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Blake Oliver

The Real Cost of Being Everyone’s Favorite Boss

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Madeline Reeves thought she’d hit rock bottom when she found herself face-down in a parking lot. She was wrong. That was before her million-dollar agency lost half its revenue in 30 days while she scrambled to save a monthly payroll costing anywhere from $88,000 to $102,000.

Meanwhile, Lynnette Oss Connell had engineered what she calls “a life of overfunctioning”—using technology and systems to layer on more and more responsibility instead of freeing up her time. When Oss Connell told her assistant she planned to add overnight Thursday shifts to handle overflow work, she expected pushback. Instead, her assistant asked how she could support the plan. That’s when Oss Connell realized, “Nobody’s coming to rescue me.”

In this episode of the Earmark Podcast, recorded at the Advisory Amplified Tour in Seattle, host Blake Oliver sits down with these two leaders who rebuilt their careers after burnout. Reeves, founder of Fearless Foundry and host of the Finding Fearless podcast, and Oss Connell, a CPA turned burnout prevention coach and founder of Burnout Bestie, share raw stories about what happens when professional success comes at the cost of personal destruction.

The Accounting Burnout Trap

The accounting profession doesn’t just attract service-oriented people. It rewards behaviors that lead to burnout. During one marketing event Reeves attended, personality testing matched attendees with unique drinks based on their personality types. The result? Out of 100 accountants, 97 received the same drink.

“This profession attracts a certain type of person,” Reeves observed. “For most accountants, their primary love language is acts of service. You live to serve. And that’s why I love accounting professionals.”

But that service mentality became destructive during the pandemic. Reeves led two firm communities during that period—one for female firm founders and another for advisory firms. For two years, she held space for leaders to “just cry privately together on Zoom because they were holding it together for their families and their staff.”

These professionals delayed their own compensation to maintain cash flow. They were filing PPP loans, figuring out EIDL requirements, and watching clients’ businesses collapse, all while absorbing the emotional and financial aftershocks.

“We went back to conferences and nobody was talking about what happened,” Reeves noted. “Doing that work for your clients was incredible, but it has a real impact on people.”

When Rock Bottom Has a Basement

Both Reeves and Oss Connell discovered that what feels like rock bottom often isn’t. “We all think we know what the burnout bottom feels like,” Reeves explained. “And then you’re like, oh wait, it can go even deeper.”

For Oss Connell, 15 years of building and rebuilding her CAS practice meant multiple burnout cycles. She had all the right support systems: a nanny, her mother as backup for her children, workflow software, and backup systems for clients.

“I had all the things you’re supposed to have,” she reflected. “But I didn’t put solutions in place that freed me up. I put solutions in place so that I could just layer more on.”

Her rainbow-blocked calendar, once a source of pride, actually represented something darker. “I was where the buck stopped and started, both at work and at home,” she explained. Even though work sometimes felt like a respite from personal stress, she wasn’t setting any real boundaries.

Reeves’s journey from that parking lot to losing half her revenue revealed similar patterns. As a service-oriented leader who loved building teams and culture, she initially got energy from mentoring her growing team. But soon she was coaching 12 employees while simultaneously mentoring all their clients, with two young children at home, a new marriage, and a recent move during the pandemic.

When four major clients, each worth over $100,000, canceled within 30 days through no fault of her team’s work, she scrambled to save everyone. She closed a $100,000 funding round in 30 days to save payroll. “That money was gone within a couple of months,” she admitted. “I was in the red for anyone who’s doing that math.”

The Three Warning Signs You Can’t Ignore

According to Oss Connell, burnout shows up in three distinct ways that serve as critical warnings.

First is emotional exhaustion. This can manifest in various ways, as seen with accountants, teachers, and healthcare workers during the pandemic.

Second is cynicism. It’s “that feeling of being jaded, the feeling that something you love doing, you now no longer find joy in. That is a big red flag,” Oss Connell says.

Third is a lack of accomplishment. You feel like “you’re on a hamster wheel, and no matter what you’re doing, you’re not getting ahead,” Oss Connell explains.

“Burnout isn’t the end of something,” she emphasizes. “It’s an indicator that you need to adjust something to be your most successful self.”

But recognizing these symptoms intellectually is different from acknowledging them emotionally. Both Reeves and Oss Connell waited for someone else to give them permission to stop.

“I was very conditioned, as I think most women are, to be a people pleaser,” Reeves admitted. She lived off the feedback of being told she did a good job, taking on clients from very large accounting firms despite values misalignment, because they represented good money and validation.

Oss Connell’s breaking point came when nobody challenged her plan to work overnight. “I desperately wanted somebody to intervene and say, ‘Hey, you’re doing too much.’ And nobody did.”

Rebuilding on Your Own Terms

Recovery required dismantling old structures and rebuilding with new boundaries. For Reeves, the first step was radical. “I stopped trying to be so likable.”

