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Private Equity, Proprietary AI, and the Self-Reinforcing Cycle Coming for Independent Firms

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In 2025, there were roughly 900 roll-up transactions in the accounting profession. Only a handful were mega-deals that made Accounting Today headlines. Most were small firms merging, tax-only shops joining advisory practices, and everything in between. Of those transactions, 200 were directly linked to private equity investments. Meanwhile, half of the top 30 accounting firms have now taken private equity money or adopted alternative ownership structures.

And while all that was happening, AI tools started being built exclusively for certain platforms, and locked behind walls independent firms can’t access.

Marcus Dillon, CPA, sees these forces clearly. As co-host of the Who’s Really the BOSS? podcast and leader of Dillon Business Advisors (DBA) and Collective by DBA, an advisory community for firm owners, he spent five consecutive weeks this past May traveling to industry events. His journey took him from the Collective Recharge conference in Mexico to Intuit’s council in California, ADP’s council in Nashville, meetings in Katy, Texas, and finally the Firm Growth Forum in San Diego. Across all those rooms, the same interconnected forces kept surfacing.

Firm owners need to understand that private equity timelines drive centralization. Centralization enables AI deployment at scale. And proprietary AI makes consolidated firms increasingly competitive against independent practices. It’s a single, self-reinforcing cycle that redraws the competitive map for firms of every size.

In Season 5, Episode 13, Marcus and Rachel Dillon unpack what he learned across those five weeks on the road, and what it means for your firm right now.

 

The M&A Wave Moving Downmarket

The numbers tell only part of the story. What makes this personal for most firm owners is where this M&A activity is heading.

MBA graduates from Harvard, the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, and similar institutions enter the market armed with a concept called “entrepreneurship through acquisition.” Their professors specifically identified accounting as ripe for a roll-up. Now you have freshly minted MBAs, search funds, and pooled investor groups actively hunting for accounting firms ranging from $2 million to $20 million in revenue.

“Private equity gets a bad rap,” Marcus explains in the episode. “All it is is pooled money. There are great people to work with. Some people aren’t so great to work with. And some people have a great investment thesis and culture and treat team members well. And some people don’t.”

In practice, evaluating a capital partner is no different from vetting a new hire or vendor. The label doesn’t automatically make it good or bad.

Marcus and Rachel speak from experience. DBA completed two acquisitions in 2025. When Marcus mentioned firms that acquired eight companies in a single year, Rachel’s response was, “After acquiring two firms in one year, I think you need an award if you acquire eight firms in one year, whether good or bad, it’s not the easy way out.”

Three distinct models emerged among the firms being celebrated at these conferences:

  • Fully centralized firms like Aprio and Armanino that integrate acquisitions completely from day one
  • Decentralized platforms that preserve autonomy for acquired firms while sharing ownership
  • Hybrid models that centralize certain functions while leaving others independent

All three were celebrating wins. But something unexpected happens beneath the surface.

The Rush Toward Centralization

“Since I’ve been back in town, there’s been a big movement with people stating they’ll remain fully autonomous and fully decentralized,” Marcus observed. “They’re now moving towards centralizing.”

Two forces drive this reversal.

First, you can’t deploy AI effectively across disconnected data. Picture a platform with 20 firms operating independently, with their own tech stacks, databases, and processes. If that platform discovers a breakthrough AI automation, they’d have to install it 20 separate times. As Marcus puts it, the data is “so much more valuable when it’s all together, and you can deploy those efficiencies at scale .”

Second, the next buyer doesn’t want a project. Private equity funds typically hold investments for three to five years before seeking a larger capital partner. When platforms go to market, that next investor “doesn’t want to own 20 different brands on a loosely connected platform,” Marcus explains. “That doesn’t make sense to them. It doesn’t make sense to pay a premium for that.”

We see this play out in real time. Springline is rebranding acquired firms under a single brand. Crete Professionals Alliance just rebranded to Current. These are structural changes designed to make the combined entity more valuable and competitive.

Rachel offers practical wisdom for those watching these shifts. “You always want to level up to your top firm. It would be a little naive to think you can keep doing exactly what you’ve always done with the same tools.”

Marcus validates this from DBA’s own experience. When they integrated their two acquisitions, they immediately moved them onto DBA’s tech stack and systems. If they’d left everything separate, “it would have been a nightmare,” he says.

The AI Divide Takes Shape

Current counts Thrive as its biggest investor. Thrive is also connected to OpenAI. Together, they’ve built AI software available exclusively to firms on that platform, and the software won’t be available on the open market.

“When you have big technology companies like OpenAI or Anthropic partnering with firms and creating proprietary software, you have to question who’s going to win the technology battle at the end of the day,” Marcus says.

These AI-powered platforms are competing with smaller firms. You don’t have to join a platform to be affected. You just have to compete against firms that did.

Meanwhile, the broader AI landscape is chaotic. New AI products launch daily. Every platform is embedding AI. Canopy released Co-work, Carbon is building AI features, and Intuit Intelligence is rolling out within QuickBooks. “Everything we open up on a daily basis has some form of AI or agent now being built into it,” Marcus notes.

DBA takes a practical approach. Currently, they deploy Microsoft Copilot across the entire team because it integrates with their Microsoft ecosystem. Select team members also have Claude Enterprise for testing advanced solutions. Once something works in Claude, Angel Sabino, DBA’s Director of Technology and AI, productionizes it in Copilot for broader deployment.

“It’s hard right now to understand what’s real, what’s conceptual, what’s just a great video that somebody put together, or what is actually a true demo of a useful product,” Marcus admits about the current AI landscape.

