AI and Client Trust: Why AI Use Should Not Lower Your Fees
Clients care about the quality of the work they receive, and they want accurate answers, timely responses, and advice they can rely on. Whether AI...
Growth Strategy
Is the Accounting Talent Shortage Easing?
Firm leaders want a clear answer to whether the accounting talent shortage is easing, so they can plan staffing with some confidence. We hear a...
Competing in a Consolidating Accounting Market
Most leaders of independent firms talk about consolidation as a general condition, a pressure that hangs over the whole profession and seems to help...
The End of the Reporting Cadence: What Clients Will Expect From Their Accounting Firm in 2027
For most of the profession’s history, the accounting relationship has been organized around the close. Work was scheduled against the calendar,...
Culling Clients: Why the Best Firms Review Their Roster Twice a Year
Every managing partner can name the clients who no longer belong on the roster. Ask privately and the list forms within seconds: the client whose...
The CRM Nobody Uses: Turning Client Data Into a Growth Engine
Most accounting firms do not have a CRM problem. They have an adoption problem. The software may be perfectly capable, implementation may have been...
Growth Outruns Culture: Guardrails for Fast-Scaling Firms
Gartner’s Chief of Research, Brian Kropp, has a name for what happens when a firm grows faster than it can hold onto itself: culture debt, the...
Beyond Synergies: Building a Structured Value-Creation Plan Before You Sign the LOI
More than 70 percent of M&A transactions fail to deliver their anticipated strategic and financial value within three years, according to PwC and...
Revenue Mix, Not Just Revenue Size: Redesigning Your Services
Revenue growth tells you that something is working, but revenue mix tells you whether what's working will keep working. Two firms at identical...
The PE-Backed Competitor Next Door: How Independent Firms Compete Without Selling
The competitive landscape for independent accounting firms has changed more in the past four years than in the previous four decades. As of 2026,...
Post Tax Season: What to Do in the Next 60 Days
The deadline has passed, the returns are filed, and if your firm is like most, the first week of May looks a lot like exhaling. That exhale is...
EY Put Agentic AI Into 160,000 Audits: What That Means for Mid-Market Firms
On April 7, 2026, EY announced the global rollout of enterprise-scale agentic AI across its assurance practice, embedding a multi-agent framework...
The Best Time to Plan for Next Year Is Right Now
Most mid-market firms wait until Q4 to begin strategic planning, and that timing is precisely why most strategic plans do not produce results. By the...
AI Won't Replace Your Tools. It Will Live Inside Them.
A belief is circulating in professional services firms that AI will eventually make the tools they rely on today obsolete. The reasoning sounds...
M&A Without Strategic Fit Is Just Expensive Chaos
Why accounting firm acquisitions succeed, or stall, and how to manage the pace of change. The accounting profession is in the middle of one of the...
The Modern Operating Model: Fixing Partner Bottlenecks Without Burning Out Managers
Growth is exciting until the foundational operating model begins to crack.