Firm Management

This Accounting Firm Finally Turned “We Should Give Back” Into a Measurable System

Earmark Team · February 5, 2026 ·

Most accounting firm owners consider themselves generous people. They write checks to local charities, sponsor community events, and encourage employees to volunteer. But ask them to quantify their firm’s charitable impact over the past three years, and most would struggle to produce meaningful numbers.

The irony is, professionals who build careers on measurement and accountability often treat their own charitable giving as an unmeasured afterthought.

Marcus and Rachel Dillon faced this same challenge. As co-leaders of Dillon Business Advisors, they listed “giving back locally and internationally” as part of their vision, along with concrete, measurable goals. However, it became a reminder of good intentions that hadn’t yet become systematic action.

In this 2026 New Year episode of Who’s Really the Boss?, the Dillons skip the typical resolution-setting advice. Instead, they share how they live out their rally cry for the year: “lead change, create impact.” For them, IMPACT actually spells out their firm’s values. And they’ve finally found a way to measure it.

The Control That Creates Commitment

The Dillons knew what they wanted to accomplish. The challenge was finding a mechanism for accountability.

A separate bank account seemed obvious. It would be easy and fast. But Marcus saw the flaw immediately. “We wanted that control mechanism in place as opposed to just setting up an additional bank account that we could redistribute or transfer money back into,” he explains.

Their solution was The DBA Impact Fund, established through the National Christian Foundation in 2025. With a donor-advised fund, once money goes in, it can’t come back out. Those dollars are committed to charitable purposes forever.

This constraint is exactly the point. For firm owners who want to build charitable giving into their operations, a donor-advised fund provides accountability that willpower alone can’t.

The practical benefits extend beyond commitment. Funds can be invested and earn returns while accumulating for larger initiatives. The account works like a checking account when distributing money to approved charities. And because it generates standalone statements, the Dillons can share their giving transparently with their team.

Creating the fund was simple. “It literally took five minutes. I went to NCF’s website to create the fund, connected a bank account, and started transferring money,” Marcus notes. Five minutes to solve a problem that had lingered for years.

The Power of Simple Math

With the fund established, the leadership team, which includes Marcus and Rachel, and their directors, Amy McCarty, MBA, and Lezlie Reeves, CPA, decided how much to give.

They came up with a simple formula: 1% of every dollar invoiced, deposited the first week of each month based on the previous month’s revenue. The formula doesn’t consider collections, net income, or profit after expenses. Just invoice revenue.

“There’s direct accountability and no creative accounting or math involved,” Rachel emphasizes. “There’s no ‘it depends.’ Or I have to wait until I run the calculations.”

Anyone can look at the monthly invoice total, calculate 1%, and know exactly what to deposit. No waiting to close books or opportunity for excuses when margins feel tight.

They chose revenue over a fixed dollar amount for a specific reason. “We tied it to revenue because we believe in growth,” Marcus explains. As the firm grows, so does the giving. The charitable impact scales automatically with business success.

“We started with 1% because it’s easy,” Marcus admitted. They can always give more during strong periods, but the baseline stays constant and predictable.

When they created the fund in mid-2025, they made an initial deposit to “true up” all the invoices from earlier in the year. By 2026, they had a solid foundation ready to deploy.

Making Water Flow: The Team Experience

The Dillons wanted their team to experience generosity firsthand.

For their signature initiative, they selected Living Water International, an organization that drills water wells across Latin America and Africa. Both Marcus and Rachel have participated in Living Water trips. They know people on the board and have seen how it operates.

“We know it is a well-run organization,” Marcus explains. “If we were going to choose any one large charity to use this first season of the DBA Impact Fund, we wanted to go with a safe bet.”

The project spans two years. In 2026, The Impact Fund will purchase a well location in Latin America. In 2027, around 20 people, including team members, spouses, clients, and Collective member firms, will travel to install the well.

The Impact Fund covers all costs, removing financial barriers. “The purchase of the well is not voluntary,” Rachel explains. “That’s happening for the whole team. Going on the trip will be voluntary.”

Marcus calls Living Water trips “entry-level” mission experiences. They have structured itineraries with backup plans, safe accommodations, good food, and often a fun activity on the final day. Her first trip included ziplining on the way to the airport.