“Be really aware and ready to start experimenting with it so when you do have a change in the firm, you can immediately solve for it and not try to figure it out when it’s too late,” Rachel counsels.

Your Window for Action

The accounting profession is facing an interconnected dynamic in which M&A drives centralization, centralization enables AI deployment, and AI makes consolidated firms more competitive. Each force feeds the next, and the cycle is accelerating.

But understanding these dynamics gives you power to act with intention. Here’s where to start:

  • Review your software spend now. Vendors push price increases in the summer. As Marcus advises, if you turned on software to experiment six months ago but only have one client using it, turn it off. DBA specifically moved clients to consolidated platforms like Ramp for bill pay.
  • Start experimenting with AI before you need it. Set aside a budget and designate a small group to test tools in a controlled environment. Don’t wait for a crisis.
  • Know your non-negotiables. Whether it’s a PE-backed buyer, a platform acquisition, or succession planning, understand what matters most before negotiations begin.
  • Take control with your dollars. “You can be a very reactive player in this market, or you can actually be proactive,” Marcus says. “And the best way to be proactive is with your dollars.”

At the San Diego conference, Marcus overheard a woman celebrating finding a session that didn’t mention M&A or AI. She called it “refreshing.” Her instinct isn’t wrong; good business fundamentals still matter. But ignoring these forces won’t make them disappear.

If you want to dive deeper into these dynamics and learn more about navigating this inflection point, join Marcus, Rachel, and other firm leaders at Gather this October in Grapevine, Texas. Visit collective.cpa for details while tickets remain available.

Listen to the full episode of Who’s Really the BOSS? to hear more of Marcus and Rachel’s discussion about preparing your firm for what’s ahead.

Rachel and Marcus Dillon, CPA, own a Texas-based, remote client accounting and advisory services firm, Dillon Business Advisors, with a team of 15 professionals. Their latest organization, Collective by DBA, supports and guides accounting firm owners and leaders with firm resources, education, and operational strategy through community, groups, and one-on-one advisory.

Your Accounting Firm’s Biggest Structural Problem Is Something You Built on Purpose

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You built a successful accounting firm, and now you’re trapped inside it. Every client question routes through you. Every tax return needs your eyes before it goes out the door. Your team is talented, but no one knows whose desk the work is on, and your clients couldn’t name their accountant if you asked them to.

Sound familiar?

Unfortunately, you probably built the structure causing all this pain with the best of intentions.

In this episode of Who’s Really the BOSS?, Marcus and Rachel Dillon pull back the curtain on how they restructured their firm, Dillon Business Advisors (DBA), from a bottlenecked, siloed operation into a scalable team-based model. They walk through the exact phased transition that made it work, including the hard conversations, the timing decisions, the mistakes, and the results.

One lesson they learned the hard way, and they keep seeing other firms stumble over it: the biggest mistake accounting firm owners make when restructuring is skipping straight to the end state without working through the messy middle. Building a firm that doesn’t revolve around you requires a phased transition. First, define the roles. Then align the teams and optimize for industry niches. Get the sequence right, and you unlock collaboration, capacity, and career growth for your people. Skip steps, and you’ll create more chaos than you started with.

Let’s break down what that transition actually looks like, starting with the pain points that tell you your current structure is broken, moving through the three phases DBA used to go from chaos to clarity, and ending with what becomes possible on the other side.

 

The Problem Hiding Behind Good Intentions

Before you can fix your firm’s structure, you have to be honest about what’s broken. What makes this tricky is, the thing that’s broken is probably something you built on purpose.

Marcus describes the symptoms DBA experienced, and they’ll sound painfully familiar to most firm owners. Despite having project management software that technically showed the status of every project, they still didn’t really know where work was. Not in the way that matters, like what a team member was actually waiting on, or why something hadn’t moved in three days. When someone needed time off, or worse, left the firm, there was no reliable way to pick up where they left off without a scramble.

Then there was the silo problem, and this one stings because it started as a smart idea. DBA intentionally created three separate teams: one for individual tax, one for business tax, and one for accounting. On paper, it looked like specialization. In practice, it built unintentional walls.

“The accounting would be done and then passed the baton to the business tax team,” Marcus explains. “The business tax team would do tax returns, and then pass things over to the individual tax team.” The business tax team would be busy at certain times of the year, completely dependent on the accounting team to deliver clean financials, but they had no visibility into what was on that team’s plate. Meanwhile, the individual tax team sat idle, waiting on K-1s, unable to push the process forward or even understand why things were delayed.

Marcus was at the center of it all. Every return needed his review. Every client conversation required his voice. The org chart was a bull’s eye with him in the middle. “I was definitely the bottleneck,” he admits. “I had to have eyes on everything before it went out to a client. It had to be me calling or sitting down with the client.”

The damage wasn’t just internal. Rachel adds the client perspective, and it’s equally sobering. “Clients really didn’t know who their point person was. So when they called, they would ask for Marcus, or they would say, ‘I don’t know who’s working on my tax return’ or ‘I don’t know who’s working on my accounting.'” Things would get lost in translation from person to person. Clients wanted two things the structure simply couldn’t deliver: fast responses and proactive advice.

That’s the real cost of a structure built around one person. It’s not just that the owner burns out. Client experience degrades. Your team knows who they’re working with, but your clients don’t. And when clients feel uncertain about who’s handling their finances, trust erodes until it’s too late.

The Three Phases From Scaffolding to Scale

This is where Marcus and Rachel’s conversation gets practical. They walk through a three-phase approach that DBA used to transition from their old structure to the Team of Three model. Each phase builds on the one before it. Skip ahead, and you’ll pay for it later.

