One Step Better Podcast

Matt and Mike have had this conversation about 9,000 times. They still don't have a definitive answer.

Mike opens with a big goal: land on some real conclusions about how the firm is structured. What follows is an honest look at the org chart behind their accounting firm. It has three pods, each with staff accountants, senior accountants, and accounting and tax managers. Above them sit team leads and a director of accounting, and admin, AP, and offshore support work across every pod. On paper, it's just an org chart. In practice, years of chasing leverage have blended the buckets of work so much that almost nobody's role looks the way it was designed.

The principle they keep coming back to comes from PASBA: the role follows the work. The trouble is that the work itself is changing. AI and automation are taking over more of the gathering, entering, coding, and reconciling that used to fill a staff accountant's day. If the roles don't change with the work, new technology just adds cost on top of existing revenue.

In this episode:

• Why "the role follows the work" is the simplest principle in firm structure and the hardest one to stick to
• How the senior accountant role became staff, manager in training, onboarder, and tax learner all at once
• The hidden blocker: a staff accountant who can't start until admin or AP finishes their piece
• Reviewing the reviewer: when layers of oversight don't create the efficiency you expected
• Going from one director managing 25 people to team leads running pods, and whether that pivot went too far
• How paying on production can quietly discourage managers from handing work down
• Should onboarding be its own team when sales swing from two deals a month to six?
• Why every manager wants to onboard clients soup to nuts, and why that might not be the best use of them
• What a "Patrick Accounting 2.0" pod could look like with AI, automation, and a human in the loop
• Clients don't care how the work gets done, so the real prize is lowering the cost of production
• Vertical pods for restaurants or home care vs. a "mutual fund" of clients in every pod

The bottom line: nothing is on fire, and the current structure is working. The goal is better gross margin through better leverage, with as little disruption for clients as possible. Next episode, they pick up where this one leaves off: how to develop people and what the staff role looks like going forward.

💬 Got a topic you want us to tackle? Drop a comment, send us a message, or share this episode with a firm owner who needs to hear it.

🎙 Want to be a guest? We're opening the show up to firm owners who want to talk shop. Reach out and let's talk.

Connect with us:

Matt Patrick on LinkedIn → https://hubs.la/Q04fKVdQ0
Mike Shaeffer on LinkedIn → https://hubs.la/Q04fKVdX0

patrickaccounting.com

Tired of struggling to find qualified accountants for your firm? Check out Cloud Accountant Staffing's candidate portal. Full of pre-vetted offshore accounting candidates ready to interview as soon as tomorrow → https://portal.cloudaccountantstaffing.com/register?p=MatthewPatrick

Accountants like things that balance. Marketing attribution does not balance.Mike and Matt get into the thing they've been chasing for about three years: figuring out whether the money they spend on marketing is actually working. Between outbound sales, content, events, local networking, paid ads, and two brands to support, the path from first touch to signed client is anything but a straight line. And when a restaurant group their sales team chased for eight years finally books a meeting straight from the website, the question gets even harder. Which of the 500 touches made the difference?In this episode:

• Why the buying cycle for an accounting firm is never "saw an ad, signed a contract"
• The first touch vs. last touch questions they never thought to ask until an agency asked them
• Why door knocking is hard work but still the easiest channel to actually trace
• The Memphis restaurant group that ignored outbound for eight years, then booked a meeting on their own
• Their most viewed blog post ever, with over 100,000 views, and why it probably hasn't produced a single client
• The reframe that finally helped: some marketing costs exist no matter what, so not every dollar has to prove a return
• Why nobody has defined what an MQL is, and why their best new prospect never would have triggered one
• The case for giving marketing a clear scorecard, and the case for just watching sales volume

💬 Got a topic you want us to tackle? Drop a comment, send us a message, or share this episode with a firm owner who needs to hear it.🎙 Want to be a guest? We're opening the show up to firm owners who want to talk shop. Reach out and let's talk.Connect with us:Matt Patrick on LinkedIn → https://hubs.la/Q04fKVdQ0Mike Shaeffer on LinkedIn → https://hubs.la/Q04fKVdX0patrickaccounting.comTired of struggling to find qualified accountants for your firm? Check out Cloud Accountant Staffing's candidate portal. Full of pre-vetted offshore accounting candidates ready to interview as soon as tomorrow → https://portal.cloudaccountantstaffing.com/register?p=MatthewPatrick

