Robert Gold was 26 years old, on track at KPMG, when his father died at 51. His dad ran a small CPA practice out of the basement of the family house, office wedged between the furnace and the dryer. Robert left the national firm within weeks, took over the clients he had known since high school, and started the long climb that turned a basement practice into Bennett Gold LLP, a Toronto firm he can trace back to 1929. The conversation follows that thread through partnership deals, a few well-timed deaths, early internet audits, and 700 podcast episodes.
What You'll Hear
- How Robert launched the Mobile Movie Minute in 2007 with his wife Cindy, recording arguments about movies in the car
- The moment his father died at 51 and why Robert did not hesitate to leave KPMG
- Negotiating his first office lease at 26 between the furnace and the washing machine
- How a lunch at Sherlock's on Shepherd turned into the Bennett Gold partnership three years later
- The 1980 recession that killed his early computerized accounting bet at 19 percent interest rates
- Getting licensed as one of a handful of Canadian firms doing WebTrust audits for sites like rocketroger.com
- Harry, the bully partner, the trip to Egypt, and the will that rewrote the firm overnight
- Why Robert still gets his best ideas in the shower and what Yoda has to do with business decisions
From the Mobile Movie Minute to 700 podcast episodes
Robert opens the conversation calling in from Toronto during a January thaw. Within a few minutes, he is telling the story of how he started podcasting in 2007, the year Steve Jobs opened iTunes to anyone who wanted to publish. Robert and his wife Cindy used to see a movie every Friday night. They started carrying a handheld recorder with lanyard mics, walking out of the theater in silence, getting in the car, and arguing about the movie on the drive home. They called it the Mobile Movie Minute. They rated films by bags of popcorn. They made a rule never to agree, because agreement was boring.
Adam Curry, the pod father, did jingles for them through his music people. From there, Robert and his friend Andrew Brown launched the Businesscast podcast, first in a bagel shop, then at a Starbucks where the ice machine kept blowing out the audio, then in an actual studio. By the time of this recording, Robert has produced roughly 700 episodes across those shows. That background comes through in the way he tells a story: full of tangents, names, and dates, always circling back to a point.
The podcast career is a side layer on top of his day job as managing partner of Bennett Gold LLP, a twelve person CPA firm in Toronto serving entrepreneurs, self-employed professionals, lawyers with incorporated practices, dentists, and chiropractors. He also serves as entrepreneur in residence at Ontario Tech University, running workshops for founders coming to Canada through the Startup Visa Program.
A family practice and a father who taught communication first
Robert's path was not a straight line. He went to university with no clear plan, studied psychology and sociology, and spent three of the best years of his life writing essays for other students, including a high school teacher who paid him and his friend John with a ride down to Florida. He met his first wife during that time, went into the MBA program at York, and decided to pursue his CPA license.
His father was a CPA in Toronto with a small practice. As Robert puts it, his dad used to say only two things in life are true: death and taxes, and you do not want to be an undertaker. The practice ran out of a den in the family house. The back office sat between the furnace, the washer and dryer, and the freezer, with two windows looking out on an above ground pool. Robert's mother was the secretary. Robert and his two brothers helped with paperwork and bookkeeping as teenagers. His dad paid him ten dollars an hour.
What he learned in that basement was not debits and credits. It was how to talk to clients. His father's line, repeated often, was that the key is to communicate at the client's level. Not down to them. With them. Robert still points to that lesson as the core skill set of his career, the thing he most has to teach younger accountants who have the technical knowledge but not the communication reflex.
Taking over the firm at 26 and the rules of transferable trust
Robert was 26, working at KPMG, and being career-pathed toward becoming a trustee in bankruptcy when his father died at 51. The plan had been for Robert to train as a trustee under KPMG, then join his father and his middle brother in a three person family firm. His brother had not yet passed his final CPA exams. The firm now had a dead founder, one employee, a widow who had been the typist, and a client base that spanned years.
Robert says he did not hesitate for a second. He had seen how KPMG worked and knew he was never going to be the guy at the top. He left the national firm, took over his father's one employee practice, put his mother on payroll, and started calling the clients. Most of them knew him from his teenage years in the basement office. He used the only honest pitch he had: this is what my dad did, I am taking over, you paid him too much for bookkeeping and not enough for the professional work we should be doing, give me a year and decide.
He did not lose a client. He contracted out the bookkeeping to outside bookkeepers, kept the professional work in house, and started building his own network. He notes that in a professional services firm, trust is transferable, but only if you live up to what he calls the wow service model. Stay calm. Be professional. Return calls. He points out that accounting referrals still come in on Mondays and Tuesdays, because people complain about their accountant at weekend gatherings and call a new one on Monday morning.
