Hey 👋 - Brandon here.

Happy Saturday to 1,902 growth-minded accountants.

Today’s issue takes less than 5 minutes to read.

A couple of years ago, I got into the coaching game.

I took on a handful of accounting firm owners as clients and met with them monthly.

Last week, I consolidated the years of call transcripts and had AI sift through them to identify the top three issues I most commonly coached on and the solutions we discussed.

Here’s the result:

1. Leadership & Accountability Gaps

• Many firm owners default to being too in the weeds. And it makes sense - being in the weeds is what made clients trust them and helped their firm grow. But at a certain point, being the client’s main point of contact and reviewing all of the work no longer scales.

• Few of your directors/managers are actually leading their teams. Managing workflow and leading are two completely different skill sets. A common issue among firms is that staff receive mixed messages about what success looks like (e.g., number of returns vs. client service). The unclear expectations result in staff underperforming and being dissatisfied with the firm.

• Often, accountability is avoided because leaders and managers don’t want to come across as harsh. They believe that by avoiding the tough conversation, the employee will be happy and continue working at the firm. This mindset invites mediocrity and, if not fixed, will lead to long-term underperformance.

Common Solutions:

• Clearly define success by developing “standards” per role and setting clear expectations with each individual member of the team (everyone has a number they are responsible for).

• 1:1 conversations should happen frequently (2-4x per month) and should focus on building the staff’s self-awareness muscle by providing feedback frequently - this gets everyone bought into a feedback culture and “tough” conversations will no longer seem tough (because they will be normalized through making it a cultural expectation).

2. Client Communication Breakdowns

• Firms most often lose clients not due to technical errors but poor communication. There are too many hand-offs, bad context transfer, delays or no replies to emails. Clients want to feel like they are being prioritized.

• Staff misunderstand the value of prompt and clear communication. They instead focus on getting the work done, believing that’s the most important thing - but the deliverable is a part of the overall client experience… customer service is the other, arguably more important, part.

• Introverted staff will resist client interactions, preferring heads-down prep work. This perpetuates the communication issues and, if not solved, will lead to client churn.

Common Solutions:

• Reframe for staff: “Communication is the work” - clients value peace of mind and while the deliverable is a part of that, it’s not the only piece that matters.

• Set firm-wide SLAs (e.g., 48-hour response rule) and track compliance.

• Roleplay difficult client conversations in training and make sure you do not promote anyone to a client communication role unless they have demonstrated a pattern of success operating at that next level.

3. Scaling Structure & Staffing

• Small teams turn into large teams that turn into departments. Large teams are difficult to manage and require strong leaders to run them effectively (and strong leaders are hard to find).

• Context transfer between departments is hard to facilitate at scale. If you don’t hold teams and their leaders accountable to the right metrics, client service will take a hit.

• Production pay is great for small firms and certain teams but it will disincentivize teamwork. As you scale, if you don’t build a culture of teamwork, you will find that you (or 2-3 leaders) have to make all the decisions and solve all the problems. And that won’t work at scale.

Common Solutions:

• Be intentional about your team structure as you scale - keep teams small ($1M per team max) and ensure multiple “departments” are represented on each team. This is often referred to as a “pod” structure.

• Find a healthy mix between production pay (objective based on output) and subjective pay based on firm performance and contributions to the team.

Do you see the same issues at your firm?

I harp on leadership and accountability because, as I’ve grown Hall CPA, I’ve learned those are the keys to success. Underperforming teams are generally not being led effectively and not being held accountable.

That's all for this Saturday. See you next week.

Cheers,
Brandon

Ready to grow your firm? Here’s how I can help:

Apply to join four15, a private community for owners of firms exceeding $1M in annual revenue. Here’s what’s happening:

• Popular Posts

  • What is the single biggest leadership lesson you’ve learned running your firm?

  • Tax advisory group model

  • Cost seg studies

Book a demo to get accurate salary data from B4Transparency so you can always attract top talent by paying top of market (I own a minority stake)

Hey 👋 - Brandon here.

Happy Saturday to 1,897 growth-minded accountants.

Today’s issue takes less than 5 minutes to read.

I started this newsletter because I felt I had a lot of value to share with owners of accounting firms.

But I’ll admit, I got burned out.

Not just from creating this content, but all content.

I stopped posting on X and LinkedIn. Stopped recording YouTube videos (after spending $15k+ to set up a sick at-home studio). Stopped writing blog posts and newsletters. I just got tired and needed a break.

My hiatus wasn’t meant to be this long - my last newsletter to you was in February.

But I’m feeling the thrill of content creation seep back into my veins. So I’m kicking off this newsletter again with some updates and my thoughts on a recent article about KPMG’s AI news.

Have a topic you’d like my thoughts on? Simply reply to this email with your idea!

First, some updates:

My 2nd daughter (3rd child) was born in February - this was the final straw that stopped my content production. I wanted to spend more time with my family and not worry about being part of social commentary (it’s a lot of work and mentally draining).

Interestingly, our lead flow at Hall CPA went UP after I quit producing content.

My marketing coordinator, Pat, is a rockstar and had been working on locking down our SEO strategy for about ~6 months prior to my hiatus. Additionally, Nate has been crushing content surrounding the Tax Bill. The results were incredible… our web traffic is up ~200% YoY and lead flow was up slightly YoY until the tax bill came out in July and new client inquiries went through the roof - July saw 563 webform submissions and this month we expect ~490 submissions.

All without me producing a lick of content.

Our firm was named an IPA Top 400 firm, which exceeds my wildest dreams. However, we are not growing as fast as my rudimentary budget predicted we would… the law of large numbers finally caught up with us. Growth is still good, but we are expecting mid-teens (w/o M&A) going forward.

My accounting community, four15 is cranking. In fact, I’m about to launch four15 2.0 and invite you to be a part of it (still need to have at least $1M in revenue to join).

Check out the four15 website I custom coded (vibe coded?) with the help of Claude. It ain’t perfect but it was a fun challenge to not use any web builder tools and instead go straight to writing custom code in VSCode. I’m now working on coding AI agents for our firm which is much harder.

And I’ve been playing a lot of golf. Recently shot a 79 on a trip out to Hilton Head, best score in 15 years.

Now, about KPMG’s AI usage…

Recently, an article came out about how KPMG built an AI tool that creates tax plans in hours rather than weeks.

You can read the article here.

I’ve talked about how AI will eliminate the billable hour, and here’s a real-life use case. KPMG created a tool that significantly reduces the inputs required for the client deliverable, which will also significantly reduce their per-client hourly billings.

Hourly billing will inevitably create revenue shortfalls as AI tools are developed to perform much of the billable work.

Smart firms are figuring out how to fix and value price engagements so that they can be rewarded with higher profitability when they drive efficiencies.

If you create a tool like KPMG, you should be rewarded with additional profits, not additional client projects to fill revenue gaps.

That's all for this Saturday. See you next week.

Cheers,
Brandon

Ready to grow your firm? Here’s how I can help:

Apply to join four15, a private community for owners of firms exceeding $1M in annual revenue. Here’s what’s happening:

• Upcoming Events:

  • Sep. 4 @ 12pm EST - Masterclass: BBB Tax Bill (Individual Provisions)

• Popular Posts

  • Building Leaders - discussion on resources available to build a bench of leadership talent as it’s needed to scale.

  • AP/AR - discussion on whether or not to integrate ap/ar services into current offerings.

  • Sign up for the four15 conference! - link with additional details on agenda, stay, and sign-up process.

Book a demo to get accurate salary data from B4Transparency so you can always attract top talent by paying top of market (I own a minority stake)

Hey 👋 - Brandon here.

