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Leading with Empathy: Building Accounting Teams That Thrive

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“Star performers aren’t immune from accountability,” says Lisa Gilreath, Managing Partner at Acuity. “Often they perform really high. But you’re going to see the other half of your team suffer in terms of their performance.”

This frank observation cuts to the heart of one of accounting’s toughest leadership challenges—dealing with talented but toxic employees. It’s just one of many practical insights shared during this episode of the Earmark Podcast, recorded live in Atlanta during the Advisory Amplified tour.

Host Blake Oliver sits down with Lisa Gilreath and Valerie Heckman, Accountant Community Manager at OnPay, to explore what empathetic leadership really looks like in accounting firms. Their conversation goes well beyond feel-good management theories to address the real challenges firms face when deadlines hit and pressure mounts.

Why Empathy Makes Business Sense

When Blake asks Lisa why firms shouldn’t burn out their people, her answer is refreshingly honest: “They’re really hard to replace right now.”

This practical reality drives home why empathetic leadership isn’t just nice to have—it’s essential for survival in today’s talent market. Lisa explains that with staffing shortages and people tired of 60-80 hour work weeks, firms have to build healthier workplaces to succeed.

But deadlines don’t disappear. Tax seasons still come. Clients still have needs. The key is finding ways to meet those demands without destroying your team in the process.

Building Breathing Room Into Your Firm

Traditional firms plan for 100% utilization, assuming everyone will be productive every single day. Lisa takes a different approach at Acuity, planning for 75-80% capacity instead.

“You can’t run the people to the absolute end and expect not to be in a crisis situation if somebody has an issue,” she explains. This isn’t about accepting lower productivity. It’s about building resilience into your workflows.

Personal crises illustrate why this matters. “Personal crises, tragedy or challenges never check your calendar to see if you have time to deal with them,” Lisa notes. Over 20 years at Acuity, she’s seen it all—employees who unexpectedly passed away, team members losing spouses, medical emergencies that required immediate attention.

These aren’t rare events. They’re the reality of managing people over time. The question is whether your firm can handle them without falling apart.

Lisa recommends having your “phone a friend on speed dial”—an HR expert or advisor who can provide objective guidance when emotions run high. Small firms especially struggle when close relationships make it hard to separate business needs from personal loyalty.

How Systems Create Space for Humanity

Many firms see standardization as rigid and impersonal. Lisa flips this completely, showing how standard processes actually enable empathy.

“If you do have a standard scope of services for your transactional stuff, you can plug and play people,” she explains. “Paying bills is paying bills. Doing payroll is doing payroll. It’s just a matter of where you get that source data.”

When every client engagement follows similar patterns, any qualified team member can step in during an emergency. This protects both the employee who needs support and the client who needs continuity.

Acuity spreads work throughout the year using recurring CAS engagements rather than accepting the traditional feast-or-famine cycle. “We’re focused on being proactive in those interactions all year long,” Lisa says. This creates predictable workflows that allow for coverage when life happens.

The approach helps team members too. Lisa tells her people: “Build our workflows and build our communication patterns so that if you need to leave unexpectedly, we’ve got your back. Help us help you.”

Reading the Warning Signs

Technology provides new ways to spot problems before they become crises. But Lisa doesn’t just watch productivity metrics. She pays attention to communication patterns.

“I’m noticing when people are no longer engaging in Slack conversations at the same pace that they once were,” she explains. “They’re not showing up in meetings and being as talkative as they once were.”

These changes signal that something’s wrong before performance completely deteriorates. A normally responsive team member whose emails slow down. A strong performer whose deliverables lag. These whispers often matter more than what people explicitly say.

Valerie adds another important metric: PTO usage. “If people aren’t using it, that’s a sign,” she notes. “Are they afraid to use it? Do they feel like if they use it, they’re not contributing enough to the team?”

Her own mother exemplifies this problem, going years without taking vacation because she worried about work piling up. “She would never, ever take a day that payroll needed to be run or the day after in case there were mistakes,” Valerie recalls.

The flip side matters too. Excessive PTO usage might signal disengagement or job hunting. These patterns hide in payroll data most firms already collect but rarely analyze for team health insights.

The Toxic High Performer Problem

Every firm faces this dilemma eventually: what do you do with someone who delivers great results but poisons team culture?

“Toxic workers will take you down,” Lisa states plainly. While star performers deliver individually, the rest of the team suffers. The math is clear—protecting one toxic high performer often means losing multiple good employees.

But Lisa doesn’t jump straight to termination. “I start from a place of curiosity,” she says. “How did we get here? What’s going on with them?”

