CPA Trendlines Podcasts
CPA Trendlines
Exclusive information. Extraordinary insight.See all podcast episodes here: https://cpatrendlines.com/category/podcast/ CPA Trendlines is the world’s only research and advisory service focused solely on the tax, accounting, and finance professions. We use a time-tested, quality-proven, proprietary blend of data, analysis, community, experience, and imagination to produce extraordinary value for our clients. Elite decision-makers from all over the world look to CPA Trendlines for trusted advice, bold insights, and confidential access to exclusive intelligence and decision support. You’ll stay more focused, save time, grow revenue in a fast-changing global digital environment, and sleep better at night. Guaranteed. Facts. Figures. Insights. Implications. Here you'll find the data and analysis you can use for your practice and your career, plus exclusive research, insights, and commentary on the most pressing issues and fastest-changing trends. We are dedicated to delivering the actionable intelligence that tax, accounting, and finance professionals need in order to identify and act on emerging issues and opportunities. We specialize in high-quality, concise executive briefings designed to help busy professionals improve their organizations, advance their careers, and enhance their lives. Our reports are relevant, timely, and to-the-point, providing the most essential information, and are digestible often in under an hour.
Episodes
Mentioned books
Dec 28, 2025 • 47min
The Hidden Friction Killing CAS Profitability | It's Not Just the Numbers
CAS success isn’t accidental. It’s engineered.It's Not Just the NumbersWith Penny Breslin and Damien GreatheadFor CPA TrendlinesClient Advisory Services (CAS) continue to outperform every other service line in accounting. But firms that treat CAS as “enhanced bookkeeping” quickly hit a ceiling. The firms that scale profitably make harder—and smarter—choices: who they serve, how they staff, how they price, and how they explain their value in a world obsessed with automation.
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In this episode of It’s Not Just the Numbers, co-hosts Penny Breslin and Damien Greathead get refreshingly practical about what actually drives CAS success. Their message is clear: strong CAS practices are built intentionally, not incrementally.One question cuts straight to the tension many firm owners feel: Should teams see profitability numbers?Breslin and Greathead don’t argue for radical openness—or secrecy. Instead, they advocate for profit literacy.Teams don’t need to know margins by client. They do need to understand three things...
Dec 27, 2025 • 18min
The Job Crisis Is a Myth; the Job Remix Is Not | Accounting Voices
Automation deletes tasks, then dares accountants to create new value on purpose.Accounting VoicesWith Rob BrownArtificial intelligence is no longer a concept that accountants debate in panels or pilot projects. It is actively reshaping how firms hire, train, and define value.In this episode of Accounting Voices, host Rob Brown delivers a blunt assessment of what many professionals are already sensing, but few are saying out loud: AI is not coming for your job. It is coming for what your job does.
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That distinction changes everything.Brown frames the moment as an AI talent shock—a structural shift that is quietly altering career paths across public accounting, corporate finance, and advisory work. This is not about fearmongering or futurism. It is about reality on the ground.
Dec 26, 2025 • 41min
Dunn: Time's the Wrong Growth Metric | Gear Up For Growth
Stop billing. Start thrilling.Gear Up for Growth With Jean CaragherFor CPA Trendlines In a re-energizing episode of Gear Up for Growth, Paul Dunn makes the case that the billable hour isn’t just outdated—it’s holding firms back. The four-time TEDx speaker and cofounder of B1G1 challenges accounting leaders to rethink how success is measured and to lead with purpose, not punch clocks.
Gear Up for Growth spotlights the best strategies for smart and efficient growth in today's competitive landscape. More Gear Up for Growth here | More Jean Caragher here | Get her best-selling handbook, The 90-Day Marketing Plan for CPA Firms, here | More CPA Trendlines videos and podcasts here
Talking with host Jean Caragher, Dunn reframes the profession’s obsession with time as a distraction from what clients actually value. “It’s not about the inputs,” he says. “It’s about the outcomes.” When firms anchor their work to results—and to the human impact behind those results—growth follows naturally.More than two decades after coauthoring "The Firm of the Future," Dunn remains a vocal critic of six-minute increments. While some firms are inching toward value pricing and advisory-led models, he argues the real shift requires courage. Measuring work by time, he notes, is “the opposite of human flourishing.” Measuring by impact, on the other hand, elevates both clients and teams.Originally published May 2025
Dec 24, 2025 • 39min
Mark Gallegos: HR1 Is Signed; the Advisory Clock Is Ticking | Big 4 Transparency
Break down the new law, the unanswered questions, and why waiting for certainty is a strategic mistake.Big 4 TransparencyBy Dominic Piscopo, CPAFor CPA TrendlinesWhat does it take to turn dense tax law into business wins? In this episode of the Big 4 Transparency, host Dominic Piscopo sits down with Mark Gallegos, tax partner at Porte Brown, to explore how a self-described “tax geek” became an eminence engine by teaching, writing, and speaking across the country while translating the new HR1 legislation into clear moves for clients.
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Gallegos serves on the AICPA Strategic Tax Reform Advisory Group (“strike force”), where volunteer experts parse bills, surface practitioner pain points, and help shape the letters and asks that go to Treasury, IRS, and Capitol Hill. That inside track, pressure-testing interpretations with national peers, feeds his day job: delivering 50,000-foot explanations that prompt the most valuable question in professional services: “What should we do next?” Gallegos and Piscopo dive into HR1’s planning levers.
