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Archives for November 2026

The real limits on your accounting firm have nothing to do with client count

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In 2020, Marilyn Melendez’s father got sick. Her mother, whom Marilyn calls “the end all and be all for the firm,” stepped away to care for him. Within one month, four of the firm’s 20 employees left and took a substantial book of business with them.

On a recent episode of Who’s Really the BOSS?, Rachel and Marcus Dillon talk with Marilyn, an enrolled agent and president of Dalia Tax & Business Advisors, a bilingual firm in West Palm Beach, Florida. The 43-year-old firm has seven employees and brings in about $1.4 million. Her mother retired this year. Marilyn’s story shows a firm’s real limits are time, energy and culture, not client count. For her, respecting those limits led to a smaller firm that earns about the same money.

A crisis that exposed a firm full of silos

Every operations question and client issue went to Marilyn’s mother. When she stepped away, “the firm really suffered.” The lesson was, “We can’t have a firm full of silos. We needed to integrate,” Marilyn says.

Her mother was old school and believed the customer is always right. “You don’t say no to business. It’s always more, more, more.” Marilyn wanted the opposite. “You need to protect your employees. Make sure a client is the right fit and grow based on the amount of effort you want to put in.”

She recommends founders “look at succession planning way earlier than you think you need it.” Her own transition brought dips, including lost clients and employee turnover. Rachel suggested handing off responsibilities while the founder is still around as a safety net, so the successor can “try and potentially fail or succeed” before the founder exits.

Fewer clients, same revenue

“I found that less is more,” Marilyn said. “My firm is smaller in size and has fewer clients, and we’re making about the same amount of money.” She can now “do more for those clients and get in deeper with them.”

Her sweet spot is businesses with $1 million to $3 million in gross revenue and usually around 25 or fewer employees. Companies with too many management layers don’t fit. Her niche is a type of person, not an industry. She prefers second-generation owners like herself, women entrepreneurs, and Spanish speakers learning to do business in the U.S. Rachel noted that people are often best qualified to help clients who are “where they were at one time.”

Marilyn says financial statements are “a byproduct,” not the goal. She sits down with each client and asks, “What’s your why?” Rachel pointed out that advisory doesn’t require having every answer. Often clients reach their own answers by talking a problem through out loud.

The takeaways are:

  • Define your ideal client by shared experience, not only by industry
  • Treat the P&L and balance sheet as tools that support the client’s real goals
  • In advisory meetings, ask questions and listen more than you prescribe

Not every dollar costs the same

When Marilyn reviews proposals and pricing, she reminds herself that “not every dollar costs the same.” She considers emotional investment, not just profit margin.

She described certain clients, the “Wolf of Wall Street” type, who leave her drained after every interaction. “They’re not yelling at me, but it feels like they’re yelling at me.” Even if they pay above her rate, it doesn’t matter. “That dollar costs me my peace.”

For clients who don’t act on her advice, her limit is two or maybe three years of “same as last year.” Then she refers them to someone else. There’s also the caller-ID face. “Everybody who owns a firm knows the face.” You reset your voice, get through the call, then have to “off-gas” the interaction afterward.

Marcus admitted owners hang on too long “because you’re worried about the revenue.” But “revenue is fleeting,” he said. Time and the people you spend it with matter more. Marilyn also recommends letting go gracefully of prospects who can’t fit within your numbers, because they may come back when they can afford you. Three years later, “that’s a blink of an eye.”

Price without taking it personally, and protect the team

Marilyn asked Marcus a pointed question. When you price a proposal, is “a rejection of that proposal a rejection of you?” Marcus admitted he does see it as a personal rejection.

So he removed himself from the sales process. Rachel now does much of that work, and Lezlie Reeves, DBA’s Director of Accounting & Advisory, brings a more analytical eye to pricing. As Marcus described Lezlie’s view, if clients “opt out, that’s great. We’ll have more capacity to serve more clients.” That beats agonizing over whether a $5 increase will spark a negative Google review. Rachel doesn’t lose sleep over a no. It just means something didn’t align.

Marcus tied pricing to culture. “Every time we say yes, that shifts culture.” Each new client changes what a team member’s day looks like. Marilyn guards that with a “no jerk policy.” Clients must speak to her staff in the same tone they use with her. Enforcing it shows employees she’s on their side and the client isn’t always right.

Less is the gold

“Doing more with less. If anybody takes anything away from this, that is the gold,” Marcus said, summing the conversation up. Marilyn put the stakes plainly. “You can always make more money, but you can’t make more time.”

  • Audit clients for energy cost, not just fee
  • Separate pricing from personal identity
  • Start succession planning early

Listen to the full episode to hear about Marilyn’s team retreat to the Dominican Republic and her unusual sabbatical.

Rachel and Marcus Dillon, CPA, own a national, remote client accounting and advisory services firm, Dillon Business Advisors, with a team of 28 professionals. Their latest organization, Collective by DBA, supports and guides accounting firm owners and leaders with Streamlined OS, an operating system for accounting firms, mastermind groups, and one-on-one advisory.