Phase 1: Define the Roles (Build the Scaffolding)

Before you can organize teams, you need to know what roles exist. DBA’s Team of Three consists of three clearly defined positions:

  1. Client Service Manager (CSM). The base of the team. Marcus describes them as “an accountant, a bookkeeper, somebody with experience who doesn’t have to have a degree.” Many of DBA’s CSMs are working parents who want a career that offers flexibility alongside meaningful work. They operate at 85% capacity, with 15% reserved for onboarding new clients and handling the inevitable surprises.
  2. Client Controller. Someone with tax experience who has “seen accounting and done closeouts,” Marcus explains. “Maybe they’ve done the bookkeeping cleanup at year end, and they can produce clean financials.” They can prepare business tax returns and advise on personal and business tax matters. When DBA hires for this role, they post it as “tax manager” because posting “client controller” attracts candidates who misunderstand the position.
  3. Client CFO. This person manages the team and drives the client relationship. “They can have larger business strategy and tax-related conversations with clients as needed or consistently throughout the year,” Marcus notes. Business ownership experience is a big plus here because it gives them risk tolerance and the ability to connect with entrepreneurial clients.

With those three roles defined, DBA assessed its existing team and started mapping people into positions. Some placements were obvious. Others required difficult conversations.

“We didn’t want to force people into a certain role,” Marcus explains. They had direct conversations with team members. “Here are the guidelines of each role, here’s what each one would do. What would you like to do? Where do you feel most comfortable?”

Rachel adds an important nuance about those conversations. “There were team members who had been with us a long time, and they were leaders within our firm. They were experienced, degreed and very good accountants. But if you think about it vertically, they’re the bottom.” It was important to help them understand that CSMs have significant client interaction and hold important relationships. They found other ways for these team members to lead through onboarding, training, mentoring, or becoming subject matter experts.

Marcus admits to a mistake from this phase. “We kept some people on too long. They clearly weren’t fully a client controller. They had a leg in CSM and another in Client Controller for just a little bit too long. And it didn’t work out.”

Phase 2: Align the Teams (Set the Team Structure)

Phase 2 is where the real transformation happens, and where it often breaks down for other firms.

After Phase 1, DBA had people in defined roles. But those people weren’t working in consistent teams. “Even with myself as maybe the only client CFO at that time, we had close to 40 different teams of three within our team of 12 or 10 FTEs,” Marcus reveals.

Rachel paints the picture. “A CSM on our team was working with three different controllers. So three people give her work, ask her questions or request things from her. During tax season, everyone’s busy. Who do I prioritize work for?”

The solution was a deliberate reorganization and locking in which three people would serve which clients. DBA used a straightforward decision framework. If two of the three team members were already working with a client, those two stayed. Swapping out two of three required exceptional justification, such as a team member having a relationship that overrode the numbers.

The timing was strategic. They planned the reorg in March and April, then communicated it to clients after tax season. “After tax season, we actually pushed through the reorg and communicated to clients,” Marcus explains.

Clients reacted well. “They said, ‘Okay, we know you have what’s in our best interest. We trust you. I didn’t lose my person.'”

The internal results were dramatic and fast. “Within a month, efficiencies and budgets improved,” Marcus reports. 

Phase 3: Optimize and Refine (Industry Niches and Career Paths)

With teams aligned and running smoothly, DBA could finally build industry specializations. They organized pods around verticals: dental, veterinary, and medical professional services. Construction and real estate were sprinkled across every team, since many clients own real estate.

This created real advisory value. “When I have advisory conversations, that’s what they typically ask me: ‘Well, how’s everybody else doing?” Marcus shares. “Because I want to know, am I the only one who’s going through this difficult time?”

Phase 3 also made career progression visible. “It gives people a clear path to move if they want to do that career ladder,” Marcus explains.

Marcus’s own evolution shows the ultimate success. “I’ve given away clients and team members to other people who are progressing in their careers.” He adds, “After the client meets the team, they forget about me.”

“Sometimes starting at phase three is the problem, or not doing phase one and phase two well,” Marcus warns. “The firms that have success with this start with role definition and then move to defining teams and then optimizing or refining.”

What The Right Sequence Unlocks

Step back and look at what DBA built through this phased approach. Each phase created the foundation for the next breakthrough.

  • Collaboration over silos. Teams know each other’s workloads and can step in when needed. There’s no single point of failure on any client. “If a team member needs to be out, the client is still going to be fully served and their team is available,” Rachel explains. 
  • Consistency through tax season. Marcus calls out a common industry problem where firms sell clients on recurring advisory work, then stop delivering it from January through April. “You should have the bandwidth and the capacity to serve those clients consistently all year long, including tax season. If you’re signing somebody up for recurring ongoing financial support, which is what most people do in CAS, you have to do that consistently.”
  • Real capacity for growth. After the Phase 2 reorg, Rachel notes, “Those team members actually had enough capacity to take on clients without being overloaded with work or going above their peak capacity.”
  • Career development without departure. Team members don’t have to leave to advance. Marcus shares, “Our team members don’t have to go outside of DBA to continue to progress in their careers.”

Marcus and Rachel have seen what happens when firms skip steps. Firms that jump straight to building industry pods without first defining roles end up with confused team members. Firms that try to align teams without clear role definitions create accountability structures with nothing to be accountable to.

The sequence is the architecture that makes everything else work.

Your Move: Define, Align, Then Optimize

The Team of Three model gave DBA a destination. But the phased transition got them there. Most firm owners who struggle with restructuring try to implement the final version on day one.