Dec 23, 2025 • 51min
Brenda Cannon: Busy Season is Self-Inflicted | The Disruptors
Exhaustion, chaos, and missed lives are the result of design choices—not destiny.The DisruptorsWith Liz FarrBrenda Cannon, co-founder of Cannon and Associates, has been pioneering a creative approach for taming tax season madness: every return is scheduled like an appointment. “We know how long it takes us to prepare a tax return. Why could we not control each week and the number of tax returns we prepare each week?” she recalls thinking after hearing Jason Staats introduce the concept on a podcast in 2022.
MORE STREAMING: Carroll: When One Person Can Break the Firm | Rampe: Build a Roadmap Even When the Road's Not There | Chang: Killing SALY, One Agent at a Time | Vanover: 5-Star Firms Don't Bill by the Hour | Kless: Profit Is a Result. Flourishing Is the Purpose | Whitman: Build Culture on 'Progress,' Not Change | 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 Over the last three tax seasons, Cannon and her team, which includes her husband and co-founder, Randy Cannon, have been refining the process. Clients choose a date on a calendar on which they will deliver their documents to her office, with the understanding that their return will be ready three weeks after that date.
Dec 22, 2025 • 34min
Aleksander Dyo: It's Not a Loophole; It's a Missed Opportunity | The Concierge CPA
Charitable gift financing has been IRS-validated for decades, yet many still avoid it.The Concierge CPAWith Jackie MeyerFor CPA TrendlinesIn this episode of the Concierge CPA podcast, host Dr. Jackie Meyer, CPA, puts a spotlight on a charitable tax strategy that sounds suspiciously modern — yet has been sitting in the tax code since 1978.The strategy is called charitable gift financing, and, according to Meyer’s guest, Aleksander Dyo, founder and managing director of Wealth Excel, it remains largely invisible to many accountants despite decades of IRS validation.More Jackie MeyerDyo frames the idea with a blunt comparison: Americans finance homes, cars, equipment — even vacations. So why not charitable giving?Charitable gift financing allows high-income taxpayers to make significant philanthropic contributions by combining personal funds with borrowed capital, while claiming a charitable deduction for the full amount transferred to charity in the year of the gift.This isn’t a loophole or a creative interpretation, Dyo says. It’s rooted in long-standing IRS guidance on the deductibility of charitable contributions made with borrowed funds, provided the funds are transferred to the charity in the same tax year.In practice, that timing is everything.
Dec 21, 2025 • 46min
Grunt Work Is Dead | It's Not Just the Numbers
...And accounting careers are better for it.It's Not Just the NumbersWith Penny Breslin and Damien GreatheadFor CPA TrendlinesFor decades, accounting careers followed a familiar script: grind through repetitive work, earn your stripes, and maybe—eventually—get to the interesting stuff.That script is officially broken.In this episode of It’s Not Just the Numbers, hosts Penny Breslin and Damien Greathead tackled one of the most misunderstood shifts in the profession: how artificial intelligence and outsourcing are reshaping early-career accounting work—and why that’s actually good news for graduates and firm leaders.
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The big question isn’t whether AI and outsourcing are here to stay. They are. The real question is whether firms will use them to strip away opportunity—or to finally fix a broken talent model.Let’s be honest: repetitive data entry, reconciliations, and manual cleanup were never great learning tools. They were time-consuming, error-prone, and often disconnected from how firms actually create value.Yet for years, they were treated as a rite of passage.
Dec 20, 2025 • 17min
The Dark Side of AI No Firm Can Ignore | Accounting Voices
Trust remains the profession’s currency, even in an automated future.Accounting VoicesWith Rob BrownArtificial intelligence is transforming accounting at breakneck speed. It writes reports, summarizes research, drafts client communications, and accelerates analysis. But when AI gets it wrong, it does not whisper. It declares falsehoods with confidence.That is the warning at the center of a new episode of Accounting Voices, which pulls back the curtain on real-world AI failures that have already shaken the profession — and explains why no firm can afford to treat AI as a neutral back-office tool.
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This is not about hypothetical risk. It is about documented failures, public apologies, reputational damage, and a hard truth every leader must confront: Technology does not absolve responsibility.
Dec 19, 2025 • 41min
AI's Already in Your Workflow...| It's Not Just the Numbers
The question is: Do you know what it’s doing?It's Not Just the NumbersWith Penny Breslin and Damien GreatheadFor CPA TrendlinesArtificial intelligence has arrived in accounting, but not in the way many expected. It’s not a single app or a single process. It’s everywhere, embedded in workflows, changing how firms scope engagements, price cleanup work, and train their people.
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In the latest episode of It’s Not Just the Numbers, co-hosts Damien Greathead and Penny Breslin explore how AI reshapes the day-to-day work of accounting firms. Their conversation moves beyond theory to real-world examples of how AI is being used in client engagements, what it means for team development, and why critical thinking, not coding, is the skill every firm must cultivate next.
Dec 19, 2025 • 47min
Lou Grassi: "How the Hell Did This All Happen?" | Gear Up For Growth
Here's what it takes to grow a CPA firm from zero to the Top 100—without losing your soul.Gear Up for GrowthWith Jean CaragherFor CPA TrendlinesWhen Lou Grassi started his firm at age 24, he couldn’t afford to pay himself. There was no client base, no safety net, and no guarantee it would work.More than four decades later, Grassi is the 56th largest accounting firm in the U.S., with $146.5 million in revenue, seven offices, 58 partners, and more than 560 employees. And yet, as Grassi tells host Jean Caragher on Gear Up for Growth, the most important lessons from that journey have very little to do with size.They have everything to do with intention.
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In this conversation, Grassi reflects on what it takes to build a firm that grows sustainably, treats people like owners, and stays independent in a profession reshaped by private equity, talent shortages, and rapid change.