Birthday Wishes That Matter

While the well project creates a collective experience, the DBA Impact Birthday Gifts program gives individual team members a voice in the firm’s giving.

On each employee’s birthday, they direct the Impact Fund to donate $1,000 to any approved charity of their choice. The program costs employees nothing and adds to their existing birthday recognition.

“It’s significant enough that it does make an impact,” Marcus explains. “If we were only to do $100, they may not feel that it was as much of an impact.”

The program also helps with recruiting. When future team members ask how the firm celebrates birthdays, the answer now includes something more meaningful than cake in the breakroom.

Your Turn to Measure What Matters

The DBA Impact Fund is unusual in that it approaches charitable giving with the same discipline that firm owners bring to client work.

The framework has three parts:

A donor-advised fund that creates real accountability
A simple 1% revenue calculation that eliminates debate
Team involvement through collective projects and individual choice

“As accountants, dollars are an easy way to measure things,” Marcus observes. “And if you want to put dollars to what you care about, this is one small way to do it.”

The Dillons are transparent about their experiment. “We’re entering into the second calendar year of the funds being there, so it’s still an early experiment,” Marcus acknowledges. “If it fails, we won’t hold back from speaking to the failures.”

For other firm owners considering something similar, you don’t need a perfect plan. You need a mechanism that creates accountability and a calculation simple enough to execute consistently.

What would 1% of your firm’s revenue look like directed toward charitable purposes? How might involving your team—not just as contributors, but as participants—change your firm’s relationship with generosity?

For the full conversation, including more of Marcus’s mission trip stories and the team’s approach to capturing impact, listen to the complete episode.

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.

Leading with Empathy: Building Accounting Teams That Thrive

Earmark Team · February 2, 2026 ·

Earn free NASBA-approved CPE for listening to this episode. Visit Earmarkcpe.com, take a short quiz, and get your certificate.

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

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

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

Why Empathy Makes Business Sense

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

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

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

Building Breathing Room Into Your Firm

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

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

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

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

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

How Systems Create Space for Humanity

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

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

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

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

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

Reading the Warning Signs

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Toxic High Performer Problem

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

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

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

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

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

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

Navigating Industry Change With Compassion

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

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

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

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

Taking Action This Week

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

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

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

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

Your Role as an Advocate

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

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

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

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

From Stuck to Strategic: How Top CPA Firms Break Free from Endless Problem Loops

Earmark Team · January 15, 2026 ·

Picture a CPA firm owner sitting across from the same colleague at the same conference, one year later, complaining about the exact same problems: the same staffing issues, same client complaints, and same technology frustrations. Marcus Dillon sees this scene too often, and it breaks his heart. “One of the most disappointing things to me,” he shares on the latest episode of Who’s Really the Boss?, “is whenever you have a conversation with somebody a year later and they’re in the same exact place they were when you previously talked to them.”

But in a packed ballroom at Hotel Vin in Grapevine, Texas, 105 accounting professionals gathered this October to make sure they’d never be that person stuck in an endless loop of unaddressed challenges. Over two and a half days in October 2025, firm owners, leaders, and carefully selected team members came together for Gather 2025, an event that offered CPE credits but delivered something far more valuable than continuing education.

About two-thirds of attendees were firm owners and leaders, while the remaining third were team members positioned to create ripple effects back in their firms. “You want to bring a team member who can learn and take part in table discussions, but then also take what they’ve heard and learned back to others on your team,” Marcus explained.

From Growth to Excellence: A New Chapter in Leadership

After a year focused on “the goal is growth, not comfort,” Marcus introduced a new rally cry for 2026 that signals a shift in how successful firms approach leadership: “Lead Change, Create Impact.” This evolution is more than a tagline change; it marks a maturity in thinking about what drives firm success.

“We’ve had a very large growth year,” Marcus reflects. “We added a couple of director level positions, did a couple of acquisitions, and continue to grow Collective by DBA very intentionally. So now we’re going into a season of refinement and then excellence.”

