Redefining Success in Accounting

Looking Ahead with Liz Farr
Episode 196 of The Unique CPA brings Liz Farr, a CPA and influential freelance writer, in conversation with Randy Crabtree. Liz discusses her diverse career path and how she transitioned from biochemistry to linguistics, then eventually to accounting, and finally writing within the profession. Taking a 30,000 foot view, they discuss the significant shifts happening in accounting such as innovative firm models, improvements in work-life balance, and the importance of a strong firm culture. Liz highlights the new generation’s entrepreneurial approach and the increasing emphasis on leadership and technology integration, as both reflect on their personal experiences and the evolving landscape, expressing optimism about the future of the profession.
Today, my guest is Liz Farr. Liz is a good friend of mine. I’m very fortunate to have met Liz about two years ago, just about two years ago now in New Orleans at a conference. Xero Con actually, my very first Xero Con, and hit it off and was just intrigued with everything she’s doing in and for the profession. But before we even get into that, I’ll give you a little breakdown of Liz, and then I’ll let her expand on it, because Liz has a very wide ranging and varied career, but for the last, well, 20 years or so, she’s been a CPA. She kind of converted that into becoming a freelance writer and ghostwriter for the profession about almost 10 years ago now. Nine, technically, I think. And in addition, through that, she’s the influencer maker behind the scenes. She’s doing some writing for some very influential people in the profession. So, before I go any further, Liz, welcome to The Unique CPA.
Thanks, Randy. And I’m glad to be here. You know, your podcast is always one of my favorites. You have a lot of pretty interesting guests on there. So thanks for inviting me.
That’s no problem. We’re continuing with the interesting guests today, and I teased that you’ve had a varied career, that accounting wasn’t the first. Why don’t you give us a little background of the careers and degrees or degrees you’ve worked out in the past, because when I look at that LinkedIn today, I go, holy cow, you were in school forever.
Yeah, I was kind of on my way to being a “professional student,” as my brothers call it. I actually first got exposed to accounting in high school when I was the treasurer of my Explorer Post and my Girl Scout Troop. Both were operating businesses. And so somebody’s mom taught me double-entry bookkeeping, sent me home with a 10 column green ledger pad, and I kept the books, and I really liked it. I thought it was really fun to do this. I really liked it. But I grew up in Los Alamos, New Mexico, which is the home of the atomic bomb, and if you grew up there, going into business was what you did if you weren’t smart enough to get a PhD in engineering or physics or something like that.
So, of course, you know, being one of the smart people, I didn’t even think about going into accounting back then. And instead, I ended up getting a degree in biochemistry. And I couldn’t find work in New Mexico with my degree, so I followed my then-boyfriend to the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where there were more biochemistry tech jobs than there were warm bodies to fill them, so, you know, you just had to say, “Hey, I’m here,” and they go, “Oh, when can you start, can you start Monday? Okay, great, great.”
And so I did that for about six years. After about the first two years of that, I figured out that I liked studying biochemistry a whole lot more than doing biochemistry. So I kind of looked around, I ended up getting a job on a database project, where we were using—actually using Oracle and Sybase and Ingress to model data that was reported in scientific journals. So all of the training materials were about how to set up your enterprise resource program. You know, here, here’s how you set up the employees, and the company, and the inventory and all of that. So, you know, I think subliminally it was working on my brain.
And so I kind of floated around trying to figure out, well, what am I going to do? Well, I thought, I’m good in languages, so let me work on getting a Ph.D. in linguistics. I took some classes at the University of Wisconsin, and then when my boyfriend finished his Ph.D. in math—he was on the 10-year program—I moved to Seattle, and he got his first teaching job at UNLV, and the plan was for him to kind of eventually find a teaching job somewhere in Washington or Oregon.
So anyways, that was 1993 and my life just kind of blew up that year. Just a lot of things happened. Right after I moved to Seattle, moved cross country, and started grad school, I realized I was a whole lot happier without that boyfriend than with him. So, I terminated a nine-year relationship, started school in a completely different field, was a long way from friends and family, and then my parents were killed in a car wreck.
