A note from Paul Dunn

Founder of The Accountants BootCamp

The first Accountants’ Boot Camp was a long time coming. It was the high point on my journey from being one of the first 10 people in the Australian office of Hewlett Packard (in 1965), to writing one of the world’s first General ledger programs, to co-creating the first computer company specifically dealing only with Accountants (in 1972) to realizing (in 1992) that Accountants really did hold the key to the on-going success of their clients.

In March of that year, I was presenting a 2-day Marketing Boot Camp to 403 Small Business owners from amongst our 23,000 Members in The Results Corporation.

One of those 403 was an Accountant — Ric Payne. During the first day Ric observed that every single business owner in that room had one thing in common — they had an Accountant in Public Practice. “You should be re-casting this great material and making it central to every accounting firm in the world!”

To do that though, it was very clear that they had to move from reporting in history to helping their selected clients create history.

That profoundly important realization was the start of the Accountants’ Boot Camp in 1992. People told me I was crazy. That Accountants would not come to a 3-day, high-ticket event no matter how well it was promoted.

They were wrong.

In 36 hours, after the first direct mail piece (yes, there was no email then), the world’s first Accountants’ Boot Camp was full. And we had to create a second one and then a third one in very quick succession.

Then the Profession really got hold of it!

It spread rapidly from Australia to the USA and to the UK. By late 2000, 17,700 Accountants had been through the process.

Literally, every single one of them told us this, “This changed my life.”

And someone very close to me told me I had to change mine!

In late 2000, I sold my share of the company and moved to live in France under legal restrictions from the new owners not to work with the profession for 3 years. The new owners changed the format, changed the processes.

And the Accountants’ Boot Camp effectively died.

Yet the impact of it did not — practically every company now operating in the “we train Accountants to do great things” space had their beginnings at the original Accountants’ Boot Camp. And not a week goes by without someone saying something cryptic like, ‘The Sheraton, 1999’, or ‘Fiji, 2000’ referring to specific locations of their Accountants’ Boot Camp experiences.

And since 2003 when I wrote ‘The Firm of the Future’ with Ron Baker, I’ve been wanting to bring it back to life.

And now, thanks to some amazing collaborations around the world (and partly thanks to Covid too), we’re RE-BOOTING.

And it’s back — not surprisingly — better than ever yet with precisely the same principles and insights that made those 17,700 Accountants observe that it changed their lives.

It’ll do that to yours too.

You’ll look back on this with precisely that recognition.

And we’ll do exactly what we promised way back in 1992 — if you don’t feel it has been a game-changing experience for you, we’ll give you your investment in it right back to you.

It’s as simple and yet as profound as that.

Paul Dunn