Sometimes it’s a personal crisis. Sometimes they don’t understand expectations. Sometimes they genuinely don’t realize they need to collaborate. Starting with curiosity creates space for course correction.

The same principle applies to clients. When Blake asks about unreasonable client demands on her team, Lisa’s response is swift: “They’re probably not going to be a client for much longer.”

Acuity holds both team members and clients to their values. “This is how we intend to operate,” Lisa explains. They regularly review their client base to ensure alignment, not just to cull unprofitable work but to protect team wellbeing.

Navigating Industry Change With Compassion

The pace of change creates another empathy challenge. Many experienced accountants built careers on consistency and process. Now they’re asked to develop entirely new skills.

“We liked that about them for a really long time—that they followed the process and they didn’t question the process,” Lisa observes. “Now we’re asking them to talk to clients, and they’ve never had to talk to clients. They just had to fill out the form.”

With AI transforming the profession, these changes feel overwhelming to some team members. The empathetic response isn’t to abandon these people but to “bring those people along at their pace as well as the pace of the industry.”

This is where hiring for adaptability becomes crucial. Lisa looks to new graduates who see AI as normal, not threatening. “They’re unafraid. They will just try anything,” she says. These digital natives may help bridge the gap for more experienced team members struggling with change.

Taking Action This Week

Valerie offers practical advice for leaders wanting to be more empathetic: pause.

“Taking that time when something happens, when there’s an experience with a worker or team dynamic and saying, okay, we’re going to sleep on it,” she suggests. This fights the instinct to immediately jump in and solve problems.

Pausing allows you to ask better questions rather than make assumptions. It could be personal challenges, professional struggles, or something else entirely. Without that pause, you might treat symptoms instead of root causes.

Lisa adds another suggestion: engage your team in discussing a problem and just listen. “They will often lead with things that are coming from a place of fear or concern,” she notes. Understanding these underlying worries helps you address real issues, not just surface problems.

Your Role as an Advocate

Perhaps the most important mindset shift involves how leaders see their role. “I am their number one advocate,” Lisa says about her team. “My role is not just to drive them to production, it’s really to advocate for their needs.”

This means creating multiple channels for support, recognizing not everyone feels comfortable approaching their direct supervisor. “If I’m not the person that you can reach out to, I promise you, I have paths for you to go raise your concern,” Lisa tells her team.

The business case remains clear throughout the conversation. In today’s environment where good people are “really hard to replace,” protecting team culture isn’t charity—it’s strategy. Firms that recognize their people as “the engine” and act accordingly will outlast those clinging to the burnout model.

Listen to the full episode to hear more practical strategies for implementing these changes in your firm. Lisa and Valerie share specific tips on creating buddy systems for coverage, working with HR consultants, and building workflows that respect both deadlines and humanity. Their insights offer a realistic path forward for firms ready to lead with empathy while maintaining business success.

From Random Acts of Advisory to Strategic CFO Services

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“The darkest times for an industry are the times in which an accountant is most valuable.”

Chris Macksey, CEO of Prix Fixe Accounting, learned this firsthand during the COVID-19 pandemic. While restaurants nationwide struggled to survive, his specialized firm actually grew—not despite the crisis, but because of it. Restaurant owners desperately needed help navigating Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) loans, Economic Injury Disaster Loan (EIDL) applications, and industry-specific relief programs that their generalist accountants couldn’t handle.

In this live recording of the Earmark Podcast from Boston’s Advisory Amplified tour, host Blake Oliver explores how accounting firms can evolve beyond traditional services to become true strategic partners. Joined by Chris and James Erving, Head of Sales, Americas at Fathom, the conversation shows that delivering valuable advisory work doesn’t require advanced certifications or complex methodologies. It just takes a willingness to form opinions and use modern tools to turn financial data into business guidance.

What Advisory Really Means (And Why Accountants Struggle With It)

The accounting profession can’t even agree on what advisory means. James cuts through the confusion with a simple definition: “Being involved in the decision-making process rather than just the delivery of information.”

Chris takes it further. At Prix Fixe Accounting, he treats advisory as completely separate from Client Accounting Services (CAS), even assigning different team members to each. “It’s any of the work that you can’t scope really very easily,” he explains. Unlike predictable bookkeeping tasks, advisory demands flexibility and judgment.

The real challenge is having an opinion. “I have run into so many accountants who just won’t have an opinion about anything other than the accuracy of the financial statements,” Blake says bluntly.

Chris shows what having an opinion looks like in practice. When a restaurant’s food costs creep up from 23% to 28%, he doesn’t just report the variance. He digs deeper. “Is it that something’s changed in the kitchen, or is it just inflation that’s causing that number to gradually rise over time?” That shift from reporting what happened to explaining why it happened (and what might happen next) is where advisory begins.

