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What happens when one of Australia’s fastest-growing accounting startups signs clients faster than it can service them, scales a delivery engine that can’t keep up, and collapses under the weight of its own ambition?
In this episode of The Ryan Tan Show, I sit down with Elvis Sehovic - former Head of Tax & Accounting at Retinue - for the first in-depth, insider account of a hyper-growth accounting firm that went from meteoric rise… to operational free fall… to collapse.
Elvis was there for all of it: the explosive sales machine, the offshore scale-up, the cultural pressure cooker, the client churn, the staff burnout, the internal panic, and ultimately, the voluntary liquidation that shocked the industry.
This conversation is raw, emotional, and disarmingly honest.
At points, Elvis needed to pause, breathe, and process the memories.
If you’ve ever worked in accounting, professional services, operations, startups, leadership or culture, this is unmissable.
It’s a blueprint for everything that can go wrong when speed outruns structure - and a rare, human look inside a business unraveling in real time.
Today, Elvis leads Accounting & Tax at The Polyglot Group, applying the hard-earned lessons from Retinue to help businesses scale sustainably into Australia.
💡 What You’ll Learn - Inside the Collapse of Retinue
🔥 The ignition point of Retinue’s rise - how an aggressive sales engine, flat-fee pricing, and relentless marketing created unstoppable early momentum.
📈 The growth model that looked bulletproof - and why it worked brilliantly at first.
💸 The economics behind collapse - how underpricing, misaligned incentives, and unrealistic delivery assumptions quietly dug the company’s grave.
🧨 The internal cracks no one could ignore - staff breakdowns, crying in the office, walkouts, burnout, and operational chaos as the workload became unmanageable.
🏗️ Why scaling a services business is nothing like scaling tech - and how Retinue tried to force a SaaS playbook onto a labour-driven industry.
👥 The culture inside hyper-growth - panic, pressure, competing egos, denial at the leadership table, and the emotional cost on staff trying to hold everything together.
🚨 The moment staff started whispering: “This can’t last.” - from impossible client loads to compliance backlogs to frantic internal firefights.
💥 The inside story of the attempted sale - why multiple firms refused to touch the client book, and how Squeeze ended up acquiring it in a distressed state.
📉 The boardroom reality - optimism vs panic, “we’re fine” vs “we’re drowning,” and the psychological theatre behind a business in free fall.
😔 The human toll - Elvis’ experience supporting a team under extreme pressure, dealing with distressed clients, and confronting the emotional aftermath of a collapsing model.
🧭 The lessons every founder, accountant, operator, or startup leader must hear:
- Speed without structure is a death sentence
- You cannot out-scale poor unit economics
- You cannot offshore your way out of chaos
- Culture breaks before numbers do
- Leadership denial is fatal
- “Fastest-growing” often predicts “fastest-collapsing”
🚀 How to build a services business that scales without imploding - sustainable pricing, capacity planning, ethical leadership, operational backbone, and protecting your people.
🔗 Connect with Elvis Sehovic💼 Polyglot Group - https://www.thepolyglotgroup.com📧 Email:
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