Focus is the New Flex

Finding A-players is hard, and most firms are already losing them at the very first step: the job post. If it doesn't grab attention, nothing else matters, because the best candidates never apply. In this session, we'll break down what makes a job post stand out from the flood of generic listings, then build one live using a free AI tool. You'll walk away with a job post ready to publish, plus the tool itself so you can build a new one for every future hire.

You'll learn

• Why most firms lose A-players before an interview ever happens
• What makes a job post stand out and get candidates excited to apply
• How to create a finished, ready-to-post job description, built live using a free AI tool you'll keep

This session will include building a job post template live so please make sure you have access to a free ChatGPT account at minimum to be able to follow along and participate hands-on.

Your team already does the analysis every month, but it stays in the workpaper and the client receives a P&L they never open. In this working session, you take one set of closed books and turn them into two things a client will actually use. The first is an interactive dashboard, built in Claude, that lets the client click through their own numbers. The second is a short email that tells them what those numbers mean, using three observations and one question. You build both live on sample books with a written procedure you can run for every client next month. You leave with the procedure, a finished example, and a simple test for whether an email is worth sending.

By the end of this session, you’ll be able to

• Separate data from observation in a set of closed books, and write three observations and one question that a client can act on.
• Build an interactive client dashboard in Claude from a P&L, balance sheet, and cash flow statement.
• Write a Month-End Recap procedure that produces the dashboard and the email the same way for every client, no matter who on the team runs it.

You started your business for freedom and flexibility, right? But now you might find yourself wondering, "Where did the time go?" Or reaching the end of another exhausting workday, knowing you were busy all day but struggling to identify what you actually accomplished.

Between client demands, team meetings, emails, and endless notifications, it's easy to spend your entire day reacting instead of focusing on the work that actually creates momentum in your business.

In this session, Justine Lackey will challenge the myth of multitasking and introduce you to the power of monotasking — the practice of giving your full attention to one thing at a time.

You'll also learn how to design your Ideal Week, a method of intentionally structuring your time around your priorities, energy, and most important work.

Walk away with practical tools to protect your focus, establish better boundaries, and create space for deep work, strategic thinking, leadership, and life outside your firm.

The real flex isn't getting more done — it's having the freedom, ease and the space to focus on what matters most.

Three takeaways

• Train your brain to focus. Learn why multitasking undermines productivity, how monotasking strengthens your ability to concentrate, and how simple techniques can help you accomplish more in less time.
• Design your Ideal Week. Learn how to intentionally structure your calendar using Michael Hyatt's Ideal Week framework, so you can create dedicated, intentional time for client work, leadership, strategic thinking, and personal priorities.
• Protect your most valuable resources. Learn how to establish boundaries around your time, energy, and attention, so you're running your firm proactively instead of spending your days reacting to everyone else's needs and priorities.

During Summer Workflow Camp, firms spent four weeks stress-testing a simple question: Could the work keep moving if someone suddenly wasn’t there?

They built playbooks for vacations, unexpected departures, and those moments when the person who “just knows how it works” isn’t available. Along the way, they uncovered fragile processes, knowledge living in people’s heads, unclear backup plans, and capabilities sitting unused in tools they were already paying for.

Months later, our three Stress Test winners are back to tell us what actually held. Dave Kersting, Debbie Hylander, and Misty Scott will share what stuck, what quietly reverted, what they changed after the challenge ended, and what turned out to matter more than they expected.

This isn’t about documenting every possible scenario or building a perfect operations manual. It’s about pressure-testing what you already have, finding the places where your firm is more dependent on one person than you realized, and building enough clarity that the work can keep moving—even when someone can’t.

You’ll leave knowing how to

• Stress-test your firm to find the work, knowledge, and decisions that depend too heavily on one person.
• Build a practical coverage playbook with clear ownership, backup plans, and just enough documentation to keep work moving.
• Spot fragile processes before they become emergencies—and strengthen what you already have before adding more people, processes, or tools.

