TONY GAVIN

Overview

Tony Gavin is an Australian accountant, entrepreneur, author and business systems architect with a career spanning more than four decades across accounting, financial services, insurance, franchising, digital media, technology and marketing. He is the founder and director of touchpoint.systems, a connected growth systems business serving established professional-service practices in Australia, and co-host of the Systems of Business Podcast with Damon Simms.

His work is grounded in a conviction developed across multiple business cycles: that predictable, sustainable growth is a systems-design problem before it is a marketing or technology problem. The businesses and practices he has founded, led and advised reflect an enduring interest in the intersection of commercial evidence, operational design and measurable outcomes.

Tony is married and has three adult children and six grandchildren. Outside of work his primary interest is animal welfare, with him and his wife having co-founded Philippines-based NGO, Best Friends Furever Sanctuary Inc in 2021. The organisation provides animal welfare education and serves the needs of senior and special needs animals. Tony splits his time between Angeles City, Philippines and Brisbane, Australia.

Current Work

touchpoint.systems

Tony Gavin is the founder and CEO of touchpoint.systems, established in 2026. The business designs, builds and manages connected growth systems for established professional-service practices: accounting firms, law practices, finance brokerages and advisory businesses in Australia.

The service model is audit-first: a Practice Pipeline Audit diagnoses where a practice’s growth system is broken, incomplete or misdirected before any technology, automation or campaign investment is introduced. From the audit, practices move to a structured, managed service engagement delivered on a HighLevel CRM and automation platform, white-labelled and operated through touchpointiq.app.

The central framework underpinning the work is Visibility → Connection → Evidence → Improvement: four conditions Tony identifies as necessary for predictable, sustainable practice growth.

Website: touchpoint.systems

Systems of Business Podcast

Tony Gavin co-hosts the Systems of Business Podcast with Damon Simms. The podcast explores the systems that make or break businesses, featuring conversations with founders, operators and practitioners about the practical approaches and systems that drive real-world business performance. The podcast is produced and distributed across major podcast platforms.

Website: systemsofbusiness.com

Advisory Roles

ActiumAI Pty Ltd — Technical Advisory Board member since December 2021. ActiumAI provides proprietary and in-licensed cognitive digital LawTech tools and applications for lawyers.

Results and Co — Technical Advisor since December 2024. Results and Co is a Certified StoryBrand Guide and GHL Agency offering comprehensive marketing agency services.

VentureX — Technical Advisor since July 2026. VentureX helps New Zealand-based companies connect with global talent and streamline offshore hiring.

Charitable Work

Best Friends Furever Sanctuary, Inc.

Tony Gavin is a co-founder and director of Best Friends Furever Sanctuary (BFFS), a not-for-profit organisation that provides a furever home for senior and special needs animals in the Philippines. The shelter was founded so that senior and special needs animals could age with grace and dignity, under the care of dedicated volunteers.

Website: bffs.org.ph

Tony Gavin – Career History

touchpoint.systems is the product of more than four decades of commercial experience across industries, roles and business cycles. The timeline below traces the journey that shaped it.

Education, Certifications, Licences & Honours

Formal Qualifications

Bachelor of Commerce (B. Com) – Canterbury University
Master of Business Administration (MBA) – Singapore Business School

Development & Certifications

More than 100 certifications covering business, accounting, design, marketing, IT, software, data science and other professional skills.

Professional Licences

Public Practice Certificate Issued by ATMA (1996-2008)
Director, Registered Tax Agent(s) (1996-2008)
Director, Authorised Credit Provider (QLD) (1999-2007)
Director, APRA Approved General Insurer (2000-2002)

Official Honours

Australian Service Medal (awarded for military service)
Justice of the Peace (Qualified) — Queensland

Published Works

Sun Tzu & The Art of Accounting: Winning Clients Before Your Competitors Know There’s a Battle

​A practitioner’s guide applying Sun Tzu’s strategic principles to the challenge of building and running an effective marketing system for accounting practices. The book addresses how accounting practices can think about client acquisition, market positioning, competitive awareness and marketing investment in a more deliberate and evidence-informed way.

A professional-services edition, extending the core framework to law, finance and advisory practices, is in development.

