Issue #30 & Sept 8th, 2026

Happy Tuesday!

I hope you had a good long weekend. I’m here today writing about trust.

Trust keeps things moving. It’s like the grease on the wheels of business. And us accountants? We’re masters of this. We cannot exist without trust.

I started thinking about how this makes client work easier more difficult.

There are few things in business that feel quite as good as being fully trusted.

A client who doesn’t question every recommendation.

A teammate who gives you the room to do your job. (boo micro-managers)

A referral partner who sends new clients your way without any hesitation.

High-trust relationships feel easy, they feel light.

Low-trust relationships feel like the opposite.

Everything takes longer. Everything needs more explanation. Every mistake feels bigger.

I’ve been noticing how this can change how a client engagement feels or how a team member is treated day to day.

This changes the entire experience of doing business.

Trust is sacred to accountants. Everything we do requires trust.

And because of that… low trust is exhausting for us.

When I’m in these situations I feel stressed, heavier, and slower.

You start choosing your words more carefully. You hesitate before making decisions. Small mistakes feel huge because there’s no goodwill built up behind them. It’s stressful!

Trust builds this goodwill, where if you do make a mistake, it’s usually not the end of the world.

So it’s actually easier than you probably think. Do what you say you’re going to do consistently.

You said you’d send something Friday, and you did.
You told them bad news early.
You admitted when you didn’t know.
You followed through on literally anything.

and bonus points - you proactively catch something for them. (which, with new tech is getting easier and easier).

Trust is built on the boring stuff. The consistency. The unremarkable. The stuff we’re typically really good at as accountants.

Firms optimize for all kinds of things: speed, margin, efficiency, responsiveness, utilization.

But trust is the thing that makes all of those smoother.

And I don’t just mean trust with clients.

I mean trust between you and your team, with referral partners, vendors, everyone around the business.

If trust is high, a lot of those things improve naturally because people move faster, need less oversight, and spend less time protecting themselves.

So what if you designed for trust? What if it were a metric?

You'd see it in the tells: how often clients push back, how many approvals a decision needs, how long until someone stops CC'ing you on everything.

A high-trust business can move faster with less friction. A low-trust business needs more processes to compensate.

The more I think about it, the more trust feels like one of those things you don’t truly notice unless it’s missing or declining.

When it’s there, the work feels lighter.

When it’s not, everything gets harder than it should be.

So maybe before we optimize another process, add another check, or schedule another meeting, it’s worth asking:

Do we actually trust each other?

Question of the week

Have a lovely week!

- Tailor