This natural progression, from growth to refinement and excellence, mirrors a cycle that successful firms navigate intentionally. But growth isn’t just about numbers. As Rachel emphasizes, when they adopted their previous rally cry, “We’re really thinking about growth personally and professionally, of what does it look like to delegate to someone else? What does it look like to upskill and learn that next new thing, or say yes to something we don’t feel we have the skill set for?”

Rachel shares a particularly striking insight she heard recently from author Ruth Chou Simons, “You don’t have to be blooming to be growing.” Sometimes the most critical development happens underground, in the roots and foundation of a firm’s culture. These invisible victories, such as saying no to wrong opportunities, developing team members’ skills, or refining internal processes, often matter more than year-end revenue numbers.

The data from Gather 2025 validates this approach. While participating firms showed revenue increases, the standout statistic was a 10% decrease in owner production hours. For an industry where firm owners routinely work 2,000+ hours annually in production, this reduction shows genuine progress. As Marcus points out, this matters enormously for succession planning. “If there was a firm owner working over 2000 hours per year, as a buyer, you probably have to hire two people to replace that outgoing owner.”

The Four P’s Framework: Your Roadmap Through Change

Change doesn’t fail because people resist it, but because leaders haven’t provided the clarity teams need to embrace it. The Four P’s Framework, which Marcus discovered through his C12 leadership group, transforms vague announcements into actionable roadmaps.

“We used to talk about change and how we communicate change to the team,” Marcus recalls. The standard three questions (What’s changing? What’s staying the same? How does this impact me?) weren’t enough. The Four P’s provide a complete structure:

Purpose answers “Why are we changing?” But “the lens that you answer that question through should be your mission, vision and values,” Marcus emphasizes. “You’re not changing your mission vision values based on a change. You’re seeing the change through the lens of those mission vision values.”
Picture addresses “What does success look like?” Marcus admits this is his personal weakness. “You have to paint a great picture of what it looks like on the other side of this change and what it looks like going through this change.” Teams need to visualize both the journey and the destination.
Plan tackles “How do we get there?” This includes specific milestones. “You’ll know when you’re 20%, 50%, or 80% there and you can celebrate and then maybe push or sprint to that next threshold,” Marcus explains.
Part clarifies “What is my role?” This component “helps foster ownership, provide clarity” by making it crystal clear how each person contributes.

The framework came to life during DBA’s recent acquisitions. Purpose aligned with their mission of “impacting others and creating a great place to work.” Picture showed “a fully integrated team under one brand, serving very similar clients in very similar ways.” Plan mapped out specific 30-day and 90-day milestones. And each team member received a clearly defined part. Some continued with existing clients, others mentor new colleagues, and others take ownership of new relationships.

Rachel’s reflection provides crucial context. “We have not always done it this way. We communicated the change, but rarely thought through all four parts.” The difference is dramatic. “You as the leader will not be in it on your own, trying to drag people along,” she notes. “You will have people who step into their role and know what it looks like to be successful.”

Solving Problems Together: The Power of Collective Intelligence

While firm owners tackled KPIs and succession planning in one room, team members gathered in another for a revolutionary session called “Borrow a Brain, Share a Solution.” With over 24 anonymously-submitted real firm challenges, participants tackled everything from lead generation to remote team connectivity to AI adoption.

“Even staff members had great ideas for lead generation,” Rachel observes. “It’s not always up to the leader to solve every challenge in the firm.”

The structured approach went beyond brainstorming. Teams identified questions needing answers, developed solutions, assigned implementation responsibilities, and specified necessary tools. They documented all frameworks and made them available through the Collective Community Resource Center, creating a permanent library of tested solutions for the 300+ team members now on the platform.

Angel Sabino, Jr., Dillon Business Advisor’s Director of Technology, demonstrated exactly how firms could build their own AI agents using Microsoft Copilot. “He built this AI agent for internal DBA team members to ask questions,” Marcus explains. “What’s our PTO policy look like? What firm holidays exist? What do I need to do to get this approved?” The agent pulls answers from the firm’s knowledge base, providing instant, accurate responses.

“He can also break it down into simple enough terms and pictures,” Rachel notes. This wasn’t about showcasing technology for its own sake, but solving the real challenge of making standard operating procedures accessible and useful.