Happy Saturday to 1,809 growth-minded accountants.

Here’s one growth tip for you and your firm.

Today’s issue takes less than 5 minutes to read.

Today I’m going to give you my thoughts on how AI will change how you bill clients and what you can do about it.

The narrative on social media is AI agents will replace professional services providers. If an AI agent can do everything a human accountant can, why do we need the humans?

Personally, I doubt that will happen any time soon.

Think about your attorney. Will you stop using him/her in favor of an AI agent? Highly unlikely because you don’t know what you don’t know. That’s the value of an expert. But you will expect your attorney to leverage AI to provide you streamlined legal services.

It will be decades before people are comfortable fully entrusting AI for professional services.

We are here to stay - take a deep breath.

That said, take a hard look at how you bill for your services. In the not so distant future, many of the deliverables we sink time into will be created instantaneously. Think about pressing a button and 60 seconds later a complex tax return is 100% complete and ready for your final review.

That will happen.

And it’s going to kill the hourly billing model (or kill the firms that cling dearly on to an outdated billing methodology). If you can instantly create a tax return, and you bill hourly, the tax return is basically free! The hours you count on today to hit revenue goals will disappear.

Instead, our time will be spent managing the client relationship, collecting and structuring data, and telling stories about the deliverables we are handing to clients to help them understand.

So what can you do about it?

Start exploring how to price the relationship with the client. Whether fixed pricing or subscription services, your clients will still want access to a professional they trust.

But it’s going to look and feel different.

How much access will clients want and how do you price it?

How many clients can you handle if the time prepping deliverables decreases by 90%+?

How do you nurture client relationships and be their go-to tax/accounting/business advisor/wealth manager?

Are you and your team prepared to manage relationships all day every day (rather than work on projects)?

That's all for this Saturday. See you next week.

Cheers,
Brandon

Ready to grow your firm? Here’s how I can help:

→ Apply to join four15, the community I launched for ambitious firm owners doing $1M+ in revenue (29/30 spots filled)

→ Book a demo to get accurate salary data from B4Transparency so you can always attract top talent by paying top of market (I own a minority stake)

Connect with me:

X (Twitter)
LinkedIn

Hey 👋 - Brandon here.

Happy Saturday to 1,796 growth-minded accountants.

Here’s one growth tip for you and your firm.

Today’s issue takes less than 5 minutes to read.

The big news this week was Bench’s sudden closure.

With no notice, a company that serves 35,000 businesses and raised over $100M from VCs shut down. Customers reported being unable to access their data and many were sprinting to find a new accountant.

It’s a good warning to any fintech company entering the space.

Fintech companies offering bookkeeping services are not tech companies… they are service companies. And if they aren’t diligent enough to adjust their pricing and business models to accommodate this nuance, they will go the same way as Bench.

Tech companies burn incredible amounts of cash acquiring customers.

But once they have a customer locked in on their software there is relatively little ongoing cost to service that customer. In this model, the goal is to acquire as many customers as fast as possible without regard to cost because the ongoing contract fees often come with 70%+ gross margins.

Service companies don’t work like that.

To run a low cost bookkeeping service like Bench, you are easily looking at 50-60% direct labor cost to deliver the service. This cost is incurred every single month, forever, not just upfront when acquiring the customer.

The solution deployed by fintech companies to overcome this fact is to automate their way to higher gross margins.

But you can’t automate accounting when the inputs are trash. Garbage in = garbage out. Even in the face of the AI revolution, I think accountants have strong job security mainly due to this fact.

Eventually, the fintech company gets stuck.

They can’t raise prices without significantly sacrificing growth (and their VCs won’t like that). They are still spending tons of money on customer acquisition, technical debt, and building custom tech solutions. They can’t automate the accounting like they thought they could, so they are stuck with low gross margins. And they can’t offer higher quality work because they can’t afford the higher quality talent - this leaves them susceptible to churn, refunds, and chargebacks.

It’s a recipe for disaster.

That said, I think accounting firms could go downmarket successfully. You may not want to help those customers as they tend to be price sensitive and needy. But it’s clear the TAM is huge and if you figure out how to win at scale you will win big.

Three ideas for you to consider if you want to move downstream:

• Offer fractional bookkeeping services to CPA firms. Let the CPAs deal with the client interactions… you focus on setting up a streamlined back office that CPAs can plug into.

• Hire accountants who want work life balance and are willing to trade career paths and high salaries for it. Have them manage a small book of clients and the offshore team of 2-3 that will help deliver the work monthly. And give them a bit of equity so they have upside. Net margins would be low, but I bet you could scale this to the moon.

• Become an offshoring expert. If you could get the bookkeeping and the review work done offshore, your U.S. team will have a lot more time to provide better customer service and identify advisory opportunities. The litmus test for success here is: if your U.S. team was not allowed to open up the accounting software, could your team produce high quality work?

That's all for this Sunday. See you next week.

Cheers,
Brandon

Ready to grow your firm? Here’s how I can help:

→ Apply to join four15, the community I launched for ambitious firm owners doing $1M+ in revenue (23/30 spots filled)

→ Book a demo to get accurate salary data from B4Transparency so you can always attract top talent by paying top of market (I own a minority stake)

Connect with me:

X (Twitter)
LinkedIn

Hey 👋 - Brandon here.

Happy Saturday to 1,791 growth-minded accountants.

Here’s one growth tip for you and your firm.

Today’s issue takes less than 5 minutes to read.

I’ve been hosting monthly sessions with $1M+ firm owners in my new community, four15, and we reflected on lessons learned during 2024.

The general theme is consistent with my writings in that firm owners need to get out of client work, learn how to delegate, and become an effective leader to scale up.

You can’t do more of the same and expect to grow.

(If you are interested in applying to join four15, check out the footer to this email)

Here are some of the lessons learned:

Client relationships got me here, but are preventing me from working ON the business

We love building relationships with clients and helping them through their own problems, but at some point client relationships become an impediment to firm growth.

Firm owners who don’t accept this are resigning themselves to a lifetime of low leverage work. The opportunity cost has to be insane.

Clear expectations + accountability

A big theme of my writing is how to develop better communication and leadership skills.

As you scale, the ROI on developing these skills outpaces everything else - even marketing/sales skills (I think).

Firm owners in four15 have learned the same lesson - clarity is kindness.

If your team doesn’t know what success looks like, they can’t possibly meet your expectations. You must tell them exactly what you expect, in writing, down to minute details.

You must also hold them accountable to the outcomes.

Many people do not like accountability. They’d prefer to work at their own pace and on their own schedule. If you want to run a non-profit, feel free to let your team have free rein.

For the rest of us, it’s important to work on creating feedback loops (daily check-ins) and quickly addressing lagging performance… do not let it fester.

Better calendar management

As your firm grows, the demand on your time also grows.

You can easily fill an entire workday with low leverage firm management tasks. You will feel busy but the impact of the time you are pouring into the business is minimal.

First, identify the 2-3 most important things you need to accomplish in 2025.

Then, find one day on your schedule each week that you will block from 9am to 5pm. No one is allowed to schedule with you during that day. That goes for clients, vendors, celebrities, employees, etc.

This is your sacred time to focus on your top 2-3 things.

If blocking one whole day makes you nervous, you have a delegation problem. You need to identify the tasks/projects/clients you can delegate to dampen those nerves.

I’d you don’t have anyone to delegate to, you have a capacity or capability problem.

You need to find people who can develop into higher level thinkers/leaders and take things off your plate.

By the way, this cycle repeats itself as you grow: identify most important tasks → calendar block → nervous, need to delegate → can’t delegate, need to develop great people → hire people.