Bennett, Gold, and the partners who came and went
A few weeks into running his father's practice, Robert got a call from Donald Bennett, a Toronto CPA about his father's age who had shared some colorful clients with his dad. Don was calling looking for Robert's father, did not know he had died, and had to hang up and call back. They met for lunch at Sherlock's on Shepherd, a restaurant in Toronto that is now a parking lot. Robert was 29. Don was 49. They agreed to talk again in three years.
Three years later they did a deal. The firm started as Armel Bennett Gold and Watson, then added Berg, becoming Armel Bennett Gold Berg and Watson. Then the story turns. Berg produced poor work and walked out the door on vacation, telling Robert to finish his job if he wanted it finished. They parted company. Watson moved his things out over a weekend, joining another CPA across town and leaving his share of the lease behind. One of the senior partners, Harry, responded by suing Watson instead of talking.
Robert and Donald did not love working with Harry, who ran the firm as a bully from his position as managing partner. Harry brought his son Ian, with whom he barely spoke, into the office and made him Robert's problem. Robert and Donald were quietly working with a firm advisor and a lawyer on a plan to separate from Harry when Harry went to Egypt with his girlfriend, came back with the flu, and died. Donald inherited Harry's practice under an old mutual will arrangement. The plan to break up the firm went in the drawer. Donald and Robert carried on, eventually becoming Bennett Gold.
Early tech bets, WebTrust, and seeing around corners
Long before QuickBooks, Robert bought his first computer system to offer what he called computerized accounting: enter the client's checks and bank statements in house, produce monthly financial statements within weeks of month end, and have a real conversation with the business owner about last month's numbers while other firms were still eyeballing paper ledgers. Then 1980 hit, interest rates shot to 19 percent, small business clients could not afford the fees, and the firm wrote off the investment and got out. Robert pivoted to one of the first IBM PCs sold in Canada, then to Compaq luggables in the field, and kept pushing his firm toward being the technology-forward option in a paper industry.
In 1999, the CPA profession in Canada and the United States launched WebTrust, an assurance service where licensed firms audited the privacy, security, and technical controls of commercial websites and issued a clickable seal. The seal linked to the actual audit report and management's assertions. The big four won most of the licenses. Robert's small firm won one too, because he was already speaking the language.
On day one, he bought ear lug ads in the Globe and Mail, Toronto's largest business newspaper, and announced his WebTrust clients. One of them was rocketroger.com, the commerce site for baseball pitcher Roger Clemens during his Blue Jays years. Later, PwC Tampa hired Robert's firm to certify one of their data centers because they did not want a direct competitor doing the work. He brought in a US technology partner he had met at a WebTrust conference at Disney World and signed the report jointly. At the Toronto launch session for WebTrust, out of roughly two hundred CPAs in the room, Robert says he was the only person who raised his hand when they asked who had actually gone through the demo website.
Entrepreneurs learn from entrepreneurs
The thread that runs through the whole conversation is Robert's belief that entrepreneurs learn more from each other than from any other source. He served on the board of the Young Entrepreneurs Association in Canada, a group for founders under 30 or 35. He noticed that members got more out of the open discussion among themselves than from the panelists the group booked. He advises every business owner he works with to build an advisory board. Six or eight other entrepreneurs. Meet every month or two over dinner. Open the books. Talk about the issue of the day. Expect four or five to show up.
He makes the case that there are only a handful of real business stories. You start a business. You hire people. You fire people. You win a client. You lose a client. You take on a partner. You lose a partner. Stay in business long enough, he says, and every one of them happens to you. The value is in hearing how other people handled their version of your problem.
He tells one that just happened. A 29 year old he spent the summer hiring through a recruiter showed up seven weeks in, said his fiancee had left him, and announced he was quitting. Robert talked him through it like his father would have. The next morning the hire said he would stay. Three weeks later he quit anyway. Robert's point is that you cannot plan for any of this. You can only stay in the room long enough for the next story to happen.
His closing line is borrowed from Yoda. Do or do not. There is no try. Make the decision at 70 or 80 percent. Waiting for 90 percent takes too long and costs more than being wrong.
About Robert Gold
Robert Gold is the managing partner of Bennett Gold LLP, a Toronto CPA firm serving entrepreneurs, self-employed professionals, and small business owners. He took over his father's small practice at 26, merged it with Donald Bennett's firm, and has built a practice whose roots trace back to 1929. He is also entrepreneur in residence at Ontario Tech University and has produced roughly 700 podcast episodes across shows including Businesscast and the Business of Beer.