Rachel and Marcus Dillon were in the middle of pricing out a closet remodel when the numbers stopped making sense. Rachel was thinking maybe $5,000—and even that felt steep for organizing a space that already had decent storage. Marcus had mentally prepared for $10,000. Then the custom closet consultant dropped an estimate for $30,000.
“She equated it to a trip to Europe that may cost $20,000 to $30,000. And that’s just one trip. You use your closet daily,” Marcus recalled on a recent episode of Who’s Really the BOSS? “And I’m like, lady, I’m not spending 30 grand to go to Europe either.”
The disconnect was almost comical. But Marcus quickly flipped it into a lesson for accounting firm owners. “You could spend $30,000 on a closet. Why don’t you spend $30,000 a year on a really good accountant and know where your business is at any given time?”
That conversation about value sets up the bigger story. Because just like that closet consultant needed to find her ideal customer, Marcus and Rachel had to figure out who should truly own each piece of their growing accounting firm.
When the Owner Becomes the Bottleneck
In the beginning, Marcus was everything at his accounting firm. Business development started with him. Some preparation work landed on his desk. And he reviewed every single deliverable before it went out the door.
“You were the beginning, the middle and the end,” Rachel told him during the episode. “And there was help in between those things.”
That worked fine when the firm was smaller. But Dillon Business Advisors (DBA) is now a $5 million-plus CPA firm with about 24 team members. At that size, having one person as the center of every decision is impossible.
The first breakthrough came when they built what they call the “team of three,” a pod structure that created capacity for quality service delivery and allowed them to scale. They could keep bringing on new clients because the pods could handle them. But even with that structure and Rachel’s help, Marcus remained the person everyone ultimately answered to.
“Your org chart and responsibilities have to look a lot different than they did at one, two, or three million,” Marcus explained. The question that forced their hand was uncomfortable but necessary: What in the firm still waits on the owner?
Why Summer Is the Time to Fix It
The Dillons tackled this restructuring during what they call “improvement season,” which runs from roughly April 15 to August 15. It’s after tax season but before extension deadlines heat up. Since most firms in their network run both tax and client accounting services, summer is when they have breathing room to experiment.
“We like to do our refinements, improvements, and sometimes experiments during the times we’re not in a deadline crunch,” Rachel explained. The timing is deliberate. They implement changes in summer, practice them during the lighter extension season in September and October, then refine them once more before year-end. By January, when the volume returns, the new way of working is second nature.
“That’s really a gift to our team,” Rachel added, “to not pull a software and change it or completely rework a whole process in the middle of tax season.”
This particular improvement season, Amy McCarty, DBA’s Director of Operations and People, led the charge to formalize director roles. But before they could put people in seats, they had to define what those seats actually were. They’d learned that lesson the hard way with a director of business development hire that didn’t work out, largely because the role lacked clear definition.
The Seven Parts Every Director Role Needs
The word “ownership” does heavy lifting in this conversation, and Rachel made the distinction crystal clear by referencing an episode of The Double Win podcast. Real ownership means handling something from conception through planning to execution, at an agreed-upon standard.
“It’s fine for a spouse to say, ‘Can I go to the store for you?'” Rachel explained. “But it’s another thing for that spouse to know we need things for the weekend, to make that list, go to the store, and unload the groceries. They need to own the whole process.”
Until someone owns the entire function, the mental load stays with the original person. They’re still wondering, “Do they know what they’re supposed to do? Will it get done to the standard I expect?”
DBA built its director roles around seven specific components:
- Primary Focus: A one-sentence statement that captures the role’s core purpose. “If you can’t say it in a sentence, then the role isn’t clear,” Marcus said.
- Owns: What they’re specifically accountable for. “Not aspirational, but concrete.”
- Measured By: The outcomes that prove it’s working. “That’s where ownership gets teeth,” Marcus noted.
- Not Responsible For: Marcus called this “the most underrated section” in the whole framework. In small firms where everyone wears multiple hats, explicitly naming what’s not someone’s job gives them “freedom, a breath of fresh air.”
- The One-Liner: The soul of the role. For example, the Director of Technology and AI “builds the machine, but doesn’t run it.” The Director of Sales and Marketing “brings in the right work, doesn’t execute it.”
- KPIs: The numbers that prove success.
- Weekly Question: A single recurring question that keeps the role honest. For operations, it’s “Where are we overloaded or at risk of missing a deadline?” For sales, it’s “Do we have enough right-fit opportunities coming in?”
