Something Quietly Hit Accounting Firms in 2025. Here's What to Do About It. | Erica Goode

Welcome back to another episode of the Accounting Leads Now podcast. We have an incredible guest joining us today. So without further ado, let's jump right into it. I want to ask you something.

What are you actually building all of this for? Because most firm owners I talk to don't want the biggest firm on the block. They want out of the weeds. They want clients they don't dread.

They want a business that funds a life they actually enjoy. The problem is most people try to build that and end up more trapped than when they started. My guest today figured out how to do it right. She started her career in audit at KPMG, moved into corporate finance at Walgreens, then walked away from it all to build something on her own terms.

Today she runs a virtual accounting firm providing fractional CFO services and has built one of the most respected communities for solo firm owners in the entire industry. And she did it while living in the mountains of Idaho with her family. On her terms, on her timeline, but here's what makes this conversation different. She's not here to sell you on slowing down.

She's here to talk about something most people in this industry are too scared to bring up the pricing pressure quietly hitting accounting firms right now. What it means for your revenue and what you need to have in place before it catches you off guard. Welcome to the show, Erica Goody. Let's get into it.

Hey James, thanks for having me. I'm excited to be here. I cannot wait to pick your brain, Erica. We've had this one circled on the calendar for a while.

A little bit of rescheduling. So I know our guests are excited to uh to have you on the show. Erica, let's get right into it. You went from KPMG audit to Walgreens Corporate Finance to founding your own firm.

Not a typical path. What was the moment in between? That was quote, just a stay-at-home mom, too. Okay.

So not a typical path in, you know, in the sense of the traditional maybe route to entrepreneurship. What was the moment you decided to bet on yourself? And what did the early days look like for you? Yeah, I actually wasn't in a like a circle of knowledge that thought I could bet on myself.

I didn't know that was an option. Um, and if anybody's listening to this as they're in corporate, like when you're on the traditional accounting career path, nobody tells you about the other career paths. Shocking, I know. And um, and so when I left corporate, I le I quit.

I quit my career. I was not leaving to go start a firm. I um was leaving to go be a stay-at-home mom because I didn't know there was an option other than work 50 plus hours a week and all that that entails, or don't. I thought that was those were my options.

Um, I actually had a really great boss who gave me an option to stay at a reduced, um, at a reduced capacity and I declined it for reasons that we don't have to go into. It was just like it wasn't gonna be the the rainbows and unicorns that that was promised. And uh he actually agreed. Uh, but uh I didn't I didn't leave to bet on myself.

I left to re recover from corporate and adulthood and traditional career path. And it wasn't until I got two years, probably a year and a half into stay-at-home momming, that I just genuinely missed work and I missed accounting. And I was desperate to go back, but I was not desperate to go back to the same capacity and the same lifestyle. And so I had to build something that worked for me because it it didn't exist out in the traditional career path.

So a bit of a trailblazer in that regard. So what and we we may circle back to it, but I'm just curious, like what do you tell that firm owner right now who had the same vision? They wanted to build something for themselves, and you know, five, 10 years passes and they're they're just like in the weeds, they're in the trenches, they don't know how to really get back to why they even started this in the first place. It's never too late to change directions.

It takes a lot of bravery, whether you're in a traditional career path or you're founding a firm or you're 10 years into a firm and you're like, oh crap, but this was not what I intended. Like it's never too late to change directions, but it does take bravery and it's really hard to go against the grain of what everybody else is doing. And you can feel that in corporate careers, you can feel that in public accounting, and you can feel that in firm ownership. If you're in circles that are telling you to go a certain direction and go a certain speed, um, there are many speeds, regardless of whether people are talking about that or not.

Um, but it does take intentionality and bravery to do something different. How do you how do you block out, and I maybe it's from the earlier days, but how did you block out some of that noise? Because I know in the marketing industry, I'm a part of a mastermind, 300 plus other marketing firm owners, and a lot of people, I won't say everyone, but a lot of people are always, you know, what's what's the next revenue threshold? What's that next higher?

And it's just constantly a topic around scaling. And if you're not at this, you know, you're you're behind. And that can become, you know, that it gets really loud sometimes. And I've often thought, okay, I I need to be the biggest and best as well.

And then there's times where, well, maybe I'm good with the lifestyle business. And then I go back to, you know, I swing on that pendulum. How do you block out the noise or recommend to listeners, you know, just kind of finding your North Star, I think is maybe the question. Yeah, I don't think it's a bad thing to turn off the noise.

