Practice Success Podcast

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Why Going Narrow and Staying Honest Grows Your Firm Faster

With Shalen Patel, Founder of J&S Accounting Solutions

What happens when you stop saying yes to every client who walks through the door?

In this episode of Canopy Practice Success, Shalen Patel, CPA and founder of J&S Accounting Solutions, shares how he built a referral-only firm for health and wellness entrepreneurs without spending a single dollar on ads.

Shalen explains how one cold DM sparked his firm's growth, why he audited his own client list and cut work that didn't fit, and how sending prospects to other firms builds trust that comes right back. He and host Luke Frye dig into authentic sales, quarterly advisory that coaches clients like marathon runners, and how to push back on TikTok tax advice without losing your integrity. Shalen also makes the case for hiring a COO in year one and shares his predictions on niche firms, personal brands, and the future of the Big Four pipeline.

Whether you're just launching a firm or ready to finally commit to a niche, this episode gives you a practical, people-first playbook for growth.

What You'll Learn

• How Shalen grew J&S Accounting Solutions entirely through referrals, with zero ad spend
• Why auditing your client list against your niche helps you say yes to the right work
• How referring poor-fit prospects to other firms builds brand equity and brings referrals back
• Why authentic, lifestyle-driven sales closes clients without hard follow-ups
• How quarterly advisory meetings prevent year-end tax surprises
• How to handle clients who want aggressive write-offs from social media advice
• Why hiring a COO in year one sets your firm up to scale
• How introverted firm owners can build client connection with short recorded videos

Connect With Shalen

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/shalen-patel-cpa-b5189852/

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Why the Best Year-End Planning Starts With a Simple Phone Call

With Moses Man, Founder of M Square Tax

What if your best year-end advisory strategy doesn't start with a pitch at all?

In this episode of Canopy Practice Success, Moses Man, CPA and founder of M Square Tax, shares how his 10-person, fully remote firm turns the post-10/15 lull into its most valuable season. Moses explains why his team's first goal at year-end isn't revenue. It's making every client feel like their accountant called just to check in.

Moses walks through how M Square tiers clients by complexity, builds tiered pricing for year-end tax projections, and uses that same conversation to lock in next year's engagement. He also shares how he aligns staff bonuses with the year-end push, why he's betting on human relationships as AI takes over manual work, and the common planning strategies he recommends for both multinational and domestic clients.

Whether you're a firm owner looking to grow advisory revenue or just trying to walk into March less overwhelmed, this episode gives you a practical playbook you can start using this week.

What You'll Learn

• Why proactive client check-ins should come before any advisory pitch
• How to tier clients by complexity to decide who gets a year-end conversation
• How to build simple, tiered pricing for year-end tax projections
• How to use year-end conversations to secure next year's engagement
• How to align staff incentives so your team actually wants to do year-end work
• Why a 15-minute phone call resolves more ambiguity than an hour of decoding emails
• What year-end strategies Moses recommends, from pre-immigration planning to donor-advised funds and Roth conversions
• Why a simple checklist beats a lengthy organizer for gathering client documents

Connect With Moses

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/moses-man-0453ab1/
Website: https://www.msquaredtax.com

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How Monthly Billing and Simple Advisory Built a Four-Day-Week Firm

With Al-Nesha Jones, CPA and Founder of ACE Group

What if advisory isn't the big, complicated offering most firms think it is?

In this episode of Canopy Practice Success, Al-Nesha Jones, CPA and founder of New Jersey–based ACE Group, shares how she rebuilt her firm around year-round client relationships after the 2021 tax season nearly broke her.

Al-Nesha explains why she moved to package pricing with monthly payments, how scheduling client calls around estimated tax deadlines keeps her team sane (and frees up the summer), and why a $1,500 minimum holds firm even for clients with two W-2s. She also makes the case that most firms are already doing advisory. They're just not getting paid for it.

The conversation then turns to culture. Al-Nesha shares how leading openly as a mom shaped a fully remote, four-day-week team, why she treats her staff the way she treats herself, and how paid internships from her alma mater, Montclair State, turned into full-time hires.

Whether you're trying to add advisory, rethink your pricing, or build a firm you don't want to escape from, this episode gives you a practical, human playbook to start with.