Rachel, drawing on her background as an elementary teacher, explained why the “not responsible for” section is so powerful. “Our brain is forming pathways, right? And trying to connect to something that we already know. You help your brain out by saying it is not this.”
The Five Director Roles at DBA
With the framework built, DBA mapped out five director positions. Each deliberately combines two related areas. This is a design choice that works at their current size but anticipates future growth.
“At a $5 million company, the directors can handle those two areas,” Rachel explained. But at $10 or $15 million, those roles might split. Sales and marketing could become two separate directors. Technology and AI might divide.
Here’s how the roles break down today:
- Director of Tax and Financial Planning: The technical authority who ensures everything the firm delivers is correct, sound, and within the firm’s risk tolerance. He doesn’t own workflow enforcement (that’s operations) or sales (that’s marketing).
- Director of Accounting and Advisory: Focuses on client experience and ongoing advisory value. “It’s not just accurate financials,” Marcus explained. “It’s the perceived insight and the conversations that you have with clients.”
- Director of Operations and People: Runs the machine and the people inside it, owning execution capacity and accountability. “She runs the thing, essentially,” Marcus joked.
- Director of Technology and AI: Builds the systems and automation layer. After 18 months on the team, DBA’s Director of Technology and AI, Angel Sabino, has moved from playing with AI tools to actually deploying them across the firm.
- Director of Sales and Marketing: Brings in the right work without executing it, working closely with operations to pair new clients with teams that have both capacity and expertise.
The process of defining these roles surfaced some surprising overlaps. Rachel’s previous title was “Firm Administrator.” It was a catch-all that mostly meant she didn’t do tax or technical accounting. When they formalized the director structure, they discovered that Rachel, Amy, and Marcus were all holding pieces of the “people” function.
“When we did this, we really created a clear divide,” Rachel said. “Amy’s really going to own people. Can I help her? Can you help her? Yes, but she owns it.”
Making It Stick Through Scorecards and Trust
Defining roles is necessary but not sufficient. “If you never review this again, if you only bring it up at someone’s annual review, this is not going to be successful,” Marcus warned.
DBA’s accountability lives in a spreadsheet. Each director has a tab to log their KPIs, which feed into a color-coded dashboard showing whether each area is on track, at risk, or off track. Directors update metrics weekly and rate their KPIs monthly.
But the magic isn’t in the spreadsheet. It’s the question they ask when something goes red. Instead of “What went wrong?” or “Why didn’t you hit your number?” they ask, “What do you need from this room?”
Rachel gave an example. If sales and marketing show zero right-fit leads, she might tell the other directors she needs educational materials or downloadable resources, something technical that makes the firm attractive to prospects. “That’s something where they could help me, since I’m not an accountant,” she said.
This only works with genuine trust. “If you have people that are not there to really ask what you need from this room, and they’re okay with either you failing or wanting you to fail, that’s an awful situation,” Marcus said bluntly.
The owner also has to resist the rescue instinct. If Marcus jumps in too quickly when someone struggles, “you’re always going to be the person picking up the pieces and quote unquote rescuing that person. And they never fully own anything.”
The Payoff Is A Firm That Can Scale Without the Owner
The shift from owner-led to director-led reduces Marcus’s workload while creating real opportunities for talented team members. These are the kinds of opportunities that, when missing, send good people out the door to create their own.
It also positions the firm to scale differently. “With the director levels plus new technology, we’ll be able to grow and scale a little bit more without adding the same number of team members,” Marcus explained. They can contemplate growing to $10 million without doubling their headcount, especially as AI and automation reshape what capacity means.
Marcus offered a simple example of how it works now. Someone forwarded a news article about COVID-related penalty and interest clawbacks. Instead of Marcus making a snap decision, three directors evaluated it together. Sales assessed the opportunity, operations checked capacity and tax confirmed feasibility. They made a collective, informed decision with no bottleneck.
“The minutes that exist here in improvement season are maybe more important than the minutes that exist during busy season,” Marcus reflected. “Because here’s where we’re planting the seeds to harvest later on.”
For firms still centered on the owner, the Dillons’ journey offers a warning and a roadmap. The warning is that growth will eventually make the owner-as-bottleneck model impossible. The roadmap is clear role definitions, genuine ownership transfer, and the trust to let capable people either succeed or occasionally fail.
DBA is sharing its complete director role framework with members of the Collective by DBA community. To learn more about joining, listen to the full episode.
Rachel and Marcus Dillon, CPA, own a national, remote client accounting and advisory services firm, Dillon Business Advisors, with a team of 25 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.