That's all for this Sunday. See you next week.

Cheers,
Brandon

Ready to grow your firm? Here’s how I can help:

→ Apply to join four15, the community I launched for ambitious firm owners doing $1M+ in revenue (23/30 spots filled)

→ Book a demo to get accurate salary data from B4Transparency so you can always attract top talent by paying top of market (I own a minority stake)

Connect with me:

X (Twitter)
LinkedIn

Hey 👋 - Brandon here.

Happy Saturday to 1,787 growth-minded accountants.

Here’s one growth tip for you and your firm.

Today’s issue takes less than 11 minutes to read.

One problem I see in the accounting industry is many firm owners and partners erroneously think doing more of the same will move them forward.

Most of the time that means billing more hours.

But billing hours is a very low form of leverage. You can only charge as much as the client is willing to pay meaning, eventually, you lose leverage.

Higher forms of leverage are marketing, sales, technology, and leadership.

Below I’m going to share my thoughts as to the skills managing partners and those on the partner track, need to build per level of revenue:

$0 - $1M Book of Business

Managing partners

This is the solo-firm owner level moving into a few employees as you near $1M in revenue.

Ultimately you need to figure out how to bring clients in the door and deliver a good work product to them. So you want to spend time on business development, networking, meetups, and then learn how to manage workflow to produce high quality deliverables.

There are three things that keep firm owners from crossing $1M

• Bad pricing… to correct the economics of bad pricing you must work more hours, but you only have so many hours to work… bad pricing will hold you back

• Operating on referrals only (no business dev efforts)… great strategy for those who have 1,000 clients, not so great strategy for smaller firms if you are looking to grow as more than a snails pace

• Bad client experience… clients value urgency and proactive communications. To hit 7-figures you must operate with a sense of urgency. Every day is a sprint.

Employees on the partner track

Most employees are expected to bill 2.5-3x their salary so $0-$1M will be largely focused on sole production.

Employees should focus on developing a sense of urgency related to responding to clients and internal requests. This sense of urgency will make you stand out given that so few people operate with urgency. If people are having to follow-up with you to check on status, you are failing.

Additionally, focus on producing high quality work. BUT don’t let it slow you down. The magic is figuring out how to produce high quality work, urgently.

$1 - $3M Book of Business

Managing partners

This is where most firms get stuck.

By this point you have a small and growing team. You are probably feeling stretched thin because you are trying to keep all the balls in the air related to firm management and, on top of that, you have your own clients to deliver to.

To get past this, you must do LESS not MORE client service.

You need to learn how to delegate client relationships.

As you creep closer to $3M, work toward the following time split: 10% client service, 60% firm management, 30% marketing and sales.

Focus on systematizing your marketing and sales process and team. This system will enable you to continue growing year-over-year… do not neglect it.

P.S. if you make it to this level of scale and want to learn how to continue growing 20-40% per year without blowing up your firm, consider joining four15 - a community for firm owners doing $1M+ and one I wish I had when I was going through this.

Employees on the partner track

When you are managing a $1-$3M book for your firm, the most critical piece of advice I can give you is to “get out in front of it.”

To do this, you have to figure out how to optimize client service. Delivering good service, keeping clients happy, retaining clients, and retaining employees is “meeting expectations.” These are table stakes.

Your success here will be largely dependent on how well you delegate.

Great delegation + accountability = free time.

Bad delegation + accountability = constant fires, stress, failure.

With some of your time earned back, you can figure out how to cross-sell and up-sell clients.

If you want to manage more than $3M and be on the partner track, you have to show that you can effectively manage your book (table stakes) and also grow it or grow the firm.

Proving you can add revenue to the firm will confirm that you “get it” to firm leaders.

$3 - $6M Book of Business

Managing partners

If you make it to this level, you will find yourself needing to further hone your delegation skills and build leadership skills.

“Delegation” at lower levels of revenue looks like “can you please get this done by X” but at this level of revenue you are delegating entire service lines and big projects that can materially impact the firm.

You are now a steward of your firm’s needs and that is a heavy burden.

You will have to learn how to be comfortable in uncomfortable situations and make decisions that are in the best interest of the firm. You will need to learn how to be exacting, draw your line in the sand, and drive clarity into your firm as to what success looks like.

If you are unwilling to embrace this new challenge, you will struggle to grow beyond $6M.

Employees on the partner track

At this point you are likely on the partner track.

You will likely appoint a caretaker or three to help you manage your book. You will need to work on delegation and setting extremely clear expectations. You will also need to get comfortable having tough conversations to keep people on track.

These are all leadership skills and if you can’t develop them, you will be stuck.

Most accountants don’t want to develop these skills. They prefer to just bill more time to clients in an effort to show they can add more value to the firm. They do this because being a leader is hard, uncomfortable, and embroils you in weekly conflict.

But if you can’t develop these develop leadership skills, you’ll find you have a ton of leverage over you time.

You will be able to improve the client experience and increase annual retention rates. You will have more time to develop business and also have a platform to plug that new business right in to.

Partner material.

$6M+ Book of Business

Managing partners

When you make it to this level, all focus should shift back to your people.

You will have a decent-sized team at this point and getting results through your people will become the biggest levers to pull.

The most important thing you need to focus on is developing leaders.

You want to be in a position to delegate complete ownership over functions of your firm and know they will hit your expectations 95% of the time. The only way to do that is to develop leaders who can be trusted to autonomously run their teams.

The problem?

Part of developing as a leader is learning from your mistakes. At this point, you are likely a decent leader given that you’ve made every mistake under the sun. But how do you enable your leaders-in-training to make mistakes? Especially if they are the same mistakes you made previously?

That’s hard.

Employees on the partner track

At this point you are likely a partner.

The biggest challenge you will face is strategic planning. Can you learn how to predict the future, staff teams appropriately to drive toward the expected economic targets, and retain a strong system of client service?

It’s a constant process and takes significant time from your weeks and months.

To do this effectively you must have the time to dedicate. So again, hone your delegation and leadership skills. Make sure everyone on your team knows what success looks like. Entrust a few lieutenants to run the day-to-day so you can focus on the big stuff.

And for the love of GAAP, stop spending so much time serving clients.

That's all for this Sunday. See you next week.

Cheers,
Brandon

Ready to grow your firm? Here’s how I can help:

→ Apply to join four15, the community I launched for ambitious firm owners doing $1M+ in revenue (21/30 spots filled)

→ Book a demo to get accurate salary data from B4Transparency so you can always attract top talent by paying top of market (I own a minority stake)

Connect with me:

X (Twitter)
LinkedIn

Hey 👋 - Brandon here.

Happy Saturday to 1,778 growth-minded accountants.

Here’s one growth tip for you and your firm.

Today’s issue takes less than 8 minutes to read.

Today, I’m going to show you Hall CPA’s annual strategic planning framework.

Regardless of your firm’s size, you need to go through a structured annual process of reviewing the past year’s performance to identify changes you need to make. What went well, what should you stop doing, and what should you start doing?

The result of this process is clarity, alignment, and identifying staffing needs ahead of the need.

Let’s get to it:

Members of my community, four15, received a training on this process as well as a goal setting and financial planning template. If you want access, I invite you to Apply Here. I have 10 spots remaining in the community for firm owners doing more than $1M in revenue.

Define Your 10, 3, and 1-Year Vision

First, I want you to figure out why you are doing this.

Why build an accounting firm?

Your “why” has to go beyond money. But it can be very personal and even selfish. If you want to be on the cover of Forbes magazine, write that down.

Don’t hold back, be honest with yourself.

Second, I want you to guesstimate what your 10-year revenue and profit looks like.

