LEADERSHIP

DiSC Profiles Boost Staff Effectiveness

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Overhead view of five people in a meeting

Better communication comes from better understanding.

By Jody Grunden
Building the Virtual CFO Firm in the Cloud

Working in a remote environment can be great, and it can also have its challenges. Communication is one of the biggest hurdles distributed companies have to overcome. To tackle this issue head on, Summit CPA has implemented many initiatives.

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One of our favorites is the DiSC profiles. Let me start off by telling you a little bit of the background on the DiSC profiles.
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Jason Blumer & Ian Vacin: How Any Firm Can Scale | Gear Up for Growth

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Why chasing clients isn’t always the right answer.

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Gear Up for Growth
With Jean Caragher

“Success doesn’t have to look like going up and to the right,” says Ian Vacin, co-founder and director of partnership relationships at Karbon, in this episode of Gear Up for Growth, hosted by Jean Caragher, president of Capstone Marketing. “You have to understand what you want as a firm owner, align your revenue with your resources, and build the scaffolding to support that complexity. Otherwise, profitability falls, and you may not recover.”

MORE Jean Caragher here | Get her best-selling handbook, The 90-Day Marketing Plan for CPA Firms, here | MORE Gear Up for Growth here

Gear Up for Growth is tailored specifically for public accounting firms with up to 100 team members looking to expand their practices intelligently and efficiently.

MORE CPA Trendlines Streaming Network here

Vacin, along with Jason Blumer, founder and CEO of Thriveal and Blumer & Associates CPAs, wrote the new book, Scale with Purpose: The Service Entrepreneur’s Guide to Intentional Growth. Drawing from research involving hundreds of firms worldwide, Blumer and Vacin reveal that only about 5% of firms successfully navigate their first major growth phase without setbacks. The authors emphasize that organizational design must precede capacity planning. Without thoughtful structure, firms hit predictable scaling plateaus, particularly between 8 and 20 employees.

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How to Keep Your Best Clients

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Make a PE displacement window calendar work for you.

By Hitendra Patil

An East Coast firm owner reached out to me about a year after a private equity-backed competitor had acquired a smaller firm in her market. She had expected to lose clients to the newly expanded firm. What she had not expected was to gain three of theirs.

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Those three clients had been with the acquired firm for years. They left within six months of the acquisition, and the reason had nothing to do with the quality of the work. The relationship had changed after the PE deal, not just new systems, new staff and new processes. The partner who had been their main contact for a decade was focused on transition and integration work and harder to reach. The clients had not been unhappy exactly, but they were back in the market. That is the part of the PE consolidation story that gets told less often. Acquisitions create client movement, and not all of it flows toward the acquiring firm.
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Why Relationships Still Drive Career Success | ARC

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Connections create career opportunities, resilience, and leadership growth.

Sponsored by True Advisor: The Definitive Success Guide for Client Advisory Services by Hitendra Patil |
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The step-by-step operating guide for firms building, pricing, and scaling advisory services that clients value—and pay for.

Accounting ARC
With Liz Mason and Byron Patrick
Center for Accounting Transformation

In the accounting profession, technical excellence is expected. However, according to the latest episode of Accounting ARC, relationships — not just work product — often determine who grows, who leads, and who thrives. 

In a candid and deeply personal conversation, Liz Mason, CPA, and Byron Patrick, CPA.CITP, explore how relationship-building shapes careers, creates opportunity, and provides stability in an unpredictable profession.  

MORE Accounting ARC: The Real Problem with AI in Accounting | AI Can Fix Your Workflow—or Break It in Seconds | Efficiency Is the Wrong Goal for AI | Accounting’s Hidden Talent Risk: The Sandwich Generation | Built Fast. Sold Faster. Broken Later? The Truth About Accounting Tech | Recognize When You Need to Recharge Before You Burn Out | Valuing More Than the Balance Sheet | Accounting’s “Untalked-About” Frontier | Why Happiness is Hard-Fought for High Achievers | The Fastest Way to Lose Talent Is “Dick Leadership” | Post-Holiday Fatigue Isn’t a Failure; It’s a Signal | OCR, Research Bots & Meeting Assistants: What Actually Helps Now | Return Season is the New Stress Test | Small Firms May Have the Biggest Advantage in 2026 | Downgraded: What the DOE Said About Accounting |

Mason, CEO of High Rock Accounting, opens the discussion by reflecting on how little emphasis the profession places on teaching interpersonal skills. Patrick, senior product manager for Karbon and co-founder and part-time educator for TB Academy, agrees. “You don’t learn it in college,” he says. “There’s no course on building relationships.”

That gap, they argue, becomes especially obvious early in a professional’s career. 

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