Nobody starts an accounting firm with a clean box. You start with client one, then client ten, and somewhere in there you said yes to payroll, yes to inventory software, yes to the FedEx exec with real estate in four states, because the mortgage was due and the mortgage does not care about your ideal client profile.Matt and Mike talk through what it actually takes to unwind that, and then what happens when the thing you kept turns into a second business with its own staffing model, its own cycles, and its own tech stack. Two rabbits, one roof, and a client who does not know or care that there are two of you.In this episode:

• Anything for a buck: the early years of saying yes because the bills come whether or not you have a process
• The epiphany is the easy part. Deciding what to do with the practice you already have is the hard part
• Why Matt would never sell off the book or 5x the fees, and what he did instead over four to six years
• The one switch you can flip today: stop saying yes to anything outside the box, starting now
• For every two or three ideal clients in, twenty 1040s go out. The math of a forced churn
• Why he would not throttle growth to make the transition, even knowing it means more churn letters
• Buying a practice full of work you do not want, and making peace with the note you still have to pay
• Every firm has a worst client, and they are usually not a bad client. Just wonky, unrepeatable, or on the wrong tech
• The perception that Patrick Accounting says cut it all immediately, and why that was never the story
• Rip the band-aid or evolve: two legitimate operating philosophies, and knowing which one your budget allows
• Running payroll and accounting as two separate businesses your clients experience as one
• Why the accounting side talks to the owner and the payroll side almost never does, and what that changes
• Where a leader's time goes when both sides need him, and the eighteen months that shifted it
• A workers comp policy that earns $50 a year and can put a $15,000 relationship at risk
• Why compressed tax season creates the same tension inside a pure PASBA firm, just with fewer service lines to blame

💬 Got a topic you want us to tackle? Drop a comment, send us a message, or share this episode with a firm owner who needs to hear it.🎙 Want to be a guest? We're opening the show up to firm owners who want to talk shop. Reach out and let's talk.Connect with us:Matt Patrick on LinkedIn → https://hubs.la/Q04fKVdX0Mike Shaeffer on LinkedIn → https://hubs.la/Q04fKVdX0patrickaccounting.comTired of struggling to find qualified accountants for your firm? Check out Cloud Accountant Staffing's candidate portal. Full of pre-vetted offshore accounting candidates ready to interview as soon as tomorrow → https://portal.cloudaccountantstaffing.com/register?p=MatthewPatrick

Every firm has a version of itself it shows on stage. This is the other version.Mike and Matt open the books on what they still haven't figured out. The staff accountant role they hired for ten years ago doesn't exist anymore. The comp plan still pays people to keep the work instead of pass it down. And behind the "this is the only way we do it" presentation is a client who's still on desktop for a reason nobody wants to explain out loud.In this episode:• Why the job you hired for five years ago is gone, and nobody updated the job description.• The comp problem nobody talks about: paying on production while asking managers to hand work off.• What happens when you promote a great staff accountant into a team lead role that needs a completely different skill set.• Why developing leaders is hard, and developing the people who develop leaders is harder.• The uncomfortable question of what an outsourced accounting firm actually sells once the bots do the bookkeeping.• Renting every piece of technology your firm runs on, and what that costs you in more ways than one.• Seven-time Inc. 5000 and still no systematized marketing engine. Growth in spite of, not because of.• Death by a thousand exceptions: how 250 tiny one-offs quietly replace the process you think you have.• Why "we always" and "we never" are almost never true, and permission to call them out on it.Subscribe on YouTube → @OneStepBetterPod 🎧 Subscribe so you don't miss what's next.💬 Got a topic you want us to tackle? Drop a comment, send us a message, or share this episode with a firm owner who needs to hear it.🎙 Want to be a guest? We're opening the show up to firm owners who want to talk shop. Reach out and let's talk.Connect with us: Patrick Accounting → patrickaccounting.comMatt Patrick on LinkedIn → https://hubs.la/Q04fKVdQ0Mike Shaeffer on LinkedIn → https://hubs.la/Q04fKVdX0This episode is brought to you by Cloud Accountant Staffing. Tired of struggling to find qualified accountants for your firm? Check out Cloud Accountant Staffing's candidate portal. Full of pre-vetted offshore accounting candidates ready to interview as soon as tomorrow. 👉 https://portal.cloudaccountantstaffing.com/register?p=MatthewPatrick

New studio, new building, and the first episode recorded in it — which turned into a looser, more honest conversation than usual.

