Here’s what you’re looking for: Rob Brown

ACCOUNTING VOICES

What Do You Have to Show for Implementing AI? | Accounting Voices

Look at pricing, services, and client relationships to assess whether AI investments are reshaping the business.

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The step-by-step operating guide for CPA firms building, pricing, and scaling advisory services that clients value—and pay for.

Accounting Voices
With Rob Brown

A tax return completed in three hours instead of five gives an accounting firm something valuable: time.

What happens to those two hours may reveal more about the firm’s AI strategy than the technology that saved them.

Does the firm take on more work? Give employees breathing room? Help a client understand an emerging business problem? Reconsider how it prices its services?

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In a solo episode of Accounting Voices, host Rob Brown examines a distinction that can get lost in the enthusiasm surrounding artificial intelligence: Adopting AI and changing a business are different accomplishments.

“Efficiency is not reshaping,” Brown says. “A little bit of doing things faster doesn’t change the model.”

The episode, part of the “AI Reality Inside Firms” series, offers leaders three ways to examine their progress: Look at the economics, consider the client relationship, and assess whether leadership is deliberately shaping the firm’s direction.

Together, those questions move the conversation from what a tool can do to what a firm intends to become.

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ACCOUNTING VOICES

How Your Skills as an Accountant May be Undermining Your Firm’s Future | Accounting Voices

Technical expertise earns credibility, but the ability to delegate, build trust, and guide people through uncertainty determines how far a businesses can grow.

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The step-by-step operating guide for CPA firms building, pricing, and scaling advisory services that clients value—and pay for.

Accounting Voices
With Rob Brown

An accounting firm’s biggest bottleneck may sit at the top.

The leader who reviews every return, answers every technical question, and makes every consequential decision can appear indispensable. But that dependence raises a difficult question: Who is building the business while its leader is busy checking the work?

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In this episode of Accounting Voices, insights from conversations with nearly 50 influential voices in the profession highlight a pressing leadership challenge: Technical excellence is the starting point. Leading an enterprise requires a broader set of skills.

The episode calls this tension the “Competency Collision.” The expertise that helps accountants advance does not, by itself, prepare them to build adaptable organizations, develop future leaders, or make difficult decisions about what comes next. READ MORE →

ACCOUNTING VOICES

Buying AI Is Easy. Rebuilding the Firm Is Hard. | Accounting Voices

Leaders reveal a widening gap between adopting new capabilities and building firms that can use them effectively.

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The step-by-step operating guide for CPA firms building, pricing, and scaling advisory services that clients value—and pay for.

Accounting Voices
With Rob Brown

A firm buys powerful technology, announces ambitious growth plans, and asks an already stretched team to deliver more. The tools change. The way the business operates barely moves.

Accounting Voices explores the strain inside that scenario. Drawing on reflections from 48 firm leaders, consultants, media professionals, technology experts, and other industry voices, it examines what their observations reveal about accounting’s direction.

In the episode, host Rob Brown identifies a “velocity gap”: the distance between firms talking about change and firms making it part of their daily operations. AI, outside investment, shifting professional identities, and talent pressures all contribute to that gap. Together, they raise a practical question for leaders: Can the organization absorb the change it pursues?
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ACCOUNTING VOICES

The Quiet Fear Behind Accounting’s Growing Divide | Accounting Voices

Leaders face growing questions about influence, identity, and professional relevance.

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The step-by-step operating guide for CPA firms building, pricing, and scaling advisory services that clients value—and pay for.

Accounting Voices
With Rob Brown

An accounting firm can keep its clients, meet its deadlines, and remain profitable while the people inside it quietly wonder whether they still belong in its future.

As technology, ownership models, and expectations reshape the profession, Accounting Voices examines the questions that software demonstrations and strategic plans often leave unanswered: Who gets to make decisions? Whose expertise still carries weight? And what happens when the career someone works toward becomes a career they no longer want?

The episode presents accounting’s growing divide as a realignment of power, relevance, and leadership. For firm leaders and professionals preparing to lead, understanding that realignment means looking beneath the most visible changes. READ MORE →

ACCOUNTING VOICES

Would You Fire Yourself? | Accounting Voices

Technology, consolidation, and changing expectations expose weaknesses in business strategies.

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The step-by-step operating guide for CPA firms building, pricing, and scaling advisory services that clients value—and pay for.

Accounting Voices
With Rob Brown

Accountants help clients plan for growth, manage risk, and prepare for uncertainty. But what happens when they turn that same scrutiny on their own firms?

The answers may be uncomfortable.

In this episode of Accounting Voices, host Rob Brown discusses how the profession’s ability to solve other people’s business problems does not always translate into a willingness to confront its own.

The discussion centers on a deceptively simple question: What changes your thinking about accounting? Across conversations with firm leaders, technology specialists, coaches, consultants, and others, familiar assumptions begin to unravel — about who should run a firm, what makes advisory services valuable, and how much protection technical expertise actually provides.

One challenge, attributed in the episode to leadership and organizational development specialist Alice Gray Harrison, brings the issue into sharp focus: If your firm were your client, would you fire yourself for lacking a five-year strategic plan?