She audited every client in the firm’s history, dividing them into two categories: “love them or hate them.” Using this data, she analyzed patterns across services, timelines, and engagement types. This informed a complete overhaul of their service offerings.

“We redid our brand strategy, which clarified our ideal client. And that quickly kicked some people off the menu,” she explained. They productized all services, implemented annual repricing, and built documented processes so no single person was “the glue.”

“If I went on vacation for a week or two, people need to know how to onboard clients,” Reeves said. “If I’m the only person who can tell you how to do those things, that’s not very scalable.”

The firm now operates by a simple mantra: “Life is too short to work with people and projects you hate, so don’t do it.”

For Oss Connell, the solution involved honest conversations with her husband about their different visions for their co-owned firm. He wanted to grow and scale; she wanted to keep it lifestyle-oriented and small. They ultimately decided to sell the firm so neither had to compromise their vision.

These changes weren’t overnight. “It took us well over a year or two,” Reeves said, “but we stacked them one on top of the other and they unlocked.”

Community as Life Support

Strategic changes created the framework, but emotional support proved equally critical. Reeves and Oss Connell emphasize that isolation accelerates burnout.

“We need to have smaller spaces where we can talk candidly about what we’re going through,” Reeves said. This means being vulnerable—not in a performative way, but simply admitting “this is a part that I’m still working on” or “this part I haven’t figured out yet.”

The challenge is that many professional communities create pressure to present a polished image. “We’re all like A-plus students around here,” Reeves observed. “That pressure to show up and just show your shiny, polished ‘I have it figured out’ self is really high.”

But community requires effort to find. “Nobody’s going to come and be like, join our community, you really need this,” Reeves emphasized. “A lot of people who are like, ‘Well, I’m all alone.’ And I’m like, but are you seeking it?”

For Oss Connell, losing her entire support system during divorce while building her firm was devastating. “When I was struggling with my personal life and my firm, I had no support system, and I did not go out and search for it. That is probably the number one problem when I look back.”

Being in a community helps clarify identity. “I can see other people have these skills, and then I begin to see who I am better because I see who you are,” Oss Connell explained.

This extends to leadership transparency. Reeves now openly expresses stress to her team, clarifying, “This is not about you, this is just me getting it out of my body.” She’s learned to show anger or disappointment directly rather than always being the “nice boss.”

Oliver confirmed this approach works. “I talk to my employees when I feel stressed out, and it’s okay. You don’t have to be the perfect boss who has it all figured out. They really appreciate it when I’m honest.”

Breaking the Cycle for Good

The path forward requires accepting that sustainable success doesn’t require self-destruction. As Oss Connell frames it, burnout is an indication that you need to change something,” and that adjustment is ongoing. “As life moves on, your firm evolves. Society evolves. Your clients evolve. You’re going to need to continually recalibrate.”

The accounting profession faces a choice: continue celebrating martyrdom or recognize that sustainable success requires energized, not exhausted, practitioners. The pandemic showed us the incredible resilience of accounting professionals and the devastating personal cost of that resilience.

“When we set good examples of reducing stress for the organization, we equip our employees to be more sustainable as well,” Oss Connell noted. It’s about creating firms where everyone can thrive.

Listen to this episode to hear the full stories from Reeves and Oss Connell. Whether you’re experiencing warning signs or rebuilding from your own rock bottom, the conversation provides validation that you’re not alone and strategies for creating a practice that doesn’t require your destruction to achieve success.

Why Most Accounting AI Will Hit an Auditability Wall

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Every day, another AI agent promises to revolutionize accounting. But there’s a fundamental problem most tech companies don’t understand: AI accounting will hit what FloQast CEO Mike Whitmire calls “the auditability wall.”

While Silicon Valley churns out press releases about AI agents that can handle complex accounting tasks, a reality check awaits. In this episode of the Earmark Podcast, host Blake Oliver sits down with Mike Whitmire, founder and CEO of FloQast, to explore why accounting AI is fundamentally different from AI in other business functions. Rather than getting swept up in the AI marketing frenzy, FloQast stepped back to solve the core problem: how to harness AI’s power while maintaining complete audit trails and human oversight.

As Whitmire warns, “A series of companies will come out with AI agents that can do a lot of this work fairly accurately. Then they hit this auditability wall, and it creates a big problem for companies trying to scale.”

The Auditability Problem That’s Breaking Accounting AI

Unlike other business functions where AI mistakes can be shrugged off, accounting operates under rules most tech companies don’t understand. When a sales AI messes up a lead, the stakes are minimal. But in accounting, every transaction must be traceable, every decision documented, and every process capable of withstanding regulatory scrutiny.

This creates a fundamental conflict between how most AI systems work and what accounting requires. “AI is really about automating work, and agents are doing non-deterministic work,” Whitmire explains. “So that becomes a little scary when you’re thinking about auditability.” Most AI systems function as “black boxes.” They can produce results, but they can’t explain their decision-making process in the detailed, step-by-step manner that auditors and regulators demand.