Whether your firm has five team members or 50, the principles hold: clarity before alignment, alignment before optimization. Your team needs to know their role before they can function as a unit. Units need to gel before you can specialize.

If you’re feeling stuck as the bottleneck in your firm, or you’ve tried restructuring and it created more chaos than clarity, Marcus and Rachel share more details about each phase in this episode of Who’s Really the BOSS?. They discuss the specific mistakes they made and how they coach other firms through the same transition.

Marcus closes with an invitation: “We have a lot of resources. If anybody wants to reach out about any of those resources, job descriptions, benchmarks, scorecards, all that fun stuff. We have those in the Collective community. But if something is sticking out, please reach out.”

Listen to the full episode to hear their complete breakdown of how to build an accounting firm structure that actually works.

Rachel and Marcus Dillon, CPA, own a Texas-based, remote client accounting and advisory services firm, Dillon Business Advisors, with a team of 15 professionals. Their latest organization, Collective by DBA, supports and guides accounting firm owners and leaders with firm resources, education, and operational strategy through community, groups, and one-on-one advisory. 

The $450,000 Worth of Clients DBA Walked Away From on Purpose

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In 2010, Marcus Dillon sat down to hand-write more than 50 letters to retiring CPAs, asking if they’d be willing to sell their practices. One of those letters launched Dillon Business Advisors, a firm that grew from a $400,000 acquisition into a multi-million-dollar advisory practice by strategically reinventing itself every five years.

On a recent episode of the Who’s Really the Boss? podcast, Marcus and Rachel Dillon celebrated the firm’s 15th anniversary by sharing its origin story and the evolution of DBA. In the first of a two-part series, they walked through specific revenue numbers, margin targets, acquisition details, and the personal sacrifices behind each phase of growth.

The Foundation: High School Sweethearts to Business Partners

Marcus and Rachel’s story started long before DBA. They met in driver’s ed at 15 and 16 and have been together ever since. By their first wedding anniversary, they had a one-and-a-half-month-old daughter, Kinley. That young family shaped every business decision that followed.

Marcus came out of Ernst & Young’s audit practice, where travel demands didn’t work for family life. He landed at a smaller Houston-area firm with around 15 employees and under $2 million in revenue. The owner took a chance on a 23-year-old kid to build an audit practice from scratch.

“I was able to get paid 45% of my effective billings, including write-ups,” Marcus said. “So I learned really early on how to price things so it was acceptable to clients.”

At his peak, he was billing close to $400,000 a year and taking home up to $180,000. But Rachel noticed a problem. Marcus had to match the owner’s hours, and he would stay at the office until 11 p.m., midnight, or sometimes 1 a.m.

“I didn’t want to be a single mom,” Rachel explained. “I was a teacher getting off at 4 p.m. and wondering, where is my husband and the father of my kids?”

DBA 1.0: Building Through Acquisition (2011-2016)

The Dillons prepared carefully for acquiring a firm. They paid off every debt except their mortgage. Rachel kept teaching for a steady income and benefits. Then Marcus wrote those letters.

One landed with Bob, a CPA in his 70s or 80s, who recently had a health scare. First Command Bank financed about $320,000 of the $400,000 purchase price. There was a 10% seller note, and Marcus brought 10% cash to closing.

Unexpectedly, clients followed Marcus, despite his non-compete agreement with his old firm. He fully honored the agreement, paying a third of the collections back to his former employer for three years. But the client migration pushed DBA from $400,000 to about $700,000 almost immediately.

The first office wasn’t glamorous. Marcus inherited a lease in what he calls a Class D building right off a major Houston interstate. “It had the old school atrium, and it just smelled like crap whenever they brought new mulch and plants into that atrium,” he recalled. He worked alone until 9 or 10 p.m., and his was often the only car in the parking lot.

Rachel’s first day at DBA in 2013 was moving day. “I remember doing a couple of collection calls on the floor as we were packing up,” she said. “I was not coming to work with you at the other place regularly.”

By then, they’d built their own 2,500-square-foot standalone office, figuring, if they were paying rent, they might as well pay it to themselves.

From the start, the Dillons prioritized same-day invoicing. Returns would flow to Rachel for client delivery, then straight to Marcus for billing that same day. “That’s something that was always a priority to get done immediately,” Rachel noted. “I hear some people spend days doing billing and invoicing, sometimes months after the fact.”

That diligence paid off. By 2016, DBA reached $1.5 million in revenue. The Dillons had paid off the acquisition loan and bought a lake house. They were successful, but as Marcus observed, “Every time someone wished me success, it was because I had just gone into debt.”

DBA 2.0: The Merger That Taught Them to Let Go (2016-2020)

In 2016, Marcus had breakfast with his mentor, Tom, who was winding down his practice. Marcus asked a question he now admits was the wrong way to evaluate an acquisition: “How would we be worse off by coming together?”

Tom brought about $400,000 of work, pushing DBA past $2 million. On paper, it looked perfect. In practice, it was a disaster.

“Tom’s clients loved Tom,” Rachel said bluntly. “Tom’s clients hated us.”

These weren’t just any clients. They were survivors of three or four rounds of exits, and they stayed for Tom personally. Plus, Tom’s service model was completely different. He offered every client two in-person meetings during tax season. DBA didn’t operate that way.

Meanwhile, the Dillons built a 12,000-square-foot office building: 7,000 for DBA, 5,000 to lease out. Marcus describes it as having “an attorney feel with wood wainscoting and leather-bound books.” It was supposed to be their forever office.

But the cultural problems didn’t solve themselves. So DBA started strategically shedding clients.