Uh, if you're in a group or a community that's pushing you in a direction that isn't what's what you want, then exit that that space, exit that noise, turn off that podcast, delete it from your feed. And the same thing goes if somebody's listening to my podcast and it's all like, you should build intentionally and you should put your life first, and they're like, that's stupid. I want to scale to 19,000 figures, then you should turn off my podcast and go listen to the noise that's gonna put you in that direction.

And I just think we're it's hard, it's hard to ignore noise. And sometimes we have to physically remove it from our feeds because it's ever constant and it's ever on our phones and it's ever hitting us in the face. And we have to unfollow people and we have to unfollow podcasts and find better communities to be in that align with truly what we want. That sounds so simple, and it's like that should that should just be so easy to go and do.

Like remove yourself from that group. Um, that's something I've definitely struggled with before. Like, still, I think going back and forth of how big do we want to grow this, or am I content, you know, being able to travel around a lot a lot in the year and the business still runs, it produces revenue, I can still have the lifestyle I have. So that's something I personally go back and forth on a lot.

So it's it's very interesting to hear your take and just how intentional you are about the path that you're going on. When I started thinking about everything as an experiment, it felt far less jarring and forever. Like, hey, what if I experiment with taking Facebook off my phone for a week? Like, I can just put Facebook.

This is an example of like removing yourself from something that potentially isn't pointing you in the right direction. Um, like, what if I just take it off for a day? What if I take it off for a week? What if I take it off for this entire month?

Right. And like, Facebook's not going anywhere. You can put it back on your phone. You can you can go back into that community.

You can go back and download all those podcasts that you ignored. But like, how does that make you feel after not exposing yourself to that for a week, a month, or even a day? Gosh, there, you know, I started taking LinkedIn off my phone for a day every week. Uh, I love LinkedIn, I absolutely love LinkedIn, but I also don't need the habitual pressing of the blue button every single hour, right?

It these things are addictive and we know this. And so um, you can remove yourself from that and just see how it feels and then go back to it if that was a poor choice for you for some reason. Yeah, I like that idea of just experiment. It doesn't have to be this is what you're committed to for the next year, 10 years.

Like you said, you can do it for a day, do it for a week, just see how see how things feel. So, Erica, the thing that nobody's talking about or people aren't talking about enough. You mentioned pricing pressure and the economic roller coaster. Uh talk, talk to me about what you're seeing, what's actually happening right now in for accounting firm owners that need to be paying attention.

I think this is my own personal experience. Um, you know, mileage may vary on every accounting firm and their experience and their positioning, as you know. But what I've seen probably since the fall of 2024, uh, and my niche tends to be professional services, they don't have inventory, they tend to work in IT, communications, HR, things that are human, but all of a sudden we see competitors come in with uh more efficient AI processes or the ability, or offshore even leveraging um artificial intelligence.

When those, you know, that's that's what I felt like happens at the start of 2025, the end of 2024, 2025. We started to see pipelines dry up with our clients. Uh, not like completely dry, but there was like a gradual pullback. Uh 2025 hit, and there was new political administration in the US.

There was a lot of tariff scare, there was a lot of grant funding, or not grant funding, but federal funding that was pulled back. And I I personally don't believe we all realized how much grant funding had its tentacles and things that we didn't think were nonprofits. And so all of a sudden we had this like 12-month, 18-month period where the economy, I think, kind of quietly, at the same time that it kind of recessed silently, just slightly, uh, AI came in at the same time and offered up a more efficient way to do a lot of things.

And I think we see accounting firms start to spin up. I'm not saying they're great, I'm just saying they exist where accounting firms spin up and have AI workflows that can be more efficient and they have uh really offshore people. And so they can offer lower services. And in a time when our clients are feeling cash flow pressures because perhaps their pipelines have come back.

Now there are a flood of cheaper uh options. I think this is true mostly in bookkeeping and correctional CFO work. I'm not seeing it from my peers as much in uh tax preparation, but I think we're seeing this like perfect storm of like cash flow concerns from our clients and cheaper options available. And I think it's pushing the pricing down in our industry.

And no offense, James, cover your ears. I think there are gonna be marketing people who are gonna say, well, they don't, you need a price to your value. And if they don't see the value, they're not gonna blah, blah, blah, blah. When people are worried about cash, they're worried about cash.