The problem is about to hit the industry hard. When AI systems can’t provide proper documentation and audit trails, auditors are forced to recreate all the work, defeating the entire purpose of automation.

Rather than getting swept up in the AI marketing that dominates press releases from major ERP vendors, FloQast took a different approach. “We tried to avoid the noise and think about how AI should be applied to accounting,” Whitmire says. They started with their experience as former auditors and accountants, asking: How do you combine AI automation with traditional software code and human oversight to create something that actually works?

The answer required rethinking the entire approach to accounting AI, leading to a solution that preserves audit trails and human oversight while still delivering efficiency gains.

FloQast Transform: Building AI Auditors Can Actually Trust

Rather than chase the latest AI trends, FloQast built something different: an AI system that auditors can actually work with. The FloQast Transform product harnesses AI’s power while maintaining the audit trails financial reporting demands.

The approach is simple: let accountants describe their processes in plain English, then use that narrative to generate automated scripts and complete audit documentation. “You build your agents,” Whitmire explains. “You chat with the product and explain your process in pretty extreme detail.”

As accountants describe their workflow step by step, the system populates what looks like a familiar Excel workbook. “This Excel workbook will ultimately be the audit evidence,” Whitmire notes. This isn’t just a user interface choice. It’s a deliberate design decision to ensure every AI-driven process produces the documentation auditors expect to see.

Take FloQast’s benefit allocation journal entry example. The process starts with integrating with UKG Payroll to pull down employee data. The accountant describes each step: “integrate with UKG,” then “pull down information around names, dollar amounts, state,” then “populate column A with this, populate column B with this, and bold and make the header gray because that’s the format I like.”

The system combines different types of automation. For routine tasks, it generates deterministic code that produces consistent results every time. But when the AI encounters something new, like when FloQast hired its first Kentucky employee, it doesn’t guess. Instead, “it surfaces the question to the reviewer of that work,” Whitmire explains. The accountant can approve the change, and going forward, Kentucky will be handled properly.

This approach changes the accountant’s role. Instead of being the preparer who manually processes transactions, they become the reviewer who oversees AI agents and approves exceptions. “Our goal is to empower accountants to automate the really repetitive, rote part of this job. Elevate them into the reviewer of the more complicated work that the agent’s now doing,” Whitmire says.

The system preserves every prompt sent to the AI, every output generated, and every decision made. When auditors come knocking, they can trace exactly how each transaction was processed and where humans intervened. It’s the kind of comprehensive audit trail that makes regulatory compliance possible while still delivering efficiency gains.

Beyond transaction processing, FloQast applies AI to other areas like variance analysis. When account balances trigger materiality thresholds, the system analyzes the biggest transactions causing the change and drafts explanations. “It’s like balance went up because of boom, boom, boom, boom, boom,” Whitmire says. “It’s not these wonderful essays on how things change. It’s like a list of transactions.”

The Future of Accounting: Cyborgs, Not Replacements

The auditability challenge yields a surprising conclusion: rather than replacing accountants, AI will transform their role in ways that could solve the profession’s biggest problems. But this transformation requires rethinking what it means to be an accountant.

Whitmire envisions accountants becoming “accounting transformation information managers,” professionals who combine accounting knowledge with software engineering capabilities. “It will be much more like the merging of an accountant with a software engineer,” he explains. “So you have the accounting knowledge, supplemented by software engineering tools like FloQast, where they can take their accounting knowledge, use our product, and automate their work.”

This isn’t just about learning new software. It’s about fundamentally changing the structure of accounting work. Instead of spending hours manually processing transactions, accountants would deploy AI agents to handle routine work so they can focus on reviewing exceptions, making judgment calls, and ensuring compliance.

The career implications depend on where you are professionally. For younger professionals, Whitmire recommends “Get really good at technology, learn these tools as they come out, and continue to learn about accounting. You’re going to be a very, very valuable employee going forward.” For experienced professionals, “You need to be really great at reviewing the work. Continue to be really great leaders, and run great organizations.”

This evolution could address the profession’s talent shortage. By making accountants more productive and the work more intellectually engaging, AI could help attract and retain talent. “My hope is that it does a really good job of plugging the talent gap we talk about so much,” Whitmire notes.

But there’s a learning concern. Whitmire worries about newer professionals who might skip foundational manual work and jump straight to reviewing AI-generated results. “I feel like the old man saying this, but I did learn a lot doing the work manually and struggling through it,” he admits. He recalls learning about jet lease accounting by struggling through contracts and GAAP guidance—work that an AI could now handle instantly.

The solution may require restructuring how accountants learn their craft. Perhaps starting in accounting roles where they do manual work before moving into audit, rather than the current model, where most start as auditors reviewing work they’ve never performed.

As Oliver puts it, “I would rather manage AIs than manage people.” It reflects both the appeal and reality of this AI-augmented future. Managing AI agents eliminates many interpersonal challenges while allowing professionals to focus on technical and analytical work.