They spun off about $100,000 to their friend Julie, who mentioned she wasn’t as busy as she’d like. “She made that mistake of telling us that,” Marcus joked. Another $100,000 went to a CPA closer to Tom’s office. The next year, they went bigger, spinning off $250,000 along with Tom’s office location.

In total, DBA shed about $450,000 in client work. Yet they never dipped below $2 million in revenue. “That was definitely a consideration,” Rachel explained. “We never wanted to dip below $2 million.”

By 2019, things had stabilized. The team was mostly part-time working parents who arrived at 9:30 and left by 2:30 to match school schedules. All work happened in the office.

Then came January 2020. At their annual team retreat, Marcus asked, “If you could do anything in this life and not fail, what would you do?”

The leader of their audit practice answered, “I would be a stay-at-home mom.”

“When you have a leader in the firm respond that way,” Marcus reflected, “it’s like, okay, this is likely not going to be the person to help lead that aspect of the business.”

By March, the COVID-19 pandemic sent the team home, and they never came back. DBA funded home office setups and kept the physical office available. Nobody used it.

The audit practice spun off during 2020. Tom pursued receivership work full-time. And DBA hit $1 million to the bottom line for the first time, maintaining 40-45% margins before officer compensation. That’s a target Marcus has carried since his days at his old firm.

But remote work didn’t mean balance. “We did the kids’ routine of dinner, activities, bath, and bedtime,” Rachel said. “And then we just went straight back to work again for the next three or four hours.”

The Hard-Earned Wisdom of 15 Years

Looking back, Marcus is clear about what drove their early success. “We were successful because we put the hours in. We weren’t necessarily working smarter. We just worked more than others around us and said yes to others around us, which doesn’t work anymore.”

Other firm owners likely recognize patterns in the Dillons’ journey:

  • Financial preparation matters. They eliminated personal debt and kept Rachel’s steady income before taking the acquisition risk.
  • Invoice immediately. Same-day billing became a cornerstone cash flow practice. You have to send out the invoice to get paid.
  • Not all acquisitions are equal. When clients survive multiple rounds of exits, they’re bonded to a person rather than a firm. Tom’s clients proved that.
  • Set a revenue floor and defend it. DBA shed $450,000 in work but never went below $2 million because organic growth and price increases filled the gaps.
  • Listen when people tell you who they are. One honest answer at a team retreat revealed the future of an entire service line.
  • Hours aren’t everything. The model that built a $1 million firm through sheer effort won’t build the next phase.

Growth isn’t just about what you build. It’s about what you’re willing to walk away from, whether that’s clients who don’t fit, service lines that aren’t growing, office space you no longer need, or the version of your firm that got you here but can’t take you further.

This is just the first half of DBA’s 15-year story. In part two, Marcus and Rachel will share how the firm evolved after the pandemic, what they’re seeing in today’s market, and where they believe the profession is headed. For now, listen to their full conversation in Part 1, including all the specific numbers, deal structures, and decision points.

Rachel and Marcus Dillon, CPA, own a Texas-based, remote client accounting and advisory services firm, Dillon Business Advisors, with a team of 15 professionals. Their latest organization, Collective by DBA, supports and guides accounting firm owners and leaders with firm resources, education, and operational strategy through community, groups, and one-on-one advisory.

She Tried to Sell Her Firm Three Times Before Moving It to a Beach in Mexico

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Sandra Koch tried to sell her accounting firm three times over ten years. She was burned out and ready to quit. Today, she runs that same firm from a beach town in Mexico with dirt roads and one stop sign. And she’s never been happier.

In this episode of Who’s Really the Boss?, hosts Rachel and Marcus Dillon talk with Sandra, founder of Aurora Consulting Group. She shares her journey from owning a building in California to running her firm remotely from Baja California Sur. The conversation gets real about the anxiety of closing an office, the grief of letting go, and the unexpected freedom that followed.

The Dream Building That Had to Go

Sandra did everything by the book. She founded Aurora Consulting Group in San Diego in 2011 with one assistant. Three years later, she was juggling two offices—one in San Diego and one in Visalia, deep in California’s farmland. For 16 months, she went back and forth between the two locations. Eventually, she closed the San Diego office. “That wasn’t really working too well,” she admits.

Then came the building in Visalia. Sandra searched for a year before finding it. She bought it, remodeled it, and made it exactly what she wanted. “It was ego feeding, and it was a status symbol,” Sandra says on the podcast. She’s not embarrassed. It felt like success.

Marcus gets it. He grew up believing the ultimate achievement was having your name on a brick building where clients came to you. “That meant you made it,” he says. The day before recording this episode, Marcus and Rachel had just sold their own “forever building.”

By August 2023, reality hit Sandra hard. Clients weren’t coming to the office anymore. Some staff had moved away and were already remote. She was paying for an empty building.

“I wouldn’t wish the anxiety that I experienced during that time on anybody,” Sandra recalls. “But I knew it was the right thing to do.”

When Aurora Consulting Group went fully remote, Sandra was surprised by the grief she felt. “I had this dream, and then the dream kind of fell apart,” she explains. “Letting go of the dream felt like, wait, what do I do now?”

Marcus admits he also tends to remember only the good parts about having an office. You forget the commute, hiding from walk-in clients when you don’t have time, and dealing with frozen pipes. “I only remember the good days,” he says.

Sandra went through the same mental battle. “I’ll get sad about it. But then I’m like, Sandra, do the math. The math says it doesn’t make sense.”

A year after going remote, Sandra realized she could live anywhere. She wasn’t tied to Visalia or even California anymore. In 2024, she moved to Baja California Sur, Mexico, a coastal town with 1,800 people, dirt roads, and 25 varieties of whales passing by.

