Beyond the Bottom Line

Revisiting this one for any founder weighing the leap from a stable paycheck to building something of their own. Miguel is the guest here, answering the questions he usually asks, and with Centurion Firm’s 10-year anniversary coming up next year, his advice for anyone starting out today still holds.

What if the “raise” that was supposed to keep you happy was actually the moment you realized you needed to leave?

In this episode, Miguel Alexander Centeno joins Alex Roman, host of Humans in Accounting, for a wide-ranging conversation about the real path from Big Four tax to founding Centurion Firm. It’s a rare chance to hear Miguel on the other side of the mic, answering the kinds of questions he usually asks his own guests.

For any founder or business owner who has ever wondered whether the leap from a stable paycheck to building something of their own is worth it, this conversation is a grounded, honest look at what that decision actually costs and what it can return. Miguel walks through the inflection point that pushed him out of public accounting (an 8% raise offer after growing an engagement into the millions), the reality of his first year in business (a $56K gross, and not even hitting his own salary target), and the mistake that nearly burned him out early: saying yes to every client regardless of fit.

The conversation also digs into how Miguel and his team found their footing by identifying the right niches: Airbnb hosts and digital marketers in the early days, and how that same instinct for finding “who you’re uniquely positioned to serve” still shapes Centurion Firm’s work today, including their focus on the R&D tax credit. Miguel and Alex also get into where AI fits into the future of accounting, why Miguel sees it as a tool rather than a threat, and the advice he’d give someone considering the leap in 2026.

Other insights from this episode include:

• The moment Miguel realized incremental raises weren’t going to get him where he wanted to go
• Why “who wants to pay me for this” was Miguel’s version of testing product-market fit
• The real numbers behind his first year in business, and why he didn’t hit his own goal
• The client-mix mistake most new firm owners make, and how to avoid burning out on the wrong clients
• How Miguel identified Airbnb hosts and digital marketers as his first profitable niches, and why
• The role outbound sales played in scaling the firm, and bringing on Ashton as the first hire focused on it
• Miguel’s take on AI’s role in accounting, and why he sees it as an opportunity rather than a replacement
• The advice Miguel would give someone thinking about leaving a Big Four firm to start their own practice today

About Our Guest

Miguel Alexander Centeno is the Managing Partner of Centurion Firm and host of Beyond the Bottom Line. After beginning his career in Big Four tax at PwC, he left in 2017 to build a strategy-first tax advisory practice for founders, startups, and growing businesses.

Hear more conversations like this on Humans in Accounting, wherever you get your podcasts or at southoffices.com/podcast.

Connect with Miguel on LinkedIn or [email protected]

At 17, Zo Patoli’s dropshipping stores were making real money, until a payment processor froze the accounts and left him and his brother about $150,000 in the hole. What he did next is how he went from scrappy to serious.

In this episode, Miguel Alexander Centeno sits down with Zo, co-founder of Leapify and Lead Origin, who has spent the last decade building companies across e-commerce, services, healthcare, and now AI. He started at 13 with his first e-commerce business, selling designer-style jeans he sourced through Alibaba, and he has been learning how to turn a skill into a business ever since. If you’re a founder deciding whether to wait until everything is set up or just start, his answer is worth hearing.

Zo walks through how a failed dropshipping run became his first marketing agency, how that agency grew and then had to be exited, and how working with thousands of small and mid-sized businesses showed him a common problem: tools that don’t connect to each other. That led to Leapify, which he describes as an AI operating system built to run a small business, not just assist it. He also shares his view on the AI bubble, why he believes humans will be elevated rather than replaced, and the habits behind his self-belief, including reading two to three books a month.

Other insights from this episode include:

• Why his parents’ only rule was: don’t break the law, don’t harm others, don’t harm yourself
• How he learned arbitrage in fourth grade by reselling pens and pencils bought at Sam’s Club
• How his first marketing client came from undercutting a local studio’s website price
• Why he says “all defeat is psychological” and that giving up is the only real failure
• Why he thinks founders overthink entity structure and taxes, and what he did about both once he could afford advisors
• How he sees AI agents running sales, pricing, inventory, and cash flow, with people focused on vision and judgment

About Our Guest

Zohaib Patoli is co-founder of Leapify, an AI operating system for small and mid-sized businesses, and Lead Origin, a digital marketing and creative agency. His other ventures include a staffing agency, two e-commerce businesses, and commercial real estate projects. 

Connect with Miguel on LinkedIn or [email protected]

Four years ago, Renee Sobaram joined the firm as an onboarding specialist, before it had a standard process for bringing in new clients. She built one, then grew into the client success manager role for accounting and tax, and the firm’s NPS scores climbed from sevens to eights to nines.

