One Step Better Podcast

Are you billing for work that never shows up on an invoice? Learn how to verify client tasks and protect your firm's revenue. Discrepancies in billing often stem from poor communication or work not performed. This conversation highlights the danger of making up numbers for services and why you must ensure every agreement is fully verified before billing. Using the Chick-fil-A model as a standa...

Patrick Accounting is on pace for roughly $1.5 million in new sales this year. That’s a great year by almost any measure. It’s also short of the goal. In this episode, Matt and Mike get honest about the leadership side of that gap and why they’re choosing to own it instead of explaining it away. The firm set quarterly run-rate targets that climbed from $350K to $500K in annual recurring revenue by...

For years, the answer to "we're busy" was simple: post a job ad. Good people fix all problems. Good people still fix problems, but Mike and Matt argue the first question has changed. Before you hire, you have to ask what you're actually hiring someone to do, and whether a machine, a better workflow, or a flat-out no is the smarter answer. Over the last nine months, nine people ha...

Matt and Mike have had this conversation about 9,000 times. They still don't have a definitive answer. Mike opens with a big goal: land on some real conclusions about how the firm is structured. What follows is an honest look at the org chart behind their accounting firm. It has three pods, each with staff accountants, senior accountants, and accounting and tax managers. Above them sit team le...

Accountants like things that balance. Marketing attribution does not balance. Mike and Matt get into the thing they've been chasing for about three years: figuring out whether the money they spend on marketing is actually working. Between outbound sales, content, events, local networking, paid ads, and two brands to support, the path from first touch to signed client is anything but a straight...

Nobody starts an accounting firm with a clean box. You start with client one, then client ten, and somewhere in there you said yes to payroll, yes to inventory software, yes to the FedEx exec with real estate in four states, because the mortgage was due and the mortgage does not care about your ideal client profile. Matt and Mike talk through what it actually takes to unwind that, and then what ha...

Every firm has a version of itself it shows on stage. This is the other version. Mike and Matt open the books on what they still haven't figured out. The staff accountant role they hired for ten years ago doesn't exist anymore. The comp plan still pays people to keep the work instead of pass it down. And behind the "this is the only way we do it" presentation is a client who'...

New studio, new building, and the first episode recorded in it — which turned into a looser, more honest conversation than usual. Matt and Mike open with the move. Nine to twelve months of planning, three weeks of the entire team working remote while the building came together, and a hard-earned verdict from Matt: whoever moves this building next will be the new owner of the firm. But the bigger t...

One Step Better now has its own YouTube channel! Subscribe here so you never miss an episode: ‪@OneStepBetterPod‬ Last episode Matt and Mike asked whether the entry-level staff accountant role still makes sense in a world of AI. This one zooms out: if the work is changing, what does the whole firm look like? Matt spent 45 minutes explaining how his team is built today. Pods, a director of accounti...

➡️ One Step Better now has its own YouTube channel! Subscribe here so you never miss an episode: ‪@OneStepBetterPod‬ Every accounting firm is quietly asking the same question right now: if AI can categorize transactions, reconcile accounts, and tie down a balance sheet, do we still need to hire entry-level staff accountants? And if we do, what on earth are we training them to become? Mike and Matt...

Patrick Accounting has a stack of "best place to work" accolades, yet Mike still rates themselves a C on the one thing that would change everything. Listen to Matt and Mike get honest about LMA (leadership, management, and accountability) and why holding people accountable is genuinely one of the hardest things about leading a firm. In this episode: The LMA framework and exactly where mo...

Every accounting firm has a client they should have said no to. Most of them took it anyway because the money looked good, the sales conversation went well, or somebody convinced themselves they could make it work. Mike and Matt have been there. Listen to them get honest about what actually makes a good client, where the lines are, and why even the best criteria in the world doesn't stop you f...

Matt connected AI to every major tool in the firm. Then things got interesting. What followed was a mix of things going sideways, things working better than expected, and one moment that made Matt realize he wasn't thinking nearly big enough. All of which sparked a real conversation about what AI can actually do inside an accounting firm today, where the guardrails need to be, and how far off...

At some point, every growing accounting firm takes their best person, puts them in a leadership role, and hopes for the best. And for a while it kind of works. Until it doesn't... Mike and Matt are in the middle of this right now. 60 people, multiple team leads, a director of accounting, and an honest conversation about the fact that being great at the work and being great at leading people ar...

The best firms don't wait for things to fall apart. They break them first.  Hiring, training, sales, team structure. If you're not proactively challenging what's working, growth will do it for you, and it won't be on your terms. In this episode, Mike and Matt get real about the specific things that broke (and keep breaking) as Patrick Accounting has grown over the past 23 years. Th...

If you're building a leadership team around you as an accounting firm owner, you already know: letting go of control is hard. And when it goes sideways, even over something small, it can feel like a lot more than it is. In this episode: The exact moment the leadership meeting went sideways and what was really behind it Why letting go of control is the hardest part of scaling an accounting firm...

Most firm owners ask the wrong question when they want to grow. They ask how before they ask am I willing to do what it takes . Or as Matt puts it: "How much brain damage do you want along the way?" Because growing a firm isn't about strategy decks or revenue targets. It's about whether you, the owner, are willing to do the messy, expensive, slow work of building something that s...

If you own an accounting firm, you probably feel a gap between where you are and where you want to be. This podcast is about closing that gap by building a firm One Step Better at a time. Hosted by Matt Patrick (owner and founder of Patrick Accounting) and Mike Shaeffer (COO), you'll hear the unfiltered conversations that happen when you own an accounting firm. The ones you probably have with...

"You have to be willing to light some money on absolute fire for the goal of what may be." Ever feel like you're growing your business but somehow everything is getting harder, more expensive, and more chaotic? Not sure if you're actually ready to scale or just tired of being stuck where you are? This is one of the most common crossroads for small business owners. Especially if y...

Most restaurant owners think about tips from the payroll side. But your customers are thinking about tips from the experience side, and right now, that experience is broken. In this episode, Matt and Mike talk about tipping culture from both sides of the table. As customers frustrated by guilt tipping, receipt clutter, and being asked for 25% on an empty cup. And as accountants who keep finding re...

Most business owners set up their tip policy once and never think about it again. That's usually when the problems start. In this episode, Matt and Mike get into the compliance side of tipped employees that most owners don't hear about until they're already in trouble. They cover why overtime math gets ugly when tipped and non-tipped hours land in the same week, what happens when night...

Do you actually know what your menu items cost you? Not what you think they cost. What they really cost after portion creep, waste, vendor substitutions, and everything else that chips away at your margins. In this episode, Mike and Matt talk through the pricing paralysis most restaurant owners face right now and how to use your actual costs to make confident pricing decisions. You'll hear: Wh...

You're looking at your POS report. Then your spreadsheet. Then your bank account. They're all telling you something different. So which one do you believe? In this episode, Matt and Mike talk through what your point of sale system is actually built to do, where it falls short, and what happens when your sales data, labor scheduling, and inventory management aren't talking to each other...

It looks like you’re winning from the outside, but your bank account tells a different story. In this episode, Matt and Mike share what they've seen across hundreds of restaurant P&Ls: consistent patterns, missed opportunities, and small changes that add up to real profit. There’s no secret formula to profitability, but there are three financial levers that actually move the needle in restaura...

Your accountant says an expense is "non-deductible" and you're confused because you paid for it with your business card. Doesn't that reduce your taxes? Nope. Just because you used your business card doesn't make it deductible. Join us for Part 2 of simplifying accounting terms that confuse business owners. This time: balance sheets, tax credits vs. deductions, and why your a...