Chapter 01
THE KID FROM BERWICK
I grew up in Berwick, a suburb in Melbourne's south-east that most people drive through on the way somewhere else. Nothing remarkable about it. Which maybe explains why, from pretty early on, I was obsessed with building things — anything that could take me somewhere bigger.
I wasn't the best student. School never clicked the way it was supposed to. But I was always the kid pulling things apart, trying to work out how they worked from the inside. Phones, consoles, ideas. If I could understand the mechanism, I felt like I could change the outcome.
At 17, I started teaching myself to code. Nothing formal — no bootcamp, no university pathway. Just YouTube, forums, and a lot of late nights making things that didn't work until they did. My first few projects were useless to anyone but me. Scripts that sent me a notification when it was going to rain. Little tools that saved me ten minutes here, twenty minutes there.
"I wasn't trying to build a business. I was trying to stop doing things that felt like a waste of time."
But the habit stuck. Automation became the lens I saw everything through. Why do this manually when a system could do it better, faster, and without complaining?
Chapter 02
THE PROBLEM I COULDN'T UNSEE
When I was 19, I started doing some work for a local accounting firm — odd jobs at first, nothing serious. But I spent time around their office, and what I saw genuinely stopped me.
These were sharp, qualified people. People who'd spent years learning tax law, financial analysis, how to read a balance sheet and tell a client what it really meant. And they were spending the better part of their day chasing client documents. Re-entering the same data between systems that didn't talk to each other. Running reports they'd run a hundred times before, by hand, every month.
They weren't doing accounting. They were doing admin with an accounting degree.
I started asking around. Spoke to more firms. It wasn't just one office — it was the whole industry. And the wild thing was, the tools to fix it had just arrived. AI had quietly crossed a threshold where it could handle real, complex workflows. The gap between what was possible and what accounting firms were actually using had never been bigger.
"The tools existed. Nobody had just sat down and built the bridge."
Chapter 03
GOING ALL IN
I was 21 when I decided to stop treating automation as a side thing and start treating it as a business. Not a product — a service. Because every accounting firm is different. Every partner has different bottlenecks, different clients, different software stacks. The last thing they needed was another SaaS subscription that half-solved three problems and fully solved none.
So I built Next Era around a simple idea: we come in, we audit your firm properly, we find the workflows that are eating the most time, and we build exactly what you need. Custom. Yours. No retainer until you see the value.
I'm not a consultant who talks about automation. I'm the person who actually builds it. Every client I take on, I'm on the phone myself. I'm in the workflows myself. When something breaks or needs updating, they're calling me — not a help desk.
That's not a scalability plan. It's a quality guarantee.
Today
WHERE IT STANDS
I'm 22. I'm in Melbourne. Next Era is young and intentionally small — I'm not trying to be everywhere at once. I'm working with a handful of accounting firms, getting it right, and building the kind of track record that earns the right to grow.
The goal hasn't changed from that first afternoon in the accounting office: give these people their time back. The admin shouldn't take longer than the accounting. The firm that figures that out first is going to be impossible to compete with.
I want to be the person who helps them get there.
— Ben Todd, Founder · Next Era