The case study sessions added another dimension. Firm owners could submit data anonymously and pose specific questions to peers. Marcus calculated the value. “I did quick math. It was about $20,000 per hour in that room.” But the true value transcended hourly rates. It was about getting honest feedback from people who “truly care about you without having a vested interest.”

Putting It All Into Practice

The event’s structure reinforced its practical focus. After sessions on everything from KPIs to AI implementation, the final afternoon wasn’t filled with more presentations. Instead, teams and firm friends gathered to process what they’d learned and create action plans. “What did you hear? What are you going to work on?” became the guiding questions as DBA and Collective team members wove through conversations offering support.

The result? As one attendee shared with Rachel, “This is the first time I’m leaving feeling confident about what I’m going to do and not feeling overwhelmed and defeated that I’m not doing enough.”

Even the venue contributed to the experience. The Hotel Vin’s European-style food hall offered variety without leaving the building, while The Baked Bear ice cream truck (featuring customizable cookie ice cream sandwiches) provided a sweet networking opportunity in perfect October Texas weather.

Your Next Step Forward

For Collective by DBA members ready to continue this journey, Recharge 2026 awaits in Mexico (April 22-25) at an all-inclusive, adults-only Marriott resort. “We’re going international,” Rachel announces, promising two days of CPE, karaoke, collaborative dinners, and the option to extend your stay. Given that the group will occupy over 50% of the boutique hotel, spaces are limited.

But you don’t need to wait for an event to start implementing these insights. The frameworks, tools, and collaborative approaches shared at Gather 2025 offer immediate value for any firm ready to move beyond the cycle of unsolved problems.

Listen to Rachel and Marcus Dillon’s full conversation to discover how two leaders who’ve “been in this game since 2011” learned to stop dragging people through change and started leading them toward impact.

As Marcus reminds us, when you look back at your biggest wins, you won’t remember the change itself. You’ll remember the people who journeyed alongside you. The question is, will you be remembered as someone who helped others navigate change, or as someone who kept showing up with the same unsolved problems? The choice (and the tools to succeed) are yours.

Stop Fighting the Same Audit Battles Year After Year

Earmark Team · January 8, 2026 ·

Those recurring review comments that keep popping up across your team? Sam Mansour, CPA, did the math and it should make every audit firm leader pay attention. When you multiply these small inefficiencies across your entire practice, they balloon into 1,000 hours of wasted time annually. That’s half a full-time position lost to preventable mistakes, year after year.

In this episode of Audit Smarter, hosts Sam and Abdullah Mansour explore how firms can transform their most frustrating pain points into powerful improvements. Rather than treating each mistake as an isolated problem, Sam shares a systematic approach that turns recurring challenges into opportunities for growth.

The Hidden Cost of Repeated Mistakes

Sam starts with a simple example: a staff member who keeps forgetting to include references from cash testing leads back to supporting check registers. It seems minor until you realize this same mistake is happening across multiple team members, multiple engagements, and multiple years.

“Without reflection, mistakes repeat,” Sam emphasizes. “Without capturing what we’ve learned, we’re almost guaranteed that they’re going to repeat themselves.”

The math becomes staggering when you look across an entire firm. Sam breaks it down. “Let’s say they’re 15-minute issues. If you multiply that by 1,000, now it’s starting to take a lot of time. Because it’s not just one person, but multiple people doing it across multiple engagements.” With an average person working 2,080 hours per year, those 1,000 hours of wasted time equal half a position.

What’s particularly frustrating is that these aren’t random, one-off errors. “Very rarely is it just this one person making this one mistake and you’re never going to see that mistake ever again from different team members,” Sam explains. “People tend to make similar mistakes.”

From Personal Notes to Firm-Wide Knowledge

Sam’s solution is simply to create a lessons-learned log. At the most basic level, this might be a Word document where a preparer titles a section “Cash” and documents specific review comments they receive.

“When you go and test that section again, you need to review your own work,” Sam explains. “You complete this testing in that cash section. Next, you need to realize, okay, I commonly forget to make the reference back from what I see in this lead schedule.”