But not every client needs this level of service, and knowing when to offer it makes all the difference.

Finding the Right Clients for Advisory Services

James identifies three clear signals that a business needs advisory support. First, rapid growth that outpaces the owner’s ability to manage finances. Second, reaching a size where DIY financial management becomes overwhelming but hiring a full-time CFO doesn’t make sense. Third, major events like acquisitions or exit planning.

This targeted approach beats what James calls “random acts of advisory”—the unpaid, unstructured advice many firms already provide without recognizing its value. By identifying specific triggers, firms can systematically deliver advisory services rather than hoping opportunities appear.

The conversation also reveals an important distinction between types of forecasting. James explains that small businesses often need short-term cash flow forecasts to predict cash positions in the next week or two. Larger or more stable businesses benefit from FP&A-style planning with three-to-12-month horizons and scenario modeling.

Understanding which clients need which services allows firms to focus their efforts where they’ll have the most impact, and where clients see enough value to pay premium fees.

Why Industry Specialization Accelerates Advisory Success

Chris’s restaurant-only focus demonstrates the power of specialization. His firm doesn’t just understand debits and credits; they understand why champagne and caviar became popular during the pandemic, how street construction affects revenue, and when consumers will pay for fine dining versus seeking value menus.

“Right now, consumers really feel a lot of pain in the pocketbook,” Chris explains. “The auto loan default rate is up. Credit card balances among consumers are at their highest levels. Consumer confidence is down.” This economic insight shapes his current advice: forget the $175 prix fixe menu and focus on feeding a family of four for under $75.

The specialization advantage goes beyond knowledge. Chris spent over a decade as a chef before becoming an accountant. “It’s a little bit of a cult industry,” he says of restaurants. “If you’re in, you’re in. If you’re out, you’re out.” This insider status builds trust that no amount of technical expertise could match.

His firm even mandates their approach. “The tech stack is set. There really aren’t any options. And there’s only one price point, it’s prix fixe. And you’re just going to have to enjoy the ride.”

This confidence comes from aggregated data across similar businesses. When restaurants see sales drop 20%, Chris can show clients it’s an industry-wide trend, not a personal failure. “When you can actually see that data and validate it for yourself, you know that no, it’s not you. It’s just the economy.”

The depth of specialization creates value generalist firms can’t match, but you don’t need a decade of industry experience to start delivering meaningful advisory services.

Making Advisory Practical: Tools, Metrics, and First Steps

“Once they actually do it for the first time, they realize, oh, I’m just looking at the last three years. I’m kind of rolling it forward, making an educated guess on what it’s going to be. And that’s really all it is.”

Chris uses this approach to explain forecasting for his team. Rather than treating it as an advanced skill only partners can handle, he involves staff accountants in creating annual budgets. They examine historical data, consider market conditions, gather client insights, like upcoming construction that might impact foot traffic, then make informed projections.

The key is matching the service to the business reality. Chris doesn’t do detailed cash flow forecasts for restaurants because “they have such tight cash flow that you’re off 5% and your cash flow projection’s shot.” Instead, he focuses on annual budgets with monthly check-ins.

Visual presentation transforms complex data into insights clients can actually use. “Our client base is largely visual people, and the financial literacy is usually pretty low,” Chris notes. He spent over a decade cooking before seeing a P&L statement, so he understands the challenge. Charts showing 12-month trends for metrics like food costs communicate far better than spreadsheets full of numbers.

Non-financial metrics add crucial context. For lodging clients, Chris tracks occupancy rates, average daily rates, and rooms sold. These are “numbers that you will not see surfaced in QuickBooks.” When revenue changes, these metrics reveal whether it’s a pricing issue or a volume problem.

James emphasizes the importance of using proper tools. “You don’t have to build an entire Excel model customized to a client to get started.” Modern platforms like Fathom automate much of the work, creating professional forecasts and visual dashboards without custom spreadsheets for each client.

For firms ready to begin, Chris and James offer practical advice. Start with forecasting, since it’s a natural extension of work you already do. Pick one or two industries where you have multiple clients and build expertise gradually. Ask more questions about your clients’ businesses. And remember, clients don’t expect you to know everything. They value accountants willing to connect financial data to business decisions.

Your Path from Compliance to Advisory

The shift from traditional accounting to advisory starts with three elements: forming opinions based on financial data, developing knowledge of specific industries or situations, and using modern tools to make forecasting efficient rather than overwhelming.

