Today, our guest is Christine Triantos. Christine has been working in CAS—I’m not sure it has been called CAS her entire career, but what is now called CAS—for nearly 30 years. She was a partner with BDO, and she managed the national CAS technology team. In December of 2023, she left BDO and started her own thing, Infinite Advisors, which is a CAS Consulting Firm dedicated to helping firms grow and enhance their CAS practices. And then even further, in 2024, she launched Infinite Ties, which is a subscription-based membership for CAS practitioners. Man, I have a hard time saying CAS when I say sentences. Christine, welcome to The Unique CPA.

Thank you, Randy, I’m so happy to be here.

Well, I’m happy you’re here, too. I think I should start just saying Client Advisory Services instead of CAS for some reason. How do I stumble over a three-letter acronym? But that’s alright. I gave you an intro there. You’ve been working in CAS for quite a while. Maybe give us a little more background on what you’re doing and then we’ll kind of get into the CAS end of things a little more.

Sure. So yeah, worked at BDO, started in ’96. So, however, I try not to count how many years ago that was. And within CAS, was an early adopter within CAS. We like to say we failed fast and learned our lessons before everybody else. With BDO, I was the West Regional Partner, so I’ve been in this space for a really long time. I have also taught the CAS workshop for CPA.com for the last seven years, so I just am able to talk to a lot of firms to understand what they need, why it’s hard to stand up, what their pain points are with standing up a practice.  And so I just decided I wanted to do something different and try something different. At the age of 50, I thought, why not now? And so I quit my job, which I think you know something about.

Oh, I’ve done that. Yep. 

Yeah! You’re like, is this a really good idea? I think it is. And so, I’m really just impassioned about helping people, if we can shave off that learning curve that we had for all those years, we’re happy to do that and just hand people, you know, tools and resources, to just deploy their CAS teams and practices and help them grow. So that led us to Infinite Advisors, which is our CAS consulting company, and then along the way too, just building Infinite Ties, which is a CAS subscription-based model for CAS practitioners. And I think a little bit of why we’re different in that community, because I do know there are a lot of communities out there right now, is that we’re really targeting all the way down to the staff level, and not just CAS leaders, right? 

And so, we have four different facets within Infinite Ties, which I think are really important to the industry. And one of them is a vendor corner, right? There are so many vendors to vet and to understand what they’re doing, and there’s a new one that comes out every single day. So just bringing that to the community without having any revenue share, it’s really just, ’cause all of our vendors ask, can we please revenue share? And I’m like, no, this is what’s best for the community. And we’re not losing sight of that. And then there’s a forum and we have resources and documents, and we have training for all levels. So, we’re really catering to that practitioner with the staff and upskilling those team members into advisors.

Nice. Advisor is obviously a hot topic, and advisory, and CAS, and TAS, and whatever we want to add in there, or CAAS with two A’s, all the two and three-letter acronyms. But let’s get into that real quick because, you know, advisory in general, you can get an idea of what it is, but when we talk CAS, everybody has their own—it feels like everybody has their own definition of CAS, which I don’t know if that’s good or bad. You could probably weigh in on that. But how do you define CAS?

And it is interesting because consulting with a lot of firms, they think that they have a CAS department and really, you know, once we get in and start assessing, a lot of it is a write-up service or bookkeeping. And so, evolving and moving into CAS is really about a couple of main facets: Number one, are you doing more than just closing their books? Are you providing proactive guidance? You know, are you giving them the consulting and advisory services that they need to run their business and not really just looking behind, you know, reflecting on what happened last month or the month prior? And in addition to that, it’s really highly leveraged with technology, right? And if you’re not using 15, 20 different tech products to take all of the manual processes out, create efficiencies, then you don’t really have a true CAS department. It’s high touch client service. It’s every day. And so, it just brings kind of a different facet.

And what’s normally in a typical right of practice, which is quarterly, is at year-end, is for the purposes of tax returns. And this is really just coming in and saying hey, we want to be basically, your internal accounting team, even if they have some internal accounting staff, and we want to guide you and we want to take this out of your responsibility. This isn’t why you started a company, it’s probably not what you’re good at. So, let us do this and you run your business and go sell.

Yeah, well you just said a bunch of things that I think are super important. One is that last one with especially business owners—they started their business for a reason, because they’re excited, they’re passionate about their business, their product, their service. They’re not passionate about the accounting end of things. And so if we can take that off their plate, that just could make them more successful. So let me kind of—I just want to make sure if I learned there. So, CAS is really more proactive, you’re not a reporter, but you’re going to impact what’s going on, looking at it more often, the financial statements, and whatever aspect, technology being an aspect to it. If we can automate and make more efficiencies in there, we can spend more of our time on the advisory end of things and have a bigger impact on our clients. And it is not this quarterly or year-end meeting with the client, but it sounds like it’s highly interactive with the client on an ongoing basis. Anything I missed in there?