Matt and Mike open with the move. Nine to twelve months of planning, three weeks of the entire team working remote while the building came together, and a hard-earned verdict from Matt: whoever moves this building next will be the new owner of the firm. But the bigger takeaway wasn't the logistics. It was what happened when everyone came back. The energy flipped on the moment the team was in one place again. Working from home is great when it's a choice. It's a different thing entirely when it's mandatory.

Then, with 70+ people heading to Memphis for the firm visit next week, they get into the part that actually keeps them up at night.

Matt's answer to "what do you still not have figured out?" starts with people — staff development, the balance between doing the work and growing — and lands somewhere more uncomfortable: client engagement. He wants clients digging into the numbers with him, finding the extra 1% in food cost, thinking about retention. Mostly they don't. And Mike pushes on whether that's actually a problem, because the reason a business owner hires you is specifically so they don't have to think about this stuff. That's why I gave it to you. That's why I'm paying you money.

That's the tension the whole conversation circles: they see themselves as business advisors as much as accountants, but when a client's business is struggling, the person they call is usually someone else in their industry — not their accounting firm.

Matt's read on it by the end is the honest one. It's his own angst, not the team's and not the clients'. The clients are getting what they paid for and then some.

In this episode:

• The move, the three weeks fully remote, and why the team came back saying the same thing
• Why "I want you to care more about your numbers" collides with "that's why I'm paying you"
• The gap between accountant and business advisor — and who the client actually calls when things get hard
• Whether small business owners should care more about the accounting function
• Getting wishful about other firms' more engaged clients, and why that comparison might be a trap
• The difference between clients not caring and clients not knowing you're the resource

💬 Wrestling with the same questions in your own firm? Drop a comment, send us a message, or share this with a firm owner who's trying to figure out what their team should look like next.

🎙 Want to be a guest? We're opening the show up to firm owners who want to talk shop. Reach out and let's talk.

Connect with us:Matt Patrick on LinkedIn → https://hubs.la/Q04fKVdQ0Mike Shaeffer on LinkedIn → https://hubs.la/Q04fKVdX0patrickaccounting.com

Tired of struggling to find qualified accountants for your firm? Check out Cloud Accountant Staffing's candidate portal. Full of pre-vetted offshore accounting candidates ready to interview as soon as tomorrow → https://portal.cloudaccountantstaffing.com/register?p=MatthewPatrick

One Step Better now has its own YouTube channel! Subscribe here so you never miss an episode: ‪@OneStepBetterPod‬

Last episode Matt and Mike asked whether the entry-level staff accountant role still makes sense in a world of AI. This one zooms out: if the work is changing, what does the whole firm look like?

Matt spent 45 minutes explaining how his team is built today. Pods, a director of accounting, team leads, managers, senior accountants, staff, interns, a production assistant, plus an offshore team for capacity. It works. It's grown the firm 20% a year for nearly a decade. And then Mike asked the question that's been rattling around both their heads: if you were starting from scratch today, would you build it this way?

Matt's answer was no. Not even close.

This is a real, unresolved conversation about the rub every firm owner is feeling right now. You can automate the back-of-house production layer more every month. But if you don't change what you're asking your team to do, all you've done is add technology cost on top of the same work. You're not more profitable. You're not serving more clients per person. You've just added a layer.

The catch? Matt built a homegrown reporting tool that replaced $2,200 a month in software, and it was done the moment he connected it. No 30 hours of setup, no onboarding drag. That kind of custom build wasn't possible five years ago. Now it is. Which means the whole model, how you staff, how you structure teams, how you price, and how fast you deliver, is shifting under your feet while the work still has to get done at scale.