Chris’s experience during the pandemic proves the value of this transformation. While generalist firms struggled to help clients navigate crisis programs, his specialized knowledge made Prix Fixe Accounting indispensable.

The firms making this transition today position themselves for a future where their value only increases. Economic uncertainty creates more need for strategic guidance. Industry disruption demands advisors who understand both the numbers and their context. Business owners facing unprecedented challenges need professionals willing to venture beyond historical facts into forward-looking advice.

Listen to the full episode to hear additional insights on pricing advisory services, overcoming staff resistance, and managing the cultural shift within your firm. Chris and James’s conversation offers a practical roadmap for any firm ready to move beyond “random acts of advisory” to systematic, profitable guidance that transforms both your practice and your clients’ businesses.

Smart Accounting Firms Are Done Being Yes People

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Picture an  accounting firm that keeps partner salaries locked away like state secrets. Staff spend years wondering what partnership actually pays. Meanwhile, another firm down the street posts everyone’s salary on a public leaderboard. The path to partnership comes with clear milestones and transparent rewards.

This stark difference shows just one way “renegade” firms are shaking up the accounting profession.

In episode 104 of the Earmark Podcast, recorded live during the Advisory Amplified tour in Austin, host Blake Oliver digs into what it means to be a “renegade” in accounting. He’s joined by Madeline Reeves, founder and CEO of Fearless Foundry, and Wesley McDonald, go-to-market leader at Relay. Together, they explore how forward-thinking firms and tech companies challenge everything we thought we knew about running an accounting practice.

What Makes a Firm “Renegade”?

So what exactly is a renegade firm? Reeves has worked with many of them, and she has a clear answer.

“A renegade firm is leading their clients to somewhere new and is not settling for the ways things have always been done,” she explains. These firms challenge the status quo. They see tech companies as partners, not just vendors. And they push their clients and technology partners to do better.

These firms also stand out in unexpected ways. Take Lance CPA (now part of Revel CPA). When they signed new clients in the brewery and hospitality space, they didn’t just send a standard engagement letter. They delivered beautiful welcome kits complete with custom beer glasses and cool socks. It was their way of saying this isn’t your typical accounting relationship.

But being a renegade goes deeper than nice gestures. These firms also excel at saying no.

“A lot of firms are dedicated to being acts-of-service people,” Reeves notes. “They become a little bit of “yes people” or people pleasers. But the real renegade firms are like, ‘I do not do that service or I do not work with that industry.’”

They’re not trying to be everything to everyone. They focus on being exceptional at what they do best.

Taking the Lead with Clients

Traditional firms often let clients call the shots. They use whatever software the client prefers. They adapt to the client’s processes. They follow rather than lead.

Renegade firms flip this completely around.

Reeves puts it perfectly: “When I go to the dentist, I’m not telling the dentist, ‘No, don’t use that drill in my mouth.’ I don’t know how to do dentistry. So if you’re an accountant, it’s your job to lead your clients.”

These firms come to the table saying, “This is how we do this job well and effectively for you. If the goal is advisory services, this is how we get there better, faster.”

When you’re the professional, you set the standards for how the work gets done.

Breaking Open the Black Box of Compensation

One radical change happening in renegade firms involves money—specifically, who knows what about everyone’s pay.

“On the most successful sales teams I’ve been a part of, there’s a leaderboard that shows exactly how much people have attained in their salary in that quarter,” McDonald shares. “Which is a wild concept to think about in some industries.”

Oliver points out the obvious problem with traditional secrecy: “One of the biggest secrets is how much the partners make. But if we want everybody to want to be a partner, why don’t we tell them?”

It’s not just about knowing the numbers, though. Reeves emphasizes that firms need “not just pay transparency but pathway transparency.” People need to see the clear steps to advancement, not just the end goal.

McDonald, drawing from his tech experience, says promotions shouldn’t be about time in seat. “You’re ready to move to the next level as soon as you’re performing at that level.”

This represents a huge shift from the traditional model where you might wait five years for a promotion regardless of your performance.

Building Teams That Actually Want to Work Together

The old model pits high performers against each other. Remember those weekly emails showing who billed the most hours? Competition is the traditional way to drive performance.

Renegade firms take a different approach.

“If you have people on your team who think the only way up is their own performance, your whole team is going to be fighting against each other,” Reeves explains. She learned this building sales teams. When she tied part of compensation to team performance, not just individual metrics, “We saw performance double because people were suddenly willing to turn to the teammate next to them and show them what was working.”

This collaborative approach is essential for attracting younger professionals. As Reeves notes, “There are a lot of young people who are coming out of school, and there’s nothing exciting to them about working 90 hours a week during tax season. They’re like, ‘hard pass.’”