I mean, there’s a lot, but no, I mean, for purposes of this short podcast, you got it, you summed it up nicely.

Alright, alright! Well, great. See, I imagine, you’re learning, I’m learning, you’re educating me already, which is well, actually, I told you two goals of the show is we educate the profession, but really one of that is educating me, so thank you for that. 

And then, if we go back to your point about CAS, right? And this is a really hot topic: What are we calling it? And so I think it’s just important to note, you know, CAS is really becoming the terminology that’s used and should be used because what we’re trying to do is educate the general public on, okay, you have audit services, you have tax services, and now you have CAS. So, have we all called it something different along the way? Absolutely. We all wanted to be unique and have our own thing. But at the end of the day, and, you know, kudos to AICPA and CPA.com for coining this “CAS,” and this is what we’re going to call it, so that we’re putting a stake in the ground with what the services are.

So, when we say CAS, because CAS doesn’t say, I mean, accounting in it anywhere, so are we talking tax aspect to advisory as well?

You know, we try to stay in our lane, but there is a lot of tax advisory that comes into play with CAS. However, though, as a practitioner, you know everything that’s going on with that client, right? And so we always advise people to stay in your lane, but you have to be viewed as that trusted advisor to know what questions to ask, to know what to look for, to know when to bring in a tax expert with whatever it is that the client’s dealing with. So yes, there’s some aspects of that, but really, you know, what we teach is you don’t have to know everything. You know, you don’t have to be an auditor, you don’t have to be a tax expert, but you need to know what to look for to bring them in at the right time.

Got it. And now, when you’re, let’s say, with your community or your consulting advisory, your advisory services to other people working in the industry, do people come to you and say, “Hey, I want to add CAS services?” Do they normally already have a CAS practice? Where’s your starting point with advisors?

Yeah, that’s a great question because it’s really interesting, right? There are a lot of firms that don’t have anything and they’re starting CAS from the ground up—that seems to not be the case. What seems to be more common is they do have a write-up or bookkeeping practice. And so, where firms get stuck is they say, “I want to convert that.” I’m like, okay, two separate practices, right? And we say this all the time—that doesn’t mean that those clients are going to convert into CAS, and it doesn’t mean that the team members that you’re servicing that business line with are also going to convert into CAS. 

And so, you know, what we teach is, let’s just create this business model from staffing and pricing and your engagement letters and scope of services, as if you were going to sell it tomorrow. Because where firms get stuck is they try to say, “Well, but I have all of these clients and how can I re-paper them, re-price them? How can I create this value proposition for them?” And I’m like, that’s the wrong starting point.

Okay. And so, let’s dig deeper into that. So, well, no, let’s go this way: Because one of the key things is when they’re starting or trying to expand it or take the next step in their evolution of their firm. You talked about the fact that one of the things you help with is the technology end of things and determining the vendors, the apps they should be working with. That’s an area where I see a lot of people shutting down. Like, “I can’t, I don’t know, who am I going to use, how am I going to do this, what do my clients need?” Is that something you run into a lot, and how do you help them through that process?

Yeah, it is, and so, you know, having taught the workshop for that many years too, that seems to be the biggest hurdle, to your point, right? I mean, it’s just hard. You know, people are like, I’m really good at accounting, but now you’re going to throw all this software and technology at me. And that’s not really, you know, my expertise. And so we just recommend you always have to have a tech champion. That tech champion may not be an accountant, but they need to know how to stand up the products. They need to know the administrative back end of it, you know, implementation. And so that tech champion is key in building a really great CAS practice. And I tell people, if you don’t have a tech champion, don’t be afraid of that because you know, all of these vendors have really great support, so you’re going to learn along the way. 

Now, where we come in with Infinite Advisors and how we work with our vendors that we work really closely with too, is just to say, let us come in and implement this for the firm so that they’re not having to learn all of this on top of their already tight schedule, zero capacity, and they’ll learn the technology along the way. But they don’t need to do this. Let’s make it simple for them in order to use these products that are going to create great efficiencies without making it feel overwhelming.

And I think one of the things that comes to mind when we’re talking about the technology and you said, you know, the 15 different things or whatever it is that they need to start analyzing or looking at, or you help them with, is it easier if we’re looking at a CAS practice that is dealing with, let’s say, a niche industry? Because then your tech stack or the technology you’re using probably is more in line from client to client.