What will it take to get there? How does your worldview need to change? What skills to you need to develop that you don’t have today? What does your org chart look like, what talent are you missing?

Your “why” is important here. If you are merely pursuing money, you’ll burn out.

Generally, we underestimate what we can do in ten years and overestimate what we can do in one… so think BIG.

Third, dial in your 3-year vision and what it looks like. Include revenue and profit.

In order to be on track for your 10-year vision, what does your firm need to look like in three years? What competencies do you need to develop? How will the clients you serve change? Do you need to offer additional services or niches?

Fourth, it’s time to develop your next 12 month plan. Again, start with revenue and profit but build a budget and be as accurate as possible.

Do you have the marketing and sales to facilitate your desired growth? Is your team properly staffed? What technology changes do you need to make? How can you tweak your service offerings to retain more clients? What pricing changes need to be made?

After going through this exercise you should have clearly defined 10, 3, and 1-Year financial targets, you’ll know what it takes to get there, and you’ll have your “why” clearly defined.

Now, Develop Strategic Initiatives

Strategic initiatives are “themes” for the year that will align your firm.

It is very important to get these right. We spend almost half of our total strategic planning time nailing down our strategic initiatives. Further, we will clearly define what success/failure look like for each strategic initiatives we develop.

The reason we spend so much time on strategic initiatives is because it’s the foundation for goal setting.

For example, if you need to improve your systems over the next 12 months, then your strategic initiatives might be “prep to scale” and your partners would each set a goal around that initiative.

Your managers would then set goals around the partners’ goals, seniors around the managers’ etc.

This cascading goal setting has the effect of firm-wide alignment and increases the likelihood your vision is realized.

You can set strategic initiatives around marketing, sales, fulfillment, systems, hiring/onboarding, people-ops, technology… you name it.

As an example, here are past strategic initiatives we’ve used at our firm:

• Prep to scale (systems, workflow, and automations focused)

• Cultivate prestige (create better content and thought leadership, attend conferences, hire highly technical professionals)

• Culture of accountability (develop scorecards, quarterly objectives, everyone has job clarity, underperformers have a plan to get back to where we need them)

Each of these would include a short write-up for additional context as well as definitions of success and failure.

Lastly, Create Personal Goals

Once your strategic initiatives are ironed out, it’s time to go through the goal-setting process starting at the leadership level and cascading down. All goals can be assigned bonuses or you can say you must meet x% of your goals to be bonus eligible.

This is where you gain leverage and alignment. Don’t mess this up!

All goals should help:

1. The person above them acheive their goal

2. The department achieve it’s goal

3. The strategic initiative be more successful

If you set a goal that doesn’t help one of those three buckets, then it’s likely a “personal development” goal, which is fine, but not something you comp on.

That's all for this Sunday. See you next week.

Cheers,
Brandon

Ready to grow your firm? Here’s how I can help:

→ Apply to join four15, the community I launched for ambitious firm owners doing $1M+ in revenue (16/30 spots filled)

→ Book a demo to get accurate salary data from B4Transparency so you can always attract top talent by paying top of market (I own a minority stake)

Connect with me:

X (Twitter)
LinkedIn

Hey 👋 - Brandon here.

Happy Saturday to 1,755 growth-minded accountants.

Here’s one growth tip for you and your firm.

Today’s issue takes less than 4 minutes to read.

Today, I’m going to break down a recent article my friend, Gary Shamis, wrote about how the industry is evolving to a more transactional approach.

Here’s a link to the full article.

Gary grew SS&G to the 37th largest firm in the U.S. before selling to BDO. He is a practice management savant and has coached me for the past few years. He runs an annual conference, Winning Ways, in Chicago - if you ever get a chance to go, you should.

Is the “Trusted Advisor” on its way out?

Gary has noticed something interesting in the accounting industry - large firms are optimizing for transactional/project work rather than strong client relationships:

If you are running, or part of, a sub $20M firm, you’ve probably seen the result of this first-hand when onboarding new clients.

We’ve won hundreds of thousands of dollars of tax work in the past year from clients coming from larger firms. These clients are GPs of syndicates and funds and complain about “just paying for a tax return,” getting no proactive advice, experiencing delays and missed expectations… all complaints about the relationship with their old firm.

I have a habit of looking up the names of the service partners these clients are leaving to come to us. And these service partners are smart, highly competent people.

But they simply can’t staff teams to keep up with all the work.

Traditional firms make their money on project work and have historically struggled to price in the relationship.

In effect, they create a death-loop of sorts where the only way, in their mind, to make more money is to do more tax returns… relationships/reputation be damned.

This transactional approach results from regulations increasing the demand for CPAs but not enough supply of CPAs to do the work.

This huge pile of work naturally leads people to optimize for task completion rather than holistic relationship management.

Optimizing for transactional work and deprioritizing the actual relationship is not a bad business model in the sense that it will make money…

at least for as long as a talent supply gap exists.

Where do we go from here?

Gary has some thoughts:

I think there will always be a need for a strictly transactional approach to tax/accounting.

Some clients just want it cheap and fast.

But I also think a subset of clients will place more value on the relationship over the coming years. This is especially true with AI advances - clients will want an expert guide (human) even if AI does all the work.

If you want to position yourself for the future:

Think about how you can prioritize the relationship component of client service. Maybe clients have to pay you an annual fee to access your services… the benefit they receive is your firm has a lower client-to-staff ratio and can spend more time guiding clients.

The TAM may be smaller, potentially limiting growth, but you’ll be more profitable.

Imagine each client you prepare returns for has 1.5 returns on average and your average return price is $2500. To bill $700k in revenue, you need 280 returns and 186 clients.

This book likely runs @ 20-25% net margin (factoring in the replacement cost of partner time).

Now imagine you require a minimum annual advisory/relationship/concierge fee of $3,000. With that, clients can access you via email and phone as well as attend private events and webinars.

To make the same $700k, you only need 103 clients.

Those 103 clients have 154 tax returns meaning you’ve axed 126 returns from your workflow.

And you are making more money:

The 154 returns bring $385k revenue @ 20% net margin = $77,000. But the $309,000 of advisory runs closer to a 60% net margin, or $185k. On this ~$700k book of business, your blended margin is 37%.

A ~17 point increase in net margin by adopting a more relationship-based model.

Your clients are happier. Employees are happier. And you are happier.

That's all for this Sunday. See you next week.

Cheers,
Brandon

Ready to grow your firm? Here’s how I can help:

→ Apply to join four15, the community I launched for ambitious firm owners doing $1M+ in revenue (19/30 spots filled)

→ Book a demo to get accurate salary data from B4Transparency so you can always attract top talent by paying top of market (I own a minority stake)

Connect with me:

X (Twitter)
LinkedIn

Hey 👋 - Brandon here.

Happy Saturday to 1,755 growth-minded accountants.

Here’s one growth tip for you and your firm.

Today’s issue takes less than 2 minutes to read.

Quick ask: I’m helping raise money for a CPA on my team, Robert. His daughter has Rhett syndrome and there have been recent breakthroughs in gene therapy treatment that can significantly alter his daughter’s life. If you’ve been enjoying my content, can you please make a small donation to help Robert’s family afford the treatment? Thank you.

Today I’m going to show you my simple delegation framework that has always helped me prioritize my time to the highest leverage work.

First, get a blank sheet of paper.

Brainstorm all of the tasks and projects you worked on over the past month. Make sure to think about all the small things too, like sending emails and scheduling meetings. This will be important later.

Now grab a new sheet of paper.

At the top, write down your target income. Then draw a T… on the left column write the header “< $X” with “X” being your target hourly rate (target income / 2000 hours). On the right column write the header “> $X.”

