Here’s what you’re looking for: Liz Farr

BUSY SEASON MANAGEMENT

Cannon: Busy Season is Self-Inflicted | The Disruptors

Exhaustion, chaos, and missed lives are the result of design choices—not destiny.

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The Disruptors
With Liz Farr

Build a 7-figure firm in just 4 hours a week!

Brenda Cannon, co-founder of Cannon and Associates, has been pioneering a creative approach for taming tax season madness: every return is scheduled like an appointment. “We know how long it takes us to prepare a tax return. Why could we not control each week and the number of tax returns we prepare each week?” she recalls thinking after hearing Jason Staats introduce the concept on a podcast in 2022.  

MORE STREAMING: Carroll: When One Person Can Break the Firm |  Rampe: Build a Roadmap Even When the Road’s Not There | Chang: Killing SALY, One Agent at a Time | Vanover: 5-Star Firms Don’t Bill by the Hour | Kless: Profit Is a Result. Flourishing Is the Purpose | Whitman: Build Culture on ‘Progress,’ Not Change | Shein: No PE? No M&A? No Problem | Hood and Weber: Time to RISE | Proctor: Turn Dumb Ideas into Brilliant Solutions | Carter-Gray: How 1 Poor Review Strengthened the Firm | Hartman: Upwork to “40 Under 40” in 3 Years |

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Over the last three tax seasons, Cannon and her team, which includes her husband and co-founder, Randy Cannon, have been refining the process. Clients choose a date on a calendar on which they will deliver their documents to her office, with the understanding that their return will be ready three weeks after that date.  

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FEATURED VIDEO

Carroll: When One Person Can Break the Firm | The Disruptors

Firms built on heroics instead of systems eventually crack.

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Sponsored by The Balanced Millionaire: The Advisor Edition by Dr. Jackie Meyer | See Today’s Special Offer

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The Disruptors
With Liz Farr

Build a 7-figure firm in just 4 hours a week!

Ashley Carroll thinks burnout is a design flaw, not a personal failing.

“I’m a big believer that burnout is a business model flaw,” she says. In response, Carroll created Operations House to help founders reduce burnout and “step out of that role as the provider, the doer, the practitioner, and into an ownership level role.” 

MORE STREAMING: Rampe: Build a Roadmap Even When the Road’s Not There | Chang: Killing SALY, One Agent at a Time | Vanover: 5-Star Firms Don’t Bill by the Hour | Kless: Profit Is a Result. Flourishing Is the Purpose | Whitman: Build Culture on ‘Progress,’ Not Change | Shein: No PE? No M&A? No Problem | Hood and Weber: Time to RISE | Proctor: Turn Dumb Ideas into Brilliant Solutions | Carter-Gray: How 1 Poor Review Strengthened the Firm | Hartman: Upwork to “40 Under 40” in 3 Years |

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According to Carroll, burnout stems not only from long hours but also from processes that lack four key qualities: reliability, efficiency, integration with existing systems, and psychological safety.

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FEATURED VIDEO

Rampe: Build a Roadmap Even When the Road’s Not There | The Disruptors

Only disciplined planning, accountability, and open communication will cut through the industry’s rapidly thickening fog.

This is a preview. The complete 1-hour video episode, with commentary and transcript, is first available exclusively to PRO Members | Go PRO here
Sponsored by Tax Season Readiness: Practical Steps for a Smoother Busy Season, Dec. 10, 2 p.m., 1.5 CPE  | See Today’s Special Offer

Subscribe to CPA Trendlines podcasts anywhere: Apple, Google/YouTube, Spotify, iHeart, Deezer, Amazon Music, Audible, Player FM, Audacy, RSS
Is your firm truly ready for tax season—or just hoping to survive it? Join this 90-minute webinar featuring an Accounting ARC Live panel with thought leaders who know what it takes to optimize performance under pressure

The Disruptors
With Liz Farr

Matt Rampe sees the accounting industry as one “under a lot of pressure to change, and it’s changing very quickly.” The combination of a staffing crisis, retiring baby boomers, AI, private equity, and tax law is creating “the fog,” a period in which the path forward isn’t just unclear; it’s fundamentally unknowable. 

To address “the fog,” his new book, CPA Firm Strategic Planning: Your Roadmap for Long-Term Success, lays out a framework grounded in decades of consulting experience with Rosenberg Associates, combined with research on organizational change, leadership psychology, and what drives team performance. “Strategic planning, in my mind, is the venue by which you analyze and think through those issues, put them up, not just out of reactivity,” Rampe explains. It means “really stepping back and looking at the big picture of the industry and your firm and your situation, and then making choices that you’re aligned with.” 

MORE STREAMING: Chang: Killing SALY, One Agent at a Time | Vanover: 5-Star Firms Don’t Bill by the Hour | Kless: Profit Is a Result. Flourishing Is the Purpose | Whitman: Build Culture on ‘Progress,’ Not Change | Shein: No PE? No M&A? No Problem | Hood and Weber: Time to RISE | Proctor: Turn Dumb Ideas into Brilliant Solutions | Carter-Gray: How 1 Poor Review Strengthened the Firm | Hartman: Upwork to “40 Under 40” in 3 Years |

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According to Rampe’s research, strategic planning fails most often at the execution stage. Nearly two-thirds of respondents reported that “execution fails after the planning meeting.” Firms gather, generate good ideas, identify priorities, and then get pulled into their day-to-day work, and nothing happens. Or they put off strategic planning altogether until some imaginary day when they might have time.  

