LEADERSHIP

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.

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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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What Happens to Your Firm If You Die? Seriously.

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Get the free practice-continuation toolkit.

By Ed Mendlowitz
Call Me Before You Do Anything: The Art of Accounting

One morning, my wife and I were having breakfast, and she asked me, “What do I do if you and Peter get killed?”

DOWNLOAD: Practice Continuation in Event of a Death or Disability Sample Agreement and Letter of Instruction, Prepared by Ed Mendlowitz

This was a Friday, and Peter Weitsen and I were flying together on Sunday to a conference in Palm Springs. My response to these questions was typical: “Don’t bother me. Nothing will happen!”
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Megan Robinson: Leadership Isn’t a Promotion; It’s a Skill Firms Need to Build | MOVE Like This

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“We’re expecting engagement without creating an environment people actually want to engage in.”

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MOVE Like This
With Bonnie Buol Ruszczyk
For CPA Trendlines Research

In this episode of MOVE Like This, Megan Robinson, founder and CEO of E Leader Experience, joins Bonnie Buol Ruszczyk to talk about one of the most common and costly mistakes firms make: assuming strong performers will naturally become strong leaders.

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At the center of the conversation is a clear distinction. Technical excellence and leadership effectiveness are not the same skill set. Yet in many firms, top producers are promoted into management roles without the training or support needed to succeed. The result is frustration on both sides: leaders who feel unprepared and teams that don’t feel supported. READ MORE →

Why Most Audit Plans Repeat Last Year’s Problems

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Why planning often reinforces existing constraints – and how to design for a different outcome.

By William Englehaupt

Most audit teams believe they are planning for the future. In reality, they are often replaying the past. This is what many would label as SALY, “same as last year.”

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As a Prussian general once observed, “No plan survives first contact with the enemy.” In auditing, that “enemy” is reality: uneven client data, evolving judgment and the rework that becomes visible once work begins. Most plans are not corrections; they are continuations.
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