Website: amazon.com.au/dp/B0H31XXNKG

Entrepreneurial Ventures

Gavin & Co. Pty Ltd

Gavin & Co. launched as an insurance agency and financial planning firm in Sydney in 1987 — a decision that, in hindsight, demonstrated either remarkable courage or a spectacular failure to read the market (like almost all of the “experts” at that time). The firm opened its doors just weeks before the October share market crash wiped roughly 25% off the Australian market in a single day.

As it turned out, the timing was less catastrophic than it sounds. The business was weighted toward life insurance rather than investment advice, which meant that while the rest of the financial services industry spent late 1987 explaining to clients why paper wealth had become just paper, Gavin & Co. had relatively few such conversations to manage. It was an early and unplanned lesson in the value of diversification — including diversification away from the thing currently on fire.

The firm was also an early mover in digital infrastructure at a time when that phrase meant something considerably more modest than it does today. A direct modem connection to insurers — allowing policy processing without the postal system — was close to unheard of in an industry still largely running on paper, the DX, faxes (a mod con at the time), phone calls and goodwill.

In 1989, Tony Gavin relocated with his family to Brisbane. The business moved with him, shedding the Sydney identity and relaunching as St George Nominees Pty Ltd to reflect the company’s broadening scope as a master insurance agency.

Primary lesson learned: shares go down in price — not just up. Timing is everything, except when it isn’t, and then resilience is.

Blacktown Office Equipment

Not every business begins with a strategy. Some begin with a borrowed van, a rented storage shed and an impulsive decision that turns out to be quietly brilliant.

While sourcing used office equipment for Gavin & Co. at a government surplus sale, Tony did what any sensible person would do: bought several hundred ex-government desks at roughly $4 a unit and more than 100 office chairs, on the reasonable assumption that someone, somewhere, would want them. The less reasonable assumption was that he had somewhere to put them.

The solution to the storage problem turned out to be the business itself. Tony rented a shed on a main road in Blacktown — chosen primarily because it was available, affordable, and close to the Gavin & Co. office — and then noticed something the lease had not mentioned: an enormous volume of passing traffic. A sandwich board advertising “Desks from $60” went up. The desks, once cleaned, sold for an average of more than $80 each. The return on a $4 purchase, by any measure, was difficult to complain about.

Blacktown Office Equipment closed almost as quickly as it opened, not because it failed but because it ran out of inventory. It had exactly one supplier, exactly one product category and exactly one exit strategy, all of which happened simultaneously.

It was Tony’s first direct experience of a principle that would recur across his career: that the most profitable opportunities are sometimes the ones you didn’t plan, as long as you are paying enough attention to recognise them and move fast enough to act.

Primary lesson learned: when opportunity knocks, you had better be ready to open the door — preferably before it moves on to the next address.

Aussie Chopsticks

In the late 1980s, food delivery in Australia meant picking up the phone, hoping the restaurant answered, and driving to collect the order yourself. Aussie Chopsticks had a better idea: a franchise network partnering with local Chinese restaurants to deliver meals directly to the customer’s door. The concept was sound. The execution, at the franchisor level, was considerably less so.

The system was, to put it diplomatically, a work in progress from the moment the ink dried on the franchise agreement. The franchisor’s inexperience showed early and often — in the support structures, the operational systems, the training, and the general sense that the people selling the franchises had thought more carefully about selling them than running them. It was a reasonably accurate preview of what a franchise looks like when the franchisor mistakes enthusiasm for infrastructure.

What saved the investment was a piece of genuine good fortune: the Chinese restaurant assigned to Tony’s franchise area happened to be excellent. Good food, reliable service, consistent quality. While other franchisees around the network struggled with restaurants that treated the arrangement as an afterthought, Tony’s territory had something the franchisor’s systems could not provide — a kitchen that actually delivered on the promise.

The delivery service proved popular enough that the franchise was exited within a short timeframe at a small profit. Not a triumph, but a clean outcome from an imperfect situation.

The experience lodged something more valuable than the profit: a detailed, first-hand education in what a franchise system looks like when it is designed without rigour. When Tony built Ledgers Bookkeeping more than a decade later — a franchised bookkeeping network that grew to 25 franchisees nationally — he drew directly on what Aussie Chopsticks had demonstrated so clearly. Systems matter. Processes matter. A franchise is only as good as the operational backbone behind it. The franchisor’s job is not to sell the dream; it is to make the dream deliverable.

