‘I changed the locks’: Mark Bouris led a coup and won a business. Now, he has regrets

Below is an extract from Mark Bouris’ latest book, Rise: How YOU can succeed in business, in your career, and in life, which covers the lessons he’s learnt from growing up in Punchbowl, Western Sydney, and founding one of the most disruptive financial services companies in Australia.

This chapter covers a period in which Bouris, aged 25, decided to forcibly take over the accounting firm he was hired by, telling the clients they were now with him, changing the office locks, and forcing the senior partners to negotiate.

In his words, “Anyone can better themselves, better their life, better their situation. You’ve got to think big. People have lost faith in the system, it’s time to rise”.

The law firm got me to do a lot of research for them at the accounting firm I was at. 

I didn’t realise it at the time, but I was good at research because I’d read everything over and over and over and over again, and I would deconstruct it, deconstruct it, and then reconstruct it. They got me to do a lot of research. This was in my third year of being in the job. When the judgement was being handed down in Canberra at the High Court for the Westraders case, I got invited to fly down in a Lear jet. I was twenty-three years of age and I was to be there when the judgement was being handed down along with the senior counsel, the QC, plus the senior partner from our accounting firm.

At that stage I was just a young bloke in the firm, and I was getting to meet all these incredibly senior people.

We won the case and I was part of it, and all of a sudden, these people at the law firm started to say, ‘Leave the accounting firm and come work for us.’ I decided, no, I was going to stay where I was. Then the accounting firm offered me a junior partnership.

I took the junior partnership and after six months I said to the other junior partners, ‘You know what? I’m actually smarter than all the senior partners.’ This is where I got ahead of myself. I felt like I was smarter because I knew more about the legislation. I knew I was getting asked to go to things when the senior partners weren’t. I knew that my work was billing more than they were billing. So I got all the young partners who had been appointed around the same time as me together and I held a meeting in the Grotta Capri restaurant.

‘Timeo Danaos et dona ferentes.’

Virgil wrote that in the Aeneid over 2000 years ago. He was talking about the Trojan Horse. The Latin phrase translates into ‘Beware of Greeks bearing gifts’. Grotta Capri was a Greek restaurant in Kensington and I hired a room at the back. The guy who had first given me a run at this firm as an employee when I didn’t qualify for the manager job had left the firm, but I rang him and asked him to come along too. He was much older than me. I sat down with him and all these junior partners and said, ‘You know what? We’re getting ripped off by these senior partners. We’re doing all the fucking work.’  

Now this is typical of how accounting firms and law firms work today, and it’s always been the case. You get the young people, you bring them in and they work their arses off. They do it for fifteen years, and eventually they become the senior partners and then they bring in young men and women who work their arses off and so the cycle is repeated. That’s the business model. But I didn’t like this business model and I thought, Fuck that. So I said, ‘What we’re going to do is we’re going to take over the firm.’ I was about twenty-five by this time.  

The others were older than me. They looked at me and said, ‘You fucking weirdo.’  

I said, ‘We’re going to do it,’ and they said, ‘How?’

‘We’re just going to take over,’ I said.  

‘Well, we can’t buy the firm, we haven’t got any money.’  

‘You don’t need to buy it,’ I said. ‘The clients make the choice where they go and we’re the ones who talk to the clients, not the senior partners. They spend all their time working on some computer program.’

Rise, by Mark Bouris. Source: Supplied

Computer programs were in their infancy then. The senior partners were working on this thing for a client called Prime Computing, who had a computer program they were building.  

I said, ‘We’re out there working with the clients, we’re earning all the money. They take the lion’s share of the money and we only get a small percentage of the dough.

‘We might as well have it all for ourselves and they can fuck off.’  

The others asked, ‘Well, how are you going to do it?’  

‘I’ll tell you what I’m going to do. We’re going to hold a cocktail party. I’m going to send a letter out to all our clients, and we’ll hold the cocktail party at the Wentworth. The senior partners won’t even know about it.’ 

In those days there were no emails, no mobile phones. ‘We’re going to tell all our clients that we’re now the firm owners, and we’re going to change the name to Bouris, Dowd and Vince.’ The guy who employed me originally was Paul Dowd and Geoff Vince was another young partner.

They said, ‘You’re fucking mad.’

‘Okay, well, I’m going to get the client list. Get all the phone numbers and type a letter, and I’m going to send it to every client, inviting them to the cocktail party. We’re going to announce it.’

The cocktail party was on the following Friday night and all the clients turned up. ‘What’s going on?’ they asked. 

‘We’ve taken over the firm.’

People were saying, ‘Well, congratulations. Well done, so young.’

I changed the locks on the office doors. Changed the signage. Monday morning, the senior partners turned up and couldn’t get in. They could get into the reception area but couldn’t get through the doors. The new signage read, ‘Bouris, Dowd and Vince’. All hell broke loose. The senior partners called a meeting. I met with them. 

I said, ‘Well, you realise that we’re taking over.’ 

They said, ‘You can’t do that, you’ve got to buy us out.’  

‘We can’t do that.’  

‘If you take over, you’ve got to buy us out.’ 

‘No,’ I said, ‘we’re not going to buy you out. I’ve got no money. I can’t pay you.’  

They said, ‘Well, you have to.’  

I said, ‘No, I don’t. I’m on the lease. I’m a partner, so I’m taking over the premises. I’m taking over the business. You can come in, you can sit in the front, but I’ve got control of the premises.’ 

Did I stage a coup? What I said was, ‘It’s not your business, because the business is the clients and the clients are coming with me. I service the clients.’ I could see they were thinking, Can he do this?

Pre-empting them, I said, ‘Of course I can, I’ve just done it. It’s been done. It’s too late. It’s done.’  

They said, ‘No, no, no, no.’  

Anyway, it went on for some months’ negotiating and we did become Bouris, Dowd and Vince. We paid them a little bit of money, not much, but we told them they could take all the computer programming they were doing and the Prime Computing client. 

They could take all that with them. I said, ‘Because, to be honest with you, you’re doing all the work on that. While we own part of that business too, you can have that. 

‘We’ll have the accounting practice. You have all of that computing stuff, and we’ll pay you a little bit of money.’  

They left and went out on their own.  

There’s an instructional side story to this in terms of making mistakes and being rash and being intellectually arrogant, which I was at that time. Just for a short period of my life, I was very intellectually arrogant.

Here’s where my intellectual arrogance got me. That Prime Computing client and the work they were developing went on to become the world’s largest online share registry company; it’s called Computershare. Of those senior partners, at least one is a very rich person, off the back of Computershare.

At the time their computer work had absolutely no relevance to my life. I didn’t know what they were doing. They weren’t sharing it with us, either. We were funding their work on that, but they never told us what they were doing. 

I thought I could take the firm over and I was driven by the fact that I felt like I was being unfairly treated. But I learned from that lesson. Everything I’ve done in my life since, I’ve never been intellectually arrogant.

I should have gone to them and I should’ve been more respectful and said, ‘Look, I’m not happy with my arrangement here.’ Not stage a coup. Intellectually arrogant and naive worked this time but I learned from it.

This is an extract from Rise by Mark Bouris published by Hachette Australia, available now in all good bookstores and online at Booktopia.