You started the business for freedom. Then you hired. Then you hired again. Somewhere past the fiftieth person every decision still came back to you. Growth did not loosen the grip. It tightened it.
Nick Sinclair has been exactly there. He grew TOA Global from a back office he built for his own financial services firm into a business turning over more than $130 million, with 4,500 people in it. He also scaled chaos for years before working out that scaling business systems, not scaling effort, is what holds a company together. In this episode he is unusually honest about the mess, about the advisory board that told him to get out of his own way and about the boredom that hit once he finally did. Press play.
Key Takeaways
- Structure comes from somewhere. Nick never documented first, but competitive swimming at state and national level gave him the routine and financial planning compliance gave him the box ticking. The instinct was there long before the documents were.
- Fast growth without documentation is how good businesses break. At a couple of hundred corporate staff, how Mary did it still worked. At 500 the wheels fell off everywhere.
- Boring and consistent beats exciting and chaotic. Boring, in Nick’s words, means happy clients. He has the scars from learning it the other way around.
- Your first AI agent will fail for a documentation reason. TOA’s internal agent gave a different answer every time because the maternity policy existed in five documents, written five different ways.
- The order is build, document, automate, then AI. Nine times out of ten, what looked like a technology problem was a broken process going into shiny new tech.
- Measure the owner’s reliance index. Profit divided by the hours you work in the business. As the systems take over, the hours fall and the number climbs.
In This Episode
- 01:45 Does a routine-driven person count as a systems person
- 03:00 What competitive swimming taught him about process
- 04:30 Saying yes enough times to go from nothing to 4,500 people
- 07:00 Booed off stage in Adelaide for talking about offshoring
- 08:45 What AI changes in accounting and what it will not
- 11:45 The point where growth outran the documentation
- 14:30 Why identity, not strategy, keeps owners stuck in the business
- 17:15 The advisory board that gave him two options and no third
- 21:30 The AI agent that failed because one policy existed five times
- 27:45 The owner’s reliance index and the ROI of a process team
👤 Today’s Guest, Nick Sinclair
Nick Sinclair is the founder of TOA Global, an outsourcing business built around accounting and bookkeeping teams in the Philippines. He started out running a financial services business, bought an accounting firm because he was tired of waiting on them, then built a back office of his own offshore. Industry friends started asking whether he had spare desks. He said yes enough times that twelve years later there were 4,500 people in the business.
Today TOA Global turns over more than $130 million and is supported by around 500 corporate team members across offices in Australia, the Philippines and the United States. Nick has stepped out of the CEO seat, meets his CEO once a week, sits on the boards and masterminds he once needed himself and is training for a half Ironman in the hours the business used to take.
Website: toaglobal.com
📋 Ten Lessons in Scaling Business Systems From a $130M Build
Based on the interview with Nick Sinclair, Founder of TOA Global.
Nick did not set out to build a systems business. He set out to solve his own capacity problem, said yes to a few friends who wanted the same thing and ended up running one of the largest accounting outsourcing operations in the world. The systems arrived later, after the chaos. Here is what he learned, roughly in the order he learned it.
“Get it up and running, test it. You’ve gotta have some structure at the start, but then as soon as you’re comfortable that it’s working, document it, and then look at how do we automate it and refine it and utilize AI for it.”
Nick Sinclair, 23:30
Lesson 1: You Are Probably More of a Systems Person Than You Think
Asked straight out whether he is a systems person, Nick says yes and no. No, in the traditional sense: he never built the system first and rolled it out, he built the plane while flying it and refined as he went. Yes, because he describes himself as a very routine and structured person. The process was running whether or not anyone had written it down.
That distinction matters for owners who have talked themselves out of systemising because they are not the documenting type. You can be structured without being a documenter. What you cannot do is leave the structure in your head and expect anyone else to follow it.
Lesson 2: A Process Mindset Starts Earlier Than You Think
Nick traces his instinct for structure back to sport rather than business. He competed at state and national level. Every training session, every swim session, followed a set routine. That gave him the discipline long before there was a business to apply it to. He is still at it, building out nutrition and training for a half Ironman the same way: this much protein, at this time, in this order.
Financial planning then layered compliance on top. Everything had to have the box ticked, which is its own kind of training. If you came to business from sport, the military, trades or a regulated profession, you have already done the apprenticeship. The job is to move that instinct out of you and into the business.
Lesson 3: Spot the Trend, Then Educate the Market
Nick did not stumble into offshoring. Six months after setting up his own back office, his friend Rob Nixon invited him onto a roadshow called Capitalizing the Cloud, three weeks in front of 1,300 accountants. After the first stop in Newcastle, five firms came up and asked the same question: can we use your spare desks? Three weeks later he had sold 90 roles. The following year it was 180. The year after that, 400.
