Rachel Dillon

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

Earmark Team · May 31, 2026 ·

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:

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.
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.
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.

What 15 Years of Running an Accounting Firm Taught Marcus Dillon About Building Something That Lasts

Earmark Team · May 24, 2026 ·

Imagine the managing partner of a $35 million accounting firm. Twenty-four partners. A hundred and fifty team members. And this managing partner still carries the largest book of business in the entire organization.

Now hold that image and set it next to another one. A husband-and-wife team in San Antonio running an $11.5 million firm. Three people at the top. Zero billable production hours between them. And by Marcus Dillon’s account, they’re “having a whole lot more fun than the people who are maintaining client work.”

Same profession. Radically different firms. And only one of those models is built to thrive in the future.

That contrast sparked a conversation between Marcus and Rachel Dillon on a recent episode of Who’s Really the Boss? The episode marks a milestone. Dillon Business Advisors is approaching its 15th anniversary, and the Dillons use the occasion to walk through what Marcus calls the “3.0” chapter of their firm. The last five years have brought reinvention, painful lessons, and hard-won clarity about what actually creates lasting value in an accounting practice.

After 15 years and three distinct reinventions, the Dillons believe the firms most likely to thrive in the next chapter of this profession build for enterprise value. That means creating role-based team structures instead of depending on irreplaceable individuals. It means developing real leadership beyond the founder. And it means maintaining enough flexibility to navigate a future where AI, private equity, and market consolidation reshape the rules faster than most owners realize.

Here are the three interconnected lessons from DBA’s journey through their third reinvention.

Building around roles, not people

For roughly six years, Dillon Business Advisors was stuck. Revenue hovered between $2 million and $2.3 million in what Marcus describes as a “yo-yo effect” of exiting clients, growing organically, exiting clients, and growing organically again. They were trying to shift from annual compliance touchpoints to monthly recurring advisory work, but the team that excelled at cranking out tax returns once a year wasn’t necessarily the team best suited to serve clients month after month with real-time advice.

“The business was moving that way, regardless of whether that team member was coming or not,” Marcus explains. And that created a problem no amount of hoping could solve.

The breakthrough came when Marcus and Rachel stopped trying to clone people and started building around roles.

DBA already had the client service manager (CSM) who handled day-to-day communication and bookkeeping. They also had the director-level advisory role at the top. But there was a gap between those two. The client controller or tax manager role wasn’t consistent. Marcus says they “experimented, screwed up, and scrapped different ideas” before landing on what became the team of three: a defined, role-based pod assigned to every client throughout the year.

The team of three model bases assignments on role, not on specific people.

“We made some mistakes by trying to recreate or clone a person, and you just can’t do that,” Marcus explains. Over 15 years, he’s watched team members leave, partners come and go, and clients move on. “Nothing is forever anymore. If you’re building all of your decisions around taking care of the team you have today, that’s kind of shortsighted.”

Rachel offers a personal window into why this mindset shift was hard. Both her parents essentially worked for the same employer throughout their careers. “Staying 20, 30, or 40 years at a job isn’t the norm anymore,” she says.

Once DBA embraced role-based structure, two things happened. First, the firm could absorb turnover without chaos. Second, teams got remarkably efficient. The team of three created so much capacity that team members started asking for more work. Clients knew their team. The team knew their clients. Life was good, maybe too good. Because when DBA looked up in 2024, they’d already converted every annual client to monthly recurring, and they were entirely dependent on organic growth for new business.

But the structural foundation enabled something most small firms never achieve: a real leadership team beyond the founders.

Amy McCarty joined as Director of Operations at the end of 2023. Lezlie Reeves, who started as a CSM in 2020, rose through every level to become Director of Accounting and Advisory. In 2024, Angel Sabino transitioned from being DBA’s external IT provider to Director of Technology. Arin Neucks joined as Director of Tax and Financial Planning. Amy and Lezlie now hold phantom stock in DBA and share in decision-making as owners would.

Meanwhile, Marcus’s own production hours dropped to between 200 and 300 annually over the last two to three years. Rather than backfilling that time with more client work, he channeled it into consulting other firm owners, advising technology companies, and leading industry groups, work that, as he puts it, “gives me life.”

The discipline to stay out of operations was tough. Marcus admits that earlier in DBA’s history, he’d “pull a pin and throw a grenade in it just to rebuild it.” The result was predictable. “You have collateral damage. People get hurt, and they leave because you don’t allow them to do the job you hired them for.”

Building around roles sounds simple. But getting there required some expensive lessons.

The cost of reinvention

If the team of three was the structural breakthrough of DBA’s 3.0 chapter, the path to getting there was paved with decisions that cost real money. Some were strategically brilliant, some were painfully expensive.