AI tools are showing up everywhere in our profession, promising to save time, automate tasks and make our businesses more efficient. But before we connect one to our accounting software, upload a client's financial information or give it access to our systems, there's an important question we need to ask: Do we actually understand what we're agreeing to?

In this interactive 60-minute workshop, Tanya Hilts will walk participants through a practical framework for evaluating AI tools before introducing them into their accounting or bookkeeping practice.

We'll look beyond the marketing promises to explore what happens to client information, how to identify potential risks in vendor terms and privacy policies, what permissions we're giving away, and who remains accountable when something goes wrong.

Participants will work through a realistic example using an AI Tool Evaluation Checklist, learning what questions to ask, what answers should raise concerns, and when it's time to say no.

This isn't about being afraid of AI. It's about understanding the tools we're using, protecting the trust our clients place in us, and making informed decisions that allow us to take advantage of technology without giving up control.

Attendees will leave with a reusable AI Tool Evaluation Checklist and a clearer process for deciding whether a tool is appropriate for their practice and their clients.

Some clients are obviously a poor fit. The harder calls are the ones where the answer is not so clear.

In this interactive panel, four firm owners will work through real-world client dilemmas and make the call: keep the client, fix the relationship, or fire them? As each scenario unfolds, we’ll add new information and see what changes their minds—and what doesn’t.

The conversation will dig into the factors that make these decisions complicated: profitability, client fit, boundaries, scope creep, team impact, security concerns, and the “just this once” exceptions that have a way of becoming permanent.

Attendees will hear how experienced firm owners weigh the tradeoffs, where they draw the line, and what they consider before deciding a client relationship is worth repairing—or no longer worth keeping.

You’ll leave able to

• Spot the warning signs that a client relationship may be costing more than the revenue it brings in.
• Evaluate client fit more objectively using factors like profitability, boundaries, team impact, scope, and risk.
• Decide when to reset the relationship—and when it’s time to let the client go.

When your team keeps working around a process, the workflow is usually telling you something. It might be missing a step, it might not account for an exception, or it might not match the way the work actually gets done. Jo builds the workflows at Arnason Accounting & Co. In many small and growing firms, that job falls to the owner or a senior team member, on top of everything else they do. This session is for whoever builds the workflows. Sometimes the real cause is a leadership issue, and Jo will say so up front. After that, she’ll stick to what the builder controls: finding the spots where people go off-script and fixing the workflow itself rather than repeating the reminder. To show how, she’ll rebuild a sample onboarding workflow in a Financial Cents template, including a Loom video embedded on the trickiest step. Not every tool lets you do that.

Takeaways

• How to spot the three places people start doing their own thing: the exception, the handoff where the next person fills gaps their own way, and the step that doesn’t match the real work
• Why “please follow the process” doesn’t fix it, and what to change in the workflow instead
• A 30-minute workaround review you can run on one workflow

A full workload isn’t the same as work moving forward. In this live customer walkthrough, Jenna Lee Dillon, founder of Gutsy Money, will show how to spot stalled work, distinguish internal bottlenecks from client delays, and define the problem so the right solution becomes clear.

Attendees will see the views and weekly routines that give her firm a clearer picture of assignments, deadlines, client dependencies, and team capacity—without chasing everyone for a status update. They’ll leave with a simple framework for reviewing work across their own firm, whether or not they use Financial Cents.

Your takeaways

• Spot where work is actually getting stuck and identify the real cause.
• Separate internal bottlenecks from client delays so the right problem gets fixed.
• Use a simple weekly review routine to get visibility into assignments, deadlines, dependencies, and capacity.

Every service business makes promises to clients: a response time, a turnaround window, a "we've got you" reassurance. Most of those promises quietly fail — not because the team isn't working hard enough, but because the promise was never attached to anything structural. It lived in a person's inbox, a group chat, or someone's memory. This session makes the case that clients don't get to decide how they interact with you — you design the door — and that the specific systems you build (a dedicated portal, a single intake channel, a defined escalation path) are what turn good intentions into guarantees you can actually keep and defend.