Yes. The more that firms can start to go down industry niches, obviously, the better off they are, right? Even from the start of proposals and prospect assessments and how you service the client, and the terminology that you even use within a prospect call, and you are speaking their language, I mean, you’ve basically already won them before you’ve even presented anything. But yes, from a technology standpoint, industry-specific niches, it’s ideal. It’s hard for a lot of CAS practices within firms to just have specific niches, but we just say, you’re still going to have some dominant niches. It doesn’t mean you can say no to everybody else because they don’t fit your model, but it is so important and it makes it so much easier because now you’re not reinventing the wheel every time, you know, implementing a new technology, you’re taking what you already know, and you’re taking templates that you’re just now able to basically copy-paste, but edit it to specific clients.

Nice. And is there, and I’m sure it varies by niche, or client, or firm, but is there a common, “Hey, these are the, you know, four key things you need for every client,” or what’s a common tech stack? You want to run through that real quick?

Oh, yes, I mean, we do have a common tech stack, like I said, it can be substantial, but there’s like, just basic, and the majority of the CAS and even the write-up teams are using a lot of the technology. You know, if you’re looking at automated bill pay, it’s Bill, right, and so there’s just a lot of efficiencies that go with that. You’re looking at spend management, you know, managing corporate credit cards, managing expense reports, so there’s just a lot that goes with that. And those are just the basics, right? Having a really great ERP system, what are you using for combined consolidated financial statements? How are you bringing in third-party applications that make it easier? And we teach, you know, a lot of the third-party apps that you’re bringing in, they seem similar, but this product does one thing, and it doesn’t do this, but this product does another thing, and it doesn’t do what the other product does. So now, you’re coupling these technology products together, but it’s still cheaper and more efficient than if you were doing it manually, right? And so it’s teaching pricing engagements properly with those added tech fees that come with it.

Yep. And I think that’s one area where people create efficiencies with technology, but then don’t price it correctly. I think that happens way too often. And so, I was going to think of going somewhere else, but since we just brought up pricing, let’s talk about that. ’Cause that’s an area where I think there’s a lot of education that needs to happen. And so how do you talk about pricing?

When we go into pricing and what we’re teaching firms is you have to gain access to their financials and all of their books and their financial systems, prior to sending out a proposal and prior to engaging them. If you don’t do that, you don’t know what you’re getting into, right? So assessing everything. And what’s great about gaining access before you engage in a long-term relationship with them is that you’re also seeing what’s wrong with their financials. And out of the gate, now you’re advisory: “Hey, we noticed this, all of these things, we put a, like a whole page together of the items that we’re” – we don’t call it back to the client, but like areas of concern, right? And they think, wow, you already identified all of those things. That’s fantastic. Now what we’re doing is say, okay, what’s the trailing 12 months? Do they have seasonality? What’s the transaction volume look like? You know, we’re touching absolutely everything. Are you going to need us to help you with invoicing? How many people are we going to have to bring into this process? What does that look like? 

So when it comes to pricing, I think it’s really important that you do that prospect analysis, gain access to the financials, because my whole thought process is, and what we’ve learned is, when you’ve come out of the gate hourly, you’re redirecting the value proposition for the client, right? Now they’re not saying, “Wow, here’s the value that they’re bringing to me and bringing to the table,” now they’re saying, how long did they spend on that? How many hours did they take? And so, then when you go to convert them, and I say this all the time, when you go to convert them to a fixed fee, now you’ve lost that margin, because they know how long it’s taken, right? And the other major thing when it comes to CAS—because CAS is so highly leveraged with technology—what happens is, when you’re hourly, you create efficiency, now, you’ve just lost revenue, and you’ve just lost margin. So it’s really important, the order in which you do these steps, because you have to get to that fixed fee, then you implement the technology and the efficiencies, and then that margin gain is yours. It’s not necessarily the client’s benefit.

Yep. 

But they’re benefiting!

They are benefiting. Yeah, I’m completely on board with that. I think that’s a step that we miss way too often in our profession that we have just been so ingrained with our value is selling an hour rather than our value of selling an outcome or a deliverable to the client. And so, yeah, pricing right and not feeling guilty about your pricing because you’ve saved time is important.

Well, and then when you price it in a fixed fee, then your clients are calling you more often, right? Because you do become that trusted advisor and it’s not about, “Gosh, if I call my accountant or my attorney, you know, I’m going to get billed by the tenth of an hour.”

