Yasso: From Wall Street to Main Street | The Disruptors

Your real ROI comes from relationships, not spreadsheets.

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The Disruptors
With Liz Farr

Martha Yasso didn’t just balance billion-dollar books — she watched businesses crumble under them.

MORE Jackie Meyer: Tax Plans in 90 Seconds? Believe It  | Erica Goode: Build a $200K Firm in 15hrs/Week | Randy Crabtree: Live at the Intersection of Passion & Skill |McClelland and Telka: Women Ready to Rewrite the Rules of Accounting | Jacob Schroeder: AI Won’t Replace Accountants—But It Will Reveal Who’s Replaceable | Ditching Corporate America: The Bold Story Behind PBS Accounting’s Rapid Rise | Jean Zick: Happy Team = Happy Clients | Breslin & Greathead: Be a Client Advocate | Dominic Piscopo: Clear Pay=Bargaining Power | Debbie Kilsheimer: Stop Thinking Small |

Yasso began her career in the high-octane world of junk bonds on Wall Street, where she relished the analytical challenges of cash flow modeling. But what initially felt like powerful work soon turned emotionally draining. “I was ripping apart companies and watching it happen in real time,” she says. “It was exhausting and depressing.”

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Dominic Piscopo: Crowdsourced Salary Data Sparks Accounting Change | Accounting Conversations

Unpack how market gaps and transparency revise the recruiting game.

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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 Conversations
With Chayton Farlee
Center for Accounting Transformation

In the latest episode of Accounting Conversations, host Chayton Farlee sits down with Dominic Piscopo, CPA, founder of The Big Four Transparency, to unpack compensation transparency and the accounting pipeline — two stubborn bottlenecks many firms still struggle to fix. The conversation centers on how accessible salary data and real-world experiences can illuminate a path toward fairer pay and clearer career ladders for accountants at all levels.

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Piscopo, a Canadian CPA now leading The Big Four Transparency, describes a career that reveals both the promise and the pain points of the industry. He starts in a Big Four firm in tax and quickly encounters a supportive leadership dynamic and a stellar coach, experiences that underscore what’s possible in a healthy culture. Yet even with that backdrop, he confronts a truth many early-career professionals feel but few talk about openly: compensation does not always align with effort or market realities, especially for younger staff trying to break in and prove their value.

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Jen Cryder: From Membership Model to Market Maker | Big 4 Transparency

State societies can evolve into engines of innovation, education, and workforce resilience.

This is a preview. The complete video episode, with commentary and transcript, is first available exclusively to PRO Members | Go PRO here
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Build a 7-figure firm in just 4 hours a week!
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Big 4 Transparency
By Dominic Piscopo, CPA
For CPA Trendlines

At a time when the accounting profession is undergoing its most rapid transformation in decades, Jen Cryder, CEO of the Pennsylvania Institute of Certified Public Accountants (PICPA), is quietly redefining what a state CPA society can (and arguably should) become. 

MORE Dominic Piscopo | MORE Private Equity | MORE Pay & Compensation

In this episode of the Big 4 Transparency Podcast, Cryder joins host Dominic Piscopo to discuss how advocacy, revenue diversification, and technology investment are converging to reshape the future of the CPA profession. 

Cryder, who spent 15 years in public accounting before joining PICPA more than a decade ago, now finds herself at the center of national conversations around licensure reform, continuing professional education (CPE), and the evolving definition of what it means to be a CPA. While state societies have historically focused on a relatively narrow set of services, Cryder argues that the profession’s accelerating rate of change has expanded that mandate dramatically. “For most of our 130-year history, the definition of a CPA was fairly static,” she notes. “In just the last few years, that list of issues has become infinite.” 

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Robert Gauvreau: Why This CPA Firm Founder Refuses Equity Partners | Big 4 Transparency

Scaling an eight-figure accounting, tax, law and advisory firm by breaking all the rules.

Sponsored by The Balanced Millionaire: Advisor Edition: Building a 7-Figure Firm in 4 Hours a Week by Dr. Jackie Meyer, CPA, CCA

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With Dominic Piscopo, CPA

The True Adviser: Buy now | Learn more

Robert Gauvreau, FCPA, founder and CEO of Gauvreau Accounting, Tax Law and Advisory, joins Dominic Piscopo on the Big Four Transparency show to explain how he’s scaling an Ontario-based firm from a non-obvious location—Peterborough, not Toronto—into a $20 million operation built around fast decision-making, aggressive reinvestment in talent, and a deliberately non-traditional partnership structure.

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Gauvreau says he made a strategic decision from day one to never take on equity partners, arguing that the traditional partnership model is “broken” because conservative consensus-driven decision-making too often blocks growth. Instead, he built a structure of high-compensated “partners” who share in wins without taking on debt, working-capital risk, or ownership downside—while enabling the firm to move quickly without governance gridlock. He framed the tradeoff clearly: partners get stability and upside participation, while the founder retains the long-term exit value. READ MORE →

Stewart Spiers: What Local Firms Can Do that the Big 4 Can’t | Big 4 Transparency

Faster, Leaner, Closer to the Client, and Two Hours to an Engagement Letter

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Big 4 Transparency
With Dominic Piscopo, CPA

Former Deloitte colleague Stewart Spiers tells Dominic Piscopo about leaving the Big 4 partner path to help build a tax planning practice at TAAG – why SMB clients pulled him back, what changes in speed and autonomy, and how partner economics differ between large and small firms.

Spiers spent roughly 15 years at Deloitte, starting as a co-op and rising through Private Company Services, before making a move many Big 4 professionals debate but rarely execute: stepping off the partner track to double down on the SMB clients he’s always gravitated toward. In this new episode of the Big 4 Transparency show, Spiers tells host Dominic Piscopo that his decision wasn’t driven by a bad experience at Deloitte, but by a career crossroads and a clearer answer to one question: What kind of work does he want to be doing in the future?

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For Spiers, the most energizing part of the job has consistently been working with owner-managed businesses, entrepreneurs, second-generation operators, and local companies where the accountant-client relationship is long-term and high-trust.

While Deloitte can deliver immense value, he described a growing friction between Big 4 structures and what many smaller businesses actually need. The firm’s push upmarket, bundled service-line model, and high billable rates can make it harder to serve “everyday” businesses where the ask is often bookkeeping, core accounting, and practical succession and planning – not ERP implementations and multi-service-line engagements.

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