Takeaways

• A framework for making promises enforceable. Attendees leave knowing why a promise tied to a person, an inbox, or a group chat quietly fails — and how to redesign it so it's backed by a system instead.
• Concrete models you can adapt immediately. Real examples of “one door” systems (a dedicated channel, structured intake process, client portal), plus language for setting the expectation at onboarding, redirecting clients when they go around the process, and holding the boundary when they push back.
• A principle that extends past communication. The same design logic applies to reporting, billing, and intake — so attendees leave with one idea that pays off across several parts of their client experience, not just email and Slack.
• How to set expectations, create boundaries, and get clients to follow your firm’s process.

Every piece of software a firm adopts quietly shapes how the firm operates. It determines where information lives, who gets interrupted, what clients have to do, where work gets stuck, and which decisions still find their way back to the owner.

In this session, Kristy Monahan will explore how firm owners can evaluate their technology as an operating structure, not simply a collection of tools. Attendees will learn how to identify unclear ownership, unnecessary handoffs, and technology decisions that create more work instead of making the firm run better.

More services don’t necessarily mean more revenue, and more clients don’t always mean more growth. In fact, offering too much can make it harder for clients to understand what you do best and harder for you to price and sell your services confidently.

In this practical session, Veronica Wasek will show firm owners how to identify the work they are best positioned to deliver, turn that expertise into a clearly defined higher-value offer, and communicate its value without feeling like a salesperson. Attendees will learn how to evaluate which services deserve their focus, define the client problem and outcome more clearly, create stronger scope and pricing boundaries, and use a consultative approach to recommend the right next step.

The goal is not to do more. It is to become known for solving the right problem for the right client, and to build a simpler, more profitable firm around that focus.

Attendees will learn how to

• Evaluate their current services to identify which ones have the strongest combination of skill, demand, profitability, enjoyment, and repeatability.
• Turn a service into a more clearly defined, higher-value offer by focusing on the client problem, desired outcome, scope, and boundaries.
• Explain and recommend their services with confidence using a consultative approach that feels professional rather than salesy.

A signed engagement letter does not mean a client is actually ready to work with your firm.

The first few weeks of a client relationship are where expectations get set, information gets lost, responsibilities become fuzzy, and bad habits can quietly take hold. A strong onboarding process makes it clear what happens next, what the client needs to do, who owns each step inside the firm, and when the relationship is officially ready to move into recurring work.

LiveCA was losing $100,000 a month before making the difficult decision to shrink from 120 people to 60 and ultimately become a more focused, highly profitable firm. In this numbers-heavy session, he’ll break down how they figured out where the money was actually going, what the economics revealed about service profitability, staffing, utilization, delivery costs, pricing, and client mix, and which numbers made it clear what had to change. He’ll share how doing less, focusing the firm, and making tough decisions as a team turned the economics around which ultimately opened the opportunity to move to Spain.

You’ll learn how to

• Find where the money is going by examining service profitability, staffing, utilization, and delivery costs.
• See how pricing and client mix can leave a busy firm losing money.
• Identify the numbers that tell you what to keep, change, or stop doing.

Performance feedback matters—we all need to receive feedback to perform better and grow into our best selves. Yet traditional feedback methods often feel too hard and don’t create real momentum. Brian Kush, of Intend2Lead, will share a new mindset to cultivate and a coaching technique to practice. This “inside-out” approach to feedback will change the way you see and hold feedback conversations so you can make them more focused, continuous, actionable, and most importantly, more collaborative and fun!

Takeaways

• Rethink feedback as an ongoing coaching conversation, not a dreaded performance event.
• Practice an inside-out coaching technique that makes feedback more collaborative, focused, and actionable.
• Use the downloadable worksheet to prepare for and guide a real feedback conversation with someone on your team.

The architecture is the workflow. The engine is the tool. Most firms buy the engine first, then build around whatever it happens to do. Dawn Brolin does it the other way, and this session is how: what she asks before a tool touches client work, what she automated first and why that order mattered, and what she has passed on. One practitioner's actual criteria from a working CPA firm. Fewer tools, used deeper, not more tools used worse.