Yep. And the problem with us too, as a profession, I’m generalizing, is we often ignore, even if we are billing for the hour, we ignore those calls, putting that on as a billable, and this at least incorporates that in, then.

Exactly. And you just want your clients to call you no matter what, at any time.

Well. Not 24/7 though, right? 

Not… You’re right, sorry! It doesn’t mean any time within the parameters and boundaries of the day, the workday.

Well, let’s talk about that then, too, because with the pricing, I think that’s probably a good segue. With the pricing, you know, we are saying, yes, we’re available to you, but we do have to still set boundaries. Is this something you talk about, boundary setting with clients?

Absolutely. You know, there’s a lot of basic things, because we’re all working late, we’re all working on the weekends. I’m like, but just don’t let that email go out till Monday morning, you know, at 8 o’clock. Don’t answer your… Do they have cell phones? Are they texting you? Are they calling you? You know, what do those boundaries look like? Also, when you’re selling, especially CAS, because this is, like I said, an everyday service model, as opposed to a tax and audit-type practice, right? This is every day all the time—they’re so dependent and reliant on you. But I’m just very adamant about firms saying “real-time.” I’m like, nothing’s real-time. Even if you have a tech product that’s connected, you might still have to push a button. And if you didn’t push that button at every minute of the day, that’s not real-time. So yes, there’s a lot of boundaries there.

But I do think in the model in which we set up and guide firms, it’s being more in face-to-face meetings with the client because you don’t want to be so far removed, and I think this is a very important aspect that we talk about a lot is, as practitioners, we make it look really easy and like, it’s just easy, but we’re doing so much behind the scenes. Well, that’s not conveying value to the client. That’s not substantiating our fees, right? And so how are we bringing this forward to clients to display and demonstrate the value in everything that we’re doing? So we intentionally, overly communicate in our statement of work that’s part of the engagement letter, “You know, how much we do for you? This is how much we do for you.” So yeah, there’s just that whole value proposition when I just, I’m like, just don’t make it look so simple, even if it is simple for you.

Right, oh no, I agree completely. So as we’ve seen over the years that, you know, obviously CAS has been a fast-growing area, it’s being talked about, it’s probably one of the most common things I hear being talked about out there, and with this growth and everything, I’m guessing, especially when we’re looking at the pipeline issues and people being concerned about, you know, can I get people in, how do you advise on that? Are people maybe getting ahead of themselves and saying, I’ve got to staff, I’ve got to staff, I’ve got to staff before I add this, or is there a different solution than that?

Yes. So many rabbit holes to what you just asked, right? I love this and we can be here until tomorrow, but I’ll try to condense that into something.

Go as long as you want. I’m fine.

But, you know, CPA.com does this amazing CAS benchmark survey, and so that just recently came out. But what it’s showing is double-digit growth for the last six years. It’s showing that net client fees per professional, for top performers, have increased by nearly 30 percent from two years ago in the survey from 2022 to 2024. So that, I think, is significant, right? When you talk about the fastest growing. So the work is out there, you know, so many companies don’t want this in-house. So many companies don’t want the responsibility, so they are outsourcing this a lot. Then what happens is when you don’t price, and if you don’t set up these clients properly, you end up with this client base with a lot of maybe large clients or various clients that have really low margins. And what we also consult firms on is some of these clients are actually costing you money. You’re not even making money. At the end of the day, you’re paying them to have them be a client. 

So, yes, is the industry resource-constrained? Absolutely. We’re all fishing out of the same pond. But instead of adding staff and instead of adding dollars to your expense, first re-evaluate your existing client base. And I just, I tell everybody too, when you get a really great new client, don’t just identify your low-margin clients and have a conversation with them. It’s like, we call it like a breakup. Like, it’s not you, it’s me. Like, I totally priced you wrong. It’s my fault. Here’s what we’re doing. Here’s the value that we bring. I completely understand if you cannot double or triple your fees—I will help you find another firm and off-board you. We did not lose one client. They all agreed to the fee increases. Now it’s just, how are you adjusting your client base to create capacity? Do you have the right technology in place to create capacity? For firms that are using offshore resources, how is that creating capacity in the right way and not in a fearful way? I think this is super, super important, Randy. When we have technology and we have offshoring, we create this fear factor for staff members of, well, am I going to have enough hours? I have budgeted billable hours. What am I going to work on? What am I going to do? So, there’s just so much that goes with that.

I can see the rabbit holes now. And that is, boy, we should maybe do another podcast on that because there’s a lot to talk about there, you’re right. Man, I had a good question.

I love it. This is why it’s so fun and exciting, and yeah.