It is a question that makes the episode less a reflection on the past than a test of what leaders are willing to change now.

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ACCOUNTING VOICES

When the Profession Changes Faster than Your Plan | Accounting Voices

The profession isn’t slowing down, but accountants can build clarity, visibility, and career capital to move forward with greater control.

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Build a 7-Figure Firm in 4 Hours a Week! 

Accounting Voices
With Rob Brown

Accountants have spent years preparing for demanding work. Far fewer are prepared for what happens when the nature of that work changes almost overnight.

Artificial intelligence, private equity, mergers, leadership changes, shifting client expectations, regulatory pressures, and persistent talent shortages are reshaping accounting at the same time. The result is not simply a busier profession. It is a profession in which many people are quietly asking a much bigger question: Is this still the career I signed up for?

In this reflective episode of Accounting Voices, listeners are encouraged to pause before charging into another year of goals, deadlines, and transformation projects. The conversation acknowledges something professionals do not always feel permitted to say: An extraordinary level of change takes a personal toll.

Feeling tired, cautious, unsettled, or less fulfilled is not necessarily evidence that someone is failing. It may be a normal response to an abnormal pace of disruption.

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ACCOUNTING VOICES

Major Changes Are Coming. Now What? | Accounting Voices

Protect your credibility and career options by responding with calm, connection, and purpose.


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Subscribe to CPA Trendlines podcasts anywhere: Apple, Google/YouTube, Spotify, iHeart, Deezer, Amazon Music, Audible, Player FM, Audacy, RSS.

Build a 7-Figure Firm in 4 Hours a Week! 

Accounting Voices
With Rob Brown

An email arrives. A town hall appears on the calendar. Leaders begin using words such as “merger,” “sale,” “new ownership,” “restructuring,” or “strategic reset.”

Suddenly, the change that once felt theoretical becomes personal.For accounting professionals, these announcements can trigger immediate questions about job security, leadership, culture, client relationships, and the future of the organization. Some people freeze. Others panic, withdraw, overshare, or rush to update their LinkedIn profiles.

But this episode of Accounting Voices argues that change itself does not necessarily damage careers. How people respond to it often matters more.

As private equity investment, mergers, leadership turnover, technology pressures, and evolving business models reshape the profession, the ability to cope with uncertainty is becoming a career-defining skill. Professionals who remain composed, connected, and useful during periods of disruption can strengthen their reputations and create new opportunities.

The episode outlines four practical moves for navigating the days and weeks after a significant announcement.

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ACCOUNTING VOICES

How Accounting Leaders Build Influence Without a Big Four Resume | Accounting Voices

…And the 8 emerging leadership paths that can help you rise to the top…


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Accounting Influencers
With Rob Brown

In the world of accounting, influence is no longer the exclusive domain of Big Four alumni or Ivy League pedigrees. Each December, Accounting Today releases its Top 100 Most Influential People list, highlighting leaders who shape the profession. The surprising truth behind many of these selections? Over 70% started from modest beginnings, without elite credentials, but with a clear strategy for building career capital.

In a recent episode of the Accounting Influencers Podcast, host Rob Brown delves into the evolving landscape of leadership in accounting. “This isn’t about popularity or vanity metrics,” Brown says. “It’s about curating influence—the kind that drives innovation, fosters relevance, and moves the profession forward.”

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ACCOUNTING VOICES

Seven Signs Your Firm Is About to Change | Accounting Voices

The smart move is learning which signals matter and how to prepare.

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Accounting Voices
With Rob Brown

The True Adviser: Buy now | Learn more

If you work in an accounting firm today, you can feel the tension in the air. Something is shifting. You sense it before anyone tells you. Leaders start speaking in strange new phrases. Workloads rise without explanation. New people appear in meetings while familiar faces quietly disappear. Rumors travel faster than email. And you begin wondering what everyone else is wondering, Is something happening here?

MORE Accounting Voices with Rob Brown | Why Accounting Firms Feel So Unstable Right Now | Should I Leave Public Accounting? | Visibility Is the New Accounting Authority | How to Outsmart the Big Four on AI | MORE CPA Trendlines Streaming Network

Today, accounting firms feel unstable. The private equity wave. The mergers. The leadership turnover. The technology pressure. The partner exits. The new business models. Today we look at the next step. How to read the signals inside your own firm before anything becomes official.

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ACCOUNTING VOICES

Why Accounting Firms Feel So Unstable Right Now | Accounting Voices

The truth about PE takeovers, mergers, consolidations and shifting partner models.

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Accounting Voices
With Rob Brown

The True Adviser: Buy now | Learn more

If you feel like your accounting firm has become unpredictable, you are not imagining it. The ground is moving under your feet. People who spent years feeling stable and secure are suddenly unsettled. Partners are leaving. New leaders appear from nowhere. Titles change. Policies change. Strategies change. And no one explains why.

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Right now, the accounting profession feels like someone picked up the entire industry, shook it hard and said, “Good luck.” Private equity is buying firms. National groups are rolling up mid tiers. Regional firms are merging into larger firms. Advisory practices are being carved out. Tax teams are being shifted. Audit is being restructured. And firms everywhere are rewriting their business models in real time. READ MORE →