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A lot of life fits into forty-two years of work. Just ask Daryl, who will be celebrating his 42nd year with Ulton this month. In this conversation, he reflects on where his journey with Ulton began and the course it’s taken since. Time, as it turns out, has a way of changing both the work we do and the reasons we do it.
You’re the firm’s Tax Advisory Partner and Chairman, but this is hardly a role you walked straight into. What were you doing when you first started with the practice?
Well, I started with Ulton in 1984. The four years prior to that, I’d worked with mid-tier firms including Peder Lavis & Co. and Price Waterhouse in Brisbane, where I’d done a fair bit of audit work and had started moving more into the business services space. So that’s what I did when I first joined the firm.
Whether it was audit, business services, or advising clients on various different things, I pretty much did whatever was put in front of me. One of the first jobs I did here was putting a timeshare together for a resort down at Bargara. A popular concept at the time…a dinosaur now.
What led you to make the move from the big smoke to Bundaberg?
So, I was working at Price Waterhouse, and at the time I was just looking for something different. Those big firms are good in that you get great training, but at the same time, you get very pigeonholed, and that’s how I was feeling.
I’d been married six months at the time and I said to my new wife: Why don’t we go and live in the regions for a few years?
And she said, “absolutely?”
No. That's not quite what she said. She’s a Brisbane girl through and through, so it did take some convincing. But she grew to love living here. These days, we split our time 50/50 between both places,so we really do get the best of both worlds.
Ulton’s built a bit of a reputation for impressive staff tenures. Though the title of longest serving team member is exclusively yours, you’ve been working alongside many of the same faces for decades and then some. What’s that like?
One of our success factors is our ability to retain good people for long periods of time. So many of us have been working together for decades.
Even Nat, who is our newest and youngest partner, has been here for 25 years. When I wrote a note for her anniversary last year, I just couldn’t believe it. I remember interviewing her for the job. A kid straight out of school, who is now a really important partner in this firm.
Working together for decades, you sort of grow up together. Almost like siblings or old friends, you can be a little more robust with each other, a little more plain-speaking. It’s a unique relationship.
What’s it been like for you to see the firm evolve over the past 40+ years?
It’s very satisfying to see the growth of the firm. To some extent, you have to stop and remind yourself to take it in. When you’re working in it all the time, you don't necessarily recognise that what the firm has achieved is a direct result of the hard work of many people, over a long period of time. No one person has made this happen. It’s been a great group effort with a single purpose and that is to provide awesome service to our clients.
Was making partner something you always envisioned for yourself?
Yes. And that’s part of the reason I made the decision to leave Price Waterhouse all those years ago. I was in my 20s, ambitious, and knew I wanted to be a partner. But looking around, I didn’t see the opportunity. I saw many skilled, more experienced colleagues hanging around for years, waiting for the offer of partnership, an offer which, in my view at the time, was never going to come. I decided that I wasn’t going to wait for someone to look over me. I wanted to go out there and take control of my own destiny.
L-R: Partners 2005 | Peter Sawyer, Mark McLean and Daryl Corpe
Thinking back on your journey, what’s something that took you a little bit longer to figure out?
To have some patience. Something I recognise now is that I would have gotten where I wanted to go faster, if I’d just just taken more time and focused more on bringing people along, rather than pulling them along. I can’t change the past, but I can learn from it.
How has your definition of success changed over the years?
What’s important to me now is very different to what was important to me as a 25 year-old. It’s far more family-oriented. Spending more time with my family, in particular my grandchildren, brings me enormous amounts of pleasure. I have four of them, two boys and two girls. The only thing the girls want to do at the moment is play, so that’s what we do. It’s a lot of fun, so long as you don’t take it too seriously.
What about Ulton are you most proud of?
I feel proud of the fact that we are recognised as a high quality firm across a broad selection of industries. I’m proud of the fact that there are very few problems we are confronted with that we can’t handle and that’s a testament to the depth and breadth of our team’s skills. And I’m immensely proud of the team of people we have in every single one of our offices. They genuinely want to provide great service to our clients and they consistently go that extra mile.
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