Start with the audit practice. DBA exited it around the beginning of 3.0, freeing the firm to go all-in on monthly CAS and advisory. Revenue temporarily dropped in 2021. PPP and ERC consulting work softened the blow, but DBA performed that work exclusively for existing clients. “We didn’t do that for any external non-existing clients,” Marcus emphasizes. “We only took care of our own during that time.”

But the client exits didn’t stop there. Over seven years, DBA performed roughly one exit per year, and sometimes two. They shed complex, non-ideal QuickBooks Desktop clients who didn’t fit the monthly recurring model. The last cut might have gone too deep.

“That very last exit we probably could have done without,” Marcus reflects. The final group made up roughly $100,000 in revenue. They’d made it through multiple prior cuts. “Margins were high on those clients, even if they were annual-only touchpoints. They were so easy.”

During those transition years, DBA created a bonus pool shared with the entire team for every new monthly engagement signed, regardless of who worked on that client. The goal was rewiring how everyone thought about client relationships.

Then came the most expensive mistake of 3.0.

At the end of 2022, DBA changed its name and domain, dropping “CPA” from the branding. The rationale made sense. “CPA” directed too much tax-only traffic when the firm had evolved beyond compliance work. But the execution was catastrophic.

“We lost all of our credibility overnight from an SEO optimization, from a recognition standpoint,” Marcus says. The domain redirects (the technical plumbing that preserves search engine authority when you change web addresses) were botched. Traffic from Google searches “almost completely dropped off for more than a year.”

The worst part was DBA hired a consulting company to manage the transition and paid “hundreds of thousands of dollars. And it still didn’t go well.”

“Don’t take anyone’s word for it when they say you just have to give it some time,” Rachel warned. “That’s definitely not the case.” Recovery took three to four years.

The firm also evolved to fully remote operations during this period, opening hiring beyond Texas to anywhere in the US and even offshore. Two team members moving to Colorado helped push this transition. But going national meant growing up operationally, adding proper benefits, launching a 401(k) with profit sharing in 2020, and eventually moving to a PEO to handle multi-state compliance.

By 2024, with excess capacity from the efficient team structure but organic growth harder to come by, the leadership had to restructure and cut, or go back to market. They chose growth. DBA completed two strategic acquisitions in 2024, one at the end of January and a larger one on October 1. The October acquisition represented about 25% of DBA’s revenue, a cap Marcus set intentionally. “We wanted to retain DBAs’ culture, processes, and technology.”

Today, DBA exceeds $6 million in revenue. But with that scale comes bigger questions about the future.

Two types of firms, one uncertain future

With a leadership team that can run the firm without Marcus touching a tax return, the question shifted from survival to direction. Marcus has conversations with firm leaders across the spectrum that reveal patterns every firm owner needs to understand.

At a breakfast with the $35 million firm’s managing partner, Marcus heard a framework that crystallized his thinking. Two firms exist in today’s market: the legacy firm, where the balance sheet is essentially a snapshot of human relationships, and the enterprise-value firm, where systems, processes, and technology create value independent of any single person.

“That first firm will continue to diminish in value just because they’re not going to be relevant in this next chapter,” Marcus says. Relationships matter, but they alone aren’t enough when private equity, alternative ownership structures, and AI permanently reshape the landscape.

Marcus sees three types of firms emerging:

First, solo and micro firms powered by AI. As larger firms consolidate, team members leave and launch practices that leverage tools like Copilot and Cowork to run $300,000 to $1 million operations without traditional employees. “If you can get $300,000 to $400,000 or more worth of work done as a solo firm owner, by all means, great.”

Second, mid-size firms like DBA, that invest in teams, leadership, and technology and build something meant to outlast the founder.

Third, large rolled-up or PE-backed organizations with the budget to deploy technology at scale.

The parallel to other industries is instructive. DBA’s dental and veterinary clients went through consolidation first. Banking followed. “Independent banking is very hard and it has to be very intentional for them to exist,” Marcus observes. For independent medical practices, “you may not have the patient base you want. You may not be able to hire and pay the team you want.”

And then there’s AI, which Marcus frames as Pac-Man moving from the bottom up. “If you’ve got technology that’s coming for you and you’re just standing there, game over.”

The solution is continuous upskilling. “You can’t not train somebody because you’re worried they’re going to outgrow you and leave.”

This leaves DBA in a deliberate state of discernment.

Marcus spends time with firms of every size, learning what $10 million firms struggle with, how $35 million firms think about technology, and what happens when $250 million firms acquire smaller practices. Part of this is strategic intelligence gathering. But it also positions DBA to attract great clients and talent when they leave larger organizations.

The Dillons haven’t decided to merge, sell, take PE money, or stay independent. They’re building what Marcus calls “optionality.” The leadership team now plans in one- to three-year windows. As Rachel notes, even five years out is difficult to predict “because we don’t even know what the next six months, 12 months, or 18 months will bring.”

