Rural communities offer meaningful work — and a chance to build a practice on purpose.

Accounting ARC
With Donny Shimamoto
Center for Accounting Transformation

In an era when private equity rollups and “bigger is better” narratives dominate accounting headlines, Donny Shimamoto, CPA.CITP, CGMA, returns to a quieter question: What does it look like to build a firm — and a career — around serving the places that rarely get the spotlight?

• MORE Accounting ARC: Why Happiness is Hard-Fought for High Achievers | The Fastest Way to Lose Talent Is “Dick Leadership” | Post-Holiday Fatigue Isn’t a Failure; It’s a Signal | OCR, Research Bots & Meeting Assistants: What Actually Helps Now | Return Season is the New Stress Test | Small Firms May Have the Biggest Advantage in 2026 | Downgraded: What the DOE Said About Accounting | Savage: Using Your License as a Megaphone | Baker: Interpreting Pricing Psychology | Don’t Get Fired by Your Own Automation | What Amazon Doesn't Tell You | Royalties, Residuals, and Reality Checks | ARC-SLC

In this episode of Accounting ARC, Shimamoto sits down with two practitioners who live that reality every day: Shayna Chapman, who runs a practice rooted in a small Ohio community, and Mohan Chirumamilla, who serves clients across Omaha, Nebraska, and Columbia, Missouri. Their conversation is part practical playbook, part gut-check — and it lands on a message that feels increasingly urgent for the profession: small towns still need sophisticated accounting, and accountants still need work that feels meaningful.

As AI automates compliance, value shifts to measurable outcomes and client aspirations.

Full show notes here

Gear Up for Growth
With Jean Caragher
For CPA Trendlines

Author and strategist B. Joseph Pine II urges accounting firm leaders to confront a fundamental question: What business are you really in?

According to Pine, the profession is approaching a critical inflection point as the global economy moves beyond goods, services, and even experiences, into what he calls the transformation economy.

“You use experiences as a raw material to guide people to change, to help them achieve their aspirations,” Pine tells Gear Up for Growth host Jean Caragher, president of Capstone Marketing. This shift, he explains, requires firms to move beyond simply delivering accounting work efficiently to helping clients achieve meaningful, measurable change.

Gear Up For Growth Ep 58 - Joe Pine

How to reset pricing, rebuild margins, and stop “helping” clients into bankruptcy.

Full show notes here

The Disruptors
With Liz Farr

Candy Bellau didn’t set out to build a firm that could operate without her. But her hand was forced when her mother became ill.

“I kept dropping the ball at my own company and my team, the long-term members kept picking it up, and slowly but surely, they just absorbed the client work I was doing,” Bellau recalls.

Bellau’s transition from operator to owner came at a pivotal moment. After working nonstop since age 14, Bellau found herself at 56 needing a change. “I don’t even know who I am. I don’t know what I like. I don’t have any interest outside of work and tasks that have to be done at home," she explains. So she took art classes, improv classes, wrote a book, and launched the Unbalanced Podcast with Sam Hallburn.

Disruptors Ep 132

Ex-Baker Tilly CEO takes helm at a new “category” of CPA firm.

By Rory Henry CFP®, BFA™
For CPA Trendlines
Full show notes here

When CPA firms talk about growth, the conversation often centers on acquisitions, headcount, or revenue targets.

But Alan Whitman, the ex-Baker Tilly CEO and newly named CEO of a private-equity-backed hybrid, says sustainable growth requires something deeper: clarity of strategy, shared language, and systems that enable people to perform at scale.

MORE Rory Henry and The Holistic Guide to Wealth Management | Holistic Guide to Wealth Management

Learn how easily pros tie well-being to success—and how fear of failure can distort self-worth.

Accounting ARC
With Byron Patrick and Donny Shimamoto
Center for Accounting Transformation

Busy season may still be a days out, but the stress response already starts to hum for a lot of accounting professionals — the calendar fills, the inbox tightens, and the margin for error feels like it shrinks to a sliver. In the latest Accounting ARC, Donny Shimamoto, CPA.CITP, CGMA, and Byron Patrick, CPA.CITP, take that reality head-on with a surprisingly practical lens: modern stoicism.

