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Smart Accounting Firms Are Done Being Yes People

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

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

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

What Makes a Firm “Renegade”?

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

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

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

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

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

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

Taking the Lead with Clients

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

Renegade firms flip this completely around.

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

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

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

Breaking Open the Black Box of Compensation

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

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

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

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

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

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

Building Teams That Actually Want to Work Together

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

Renegade firms take a different approach.

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

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

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

When Banking Becomes a Partnership

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Learning from Renegade Mistakes

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Path Forward

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

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

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

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

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

Women in Accounting Need Mentors Who See Their Potential Before They Do

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“We see in others what we fail to see in ourselves.”

This simple but powerful insight came from a coffee conversation between two accounting colleagues. One was sharing her frustrations about advancing in a male-dominated leadership environment. The other pointed out strengths that were completely invisible to their owner: clear communication, authentic presence, and natural insight.

This conversation sparked a recent episode of the She Counts podcast, where hosts Questian Telka and Nancy McClelland dive into why mentorship is critical for women in accounting.

The Hidden Crisis in Accounting Leadership

The numbers tell a troubling story. Men and women enter the accounting profession at roughly equal rates: about 50/50. But women hold only 19% of partner positions in CPA firms nationwide. 

As Nancy points out, some major accounting firms are completely scrapping their diversity, equity, and inclusion programs (while others are doubling down on them). “Think about what the future of leadership in those companies is going to look like,” she says.

The reality is that this leadership gap isn’t about qualifications. When Questian worked at a Big Four firm early in her career, seeing a female chairperson of the board felt “unbelievable,” not because the woman wasn’t qualified, but because such representation was so rare.

Even more troubling are the explicit barriers that still exist. One colleague shared how she was promised a partner position when she joined a firm. After years of working toward that goal, the position went to a male colleague instead. When she had her first child, firm leadership told her she “wouldn’t want to be in a leadership role now anyway, because she was a mom.”

This kind of thinking—illegal as it is—shows the deeper assumptions that still limit women’s advancement.

Civil rights leader Marian Wright Edelman said it best: “You can’t be what you can’t see.” When leadership representation is so skewed, it creates a visibility problem. Women entering the profession may limit their own ambitions simply because they haven’t seen enough examples of women successfully reaching senior leadership roles.

The Science Behind Seeing Potential

The power of mentorship isn’t mysterious; it’s grounded in neuroscience that explains why outside perspective can literally change how we see ourselves.

As women, we’re often taught to fixate on our shortcomings rather than our strengths. “It is so common for us to focus on looking at our negatives,” Questian explains, “that we are often not paying enough attention to what our good traits are, and all of the positives that we bring to the table.”

Nancy admits she struggles with this, too. “If I’m naturally good at something, I don’t really take credit for it. I don’t think there’s anything impressive about this. It just is.”

This is where the science gets fascinating. Mirror neurons make it possible for us to learn something without doing it ourselves. When we watch someone teaching on stage or demonstrating a skill, “the audience can actually learn that thing as if they were doing it themselves,” Nancy explains.

In mentorship relationships, this means we can observe behaviors in our mentors and begin to see those possibilities for ourselves. When Nancy saw women like Claudia Hill speaking at accounting conferences, her immediate reaction was “me too. That’s a thing I’d like to do.”

When we receive positive feedback from someone we trust, our brains release dopamine. This reinforces the behavior that created the praise in the first place. “Getting a positive affirmation from it makes you much more inclined to continue to repeat it,” Questian says.

This creates a positive cycle where confidence builds on itself, leading to more confident behaviors that generate more positive responses.

This science helps explain Questian’s remarkable transformation. She went from someone who “could hardly get on a zoom call” to confidently delivering webinars and speaking at conferences. When Nancy pushed her to take a Theater of Public Speaking class, she wasn’t just suggesting skill-building; she was recommending a way to rewire her brain around public speaking anxiety.

Even today, Nancy provides the outside perspective that catches limiting thoughts before they take hold. When Questian says something like, “I’m going to submit this topic to Intuit Connect, but I’m sure they won’t take it,” Nancy immediately calls it out: “Is that your lizard-brain trying to protect you from rejection?”

