CPA Life

On Episode 97 of CPA Life, John Randolph returns to the Pipeline Pulse, a quarterly deep dive into what's actually happening inside the hiring market in accounting. Firms keep treating capacity planning as a tax-season scramble rather than a year-round discipline, and it shows, with one East Coast firm losing a quarter million dollars in business before realizing they needed to hire thirteen people in a single year. Candidates aren't chasing bigger paychecks either, with one example, a senior with fourteen years of experience who turned down a manager promotion because it demanded 2,000 billable hours. Simply put, she valued flexibility over title. Meanwhile, firms keep recruiting for advisory skills nobody's training for internally, and they treat their talent pipeline like a faucet they can turn on only when a seat opens up. Trust, reputation, and relationships built long before a vacancy exists turn out to matter more than any resume count, and that's a shift in mindset that separates firms building real staying power from those stuck reacting month to month and quarter to quarter. Get the full show notes and more resources at CPALifePodcast.com

As we rejoin John Randolph's conversation with Adam Boatsman on Episode 96 of CPA Life, we learn that Adam didn't set out to sell BGW. He just wanted to be able to take a two-week ski vacation, realizing he'd built a firm too dependent on him to allow it. That single, honest admission cracks open a wider conversation about what it actually takes to build something that survives its founder. Adam traces the real story behind BGW's private equity partnership with Ascend, born less from financial pressure than from a succession plan that surprised him. He talks candidly about diminishing returns past 60-hour weeks, the myth that people quit jobs they hate rather than places that exhaust them, and the uncomfortable math AI is forcing onto every compliance-driven firm. Beneath the tactics sits a simpler thesis: firms don't scale because owners work harder, they scale because owners learn to let go, invest in people, and trade suits of armor for something closer to being human. Get the full show notes and more resources at CPALifePodcast.com

Adam Boatsman failed out of engineering, drifted into accounting almost by accident, and spent his early Big Four years complaining over beers about how there had to be a better way—so he built it. As managing partner of BGW, he's turned "anything but typical" into an actual operating philosophy: chasing the right clients instead of the easy money, treating culture as a strategic asset rather than something that just happens, and learning the hard way that the loudest underperformer in the room usually costs you your best people. On Episode 95, part 1 of this special two part episode of CPA Life, John Randolph digs into the lessons from Adam's endurance racing that shaped his leadership, the quadrant of employee engagement that changed how he manages, and why "quiet cracking" might be a bigger threat to your firm than anyone quitting outright. Along the way, Adam makes the case that grace, autonomy, and a little bit of humanness go further than any perfectly polished management playbook. Get the full show notes and more resources at CPALifePodcast.com

Brendan Morahan built his firm without a single full-time hire, running it almost entirely on contractors, and he's convinced it's the model most accounting firms are too slow to see coming. In this conclusion of a two-part conversation with John Randolph on Episode 94 of CPA Life, Brendan argues that the tax manager role has become an impossible trade: firms won't offer equity or partnership, and the people qualified for the job already know they can go build something of their own. So he's assembling a roster of vetted senior tax managers willing to work as contractors, embedded in pods, splitting time between client work and their own emerging practices. John pushes back on the obvious tension. What happens when a firm owner wants loyalty, not a bridge to someone else's business? They examine hourly billing, remote work, private equity's effect on morale, and what ownership might even mean a decade from now, as the old assumptions about paying dues for a partnership keep collapsing. Get the full show notes and more resources at CPALifePodcast.com

After a decade in Big Four audit and private equity finance, Brendan Morahan saw two partner-track opportunities collapse in the space of six months. He didn't set out to start BPM CPA, but he found himself in December 2023 with few good options and a lot of hard-won opinions about how small firms were getting it wrong. Within three years he had built a million-dollar practice by doing almost the opposite of what most firm owners do. In part 1 of this special two part conversation with John Randolph on Episode 93 of CPA Life, Brendan makes a pointed case that the traditional partnership model is losing its pull on the most capable people in public accounting, that the tax manager role is the single most critical and irreplaceable position in any small firm, and that advisory isn't a service tier you can bolt on. It's either already in your nature, or it just isn't. Get the full show notes and more resources at CPALifePodcast.com