But personal documentation is just the beginning. Abdullah suggests using OneNote for better organization. “OneNote helps organize it so that you can have one folder for one client,” he explains. “And then you can have several different pages essentially underneath that. So just organizes it a lot better. It’s like a file structure on a network.”

The real power comes when firms turn these individual insights into searchable, firm-wide resources. Sam shares his own recurring challenge with farm audits. “Every year I get into those work papers, I’ll be like, oh shoot, how did those journal entries work? What was that again? Because I only tested like one or two of these a year.”

The solution is to create what Sam calls “a trail of breadcrumbs,” detailed guidance that lives outside the formal audit documentation. This might include written instructions, screenshots of calculations, or even “record video of yourself talking about it.”

By organizing these resources into categories like planning, fieldwork, and wrap-up, firms create an institutional memory that helps everyone, but especially new team members who can access years of accumulated wisdom before their first engagement.

Post-Engagement Debriefs Can’t Be Optional

Sam acknowledges the common perception of post-engagement debriefs as just administrative work. Teams finish one audit and want to jump straight into the next, treating reflection as a luxury they can’t afford.

But Sam insists these debriefs are critical. Structure these meetings by asking three essential questions: What worked? What didn’t work? Where did we get stuck?

Timing matters enormously. “If you wait six months to ask what worked and what didn’t work during busy season, it’s difficult to recall all those little instances,” Sam explains.

The solution is to make debriefs mandatory. “Don’t make it an optional thing,” Sam insists. “We need to sit down, discuss, and reflect.”

These insights then translate into concrete improvements. Sam provides specific examples of how to use what you learn:

Update templates. Add conditional formatting that turns cells green when correct values are entered, creating visual confirmation that eliminates data entry errors.
Improve checklists. Sam says people like to complain about adding more things to the checklist. His response is practical: “We should continue to add things to the checklist until we stop missing them.”
Document compensating controls. In smaller environments where proper segregation of duties isn’t possible, teams often miss compensating controls. Sam’s solution is to put a header in the template that says Compensating Controls. Highlight that section in yellow, and force auditors to fill it out when they’re in the field.

Getting Your Team to Actually Buy In

“They’re filling out more paperwork. Their checklists are becoming longer, their templates are becoming longer. They’re asked to do more work. People get frustrated,” Sam says, acknowledging the pushback firms encounter.

The key to overcoming resistance is to explain the “why” behind every change. Using the compensating controls example, Sam shows how to frame it. Explain why smaller clients need these controls, how missing this documentation puts the firm at risk, and why this has emerged as a firm-wide trend.

Most importantly, show the math. “Yes, it takes an extra 15 minutes to fill out this work paper,” Sam quantifies, “but on the back end it costs us, on average, an hour. So we’re saving 45 minutes and we’ve improved our audit quality.”

Recognition matters too. “Recognize people who help us improve as a firm,” Sam emphasizes. When you publicly acknowledge team members who contribute ideas, it shows everyone that the firm values continuous improvement.

The payoff is clear when teams understand the bigger picture. “Improvement is easier to embrace when it’s linked to wins, not just extra tasks,” Sam explains. The wins include reduced hours, better documentation, less stress during peer reviews, and becoming better auditors overall.

Building a Culture Where Every Audit Makes You Stronger

The ultimate transformation happens when learning becomes part of your firm’s DNA. “We do work and then we reflect on that. What did we do good? What did we do bad? What needs to improve? What needs to change?” Sam describes. “We take those lessons learned and then we implement change in the firm. Now it’s an upgrade.”

This creates a powerful shift in how teams approach their work. “Eventually it becomes so ingrained in people that they go out into the field with that mentality from the very beginning,” Sam observes. “If you know you’re going to have that conversation, the next audit you go out on, you don’t want come to the next meeting and say, oh shoot, we missed this.”

The benefits extend beyond efficiency. Sam notes that when professionals evaluate career moves, they ask themselves if working at a firm will enhance their resume. “It’s really important to have a culture of learning, to have a culture of enhancing and moving forward,” he emphasizes.

Perhaps most remarkably, this approach transforms the audit environment itself. “I have found audit environments like that are much less stressful to be in because everyone’s just so ahead of the game and so proactive,” Sam reflects.