“You can tell people to do the work and you can pay people to do the work,” Reeves says. “But to actually get people to want to show up and fully do the work, it has to align around the things that genuinely motivate them as a human.”

When Banking Becomes a Partnership

Banking isn’t usually seen as innovative. But companies like Relay are changing that, starting with how they work with accountants.

Most people choose banks for passive reasons. “It’s because I know that bank exists or they’re down the street or my parents bank there,” McDonald observes.

But what if your bank actually worked for you and your accountant?

“Relay is purpose built for our accounting partners and their clients,” McDonald explains. Traditional banks gatekeep information. Relay surfaces it to accountants so they can actually help their clients.

The difference is stark. “I’m not even sure how I would give feedback to Chase or Bank of America or Wells Fargo,” Oliver admits. In contrast, McDonald says, “If a partner of ours has an idea and they bring it to us, we will act on that idea.”

This isn’t just talk. Being a champion for SMEs and their partners is one of Relay’s seven core values. They were the first banking platform to go to market specifically through accounting professionals.

Reeves shares her own frustration with traditional banking. She wanted to support a local community bank that shared her values. But they had no online banking. Getting statements required writing emails to a banker.

“If you’re really serving small business at the core of who you are,” she says, “making me have to email a banker to get a bank statement isn’t serving small business. That’s creating extra manual work for me or for my accountant.”

Learning from Renegade Mistakes

Being a renegade means trying new things. And that means making mistakes.

Reeves shares a particularly painful one. She built what she thought was an innovative compensation model, paying top performers a percentage of deals they closed. Then she discovered a senior employee was committing fraud, jacking up prices in their proposal system to increase her cut.

Reeves recalls discovering the fraud just before a major conference and having to lock down all her banking immediately. The experience taught her to “trust but verify.” You need systems to ensure people act the right way, even those you trust.

McDonald shares his own revelation about breaking from the traditional path. He started his career as a fixed income broker. But as he earned promotions, he looked around and realized, “everyone there had been doing it for 30 years. I thought, ‘Can I do this for 25 more years?’”

He chose the non-linear path instead, moving between sales, consulting, and building teams. “I had stopped my learning journey,” he reflects. “I want to be a lifelong learner.”

Oliver’s “mistake” was majoring in music at the most expensive university in the country. But the experience taught him how to teach himself anything—a skill that proved invaluable in accounting. “If you can sit in a practice room for six hours a day and learn how to play a concerto, that’s all just breaking problems down into literally measure by measure, note by note.”

The Path Forward

The renegade firms discussed in this episode aren’t making small tweaks to the traditional model. They’re rebuilding it from scratch.

They’re becoming strategic leaders who guide rather than follow clients, creating transparent cultures where collaboration beats competition, and embracing technology companies as true partners rather than necessary evils.

With younger professionals rejecting traditional firm culture and clients demanding strategic guidance over compliance work, the old model is dying. The renegade approach offers a sustainable alternative that actually addresses why people leave accounting.

These innovations are happening right now at thriving firms. From brewery-themed welcome kits to banking platforms built for accountant collaboration, these changes prove accounting firms can create experiences that rival any modern service business.

Want to hear the complete conversation? Listen to the full episode. You’ll get the full story of how Reeves uncovered fraud through her proposal system, Olivers’s journey from professional musician to accounting innovator, and detailed strategies for implementing renegade principles in your own firm.

From Burned Out to Built Up: How Workflow Systems Transform Average Accountants into A-Players

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“This is the first year where we didn’t have any crazy day during tax season,” a firm owner told Mary Delaney after 25 years in practice. The secret? They had finally mastered workflow automation, transforming their firm from a chaotic fire-fighting operation into a well-oiled machine where even tax season runs smoothly.

In this episode of the Earmark Podcast, recorded live at the Advisory Amplified conference in Chicago, host Blake Oliver sits down with two workflow transformation experts: Mary Delaney, CEO of Karbon, and Kenji Kuramoto, co-founder of Acuity and a pioneer in remote operations and client accounting services.

The trio discussed how accounting firms can break free from the exhausting cycle of individual heroics and constant firefighting. Forward-thinking practitioners realize documented workflows are the foundation for scaling beyond founder dependence and actually delivering the advisory services clients need.

From Chaos to Control: The Science of Accounting

The accounting profession has long operated as a craft, where success depended on individual practitioners juggling multiple responsibilities. But as Delaney explains, the real revolution comes from “turning it into a science” through systematic documentation and automation.