Now get the first sheet of paper where you brainstormed all of your tasks and put them into the left or right column.

Everything in the left column should be delegated asap.

You should only work on tasks/projects in the right column.

I do this process whenever I feel frustrated - I’ve learned my frustration usually stems from (1) working on low leverage work; and/or (2) not getting expected results.

This exercise helps me re-focus on the highest value work.

What income target should you set?

I always set income targets 50-100% higher than what I’m earning today. It helps me get into the mindset of what “next level” work looks like. This type of forward thinking can help you scale your income faster than you know.

You can also set your current income level just to get a sense for the tasks/projects you should absolutely say no to.

That's all for this Saturday. See you next week.

Cheers,
Brandon

Ready to grow your firm? Here’s how I can help:

→ Apply to join four15, the community I launched for ambitious firm owners doing $1M+ in revenue (19/30 spots filled)

→ Book a demo to get accurate salary data from B4Transparency so you can always attract top talent by paying top of market (I own a minority stake)

Connect with me:

X (Twitter)
LinkedIn

Hey 👋 - Brandon here.

Happy Saturday to 1,755 growth-minded accountants.

Here’s one growth tip for you and your firm.

Today’s issue takes less than 3 minutes to read.

Happening in four15 - we have 17 firms in the community and Core Group sessions are starting this month. We held a strategic planning masterclass and I dropped my template for how I run Hall CPA’s annual strategic planning process. If you are running a firm >$1M in revenue, we’d love for you to be part of our budding community.

I had the pleasure of attending Winning Ways, a top practice management conference for CPA firms in Chicago.

During one of the excellent keynote sessions on leadership, the speaker had this to say about decision making abilities of great leaders:

The best leaders bat .600. You’d think that’s a mistake and they’d be more successful. The worst leaders? They bat .900!

The speaker’s point was great leaders find a way to make decisions quickly even when they don’t have all the information. They are comfortable taking risks and have honed their gut instinct through years of practice.

The worst leaders may have a higher hit rate but it comes ant the cost of speed. They are too slow to make decisions and suffer from analysis paralysis needing to know all information possible before moving forward. They are risk-averse and cannot operate in ambiguous environments (which is all leadership).

By the time they are ready to make a decision, the opportunity has passed.

They miss the boat.

Many of us accountants are overly analytical. Taking risks is hard and we’d prefer to analyze and re-analyze our spreadsheets to ensure 100% accuracy.

But as you move up in your career, and as your firm and team scale, your job becomes more and more subjective.

You cannot possibly have all the information.

So aim for a .600 success rate on your decisions.

Trade success rate for speed.

Make more decisions, more often.

That's all for this Sunday. See you next week.

Cheers,
Brandon

Ready to grow your firm? Here’s how I can help:

→ Apply to join four15, the community I launched for ambitious firm owners doing $1M+ in revenue (17/30 spots filled)

→ Book a demo to get accurate salary data from B4Transparency so you can always attract top talent by paying top of market (I own a minority stake)

Connect with me:

X (Twitter)
LinkedIn

Hey 👋 - Brandon here.

Happy Saturday to 1,756 growth-minded accountants.

Here’s one growth tip for you and your firm.

Today’s issue takes less than 5 minutes to read.

(Note: I’m going to send these emails out on Sunday going forward. For me, Sunday is the day I catch up on content and news and it seems like many of you have a similar routine. If you feel strongly either way, shoot me an email).

As I’ve grown my firm, I’ve found myself making decisions based on limited information.

I try pushing decision making down as a result. People closer to the problem have more information than I have and they are typically qualified to make decisions, but sometimes they need direction from me.

Here are three power questions I use to cut through the noise, gather context, and point leaders in the right direction:

How do you know this is true?

This is my all-time favorite question and works especially well when subjective information or bad data is being presented.

It forces people to think about the inputs that led to the data they are analyzing.

I’ve used this to challenge my marketing team on lead attribution, sales team on closed-lost reasons, tax team on client experience issues, etc.

If you cannot prove that whatever you are presenting is true, then you have more work to do.

Where can this fail?

When rolling out a new idea, process, or change, it’s important to gather feedback from your team prior to implementation.

Sometimes, the best feedback comes from people closest to the work.

But because these teammates are often lowest on the totem pole, they aren’t inclined to speak up. It’s nerve-wracking and perceived as high career risk to say something wrong (especially to the CEO).

To cut through this, I ask “where can this fail?”

It’s a beautiful questions because it’s hypothetical - thus, there’s no risk in giving negative feedback.

Make sure to ask for specifics. Analytical people will often say “it’s impossible” which is never true… but you do want to learn why they perceive it as daunting.

What is preventing you from X in 12 months?

This is my favorite growth-related question that helps people identify the main issue preventing them from doing something.

Often, I will ask: “what is the main thing preventing you from 2x’ing revenue in 12 months?”

Whatever people say next is most likely a solvable problem.

For example, when asked this to firm owners they will say they can’t hire fast enough. But we’re talking about 2x’ing revenue here… if you really wanted to solve the hiring problem, you could hire a recruiter or a VP of Talent to focus on that issue day in day out.

This question works everywhere in your firm:

“What is the main thing preventing you from increasing NPS from 6 to 9 over the next 12 months?”

“What is the main thing preventing you from building an offshore team in the next 12 months?”

“What is the main thing preventing you from reducing turnaround time from 7 weeks to 3 weeks in the next 12 months?

12 months is a perfectly long and short enough window to think strategically but also tactically enough to walk away with immediate action items.

Try it out.

That's all for this Sunday. See you next week.

Cheers,
Brandon

Ready to grow your firm? Here’s how I can help:

→ Apply to join four15, the community I launched for ambitious firm owners doing $1M+ in revenue (17/30 spots filled)

→ Book a demo to get accurate salary data from B4Transparency so you can always attract top talent by paying top of market (I own a minority stake)

Connect with me:

X (Twitter)
LinkedIn

Hey 👋 - Brandon here.

Happy Saturday to 1,729 growth-minded accountants.

Here’s one growth tip for you and your firm.

Today’s issue takes less than 7 minutes to read.

In today’s email I’m going to talk about three marketing channels to grow your brand and make lots of money.

Over the past two weeks I’ve posted content on X and LinkedIn about what it takes to make partner at larger firms.

Some of the conversation turned to it being easier to make $300-500k running a solo practice - frankly I’m not sure I agree. I think people hear my story, and others from breakout firm owners, and assume it’s easy to set a lower revenue target and make just a few hundred $k.

But there are 46,000 accounting firms and only 500 gross more than ~$6M. I bet 44,000 gross <$1M.

It’s harder to build a firm than it appears.

Whether you run a firm or want to be a partner in one, if you want to earn (net) $300k-$500k, or heck even $1M, you need to get comfortable with marketing and building your brand.

Getting out there in front of people is scary.

It may feel a bit cringy.

But if you want to greatly accelerate your career and earnings potential, being a rainmaker is a great way to do it. All firms want rainmakers. And if you launch your own firm you’ll need to be the rainmaker.

Here are the marketing channels I recommend hitting had to build brand momentum:

Niche Communities

All niches have communities.

For example, my niche is real estate. There are online communities such as Biggerpockets and FB Groups where real estate investors ask tons of questions, including accounting/tax. Be the go-to accounting/tax person.

There are also offline communities such as networking events and meetups. You can be the local community’s “tax guy/gal.”

Getting involved in communities is highly effective and enables you to build a foundation for your brand to springboard later.

SEO/AI Search

Don’t sleep on SEO.

