Randy Crabtree sits down with CPA turned leadership coach Erin Daiber on Episode 260 of The Unique CPA. The founder of Well Balanced Accountants, Erin digs into what it actually takes to build a firm that can survive and thrive in a rapidly shifting profession. Bringing a refreshingly grounded perspective on AI adoption, Erin says your focus should be less about chasing every new tool, and more about having a strategy before you start stacking up subscriptions. The conversation moves into the leadership crisis that's quietly brewing in many firms, mindful of the gap between great technicians and effective leaders, and what happens when nobody's been developed to take over when senior partners retire. Erin is a fierce advocate for firm independence, and makes a compelling case that most firms turning to PE or M&A could have avoided it with earlier, more intentional investment in their people and processes.

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Support for this episode comes from BILL. Simplify your workflows and accelerate your growth with BILL's accountant console. Take a demo today at BILL.com/UniqueCPA for a $250 gift card – terms apply.

In part two of their conversation on Episode 259 of The Unique CPA, Randy and Cosmin Nicolaescu, co-founder of Accrual, get into the harder questions: What happens to pricing when a hundred-hour return takes ten? What do junior accountants actually need to learn if AI handles the data entry? Which firms are quietly positioning themselves to win the next decade, while others stall on change management? Cosmin makes a pragmatic case that early adopters will capture a real arbitrage window before the market reprices, and that the firms who use that window to build advisory capacity rather than just cut costs are the ones who come out ahead. The conversation covers review workflows, glass-box versus black-box AI why organic growth in accounting has been so hard to achieve, and what might finally change that.

Get the full show notes and more resources at TheUniqueCPA.com

Support for this episode comes from BILL. Simplify your workflows and accelerate your growth with BILL's accountant console. Take a demo today at BILL.com/UniqueCPA for a $250 gift card – terms apply.

Cosmin Nicolaescu spent years at Stripe and Brex building the financial infrastructure that millions of businesses depend on. Now he's turned that experience toward a different problem: Why are accounting firms still operating like it's 1995? As CEO and co-founder of Accrual, Cosmin is building an AI platform designed to take the mechanical burden off CPAs and give them back time for the work that actually requires their judgment. Episode 258 marks part one of a two-part conversation on The Unique CPA where he talks with Randy about what drew him to the accounting profession specifically, how watching finance teams operate strategically at Stripe and Brex shaped his thinking, and what it looks like in practice when a firm cuts a 100-hour tax return down to 15.

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Big thanks go out to Magnetic for backing The Unique CPA. MagneticTax.com.

Chad Davis helped build LiveCA to 120 people and then made the deliberate decision to cut it nearly in half. On Episode 257 of The Unique CPA, he tells Randy that at that size it wasn't enjoyable, and the math, modeled out on a road trip through the Italian countryside with his business partner Josh Zweig, pointed clearly to 60 as the number where profit, people, and sanity could actually coexist. That restructuring meant repricing every client, moving from value pricing to budgeted hours, and navigating the realities of headcount changes. Randy and Chad cover all of that, the AI tools accountants are trying through his AutomationTown community, the time-zone arbitrage of running a Canadian firm from Spain, and why changing people's mindsets inside a firm matters more than any efficiency gain the technology can deliver.

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Speaker and leadership strategist Brian Hilliard joins Randy Crabtree on Episode 256 of The Unique CPA to make a case that burnout in the accounting profession isn't a character flaw, it's "good qualities gone out of bounds." The work ethic and integrity that make CPAs excellent at their jobs are the same traits that, left unchecked, drive them straight into the ground, and to illustrate, Brian draws on his own early experience of getting sick three times in two years before recognizing that his body was simply taking the vacation he refused to schedule. The conversation gets practical quickly: managing energy rather than time, clustering deadlines to reduce background anxiety, and rethinking the to-do list with a whiteboard, a four-by-six note card, and a Sharpie. None of the fixes Brian proposes are dramatic, which is exactly the point: You can do them starting today.

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Randy Crabtree sits down with Mark Gallegos, partner at Porte Brown and one of the more broadly active figures in the accounting profession, on Episode 255 of The Unique CPA. Together, they work through what HR-1 actually means for tax practitioners right now in practical terms. Mark has a knack for staying relentlessly neutral on legislation while still finding the angles that benefit clients, and that discipline runs through the whole conversation as they get into the advisory mindset shift that tax reform demands, the uncomfortable truth that most CPAs are undercharging for work that clients genuinely value, and what AI will actually compress versus what it can never replace. Mark also shares how Porte Brown operationalizes delegation as a leadership strategy, not just a talking point; a wide-ranging conversation that manages to be both technically grounded and surprisingly candid about the profession's blind spots.

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Randy didn't expect to ever sit through an entire conference session, but Elliott Bastien Morin's "narrative archeology" workshop changed that pattern. What started as curiosity about excavating stories became a months-long collaboration that transformed Randy's keynote from five scattered narratives into a single arc that earned a standing ovation, and plenty of Kleenex. On Episode 254 of The Unique CPA, Elliott, the co-founder of 3Motion, explains how he's spent 15 years interviewing thousands of people to uncover authentic stories, and that he treats storytelling like an archeological dig: finding fragments, piecing them together, and polishing them until they captivate. For accountants who've always worked for their clients instead of on their selves and their stories, this framework offers something urgent, and as AI handles more compliance work, the human connection becomes the differentiating factor. The profession is moving from reporting to interpretation, and that shift demands something accountants haven't always prioritized: a cohesive story that unites teams and resonates with clients in an oversaturated world.

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The Unique CPA is evolving. On Episode 253, Randy Crabtree and Terrell Turner sit down to announce a significant shift: Terrell is joining as co-host, and the podcast is becoming fully independent. But this isn't about changing the mission: mental health, peak firm performance, and elevating the profession remain central. It's about expanding how those conversations happen. Randy and Terrell brainstorm openly about what comes next, whether it's live recordings at conferences and roadshows, college campus visits to "bridge the gap" when it comes to talent, or revisiting past episodes on private equity and AI to see how predictions held up. They reflect on how a single LinkedIn message on Christmas Eve 2020 led to their over five-year friendship, and how Terrell once turned Captain Underpants into a marketing presentation for accounting firms after Randy challenged him at dinner. It's a candid look at what's stayed the same, what's changing, and why community matters more than ever.

Get the full show notes and more resources at RandyCrabtree.com