Some might think this vision sounds unrealistic, but Sam addresses this directly. “For a lot of audit firms listening to this, they’re thinking this is an unrealistic dream. But it’s very realistic if the people in the firm buy into this idea.”

Over time, Sam promises, “your audit methodology becomes smarter, more efficient and more resilient because now you’re not just digging holes and going home. You’re you’re thinking it through.”

Turn Your Next Review Comment Into Progress

The difference between firms that fight the same battles year after year and those that continuously improve isn’t talent or resources. It’s the discipline to capture, analyze, and act on lessons learned.

Sam’s framework shows every review comment, debrief insight, and team suggestion can strengthen your entire firm. When you transform individual experiences into institutional knowledge, optional debriefs into mandatory investments, and isolated improvements into a learning culture, each audit makes your firm stronger.

Ready to stop losing productivity to preventable mistakes? Listen to the full episode for detailed frameworks and additional examples.

Your Team Actually Wants You Less Involved in Daily Operations—Here’s How to Give Them What They Need

Blake Oliver · November 25, 2025 ·

For an accounting firm owner, days can feel like an endless stream of Slack notifications and “quick questions” from your team. You’ve become your company’s “internal Wikipedia”—the go-to source for every operational decision, client question, and process clarification. Sound familiar?

Chase Damiano, founder of Human at Scale and recent guest on the Earmark Podcast, has a name for this trap: the bottleneck.

Damiano brings a unique perspective to the accounting world. After scaling Commonwealth Joe Coffee Roasters from zero to $5 million in revenue and earning a spot on Forbes’ 30 Under 30 list in 2018, he experienced burnout so severe it drove him to take a 12-week sabbatical that included two weeks of silent meditation. This radical reset transformed his understanding of leadership and delegation. Now, he shares those insights with accounting firm leaders trapped in similar operational quicksand.

In his conversation with host Blake Oliver on the Earmark Podcast, Damiano challenges a fundamental assumption plaguing firm owners: the belief that hiring more people will solve their capacity problems. The reality is far more complex. Breaking free requires a systematic approach to delegation that transforms how you communicate expectations and how you measure success.

Every overwhelmed firm owner needs to understand three critical transformations. First, why the traits that make you successful—perfectionism and desire to serve—become the quicksand that traps you. Second, how a six-part delegation framework frees you from daily firefighting. And third, why building a “team responsibility inventory” provides the roadmap for extracting yourself from workflows while actually increasing your team’s autonomy.

The Psychology of Being Stuck: Why Good Intentions Create Bad Systems

Before you can implement systematic delegation, you need to recognize that the very traits that made you successful now hold your firm hostage.

Damiano knows this pattern intimately. After scaling his coffee company to $5 million in revenue, he found himself addicted to the productivity habit. It took three full weeks of his sabbatical just to stop compulsively “figuring things out.”

“Even the act of ‘figuring out your life’ can now look more like a job,” he explained to Oliver. “Wake up, have breakfast, go to a coffee shop to figure things out. Then it’s time for lunch, more figuring out, dinner—and suddenly another day has vanished.”

This addiction to busyness hits accounting firm owners particularly hard. Your perfectionism, your genuine desire to serve clients, and your technical expertise aren’t character flaws. They’re the foundation of your professional success. But when it comes to scaling a firm, they become quicksand.

Oliver admits he fell into this exact trap with his own firm. “I said yes to everything,” he reflected during the conversation, “and then I’ve got too much to do and I’m busy all the time, working 60 hour weeks.”

The desire to help everyone feels noble in the moment. But it creates a system where your brain becomes the firm’s operating system. Every decision, every quality check, every client question routes through you.

The perfectionism problem runs deeper than just workload. Oliver shared an example from his time at a Big Four firm. The nonprofit team was performing full compilation engagements for clients who didn’t need them. “Most of these nonprofits did not need compilations, but we were doing it anyway with a huge added cost,” he observed. The team could have delivered a simpler service at better margins while still meeting client needs.

Damiano challenges firm owners to examine their “inner data”—not financial metrics, but the intuitive signals about energy and alignment. When he asks bottlenecked CEOs how they feel day-to-day, the answer is always the same: “incredibly draining,” “incredibly stressed,” “I don’t want to do this.”