Yeah. So, okay. So then probably, yeah, one of the questions I was going to ask to start wrapping up was like what piece of advice would you give to somebody who’s jumping into this? And it sounds like we just gave them that, you know—evaluate what you have already and how you’re pricing them and who’s the low margin and, you know, seeing if you should invite them to be successful elsewhere. And when you do that and reprice it, they stick around. I’ve heard that story so many times. Clients are actually willing to pay more, you just don’t even realize it until you tell them it’s time.

And did you convey the value, or are you just doing it really easy and they don’t know what you’re doing and they think, well, that’s easy. I could probably take that back in-house and do it myself.

Right. Yep. Well, I actually kind of just did a wrap, but I want to ask you on this subject we’ve been talking about, how would you have final thoughts on it?

On?

Everything.

You know, here’s the thing: CAS is, again, the fastest growing revenue stream within firms and a lot of practitioners are leaving firms and starting their own practices. It’s a really exciting time, and I am very, very passionate about helping clients—helping them make money, grow their businesses. So I just feel like there’s just a lot of people that have a lot of interest and then you insert technology, and it just, it’s so fun. It’s so fun. And so you just want to build it in the right way and still have what we call, you know, balance, if we still call it work-life balance, it’s just a great industry for people to be in, and it’s constantly busy, but we don’t have the ups and downs of tax and audit, not working those hours. So it’s just a great business line for practitioners and for firms too.

And I think you just said a good point there, and you and I talked about this a little before we recorded, but that whole work-life balance, in reality, if you are passionate about what you’re doing, if you’re enjoying the work—and actually we just did a survey on this, hours don’t matter if you really enjoy what you’re doing. Now, I’m not promoting work more hours, that’s not the thing, but I’m promoting follow your passion and get into an area you really enjoy. I think you found that, I know I found that, and I think both of us want to help other people find that.

Absolutely. It’s so fun. And you know, you’re in everybody’s business and you’re learning something new all the time. It’s something new every day. It’s a blast.

Yep. Oh, believe me, start a podcast because you learn constantly. So that is a lot of fun. Alright, well, two final things before we wrap up. You know, everybody gets this question, I always kind of preface it the same way, but I’m going to jump right into it this time, because listeners probably hear it every single time, the way I say it. But I love talking about what we’re doing in the profession, but I really love hearing what people do outside of work, what their passions are, what they love doing when they’re not helping people build a CAS practice. So what are the things that you enjoy?

Oh gosh, you know, so I honestly love to cook—I cook a ton. We’re kind of like the home base for the entire family, so I’m cooking all of the time. I have two Rhodesian Ridgebacks that are show dogs, and so, they are, I have a grand champion and a champion. 

Oh, wow. 

I know, so that’s fun. It’s a whole other lifestyle, like you wouldn’t even, yeah. And then, we camp a lot. I live in Colorado, so we’re always outside. I’m more of a, we call it mud season here in the summer versus skiing in winter. So yeah, that’s what I do for fun. It’s a blast.

Nice, I gotta ask about camping: tent, trailer, how do you do it?

We glamp, yeah, we’re glampers. We have a trailer and kitchen and bathroom and shower, you know. I don’t know how they call it camping, other than we’re just in the woods without…

Oh yeah. Well, we’ve evolved to the same thing. We have a travel trailer that’s got everything in it that you just mentioned. It’s a little mini home. We used to have tents. We went from tents to pop-up trailer and pop-up trailer to travel trailer.

That’s exactly what we did! And we kept, you know, it’s funny, we kept the pop-up trailer as the guest house.

Yeah, we actually did that, we had that for a while too, we just sold our pop-up last summer. It was very emotional because we had it, I mean, when the kids were born basically is when we bought it, it was emotional, but the cool thing was, we sold it to a couple who had three young kids, and it was like, oh, someone else now gets to create experiences and memories with this pop-up, so that was pretty cool.

It’s so cool. I love it. I couldn’t go back to the pop-up now though, I don’t think.

I’m liking the travel trailer at this point. And then lastly, if people want to hear more about your businesses, what you’re doing personally, and what you’re doing with the community, what’s the best place for them to look?

Yeah, thank you. So, Infinite Ties is Infinite-Ties.com. So, check out our CAS community and our membership. It’s really valuable and inexpensive. And so, we’re just trying to, like I said, bring everybody together for the greater good. And then, for the advisors, it’s Infinite-Advisors.com.

Alright, awesome. Well, Christine, thank you so much.

Thank you, Randy.

Great conversation, and I appreciate you being on The Unique CPA.

Thank you so much, Randy. Appreciate it.