Marcus grounds it all in stewardship. “If I’m no longer the best single owner of this business, what does that look like?” He’s asking the question. He’s just refusing to answer it prematurely, or out of fear.

“It’s not a bad idea to pause and pray and wait for your decision to be the right one for you and at the right time,” he says. “Other friends are doing deals, don’t feel pressure to do your own and do a bad one.”

What 15 years of reinvention actually teaches

DBA’s journey distills into three lessons that apply whether you run a $1 million practice or a $100 million operation.

Build around roles, not people. The team of three made DBA resilient enough to absorb turnover and efficient enough to create real capacity. If your firm collapses when one key employee leaves, you have a structural problem. Define the roles that make service consistent regardless of who fills them.
Expect real pain on the path to enterprise value. DBA didn’t reach $6 million by making perfect decisions. They arrived by making intentional ones and refusing to let mistakes paralyze them.
Independence requires more intentionality, not less. Standing still is a decision, and increasingly a bad one. Whether you stay independent, merge, or take investment, the question is whether you’re adding enterprise value daily, or performing tasks technology will soon handle better.

The Dillons share what they’ve learned while figuring out their own path. After 15 years and three reinventions, they’ve earned the right to take their time with the next decision.

Listen to the full episode to hear Marcus and Rachel walk through every chapter of DBA’s evolution, including the specific conversations happening right now about what this profession’s next chapter actually looks like.

Why Your Team Resists Change and the Simple Framework That Fixes It

Earmark Team · May 19, 2026 ·

A client builds an AI-powered dashboard, gets his CPA to validate it, then turns around and asks, “So what value do you bring that I can’t get from this thing?” The CPA doesn’t have a great answer. Services get scaled back.

Meanwhile, an oral surgery practice with four doctors and $8 million in annual revenue is still running QuickBooks Desktop, booking revenue through monthly adjusting journal entries, and entering its entire American Express bill as a single payment each month. They haven’t updated a single process since they founded the business decades ago. Both of these clients exist right now, and they could both be sitting in your pipeline this week.

That’s the change landscape accounting firm leaders navigate today. And if you think the biggest threat is AI or the private equity money flooding into the profession, Marcus and Rachel Dillon say you’re looking at the wrong problem.

In this episode of Who’s Really the BOSS?, the Dillons, owners of Dillon Business Advisors, make the case that the real risk isn’t the change itself. It’s how you lead your people through it. Drawing on real client stories, their own leadership missteps, and a framework borrowed from Patrick Lencioni, they lay out a practical approach to change management any firm leader can start using immediately.

The Change Landscape: From Silicon Valley to Main Street

Before you can bring your team through change, you need to understand what you’re actually up against. The answer depends on where you’re standing.

Marcus spends time networking with partners at top-20 and top-100 firms with $60 million or more in revenue. What he hears from those conversations tends toward doomsday. These firms serve private equity-backed businesses whose principals all have finance or business backgrounds. Those clients are leaning hard into AI, meaning the professionals serving them have to keep pace or move faster.

One leader at a larger firm told Marcus he no longer opens conversations with “How are the kids?” Instead, the first question he asks clients, prospects, and peers is, “How are you using AI today?”

“If your clients are changing faster than you are,” Marcus explains, “you’re going to be the weakest link in that relationship, and they’re going to move on faster than you can.”

The Big Four are already placing their bets. PwC is doubling down on technology and AI at the entry level, slashing recruiting and campus visits. If that layer of the workforce shrinks, they don’t need to wine and dine as many college students. EY is taking a different approach, doubling its CPA exam pass bonus to $10,000 and investing in the human side.

But while Silicon Valley types are sounding the alarm, Main Street tells a different story.

Remember that oral surgery practice? The lead doctor told Marcus they set up the business nearly 30 years ago and never updated their processes because the same team has been in place the whole time.

DBA’s plan for this client is to set up QuickBooks Online, enable bank feeds, connect them to a service like Ramp, and automate the revenue journal entry. Low-hanging fruit by any modern standard.

“You have to choose how analog you want to exist in this digital world,” Marcus says. The clients who want a human touch continue to pay a premium for it. A purely digital product, he argues, is a race to the bottom.

When Change Communication Goes Wrong

Marcus doesn’t sugarcoat DBA’s early track record on change communication. When the firm merged in another practice nearly a decade ago, Marcus was so excited about the acquisition that he gathered everyone in the conference room and essentially announced it cold. Most team members were hearing about it for the first time.

“That probably didn’t go over as well as I could have hoped,” he admits.

The fallout from moments like this is bad. People disengage. The service atmosphere turns mediocre. Tension builds. Marcus found himself labeled “addicted to change,” which bred resistance rather than readiness.

“If you don’t work on your culture, you still have a culture,” he says. “It’s just unintentional. The same can be said of change.”