“The freedom I have from letting go of a physical location has been profound,” Sandra says. Every morning, she watches the sun rise over what Jacques Cousteau called “the world’s aquarium.”

She keeps a small office in Visalia for when she visits and has a part-time assistant who handles the occasional bank deposit. She learned some lessons the hard way, like discovering U.S. banks require a physical presence in the country to maintain accounts.

But that building with her name on it is gone, and she’s more proud of her firm now than ever.

Staying Close From 1,500 Miles Away

Going remote created new challenges. How do you stay connected to clients you genuinely care about? How do you keep a scattered team feeling like a team?

Sandra’s approach to clients is simple. She flies back three or four times a year and takes them to meals, one-on-one. No group events or presentations. Just food and conversation.

“I care about them and miss them. I want to see them just like I would want to see my family,” she explains. The one-on-one format is intentional. “That’s where the magic is. They tell me what’s really going on with them.”

Her clients’ warm response surprised her. They’re genuinely excited to see their CPA up in person.

Marcus shares a similar story. When a client who had sold his business invited Marcus to visit his farm, Marcus took him up on the offer and saw the excitement in the client’s eyes. They spent the day at the farm. No tax talk, just relationship building.

Building Team Culture Without an Office

Sandra’s team of six is spread across California and beyond. Her first remote hire four years ago turned out to be the right fit and set the standard for what worked.

Three things make remote work function, according to Sandra: training, culture, and communication. “You have to be religious about it,” she says.

The centerpiece is their Tuesday morning meeting at 10 a.m.. The key to this meeting is it’s not about work. The team shares what they need help with, their wins, and their struggles. Then they discuss their monthly book, with a $100 bonus for anyone who finishes it. They wrap up with “happies and crappies” (highs and lows).

Rachel points out that putting even modest money behind expectations shows the team you value the activity. “Start lower than you think,” she advises. “You can always increase an incentive, but it’s nearly impossible to reduce one.”

Sandra also discovered her team loves company swag. Nice jackets at Christmas had everyone excited. “It makes me realize they’re proud of the team they’re on,” she says.

In-person moments matter too. Sandra took the team to Intuit Connect in Las Vegas, where some team members met face-to-face for the first time. “They still talk about it,” she says. These investments show “I’m putting my money where my mouth is.”

As a result, Sandra believes she’s actually better at her job now.

“My clients get a better version of me,” she explains. “They get a less stressed-out version of me. I’m more present for them now because I’m not dealing with all the things attached to a physical location.”

The Science Experiment That Changed Everything

Sandra managed a lot of change in a short time period by changing how she thinks about trying new things.

“I used to think trying new things meant it would either succeed or fail,” she says. “When I changed to thinking ‘I’m doing a science experiment to see what happens,’ it really helped me.”

A science experiment doesn’t fail. It gives you data. You try something, see what happens, and decide whether to continue or pivot.

“I don’t have to commit to anything,” Sandra explains. “Not to software, not to a staff member, not to a client. When I go in thinking ‘I don’t have to commit, but I’m willing to try because I’m curious,’ it takes all the pressure off.”

This requires humility. You have to be honest about what’s working. Sandra’s team serves as a reality check, and her husband keeps her grounded when her curiosity pulls her in too many directions.

The results speak for themselves. “Our internal workflows went from practical nonexistence to a well-oiled machine very quickly,” Sandra says. “When something wasn’t working, we dropped it and went on to the next thing.”

Her 2026 goals show how far this mindset has taken her. Aurora has just three goals this year, down from 29 last year and 52 the year before. The three words: align, refine, and define. No big initiatives. Just steady improvement of what’s already working.

Finding Her People Made the Difference

Sandra credits one encounter with saving her firm. In November 2022, she heard Marcus speak at Intuit Connect. She got on the mailing list for Collective by DBA and signed up for their first in-person event.

“I heard a message of hope,” she remembers. “Aurora would not exist today if I hadn’t met you.”

Before that, she felt alone. Now, “I feel like I’m part of a community for the first time in my career,” she says. “A community that cares about me.”

She hasn’t missed a single Collective event. She brings team members. She reads every email, asks questions on the forum, and shares what she knows with others.

“It feels safe,” she explains. “I can be my messy self with you guys.”

When Rachel asks about her best advice, Sandra doesn’t hesitate: “Trust God, clean house, and help others.” Keep your side of the street clean. Look for opportunities to serve. Know you don’t have to control everything.

That philosophy carried a burned-out firm owner from trying to sell her practice to running it from a beach in Mexico. And she’s more proud of her work than she’s ever been.

Your Turn to Experiment

Sandra tried to sell her firm three times. Today, she wakes up to the sun rising over the Sea of Cortez and runs a thriving practice. Her transformation required questioning one assumption: What does a “real” accounting firm look like?

Here’s what she learned:

  • Physical space isn’t mental space. Without a building’s demands, Sandra became more present and effective. Her clients and team got a better version of her.
  • Remote doesn’t mean distant. One-on-one client visits, weekly team meetings that skip the work talk, book clubs with incentives, and company swag can build stronger connections than any conference room.
  • Make everything an experiment. Calling new initiatives “science experiments” removes the fear of failure. You’re just collecting data.
  • Nothing has to be permanent. You don’t have to commit to software, locations, or structures forever. Curiosity beats fear every time.

For every firm owner wondering if there’s a better way, Sandra’s story says yes. But only if you’re willing to run the experiment.