The accounting profession is heading toward becoming a hybrid of human judgment and AI automation. The question is whether professionals and firms will adapt quickly enough to thrive.

Regulatory Changes on the Horizon

The discussion also touched on significant regulatory changes that could reshape the profession. There are efforts in Congress to eliminate the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board (PCAOB) and transfer its responsibilities back to the SEC without additional funding, effectively ending independent audit oversight.

“When I was at EY, we were always scared of a PCAOB audit. So it was a thing that drove behavior,” Whitmire reflects. The fear-based incentive improved audit quality, even if the overall effectiveness is debatable.

Without the PCAOB, the industry would likely return to peer review, where accounting firms review each other’s work. As Oliver notes, “You’re not so afraid of your buddies reviewing your work.” That’s the same dynamic that led to audit failures before the Sarbanes-Oxley Act.

This regulatory uncertainty adds another layer of complexity to the AI transformation. Firms implementing AI systems need to consider current audit requirements and how oversight might change in the coming years.

The Path Forward: Auditability as Competitive Advantage

The accounting profession’s rigid requirement for auditability is often seen as a weakness. But it may become its greatest competitive advantage in the AI revolution. While tech companies rush to market with AI agents that promise to automate everything, firms that understand and embrace the auditability challenge will build sustainable, scalable solutions.

FloQast Transform demonstrates that the future isn’t about choosing between human judgment and AI automation. It’s about creating systems where they work together seamlessly. By preserving audit trails, maintaining human oversight for exceptions, and generating documentation that auditors can use, they’ve solved the fundamental problem that will likely sink many AI accounting startups.

For accounting professionals, this is a career evolution opportunity. The future belongs to those who combine accounting expertise with technology capabilities. These professionals will be empowered by AI to focus on higher-level analysis, judgment calls, and strategic work. The professionals who master these systems now will find themselves in increasingly valuable positions as the technology matures.

To hear the complete conversation about FloQast’s approach to accounting AI, including detailed technical examples and Whitmire’s predictions for the profession’s future, listen to the full episode above.

How Smart Small Businesses Turn Economic Headwinds into Competitive Advantages

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Small businesses are navigating a unique economic moment in 2025. They’re still serving customers and meeting market demands, but they’re doing it while managing changing costs and ongoing policy uncertainty. Despite these challenges, they’re not shutting down or laying people off. Instead, they’re finding creative ways to adapt.

Nicholas Tremper, senior economist at Gusto, shared this insight in a recent Earmark Podcast episode. Tremper tracks data from hundreds of thousands of small businesses through Gusto’s platform, so he has a unique view into how small businesses respond to today’s economic challenges.

The picture Tremper paints is more complex than the headlines suggest. While businesses face real pressures from tariffs, labor shortages, and economic uncertainty, many thrive by combining two essential strategies: utilizing AI to boost productivity and offering more appealing benefits to attract workers. For accounting professionals, this creates new opportunities to become strategic advisors rather than just compliance providers.

Economic Headwinds Create Planning Challenges

In the current economic environment, several interconnected challenges reshape how small businesses operate. Tariffs have reached a weighted average of about 18% across all imports—a significant jump from single digits in previous years. While this level is manageable for most businesses, the bigger problem is uncertainty.

“Small businesses don’t necessarily know how to think about what their costs will be three or six months from now,” Tremper explains. This uncertainty affects everything from inventory planning to contract bidding. For example, if you’re a retailer trying to stock up for the holidays or a contractor giving price estimates months in advance, not knowing future costs makes planning nearly impossible.

The labor market adds another layer of complexity. Unemployment sits at a relatively low 4.3%, but the July jobs report showed weakness with only 73,000 jobs added versus 100,000 expected. More concerning was the massive downward revision of 258,000 jobs from previous estimates for May and June. (Updated numbers released after the show was recorded are +22,000 jobs for August.)

This reflects what Tremper calls an economy that’s “idling”—staying in place rather than growing or contracting. Businesses aren’t laying people off, but they’re not hiring aggressively either. The combination of an aging population and tighter immigration policies creates structural labor shortages, especially in construction and hospitality sectors that traditionally relied on both groups.

These pressures force businesses to delay growth plans. As Tremper puts it, “You may not be able to work on that fourth development. You may have to stop at the three.” When you can’t reliably access more labor, expansion is much more complicated.

Entrepreneurship Boom Continues Despite Challenges

Despite these headwinds, there’s been an entrepreneurship renaissance in the United States. The number of new business applications skyrocketed during the summer of 2020, and as of June 2025, new businesses were still 57% higher than June 2019 levels.

The resilience of small business formation helps explain why the economy has remained relatively stable. “One of the reasons that the economy has been so resilient is because these new businesses have been bringing creative ideas to market,” Tremper notes.