What You'll Learn

• Why monthly billing gets clients to share information year-round, and smooths out your revenue
• How to schedule advisory calls around estimated tax deadlines instead of a rigid quarterly calendar
• Why free W-4 reviews for every client are one of the simplest, highest-value services you can offer
• How package pricing separates your fee from the client's refund or balance due
• Why a published $1,500 minimum and a live review call for every return justify premium pricing
• How an ideas and improvements log keeps your client processes getting better every season
• What a small firm can offer employees that bigger firms can't
• Why Al-Nesha believes human connection will keep CPAs irreplaceable as AI handles more compliance work

Connect With Al-Nesha

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/alneshajones/?isSelfProfile=false

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Why Workflow Adoption Fails and How One Super User Fixes It

With Lera Kooper, COO and Owner of Proactive Advisory Group

Designing a workflow is half the problem. Getting anyone to use it is the other half.

In the finale of Canopy Practice Success's five-part series, Luke Frye talks with Lera Kooper, COO and Owner of Proactive Advisory Group, about building processes a team adopts voluntarily. Her change management advice runs against the usual instinct: don't ask everyone to become a power user. Pick one champion, let them architect it, and let everyone doing billable work just be a user.

She walks through her whiteboard-first design method, how she tells a broken workflow from a working one, and the single most common design bug she sees. Three subtasks in a row assigned to the same person will always produce stuck work, and that's a design problem rather than a people problem.

Then the specific one. Most firms model e-filing as a single step. Lera says it's four, and the missing three are where the work quietly sits.

If you've bought good software and watched your team quietly route around it, this episode is about why that happens and what to change.

What You'll Learn

• Why one super user beats asking every department head to build templates
• How to design a workflow on a whiteboard before touching software
• What separates a workflow that works from one that only exists on paper
• Why three subtasks in a row will always get stuck
• Why e-filing is four steps, not one
• How moving production management to operations freed up the tax team
• Why to master one feature before bolting on the rest
• What dialed-in workflows do to a firm's valuation at exit

Connect With Lera

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lerakooper/

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Why Solo-Owner Habits Break Fast-Growing Accounting Firms

With Lera Kooper, COO & Owner, Proactive Advisory Group 

Growing fast is easy. Growing without burning out your team, your clients, or yourself is the hard part.

In episode four of this five-part series of Canopy Practice Success, host Luke Frye, CPA and Accountant in Residence at Canopy, sits down with Lera Kooper, owner and COO & Owner, Proactive Advisory Group. Her firm is scaling aggressively through acquisitions, so she's working through these questions in real time.

Lera explains how she defines sustainable growth, why every system her firm builds is out of date within 18 months, and how she turns a big goal into three habits her team repeats a thousand times. She also shares the growth trap she's fallen into herself, the solo-owner habits she sees holding back acquired firms, and why she thinks firm owners who are uncomfortable with sales are doing their clients a disservice.

The conversation closes with predictions on firms that wait on cloud and AI, the future of the billable hour, and why client relationships and advisory will make up most of the work in the next decade.

If you own a growing firm, or you're thinking about how to grow without losing what made your firm work, this episode gives you a practical playbook from someone in the middle of it.

What You'll Learn

• How Lera defines sustainable growth: serving clients without underserving others or burning out the team • Why consistent client and team experience starts with standard operating procedures and a shared definition of good 

• How to break a big goal into KPIs and daily habits that make fast growth feel manageable • Why chasing every new idea leads to failing at five things instead of succeeding at one 

• Which solo-owner habits, like billing after the fact and undocumented procedures, hold back a growing firm 

• Why retention and upselling existing clients are her top two growth priorities for the next two years 

• How to reframe sales as recommending what clients need, and why not doing it is a disservice

• Why firm owners who skip cloud and AI may end up accepting a lower acquisition offer

Connect With Lera

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lerakooper/

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Why Your Best People Burn Out When Work Lives in Spreadsheets

With Lera Kooper, COO and Owner of Proactive Advisory Group

Capacity isn't an operations problem. It's a leadership one.

In this episode of Canopy Practice Success, Luke Frye talks with Lera Kooper, COO and Owner of Proactive Advisory Group, about the hard calls a growing firm makes on time and staffing. Every yes is a no somewhere else, and Lera makes that trade deliberately instead of discovering it at the bottleneck.