Oh!
Right after I got there. So, everything just kind of, you know, my life was just in turmoil. And I stuck it out for about two years. On one of my trips back to New Mexico to deal with my parents’ estate, I bumped into an old friend of mine. We were both single for the first time in forever—we’d known each other for a long time, since I was 17 I think we first met. And we hit it off, and it was supposed to just be a little kind of date or something, and I’ve now been married to him for 24 years, with him for more than 30, ended up coming back to New Mexico, I didn’t finish my PhD, didn’t finish a master’s in linguistics, but I came back and kind of drifted around trying to figure out, well, what can I do? I was driving along the road one day and I saw this sign that said, “Take our tax class” by an H&R Block, and I thought, “Hey! That’s not a bad idea.”
My only interest in that at that time was because my husband and I had inherited these investments, so we’d get these 1099s and I’d look at them and go, what is this stuff? OID? Municipal Bond Interest? What do you do with this? Capital Gains? Qualified Dividends? And I thought, well, if I take this H&R Block tax class, I’ll learn enough to do my tax return. So it turned out I was really good at this stuff, so halfway through this 11-week class, the owner of the franchise who was teaching the class said to me, “You’re going to come work for me in January, aren’t you?” It hadn’t even crossed my mind. And I said, “Sure, why not? Okay.” You know, that was the fastest job interview I’ve ever had.
So I did that for a year and I thought, yeah, this is really kind of fun. How can I turn this into a year-round career? I stumbled upon the new Masters of Accounting program that they were starting up at Anderson School of Management at UNM, which was designed for career changers, for people who had a degree in something other than accounting. So I signed up for that, got a Master’s of Accounting, sat for the CPA exam, worked at a couple of different firms for, you know, worked at one for 11 years. Then I decided, you know, there’s something better than just cranking out tax returns. So I started thinking about what else can I do—a copywriting course landed in my lap, and I did that, I really liked it. So, I started getting some writing clients.
I started writing for some local firms, and my first client was a firm in a company called BizInc in New Zealand. They specialize in websites and marketing for accountants and bookkeepers throughout the English-speaking world, so Australia, New Zealand, Canada, the U.S., and the U.K. So, I wrote a lot of blog posts and a bunch of website copy and I thought, dang, you know, some of these little firms in Canada and New Zealand and Australia are doing some pretty interesting things. So that was really kind of the start of my journey into learning about what accounting can be. Not the traditional model that I’ve been exposed to, which was, you know, long hours, billing, get your quota of, you know, billable hours and, you know, doing the same thing over and over, bouncing between different businesses. You know, you put down a construction tax return and the next one you pick up is a law firm and then the next one is a restaurant and, you know, that was part of the madness that drove me out of public accounting. So, that’s kind of how I ended up where I am.
Yeah, that’s a pretty cool story, and I knew it was varied, and you are definitely a lifetime learner, whether you define yourself for that or not, you are, which is cool. And the things, what you were just talking about, that whole, you know, things that were bothering you and, and you didn’t like, but you saw some cool things happen in New Zealand and Canada. I do want to expand on that, what you and I are seeing in the profession. But before I do that, I just want to go into something you said, which is very similar.
I don’t know if you and I have talked about this before, I kind of had a similar enlightenment moment about accounting, kind of like you did—and I wasn’t, I didn’t start out in accounting, I started out as a computer programmer, and then I went into sales, and then one day, you know, six months maybe after I did my wife and I’s tax return, the first year we were married, and thought back to that, I go, “I really enjoyed doing that tax return. That was fun. I’m going to be a CPA.” I mean, that just light bulb went off. I’m going to be a CPA and quit my job, went back to school full time, became a CPA. So, you know, different but similar from that aspect. It’s like, hey, this is, let’s learn taxes, sounds cool. And then, let’s turn that into a profession.