Rachel offers the perspective from the other side. When she talks to team members about why they push back on change, the answer is almost always a lack of clarity. They don’t understand why it’s important. They can’t see how it impacts them personally.

“A lot of times it feels like, ‘This is going to take me longer and I’m going to have to work more. And I don’t have any more hours or capacity left to give,'” Rachel explains.

The Dillons evolved toward a three-question framework:

What is changing?
What is staying the same?
How does this impact me?

It was an improvement, but still incomplete. It only addressed the team’s perspective, not clients or other stakeholders.

A peer group introduced Marcus to Patrick Lencioni’s Four Ps framework. The Dillons adopted it as their change-management filter and introduced it to the team at their recent Gather event alongside their rally cry for 2026: “Lead change, create impact.”

The Four Ps: Your Repeatable Framework for Leading Change

The framework gives firm leaders four sequential steps to follow every time they introduce change, whether it’s a new tech stack, a team restructuring, or a client exit strategy.

Purpose: What are we changing?

You need to anchor every change in something bigger than “we found a cool new tool.” At DBA, that anchor is their mission, vision, and values. Their core values spell out the word IMPACT, and Rachel describes how they literally map each proposed change back to specific letters in that acronym.

The trap most leaders fall into here is vagueness. Marcus admits he’s guilty of softening language because he wants to be liked and avoiding directness to dodge conflict.

“Just tell me what you expect. Just tell me what you need me to do,” Rachel says. “People don’t want 20 options. They want one or two.”

Marcus borrows from Andy Stanley: “To be clear is to be kind. To be unclear is to be unkind.”

“If you can’t clearly say what’s changing, the team will default to their comfort level,” Marcus warns. “Which means they’ll do as little as possible.”

Picture: What does success look like?

Leaders often skip this step. They explain what’s changing and how it will happen, but they never describe what winning looks like on the other side.

Marcus uses a family vacation analogy. You decide to take a trip (that’s the purpose). Now tell the kids you’re going to Disneyland and describe the destination so everyone can see it.

In a firm context, that might mean showing the team what life looks like after implementing a team-of-three service model: predictable capacity, no more overtime scrambles, better client satisfaction scores.

The Dillons deploy an exercise called Optimist/Pessimist. Pair people up. One person must articulate at least one or two positives about the proposed change. The other must find negatives. This gives explicit permission to voice concerns that would otherwise get whispered in private channels.

“Once we are sick of saying the same thing over and over again, they’ve actually received it, processed it, and can carry it out,” Rachel says.

Plan: How do we get there?

The plan phase breaks the picture into executable steps. Extending the road trip metaphor, explain whether you’re flying or driving. If driving, are you taking the scenic route? Where do you pull over to celebrate progress?

Rachel emphasizes two non-negotiables for every step: a responsible person and a deadline. Each milestone needs an owner and a date, so there’s no ambiguity about who’s doing what by when.

This is also where you appoint change agents from within your team. Team members who showed energy during the Picture phase are natural candidates to lead portions of the execution.

“A simple plan executed beats a perfect plan that’s been delayed,” Marcus notes.

Part: What’s my role in this?

Every single person needs to understand their role, including those whose role is “nothing changes for you.”

Marcus shares a recent example from DBA’s acquisition work. For some team members, the message was, “Keep serving your current clients well. You’re not getting new clients from this acquisition. You’re not learning a new process or technology.”

Simply telling people “your job stays the same” is just as critical as the detailed instructions given to people at the center of the transition.

When you don’t tell people their part, they default to their worst experience. Maybe a previous boss promised “nothing will change” and then changed everything. You can’t control the baggage people carry, but you can replace old narratives with present-tense clarity.

This step requires a conversation, not an email. People need two-way dialogue where they can ask questions and process in real time.

Leading Through the Messy Middle

Marcus closes with an honest confession. “I’m as guilty as anybody. I want to initiate the change. And I want all the fruit from the success of that change. I don’t want to live through the change. I want to just speed through it or delegate it.”

Successful firms have leaders who bring their people through change intentionally, with clarity, conviction, and care.

The Four Ps give you a repeatable filter for any transition:

Purpose: Anchor the change in your mission and values and say it plainly
Picture: Show people what success looks like, then repeat until you’re sick of it
Plan: Break the vision into steps with owners and deadlines
Part: Tell everyone their role in a live conversation, not an email

Whether you’re navigating a firm acquisition, a technology overhaul, or wondering how fast AI is coming for your services, the same four questions apply. As the Dillons put it, the goal for 2026 is to lead change and create impact.

Listen to the full episode to hear Marcus’s take on how fast AI is really moving, Rachel’s breakdown of the Optimist/Pessimist exercise in action, and why moving homes during busy season might actually make perfect sense for a couple “addicted to change.”

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

Earmark Team · May 15, 2026 ·

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.

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

Earmark Team · April 17, 2026 ·

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.