She walks through how she tiers clients, the math behind hiring versus optimizing, and what she says to a client when the firm has taken on too much. She also makes a direct case for keeping time sheets in a fixed-fee firm, not for billing, but as a diagnostic for whether a process has gone stale or a team member needs support.

Then she names what she turned down. Marketing spend, Google Ads, and an offer to be acquired, because the client base she already has is the asset she'd rather work first.

If you're protecting a high performer who's quietly buried, or deciding between a hire and a better process, this one gives you a framework and the numbers behind it.

What You'll Learn

• How to tier clients before capacity becomes a crisis
• Why a $100K hire has to produce three times their cost
• How to tell a client you're at capacity without damaging trust
• Why ghost tasks are the real threat to your best people
• Why Lera keeps time sheets in a fixed-fee firm
• How an acquired client list becomes a lead list
• Why she turned off marketing spend on purpose
• Where a firm that skips cloud and AI lands in three years

Connect With Lera

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lerakooper/

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Why Delegating Tasks Without Authority Keeps Firm Owners Stuck

With Lera Kooper, COO and Owner of Proactive Advisory Group

Define Good, Episode 2 of 5: Delegate Authority, Not Tasks

What does it actually take to hand off a piece of your firm?

In this episode of Canopy Practice Success, Luke Frye talks with Lera Kooper, COO and Owner of Proactive Advisory Group, about the gap between delegating tasks and delegating authority. Lera is based just outside Seattle with team members nationwide, and she treats her own workload the way she treats any inefficient system. She maps it, audits it, and redesigns the parts that don't hold up.

Lera explains how handing over authority forced her to get specific about the result she wants instead of the path someone takes to get there. She describes why she documents processes as burnout prevention, how she separates "only I can do this" from "I've always done this," and what happens when the work you're best at is no longer the work worth your time.

The conversation then moves into predictions. Lera agrees the profession has a talent shortage, and she argues the bigger problem is a shortage of firms people want to work for. She makes the case for scoping and billing upfront, building teams that move into advisory work faster, and staying remote capable by design. She also shares the habit she uses to protect her attention: no Reels, no TikTok, no YouTube Shorts.

If you run a firm and you're still the bottleneck on work someone else could own, this episode gives you a practical place to start.

What You'll Learn

• How Lera restructured her role by handing over authority, not just tasks
• Why clarity about the result matters more than control over the path
• How documented SOPs prevent burnout instead of creating busywork
• How to tell "only I can do this" apart from "I've always done this"
• Why Lera calls the talent shortage real and misdiagnosed, and names the shortage of firms people want to join as the bigger problem
• Why Lera made roughly six hires this year and still said no to three to five good candidates per role
• Why scoping and billing upfront protects client trust better than invoicing in arrears
• Why Lera stays off short-form video to keep her attention span intact

Connect With Lera

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lerakooper/

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Why Treating AI Like a New Hire Beats Chasing Every Tool

Treat AI Like a New Hire (Define Good, Episode 1 of 5)

With Lera Kooper, Owner and COO of Accountability Services

Most AI conversations start with the tool. This one starts with the job description.

In this episode of Canopy Practice Success, host Luke Frye, CPA, Accountant in Residence at Canopy, talks with Lera Kooper, owner and COO of Accountability Services, about the rule that keeps her firm's AI adoption grounded: onboard a new tool the same way you onboard a new person.

Lera explains why she hands AI the tasks that require the least professional judgment first, how she sets expectations and weekly check-ins the way she would for any team member, and why a year spent documenting SOPs turned out to be the real prerequisite. She also gets candid about one rollout her firm paused, not because the tool underperformed, but because no one owned the standard for how to use it. Her words: "we haven't had the resources to go in and define good in our use of that type of tool."

The conversation also covers what changes when bookkeepers and staff accountants spend more time in front of clients, where automation still stalls today, and how small firms can use their speed to close the efficiency gap with much larger ones.

If you're deciding what to hand to AI next, or trying to work out why your last rollout stalled, this episode gives you a practical order of operations from someone running it inside a fast-growing firm.