You’ll learn how to

• Evaluate the workflow before the AI to determine what should actually be automated—and what shouldn’t.
• Prioritize where to start based on risk, repetition, and impact rather than what a tool happens to make possible.
• Apply a practical framework for AI adoption that helps your firm go deeper with the right tools instead of adding more to the stack.

AI should not simply replace people - it should release them for more valuable work. In this practical session, Deborah Harris shares how firm leaders can move repetitive work to AI while developing their people for stronger judgment, problem-solving, client relationships and commercial contribution.

Attendees will learn how to create a culture in which team members actively challenge inefficient workflows, experiment safely with AI and seek higher-leverage ways of working. They will leave with Deborah’s Human Leverage Loop: a practical framework for determining what moves to AI, what remains human and how released capacity can be deliberately redeployed.

The future-ready firm is not the one with the fewest people. It is the one in which people continually become capable of more.

Your key takeaways

• Remove the work that is holding back the person. Identify what AI can take off your team’s plate - then deliberately move your people towards higher-value judgment, relationships and problem-solving.
• Every task handed to AI should be matched by a capability handed to a human. Automation creates capacity; leadership turns that capacity into growth by developing what your people become capable of next.
• Reward leverage, not busyness. Make it safe and worthwhile for your team to challenge inefficient work, share AI improvements and compete with yesterday’s workflow - not with AI.

Adding a new service to a firm usually sounds like more work, more tools, and more friction. Social Security planning does not have to be that. This session shows how firms are folding Social Security conversations into their existing client workflows, using structured software and case-based processes rather than building something new from scratch. Attendees will leave with a practical picture of what this looks like inside a firm that is not trying to reinvent its operations, just extend them.

By the end of this session, you’ll be able to

• Identify natural points in an existing client workflow where Social Security planning fits without disrupting current processes
• Describe how case-based software (RSSA Roadmap®) supports repeatable, low-friction delivery of Social Security planning
• Explain how to introduce a new service line without adding significant time or complexity to existing workflows
• Recognize the training path (RSSA®) required to deliver this service credibly within an existing engagement

Pricing is how you say no without actually saying no. Learn how to use pricing to manage capacity, improve your client base, and create more room for the work you actually want to do. We’ll cover pricing strategies for both new and existing clients, including how to raise rates.

Your key learnings

• Build the confidence to raise your rates without worrying that every client will walk.
• Walk away with practical scripts and resources for communicating price increases to both new and existing clients.
• Learn how to use pricing strategically to manage capacity, protect your time, and shape the firm you actually want.

This session is about what happens after you acquire an existing tax practice and have to decide what comes with you into the firm you actually want to build.

The goal is to give attendees an honest, practical look at what it takes to take over someone else’s version of tax season and intentionally make it your own.

Most firm owners think alignment means everyone nodding in the meeting. So they either push for a consensus that evaporates once people leave the room, or they tolerate real misalignment because everyone seems to get along. Neither one grows a firm.

Alignment is not agreement. Agreement means everyone gets their first choice. Alignment means people can fully support the direction even when the outworking includes things they wouldn't have chosen. You can be aligned with someone you disagree with, and that's often where the most meaningful leadership happens.

In this session, I'll give you a working definition of alignment that you can assess and lead. We'll walk through the chain that drives growth: trust is the root, alignment is the trunk, leverage is the branch, and reach is the fruit. Then we'll apply it where it matters most. First, your team: the four parameters we score and what to do when the scores reveal a gap. Second, your clients: the four parameters that separate aligned clients from vendor relationships, and why letting a misaligned client go is a leadership move, not a failure.

Session takeaways

• A working definition of alignment that separates it from agreement, so you stop demanding false consensus or tolerating hidden misalignment.
• A simple scoring method for assessing the alignment of both your team members and your clients.
• The confidence to act on what the scores reveal, whether that's a coaching conversation or a hard decision, so you get the leverage that expands your reach as a leader.