
Growing Your Firm · 2026-05-23 · 40 min
Are you running an accounting practice that relies entirely on your own personal production, or have you built a scalable business that can exist independently of you? For accounting firm owners, managing partners, and CPAs starting firms, understanding how to shift from manual operations to an acquirable business model is the ultimate goal. In this episode of Growing Your Firm, host David Cristello sits down with Joe Manganelli, the former founder and CEO of Calculate. Joe shares his incredible journey of launching, scaling, and successfully selling his outsourced CFO and accounting firm in under seven years. He pulls back the curtain on his aggressive top-line growth strategies, pricing models, and how he scaled his team to nearly 45 headcounts with zero outside funding. In this episode, we explore: - The Bootstrapped Blueprint: How Joe scaled Calculate to a $10M run rate without taking on venture capital or outside investment. - Top-Line Growth vs. Profitability: The strategic decisions behind running a high-growth firm (averaging 75%+ year-over-year) with modest margins.