What You'll Learn

• Why Lera Kooper onboards a new AI tool the same way she onboards a new hire
• How to sort which tasks belong with AI and which still need a person
• What "defining good" means, and why documented SOPs make AI easier to trust
• Why an AI rollout without a clear champion ends up on pause instead of in production
• How AI meeting notes freed an admin to move into operations, workflow, and client experience
• Why her bookkeepers and staff accountants sit in front of clients more than they did three years ago
• What still has to happen with bank connections before bookkeeping is fully automated
• How small firms can close the efficiency gap with large firms, and where technology stops being the answer

Connect With Lera

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lerakooper/

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Send us your thoughts or what you want to hear more about!

In this episode of Canopy Practice Success, Luke Frye explains how he built his own tax practice to $500,000 in recurring revenue in a little over four years without raising a dollar. He walks through the math on a single S-Corp client, six touchpoints a year instead of one, and why the quarterly projection is the piece accountants undercharge for most.

Luke also compares what he learned as the first accountant at Bench.co, where Facebook ads drove growth, with what he had to do on his own: chambers of commerce, BNI groups, and teaching classes at camera stores to reach photographers. He explains why he runs his sales pipeline in HubSpot with the same rigor his partner runs the client list, why he's a Deming guy about visualizing work, and why he thinks accounting firms should stop building their own software.

The conversation closes on private equity and succession, and Luke's argument that you should decide how your partnership ends while you're still happy in it.

If you're building a firm you actually want to own, this episode shows how recurring revenue comes together one touchpoint at a time.

What You'll Learn

• Why Luke built his practice around single member LLCs and S corporations, the entity he calls "everyman's entity"
• How one S-Corp client turns into six touchpoints a year instead of one
• Why handing clients last year's safe harbor number undercharges for the answer they actually want
• How treating your sales pipeline like a client deliverable will double your sales
• Why March 1st to April 15th is the best window to launch a new firm, when every other firm has stopped taking clients
• What Luke burned through before year three clicked, including his savings and credit cards
• How automating proposals, e-signatures, payments, and invoices saves 40 hours a week for two months
• Why "playing not to lose" costs firm owners more than the software they refuse to buy
• Why you should decide how your partnership ends while you and your partner are still happy
• Why Luke thinks firms should buy software instead of building it, and what maintenance really costs

Connect With Luke

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lukefrye/

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How Writing Built a Niche CPA Practice for Freelancers and the Self-Employed

With Jonathan Medows, CPA, Founder and Managing Member of Medows CPA and Founder of CPA for Freelancers®

Most accountants don't write. Jonathan Medows built a firm on it.

In this episode of Canopy Practice Success, Jonathan Medows shares how he went from one client and a Craigslist ad in 2004 to a 15-person New York City firm serving freelancers, creatives, clergy, and independent professionals. The niche wasn't a plan. It came from paying attention to which clients he actually enjoyed serving, and where he added the most value.

Jonathan explains why he writes constantly, how that content teaches him and his staff as much as it attracts clients, and why articles are showing up in AI-driven search results for the exact questions his ideal clients are asking. He also walks through the workflow he built to route returns by risk level, the culture of accountability he looks for when hiring, and why he'd rather let a client leave than fire them.

The conversation closes with rapid fire advice: the deduction New York firms are too cautious about, why new business owners go backwards before they go forward, and the one habit every self-employed person needs.

If you're building a firm around a specific type of client, or wondering whether content marketing is worth the time, this episode gives you a practical, unglamorous look at what it actually takes.

What You'll Learn

• How Jonathan found his freelancer niche by tracking which clients he enjoyed most
• Why writing articles makes you a better technician, not just a better marketer
• How consistent content builds domain authority and shows up in AI search results
• Why you should hire a copy editor instead of trying to write everything yourself
• How to route tax returns by risk level so work lands at the right supervision tier
• Why tiered pricing and services beat a one-size-fits-all offer for self-employed clients
• How to raise fees professionally so clients leave on their own instead of being fired
• What Jonathan looks for in new hires, and why he'll happily hire siblings
• Why the home office deduction is underused and travel and meals get firms audited
• What to expect financially in your first years of self-employment

Connect With Jonathan

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jonathan-medows-cpa-9729702/

If you enjoyed this episode, be sure to subscribe and follow Canopy Practice Success wherever you listen to podcasts.