What’s particularly interesting is who’s starting these businesses. For the first time, almost half of new businesses were started by women, compared to 30% in 2019. There’s also been an increase in businesses started by nonwhite entrepreneurs, showing entrepreneurship is spreading across demographics.

These new business owners face similar challenges regardless of their background. When asked about their top three challenges, they consistently mention cash flow, time management, and acquiring customers and employees. At least two of these are areas where accountants can provide significant value.

AI Boosts Productivity Without Replacing Workers

Here’s a statistic that might surprise you: 95% of small businesses using AI aren’t cutting their workforce. Instead, they’re making their existing employees more productive. This contradicts the common narrative that AI inevitably leads to job losses.

The productivity gains are substantial. According to Gusto’s research, 80% of small businesses using AI report productivity increases of 20% or more. But the key insight isn’t just that AI works; it’s how it works.

“Rather than an AI doing somebody’s job, what the person’s doing is they’re like, I’m the expert and you’re going to be a teammate to help me accomplish this quickly,” Tremper explains.

Businesses use AI for routine tasks like summarizing information and conducting market research—the necessary work that doesn’t require deep expertise. Meanwhile, humans focus on applying their knowledge, making judgment calls, and building client relationships.

This approach creates an unexpected benefit in hiring. Businesses that allow employees to use AI report 45% less difficulty finding new workers. It turns out people want to work for companies that give them tools to focus on meaningful work instead of tedious tasks.

The most successful AI implementations happen when businesses develop clear plans about when to use human expertise versus when to leverage AI for efficiency. This strategic approach creates a cycle where better tools lead to more satisfied employees, which makes companies more attractive to potential hires.

Benefits Become Essential for Talent Competition

While AI tackles productivity, smart businesses simultaneously invest in benefits to attract and retain workers. In today’s tight labor market, benefits are competitive necessities.

Offering healthcare benefits increases employee retention by 40% in the first year. Retirement plans show similar effects. What’s interesting is that half of the businesses offering retirement benefits don’t do any company matching. They get significant retention benefits just by offering the benefit.

This creates opportunities for businesses willing to think strategically about their total compensation packages. While competitors focus solely on wages—an expensive and difficult race to win—smart businesses create comprehensive value propositions that extend beyond the paycheck.

For accountants, a communication gap represents a missed opportunity. Fifty percent of small businesses don’t know if their accountant offers benefits guidance, and two-thirds of those simply never thought to ask. When small businesses receive benefits guidance from their accountants, 60% say it influences their benefit decisions. For businesses under two years old, that number jumps to 85%.

Accountants as Strategic Partners

This economic environment creates new opportunities for accounting professionals to evolve beyond traditional compliance work. The share of businesses reporting productivity gains from their accountants has jumped dramatically—from 52% in 2021 to two-thirds in 2025.

“Small businesses view their accountants as business partners. These aren’t number crunchers. These are people who are actively helping me figure out what I’m going to do next,” Tremper explains.

Businesses navigating today’s challenges need more than bookkeeping and tax prep. They need guidance on cash flow analysis, scenario planning, and strategic decision-making. When small businesses can’t predict their costs or easily access more labor, having an advisor who can help them model different scenarios is invaluable.

Cash flow, time management, and hiring are all areas where accountants can provide significant value. Whether it’s helping a client switch to upfront billing to improve cash flow or advising on benefits strategies to attract workers, these services directly address the problems keeping business owners up at night.

Interest rates remaining higher than business owners would like make this financial guidance even more critical. As Tremper notes, “It’s so important to really understand the return on investment on those borrowing costs.” Businesses need help evaluating whether investments will generate enough return to justify higher borrowing costs.

Cautious Optimism for Small Business Future

Despite the challenges, Tremper remains optimistic about small businesses’ prospects based on their track record of resilience. Over the past five years, small businesses have navigated a pandemic, an inflation crisis with rates hitting 8-9%, a major labor market reshuffling, and now uncertain tariff policies. Through it all, more people keep choosing to start businesses.

“They’ve got this grit, this creativity,” Tremper observes. “These things make me most optimistic about small businesses.”

The economic fundamentals, while softening, aren’t collapsing. Consumer spending continues to increase, albeit more slowly. People are choosier about purchases, but demand hasn’t fallen off a cliff. This provides a foundation for businesses that can adapt to changing conditions.

The businesses succeeding in this environment understand that sustainable competitive advantage comes from combining cutting-edge tools with meaningful employee value propositions. They’re not choosing between technology and people; they’re investing in both simultaneously and strategically to create resilience against future uncertainty. By maximizing productivity per employee and creating strong retention through benefits and culture, these businesses position themselves to weather whatever economic storms may come.

For accounting professionals, this transformation represents a challenge and an opportunity. Clients need more strategic guidance than ever, and they’re willing to pay for and value that guidance in ways they haven’t before. The firms that master this new approach can build sustainable competitive advantages that compound over time.

