Accountant's Flight Plan

 Alex  Loewenstein heads up talent acquisition for CPAs at Paro. Paro places fractional 1099 accounting professionals in firms. 

Kenji and I had an awesome conversation I’m excited to share with you guys. I really wanted to get into how he grew his accounting firm and his advice for how you can scale your own…not to mention… He has some amazing key insights on attracting and retaining staff. 

Learn tips and tricks for converting your rural accounting firm to the cloud. 

Lessons from Millions in accounting firm sales

Creating a virtual firm

Learn how Alex Dawes scaled her cloud firm and gain insight into how you can implement those growth tactics in your firm. 

On this podcast, we discussed accounting trends specific to the U.S and how they compare with the industry world-wide. Bruce has noticed a slower trend for the United States to adopt fixed price billing packages compared to Australia and the U.K. He attributes that to the complicated tax code of the U.S. We also chatted about digitization, and why data collection is one of the biggest hindrances t...

The tech stacks and tools accountants are using to virtualize their firms, and the benefits of converting. 

Mario cut his client list by 150 clients and increased his revenue by $150,000 all the while setting boundaries around his weekends and nights. In this experience share, Mario says, “I got control of my business so it could provide for my life and not be my life.”

We know that hiring and retaining staff is a huge struggle for many businesses right now, not just in the accounting industry. In short, what employees want is work-life balance, flexibility and a healthy company-culture. Our most recent podcast guest, Jill Christensen is impassioned about helping companies build the right culture for attracting and retaining employees. Jill is a former Fortune 50...

Allocating time and energy toward automation can seem daunting, but truthfully it's just tedious. It’s a matter of selecting the right software and getting support to help integrate. Help could come from a team member or an external coach to help move your clients over 1 by 1.  I’ve always said it’s analogous to doing dishes. You can only load one dish at a time, and you can only convert one...

In her coaching, Geraldine focuses on the kind of pricing model you use in your firm, what your client list looks like, and what changes could be made based on your goals; and from there onto how to revitalize your firm with some simple changes to your service packaging and advisory.  It was awesome getting to chat with her in this episode and share some commonalities in our coaching experience. I...

Liz Farr is a CPA and full-time freelance writer for the accounting profession. Her words have been in Forbes, CFO.com, Accounting Today, and the Journal of Accountancy to name a few.  Liz is hoping to bring accounting into a more balanced future with her writing partnerships. We discuss how the accounting profession is moving towards automation and how if you don’t adjust you’ll be left behind. A...

In this episode, we quickly connected on how important it is to have a simple explanation of the numbers even for our own businesses. If you stop for a moment and think about what’s possible when you as a business owner get a solid, tactical expression of your numbers, the world gets a whole lot bigger. With better reporting , you can properly formulate a growth plan for your business over the nex...

We decided to change up the podcast a little bit and turn the focus inward to give you guys a glimpse into how Accounting Practice Academy came to be.   In this episode of the podcast, we have Ian Brennan (APA’s Creative Director), and my wife Carol Poe (PGA Buyer Specialist/APA’s right-hand woman) who played a pivotal role in the creation and execution of the workshop. This workshop wouldn’t exis...

David and I have been friends for years, and when we last spoke I could see him light up as he talked about this new venture he’d been thinking about in the podcasting world. I could tell he was excited and it shows. His new and now-running venture is Your Podcast. Team. “[Podcasting] It’s the rarest  form of online content.”  David noticed there were some barriers to entry in the podcasting scene...

In this episode, Gina and I dive into the finer points of her hiring process so you can instantly come away with practical, implementable “to-do’s”. She explores common pitfalls most of us are making, simple tweaks in our hiring conversations that make substantial changes, and a workflow to sift through your candidates.

Recently, Brannon had an exciting conversation with Ryan Lazanis. Ryan is a CPA who considers himself more of an entrepreneur than an accountant.  In 2013 he founded a fully cloud-based accounting firm which was acquired five years later with the help of the Poe Group team. Now Ryan is focusing on his passion to help modernize the traditional accounting firm model and foster innovation in the prof...

If you want to get out of the bottleneck position in your firm, you have to delegate. The first step toward delegating is Auditing Your Time.  Brad’s advice, “Audit yourself…for a week or so just audit. Every time you sneeze document it. And estimate how many hours per month you’re spending on [any given] task.” 

Mitch Baldridge is a CPA based in Houston, Texas and he has been steadily growing his firm, Baldrige CPA, since going out on his own in 2014. His first year, he essentially made no revenue and now he has several employees and steadily growing margins. Mitch found Brannon a few years ago when he was thinking about acquiring a firm. He thought he would purchase an existing practice to help build the...

On the most recent episode of The Accountant’s Flight Plan Podcast, we interviewed Shehan Chandrasekera, who is one of a handful of CPAs in the country recognized as a real-world operator and conceptual subject matter expert on cryptocurrency taxation. He is the Head of Tax Strategy at CoinTracker, partner at JAGArgueta CPAs a Forbes Tax Contributor and a CPE instructor who has won various awards.

Communicating with clients like they are another accountant doesn’t cut it. Justin Hatch shares with our listeners that what clients want from their accountants is simplified language and visual reporting first, and then a dive into the details. Accountants have to give their clients a high-level perspective written in layman’s terms when it comes to data.

Even without a start in public accounting, (or perhaps because of that) Rich Stang built a powerhouse of a firm by focusing heavily on one thing – Hiring for culture. In this podcast he dives into how his team is the source of that growth and success. The art of hiring well takes finesse and several counter-intuitive perspectives, some of which Rich explores in today’s episode.

In 2019 we helped Jim sell his CPA practice in the Washington, DC area and we wanted to share with you a bit about what it was like for him to successfully go through that process. He talks about taking the leap to start his own firm, how he decided to exit, and what he wished he had known in the midst of managing his firm. A pearl of wisdom that Jim shared with us in this episode is that: “You go...

Guess what? You don’t get to choose whether or not you have a brand; you either have a weak brand or you have a strong brand. That’s just one of the powerful ideas that Matt Wilkinson and Maggie Antone share in this episode of The Accountant’s Flight Plan Podcast. Listen in (or watch ) to learn from Maggie, a seasoned branding expert who’s worked with big brands such as Coca Cola, BP, McDonald’s,...