CPA Trendlines Podcasts

"The classroom is no longer a pipeline for work-ready professionals."Accounting InfluencersWith Rob BrownToday’s accounting leaders are facing an alarming truth: the next generation of recruits may be the least “work-ready” in decades.They know their algebra, their Shakespeare, and their chemistry formulas—but not how to introduce themselves in a job interview, meet a deadline, or handle feedback. That’s the provocative premise explored in the latest episode of Accounting Influencers Podcast, where host Rob Brown tackles the widening gap between what schools teach and what firms need.“The classroom is no longer a pipeline for work-ready professionals,” Brown warns. “And accounting firms are starting to feel the pain.” MORE Accounting Influencers with Rob Brown Brown, a former high school math teacher, speaks from experience. He spent years coaching students to pass tests—not preparing them for the real world. “The curriculum is built for exams, not for the workplace,” he says. “No one’s teaching children how to build trust, handle tough feedback, or develop emotional intelligence.”That shortfall has far-reaching consequences. According to research cited in the episode, only 11% of business leaders strongly agree that graduates leave school ready for work. Eight in ten employers say that new hires lack not only technical proficiency but also critical soft skills, such as resilience, digital literacy, and time management.

Poe Group Advisors; Helping accountants buy, build, and sell exceptional firms.Our clients love working with us, and we know you will too! Don’t just take our word for it. Learn more about our client success stories and how we’ve guided buyers and sellers through a smooth transition with their bookkeeping, accounting, and CPA firms. Learn MorePoe Group Advisors is the premier accounting practice intermediary firm in the industry with over 20 years of M&A experience. PGA was founded by Brannon Poe, a CPA with a Big 4 background. Buying or selling a CPA firm is one of life’s most significant ventures for business owners. Qualified buyers looking to buy an accounting firm want to find the right CPA practice for sale, and accounting practice sellers want to find the right buyer. This is where Poe Group Advisors excels time and time again in helping our clients find the right accounting practice sales opportunity. Learn More

Firms that want to stay independent must transform how they operate, lead, and plan for succession..Gear Up for GrowthWith Jean CaragherFor CPA Trendlines “The problem that a lot of firms have is they just don’t pay attention to what succession really is until they get to the last few years,” explains William “Bill” Pirolli, executive vice president of firm services at Succession Institute, LLC, on Gear Up for Growth, hosted by Jean Caragher of Capstone Marketing. “It has to happen all throughout the lifetime of the firm in order to be properly established at the end.”  More Jean Caragher here | Get her best-selling handbook, The 90-Day Marketing Plan for CPA Firms, here | More Gear Up for Growth | More CPA Trendlines videos and podcasts here Pirolli, a former AICPA Chair and longtime CPA firm partner, emphasizes that succession planning must begin on day one, not five years before retirement. He cautions that too many firms wait until it’s too late to build future leaders or transfer client relationships effectively. He also challenges firm leaders who proudly declare their intent to stay independent but lack a strategy to sustain it. True independence, Pirolli says, requires more than avoiding private equity. It demands discipline, leadership development, and a clear operational strategy. 

Poe Group Advisors; Helping accountants buy, build, and sell exceptional firms.Our clients love working with us, and we know you will too! Don’t just take our word for it. Learn more about our client success stories and how we’ve guided buyers and sellers through a smooth transition with their bookkeeping, accounting, and CPA firms. Learn MorePoe Group Advisors is the premier accounting practice intermediary firm in the industry with over 20 years of M&A experience. PGA was founded by Brannon Poe, a CPA with a Big 4 background. Buying or selling a CPA firm is one of life’s most significant ventures for business owners. Qualified buyers looking to buy an accounting firm want to find the right CPA practice for sale, and accounting practice sellers want to find the right buyer. This is where Poe Group Advisors excels time and time again in helping our clients find the right accounting practice sales opportunity. Learn More

“Waiting this one out is not an option. The rate of change is too fast.”Accounting ARCWith Liz Mason, Byron Patrick, and Donny ShimamotoCenter for Accounting TransformationArtificial intelligence is not replacing accountants; it is replacing the parts of accounting that accountants least want to do. That is the consensus of Liz Mason, CPA; Byron Patrick, CPA.CITP, CGMA; and Donny Shimamoto, CPA.CITP, CGMA, who devote the latest Accounting ARC to reframing AI as an accelerant for professional judgment rather than a threat to jobs. MORE Accounting ARC: What Amazon Doesn't Tell You | Royalties, Residuals, and Reality Checks | ARC-SLC | Free Speech Is a Right; Respect Is a Responsibility | Cash Bags, Casinos & Audits: How First Jobs Shape Us | Gen Z Redefines Careers | Bootleggers, Baptitsts & CPAs: Rethinking Licensure | CPA Firm Ownership Under Fire | Walking Violation: When Showing Your CPA Gets You in Trouble | Audit Bags to TikTok Tags, Gen Z Talks Success Patrick, CEO of VERIFYiQ and founder and instructor for TB Academy, begins with a familiar refrain from social media: AI will put accountants out of business. Mason, CEO of High Rock Accounting, answers with little patience. If a practitioner’s value is “typing numbers into a screen,” she says, then replacement is inevitable. The hosts argue that firms win when they let technology handle the typing and redeploy human time to analysis, communication, and decision support.The panel notes the pattern is not new. Mason recalls first-year work in paper binders and shoeboxes of receipts. Today’s first-years receive organized digital feeds and tagged PDFs. Roles change; the need for human professionals does not. The hosts expect a similar shift with AI: fewer manual steps, faster cycles, and more conversations that translate data into business choices.