• MORE Accounting ARC: The Fastest Way to Lose Talent Is “Dick Leadership” | Post-Holiday Fatigue Isn’t a Failure; It’s a Signal | OCR, Research Bots & Meeting Assistants: What Actually Helps Now | Return Season is the New Stress Test | Small Firms May Have the Biggest Advantage in 2026 | Downgraded: What the DOE Said About Accounting | Savage: Using Your License as a Megaphone | Baker: Interpreting Pricing Psychology | Don’t Get Fired by Your Own Automation | What Amazon Doesn't Tell You | Royalties, Residuals, and Reality Checks | ARC-SLC

They start by naming the misconception most people bring to the word “stoic” — that it means emotionless, rigid, “stone-faced.” Shimamoto, founder and managing director of IntrapriseTechKnowlogies LLC and founder and inspiration architect for the Center for Accounting Transformation, admits that’s how he learned it, too: a kind of unfeeling resilience.

But the article that sparks the episode — a Psychology Today piece on the science of stoicism — reframes it as something more useful (and more human): a set of attitudes and behaviors linked with resilience, lower anger and higher life satisfaction.

Expanding access while maintaining rigorous standards.

Gear Up for Growth
With Jean Caragher
For CPA Trendlines

Full show notes here

“This legislation has real consequences – positive consequences – for the health of firms, corporate accounting departments, and the broader economy,” says Aiysha “AJ” Johnson, CEO and executive director of the New Jersey Society of CPAs, during her appearance on Gear Up for Growth with Jean Caragher of Capstone Marketing. “I like to think that we’re opening doors.”

More Jean Caragher here | Get her best-selling handbook, The 90-Day Marketing Plan for CPA Firms, here | More Gear Up for Growth | More CPA Trendlines videos and podcasts here

Johnson highlights New Jersey’s new legislation signed by Governor Murphy, creating an additional pathway to CPA licensure, a move designed to expand access while maintaining rigorous standards.

Label intent, clarify tone and choose the right channel so feedback lands as coaching, not conflict.

Accounting ARC
With Liz Mason, Byron Patrick, and Donny Shimamoto
Center for Accounting Transformation

Leaders in accounting do not need to choose between being “nice” and being effective.

In this ARC episode, Donny Shimamoto, CPA.CITP, CGMA; Byron Patrick, CPA.CITP; and Liz Mason, CPA, make the case that the best bosses aim for something tougher — kindness with clarity.

The conversation starts with a story familiar to anyone who has ever hovered over the “Send” button on a difficult message.

• MORE Accounting ARC: Post-Holiday Fatigue Isn’t a Failure; It’s a Signal | OCR, Research Bots & Meeting Assistants: What Actually Helps Now | Return Season is the New Stress Test | Small Firms May Have the Biggest Advantage in 2026 | Downgraded: What the DOE Said About Accounting | Savage: Using Your License as a Megaphone | Baker: Interpreting Pricing Psychology | Don’t Get Fired by Your Own Automation | What Amazon Doesn't Tell You | Royalties, Residuals, and Reality Checks | ARC-SLC

Mason, founder and CEO of High Rock Accounting, recalls proposing a conference talk with a deliberately provocative title — a reminder that most professionals feel the tension between holding the line and keeping the peace. The point, she says, is not to sanitize reality. It is to learn how to hold people accountable without turning it into a personal attack.

Advisory at Scale Requires Systems, Not Heroics. Plus 5 More Takeaways.

Complete show notes here

With Rory Henry CFP®, BFA™
For CPA Trendlines

When firms talk about innovation in accounting, they often start with technology. But in my conversation with Nick Pasquarosa, founder and CEO of Bookkeeper360, it became clear that technology was never the starting point for his firm. It was the result of listening closely to small business owners and building systems to solve their most persistent problems.

MORE Rory Henry and The Holistic Guide | BOLT: Bookkeeper360 Launches Mobile and Web App Featuring AI-Powered Virtual CFO

Pasquarosa founded Bookkeeper360 in 2012, long before cloud accounting was the norm. What began as a door-to-door side hustle helping local businesses reconcile their checking accounts evolved into a nationwide cloud accounting firm serving nearly 1,000 small business clients with a team of more than 75 professionals across 26 states.

“I started this in high school,” Pasquarosa tells me. “It really started with an interest in helping small businesses stop running their business off their bank account balance and [instead] giving them timely, accurate books so they could make real-time decisions.”