Yeah. Well, it's almost like you read my mind. Cause I was gonna say, how do you, how are you responding to your clients or potential clients or sales calls, whatever that is coming up? And I'm guessing you've come across this yourself.

I I think as accountants, we need to be prepared. Like if you want to keep your clients, you need to be prepared if they're in that situation, right? There are some clients who will thrive this year because their particular industry is in an is in a time of thriving, right? When when a hurricane comes, uh Home Depot sells a lot of wood, right?

There are there are certain situations where people thrive, and that's that's great for that industry. Um, those industries are helpful in the time when they are helpful. But I think as accountants, we have to be aware. I think there was years where we talked about premium pricing and bringing your value and charging your value and all of all of these noise things, right?

And all the things we listen to, there's noise about that. And that is important. Um, but I think there's a new geography, a new like a new happening of the economic situation in our industry where we're now seeing a little pricing downward. And I think if our clients are wanting to spend less money in an economically uncertain time, then and if we want to keep them, you don't have to keep all your clients, right?

You want your client to walk? Let your client walk. Um, but I think we need to be prepared with the conversation of is there a lower price I can offer? Perhaps I wouldn't say offer a lower price for the same service, but if your client is feeling a pullback, are can we provide them with something that's lower scope and lower pricing so that we can keep working with them?

Yeah. And there's a lot to unpack there, but I I think to add in, if because of AI now, because of all the tools we have, if you can provide that same service and leverage AI, that helps. On the flip side of it, I think what people will continue to pay for and what the competitive advantage is is the strategic advice that you bring to all of your clients. AI is great, but if you you know if you put in a bad prompt, you're gonna get a bad output.

So just from a client switching over, maybe they want the cheapest thing. They don't know what they're looking at anymore, they didn't put in the right input, they're they will very much get what they pay for. So leaning on the strategy and all the education that we've all invested in ourselves, I think that is the competitive advantage that firm owners still have. And to your point, someone doesn't want to pay for your service anymore and they want the cheaper out, that's totally fine.

There's enough businesses out there to work with. So it's um, I guess back to the first one you mentioned, just being intentional about what you want in your firm. Yeah. And I do think your comment on like if you put bad inputs in, right?

If you I think this is gonna take a couple tax cycles for business owners to realize that AI is not the end all be all of my automated accountant and fractional CFO and bookkeeper. But like, you can't, you know, it's kind of like uh when a kid wants to make their own decisions and as a parent, you're like, oh, you're gonna have to learn this the hard way. Like, I can't teach this for you. And I think it's gonna take the business owner a couple tax cycles to realize that I need somebody who understands us better than either my AI-backed accounting firm that was the cheapest option, or my DIY uh bookkeeper that I just built through Claude Code, right?

Not that those things are wrong, but like there's a human aspect that we're still gonna need, and it's gonna take months and potentially years to filter this information and this this learning into business owners' minds. 100%. There's uh people have to touch the hot plate to understand that it's hot and then come back and say, I shouldn't have touched that. Yeah.

Um, Erica, tell us a little bit about your community. I mean, I I've I speak to so many firm owners. Uh like you're so popular in the accounting space. I know you're probably gonna be super humble about this, but I would love to hear that's so weird to hear you say.

But I would I would love to hear more about the community you've built, why you built it, and and for those who aren't aware of it, who are looking to join, like what they could get out of that or what what they could expect by joining. Yeah, so it's called aligned accountants. And going back full circle to how you started about the noise in all of the spaces, like there is so much noise. Much of the noise is about scaling and hustle and seven-figure firms and hiring, and none of that is bad.

I like we need big firms to be wonderful in this industry, and absolutely um we want those to grow and in the right way and to be an option for future employees. But I think there is a ton of people who are trying to juggle parenting and career or grandparenting or second, um, maybe sunsetting a career. And there's a lot of people who don't want to scale and they feel like there's no place for them, or they feel like they're they're little or they're less than because I don't want to scale.

I just want to be an accountant for a handful of clients and I want to have a hundred thousand, two hundred thousand, three hundred thousand dollar firm. And I feel silly about that, right? Like, oh, I feel like it's nothing, and I, and I don't, I don't want to talk about it because everybody else is talking about scaling. And so aligned accountants is the place for those people where you're not the weird one.

