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CPA & Consultant for Accounting Firms
The Mexican Fisherman, PE Money, Xero wtf, and the Accounting Bottleneck
Happy Frye-Day.
You've likely heard the parable of the Mexican Fisherman. An MBA consultant tells a small-town fisherman he should raise capital, buy a fleet, go public, and make millions. All so that decades later he can finally retire, sleep late, fish a little, and enjoy his family. The fisherman looks at him and says, "I'm doing that right now."
It's a classic fable about contentment versus scale for scale's sake. But having lived on both sides of the accounting fence, the reality isn't quite that simple.
Both sides of the fence
You probably know, I worked at a VC-backed accounting practice. When our delivery capacity hit a breaking point, I told the CEO we needed to pause client onboarding. The look of sheer terror on his face said everything. The board expected aggressive growth, period. Stopping was off the table, so the command was predictable: stretch the team, automate faster, and keep shipping.
When I left and bootstrapped my own practice. The freedom to pick our work was incredible, but the romanticized vision of bootstrapping came with credit card debt and high stress, saved only by my business partner's financial savviness getting us through the dry spells.
Capital-backed growth can turn into a meat grinder, but total independence can leave you stranded without resources.
With private equity pouring into firms like Eide Bailly and CBIZ reshaping the market, this tension is front-page news. PE isn't inherently evil, it's an accelerator. While I don't have much patience for "outsider" CEOs who treat accounting culture like a cold line-item optimization, I've also watched brilliant technical accountants become the biggest bottleneck to their own growth simply because they lacked capital.
The trade-off
PE brings infrastructure, leverage, and liquidity. Bootstrapping brings autonomy, soul, and control. Neither is pure evil or pure good. They are just different sets of trade-offs. Companies like Current (fka Crete), backed by OpenAI, are another example of this.
To complicate things further, Bill Gates is warning of something I've been skeptical of for a long time. AI needs limits, but who's going to put them on? What will happen if unemployment is rampant and only a few of the people who control these models and firms are left?
Where do you fall on this? Is PE modernizing an industry that desperately needed capital, or is it stripping the soul out of public accounting? Hit reply and tell me.
Xero, wtf?
Xero was lambasted this week for their influencer marketing campaign saying to fire your accountant.
Like, did they not see Intuit's attempt at this? Do they know something we don't?
I know the labor market and our jobs will be infinitely different in 5 years, but I believe companies at the highest levels can use this opportunity to help uplevel and reskill people who will need to adapt.
This is disappointing, especially after reigniting my spark for them at Xerocon in Denver a couple weeks ago.
On the feed
Speaking of consolidation. News broke this week that Puzzle, where I spent three years, is merging with Accrual. Complicated feelings this week.
Big congrats to Sasha Orloff and the leadership team, and I'm thinking especially of anyone whose day-to-day looks substantially different than it did before. I wrote a note.
Read the full post on LinkedIn
✦ New section: How I AI
Wins and losses from putting AI to work in my day-to-day.
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New win: Canadian Citizenship Timeline I'm submitting my Canadian citizenship application, which needs an exact travel history for the last 5 years. Every entry, every exit, every day out of the country accounted for. I fed Claude my phone records, the geolocation history baked into my photos, and my Google Maps timeline. It cross-referenced the three, flagged the gaps, and gave me a clean day-by-day travel log I could actually submit. Days of manual reconstruction, done in an afternoon. |
Coming up
- FREE WEBINAR: Walking through the whole Playbook, live. Foundation pages, the Monday and Friday rhythm, and Q&A. Save the date: Thursday, SEP 24, 12:00PM. Reply "I'm in" for the invite.
- Speaking: Intuit Connect + Gather by DBA. Both in October. If you're going, say hi.
P.S. Friends over at the Numbers Game are running a partner deal. Code LUKE gets you 10% off: numbersgame.xyz/partners
Luke
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