It was not a warm reception. He was booed off stage in Adelaide and pulled back up twice in Melbourne, because the room heard sweatshops and jobs going offshore. Out of those 1,300 accountants, about three were offshoring anything. The reframe is what changed it: stop selling cost savings and start talking about access to talent in an industry with a global shortage. Nick now puts the share of accounting firms with global teams at 85 to 90 per cent.
Lesson 4: Scaling Without Systems Just Scales the Chaos
This is the part Nick is most candid about. TOA grew fast. For a long stretch it also grew messy. With a couple of hundred corporate staff it held together, because enough people had been there long enough to carry the knowledge. It was how Mary did it, how David did it, how Nick did it. That worked right up until it did not.
At 300, then 400, then 500 corporate team members, the wheels started falling off everywhere. Someone would leave and the question would be where the document was. The answer would be that it was on their computer. Service quality suffered while the business was still growing, which is the worst possible combination. If you want to scale without adding hours to your own week, the documentation has to go in before the headcount does.
“Boring and consistent to me means happy clients as opposed to chaos, and we went through the chaos because we didn’t have it.”
Nick Sinclair, 12:45
He is blunt that he learned it the hardest way possible and that he was a slow learner about it. The fix was not a burst of effort. It was bringing in teams whose actual job was process and accepting that every part of the business now needs one.
What happens in your business when the person who knows walks out?
Nick found out at 500 staff. The free System for Creating Systems walks you through getting that knowledge out of people’s heads while you still can.
Lesson 5: Documentation Comes Before AI, Not After
TOA launched an internal agent a couple of years ago to answer the everyday staff questions: what is my pay, what is this policy, what happens here. It was, in Nick’s word, a disaster. Everyone blamed the AI.
The actual cause was that the maternity policy existed in five different documents, written five different ways, contradicting each other. The agent read all five and answered differently every time. Nothing was wrong with the model. Everything was wrong with the source material.
“Forget the AI, get your systems, get your process, get your knowledge, get all of that stuff in your head in a document, then you can train AI. Without any of that, it’s just a nice to have, and it’ll be a disaster.”
Nick Sinclair, 22:15
He tells the same story about people, not just agents. A member of his One Life Club board meeting complained that he had been through three executive assistants and they were all hopeless. Nick asked to see the documents they were given to follow and the knowledge articles that would let them write like him. There were none. His verdict was that it was not them.
The sequence he recommends is the one he now runs internally. It is the same shape as documenting a business process step by step.
| Order | Stage | What it needs first |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Build and test | Enough structure to run it |
| 2 | Document | A version that works |
| 3 | Automate and refine | One agreed way of doing it |
| 4 | Add AI | Documents that do not contradict |
Nine out of ten times when TOA hit problems during a digital transformation, the technology was fine. The process was broken, or there were fifteen ways of doing something and the one that got built into the new system was not the right one.
Lesson 6: AI Reshapes the Work, It Does Not Remove the People
Nick is not breathless about AI. His CIO is even less so: AI is not new, it has been around for twenty years. TOA already runs a data team of more than ten people on predictive models, including one that flags when a team member is likely to resign with better than 90 per cent accuracy.
His read on his own industry is that AI will absorb a shortfall rather than replace a profession. There is a deficit of hundreds of thousands of accountants a year. The routine compliance work, the work with exactly one right way of doing it, is what gets automated first. What is left is the part accountants are currently too buried to do: keeping clients informed, being proactive, actually advising. You can see the same shift play out in AI and automation inside an accounting firm.
For any owner watching their industry change, the useful question is not whether AI replaces the team. It is what higher value work the team gets handed back.
Lesson 7: Treat a Process Team as a Balance Sheet Item
Nick is a numbers person, so the ROI question gets a numbers answer. A dedicated systems and process team is a cost on the profit and loss today. Five years out it is a balance sheet item, because a business that does not depend on its owner sells on a higher multiple.
He does not pretend it is cheap. There are five to seven people in that team, a good chunk of them in the Philippines but highly paid, closer to a 50 per cent cost saving than 70. The spend runs into the hundreds of thousands. What it buys is redundancy in every department: here is the playbook, here is the system, here is the automation, next person up. His line is that you should never be stuck in a corner because you rely on someone too much. If you are wondering who actually carries that work, here is what the role looks like day to day.
He also offers a measure simple enough to run on the back of an envelope. The owner’s reliance index is the profit the business makes divided by the hours the owner works in it. As systems take over and the hours come down, the number goes up. That is the whole proof.