Alright. Just a quick story. Now, let’s go back to where we were. Going back to things you were saying about, like I mentioned, New Zealand and Canada and the way they’re doing things different and innovative. You and I, as I mentioned, met at a conference. We’ve been together at very many conferences since then. We see some really interesting things happening in the profession. And often the people we’re hanging out with are probably the younger generation, the innovative firm, the startup firm, the firm that’s not afraid to pivot and make a change to see that when things are not working and let’s do something the other way. Let’s talk about, you know, what’s going on in the profession, where we see the next generation, you know, landing from, you know, are they going to be generous? Are they going to be a niche practice? Are they going to want technology innovation? Are they going to, whatever, are they going to track hours? Are they not going to track hours? Are they going to all these different things? A four-day workweek? Is there specific, like, emerging trends that you’re really seeing with the younger generation that you’re excited about or you think are good or things that they may need to change? Let’s just get your opinion on what’s going on with this next generation of accounting and bookkeeping firm owners.
Well, the ones that I find really exciting are the ones that come from outside of public accounting, and start up their firms without really knowing what public accounting is like. You know, Nicole Davis is an example of one of those. These are people who were not indoctrinated in that traditional mold that you and I both spent some time in, where you’re billing by the hour and you’re a generalist, and it’s the partner track and you have these levels of responsibility and these job titles and this is what you do to move up, you know? And just kind of like, you know, you’re a technician and then, and that’s really all you can do. You know, there wasn’t really any encouragement to expand into like firm marketing or specialize in a niche or to even hire a salesperson.
Right. Oh, that one always gets me.
Yeah. You know, I keep thinking that maybe if the firm I was at had offered me an opportunity to do something like be an onboarding specialist or a client liaison—these are the kinds of things that we see in the firms, in the younger generation firms, because they see that that is a need, that that is something that will allow their high-volume, high-value people to focus on what they do best. If we take some of the administrative stuff off their plates and just let them do the work that they’re best at. So those are the kind of things that I see that are really cool.
Yeah, I agree. It’s, I think historically it’s been, like you said, you know, kind of pigeonholed into, right, you just do this, as you were talking before with the, you know, I’m doing a construction tax return, and then I’m doing a tax return for a restaurant, then I’m doing a tax return for accounting for this. I agree with you, this younger group, this startup, it’s pretty cool. The innovative things they’re doing, but they’re, they’re sticking to areas that they’re passionate about, which, you know, before we even started recording, you know, we mentioned Terrell Turner, who you and I both know, and Terrell’s gone through a couple of iterations of his firm, which he started in 2020, so it’s only four years old now, but he started concentrating on the restaurant industry. And quickly, you know, realized that he had more passion for working with law firms and enjoyed that a lot more. And even though he had built a reputation with the restaurant industry, he wasn’t afraid to make that pivot, to make that change, to find an area where he felt one, probably the growth was going to be good, where he enjoyed more, where he had the ability to impact the profession the way he wanted to, and I think we’re seeing that with a lot of these firms—more so at the startup, smaller firm level. But what I want to see is that trickle up instead of trickling down. Do you think that’s happening? I do. I believe there’s some larger firms that are starting to look at their practice that way, but I’m just wondering if you’ve seen any of that at the larger firm level.
Prime example that I can think of is Jody Grunden and his firm Summit CPA, where they, you know, this is not really a brand-new firm. They’ve been around for 20-some years. But what they were doing was really different from the typical brick and mortar generalist kind of CPA firms. So his firm, Summit CPA, was acquired by a bigger brick and mortar firm because they wanted to learn what he was doing. They wanted him to teach their people what he was doing so that they could do that too. So I see that. So, I think that’s good.
