From Chaos to Clarity
MDB Taxation and Business Advisors | Lawrence Petruzzelli's story
My Firm - who I am and what my firm looks like
I manage a family based accounting firm in Melbourne turning over $1.4 m with 14 people in total. We handle a broad range of compliance and advisory work for small and medium‑sized businesses.
Despite our size, we struggled with profitability and operational efficiency. I assumed marketing and sales were the answer.
Problems Faced - what I thought was going on
Before I met Andrew, the firm was a bit all over the place. We were frantic with work but profit barely moved.
Clients would send in work, everyone would get really, really stressed out, and then we'd have periods where we had no work, and everyone would just be sort of twiddling their thumbs, trying to work out what to do next. Our workflow suffered from extreme and unpredictable 'feast or famine' cycles, creating persistent instability.
OVERVIEW
Lawrence manages a family-based accounting firm in Melbourne, serving small and medium-sized businesses across compliance and advisory services.
Revenue: ~$1.4M annually
Team: 14 people
Location: Melbourne
Services: Compliance and advisory
From the outside, the firm appeared busy and established. Behind the scenes, profitability and operational efficiency were under pressure.
Periods of sudden, intense work influx from multiple clients would overwhelm the team, causing high stress, long hours, and partner burnout. Conversely, these frantic periods were followed by disruptive dry spells where client work dwindled, leaving the team idle, anxious, and unproductive. This erratic pattern made resource and capacity planning impossible and severely damaged everyone's morale.
Partners kept thinking, “we just need to grow”. We all thought adding more clients would fix our financial strain.
Real Problems – what I discovered was really going on
Andrew Robertson challenged my assumption. He showed me that our pricing model and workflows were broken. We were under‑scoping jobs and absorbing “little extras.” Each partner had their own pricing method, causing confusion and scope creep.
Workflow was managed by everyone individually, therefore partners didn't know where jobs were up to. Clients called looking for their work and partners got frustrated with the team. Managers felt overwhelmed and played catch up every day. They wanted more people to help get through the work.
The root cause of our stagnation was inconsistent pricing and poor workflow structure, not lack of working hard.
Strategy Applied
I joined Andrew’s coaching programme and used his pricing calculator. We aligned partner pricing and defined clear service packages. A repricing plan was set.
Andrew helped us streamline meetings and client handovers. We trained our team to explain outcomes rather than hours and to stick to scope. We separated compliance from advisory and allowed us to price by value, not what we did.
We followed Andrew's advice and set up a workflow scheduling system. Client work is now scheduled around capacity each month with set timeframes and knowledge of who is doing what.
This was followed by a job completion accountability system. Andrew trained the team on how to manage their own workflow and mentored the managers to hold their team accountable. Productive increase immediately and work got done ahead of time. We are now calling clients to get extra work in and it's only February, we will run out of work by April.
I turned marketing back on, and launched into sales mode.
Results Achieved
Productivity increased by 30 % repricing and upgrading clients resulted in $300,000 of extra revenue.
Staff stress levels dropped, pricing conversations became easier, and the business finally felt in control.
We are now expecting a 20 % growth for 2026 of new clients and have full confidence of getting through the workload.