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.”
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.