What is every ‘yes’ on your calendar really costing you?

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For years, Marit Burmood, CPA, EA, worked toward a seat on the advisory board for a tax group she taught. Only the most knowledgeable people sat on it. When the invitation finally came, “I knew in my heart this might not be the best move,” Marit says. She said ‘yes’ anyway. A couple of months in, she wrote her resignation letter.

On Episode 39 of She Counts, host Nancy McClelland and Marit dig into the irony of explaining opportunity cost to clients but rarely running the calculation for ourselves. They argue that evaluating opportunities based on emotion, one at a time, without counting the related sacrifices is costing women more than we realize.

Why we say yes before doing the math

Nancy calls out the feelings behind these decisions: Status matters, and so does respect. Marit agrees, with one condition: “The emotion can sit in the back seat or the passenger seat, but they can’t drive.”

The trap cuts both ways. One side is the fear that the chance won’t come again. The other is the fear that “I’m not good enough for it yet,” which keeps us from trying. Nancy adds that women “have historically had to prove their competence and credibility,” so we say ‘yes’ to show we can be counted on.

Once we commit, walking away gets harder. “Accountants aren’t quitters,” Marit says. She resigned but felt terrible about letting down the man who invited her, a longtime mentor. She learned, “Everything we say ‘yes’ to has a cost, even if it doesn’t have monetary value.”

Your calendar is a portfolio, and time is the asset you can’t rebuild

Nancy wonders if the real problem is judging one decision at-a-time. Marit offers an investing analogy. You assess individual stocks, but you also manage the whole portfolio and sometimes cut the losers.

“You can literally lose every dollar in your bank account” and rebuild, Marit says, but you can’t get time back. At 43, she knows half her life is already gone. Stack up enough yeses, Nancy warns, and we end up with “a portfolio we didn’t intend to build.”

Marit lived it. Speaking at post-tax-season conferences meant missing her kids’ last day of school three years in a row. No pickup, no blasting “School’s Out for the Summer,” and no ice cream. This year, an unpaid conference landed on that date, and she turned it down. “It hurts to say no,” she admits.

Count the full cost, not just the event day

Jennifer Dymond often sends Nancy recovery memes on social media because Nancy rarely makes time to clear email, catch up on sleep, do laundry and rebuild energy.

Marit used to rush home to her twin 8-year-olds and her 10-year-old and walk straight into stories, squabbles and owies, with zero recovery. Last time, she booked a flight that landed after the kids were asleep, then took an Uber home. “That night of recovery made a world of difference.”

For Nancy, Advisory Amplified looked like “six days over three weeks.” Counting travel, each of the six cities took three days. And booking all the travel and lodging took two-and-a-half days.

So what’s the solution? First, know where your time goes. Mariette Martinez color-codes her Google Calendar and can filter it to see how much time she spent with family. Marit tried it and showed her kids how much family time she logged that month when they complained she was “always working”. For a lighter option, try Sharrin Fuller’s time audit: guess your hours first, then track them. She reasons, “the bigger the gap, the more careful you have to be moving forward.”

But watch the blank spots. Nancy lost 45 minutes to an accidental Dolly Parton rabbit hole and another 45 to a “quick question” call with David Leary. Both were enjoyable, but neither was planned.

The four-step opportunity cost audit

You can’t judge the cost until you know what you’re building, so take time to define and rank your personal and professional goals. Then:

  • Step 1: List your commitments. Your calendar will show you quickly what you said ‘yes’ to.
  • Step 2: Run the numbers. Weigh the returns, including financial, career, relationships, learning and energy. Then add prep, travel, admin, follow-up and recovery to the cost.
  • Step 3: Ask the uncomfortable question. “Would I choose this again?” Marit found the joy of missing out (JOMO) by filling the time she freed with higher-ranked priorities like froyo with her kids and, that same week, a two-to-three-hour in-person recording of the Universal Accounting podcast.
  • Step 4: Decide for each commitment. Keep it, change it, delegate it, renegotiate it, finish it or let it go.

Money belongs in the ranking. “As women, it’s okay to say we want to do things for money,” Marit says. She once ranked money so low it caused stress elsewhere. Nancy asks, “What does enough look like for you?” The point, she says, is to stop letting your calendar “have a direct transfer to your bank account of time, energy and money.”

Choose the price you’re willing to pay

“Maybe ambition isn’t the problem after all,” Nancy says, reframing the conversation. What matters is whether you’re consciously choosing the price you pay. Marit isn’t asking anyone to stop being ambitious… only to be intentional about it. If you choose to keep a passion project that pays nothing, she says, “I better not complain” about its cost.

They close with a quote from Annie Dillard: “How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.”

Listen to the full episode, then answer this question on the She Counts LinkedIn page: Which commitment in your “portfolio” would you choose differently?