Yeah, and the cool thing is, we haven’t said the name, and maybe I won’t say the name of the firm that bought him, but the cool thing is that firm reached out to me to have me come in and speak on mental health awareness and burnout in the profession, and so, yes, I’ve seen a lot more larger firms—in fact, I’m speaking at a top, you know, 50 firm in a week on that same topic. And so the things that we’re seeing, I think, at the younger firm level, where they’re more aware of the work-life balance and, you know, not having to sit at your desk 80 hours a week, I think that is trickling up now to the larger firms. I don’t know if you say trickle up, but I’m going to say it, cause you trickle down, but I’m going to go, we’re trickling up instead.
So let’s talk about that then, at this new generation of firm owners or people working in the profession, we just mentioned work life balance, and work culture. What do you see in, specifically on the culture aspect of things that, that may be different from the SALY methods, the “same as last year” methods that you and I may have seen when we started out in the profession?
Well, I’ll just use as an example, the firm that I spent 11 years at, you know, we, we spent a lot of time one year working on our mission statement. And we got this beautiful mission statement and then somebody got it beautifully calligraphed, and framed it and put it on our break room and it said something like, “We are a holistic provider of financial and accounting services,” and that was where it stopped. And I remember when I was moving out of that firm, when I was sort of phasing my way out of there, I talked to one of the guys who I knew was eventually going to become a tax partner there. And I said, “You know, look, if you’re going to be a holistic provider of accounting services, when you onboard a new client, you’ve got to ask them, you know, who is your attorney? You don’t have one? Okay, let’s get you one. What’s your estate plan? What is your exit plan for this business? Oh, we don’t care that you just started it a year ago. What is your goal for this firm, for this business? Who’s your financial advisor?” And I told them you’ve got to weave that idea into the whole fabric of the firm. And I’m seeing that with a lot of firms today where they really focus on the culture and well, what does this mean? And how can we weave this into everything we do? How can we call it out when we see one of our people demonstrating part of our culture? And they actually do this. And I think when you get something like that, it’s like a spear that you throw and it will go really, really far. It will go further with all the power of everybody behind it. It’s not just one person trying to help a client, but you’ve got the whole firm behind this idea of making things better for the clients, making things better for people, instead of just, let’s crank out the work, let’s crank out the work.
And we do see that a lot, I think, at these firms that we’ve been talking about, the innovative startup firms. But the cool thing is, I mean, I can think of, you know, just off the top of my head, three top 100 firms, and there’s going to be many more, that are very culture-oriented. Somebody I like to talk about a lot is John Sensiba, Managing Partner of Sensiba out of Pleasanton, California. John’s there, and I’ll probably get this wrong, but when John took over Managing Partner, he wanted to create a firm culture that, how did he say it, “where the employees and their families could thrive.” I mean, it was about the employees and their families. It didn’t say, we’re going to do everything we can and work 120 hours a week to make clients first. It was, we’re going to put our employees first. That’s cool. Richard Kopelman, managing partner of Aprio, who recently spoke at our conference, they have, I think they call it the Aprio Way, or 31 core initiatives or culture aspects that they do. Sikich, a top 25 firm, they have a VP of culture on their staff. So I do like what’s happening in the profession from that standpoint.
And a lot of that then ties back to culture is important. Getting to know the people you work with, the partner, but work-life balance. The next generation of people coming in the profession are not going to be satisfied with, “You just need to power through this 100-hour a week tax season, and then maybe you can go on a vacation,” or “then maybe you can enjoy some time and only work 60 hours.” And so what do you see from the work-life balance shift in the profession or at this next generation coming into the profession?
Yeah, I’ve seen a lot of people who are figuring out how to structure their firms so that they’re only working at most 40 hours, or maybe 25, or maybe even just 15 hours a week. And you can do that. It is possible to do that, to create that kind of work-life balance, but you have to be super intentional that that’s what you want to do. So it takes pricing—you have to change your pricing model. You may have to completely change who your clients are, because you will do better if you are serving clients at a higher level. Now, I know this gives a lot of the old timers heartburn because that means that, well, you mean those little bitty $800 tax return clients that eat up all our time? You know, where are they going to go? And my answer to that is, I don’t know where they’re going to go, but I do think that technology is going to help take care of a big chunk of that market. It may mean they may have to get a little more involved or they may just find a practitioner who specializes in leveraging technology and cranking out those tax returns.