“One of the insights is you need to spend time working on the business, not just in the business, because the in the business is going to drown you,” Rampe explains. The way you solve that is “not working harder in the business. It’s working, prioritizing, working on the business.” 

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AUDIT & ASSURANCE

Horton: Burnout Isn’t Inevitable in Audit | The Disruptors

Analytics, automation, and AI will reshape audit roles—and that should excite CPAs.

This is a preview. The complete 1-hour video episode, with commentary and transcript, is first available exclusively to PRO Members | Go PRO here
Sponsored by Tax Season Readiness: Practical Steps for a Smoother Busy Season, Dec. 10, 2 p.m., 1.5 CPE  | See Today’s Special Offer

Subscribe to CPA Trendlines podcasts anywhere: Apple, Google/YouTube, Spotify, iHeart, Deezer, Amazon Music, Audible, Player FM, Audacy, RSS
Is your firm truly ready for tax season—or just hoping to survive it? Join this 90-minute webinar featuring an Accounting ARC Live panel with thought leaders who know what it takes to optimize performance under pressure.

The Disruptors
With Liz Farr

Audit is notorious for long hours, terrible work-life balance, reliance on endless checklists, and repeating the same mind-numbingly tedious procedures year after year. But some, like Kathryn Horton, are creating a different path for success as an auditor.  

 At her solo firm, Kathryn K. Horton CPA, she provides outsourced audit and analytics consulting services to firms nationwide. As “auditor on call,” she steps into manager and senior manager roles for local, regional, and national firms, helping them increase capacity while reducing staff burnout. 

MORE STREAMING: Chang: Killing SALY, One Agent at a Time | Vanover: 5-Star Firms Don’t Bill by the Hour | Kless: Profit Is a Result. Flourishing Is the Purpose | Whitman: Build Culture on ‘Progress,’ Not Change | Shein: No PE? No M&A? No Problem | Hood and Weber: Time to RISE | Proctor: Turn Dumb Ideas into Brilliant Solutions | Carter-Gray: How 1 Poor Review Strengthened the Firm | Hartman: Upwork to “40 Under 40” in 3 Years | Telka: Transform Fear into Fuel | Woodard: Move Past Reports; Deliver Results | Baker: Find True Purpose to End Burnout | Brolin: The W.I.N. Leadership Formula | Gertrudes: How EOS & “Unreasonable Hospitality” Reshaped GrowthLab | Vilms: The Power of People in a Tech-Driven World | Dickerson: From Diagnosis to Disruption | Kapilovich: Treat People Like People | Martha Yasso: From Wall Street to Main Street | Jackie Meyer: Tax Plans in 90 Seconds? Believe It  | Erica Goode: Build a $200K Firm in 15hrs/Week |

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During her eight years in public accounting, Horton says, “I did struggle with burnout at various times, where the work–life balance really wasn’t a balance anymore.” A significant factor was the hyper-connectedness of today’s technology, where “we’re essentially on call 24/7” responding to emails and calls, which made it “really hard to unplug and just recharge the batteries.” 

Another factor was demanding clients. “I realized that 80% of my stress was coming from 20% of my clients,” Horton recalls.  

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FEATURED VIDEO

Brolin: Blueprint for Empathetic Leadership | The Disruptors

Embracing empathy helped build a healthier, more profitable firm with a smaller, stronger team.

This is a preview. The complete 1-hour video episode, with commentary and transcript, is first available exclusively to PRO Members | Go PRO here
Originally published Aug. 19, 2025
Sponsored by the Center for Accounting Transformation’s Small Office/Home Office Cybersecurity Protection Package–
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The Disruptors
With Liz Farr

After decades in public accounting, years emceeing national conferences, and a long stretch coaching college softball, Dawn Brolin has learned something most leadership books bury in footnotes: empathy drives performance.

“Empathy is, to me, the number one characteristic that a leader should follow,” she told host Liz Farr in her return to The Disruptors. Her latest book, The Elevation of Empathy: Leading for the W.I.N., digs into why the accounting profession needs a different kind of leadership—one rooted in awareness, humanity, and intentional care.

MORE STREAMING: Chang: Killing SALY, One Agent at a Time | Vanover: 5-Star Firms Don’t Bill by the Hour | Kless: Profit Is a Result. Flourishing Is the Purpose | Whitman: Build Culture on ‘Progress,’ Not Change | Shein: No PE? No M&A? No Problem | Hood and Weber: Time to RISE | Proctor: Turn Dumb Ideas into Brilliant Solutions | Carter-Gray: How 1 Poor Review Strengthened the Firm | Hartman: Upwork to “40 Under 40” in 3 Years | Telka: Transform Fear into Fuel | Woodard: Move Past Reports; Deliver Results | Baker: Find True Purpose to End Burnout | Brolin: The W.I.N. Leadership Formula | Gertrudes: How EOS & “Unreasonable Hospitality” Reshaped GrowthLab | Vilms: The Power of People in a Tech-Driven World | Dickerson: From Diagnosis to Disruption | Kapilovich: Treat People Like People | Martha Yasso: From Wall Street to Main Street | Jackie Meyer: Tax Plans in 90 Seconds? Believe It  | Erica Goode: Build a $200K Firm in 15hrs/Week |

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Accounting firms often reward technical strength or revenue generation with leadership titles. But Brolin argues those metrics don’t create leaders; they create what she calls “appointed leaders.”

“You could be appointed a leader because of a skill or the amount of revenue you bring in. That doesn’t mean you are one,” she says.

Real leadership, in her view, has less to do with credentials and more to do with emotional intelligence, personal responsibility, and daily behaviors that elevate the people around you.

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