SEO is our #1 lead gen channel. We optimized our website pages and blog posts to rank for keywords and capture traffic. We are now doing the same for AI searches and are starting to capture good traffic from LLMs like Chat GPT.

But here’s the cool thing:

Some of you reading this may think you can’t play the SEO game because you don’t control your firm’s website.

Wrong.

Do you know the second largest search engine?

It’s YouTube.

You can spin up a YouTube channel and compete in YouTube itself but also on every other search engine for keyword rankings.

Next time you Google Search, check out how the YouTube videos that display in search.

That could be you.

Email

The above two channels are focused on distribution.

Getting out in front of people and making them aware of your existence with high quality content is critical. But once they enter your ecosystem, you need a way to re-target them because most people aren’t going to buy after hearing about you once.

Email is a great way to remind people you exist.

For example, I send a weekly email to all of you talking about firm running. This has enabled me to launch a community for firm runners.

I also send 2x emails per week to our prospective clients and talk about tax education and stories. I plug a discovery call at the bottom of my email (much like I plug the community at the bottom of this one).

Email isn’t controlled by ever-changing algorithms.

If you aren’t emailing potential clients 1x per week, brainstorm topics and start!

What About Social Media?

Social media can work as it gives you immediate distribution. But algorithms change constantly and creating good content isn’t as valuable as it used to be in terms of growing a following and converting business.

I say this as someone who still converts a lot of business from social, but I have found myself questioning the ROI on our social marketing a lot this year.

If you notice, the above three marketing channels I gave you have immediate distribution (communities), slow distribution (SEO), and retargeting (email).

II gave you a marketing funnel… just go and do it.

That's all for this Saturday. See you next week.

Cheers,
Brandon

Ready to grow your firm? Here’s how I can help:

→ Apply to join four15, the community I launched for ambitious firm owners doing $1M+ in revenue (16/30 spots filled)

→ Book a demo to get accurate salary data from B4Transparency so you can always attract top talent by paying top of market (I own a minority stake)

Connect with me:

X (Twitter)
LinkedIn

Hey 👋 - Brandon here.

Happy Saturday to 1,728 growth-minded accountants.

Here’s one growth tip for you and your firm.

Today’s issue takes less than 3 minutes to read.

ICYM: Rebecca Driscoll and Mike Sylvester launched a new community for accounting, bookkeeping, and tax pros. Live events will be hosted by experts and coaches and there is an online message board where you can learn, grow, and expand your network. If you join by 9pm EST on 10/15, the price is $50/mo. You can learn more from Rebecca’s X post, Mike’s X post, or their intake page.

I am not affiliated nor am I receiving compensation for sharing this with you - Rebecca and Mike are stand-up accountants who I respect and I think their community will be awesome!

I read this story about a business owner, Tucker Max, who built a large business only to see it barely escape bankruptcy.

Tucker brought on a business partner whom he developed strong trust with and, as a result, ignored red flags.

That business partner was eventually handed the reins of Scribe, the company at issue, while Tucker set off to build other businesses.

But his business partner had greatly inflated his capabilities and almost burned Scribe to the ground.

As an entrepreneur, I get bored easily. The prospect of building something new is exciting and refreshing. It’s almost impossible to push down that brilliant new idea that is surely a home-run.

But the lesson from Tucker’s story: don’t take your eye off the ball.

Your main business should be the focal point until you sell or retire from it. We all have limited time in our day and spreading our attention too thin seems a sure fire way to set ourselves up for failure.

This is one of the reasons I waited so long to launch my new firm-owner community, four15.

I had the idea for years and would constantly tell my COO, Blake, that I wanted to launch it ‘next month.’ But until recently, our firm simply wasn’t ready for me to deviate even a small portion of my time and energy into a new venture.

I’m writing this well aware that I’m not taking my own advice…

But I think four15 will end up being a tangential part of my firm’s growth in the long-run for a variety of reasons.

Anyway,

If you’re bored after 10/15 and feeling like you want to launch something new and get a fresh start, first:

• Get 100 qualified leads to fill out your webform within a 30 day period

• Do that every month for 6 months

• Increase your close rate to 40%

• Then figure out how to get 200 qualified leads per month

• And THEN you might be ready to start something neW

Optimize your business before you try something new. And even then, the “new” thing shouldn’t demand so much time that your main business is no longer the main focal point.

That's all for this Saturday. See you next week.

Cheers,
Brandon

Ready to grow your firm? Here’s how I can help:

→ Apply to join four15, the community I launched for ambitious firm owners doing $1M+ in revenue (15/30 spots filled)

→ Get accurate salary data from B4Transparency so you can always attract top talent by paying top of market (I own a minority stake)

Connect with me:

X (Twitter)
LinkedIn

Hey 👋 - Brandon here.

Happy Saturday to 1,725 growth-minded accountants.

Here’s one growth tip for you and your firm.

Today’s issue takes less than 5 minutes to read.

ICYM: I launched a new community for ambitious firm owners doing $1M+ in revenue. We have filled 13/30 spots. If interested, apply here.

This week, I saw a hot Reddit post (in r/Accounting) blasting private equity (PE):

First, I don’t think you “stop” PE and I doubt you want to anyway.

PE brings new liquidity options into markets. Firms can now trade more efficiently and at higher multiples than in years past which is a good thing in my opinion.

But that doesn’t mean you have to like PE.

Instead of “stopping” PE, let’s talk about how to “beat” PE.

After all, they are competing in the same talent pools, going after the same clients, and schmoozing the same M&A targets.

So how can you beat PE?

(By the way, I’ve built relationships with a few people running these funds in the accounting space and they are smart, really smart, and generally nice people as well. To be clear, this post is not meant to villanize anyone which I think is easy to do when talking about PE. Instead, the focal point of the message is how can you effectively compete against them).

First, Understand Their Business Model

PE primarily makes money on a multiple arbitrage play.

Here’s how it works:

• Fund 1 acquires a bunch of firms for 5-7x EBITDA. After 4-6 years of this heavy M&A activity, they sell to Fund 2 for 10x EBITDA.

• Fund 2 acquires several Fund 1’s for 10x EBITDA. After 4-6 years of this heavy M&A activity, they sell to Fund 3 for mid-teens EBITDA.

• Fund 3 is massive and likely has synergies embedded into its fund to enable all of the Fund’s businesses to cross-sell, boosting organic growth. Fund 3 may look to liquidate to an even larger fund or IPO to create liquidity.

An example makes it easier to understand:

You run Fund 1 and you want to acquire $10M of EBITDA which will enable you to sell the platform for 10x EBITDA. You pay $70M for the firms making up $10M EBITDA, you put corporate processes and team in place, and you sell for $100M.

You made $30M for your fund.

Now let me ask you this:

If you run a fund and your goal is to maximize EV (enterprise value), are you really going to make the necessary investments to grow a sustainable company?

If you know every one dollar of spend costs you ten dollars of EV, how motivated would you be to spend that dollar on labor, systems, tech, resources, leadership development, etc?

Especially as the fund nears the end of its life.

Remember, PE doesn’t get rich on cash flow.

They get rich on the exit.

Take a long-term view

I may be naive but I think a simple way to beat PE is to take a long-term view.

They are on a clock to go full cycle in 4-6 years.

You are not.

So build something that lasts.

• Invest in hiring great people and developing them to become leaders in your firm.

• Invest in the resources and technology they need to be successful.

• Invest in the coming AI revolution.

Focus on hiring people that PE leaves in their wake (there will be opportunities to hire amazing people) and setting them up for success at your firm.

And lean into fully serving the client: advisory, accounting, and tax.

Avoid building a firm that needs to be rescued

Many large firms are realizing they need to deploy capital to modernize and remain competitive.