In this episode:

• The full anatomy of a modern firm, and why Matt would build it completely differently from scratch
• Why adding automation without changing the work just adds cost, not profit
• The front-of-house, back-of-house restaurant model applied to accounting production
• "Can I service 1,000 clients with 30 people instead of 450 with 24?"
• The homegrown tool that replaced $2,200/month in software the day it was connected
• The fee pressure that's coming, and why "$250 down the street" changes your math
• Why your own best people could leave tomorrow and build the same thing you built
• The real engagement problem: 85% of clients just want the work done, and why that shouldn't stop you from serving the ones who want more
• Spin off a separate AI-first brand, or pivot the firm you already have?

The throughline: the fundamental business hasn't changed. Firms exist to simplify financial complexity so business owners can thrive. Real-time, accurate, on-time data is the mountaintop. Whether you get there human-first or AI-first is the layer in constant flux. Get the mission right, and the chaos underneath gets a lot easier to navigate.

💬 Wrestling with the same questions in your own firm? Drop a comment, send us a message, or share this with a firm owner who's trying to figure out what their team should look like next.

🎙 Want to be a guest? We're opening the show up to firm owners who want to talk shop. Reach out and let's talk.

Connect with us:
Matt Patrick on LinkedIn → https://hubs.la/Q04fKVdQ0
Mike Shaeffer on LinkedIn → https://hubs.la/Q04fKVdX0
patrickaccounting.com

Tired of struggling to find qualified accountants for your firm? Check out Cloud Accountant Staffing's candidate portal. Full of pre-vetted offshore accounting candidates ready to interview as soon as tomorrow → https://portal.cloudaccountantstaffing.com/register?p=MatthewPatrick

➡️ One Step Better now has its own YouTube channel! Subscribe here so you never miss an episode: ‪@OneStepBetterPod‬ Every accounting firm is quietly asking the same question right now: if AI can categorize transactions, reconcile accounts, and tie down a balance sheet, do we still need to hire entry-level staff accountants? And if we do, what on earth are we training them to become?Mike and Matt don't pretend to have this one solved. This is a real, unresolved conversation about the rub every firm owner is feeling: you're building an assembly line that's more automated by the month, but you still need people who understand the fundamentals well enough to catch when the robots get it wrong. So you keep some work manual, not because it's efficient, but because it's how a junior accountant learns to see how money actually moves through a business.The catch? The client paying a thousand a month for that manually-done work isn't getting a better, faster experience out of your training program. Which means the whole model, who you hire, how you price, what you deliver, and when, is shifting under your feet while the work still has to get done at scale.In this episode:* Why the entry-level staff accountant role might be disappearing, and why that's a developmental problem, not just a hiring one* The "human in the loop" dilemma: can someone own a client relationship without understanding how the information got made?* Why schools still teach debit-credit fundamentals while the industry races to embed that knowledge into the tech* The real reason to keep some work manual (hint: it's about how people learn, not about getting the work done)* Whether an "AI-first" firm is a different business model entirely, or just the same mission delivered a new way* Why your mission can't be tied to how you do the work, and how that distinction keeps you sane when everything changes* What Matt would tell a college student majoring in accounting today (spoiler: don't just study accounting)The throughline: the fundamental business hasn't changed. Firms exist to simplify financial complexity so business owners can thrive. How that gets delivered, human-first or AI-first, is the layer that's in constant flux. Get the mission right, and the chaos underneath gets a lot easier to navigate.💬 Wrestling with the same questions in your own firm? Drop a comment, send us a message, or share this with someone who's trying to figure out what their next hire should even look like.🎙 Want to be a guest? We're opening the show up to firm owners who want to talk shop. Reach out and let's talk.Connect with us:Matt Patrick on LinkedIn → https://hubs.la/Q04fKVdQ0Mike Shaeffer on LinkedIn → https://hubs.la/Q04fKVdX0patrickaccounting.comTired of struggling to find qualified accountants for your firm? Check out Cloud Accountant Staffing's candidate portal. Full of pre-vetted offshore accounting candidates ready to interview as soon as tomorrow → https://portal.cloudaccountantstaffing.com/register?p=MatthewPatrick

Patrick Accounting has a stack of "best place to work" accolades, yet Mike still rates themselves a C on the one thing that would change everything.

Listen to Matt and Mike get honest about LMA (leadership, management, and accountability) and why holding people accountable is genuinely one of the hardest things about leading a firm.