Listen to the full conversation with Nich Tremper to discover specific strategies for advising your clients through this period of transformation and learn how to position your practice as an indispensable strategic partner in their success.

Stop Talking About Culture and Start Fixing These Three Problems

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“There’s nothing worse we can do for our people and our organizations than doing it the way we’ve always done it,” says Erin Daiber, CPA and founder of Well Balanced Accountants. In this episode of the Earmark Podcast, Daiber joins host Blake Oliver to tackle one of accounting’s biggest challenges: how to actually change firm culture instead of just talking about it.

From Big Four Burnout to Culture Coach

Daiber’s story starts with an ironic twist. When she entered business school, she told her parents she’d do “anything but accounting.” Yet a professor convinced her she was good at it, and at 19 or 20 years old, she took that advice to heart. “Being at that moldable stage, I thought, well, okay, I guess that’s what I need to do,” she recalls.

While she doesn’t regret her path, Daiber discovered a fundamental mismatch between her personality and the detailed work required at the staff and senior levels. “I’m not naturally detail oriented,” she admits. “I would get review notes back from my manager and the partners, and I just had nothing left to give. I really couldn’t care less about some of those details, as important as they may have been.”

What kept her going was the people. “I loved interacting with my colleagues on a day-to-day basis,” she explains. But when the managers she connected with left the firm, things unraveled. By the time she reached senior level—about three and a half years in—burnout had taken hold. “I was driving to work, looking at other people doing their jobs and thinking, gosh, that looks nice. Even the guys that were mowing the lawn on the side of the highway, I’m like, at least they get to be outdoors and breathing fresh air every day.”

After leaving for industry work that didn’t solve her problems, Daiber enrolled in a coach training program for self-discovery. Eventually, she found her way back to serving the accounting profession, but with a different mission: helping firms navigate the challenges that drove her away.

The Gap Between What We Say and What We Do

When discussing firm culture, Daiber cuts straight to the heart of the problem. “There’s often the one that we say we have, and then there’s the one that we actually have,” she states. Culture isn’t about the values on your website, it’s about “the values we live by, the behaviors that show up and are accepted and tolerated and encouraged inside of a firm.”

She shares an exercise from her firm retreats: projecting the firm’s stated values on a slide without commentary. “Oftentimes they don’t recognize them because they are not living those values every single day,” she observes. These values become “almost a mythical thing out there that we’re working towards, but not very intentionally.”

To expose this disconnect, Daiber challenges firms with a thought experiment: “If I was observing your organization from the outside in and could hear and see what’s going on, what would I say your values are? Is it profit first? Is it billable hour is king?”

Oliver agrees, sharing his preference for honesty over hypocrisy. “I would almost prefer it if the firms that are not people-first were just open about it,” he says, comparing it to Wall Street investment banks that make no pretense about prioritizing profits. “At least that’s honest.”

What Keeps Firms Stuck in Old Patterns

The conversation reveals three main forces preventing real culture change in accounting firms.

First is the scarcity mindset that infects decision-making. Oliver openly shares his struggle with saying yes to too many speaking engagements, even though he knows it prevents him from focusing on long-term goals and family time. “I say yes to these things, even though I shouldn’t, I know I shouldn’t, but then I do it anyway,” he admits.

Daiber sees the same pattern with client acceptance. She walks firm owners through their fears. “Usually within five or six steps we can get a firm owner to, well, we’ll be bankrupt. We won’t exist anymore.” The reality? “They’re so far away from that, that’s not really going to happen.”

Second is the resistance to change itself. “When I hear of firms that say, ‘we’re just doing it the way we’ve always done it,’ that is like Kryptonite,” Daiber emphasizes. “Nothing in the world is the same as it was even five years ago. How can you justify not changing how you’ve done things and how you’re serving your clients?”

Third is simple busyness. “As soon as we step back into our day-to-day, there is an almost insurmountable inertia that keeps you in that sway of busyness,” Daiber explains. Without creating what she calls “white space” in the day, there’s no capacity to implement changes.

The conversation also touches on structural problems like billable hours (“every hour is not created equal”) and micromanagement that develops when leaders lack diverse management tools. As Daiber notes about micromanaging leaders, “They actually don’t have to take responsibility for it, because you’re going to check in with them all the time.”

Making Change Actually Happen

Moving from theory to practice requires specific actions and uncomfortable decisions. Here’s what Daiber recommends:

Start by saying no

This includes “cleaning up your own mess” by transitioning out clients who don’t align with your values. “Finish out your term of working with that client, but let them know we’re not going to continue,” Daiber advises. Firms need what she calls a “red velvet rope policy” that only accepts clients who “treat our people with respect, value our services, and are willing to pay.”

Create structural changes that force new behaviors

One firm Daiber mentions implemented mental health days with a twist. “If you said, I’m taking a mental health day and anyone was caught making a request of that person on that day, they were the ones in trouble.” Oliver suggests an even more radical experiment: turning off firm email during certain weekend hours.