Listen to Sandra’s full conversation with Rachel and Marcus on Who’s Really the Boss? The details that don’t fit in an article make her story even more valuable for any firm considering remote work.

Rachel and Marcus Dillon, CPA, own a national, remote client accounting and advisory services firm, Dillon Business Advisors, with a team of 26 professionals. Their latest organization, Collective by DBA, supports and guides accounting firm owners and leaders with firm resources, education, and operational strategy through community, mastermind groups, and one-on-one advisory.

The Off-Season Work That Makes Tax Season Manageable

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Imagine it’s mid-March, and an accounting professional just left for spring break with her family. The business tax deadline is days away, and she’s at the beach.

Meanwhile, at firms across the country, accountants are settling in for another late night, sustained by the promise of a half-day Friday sometime in June (if they’re lucky). Blackout dates stretch from January through April, and the unspoken rule is that personal lives get shelved until after the deadline.

These two realities coexist within the same profession during the same tax season. The difference isn’t luck or lighter client loads; it’s deliberate design.

Rachel and Marcus Dillon, owners of Dillon Business Advisors, have spent 15 years building a firm where tax season looks remarkably different from the industry norm. Their team of about 30 remote professionals works 36-hour weeks year-round, maintaining “Flex Fridays” even during peak filing season. Team members take spring break. And by mid-January, they’ve already filed dozens of returns because the real work happened months earlier.

During a recent episode of the Who’s Really the BOSS? podcast, the Dillons responded to a LinkedIn discussion that had been making the rounds. Their friend David Cristello asked, “How do you keep your team motivated during tax season?” When another friend jokingly suggested pizza parties—a tongue-in-cheek reference to the go-to perk at many firms—it sparked a deeper conversation.

The Foundation: Improvement Season Sets Up Success

When Marcus responded to that LinkedIn post about keeping teams motivated during tax season, his answer surprised some readers: “The hard work starts outside of tax season.”

It’s not a deflection. It’s the foundation that makes everything else at DBA possible. The firm operates on what they call “improvement season,” the period right after each tax deadline when the team identifies what went right and what went wrong and implements fixes before the next cycle.

The results speak for themselves. By mid-January 2025, DBA had already filed dozens of returns because the books were already closed. When you send financials to clients by the 15th of every month throughout the year, there’s nothing to catch up on in January.

This year-round engagement creates a ripple effect on tax season workload. The firm conducts tax projections in Q4, so clients already know roughly where they stand before the new year begins. When a business owner learns in October that they might owe $80,000 with their return, and the final number comes in at $50,000, that’s actually good news rather than a crisis. The cash flow conversation happened months ago, not in a panicked April phone call.

“We just try to minimize surprise as much as possible,” Marcus says.

But even with these systems in place, the Dillons are quick to point out they’re still learning. After acquiring two firms in 2025, they’re dealing with a higher volume of annual-only tax clients than they’ve had in years. This influx has highlighted some stark contrasts.

Take 1099 preparation. For monthly clients, the groundwork happens throughout the year. Client service managers review vendor payments quarterly and request W-9s as soon as they spot gaps. By January, there are usually only a handful of forms to chase down.

Annual-only clients are a different story. “We have no idea what’s been going on all year long,” Rachel explains. “We have no idea how many 1099s they’re going to need, if they’ve asked for W-9s or not, if they can get a hold of the people, if we can get a hold of the annual client.”

The experience has Marcus questioning whether they should even offer 1099 services to annual-only clients. “If you’re not engaging us for monthly recurring accounting services, you can do your own 1099s is kind of how I’m feeling at this point,” he says. Though he adds with a laugh that since team members probably listen to the podcast, they might hold him accountable for that change next year.

Team Structure That Creates Real Flexibility

Having year-round client touchpoints only works if you have the right people consistently delivering those services. At DBA, that happens through their “Team of Three” model, a structure Marcus calls “one of our biggest wins by far.”

For monthly clients, the model assigns three distinct roles to every client relationship. The Client Service Manager handles all communication and administrative tasks. The Client Controller focuses on preparation and review. The Client CFO provides complex review, planning conversations, and quality control.

This separation might sound simple, but the impact runs deep. When administrative tasks get pulled out and assigned to someone whose specific job is coordination, preparers and reviewers suddenly have hours back in their week.

“Breaking out the administrative parts and giving those to a professional who can handle them and communicate with clients gives a lot of time back to preparers and reviewers,” Rachel explains.

The same structure now applies to annual-only tax clients, a recent adaptation as they handle more of these relationships. The Tax Administrator manages all client communication, including sending organizers, accepting documents, generating engagement letters, and handling the back-end filing process. The Tax Controller handles preparation, often reviewing simpler returns. And their Director of Tax and Financial Planning provides oversight, education, and handles complex returns.

This structure creates essential coverage. When someone takes time off, two other team members understand each client relationship. Work doesn’t pile up while someone’s away.

The coverage philosophy shapes how DBA handles time-off requests. Before approaching leadership, team members coordinate with their Team of Three to ensure coverage. “You have to let your team of three know the dates and make sure it doesn’t put somebody else in a weird spot,” Marcus explains.

This approach makes possible what would seem impossible at traditional firms: client controllers taking spring break in March, right when business tax deadlines hit.

Rachel addresses the human reality behind these decisions. “When someone takes more than a day or two of PTO, it’s rare that they’re going alone somewhere. Most of the time, they’re traveling with their family, extended family, or friends for a special occasion.”

The Dillons understand this firsthand. They started taking spring break specifically because it was the only time their daughters’ swim practice and school schedules aligned. Expecting employees to forfeit those windows because of arbitrary blackout dates ignores how life actually works.