Oliver knows the old way’s exhausting reality firsthand. “In order to be an A player, you had to be really good at putting out fires, juggling a bunch of things,” he reflects. “You had to be so organized yourself. There was no support system underneath you.” He admits candidly, “I wasn’t an A player. That’s the thing. That’s why I didn’t last.”

Workflows change this equation. Instead of requiring heroic individual effort, firms create systems that support everyone on the team. Delaney’s approach starts with observation, or what she calls “time studies.”

“I’ll take a team of two or three people to our customer’s location and do an on-site for a day, literally sitting and watching our customers work,” she explains. “I’ll watch three people do their tax work for 20 minutes, or three people do advisory. You’ll see they pull up a report. You’ll see they write something down. Why are you writing that down? What are you doing with that?”

These observations reveal areas of waste, automation possibilities, training gaps, and process inconsistencies that might otherwise stay hidden.

From Struggling CFO to Workflow Champion

Kuramoto’s experience demonstrates how workflow can transform careers. Coming from Big Four audit, he founded Acuity but admits he wasn’t naturally gifted at the work. “I was a moderately technical CFO and accountant,” he says with characteristic humor. “Luckily, I have a little bit of a quirky personality and I’m pretty outgoing, so clients liked me. But I was not the most technical.”

His firm’s workflow evolution started with simply moving from paper to Excel spreadsheets. They progressed to digital task management tools, with Kuramoto initially dreaming that someday systems might automatically check off completed tasks.

“I thought for a long time that the epitome of what an ideal workflow would look like would be when you completed some task, somehow the tool just knew it and it checked it off,” he recalls. Today’s reality exceeds even that vision. “Now the workflow tool is actually doing the work. I don’t think I ever even imagined it taking that leap forward.”

Kuramoto found that workflow helped him overcome his limitations. When senior CFOs in his firm documented their processes, he learned from them quickly. “Can I please take a look at your process for how you run a board meeting or raise capital, or how you build a proforma model?” he would ask. “I could learn so much quicker by just looking at a playbook for how they got there.”

This knowledge-sharing transformed Acuity’s recruiting. They began targeting controllers and VPs of finance who aspired to become CFOs. 

Making Workflow Empowering, Not Controlling

The biggest obstacle to workflow implementation isn’t technology; it’s people. Senior professionals, especially in advisory roles, often resist standardization. Kuramoto learned this firsthand when implementing workflows with senior CFOs at Acuity.

“They are sometimes the least receptive to change,” Kuramoto admits. Despite being the founder, when he suggested creating standardized processes, the reception was cool. “To them, initially, it felt like more of an accountability tool. Like I was telling them how to work versus letting them feel like they had ownership of the work.”

Delaney’s solution centers on showing the “what’s in it for me” factor. “If we map it out, we can automate some of it. And the part we automate is the energy-draining low value work,” she explains. “All of a sudden they get to do more of what they love.”

The transformation happens when workflow becomes a knowledge-sharing tool rather than a constraint. With better visibility into how people work, firms can identify real problems. “We could identify where someone was a B or C player, but it started understanding why,” Kuramoto explains. “Were we missing out on training? Were we overwhelming their schedule? Were they stuck on tough clients?”

Delaney emphasizes that workflow reveals patterns. “You can see some people are rock stars, but instead of saying they’re just incredible, you start to study what they do and you can train that to others. All of a sudden you’re lifting your C players to be in your B to A players.”

The 30-Day Transformation Plan

Delaney offers a rapid transformation plan for firms drowning in chaos. If dropped into a small firm as CEO with 30 days to free up capacity, here’s what she’d do:

First, “I would make sure I understood what their job is, how we measure performance, and how they will be compensated and recognized.” This clarity alone can unlock 20-30% more capacity because “if people understand clearly their job and expectations and they have something they’re chasing, you will get 20, 30% more out of them.”

Second, “Look at our customers and see if there’s any we should let go or just increase the price.”

Third, conduct time studies. “Sitting there and watching people work, you can see all the areas of waste. What can we automate? You also see where there are training gaps.”

The results can be dramatic. Remember that firm with their first stress-free tax season in 25 years? “They have the process down, they have capacity planning down, they work ahead,” Delaney explains. “They have all the insights to manage every minute wisely. So it’s not putting out fires.”

Workflow as the Foundation for Growth

This workflow discipline is critical during mergers and acquisitions. Kuramoto’s first acquisition taught him this lesson painfully. “The first firm we acquired was kind of a disaster,” he admits. “We had incredibly dissimilar ways of working. Even though on paper we delivered some of the same services, the way we did it was so different.”

They waited too long to integrate workflows. “We didn’t want to disrupt things, so we waited a long time. It was an awful transaction for us, largely because we didn’t get workflow on the same page.”

