wrong than right, purely as a [00:14:00] function of population.
And here's exactly where that goes wrong on the brain elevator. A high C partner's natural style, which is careful, qualified, wants to show the working before the conclusion, lands on a high D executive who wants the bottom line in the first 90 seconds, and he or she perceives the partner as slow, evasive, even a little untrustworthy.
Now, that's not a floor three problem. That's floor one. The D style executive's threat detection fires because the conversation feels like it's hiding something behind all that caution and detail. On a high I executive who wants warmth and story before substance, the same careful data first approach reads as cold and transactional.
A floor two problem, a goodwill [00:15:00] rupture, long before the numbers even get discussed. Either way, that stakeholder never reaches floor three. The technically flawless analysis your partner prepared never gets a rational hearing because the brain elevator never arrived at level three, the neocortex.
And it cuts both ways, which is the part that actually surprises people. The rainmakers in this industry, the partners generally excellent and bringing in new work are disproportionately high I or high D themselves. Fast, warm, confident, comfortable filling a room. That's exactly what wins a pitch. But the same energy unmodified walking into a room with a cautious detail-driven high C or high S client, which statistically is where most of your technical buyers actually sit, reads as exactly the kind of overconfident corner-cutting [00:16:00] behavior this industry's scandals have made people newly suspicious of.
Your best rainmaker can alienate your most conservative highest value client in the first 15 minutes with generally good intentions and never learn why the deal went quiet.
Add one more layer for your multinational accounts. A German finance function wants the methodology laid out before the conclusion. On the flip side, an American one wants the number first and the reasoning on request. A client from a more hierarchical culture expects the engagement partner personally in the room for anything that matters and reads a junior manager sent instead as a signal about how much they're valued, not a scheduling convenience.
A cultural misread used to just slow a relationship down. In an industry with this much trust already burned, it [00:17:00] doesn't slow things down anymore. It ends them.
I already know what some of you are thinking because I hear it in almost every one of these conversations. "I know DISC. I did a workshop on it a few years back. I get it. Maybe I've even done multiple of them. I get it." Well, here's the distinction that matters, and I want to leave you with it before I make the ask.
Knowing about a language and speaking it fluently are not the same skill. You don't become fluent in French, German, Mandarin, or Japanese by sitting through a one-day workshop and filling in a questionnaire about yourself. You become fluent through years of consistent practice, actually using it under pressure, in real conversations, until it stops being a translation exercise in your head, and it starts becoming how you naturally speak and behave.
Most of this [00:18:00] training, the way firms run it, teaches you to read the menu. It doesn't teach you to order in the language.
And here's the harder part of that analogy. It takes deliberate practice, rehearse, and drill to speak someone else's style when your own instinct is pulling you somewhere else, especially under pressure when your default kicks in hardest. Now, for a lot of technical partners, that default is avoiding the tough conversation, sidestepping conflict, staying in the comfortable technical register instead of naming the tension directly with a client who's gone quiet.
Knowing that you should adapt your style doesn't make you able to, in the room, in real time, when it's uncomfortable and when the stakes are high. That gap between knowing and doing is exactly where deals stall.
And here's a number worth sitting with. Most people, [00:19:00] by most practitioner data, aren't fluent across all four styles. They have one or at most two dominant styles. Roughly two-thirds of people fall into that pattern, like a bell curve.
And everything outside their one or two is effortful, not natural. Translate that back into the language analogy of two out of every three partners in your firm natively speak one or two of the four languages in the room, and are guessing or translating on the fly for the other two or three stakeholders in every buying committee they're in front of.
They're not incompetent. Just never learnt the other languages, and nobody told them that they needed to in the first place.
Now, assuming you understand someone's psyche when you don't, it's costly. Here's how you know if it's actually costing you, because the market never really goes silent about it. It just [00:20:00] doesn't get read as feedback. Every client who doesn't get back to you when they said they would is one example.
Another one, every deal that's technically still "in progress" a year later than it should be, or every piece of work that quietly went to someone else without a real explanation. That's not random, and it's not that the client's being slow or difficult. That's the market handing you feedback on a silver platter about the miscommunication every single time, and most firms don't read it that way.
You're always paying the price of miscommunication somewhere in your pipeline right now. The only question is whether anyone's looking at it that way.
So here's what I actually want you to do with this. Three questions about your own top 10 accounts starting Monday. One, for your most technically excellent partners, the ones [00:21:00] with the cleanest files and the best win rates on paper, do you actually know how they land in the room with a skeptical, scandal-wary stakeholder?
Or are you assuming that because the work is right, the relationship is fine? Two then, when a client's gone quiet or a scope has quietly shrunk, has anyone actually asked whether that's a pricing problem or, more importantly, a trust problem? Because you'll fix the wrong one if you guess.
Three then. If being technically right is no longer the differentiator, what exactly are you doing right now to build the skill that is? Not generically. Specifically, partner by partner, account by account. This industry's next five years won't be won by the firm that cuts fastest or automates hardest.
That's a race [00:22:00] to the bottom that every firm in the tier is already running anyway. It'll be won by the firm whose partners were the actual reason a client stayed when three cheaper, faster, and AI-enabled alternatives could have done the technical work just as well. That reason, as in trust, reading correctly, and building deliberately, is learnable.
Right now, in most practices, it isn't being taught at all.
Remember that Deloitte report from the top of this episode? The firm that got caught by the very technology it was selling? Well, the failure wasn't the AI. It was nobody in the room who knew they still needed to be the trusted ones to check it off.
If any of this landed, if you've got partners who are technically brilliant and you're not entirely sure why certain relationships have gone quiet, that's exactly the work I do through Communication Mastery.
Now, built [00:23:00] specifically for partner-client relationships in accounting and advisory firms. There's a link in the show notes for a free discovery call, and we'll look at exactly where trust might be quietly costing you scope and how learnable it actually is.
See you next time. Thanks for tuning in. My name is Bram.