Yet the pattern continues. They know they’re stuck, they can articulate the problem, but they take no action to change it.

This paralysis stems from a fundamental identity crisis. As Damiano discovered after exiting his coffee company, entrepreneurs often don’t know who they are without their business. “Everyone asked me what I’m going to get into next.” he recalled. “People assume you’re going to go on to an even greater thing, but you might not be clear about that internally, and that’s okay.”

The reality check comes when you realize your team actually wants you less involved. Teams see your pain from being overwhelmed. But more importantly, they experience frustration when you inject yourself into processes and “muck things up,” as Damiano puts it.

Your team craves autonomy over their roles. They want to make decisions without running everything by you. But first, you need to accept that your five-minute solution might be worth sacrificing for their two-hour learning experience.

Damiano’s perspective on one-on-ones captures the mindset shift required: “Your one-on-ones should not be about status updates. It’s an opportunity to develop them as leaders in every role, in every position. They should do 80 plus percent of the talking.”

Understanding these psychological barriers is crucial, but awareness alone won’t free you from the trap. You need a concrete system for transferring responsibilities that addresses both your need for quality and your team’s need for clarity.

The Six-Part Delegation Framework: From Chaos to Clarity

The breakthrough moment in Oliver and Damiano’s conversation came when Oliver realized effective delegation to humans uses the exact same structure as prompt engineering for AI.

“What you just described is a well-written prompt,” Oliver exclaimed as Damiano outlined his delegation system. “It’s the same thing.”

This revelation transforms delegation from an art into a science. The framework emerged from Damiano’s observation of countless delegation failures. One particularly instructive disaster involved a chief operating officer who attempted to delegate a billing process. She wrote just seven words on a piece of paper: “Manage billing process while I’m out on vacation.”

The predictable result? Complete failure. Without context, success criteria, or clear boundaries, the delegation was doomed from the start.

During the podcast, Damiano and Oliver worked through a real example: delegating the management of weekly team meetings. Here’s how the framework transformed this common bottleneck into a clear, delegatable responsibility:

1. Name the responsibility: “Manage and coordinate weekly team sync.” Just two to three sentences that start with action verbs.

2. Define the purpose: As Oliver articulated: “Our weekly team sync is what keeps everyone organized and makes sure nothing falls through the cracks. It helps us prioritize.” Damiano added, “This is our command center for what is happening for the week, but also a place for us to come together as a culture.”

3. Establish success metrics: “Everybody leaves the meeting with their top three to five priorities clearly defined. We’ve addressed any blockers,” Oliver said. Plus the binary metric: Did the meeting happen? Did everyone who could attend actually attend?

4. Document the process: They mapped out everything from sending meeting invites and creating agendas to collecting topics, facilitating discussions, and updating the practice management system.

5. Identify resources: Access to calendars, ability to run reports on upcoming deadlines, time for preparation and follow-up. “In a prompt that would be the tools,” Oliver noted.

6. Clarify decisions: The operations manager can choose meeting times and create agendas autonomously, but needs approval to cancel meetings two weeks in a row.

The elegance of this system lies in its flexibility. “Those first three are perfect delegation opportunities for a more senior individual,” Damiano explains. Junior team members benefit from all six elements as guardrails.

What makes this framework powerful is how it addresses trust issues that sabotage most delegation attempts. When delegation fails using this structure, you can pinpoint exactly what went wrong.

“You can literally look at it and pinpoint exactly where,” Damiano says. “And that is what makes the delegation stick, because you can just fix that one issue.”

The framework also flips the traditional delegation dynamic. Instead of the owner having to document everything, team members can use these six elements as a guide to ask better questions. This transforms delegation from a top-down directive into a collaborative process.

Oliver’s enthusiasm was immediate: “I’m going to start using this. I’m going to do this tomorrow with my team.”

The framework addresses his core challenge: getting his team to take ownership without constantly coming to him for decisions. By clearly defining decision boundaries upfront, team members gain confidence to act autonomously while knowing exactly when to escalate.

But individual delegation is just the beginning. True transformation requires examining every responsibility across the entire firm.