Primary lesson learned: look carefully before purchasing a franchise — and look even more carefully at the people selling it. The experience proved invaluable when it came time to build a franchise system worth buying into.

St George Nominees Pty Ltd

When Tony Gavin relocated to Brisbane in 1989, Gavin & Co. made the move with him, emerging with a new name and a more ambitious structure. St George Nominees operated as an incorporated master insurance agency — a designation that, in the context of late 1980s Australian life insurance, was about as close to printing money as a legitimate business arrangement could get.

The mechanics were straightforward and extraordinarily lucrative. As a master agency, St George had the right to appoint its own agents and collect overriding commissions and bonuses on top of whatever those agents produced. In an era of virtually no regulation, commissions on life insurance sales could exceed 200% of annualised premium income by the time master agency overrides and bonuses were factored in. The industry was not so much a market as a gold rush with paperwork.

In its early phase Tony sold directly, and did so with some distinction. There were periods where he personally outsold entire tied-agent sales teams of 20 or more people — a fact that says something about both his ability and the somewhat chaotic productivity of large, loosely managed sales forces. He subsequently recruited, trained and built his own team of high-performing agents, while the insurance companies — competing aggressively for productive distributors — threw fuel on the fire in the form of large, unsecured agency development loans. The industry logic was simple: find the productive agencies and back them heavily. St George Nominees was productive. It was backed heavily.

Then, with the particular lack of warning that tends to characterise these moments, everything changed at once.

Regulation arrived. Commissions were cut to a fraction of their former levels virtually overnight. The agency development loans — which had never felt quite as unsecured as their name suggested — were called up. Master agency arrangements were terminated. And then, as if the industry upheaval were insufficient, Paul Keating delivered what he memorably described as “the recession we had to have,” which arrived on schedule and without apology.

St George Nominees was caught squarely in the crossfire. The combination of slashed revenue, called-up debt and a contracting economy was not survivable. The business closed with significant residual debt that required years to resolve.

It was the most instructive failure of Tony’s early career — not because the business was badly run, but because it demonstrated with unusual clarity how quickly external forces can render a thriving operation unviable. The income had been real. The loans had been real. The commissions evaporating and the loans being called simultaneously were also, unfortunately, real.

Primary lessons learned: circumstances change — often quickly and without notice. Excessive debt can destroy a business faster than any competitor or bad decision. Soft loans always come with strings attached, and the strings tend to appear precisely when you can least afford them. Make hay while the sun shines — but don’t build your barn out of the hay.

St George Legals Pty Ltd

St George Legals occupied a narrow but commercially productive gap in the market: the space between what people genuinely needed — properly executed legal documents — and what they were actually getting, which in most cases was nothing, because the cost and inconvenience of seeing a solicitor ensured the will, the power of attorney and other important documents remained permanently on the to-do list.

The business model was deliberate and carefully constructed. St George Legals provided templated legal documents — wills, enduring powers of attorney, partnership agreements, trust deeds, company incorporations — and charged clients for word processing, printing and postage. It did not provide legal advice. The distinction was not a technicality; it was the architecture of the entire operation.

Its direct sales model was effective. The company sold thousands of wills through a cold-calling operation at a time when most Australians had none — a fact that reflects more on the legal profession’s accessibility than on any deficiency in the product being sold. Demand, it turned out, was not the problem. The problem was visibility, and a direct sales team solved it efficiently.

The Queensland Law Society eventually took notice. The ensuing engagement produced an enforceable undertaking — prohibiting St George Legals from providing legal advice, which it had never provided, and from selling wills, which had been its primary product. The undertaking was, in practical terms, a solution to a problem the business had not actually created, framed as a concession the business could not afford to refuse.

By the time the Law Society made its position known, Tony had already sold the business. Having exited cleanly, he took the pragmatic view that contesting the undertaking — while arguably winnable — was a fight whose costs in time, money and distraction would comfortably exceed any likely benefit. The juice, as he put it, was not worth the squeeze.

The business had operated lawfully throughout. The exit had been timely. The lesson filed quietly under experience rather than regret.

Primary lesson learned: operating in the gap between what is legal and what an established profession considers acceptable is a viable strategy — until it isn’t. Know when the cost of the fight exceeds the value of the prize, and be willing to walk away from both.

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