But I think a big part of this is becoming intentional about what kind of firm you want to create and working towards that. You can kind of work backwards from that, you know? What income do I want? Okay, what does that mean? What price points and client counts is that going to work? What kind of capacity? How many hours do we want to work? You can design a firm around that. It may mean that 90 percent of the clients you’re working with today are not going to be your clients in the future, that you may find just 10 percent of your clients want to go with you. They want you as a partner in this journey. And so that is one option, you know, and the other option, as I mentioned, you know, you can be the person who leverages technology and just cranks out these little bitty tax returns. You can do that, but you just, it takes intention.
Yes. Intention. That’s good. And that, based on what you just said, I mean, we know many people that have done that define the firm that they want, and they’ve done that backwards, you know, let’s look at where we want to be. How do we get there? You know, a few I could think of is Luke Templin. He runs an outsourced, what do you call it? Fractional CFO firm out of, he’s in Omaha, I think. Dawn Brolin, who’s out of Connecticut. Luke doesn’t work Fridays, Dawn tries to stay to 35 hours a week or less, Al-Nesha Jones, her firm, and there’s about 10 people, they don’t work Fridays. We have all these, you know, people like Roman Villard, they’re all about “going full send.” But as an organization, as much as for their clients. And so seeing all these really cool things happen in the profession is, gets me excited.
And sorry, I’m going to go on a rant for a second, but I recently got to review scholarship applicants for the AICPA, so current students in college, applying for scholarships, and just to see the passion that they were bringing to the profession that they haven’t even been in yet? That was pretty cool. So it gives me a great feeling that we’re in a good spot. And to back up a second, Roman Villard, the one thing that he recently talked about is Gen Z, which is really the next generation coming into the profession. And you just mentioned it, but the most important thing they want to see is technology integration into the firm that they go work for. And so I think if you are a legacy firm and maybe a little stagnant on your technology—hopefully you’re not, but if you are—if you want to be one of those firms that generates the attraction of the next generation, make sure that you are up to date on the technology as much as you can. And don’t be stagnant, don’t be afraid to pivot because things are always going to change as well.
Alright. I went on my rant there. So we, there’s things that, we didn’t touch on that I’m sure you want to. So let me open it up to you and let you just say what the most important things that you’d want to touch on that we haven’t yet in this discussion.
One thing that really sets the younger generation apart from the older generation is their approach to the profession. You know, the older generations, we were technicians who happened to work in an accounting firm, or who happened to own a business that provided accounting services. So it tended to be very kind of siloed practice. The younger generation contrast is a more entrepreneurial approach. They want to have a business that provides accounting services. It’s a very different approach. They’re business owners first and technicians, you know, maybe, you know, well, I don’t really need to do that. You know, I really want to own a business, so that means that I hire the talent to do the technical stuff. You know, maybe I’ve done the technical stuff for a while and develop a process that I can teach people, but eventually, the goal for a lot of these people is to get out of the weeds of doing the work.
You know, I had lunch a couple of weeks ago with my former boss. He’s a retiring tax partner in a firm that I worked at, and he’s having a devil of a time extricating himself from the firm because he’s still doing a lot of the review work. They just don’t have the people to handle the high-level review work. And so here he is—he’s older than me, he’s in his late 60s, wants to spend time with his grandkids—and he’s stuck reviewing tax returns, and he doesn’t really see a way out of that, so that, that’s a real difference, you know, I can see someone like Roman Villard, when he gets tired of doing this, when he’s ready to spend time with his grandkids, or even his kids for that matter, he will have built an asset that he can sell to somebody else, and somebody else can step in and do it. He’s not going to be tied to doing the work anymore. So that’s a huge contrast, huge difference.