But they also pay out ~90% of cash flow to partners… imagine trying to claw that back.

You think partners are going to vote for making less money?

The big firms are stuck (thanks to decades of building a bad business) and ultimately look to PE capital as a rescue option to restructure their balance sheet and business model.

Two ways to avoid this:

1. Don’t give up majority control. Every firm needs someone leading it that has unilateral power to make decisions and drive the firm forward.

2. Don’t let your partners get too fat and happy. Make ‘em sweat a little bit from time to time. It’s good for them.

Consider your marketing message

If you are strongly opposed to PE, I think in the near future it will make business sense build a firm around that message.

As the first PE funds liquidate, my guess is we’ll see growing resentment around PE-backed firms.

I’m not saying it’s right or wrong, but…

If you commit to never taking on PE and shout that loud and proud, I’d wager you’ll gain industry clout/reputation and access to strong talent as a result.

That's all for this Saturday. See you next week.

Cheers,
Brandon

Ready to grow your firm? Here’s how I can help:

→ Apply to join four15, the community I launched for ambitious firm owners doing $1M+ in revenue (13/30 spots filled)

Connect with me:

X (Twitter)
LinkedIn

Hey 👋 - Brandon here.

Happy Saturday to 1,711 growth-minded accountants.

Here’s one growth tip for you and your firm.

Today’s issue takes less than X minutes to read.

I spent last weekend in the mountains near Asheville, NC with a former DAP pilot and two Delta Force Special Operators.

To be honest, I didn’t know what I was signing up for and there was a lot more physical activity than I was expecting. We went on hikes (and carried sandbags/kettlebells on said hikes) and had a tree-cutting competition. Overall it was a great experience and I’d go back in a heartbeat.

The experience put things into perspective for me.

What stresses me out as a firm runner is frankly not comparable to what these guys go through on their missions. Each time they deploy, there’s a decent chance they don’t come back.

I’m going to start taking life a bit less seriously from now on.

But…

I did want to share one thing I learned that can help you run a better firm:

After Action Reviews (AAR).

An AAR is where you get your team together to review performance offer the course of a season or even an individual project and identify key areas for improvement. The outcome is alignment, action items, and memorializing your lessons learned to prevent repeated mistakes.

Here’s how to run an AAR:

The Set-Up

To run an AAR well, first identify key stakeholders that should be in attendance.

At the beginning of the meeting, state the purpose of the AAR (what is the scope of the review) and set rules for the discussion:

• Ask hard questions

• Give transparent answers

• Be open to feedback (less emotional, more objective)

• Turn all distractions off

Then identify the note taker to ensure all thoughts/ideas/actions are captured.

Lastly, identify someone to ask questions related to your firm’s culture. For example, in the recent AAR we ran I asked one person on the team to spend a minute reviewing our values and mission statement and to ensure we are asking “how did that decision align with our ‘people first’ ideal?”

Now, you’re ready to begin.

Step Through Each Phase

First, identify the phases of the event or project you are reviewing.

We were reviewing a specific client account, so our phases were sales, onboarding, accounting set-up project, accounting monthly project, tax projects, delivery, and renewal.

You then progress through each stage and assess:

• Planning

• Communication

• Execution

• Client response

• Team performance

We found ourselves asking many questions about communication and context sharing as well as planning proactively for inevitable results.

We spent 2 hrs and 15 minutes on our AAR.

Memorialize It

After the AAR is concluded, the note taker will share the full notes and action items with the group.

The group will set their deadlines on action items in their calendar and get to work.

The military does a phenomenal job retaining and indexing their AARs. They are a knowledge machine.

Because this is our first time going through it, we simply created a GDrive to store the AAR notes.

In the future, my goal is to create an indexable/searchable knowledge base so that future leaders can make decisions based on historical context.

It’s not a Bitch Fest

One final important point I want to make:

An AAR is not a bitch fest.

I would highly recommend you keep people who are prone to complaining off the AAR as they will only serve to distract the group as they attempt to deflect blame away from themselves.

The point of an AAR is not to blame any one on the team - instead, it’s to assess team performance and make decisions for the team to improve on.

It requires maturity and professionalism.

That's all for this Saturday. See you next week.

Cheers,

Brandon

Hey 👋 - Brandon here.

Happy Saturday to 1,691 growth-minded accountants.

Here’s one growth tip for you and your firm.

Today’s issue takes less than 1 minutes to read.

Today’s newsletter is in audio format. I discuss the top two things that I believe have, above all else, enabled our firm’s growth.

CPA newsletter 8.31.24 (enhanced).wav

drive.google.com/file/d/17GE56XGIHOrK6uhfrVgjUrAiQOtSY-sr/view?usp=drivesdk

(You might have to download the file to play it… sorry!)

Let me know what you think.

Cheers,

Brandon

Hey 👋 - Brandon here.

Happy Saturday to 1,661 growth-minded accountants.

Here’s one growth tip for you and your firm.

Today’s issue takes less than 4 minutes to read.

I want to share a catchy graphic from Ryan Lazanis’s post on LinkedIn:

It does a good job highlighting the main issues firms struggle with but one thing is missing:

Leadership skills.

I discussed this on my recent podcast episode with JStaats.

It’s the number one blind spot I believe accounting firms face.

As an industry, we spend tons of time tweaking our pricing models squeezing every cent out of engagements as possible.

Invest hundreds of hours testing new software apps and automating workflows.

But then we promote the wrong people into leadership roles.

(in practice, it often means promoting the people with the most billable hours)

All the leverage gained from the pricing tweaks and software implementation is nuked as soon as we promote someone to a leadership role who doesn’t know how to lead.

Here are the characteristics of people who have the potential to be great leaders:

They can objectively self-reflect on how their own actions impacted the team

When the team fails, bad leaders blame everyone but themselves.

They blame technical skills, lack of support, software issues, workflow inefficiencies, client document disorganization, you name it.

And that’s not to say these issues don’t exist.

But great leaders start by assessing how they may have set their team up for failure.

Specifically, they review expectations that were set and how they held the team accountable throughout the process.

Only after they’ve confirmed they did everything they could from a communication, expectation setting, and accountability perspective do they start assessing other potential causes of the failure.

Great leaders focus on the right problems.

I find it interesting people will spend hours and hours trying to make small tweaks to workflow and technology but don’t spend a minute thinking about how they set up their teams for failure or success.

(and by the way, most of the time, team failure is due to poor expectation setting… good people with great leadership can execute in bad systems).

They have ideas to improve and present well-thought-out solutions

How many meetings have you attended where an issue is being discussed and ideas start flying?

There are certainly times when brainstorming is needed.

However, I’ve found most ideas are cheap.

And sometimes the ideas presented are a defense mechanism intended to deflect the boss’s attention away from the person causing the failure point.

Great leaders gather context before presenting an idea.

They seek to understand what the firm has tried in the past. Whether it worked or not and what alternative solutions were explored. They may even seek to understand the financial impact of solving the problem.

They will then spend time developing their idea into a real solution.

One that includes thoughts on how to implement effectively, downstream impact, and expected results over a specified time frame.

They don’t experience the same issues over and over (because they solve them)

How urgently someone solves a problem that has the potential to reoccur is a good indication of leadership potential.

Bad leaders complain about experiencing the same problems week in and week out.

Great leaders solve the problem once and for all.

This is because people with leadership potential are forward thinkers. They consider the impact of a problem reoccurring in the future and opt to solve it today for good.

That's all for this Saturday. See you next week.

Cheers,
Brandon

Hey 👋 - Brandon here.

Happy Saturday to 1,629 growth-minded accountants.

Here’s one growth tip for you and your firm.

