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.
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.