Finding Your Mentors

Understanding the science is one thing. Actually building these relationships is another. The good news is that mentorship opportunities exist everywhere… if you know where to look.

But first, you need to get clear about what you actually need. As mentor Gaynor Meilke told Nancy, “How are you going to get to where you want to be if you don’t know what that is?”

Sometimes you need technical guidance. Sometimes confidence building. Sometimes a roadmap for advancement. Sometimes just someone who understands your challenges.

Questian never had a formal mentorship program. Instead, she’s found value in informal relationships with people who share similar values and communication styles.

Conferences are gold mines for mentorship connections. Both hosts trace pivotal moments to conference encounters. LinkedIn, Facebook groups, mastermind communities, and even your current workplace all offer potential mentor relationships.

The step that stops many people is actually asking for help. “You have to ask them,” Questian emphasizes. “What’s the worst they can say? No.”

Questian learned this when she persistently pursued Nancy as a mentor, even after initial hesitation. Sometimes the answer is no. But often, people who seem unreachable are willing to help if you show genuine interest.

Mentorship doesn’t depend on traditional hierarchies either. Nancy’s relationship with Melissa Miller Furgeson shows peer mentorship in action. “I feel so comfortable being able to go to her and say, I have no clue what I’m doing, and she’ll be like, here’s a Loom.”

Questian notes that mentors can even be younger than you. She considers Krista Marina Apardian from Theater of Public Speaking a mentor despite Apardian being younger, recognizing her as “an incredible speaker” with valuable expertise.

Different life phases need different types of mentorship. When Nancy needed encouragement to pursue tax preparation, Theresa Briggs saw potential Nancy couldn’t recognize. She gave Nancy a CCH Master Tax Guide with an inspirational inscription Nancy still treasures.

When Nancy needed business operation skills, Clare Karchmar taught her to “come to me with solutions, not problems.” This lesson fundamentally changed how Nancy approached professional challenges. Karchmar even gave Nancy a name badge that said “Hello, I’m: Shocked” to help break the habit of expressing surprise instead of focusing on solutions.

Recognizing Bad Mentorship

Not all mentorship relationships are helpful. Recognizing warning signs protects you from relationships that could harm your career.

Nancy shares a cautionary tale about approaching a leader for help with overwhelming work challenges. The leader’s solution was to make herbal tea and suggested yoga. “That would not have happened to a man.”

Warning signs include mentors who seem more interested in making themselves look good than developing you; those who take credit for your work; or anyone whose treatment feels patronizing.

Nancy advises, “If something happens that would never happen to a man… this is not your person.”

Being a Mentor Yourself

The mentorship relationship works both ways. Even as Nancy mentors Questian, she continues seeking mentorship for her own challenges.

“I am going to be turning 53 years old in a couple of days, and I am still in need of mentorship,” Nancy says. “We need to both have and be mentors at every stage of our lives.”

This eliminates the pressure to wait until you’re “qualified enough” to help others. Your current struggles and experiences are valuable to someone a few steps behind you in that area of life.

Some women hesitate to mentor because of imposter syndrome. “What do I have to offer?” is a common thought. But as Nancy points out, “Sometimes it’s your mistakes and your failures and your experiences that make you a more valuable mentor.”

When women support each other through mentorship, they create visibility that makes ambition feel achievable for the next generation. This gradually shifts from initially seeing a female leader as “unbelievable” to it eventually feeling normal.

Moving Forward

The accounting profession’s leadership gender gap at least partially stems from the absence of mentors who can see and nurture potential before women recognize it themselves.

As Marianne Williamson reminds us, “When you let your light shine, you unconsciously give others permission to do the same.”

Building mentorship relationships is about creating the visibility and support systems that will help other women recognize and develop their potential, too.

Listen to the full episode and join the conversation on the She Counts Podcast LinkedIn page. The hosts want to know how firms and businesses can build good mentorship cultures and what mentorship experiences have worked for you. Share your thoughts and experiences to help build a stronger community of women supporting women in accounting.

Whether you’re seeking mentorship or stepping up to mentor someone else, remember that these relationships have the power to transform the profession. The accounting industry’s future depends on women supporting women, and that future starts with the mentorship relationships we build today.