Today’s issue takes less than 5 minutes to read.

Subscription pricing is all the rage.

There’s nothing like that sweet, sweet monthly recurring revenue (MRR).

But have you ever wondered how monthly subscriptions impact your client retention?

I was listening to a recent Hormozi podcast where he discussed monthly vs. quarterly vs. annual subscriptions.

He found that annual subscriptions increase retention and customer lifetime value.

The reasoning is simple:

On a monthly subscription, the customer reviews the past 30 days to evaluate whether the service is worth continuing. An annual subscription expands the review window to 12 months making it more likely the customer will associate the subscription with consumption of value.

You are more likely to demonstrate significant value over a 12 month period than a 30 day period.

I was curious about this so explored further:

Is there any data on the topic?

INMA, a national media association, reviewed a 2024 study of Piano’s clients. At the end of the first year, 70% of annual subscribers were retained where only 34% of monthly subscribers were retained. The gap widens as time goes on.

I then went to Paino’s website.

Piano compared performance in a 2021 review over the first year of a subscription and found that, at the median, only 45% of monthly subscribers are left at the end of that year, while 75% of annual subscribers remain.

Statistica seems to echo this retention trend with mobile apps. 28% of mobile app users are retained after one year when the billing is annual versus 12% when the billing is monthly.

FTStrategies wrote an article suggesting the survival rate of annual subscriptions is roughly 11x that of monthly subscribers after one year.

Clearly, annual subscriptions result in higher retention compared to monthly.

But are professional services any different?

I think professional services are stickier.

The switching costs of a SAAS product or Piano digital membership is significantly lower than switching your accountant.

But if you zoom out, it’s likely similar patterns exist among professional service firms.

During 2016-2018 I offered advisory, tax prep, and monthly accounting on an annual subscription.

One monthly price for all service needs.

The problem I experienced was, outside of monthly accounting services, the client’s consumption of value did not align with the timing of their payments.

For example, we’d split tax prep and planning into 12 payments, but clients did not consume compliance and advisory value monthly.

Instead, they’d receive the return and later wonder why they are still paying for it. Or they’d want to cancel before the back half of our advisory services were delivered.

You may be wondering how much of our retention issues had to do with fulfillment versus billing frequency.

It’s a fair question.

We made improvements to our fulfillment processes but by 2018 I decided to nix the monthly billing because it was a consistent customer service issue.

To a degree, monthly billing handicapped our ability to fulfill work at a high level.

“I lock clients in for 12 months, they can’t break the contract”

Yes they can.

Your terms don’t really matter.

What matters is whether either party is willing to take the serious step of initiating a lawsuit.

If you are unwilling to take a client to court, then your contract terms are largely meaningless.

Sophisticated clients know this.

I don’t price tax returns and tax planning, I just have a price for “all access”

This is rooted in the idea of delivering concierge access to clients, a concept I really like.

But you still have to understand your costs to fulfill the service.

If you don’t, you’ll handicap your ability to drive higher margins and grow.

And once you understand your fulfillment costs, you’ll start pricing individual services to come up with your concierge service price.

If you don’t do this, I’d argue you don’t have a grasp on your firm’s economics and will struggle to scale.

Keep it simple

As I’ve grown my firm, I have learned to keep it simple.

If hourly billing works for you, go for it.

Subscriptions? Great.

Fixed prices? Cool.

The key with the pricing discussion is to figure out the highest price the market is willing to pay for the scope of services you are going to deliver.

This will leave you with a healthy margin to re-invest into your firm.

The pricing model, in my opinion, is less important.

That's all for this Sunday. See you next week.

Cheers,

Brandon

Hey 👋 - Brandon here.

Happy Saturday to 1,628 growth-minded accountants.

Here’s one growth tip for you and your firm.

Today’s issue takes less than 3 minutes to read.

I was on a podcast with J Staats recently (to be released soon) and the topic of pricing came up.

While we discussed, it occurred to me that the accounting industry is overly obsessed with the topic of pricing.

There’s hourly billing, fixed pricing, productized pricing, value pricing 1.0, value pricing 2.0, subscription pricing, etc.

But I think firms are hyper-focused on the wrong lever.

Think about it…

How much leverage does better pricing really give you?

If you are charging below market rates, a better pricing model is an easy lever to pull and can result in immediate increases in profit.

And a strong pricing model can compound at scale.

I’m not saying you shouldn’t look hard at your pricing model - all firms should.

But at some point in your pricing journey, you find equilibrium - the price the market is willing to pay for the scope you are willing to deliver at that price.

As a result, the leverage pricing gives you is effectively capped.

Once you find equilibrium, the marginal effort to improve pricing is no longer worth the cost (your time, energy, and resources).

Here’s an unpopular opinion but stick with me…

What if you didn’t change your pricing model at all and instead just doubled the prices you currently offered?

It would be easy from an admin/process perspective to roll out.

You wouldn’t have to spend months developing a new system, forecasting revenue and cash flow, crafting communication to teach your clients the “new way” of pricing.

Instead, you just roll out a price increase and see what it does to your retention numbers.

Simple.

And all that time and energy you saved?

Roll it into winning new clients and coaching your team - these are the highest impact hours you can spend as a leader of your firm.

How does this perspective change in regards to hourly billing?

It’s no secret I’m not a fan of hourly billing and time tracking. I think you can end up making decisions on data that is inherently false.

But…

At the end of the day, big firms have been billing hourly for decades and it works “fine” for them.

So if you are able to bill $500 per hour with a close-to-100 realization rate…

Why change models?

That's all for this Saturday. See you next week.

Cheers,

Brandon

Hey 👋 - Brandon here.

Happy Saturday to 1,625 growth-minded accountants.

Here’s one growth tip for you and your firm.

Today’s issue takes less than 3 minutes to read.

Here are three pieces of tech that help our firm communicate effectively with clients.

The number one complaint we hear from new prospective clients is their current accountants are terrible communicators.

• Slow to respond to emails.

• Not offering proactive advice.

• Get passed around the firm and no one understands their situation.

Implement these three pieces of tech and you will 10x your comms game.

Front App

Front App is amazing.

It sits on top of Gmail or Outlook - but once installed you only ever log into Front.

Front enables team collaboration on emails.

On individual emails, you can tag teammates, add comments / notes / documents, and have entire conversations without the client ever seeing it. Front also has an AI summary tool that summarizes all prior emails and comments in an email thread.

Analytics and rules allow you to set communication policies and make sure everyone across the firm adheres to them (like responding to clients in 48 hours).

This was a game changer for our firm.

Fathom Recorder

Fathom joins your Zoom as a participant and records the meeting.

After the meeting, Fathom provides you with a video recording and transcript. It also provides an AI summary of the meeting including action items.

A cool feature is clipping parts of the recording… maybe you don’t want to share the entire recording with a teammate but you want to share a 1 minute clip. You can easily clip inside of Fathom.

You can also create a highlight reel which is very effective for sales training (i.e. here are 30 clips of videos where we handled X objection).

Fathom enabled our firm to get up to speed quickly on client accounts when multiple people are servicing a client.

Send and Snooze

Though not a specific software, this feature is helpful in communication tools that you use every day.

Instead of letting emails or Slack messages stack up, and subsequently getting stressed about it, you can action it for “later” by snoozing it until a later date.

Or maybe you want to proactively follow-up on an email… you can “send and snooze” (a specific feature Front App has that I love) and the email will pop back up in your inbox at the desired date… even if you haven’t received a reply.

Snooze features help you stay on top of all communications you are responsible for.

And they will make you look like a comms wizard.

That's all for this Saturday. See you next week.

See you again next week.

Cheers,

Brandon