Build real accountability

“The firms that are really successful with this are willing to call each other out in a respectful way,” Daiber states. This means partners holding each other to commitments. “Hey, that was one of the things we said we were going to not do. Let’s fix that going forward.”

Show genuine appreciation

This goes beyond generic praise. “Catching people doing a good job is so simple. It’s free,” Daiber notes. But it also means “checking in on someone, not just about their progress on a task. How are they feeling? Do they feel like they’ve grown?”

Exit interviews reveal what happens without genuine appreciation. People say, “I don’t feel like I’m a valuable or valued member of the team. No one’s training me. No one’s taking me under their wing,” Daiber shares. “I’m going to go somewhere where I feel like somebody cares about my development.”

Most importantly, leaders must model the values they claim. “Encourage them to take time off and unplug during their time off, don’t email them on the weekend,” Daiber emphasizes. “All of those things that we wish people would do for us, we need to do for them.”

The Choice Every Firm Must Make

As the conversation wraps up, both Oliver and Daiber acknowledge that changing firm culture isn’t mysterious; it’s just uncomfortable. It requires letting go of profitable but problematic clients, breaking long-held habits, and having difficult conversations with colleagues.

“We have to start creating a culture of ownership and responsibility,” Daiber explains. But this can’t happen while clinging to old metrics and methods. Each leader must take personal responsibility for “working through their own blocks and concerns or scarcity or fears around letting go of this old way of doing things.”

The accounting profession faces a clear choice: continue losing talented people to outdated practices and fear-based management, or do the hard work of aligning daily operations with stated values. As Daiber’s own journey shows, when good accountants leave the profession entirely, everyone loses.

Listen to the full episode to hear more about Daiber’s framework for culture transformation, including additional exercises for exposing true firm values and strategies for breaking the micromanagement cycle. Whether you’re a partner watching good people leave, a manager caught between competing demands, or staff wondering if change is possible, the conversation offers a practical roadmap for moving from culture as concept to culture as daily experience.

The Math Is Brutal: Every CPA Must Triple Their Productivity by 2035 or Face Professional Extinction

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“When you chart out demand versus supply of people over time, what that math tells you is that ten years from now, 2035, every CPA in the profession will have to be 2.7 times more productive on a revenue per employee basis than they are today. That is crazy.”

David Wurtzbacher shared this projection on a recent episode of the Earmark Podcast. As the founder and CEO of Ascend, a private equity-backed platform that’s completed over three dozen firm acquisitions in just over two years, Wurtzbacher offers an outsider’s perspective on the profession.

His background scaling Lightwave Dental from 7 to 80 locations taught him how private equity can either destroy professional cultures or transform them for the better. Now he’s applying those lessons to accounting, where the numbers paint a sobering picture: demand for services keeps climbing while fewer people enter the profession each year.

To put this in perspective, a typical well-performing firm today generates around $200,000 in revenue per employee. Wurtzbacher’s projection means that number needs to approach $600,000 per person within a decade. Even scarier? By 2035, roughly 85% of the profession will consist of people with ten years or less of experience in an industry where most say you can’t even make partner in that timeframe.

But Wurtzbacher isn’t just highlighting the problem. Through Ascend’s model of preserving firm independence while providing enterprise-scale resources, he’s showing how firms can achieve these seemingly impossible productivity gains through three key transformations.

The Leadership Evolution: From Managing Partner to True CEO

The biggest barrier to 2.7x productivity isn’t technology or talent. It’s how firm leaders spend their time. Most managing partners remain trapped doing client work while trying to run their businesses, creating a fundamental ceiling on growth.

“The very first place we go is to the leader of the firm,” Wurtzbacher explains. “We want to help them through a transition to become a true CEO, defined as them having one client, which is the firm.”

This leadership trap stems from what Wurtzbacher calls the “fiercely independent” culture of accounting. During his research, he consistently heard from entrepreneurial CPAs who valued their independence: the name on the door, community reputation, caring for people and clients their way. But this independence prevents the changes necessary for breakthrough growth.

The problem runs deeper than time management. The client service orientation that defines quality accounting actually caps leadership development. With seasonal demands and constant client pressure, managing partners find limited windows for strategic work throughout the year.

The real breakthrough requires confronting a limiting belief. “When you’re close with your clients, you believe nobody can do the work but you,” Wurtzbacher observes. “No one else can have this client relationship.”

Consider Lee Cohen from LMC in New York, who exemplifies this transformation. Cohen was initially stressed, unhappy, and heavily involved in client work. Through Ascend’s CEO transition process, “Cohen literally became a different person. He would tell you that,” Wurtzbacher says.

Fifty percent of Cohen’s transformation came from a mindset shift. The other fifty percent came from bringing in a Chief Growth Officer—not a traditional business development role, but a general manager from outside the profession. “A lot of them have MBAs, but they are hungry, humble, smart people that come in and create visibility for that leader about what’s going on in the business and where there are opportunities.”