In this episode:

• The LMA framework and exactly where most accounting firms break down inside it

• Why the small things that go unchecked become the big problems you didn't see coming

• How to tell the difference between managing and micromanaging when your team can't

• Why it's harder to hold your friends accountable than anyone you've ever managed before

• The generational gap between leading by authority and leading by influence

• What it looks like when accountability stops cascading down through your leadership layers

💬 Got a topic you want us to tackle? Drop a comment, send us a message, or share this episode with a firm owner who needs to hear it.

🎙 Want to be a guest? We're opening the show up to firm owners who want to talk shop. Reach out and let's talk.

Connect with us: 

Matt Patrick on LinkedIn → https://hubs.la/Q04fKVdQ0

Mike Shaeffer on LinkedIn → https://hubs.la/Q04fKVdX0

patrickaccounting.com

Tired of struggling to find qualified accountants for your firm? Check out Cloud Accountant Staffing's candidate portal. Full of pre-vetted offshore accounting candidates ready to interview as soon as tomorrow → https://portal.cloudaccountantstaffing.com/register?p=MatthewPatrick

Every accounting firm has a client they should have said no to. Most of them took it anyway because the money looked good, the sales conversation went well, or somebody convinced themselves they could make it work.

Mike and Matt have been there. Listen to them get honest about what actually makes a good client, where the lines are, and why even the best criteria in the world doesn't stop you from talking yourself into the wrong ones.

In this episode:

• ICP vs. acceptable client and why blurring that line when you're growing fast will cost you

• What "healthy fear of the IRS" actually looks like in a real prospect meeting

• The criteria that matters more than industry or revenue size

• The sales team loves them, the service team can't stand them problem

• Why saying yes to a startup client might be the worst thing you can do for them

• What it actually feels like when half your revenue disappears in 24 hours

💬 Got a topic you want us to tackle? Drop a comment, send us a message, or share this episode with a firm owner who needs to hear it.

🎙 Want to be a guest? We're opening the show up to firm owners who want to talk shop. Reach out and let's talk.

Connect with us:

Matt Patrick on LinkedIn → https://hubs.la/Q04fKVdQ0

Mike Shaeffer on LinkedIn → https://hubs.la/Q04fKVdX0 patrickaccounting.com

Tired of struggling to find qualified accountants for your firm? Check out Cloud Accountant Staffing's candidate portal. Full of pre-vetted offshore accounting candidates ready to interview as soon as tomorrow → https://portal.cloudaccountantstaffing.com/register?p=MatthewPatrick

Matt connected AI to every major tool in the firm. Then things got interesting.

What followed was a mix of things going sideways, things working better than expected, and one moment that made Matt realize he wasn't thinking nearly big enough.

All of which sparked a real conversation about what AI can actually do inside an accounting firm today, where the guardrails need to be, and how far off the fully automated accounting process really is. 

In this episode:

• How to think about AI as an efficiency tool today vs. an autonomous system tomorrow

• The HubSpot incident that became a lesson in AI permissions and guardrails

• The monthly accounting process use case that came back 100% accurate and changed how Matt thinks about what's possible

• What it would actually look like to automate bank statement pulls, transaction coding, and client outreach end to end

• How Patrick Accounting is running biweekly AI happy hours to get their whole team experimenting

• The three lanes every AI investment should fall into: more revenue, better margins, or better client experience

• Why Matt's headcount is going up (not down) and what kind of people he's going to need

💬 Got a topic you want us to tackle? Drop a comment, send us a message, or share this episode with a firm owner who needs to hear it.

🎙 Want to be a guest? We're opening the show up to firm owners who want to talk shop. Reach out and let's talk.

Connect with us:

Matt Patrick on LinkedIn → https://hubs.la/Q04fKVdQ0

Mike Shaeffer on LinkedIn → https://hubs.la/Q04fKVdX0

patrickaccounting.com

Tired of struggling to find qualified accountants for your firm? Check out Cloud Accountant Staffing's candidate portal. Full of pre-vetted offshore accounting candidates ready to interview as soon as tomorrow → ⁠⁠⁠https://portal.cloudaccountantstaffing.com/register?p=MatthewPatrick⁠⁠