In this Under the Hood episode, Miguel Alexander Centeno talks with Renee as she steps into her new role as operations manager, overseeing the firm’s departments. They cover how the firm tracks client feedback with NPS surveys and what changed once it started asking happy clients why they love working with the firm. They also get into why flexibility at work goes hand in hand with accountability, and the communication habits that matter most when a deadline is about to slip. Miguel shares the question he now asks his team to check that his instructions landed: “what did you hear me say?”

A buyer prices a business off its profit. That means every personal expense and every dollar of unrecorded cash changes what the owner gets paid.

In this episode, Miguel Alexander Centeno sits down with Christine McDannell, founder of Magnolia Firm, a boutique M&A brokerage for digital businesses, and author of Get Acquired: Seven Steps to Your Most Lucrative Exit. She has exited 10 of her own startups, from a cleaning company in San Diego to a wellness spa, and now guides founders from valuation through close. If a sale is anywhere in your future, you’ll hear what to fix well before a buyer sees your numbers.

Christine walks through how she cleans up a profit and loss statement before going to market, what buyers look for beyond the numbers, and how she structures deals. She also tells the story of how a weekly build club in Austin took her from feeling paralyzed by AI to teaching it.

Other insights from this episode include:

• The “seven R’s” buyers look for: remote-based, relocatable, recurring revenue, retention, removal of the owner, revenue growth, and repeatable processes
• Why 10 to 20 hours a week of owner involvement is the sweet spot, and why zero isn’t believable
• Why an owner’s face all over the company website can hurt a sale
• Which personal and one-time expenses can be added back to profit, and which are gray areas
• Why cash that was never deposited doesn’t count toward the sale price
• How she handles seller financing: 10 to 20% of the price, about 8% interest, and a personal guarantee from the buyer
• Why SBA loans slow deals down, and why most of her sales close in cash
• Why founders are often surprised by personal bills after a sale, when income stops
• Why owners who assume nobody would buy their business often undervalue it or close it down
• How the AI Implementation Club in Austin works, and why she tells owners to pivot rather than hide from AI

About Our Guest

Christine McDannell is a serial entrepreneur, author, speaker, and founder of Magnolia Firm. She leads the AI Implementation Club in Austin. 

Connect with Miguel on LinkedIn or [email protected]

The team has no room for more work, and business owners are more ready than ever to switch firms or finally look at the R&D tax credit. That is the contradiction of the weeks between the September 15 and October 15 deadlines. Miguel Alexander Centeno sits down with Ashton Chanana to talk about how he balances sales against team capacity during the busiest stretch of the year, including a recent client whose books turned out to be a mess.

They also get into a lead that looked perfect and wasn't: a client in a hurry for payroll, an invoice that bounced, and a phone number that didn't work. Miguel shares a low-effort trap he first used in hiring, a hidden line of text that makes copy-pasted AI answers give themselves away. The point isn't avoiding AI. It's checking what it says before sending it.

Testing the Untestable: Building Happy Path with Noah Bortz

Long before he was automating enterprise software testing, Noah Borts was selling herbal cigarettes in high school, building a catering-scheduling platform that launched three months before COVID, and learning, the hard way, what it means to find a problem that's actually big enough to build a company around.

On this episode of Beyond the Bottom Line, Miguel sits down with Noah, co-founder of Happy Path, an AI-powered platform that automates software testing for complex enterprise implementations like Workday. Noah walks through the winding path that got him here: growing up in a family where entrepreneurship was "pervasive, maybe even contagious," the release-hell problem he lived through in trading that inspired Happy Path, and the strategic decision to go all-in on one niche instead of chasing every market his team's collective experience could have opened up.

The conversation goes deep on what it actually takes to build an AI company right now, why "we slapped AI on it" isn't a strategy, how Happy Path keeps costs down by not always reaching for the newest, most expensive model, and why Noah believes the founders who win in an AI-saturated world will be the ones who pick up the phone instead of hiding behind another automated email. He also gets candid about choosing co-founders (find people who complement your weaknesses, not just your friends), the paradox of needing total confidence externally while staying honest about what you're bad at internally, and why patience, not building, has been the hardest skill of his founder journey.

In this episode:

• Why Noah's early ventures (including one before COVID) taught him to validate market size, not just the problem
• The "release hell" story from his trading days that became the idea behind Happy Path
• Why AI companies keep failing at "knowing what to build and why"
• How Happy Path keeps AI costs low while staying accurate enough for QA
• What makes a strong co-founder match (hint: it's not just friendship)
• Why in-person relationships and old-school sales skills matter more, not less, in the AI era

About Our Guest

Noah Borts is the co-founder of Happy Path, an AI-powered software testing platform that helps companies automate and improve how they test complex enterprise software implementations, with an initial focus on Workday. Before Happy Path, Noah spent over eight years across product management and operations, including time in trading and consulting, giving him firsthand experience with the challenges of implementing and testing complex technology.

