30 January 2026
By Crystal Boston, Co-Founder
People love a neat founding story, a single lightbulb moment where everything suddenly makes sense but that was not our experience.
Delphini was not born from a dramatic epiphany but came from years inside the profession, watching the same patterns repeat, feeling the same frustrations surface and having the same quiet conversations about how things could be better.
Accounting has changed, but in many firms the mindset has not.
Compliance still dominates the agenda.
Deadlines run the calendar – January, March, September, year end, repeat.
Of course those things matter and anyone who says otherwise is kidding themselves, but somewhere along the way, the job became smaller than it should be.
Talented, highly trained people reduced to production lines and smart conversations squeezed into the margins of a schedule built around forms and filings.
We kept asking ourselves a simple question: If all we do is report the past, who is helping clients shape the future?
The reality is that most business owners are not losing sleep over their trial balance but they are worrying about cashflow, growth, pricing, hiring, risk.
They want someone who understands how decisions today affect where they will be in two, three, five years and we knew how to have those conversations.
We were trained to think that way, yet the structure we were in left little room to do it properly.
Advisory became the extra, the nice to have, the thing you do if you somehow find spare time after the real work is done.
That never sat right with us, because the so-called real work should be the thinking, not just the processing.
Technology played a bigger role in this than people expect.
Not because we are obsessed with shiny tools, but because we saw what automation was actually capable of.
When software handles the repetitive tasks, what is left is judgement, interpretation, strategy, relationships.
In other words, the human bit.
The irony is that the more advanced the tech became, the more obvious it felt that many firms were still operating like it was twenty years ago, just with cloud logos instead of filing cabinets.
We did not want to use technology to do the same work faster, we wanted to use it to do different work entirely.
There is also a hard truth that does not get said often enough – traditional firm structures can quietly cap the value you are allowed to deliver.
You do the job, you hit the deadlines, you move on and the system rewards throughput, not depth.
Long conversations about a client’s business model or long-term plans are seen as inefficient unless they fit neatly into a billable box.
Over time, that shapes behaviour and you stop asking bigger questions because there is no space for the answers.
We reached a point where we realised that if we stayed, we would have to shrink our ambitions to fit the structure.
Starting Delphini was the opposite choice.
“Build the structure around the level of thinking we believe clients deserve.”
Yes, frustration was part of it – the frustration with slow change, the frustration with good ideas getting parked because “that is not how we do things” and frustration with seeing business owners treated like a set of deadlines rather than people trying to build something meaningful.
But it was not just frustration driving us away from something, it was conviction pulling us towards something better.
We wanted a firm where advice is not an add on and where understanding a client’s goals is the starting point, not a pleasant extra.
Where success is measured by the progress clients make, not just how smoothly compliance season went.
Where we can challenge, question, guide and sometimes tell a client what they need to hear, not just what fits neatly into a checklist.
Delphini is our attempt to put that into practice.
Solid foundations, handled efficiently, so the real energy goes into helping businesses make smarter decisions.
That is where we think accountants earn their keep.
That is where we think the profession is heading, whether everyone admits it yet or not.
So no, there was no single moment.
Just a growing sense that we could do more, that clients deserved more and that the only way to make that real was to build it ourselves.