Lesson 8: Visionaries Should Not Be the Ones Documenting
Nick calls himself useless at detail and he means it as a job description rather than an apology. He is the sales, marketing and vision end. Process and systems are the detail, so he gives them to people who are good at detail. His observation about founders who insist on doing it themselves is sharp: the ones gifted at detail often grow more slowly, because they want every T crossed before anything moves.
The current example is recruitment. TOA hires 180 to 220 roles a month. Eighteen months ago the average time to hire was 34 days, which the industry considers good. It is now 18 to 20 days. The project Nick is personally running is aiming for three to five. His part is the strategy and the structure of the test. His VP of talent comes along behind him turning it into process, documentation and training. She sent him a 30 page deck summarising it all, which he describes as phenomenal, because it is the thing he would never have produced himself.
That is the move most owners miss. The answer to not being a detail person is not to skip the systems. It is to hand the system building to people who are.
Lesson 9: Nobody Warns You About the Identity Shift
Nick spent ten days trekking with no phone and no internet alongside a mate who had exited his business. The conclusion they reached was that most owners never really work on the business, because so much of their identity is tied up in the doing. He had a CEO running the company for five years and still worked full time in it, picking up the CMO role for a while, taking on special projects, co-running the thing he had hired someone else to run.
What changed was a second CEO who made it a condition. He would run it, Nick would not and he would ask for help when he wanted it. Nick now meets him once a week.
“The biggest challenge I found was I was bored.”
Nick Sinclair, 15:45
So he started a coaching business to stay occupied, then realised he had built the exact thing he claimed not to want: something that needed him. He shut it down. What replaced it was space, reading, training and the thing his coach had told him five years earlier and he had dismissed at the time. Make one or two genuinely good decisions a year and they will move the business more than the thousand small ones you used to make in a day.
Lesson 10: Do the Work on Yourself First
The turning point was an advisory board meeting in 2023. His CEO resigned the night before it. The board, assembled in Texas to review the business the way a private equity buyer would, spent two days pulling it apart. Their verdict was that it was too reliant on Nick and that he had two options, no third: step back in and run it himself, or get out and let someone else run it properly.
He took the first, gave himself 18 months as CEO, promoted his number two to COO and stepped out nine months later. He is clear that he could have got there five or six years earlier and that what held him up was not strategy. It was wanting to feel needed.
“I think the first thing that I say to anyone is you need to change your identity. You need to be a … You need to run a business, not be in it.”
Nick Sinclair, 36:45
His closing advice is unglamorous. Decide you want a business that does not rely on you, then put the plan and the steps in place to get there. It might take five years. It might mean working harder before you work less. Just do not skip the decision, because without it nothing changes and you stay chained to the thing you built for freedom.
Nick started a business for freedom, lost it in the growth, then bought it back by doing the boring work: getting what was in people’s heads onto paper, hiring people who are good at detail and measuring how little the business needed him. Your business isn’t broken, your systems are. Pick the one thing that would fall over if you disappeared for 90 days. Document that first.
Frequently Asked Questions
Do you need to be a systems person to build a systems business?
No. Nick says plainly that he is not one in the traditional sense and never built a system before rolling it out. What he had was routine and structure picked up from competitive sport and compliance work, plus the sense to hire people who are good at the detail he is bad at.
When should a business start documenting its processes?
As soon as something works. Nick’s order is to get it up and running and test it, document it the moment you are comfortable it is working, then look at automation and AI. Asked what he would change, his answer is that he would have started a lot earlier in the journey.
Why do AI agents give wrong or inconsistent answers?
Usually because the source documents disagree with each other. TOA’s first internal agent kept contradicting itself on maternity leave, because that one policy existed in five documents written five different ways. The model was fine. The documentation was not.
How do you justify the cost of a dedicated process team?
Nick’s framing is that it is a cost on the profit and loss today and a balance sheet item in five years. A business that does not rely on its owner commands a higher multiple and no single person can hold it hostage. He spends into the hundreds of thousands on a team of five to seven.
What is the owner’s reliance index?
It is Nick’s own measure: the profit the business makes divided by the hours the owner works in it. As systems take over, the hours fall, the profit holds or rises and the number climbs. It gives you something to watch quarter by quarter instead of a feeling.
What actually happens once you remove yourself from the business?
In Nick’s case, boredom and an identity problem he did not see coming. He started a coaching business to stay busy, realised he had rebuilt something that needed him and shut it down. His advice is to prepare for that shift rather than be surprised by it.
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Business Processes Simplified
We interview industry experts and have them share their best small business systems and processes. This is the quickest, easiest and most efficient way to build a systems centered business.
