Accountant, marathoner, yoga instructor, family man and frequent flyer Stefano Passarello is on a mission to help good businesses do good. Elizabeth Kerr reports
On a cool January Tuesday just before Lunar New Year, 17-year DB resident Stefano Passarello is gliding around the Sheung Wan office of his accounting firm, Monx, mostly collecting last-minute work for himself to do on a flight to Milan, departing in about two hours. “I’m comfortable with a little chaos,” he says easily, sitting down at the make-shift boardroom. He’s not breathing down anyone’s neck in the single open space; there are few barriers at Monx.
Stefano looks almost exactly as he did when I last spoke to him in 2014, just after he set a record and won the 2014 Standard Chartered Marathon. Unsurprisingly he just ran a marathon in Thailand, which explains the extra-Tuscan glow to the Siena native’s complexion, but these days his status as a yoga instructor is showing too.
A lot’s changed. First, Stefano sold his Discovery Bay-based accounting firm People & Projects, which he started in 2003, to a private equity firm right before COVID. “My life has been really determined by pandemics,” he points out wryly. After considerable success with branches in China and Singapore among others, he had what he calls an “Apple moment”, feeling like he and his board were getting farther and farther away from P&P’s original personalised service mandate. “I couldn’t do that anymore and I lost motivation. I thought I wanted to retire.” He was 37.
Second, he opened, closed and finally quarantined at his ambitious Kapuhala Resort in Koh Samui (more in a bit). “We were open for six months before COVID, and then I was stuck in Thailand for around three months, waiting out the pandemic, while my wife and kids were in DB,” he recalls. “It was like being a monk.” That monk part is important to the third change: establishing Monx.
To call Monx a COVID project undervalues Stefano’s intent, but in spirit it is. During his hermetic time in Thailand, he remembers feeling like, well, a monk with plenty of time to just sit and think. Stefano’s existential musings on what to do next – in between yoga training – led to a very simple question: What made him happy? Yoga did, for a while, but “not the happiest”. Ultimately he decided he wanted to go back to accounting.” Inspired by the 15th century mathematician, Franciscan friar and father of standard accounting as we know it, Luca Pacioli, Stefano decided he would usher in “the next generation of global accountants. I decided to put my effort and my money into a company that will support people in achieving longevity both financially and physically.” Thus Monx (hongkong. monx.team) was born in 2021.
Stefano is aiming to reinvent the prevailing image of the accountant and accounting. He wants to shed the idea of nerds with pocket protectors and thickrimmed glasses sitting in dark, dusty basements surrounded by stacks of paper, silently crunching numbers. Or worse, anonymised drones in cubicles at the big international agencies doing likewise. As Stefano sees it, there’s more to accounting than credits and debits, though few SMEs know that.
“Sit with me with your books, and I’ll explain why accounting is useful for your business, not just to comply with tax rules, but to use as a compass for making your business better,” he explains. “I want accountants [at Monx] to be super-happy to do their jobs, and to think of accounting not just as complying with the law, but as a way to provide clients with the tools for them to thrive, not just survive.”
In fairness, the glasses are fine; they can be stylish. But Stefano wants to engage with his clients – now over 500 of them spanning offices in 17 locations – and have a good time as well as do good. Monx does its best to take on clients with businesses that have some kind of positive impact, be it social, environmental, financial or physical. It’s how he gets his team excited.
“I’m too old to do business for crappy human beings. I want to be surrounded by happy people, by happy business, by meaningful businesses, because I have no time for boring nonsense,” he sniffs. “I need to work for somebody that has a crusade, that’s willing to change the world.”
Which is why Kapuhala (kapuhalasamui.com) is the perfect lifestyle complement to Stefano’s corporate credo at this stage of his life. Initially planned as a three-location brand (DB and Sicily as well as Thailand) until the pandemic scuttled those, the Koh Samui boutique resort is defined by its natural setting, where guests can indulge in yoga, farm-to-table communal vegan dining and specialist programmes that incorporate longevity elements. It’s also become the Monx ‘campus’ for its annual meetings.
But in getting back to business, Monx is purposebuilt to help businesses grow, and let’s face it, not many institutions have a worse public image problem right now than corporations. “I don’t know if business is changing, but people are changing,” says Stefano, arguing that work is about more than just salary now, and that philosophy might be trickling up. Major employers are fighting for talent, and that talent is getting choosy about who and what it aligns itself with.
“I believe that in any business we need to have a crusade because your team doesn’t need to know who they are working for. It needs to know what they’re working for,” Stefano states. A pandemic silver lining was the rise of remote working and accessible digitalisation. Monx has a few dozen binders with accounting info in them on its office shelves, a far cry from its client count, and works from a “top-notch, futuristic, secure, cloud-based digital solution”.
“I want to give my staff freedom. I want them to be in Thailand to do accounting for our clients with their feet in the pool. And I can tell you if they are happy, they work hard, they work better – 100% of the time.”
Just like that Stefano jumps up and grabs his knapsack. It’s time to head to the airport. He racked up 111 flights last year, and he admits he’d rather spend more time in Sheung Wan – or better still the DB office he still keeps. That’s still home. “The place my kids are most in love with is DB Plaza,” he says, adding he has no plans to leave Hong Kong. It’s still the ideal place for work. “I’m agnostic jurisdiction-wise, but it’s easiest to travel from, and easiest to set up business. In Dubai, you need a nominee director. In Thailand, you need a partnership, Singapore needs a local resident director. Japan… don’t even go there. The UK is freezing cold,” he quips.
“Hong Kong isn’t perfect, but it is business-wise. And within Hong Kong, there’s only one place where my heart is.” Stefano rattles off his home address in DB and is out the door. He’ll be back.