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Chad Davis built 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 was not because the firm was failing, but because the math, modeled out on a road trip through the Italian countryside, 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 inviting a good number of people to "be successful elsewhere." Randy and Chad cover all of that, the AI tools Chad is boosting 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.

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

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.

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

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.

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