I agree. You know, building a firm where you actually aren’t necessarily necessary. A sustainable firm that someone else could just step in and take over, because in your scenario you just said with your ex-boss, I mean that’s not something I ever want to be in. I can’t escape—not that escape is the right word—but I can’t go enjoy my life with my family because I have to stay here because I can’t find anybody to do the work that I’m doing? Yeah, that’s, I agree, that is a huge thing that we’re seeing, that the next generation is looking at the firm as a business rather than as a, well, we’re just here because I have technical skills and we keep doing technical work and that’s what I do, rather than running the firm. And a funny thing is I just talked to Lisa Simpson from AICPA today and one of the big discussions was just the whole business model and how we are looking at the accounting profession and how it needs to change. And that’s a big passion of hers. She’s trying to be an advocate of that for the AICPA and promote change. And so that was an exciting conversation with her this morning.
Oh, that’s really good to hear. And that the business model has been broken for a long time. And, you know, another thing that really sets the younger people apart from the older people is the emphasis on leadership. Leadership is a thing—it’s not just something you get promoted into, it’s not just a job title that lands on you, but it is something that you develop by having people who want to follow you because they like your ideas and you are taking care of them. They trust you. So, that’s really different, and that’s a really good thing.
Yep, no, I agree. I think leadership skills are, I was just talking to someone else, they said that, you know, pretty much everybody that gets promoted to manager doesn’t get trained on how to be a manager. And so, these leadership skills are an area that we need to work on as well. But I think we’re doing it. I think we’re getting better. I am, what is it, bullish? That means positive? I’m bullish on the—I think I’m using the right term—on the profession and where we’re going, and I’m excited to see what’s happening. And I think we both are, but I think you would agree you’re excited to see where this profession is going, and I will call myself one of the old people in the profession—I won’t call you that, but I’ll call me that—and I’m excited every day when I get to talk about what’s happening in this profession. So I was going to say, I appreciate you being on—anything you want to wrap up, I think you just did, but anything else you want to say, and then I’ll have a final couple of questions for you.
Well, when I left public accounting, you know, back 10 years ago, 12 years ago, when I was thinking, I’ve got to get out of accounting, and I was ready to set aside my CPA, I was a CBA at the time also. I was ready to just dump all of that to do something else. But now, I see hope and I see the gifts that this new generation is bringing to business owners and the tremendous resource that they can become for the world. We need business advisory services to have a healthy economy.
You were at our conference that we had in July of ’24 here, and I don’t know if you remember Jennifer Wilson said something when she accepted an award that we gave out at the conference, and oh, what was it? It was like, it was something very similar to what you said, but you are the, you know, the gatekeepers to the world’s economy, or something like that, and you have a great responsibility. And yes, I agree with you completely. We are a very vital, important cog, if not the most important in the world’s economy. So well said.
Alright, two final things: One, you know I’m all about work-life balance and getting to know people on a personal level, and so we just talked about the profession and we talked about your history, but we didn’t talk about what you like doing on a personal level. So, hobbies, passions, give us some things that you enjoy doing when you’re not out writing or being an advocate for this profession.
Well, as you know, Randy, I like to go on hikes. And a year ago, in September, I walked across England, or I tried to, so I love doing that. I also like knitting, and years ago, I inherited my mom’s stained glass tools. So I do a little bit of that. I haven’t done it for a while because we packed it away to do some renovations and haven’t gotten it back out again. But I love—there’s something about working with my hands, I gotta have my hands doing something all the time.
Nice. Yeah, that walk across England was, when I had met you, you were using a cane because you had recently, what, broke your ankle?
I had ankle surgery. I tore a tendon and the surgeon also reshaped my heel bone so that I don’t walk on the outside of that foot anymore. So it’s been a major rehab process.
Yep. And so that hindered the walk a little bit. I was impressed that you were doing this because I’m like, wow, that’s, that’s quite a goal, especially not much more than what, a year after the surgery, or was it less?