This experience changed how Acuity approached their eventual merger with 14 firms. “When we went through due diligence, they looked heavily at our workflow. What were we doing? How are we putting it together? Most acquisitions don’t fail because the deal isn’t good. It’s because the integration doesn’t work.”

For firms ready to transform, Delaney emphasizes investing in dedicated operations resources. “The one thing they never regretted was hiring a non-billable person to start really moving on quality and scaling and operations,” she notes, recommending this when firms reach 10-20 people. “The gift you give yourself is having someone who spends 100% of their time looking at how to make the firm better, versus how to bill dollars today.”

The AI-Powered Future

Looking ahead, AI promises to accelerate this workflow revolution. The Karbon-Aider acquisition, announced that very morning, exemplifies this vision. “Aider is all about automating month end and getting you to insights that you can immediately share back with your customers,” Delaney explains.

But she cautions that AI requires careful implementation. “The challenge with AI is it’s highly imperfect. We’re building agents to do the work, but you have to show all the agent’s work, and give it a step for a human to check it and sign off. Because in accounting, you have to be perfect.”

The future Kuramoto envisioned is becoming reality in ways he never imagined. What started as digitized checklists has evolved into tools that actually perform the work itself.

Your Firm’s Revolution Starts Now

The conversation between Oliver, Delaney, and Kuramoto at Advisory Amplified shows the firms thriving today aren’t necessarily those with the most talented individuals. They’re the ones who’ve systematically documented and optimized how work gets done.

This transformation is about democratizing expertise across teams, creating sustainable careers that don’t require heroic effort, and delivering consistent advisory services that clients need. The stakes keep rising as AI tools mature. Firms with strong workflow foundations will leverage these technologies effectively while others risk being left behind.

The good news? You don’t need years to see results. Delaney’s 30-day plan shows that simple steps can unlock 20-30% more capacity almost immediately. And unlike the old model where success required exceptional individual talent, the workflow revolution means firms can build operations that elevate everyone.

Want to learn more about transforming your firm from chaos to capacity? Listen to the full conversation with Delaney and Kuramoto on the Earmark Podcast, where they share additional insights, implementation strategies, and discuss how AI is reshaping accounting practice. The revolution isn’t coming; it’s already here.

Stop Pricing the Deliverable and Start Pricing the Relationship

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Marie Greene once spent more than 20 hours on a client she was charging just $12. But she only realized how little she was charging for her time when her firm started tracking time. While extreme, Greene’s story highlights a problem that plagues accounting firms everywhere: chronic underpricing that leaves practitioners exhausted and struggling to grow.

In this episode of the Earmark Podcast, recorded live in Los Angeles during the Advisory Amplified tour, host Blake Oliver explores the pricing puzzle with Greene, a CPA and founder and CEO of Connected Accounting, and Ryan Embree, Director of Partnerships at Ignition. Together, they tackle one of the profession’s toughest challenges: how to charge what you’re worth without losing clients.

The Time-Tracking Wake-Up Call

Greene’s journey to better pricing started with tears of frustration. “I literally cried, but I didn’t know it was so bad. My pricing was so bad until we started tracking time,” she admits. Even though Connected Accounting had always used fixed fees instead of hourly billing, they had no real grasp on whether their pricing made sense.

The problem got worse when Greene hired her first team member. She’d been pricing based on how quickly she could complete tasks, not realizing she was “super mega efficient” compared to most people. “When it takes someone a normal amount of time, I was destroying my budgets and I couldn’t delegate fast enough. And then I was just buried in work,” she explains.

This pattern isn’t unique to Greene’s firm. Embree sees it repeated across hundreds of firms he works with at Ignition. The problem often hides in compliance services, where firms fall into the trap of charging “the same as last year.”

“If you quoted someone X amount of dollars seven years ago and they’re still paying that fee, that is the biggest opportunity,” Embree points out. Many firms hesitated to raise prices during COVID when clients were struggling. But as Embree notes, “price increases are normal. They’re a part of business.”

Eventually, Greene’s managers staged an intervention. They took over pricing and told her to stop selling certain services at unsustainable rates. Six years later, the firm has a much more realistic pricing model. But it all started with that uncomfortable first step of tracking where time actually goes.

Pricing the Whole Relationship, Not Just the Deliverable

The real breakthrough came when Greene realized she was charging two clients the same amount for identical services, but one required far more time and attention than the other.

“You can’t just price the deliverable, which is a P&L at the end of each month,” Greene discovered. “You have to also price the number of touchpoints. You have to price how often they have ad hoc random questions that are not part of the scope.”

