At 1 AM in a Scottsdal, Arizona hotel room, a CPA named Martin Kamenski sat down and wrote the thing most firm owners already know but don't say out loud.
It's worth reading. The ideas aren't new. He just had the nerve to write them out loud online.
The drift is real
Kamenski describes something practitioners across Australia and the US feel but rarely name directly. The profession was quietly taught that its value lives in the deliverable. The return. The close. The report. Production became measurable, billable, scalable. And somewhere along the way, the relationship stopped being the job and became the nice-to-have.
Most firm owners reading this know exactly what he means. They can tell you a client's revenue, cash position, and whether their BAS is lodged. They cannot tell you the last time they called that client without a reason.
That gap is not a time management problem. It is a structural one. The work that fills the calendar, chasing documents, reconciling accounts, nudging for signatures, expanded to fill every available hour. The work that was supposed to be the point got pushed out.
AI doesn't fix this on its own
The profession's current conversation about AI tends to focus on efficiency. How much faster can the compliance work get done. Which tools to buy. What the tech stack looks like in three years.
Kamenski's point is sharper than that. The widget work is heading toward automation regardless. The question is what firms do with the headroom when it arrives. More volume, more clients, more output is one answer. It's the wrong one. The drift gets worse, not better.
The firms that will matter are the ones that use automation to reclaim the part of the job that was always the point. The call on a Tuesday when a client is scared. The conversation that saves a year of mistakes. The advisor who knows this business, this owner, this family.
A machine can categorise a transaction. It cannot care about the outcome.
The client you're about to lose
Kamenski tells the story of a client called Jed. Organised, responsive, easy to work with. The kind of client you build a firm around. They lost him. No fee dispute. No service failure. The check-ins stopped, the relationship thinned to a checklist, and from Jed's side of it, he felt processed.
Most firms have a Jed. Some have several. The signal is quiet. A slower response, a shorter email, a renewal conversation that feels different to the ones before it. By the time it's visible, the decision is usually already made.
The work of keeping a Jed is not complicated. It is just hard to prioritise when the inbox is full and the deadline is close.
So here's the question
Kamenski ends his post with a few direct ones. Here's one of our own.
If the compliance work in your firm was mostly automated tomorrow, what would your team actually do with the time?
If the honest answer is "catch up on the backlog," that's worth sitting with. The backlog is what happens when the relationship work keeps getting deferred. Clearing it just makes room for more backlog.
Fewer hours. Less busyness. More relationship. That's Kamenski's summary. It's a simple line that carries a significant challenge to how most firms are currently built.
Read his full post here.