You're in a sea of normal. Nobody's trying to scale. Everybody's just trying to juggle the things with the kids and the small firm and enjoying their whole life together. And so we offer uh resources.

We have a couple trainings in there, we have monthly events that are live or on recording if you can't make them. We have a whole bunch of discussion where you don't have to feel bad about asking the question that is gonna feel different. Like uh one of the questions that gets thrown around right now as we're recording this in May is how is everybody handling work capacity for the summer when kids come home from school? Are you guys pulling back?

Are you guys um like hiring a nanny? What are what are you doing? You know, and it's those questions that you're not gonna hear. Maybe you're gonna hear in these big scaling communities, but um sometimes we feel embarrassed to ask that.

And I don't want anybody to feel embarrassed in this community to ask very normal questions for a solo firm. Yeah, I love that. That's so cool. And and where where can uh listeners find the community?

How could they join? Yeah, it's on alignedaccountants.com. You can it'll give you all the information.

Uh, if you're on my newsletter, you can kind of get a pick a peek behind the curtain of what we're doing every week. So, you know, if you just want to suss it out before you join, I always put some blurbs down at the bottom of my weekly newsletter, which is free, where you can just see what we're doing uh before you decide to join. Yeah, awesome. That's so good.

And Erica, just as we're we're wrapping up here, um what's one piece of advice when this episode's done for everyone listening, they can go and implement right away. What would be the number one piece of advice or actionable insight that you would pass on to that listener? I I don't know if this is an action. Maybe we've talked about all the actions, but it's you don't have to build what everybody else is building.

That's a like you can you can do things different and you can do things that work for you. And there is no shame in having your own version of success. Everybody's gonna have their own version of success. So simple.

I love it. It's so simple, but it's so powerful. Um, Erica, thank you so much for sharing that. And okay, last question for you then.

What's the best piece of advice you've ever received, personally or professionally? When I quit corporate, my boss uh more or less locked me in a conference room to convince me not to leave, which was super nice. And I was like, no, no, no, this is what I'm doing. And he spent about an hour like offering me the moon, right?

Like, no, no, no, you can sit. You're so great. This you should stay and all these wonderful things. And I was like, I I just can't, it's not the right season.

I need to go go home and be with the kids. And he kind of, and this was within the first, you know, hour. And his shoulders kind of dropped, and he was like, Okay. And and I was, he's like, I'm not gonna convince you.

I was like, I'm so sorry, you're not gonna convince me. And then he totally like turned a corner and he went, Okay, when you decide to come back to the workforce, do not come back to corporate. And I was like, okay. He was like, You need to start your own accounting firm.

That's where, that's where the margin is, that's where the money is, that's where the control and flexibility is. Start your own accounting firm. Don't come back to corporate. And I was like, that is the stupidest thing I've ever heard.

I would never ever start an accounting firm. Why would I ever do that? I don't know how to do that. Um, and I just brushed it off.

Like, that's ridiculous. Absolutely not. And I walked out of the conference room and I thought he was crazy. Interesting.

Isn't that funny? So I had to go back um with my foot in my mouth years later and tell him. And he just laughed. And yeah.

Yeah. Here we are. Wow, full circle. That's so cool.

Erica, thank you so much for for stopping by on the Canon Leads Now podcast. Thank you so much for sharing your insight, how intentional you've been about building your firm, about the community. I hope people listening join, go check out your community and join and and just take a step or take a step back to think about what they truly want within their business. This conversation with you has been incredible.

And I know I've I've been having a lot of kind of reflection as you're as you've been speaking. So just getting more intentional with my own business as well. So I really appreciate that. Great.

Thanks so much for having me, James. That's a wrap on another episode of the Accounting Leads Now podcast. If you got something out of today's conversation, do me a favor, hit subscribe so you never miss an episode and leave us a review wherever you're listening. It genuinely helps this show grow.

And the bigger this community gets, the better the conversations we can bring you. Now, here's the part I actually care about most. If you're running a firm and you're still relying on word of mouth to bring in new clients, I want you to hear this. Referrals aren't a growth strategy.

I'll say that again. Referrals are not a growth strategy. They're a hope strategy. If you're ready to stop hoping and start building a system that brings qualified prospects to you consistently, go to accountingleadsnow.

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It's the digital marketing playbook built specifically for accounting, bookkeeping, and tax firms. Link to grab a copy is in the show notes. Thanks again for listening, and we'll catch you on the next one.