Learn more about Happy Path at happypath.io.

Connect with Miguel

Connect with Miguel on LinkedIn or reach out at [email protected].

In this episode of Under the Hood, Daniela turns the interview around and puts Miguel in the hot seat. They get into what burnout actually looks like for him, not too much work, but doing the wrong things at the wrong time of day, and how structuring his schedule around his own energy, rather than just pushing through, changed how he leads the team.

Miguel also reflects on a prediction that didn't pan out, the assumption that clients needed custom-built software rather than accessible AI tools, and what he'd do differently if he were starting the firm today. The conversation moves through leadership, presence, and the moments early in a business that end up mattering more in hindsight than they seemed to at the time.

Every founder's inbox is drowning in AI-generated outreach. So where's left to actually reach people?

In this episode, Miguel talks with Sharon Melzer, co-founder of Venue Hopper, a targeted event marketing company that connects tech companies to communities in New York City. Sharon is also a content creator and marketer currently finishing her degree at NYU, sharing her take on entrepreneurship, AI, and personal branding along the way.

For any founder rethinking where their marketing dollars actually work anymore, this conversation makes the case for real-world connection at a moment when digital channels are more saturated than ever. Sharon walks through why she believes in-person events are becoming one of the few channels that can't easily be automated or spammed, what actually makes an event worth someone's time (hint: it's not the open bar), and the mistake founders make when they name and design events without thinking about who they actually want in the room.

The conversation also gets into the reality of building a company as a first-time founder: how Sharon evaluated whether her co-founder was the right fit, the pivot Venue Hopper made from event logistics to sponsor connections, and why letting go of past progress is often the hardest part of changing direction. Sharon and Miguel also talk candidly about the founder tension between staying "always on" and protecting personal boundaries, and where she sees human connection heading as AI reshapes how people work and communicate.

Other insights from this episode include:

• Why Sharon believes IRL events are one of the last channels that can't be easily saturated
• What actually makes an event format work: curation, agenda, and designing for connection
• The no-show problem at public events, and a simple fix that can meaningfully raise turnout
• How to know if a co-founder is the right fit (hint: coffee chats won't tell you)
• The difference between a small pivot and the kind that sends you back to square one
• Why Sharon thinks the loneliness epidemic is driving renewed demand for in-person community
• How founders across generations experience the pull between connection and constant availability
• Sharon's honest take on where AI helps, where it doesn't, and what stays uniquely human

About Our Guest

Sharon Melzer is the co-founder of Venue Hopper, a targeted event marketing company connecting tech companies to communities in New York City. She's also a content creator and marketer, currently completing her degree at NYU, where she shares her perspective on entrepreneurship, marketing, AI, and personal branding.

Connect with Sharon on LinkedIn.

Connect with Miguel on LinkedIn or [email protected]

Behind the Bookkeeping

In this Under the Hood minisode, Miguel sits down with Renee and Maria, two of the people quietly keeping the firm's client work running behind the scenes. Renee, who's stepping from client success and project management into an operations role, and Maria, an accountant managing the full accounting cycle for clients, talk through what a real day looks like, from Renee's early-morning quiet hours before the rest of the team logs on, to Maria's steady afternoon stretch once the meetings finally clear.

The conversation turns personal as they trace how they each landed here. Neither planned on accounting, Renee came from hospitality and a communications degree, Maria failed her first accounting class before ever imagining she'd earn a CPA and both found the firm almost by accident, through a stray job listing and a cold email that wasn't supposed to lead anywhere. What was meant to be temporary for both of them turned into years.

It's a reminder that behind every client relationship is a team figuring things out one day at a time and that some of the best career paths are the ones nobody plans.

Leadership Lessons from the Cockpit

Most business owners plan a launch, run it, and move on to the next thing, without ever asking their team what worked and what didn't. Randy Miller learned a different way in the U.S. Air Force, where every mission ended with a "debrief," and rank didn't matter once the discussion started.

In this episode, Miguel sits down with Randy Miller, a Vistage Chair in Austin who spent over 20 years flying F-4 fighter jets before building an Inc. 500 staffing company and later becoming an executive coach. Randy breaks down the leadership habits he picked up in the military and later in business that most CEOs never build into their teams.

Other insights from this episode include:

• Why the military "debrief" is a habit most businesses are missing
• How to communicate the "why" behind every ask, not just the ask itself
• Challenger Sales: why asking the right questions outsells pitching features
• The "can you do one more?" trick for compounding team productivity
• Why employees don't leave companies, they leave managers
• How Randy is using AI tools like Claude to sharpen his coaching

About Our Guest
Randy Miller, Vistage Chair in Austin, leads CEO peer advisory groups helping business owners and executives grow their companies.

Connect with Miguel on LinkedIn or [email protected]