Poe Group Advisors; Helping accountants buy, build, and sell exceptional firms.Our clients love working with us, and we know you will too! Don’t just take our word for it. Learn more about our client success stories and how we’ve guided buyers and sellers through a smooth transition with their bookkeeping, accounting, and CPA firms. Learn MorePoe Group Advisors is the premier accounting practice intermediary firm in the industry with over 20 years of M&A experience. PGA was founded by Brannon Poe, a CPA with a Big 4 background. Buying or selling a CPA firm is one of life’s most significant ventures for business owners. Qualified buyers looking to buy an accounting firm want to find the right CPA practice for sale, and accounting practice sellers want to find the right buyer. This is where Poe Group Advisors excels time and time again in helping our clients find the right accounting practice sales opportunity. Learn More

"You can write off lingerie?" Learn how one accountant built a judgment-free firm for the adult industry. Big 4 TransparencyBy Dominic Piscopo, CPAFor CPA TrendlinesWhen Katherine Studley posted a short TikTok in 2021 with the line “Boobs aren’t a write-off,” she wasn’t trying to build a firm - she was trying to prove a point. Now, the founder of The Only Consultant and Prisma Tax is one of the most in-demand accountants for adult industry professionals across North America, having helped thousands of creators, dancers, and sex workers file taxes, get compliant, and navigate financial systems that too often shut them out.  MORE Dominic Piscopo | MORE Private Equity | MORE Pay & Compensation In this episode of Big 4 Transparency, host Dominic Piscopo speaks with Studley about how she carved out one of the most unusual and underserved niches in accounting and scaled it to a fully remote, growing firm with a waitlist and a social following that fuels constant inbound interest. Studley’s journey started after leaving the CPA firm grind, working in coffee shops, and being recruited into a government intelligence role. But it was a viral conversation during the pandemic that unlocked a huge market: OnlyFans creators and exotic dancers who were suddenly earning six figures with no idea how to file taxes or whom to trust to help them.

Poe Group Advisors; Helping accountants buy, build, and sell exceptional firms.Our clients love working with us, and we know you will too! Don’t just take our word for it. Learn more about our client success stories and how we’ve guided buyers and sellers through a smooth transition with their bookkeeping, accounting, and CPA firms. Learn MorePoe Group Advisors is the premier accounting practice intermediary firm in the industry with over 20 years of M&A experience. PGA was founded by Brannon Poe, a CPA with a Big 4 background. Buying or selling a CPA firm is one of life’s most significant ventures for business owners. Qualified buyers looking to buy an accounting firm want to find the right CPA practice for sale, and accounting practice sellers want to find the right buyer. This is where Poe Group Advisors excels time and time again in helping our clients find the right accounting practice sales opportunity. Learn More

Language, collaboration, and leadership training turned competition into cohesion.The DisruptorsWith Liz FarrWhen Alan Whitman became Baker Tilly's CEO, he was caught between two warring camps. On one side were the legacy partners who had built the organization and “wanted to continue doing things the way that we’ve always done them because we’ve been so successful.” That side was afraid of “losing what they had built.” In the other camp were the new partners who wanted to change “to what they were promised, what they signed on to by becoming part of Baker Tilly.” The newcomers wanted “to move faster and do it differently.”  MORE STREAMING: Shein: No PE? No M&A? No Problem | Hood and Weber: Time to RISE | Proctor: Turn Dumb Ideas into Brilliant Solutions | Carter-Gray: How 1 Poor Review Strengthened the Firm | Hartman: Upwork to “40 Under 40” in 3 Years | Telka: Transform Fear into Fuel | Woodard: Move Past Reports; Deliver Results | As Whitman describes in his new book, “Break the Mold: How to Achieve Transformational Change Scale and Grow Simultaneously, the conflict was resolved over time, one conversation, one small meeting at a time. “It would be more evolution, not revolution,” Whitman says.  Whitman’s book, part memoir and part practical guide, describes his time leading one of the largest accounting firms in the US through a fundamental transformation. “We’re a storied profession, the CPA profession, and we are an incremental type of people,” Whitman explains. The transformation Whitman had in mind needed a different approach, as he says in his previous appearance on The Disruptors. “Break the mold is designing new ways of doing things to achieve results that we don’t think can happen, or don’t even think that are possible.”  

Poe Group Advisors; Helping accountants buy, build, and sell exceptional firms.Our clients love working with us, and we know you will too! Don’t just take our word for it. Learn more about our client success stories and how we’ve guided buyers and sellers through a smooth transition with their bookkeeping, accounting, and CPA firms. Learn MorePoe Group Advisors is the premier accounting practice intermediary firm in the industry with over 20 years of M&A experience. PGA was founded by Brannon Poe, a CPA with a Big 4 background. Buying or selling a CPA firm is one of life’s most significant ventures for business owners. Qualified buyers looking to buy an accounting firm want to find the right CPA practice for sale, and accounting practice sellers want to find the right buyer. This is where Poe Group Advisors excels time and time again in helping our clients find the right accounting practice sales opportunity. Learn More