Connected Accounting now looks at multiple factors when setting prices:

  • Number of bank accounts (17 credit cards vs. one checking account makes a difference)
  • Transaction volume (one account with 1,000 transactions can be more work than multiple quiet accounts)
  • Number of bills and invoices processed monthly
  • Meeting frequency (weekly touchpoints vs. monthly check-ins)
  • Communication style and expectations

This approach also creates natural price escalators. “We’ve always been very clear up front that we grow with you,” Greene explains. “As you add employees, as you add bank accounts, as your transaction volume increases, our fees increase.”

Embree adds that this reframing helps clients understand price changes. “They know they’re growing. They know they’ve exceeded scope. So they know they’re just kind of leveling up to a new level of service.”

Beyond pricing existing services correctly, firms often miss revenue by not telling clients about everything they offer. Greene discovered this after creating a comprehensive list of which clients used which services. “I was like, oh, we only have six accrual clients, or we only have three that use X.”

This led to casual conversations during client meetings. “We’d say, hey, by the way, we notice you do this. Who does your payroll?” Greene recalls. “We’re not saying we sell payroll and you should buy it, but it was just planting a seed.” Often, clients would respond enthusiastically, not even knowing Connected Accounting offered that service.

Having the Conversation: A Live Repricing Role-Play

During the discussion, Greene demonstrated her approach to repricing conversations in a role-play with Embree acting as the client. She showed how her strategy turns a potentially awkward discussion into a collaborative planning session.

Greene starts with enthusiasm, not numbers: “Hey, Ryan, how excited are you about next year? What are you looking forward to doing with the business?”

When Embree shares his growth plans, she follows with genuine concern: “And with the growth, what are some of the things that keep you up at night?”

Only after understanding his challenges does she pivot to solutions: “Would you be interested if we can find a way to help you lower some of your costs by not having to hire one more admin, and we can take on some of the grunt work?”

The conversation naturally flows into discussing additional services like benefits renewal and talent retention strategies—services Embree’s character didn’t even know Connected Accounting offered.

After these discovery conversations, Greene presents three-tier proposals. “I was no longer trying to force a single price. I showed three and then they could choose. And that was the relief,” she explains. This approach gives clients control while removing the pressure of “selling” a single option.

Despite common fears, clients rarely leave over price increases. Embree observes, “A lot of firms that want to cut clients think raising fees is the way to go. And the short answer is no, they actually still stick around.”

In fact, the worst clients often prove surprisingly price-insensitive. “Whatever the fee is, you can’t actually price them out,” Embree notes.

Technology makes these conversations easier. Connected Accounting now automates annual increases using opt-out language in engagement letters. “Every year in December, we send a notice saying, hey, you have 30 days to cancel your services. But just so you know, effective January 1, all pricing across the firm is going up 3%,” Greene explains.

This mirrors how services like Amazon Prime handle increases: making them expected rather than exceptional. As Oliver points out, “That fee just goes up every year. And we get the email and we look at it and we accept it.”

Your Pricing Transformation Starts Now

Greene’s journey from charging $12 for 20-plus hours of work to running a profitable firm with systematic pricing shows that transformation is possible, even if it takes time. The lessons are: track your time to understand true costs, price the entire client relationship rather than just deliverables, and reframe price discussions around growth and value.

The fear of losing clients to price increases is largely unfounded. When one client left Connected Accounting for a competitor offering a deal, they returned after 12 months and started paying the competitor’s higher rate, which Greene then maintained. “The market often values accounting expertise far more than practitioners themselves realize,” she discovered.

Greene admits she still gets nervous before pricing calls. But she’s learned that authenticity matters more than perfection. “They see how excited I get. They know I’m a huge nerd, I love technology, I love accounting,” she says. “Eventually, they’re like, okay, cool. She sounds like fun to work with.”

Embree emphasizes that positioning yourself as an expert dramatically increases what clients will pay. “People’s willingness to pay is infinite for that piece of mind,” he notes. “To know that you have an expert in your corner that has done this with other clients and knows everything about you and your business.”

The profession’s chronic underpricing doesn’t just hurt firm owners; it limits the entire industry’s ability to innovate and serve clients well. When accounting professionals charge appropriately, they can invest in better tools, training, and talent.

Ready to stop leaving money on the table? Start by tracking where your time really goes. Then look at your client list and identify who’s grown beyond their current service tier. Finally, practice having value-focused conversations that celebrate client success rather than apologizing for price increases.

The full episode includes the complete repricing role-play, detailed pricing metrics, and specific strategies you can implement this week. Because as Greene’s story proves, the biggest barrier to profitable pricing isn’t your clients’ willingness to pay. It’s your own reluctance to ask.