Accountant's Flight Plan

Brian Gray made partner at a top 100 CPA firm, built a career advising billionaires and high-net-worth families on complex tax strategies, and then realized that none of it had made him any happier.

Brian is a tax partner, award-winning CPA, frequent speaker at the USC Tax Institute, and the author of Suck Less, Laugh More. He has had a front-row seat to some of the world's most successful entrepreneurs and noticed a pattern: about ...

Meghan Hickman has spent over three years as our EOS implementer at Poe Group Advisors, and this conversation is one we have been looking forward to sharing. Meghan works with entrepreneurial leadership teams to help them build structure, create accountability, and scale with intention. She has helped over 40 organizations do exactly that, including ours.

The conversation covers:

• How a career in politics taught Meghan to recogniz...

Joe Woodard has trained over 150,000 accounting professionals and spent his career studying what separates firms that grow from firms that stay stuck. His answer? It almost always starts with pricing.

In this conversation, Joe walks through the Woodard Ideal Practice Model, which focuses on seven key areas of operational excellence: brand, services, clients, technology, process, engagements, and team. But the most actionable insight...

Seven episodes. Dozens of real-world examples. One recurring answer.

Brannon Poe and Ian Brennan sit down one more time to close out the Power of Focus series. Throughout this series, the pattern that emerges is hard to ignore: the firms that get results are the ones that get intentional about where they put their energy.

This episode is for accounting firm owners who have listened to the series and are ready to ident...

A niche accounting firm with 45% cash flow and 1,500 owner hours sold for 5.6 million dollars on 2.6 million in revenue. That is the kind of result possible when a CPA firm owner gets intentional about the factors buyers care about most. In this episode, Brannon Poe sits down with Laurens Ball, a highly accomplished intermediary at Poe Group Advisors, to break down what really drives practice valuations in today's market.

This is th...

Ric Payne has been thinking about how accountants build better practices for decades. If you have been in the industry for a while, you likely know about Ric Payne. 

He co-founded Results Accounting Systems in 1992, ran the Accountants Boot Camp across multiple continents, and worked with thousands of firms around the world. 

His conclusion? High-performing firms are selective about who they work with. 

The conversation...

Jason Ackerman, Co-Managing Partner at BNA Advisors, helped grow the firm from a $1.5 million firm to over $7 million organically, without acquiring a single practice. He joined his father's firm in 2012, scaled the team from 14 to 35 people, and built systems that allow the firm to handle more than 2,000 individual tax returns per year. His approach combines practical technology adoption, intentional pricing strategy, and a long v...

Chip Summers worked 2,900 hours a year for over 25 years. Every Saturday. Some Sundays. Always behind. Then he made a series of decisions that transformed his firm.

He raised prices across the board. He moved on from high-maintenance, low-return clients. He gave up control and let his staff handle work from start to finish. He invested in technology that made everyone more efficient. And in December 2025, for the first time ...

Greg Toner kept only his best clients, raised prices, picked one niche, and grew his practice 15X.

While many CPAs accept any business that comes their way, Greg found success by being highly selective. He looked at his client list, identified the bottom 10% who weren't getting value from his work, and let them go. Then he raised fees on the clients who remained. His team didn't complain. His revenue didn't drop. And the cap...

Bill and Chris Murphy increased their firm's value by half a million dollars in six months. They weren't desperate to sell, just ready to work reasonable hours with clients they liked. So they did something about it. They fired almost all their individual tax clients and more than doubled their fees.

The result? They gained revenue and clients happily paid for the valuable work they provided. Their firm had the capacity to p...

Part of the Power of Focus Mini-Series

What really separates great accounting firms from the rest?

That question is what led Brannon Poe and Ian Brennan to put together this mini-series. And after years of working with firm owners across the country, lifting up the hood on hundreds of practices, the answer kept coming back to the same thing: focus.

Welcome to the Power of Focus, a mini-series produced in partnership with Accounting Pr...

Barbara Agerton flunked retirement. After selling her California CPA practice, she thought she'd ride off into the sunset with her husband. Instead, she got bored, picked up the phone, and asked if she could come work for the company that sold her firm.

Now she's an intermediary at Poe Group Advisors, which means she gets to help other firm owners navigate the exact journey she just completed. Barbara knows what it feels like to let...

Private equity is flooding into accounting, but taking an offer because of the flashy number on the table isn’t always the best decision.

In this crossover episode with the Inside Public Accounting Podcast, Brannon Poe joins host Rob Brown to break down what’s really happening in CPA firm M&A right now. After attending a private equity conference at Harvard Business School, Brannon shares why this may be the ...

Selling your accounting firm is a major life transition and that often comes with an emotional tax that proper strategy can mitigate.

Lisa Handziak, who covers much of the Northeast and Midwest for Poe Group Advisors, has guided owners through successful exits. She's learned that the sellers who thrive during this transition aren't the ones who avoid emotions; they're the ones who understand how to channel them productively....

The firms winning with AI aren't the ones implementing every tool they can find. They're the ones being strategic about what actually moves the needle.

Rachel Ferris learned this firsthand when she built TaxStack AI, not because she wanted to start a software company, but because she needed a solution that didn't exist. As a tax advisor specializing in Puerto Rico's Act 60, she was spending hours researching complex state-specific c...

In this episode, Yuri (aka "The Fun CPA") explains why now is the perfect time to build the kind of firm where people genuinely want to work. He's spent four years building a following on LinkedIn by saying the things that managers and senior accountants at big firms are thinking but can't say out loud. 

His mission is to change the perception of accounting by showing what's possible when you prioritize people, mentorship, and ...

If your best accountants are walking out the door, it's probably not about the money. 

In this episode, Tim Schurrer (CEO of David Novak Leadership and author of "The Secret Society of Success") reveals the leadership principle that grew Yum! Brands from $4 billion to $32 billion, and it has everything to do with solving what's plaguing CPA firms right now: the talent crisis.

Here's the reality: when your senior accountant flawl...

You've spent years developing your next generation of partners, but what happens when they don't want to lead, can't secure financing, or simply aren't the right fit to take over? 

In this episode, our Ontario Market Leader Darryl Boyd, reveals why so many multi-partner firms are discovering that their "default" internal succession plan isn't working, and why external sales often deliver better outcomes for everyone involve...

In this episode, we sit down with Lisa Smith who is a functional medicine dietitian, gut-health expert, and founder of Lisa Smith Wellness. We explore the realities of deep stress and the health impacts that so many accounting firm owners quietly carry. We start by talking about the concept of “deep stress,” how it differs from everyday overwhelm, and why professionals who juggle multiple roles often don’t realize...