This operational support, combined with the mindset shift away from client dependency, sets leaders free to focus on what only they can do: building and directing their firms.

Creating an “Irresistible Offer” for Top Talent

Even the best leadership transformation can’t solve the profession’s talent crisis through traditional methods. When quality candidates routinely field six, seven, or eight job offers, firms need something fundamentally different.

Wurtzbacher’s solution centers on creating an “irresistible offer,” and it starts with better recruiting. “So many firm recruiters grew up in the profession, and they’re trapped with the baggage of old ways of doing things,” he explains. Ascend built a team of professional recruiters from outside accounting who understand best practices for finding candidates and closing deals.

But the real breakthrough is compensation innovation. While the profession is “very base salary heavy,” Ascend developed an off-the-shelf bonus program that lets firms pay more cash than competitors. They also extended equity ownership far beyond traditional partner levels.

“We have well over 100 people across all our firms that are managers or senior managers that are investors in Ascend. They own Ascend stock,” Wurtzbacher reveals. These employees invest $10,000 to $50,000 annually in company stock—typically funded through the enhanced bonus program—essentially dollar-cost averaging into equity appreciation throughout their careers.

This creates what Wurtzbacher calls “a different cultural energy.” When people understand how equity value creation works outside the traditional partnership model, they connect their daily work to long-term wealth building. The psychological shift from employee to owner fundamentally changes commitment levels.

The design also solves a collaboration problem. Because everyone owns Ascend stock regardless of which firm they work for, “it creates a one team attitude across all our firms” that unlocks knowledge sharing across the platform.

The results speak for themselves. Firms that described capacity as their “#1 issue” now consider that problem solved. “Our big issue now is how do we go and get all the right kinds of new business that we want to keep our great people excited and motivated,” Wurtzbacher notes.

Technology at Enterprise Scale

Achieving nearly triple productivity requires more than incremental improvements. It demands systematic transformation through AI, global teams, and automation that individual firms cannot afford alone.

But there’s a gap between AI hype and reality. “There is so much more hype and future forecasting than there is reality in this area,” Wurtzbacher observes. For firms feeling behind, “that’s just not the case.” Most firms implementing AI are saving perhaps two hours per person per week, and that’s only for the most advanced adopters.

This creates both opportunity and strategic imperative. While individual firms struggle with overwhelming AI options, they lack technical expertise and capital for truly transformative capabilities. The solution requires enterprise scale.

Ascend illustrates this advantage in action. They’re building a 30-person software engineering and AI team by year-end. “No medium-sized or smaller firm is going to be able to do that,” Wurtzbacher explains.

Their strategy operates on two fronts: strategic buying versus building. For general needs, they purchase existing products. For capabilities essential to their workflows, they invest millions annually developing proprietary AI solutions.

One promising area addresses what Wurtzbacher calls the client context problem. Years of relationships generate institutional knowledge typically trapped “in your head, in spreadsheets, in work papers, in your inbox, and some other tool.” Their AI team works on aggregating this context into accessible systems that transform practitioners from information gatherers into true advisors.

Global talent represents another productivity component. Ascend’s acquisition and transformation of Sentient Solutions, a global capability center exclusively serving US accounting firms in Hyderabad, India, demonstrates sophisticated global team integration. But this isn’t simple outsourcing; it requires developing playbooks that elevate rather than replace domestic work.

Even basic infrastructure offers huge opportunities. Practice management systems in accounting are “so messed up,” Wurtzbacher notes. Before AI delivers transformation, firms need fundamental technological foundations for tracking work and maintaining institutional knowledge.

The Choice Facing Every Firm

Survival depends on three interconnected transformations happening simultaneously: leaders evolving from client servers to strategic CEOs, revolutionary talent approaches through equity ownership, and enterprise-scale technology investments individual firms cannot achieve.

This is a watershed moment for professional services. The mathematical reality of 2.7x productivity gains will separate surviving firms from those becoming obsolete. When 85% of the profession will have a decade or less experience by 2035, traditional models don’t just fail; they become mathematically impossible.

But there’s reason for optimism. Firms embracing these changes discover that freeing leaders from client work unleashes strategic energy, equity ownership creates cultural transformation beyond salary increases, and enterprise-scale technology delivers impossible productivity gains.

Wurtzbacher’s personal timeline reinforces this long-term vision. At 37, he tells people “this very well could be the last thing I do. So I’m thinking of Ascend in terms of decades.” While typical private equity investments last three to four years, his commitment spans the time needed for real transformation.

For accounting professionals, this is an existential threat and an unprecedented opportunity. The mathematical moment of truth has arrived. The question isn’t whether change is coming. It’s whether you’ll lead it or be overwhelmed by it.

Listen to the full conversation with David Wurtzbacher on the Earmark Podcast to hear more about Ascend’s approach to transforming accounting firms while preserving their independence.