Building Your Delegation Roadmap: The Path to Strategic Leadership

Moving from technician to strategic architect demands a systematic inventory and redistribution of all responsibilities across your firm.

Damiano calls this process building a “Team Responsibility Inventory.” As Oliver discovered with his own 16-person company, you can reach a point where founders are still doing work from when the company was half its size.

“We’re the bottleneck,” he admitted, recognizing how he and his partner had become “functionally critical participants in the workflow” even though they now had a team capable of handling that work.

The Team Responsibility Inventory begins with radical transparency. Every team member completes a seven-day time audit, brain-dumping every task and responsibility they handle. No organization needed, just raw data.

Then comes the revolutionary part: a facilitated session to compile all these responsibilities and review them line by line as a company. For many firms, this marks the first time the team sees exactly what’s on the CEO’s plate.

“Imagine you’re going line by line through these responsibilities and as a team making a decision,” Damiano explains. “Should the CEO still have this responsibility?”

The power of this collective review can’t be overstated. Team members who’ve been frustrated by their CEO’s constant intervention suddenly understand the impossible workload their leader carries. More importantly, they become active participants in solving the problem.

Each responsibility faces one of six possible destinies: hire someone, delegate and train internally, outsource to a service provider, automate through software, consciously eliminate, or keep.

The elimination option deserves special attention. “This is an underused one,” Damiano emphasizes. After years of growth, firms accumulate zombie tasks—reports nobody reads, processes that served a purpose five years ago.

Oliver shared the perfect example: “There’s all these people running weekly, monthly, quarterly reports that were defined five years ago that they’ve been sending out constantly and nobody’s actually reading them.”

The delegation roadmap shows how responsibilities shifts over time. But successful execution requires developing your team’s decision-making capabilities, not just their technical skills.

This is where Damiano’s “Problem-Outcome-Solution Framework” comes in. Instead of bringing problems to leadership, team members learn to present complete proposals. Define the problem and its cost. Articulate the desired outcome. Recommend a solution with clear resource requirements.

Oliver’s current challenge illustrates why this matters: “My team comes to me with a problem and then I have to use my brain space to think about the solution. But it’d be much better if they defined the problem, defined the outcome they want, and gave me a proposed solution.”

This shift transforms every interaction from a drain on the CEO’s cognitive resources into a development opportunity for the team member.

The framework works because it addresses a fundamental misunderstanding about delegation. Firm owners often justify keeping tasks because “I could do this in five minutes. Why delegate something that takes them two hours?”

But this calculation ignores the compound effect. That two-hour learning investment today becomes 90 minutes next week, then 60 minutes, then eventually faster than you could do it yourself—all while freeing you to focus on strategic work only you can do.

Oliver’s ultimate success story proves what’s possible. After five years building his firm with these principles, he achieved the dream: “I was doing no sales, I was doing no client work. We were getting customers. They were getting served. They were happy, they were paying. Money was coming into the bank and I was not involved.”

For anyone trapped in 60-hour weeks, Oliver’s enthusiasm is infectious: “I will tell you that it is the greatest thing in the world to get into that position, because then you’re really just an owner of a business.”

From Bottleneck to Breakthrough: Your Next Strategic Move

The journey from bottleneck to strategic leader is about fundamentally reimagining how knowledge and decision-making flow through your organization.

Damiano’s framework reveals that delegation isn’t a single skill but a system. It requires clear communication, defined success metrics, and the courage to accept “good enough” from others. The same perfectionism that built your reputation can become the cage that limits your growth.

This transformation extends beyond individual firms to the entire accounting profession’s evolution. As AI handles increasingly complex technical work, the firms that thrive will be those where owners have already extracted themselves from technical execution. They’ll focus on strategy, relationships, and innovation instead.

What makes Human at Scale different is, “We don’t just come in as a consultant or advisor or coach,” Damiano explains. “We actually come in and join your team. We are in there, actually running these systems and building that with you.”

Listen to the full conversation between Oliver and Damiano on the Earmark Podcast to discover additional frameworks and tools. Visit Human at Scale to take their operational leadership assessment that can diagnose your firm’s specific bottlenecks.