Marcus doesn’t mince words. “If you have blackout dates and you tell people they can’t live life during four months out of the year, they’re not going to leave your accounting firm for another accounting firm. They’re going to leave your accounting firm for another profession or another industry altogether.”

The team also maximizes efficiency through technology. Every deliverable, from financials to tax returns and projections, includes video commentary recorded through Vimeo. Clients watch explanations on their own schedule, rather than booking meetings just to review numbers. Zoom phones enable text messaging that looks direct but feeds into practice management systems, meeting clients where they communicate while maintaining boundaries.

Marcus notes that team members are often most productive right before vacation. “You are most efficient and effective right before you go out of town,” he observes. The team plans accordingly, with people getting ahead on work before time off rather than dumping it on colleagues.

Building a Culture Beyond Temporary Perks

The LinkedIn discussion that sparked this podcast episode revealed something telling about the profession. When asked how to keep teams motivated during tax season, someone jokingly suggested pizza parties, and everyone got the joke because nearly everyone has worked somewhere that tried to make up for brutal hours with free food.

“For us, as a remote team, that would cost a lot of money to send everybody pizza,” Marcus notes about their 30-person team. But cost isn’t the real issue. “Being in different roles over my career, knowing my voice is being heard means way more to me than a slice of pizza.”

At DBA, that philosophy takes concrete form. The firm maintains a shared spreadsheet where any team member can nominate a client for exit at any time. Leadership might see completed work and paid invoices, but they don’t witness the difficult phone calls or patterns of disrespect that make certain clients exhausting to serve.

This isn’t just lip service. In what they’re calling their “year of refinement” for 2026, DBA has shortened its tolerance for poor-fit clients. “In the past, we would give people a couple of different opportunities to tell us no,” Marcus says. “Where we’re at today as a business, it’s just one time to tell us no before we exit that client relationship.”

The same philosophy of actually listening to the team’s needs shaped their benefits evolution. Half-day Fridays started as a summer perk to give back time worked during tax season. Then it expanded to most of the year. Now it runs year-round, including during tax season. A full-time employee at DBA works 36 hours, not 40.

“We didn’t want to take it away from people,” Marcus says simply. “A lot of clients aren’t around on Friday afternoons either.”

PTO evolved similarly. In 2025, the firm extended paid time off to part-time team members, in proportion to their hours. But tracking PTO across multiple systems created an administrative burden that defeated the purpose. “Ultimately, you want people to use their PTO and have time off, not necessarily be worried about tracking their PTO,” Marcus explains.

Effective January 1, 2026, DBA moved to unlimited PTO with guardrails around approval and booking limits. The policy includes part-time team members.

Marcus addresses the common criticism head-on. “I know it’s been discussed that people take less time off with unlimited PTO. That is not our intention at all.”

For individual tax clients who might otherwise only appear at filing time, DBA offers its Tax Advisory Plan (TAP). This monthly recurring service includes tax preparation plus two annual projections, one mid-year and one year-end, each with a consultation. Clients get introduced to their dedicated team, so when questions come up, someone familiar with their situation responds without hours of research.

“We have solved for that with our tax advisory plan,” Rachel says. The service transforms annual relationships into year-round engagement, turning filing-time scrambles into predictable workflows.

“Allowing your team more freedom to go home at a normal time, every day and all year long, is going to go a lot further than a one-time meal or party,” Rachel says, capturing what actually matters to team members.

Taking Control of Your Firm’s Tax Season

The Dillons freely admit they’re not perfect. They’re dealing with integration challenges from two recent acquisitions. They’re still figuring out whether to offer certain services to annual-only clients. Marcus is currently working from a poorly insulated sunroom in an Airbnb because their Fort Worth house renovation isn’t finished. But their approach offers a blueprint built on three principles that any firm can adapt.

Start improvement season immediately after tax season

The work that makes January through April manageable happens in the months after the previous deadline. When clients know their tax position from Q4 projections and books stay current monthly, there’s nothing to scramble over in March.

Structure teams for coverage, not just efficiency

The Team of Three model distributes work and creates redundancy. When someone leaves for spring break, two others understand every client relationship. Breaking out administrative from technical work maximizes everyone’s strengths.

Listen to what teams actually want

Sustainable practices beat temporary perks every time. Team members want their concerns heard and acted on. They want to attend their kids’ events, travel when their families can travel, and not have their lives dictated by arbitrary deadlines.

“We’re not up against the CPA firm down the street anymore. It’s a different ballgame,” Marcus says, putting the stakes in perspective. Talented professionals have options beyond public accounting, and firms that don’t adapt will lose team members to other industries.

Listen to the full conversation on the Who’s Really the BOSS? podcast for additional insights about managing life transitions during busy season, specific tools for client communication, and how the Dillons are applying these principles during their own busy season. As Rachel notes at the end, “All of these things eliminate the need for staying at the office until midnight doing actual work because all you’ve done all day is put out fires.”

Tax season doesn’t have to control your firm. But escaping that cycle requires doing the hard work when everyone else is taking a breather. The firms having calm tax seasons aren’t lucky; they’re prepared.

Listen to the complete episode to hear how DBA is navigating tax season, managing team growth from recent acquisitions, and keeping their Flex Friday promise even in the thick of filing season.

Rachel and Marcus Dillon, CPA, own a Texas-based, remote client accounting and advisory services firm, Dillon Business Advisors, with a team of 15 professionals. Their latest organization, Collective by DBA, supports and guides accounting firm owners and leaders with firm resources, education, and operational strategy through community, groups, and one-on-one advisory.