It was about a year and a half, and I’m going to try it again in about another two years, I think. And I think by then I’ll actually be able to walk the entire 200 miles. Now the trail we went on incidentally was created by an accountant in the UK, Alfred Wainwright was an accountant who liked to go on walks.
Wow. Yeah, 200-mile walk, huh? That’s pretty cool. Alright, well, you’ve got me motivated to look into this because I’m like, that would be something pretty cool to do, and, and so
You know, one way to look at it is, it’s a really long pub crawl.
That’s what I was thinking.
Because most of the places we stayed at were bed and breakfasts that were old English inns. So, you know, you had the bar downstairs with food and then rooms upstairs.
I am definitely going to look into that. I just yesterday booked an appointment to get my left knee replaced on March 10th. I already had my right one replaced. So it may take me a few months after that to do it. So maybe we’ll look at 2026 as a game plan for doing this. And I appreciate you sharing that because I’d love to hear the cool things people are doing and this is one of the coolest I’ve heard. And then last question, we did mention you’re a writer, you’re a freelance writer, you’re a ghostwriter. If people want to know more about that, where’s a good place to find out information or get ahold of you?
A good place to find me is on LinkedIn. Just look for my name, Liz Farr, and look for CPA and Ghostwriter. You’ll find me there, that’s a good place. I’m also on Twitter, and you can also go to my website, FarrCommunications.com, and that’s Farr with two R’s.
I was going to say that.
So, that’s where people can find me.
Alright, Liz, well, this was, I think, our third attempt to get this recorded, so I, at least our third, it might be fourth, even, but I’m glad we got it. I always enjoy talking with you, Liz, and I appreciate your passion for the profession.
Well, thank you so much, and you’re one of my heroes in the accounting world, so it’s a true honor to be here and be able to contribute to what you do.
Well, I’m humbled that you would say that. I just love what I’m doing. So thank you.
Important Links
About the Guest
Liz Farr is a B2B copywriter who is also a Certified Public Accountant. She spent 15 years working in tax and accounting, first at a small H&R Block office in rural New Mexico, then at several small public accounting firms in Albuquerque, New Mexico, and earned her CPA license in 2005.
A freelance writer since 2015, Liz has been writing website copy, blog posts, newsletters and case studies for accountants and bookkeepers around the world. In 2017, I began writing for the Journal of Accountancy, AccountingWEB, and Intuit’s Firm of the Future blog. She’s also worked as a biochemist, a relational database annotator, and even studied linguistics at the graduate level. Liz’s training in copywriting comes from American Writers and Artists, Inc., where she is a member of the prestigious Circle of Success and the Professional Writers Association.
Meet the Host
Randy Crabtree, co-founder and partner of Tri-Merit Specialty Tax Professionals, is a widely followed author, lecturer and podcast host for the accounting profession.
Since 2019, he has hosted the “The Unique CPA,” podcast, which ranks among the world’s 5% most popular programs (Source: Listen Score). You can find articles from Randy in Accounting Today’s Voices column, the AICPA Tax Adviser (Tax-saving opportunities for the housing and construction industries) and he is a regular presenter at conferences and virtual training events hosted by CPAmerica, Prime Global, Leading Edge Alliance (LEA), Allinial Global and several state CPA societies. Crabtree also provides continuing professional education to top 100 CPA firms across the country.
Schaumburg, Illinois-based Tri-Merit is a niche professional services firm that specializes in helping CPAs and their clients benefit from R&D tax credits, cost segregation, the energy efficient commercial buildings deduction (179D), the energy efficient home credit (45L) and the employee retention credit (ERC).
Prior to joining Tri-Merit, Crabtree was managing partner of a CPA firm in the greater Chicago area. He has more than 30 years of public accounting and tax consulting experience in a wide variety of industries, and has worked closely with top executives to help them optimize their tax planning strategies.