A business owner can spend decades building a company and still find the hardest questions waiting beyond the balance sheet. Who will take responsibility next? What does fairness mean within the family? What is the wealth intended to make possible, and which relationships could be damaged if those intentions remain unspoken?
Those questions sit at the centre of Darren Rotsch’s account of Murphy & Chung. The senior partner describes an advisory practice designed to connect financial decisions with the lives that depend on them.
“My vision was simple but, at the time, uncommon: an accounting firm shouldn’t just be the place you go for financial statements and tax returns,” he tells LAPSOFLUX.
He wants the firm to serve as a coordinating relationship for business owners and families, bringing legal, investment, insurance and accounting perspectives into a shared plan. The ambition is practical, but its purpose is deeply human: helping people understand what they are building and how they want it to continue.
An Unconventional Route to Accounting
Rotsch’s own career began in engineering. He later earned an MBA before pursuing his CA designation. He believes that sequence helped him approach accounting through the perspective of a businessperson and entrepreneur.
His interest is in how a company operates, how its owners make decisions and how those decisions affect a family over time. Tax returns and financial statements remain necessary, but they do not answer every question an owner brings to an adviser.
In the interview, Rotsch describes the problem of fragmented advice. An owner may work with capable professionals in several disciplines while remaining responsible for joining their recommendations together.
The result can be a collection of technically sound decisions without a clearly shared purpose. Murphy & Chung’s proposed answer is to coordinate those perspectives around the client’s goals, making sure each adviser understands the wider circumstances.
That requires time and communication. It also requires someone to ask questions that do not begin with the tax treatment of a transaction.
Start With the Reason
Rotsch calls the opening stage of that relationship the Discovery Meeting. Its central concern is the client’s motivation: why they are creating a business, what wealth means to them and what they hope to leave behind.
“What does wealth actually mean to you and to your family?” he asks in the interview. “What is this all for?”
These questions change the order of the discussion. An adviser can understand an ownership structure without knowing whether the founder wants children to run the company. A family can agree that succession matters while holding very different assumptions about what succession should mean.
The Discovery Meeting is intended to bring those assumptions into the conversation before technical structures are selected. Rotsch describes planning as something that should follow an understanding of the person.
The tools may be familiar to the professionals involved. Their application should reflect the particular family and business. His emphasis is on alignment: different advisers working from the same understanding of what the client wants to achieve.
Making Time for the Relationship
Rotsch identifies the arrival of Clarissa Sidaway and Tim March in the partnership through a merger as a defining moment for the firm. He describes complementary strengths in assurance, operations and client relationships, giving the leadership team a broader foundation.
Another important decision, in his account, was the move towards value-based pricing. He believes a traditional hourly model can make clients hesitant to initiate conversations, especially when they are unsure whether a question is worth raising.
Changing that dynamic was intended to create more room for understanding the client’s circumstances. A useful planning conversation can depend on information that would never appear in a routine annual checklist.
Rotsch extends that philosophy to technology. In the interview, he describes ALEX, short for AI Ledger Expert, as a system developed in-house to assist with routine and back-office work.
He says the system is designed to keep client information on the firm’s own servers. Those descriptions are the firm’s account of its technology and controls, rather than an independent security assessment.
His stated purpose for the system is more revealing than the technology itself.
“We don’t use ALEX to reduce the time we spend with our clients,” he says. “We use it to increase it.”
In his model, time saved on processing should create capacity for conversations, planning and judgement. Efficiency becomes valuable when it strengthens the relationship the firm has chosen to build.
The Custodian’s Perspective
Succession is personal for Rotsch. He says he bought the firm from his uncle, Jim Chung. He therefore understands the name on the door as a responsibility inherited as well as a business operated.
That experience informs how he talks about family enterprise. The financial asset carries a history of work, values and relationships. Passing it on involves more than deciding who receives what.
Rotsch is particularly concerned with the conversations families postpone. Different expectations can remain hidden for years, only becoming visible when a transition forces decisions. He sees early communication as an essential part of preparing for that moment.
He also speaks as a father of two daughters, reflecting on how values move between generations through what people teach and how they live. That gives his professional language of stewardship a personal reference point.
“Money comes and money goes. Relationships and family endure.”
For Rotsch, a successful legacy would include the firm itself passing to another generation of leaders. But the more meaningful measure would be what the practice had helped other families preserve.
The enduring question is the one he wants clients to consider early: what is all this for? A financial plan becomes more purposeful when the people involved can answer together.