Joe Woodard has trained over 150,000 accounting professionals and spent his career studying what separates firms that grow from firms that stay stuck. His answer? It almost always starts with pricing.
Joe is the founder and CEO of Woodard, a company that equips CPAs, enrolled agents, and bookkeepers with education, coaching, and resources to build stronger practices. He is also the host of Scaling New Heights, one of the largest conferences for accountants and bookkeepers worldwide, and has been recognized by Accounting Today as one of the Top 100 Most Influential People in Accounting for the last ten consecutive years.
In this conversation, Joe walks through the Woodard Ideal Practice Model, which focuses on seven key areas of operational excellence: brand, services, clients, technology, process, engagements, and team. But the most actionable insight he shares is simpler than a seven-part framework. He says the very first lever any firm should pull is pricing, and he lays out a specific strategy for doing it. Double the price on your bottom 20% of clients. If half of them stay, you have the same revenue. If all of them leave, you get the capacity back. Either way, you win.
Joe also shares a measured perspective on AI adoption, noting that mass adoption in accounting is still 12 to 18 months away and that the best thing practitioners can do right now is learn directly from the developers of the platforms they already use.
The conversation covers:
- Why mindset and skill set are the two obstacles keeping most firms from making the advisory shift
- How doubling the price on your bottom 20% of clients breaks the capacity problem regardless of who stays or leaves
- Why the ideal CAS client is a business doing $1M to $10M in revenue, with the sweet spot around $3M to $4M
- How Joe’s seven Ideal Practice Model components work together, and where to start if you can only focus on one
- Why mass AI adoption in accounting is still 12 to 18 months away and what to do now to prepare
- How right pricing directly impacts the two metrics buyers care most about: owner hours and cash flow
Joe’s biggest insight? Most firms know they need to change. The obstacle is rarely awareness. It’s the chicken-and-egg problem of needing capacity to make improvements but not having the capacity to get started. Pricing is the lever that breaks that cycle, and it can be done in a matter of weeks.
This episode is for firm owners curious about how to create capacity without hiring, practitioners ready to revisit their pricing strategy before the next busy season, leaders wondering where to start with advisory services, and anyone interested in a practical framework for building a more valuable practice.
BOOK RECOMMENDATION
A World Without Work by Daniel Susskind
TIMESTAMPS
00:00 – Brannon Poe intro and podcast welcome
00:14 – Introducing Joe Woodard: founder of Woodard, host of Scaling New Heights
00:51 – Joe’s background: classical Greek degree, a temp agency, and how accounting found him
02:03 – How Joe’s practice led to Scaling New Heights and a coaching and consulting division
04:01 – The shift from compliance to advisory: what is holding CPA firms back
04:43 – Why AI is accelerating the urgency to move into a full advisory model
05:33 – Mindset as the primary obstacle: imposter syndrome and self-limiting thinking in accounting
06:01 – Skill set and mindset working together: cash flow projections, dashboards, and KPIs
07:16 – The downward spiral: too busy to invest in new skills, team pressure, and turnover
07:58 – The chicken-and-egg problem: how to break it using the Ideal Practice Model
08:40 – Ideal service meets ideal client: how right pricing is the output, not the starting point
09:18 – Applying the Pareto Principle to your CPA firm client base
09:38 – The math of repricing the bottom 20%: why you win whether they stay or leave
10:42 – How to move methodically through the full client base after creating capacity
11:23 – What most APA members find when they raise prices: they are never aggressive enough 1
2:19 – How pricing improvements affect CPA firm valuation: revenue per FTE and clients per million
12:38 – The 32 clients per million benchmark and the $2,500 average monthly client target
13:33 – Why the mindset block comes back around when targeting larger advisory clients
14:13 – Pricing is the first lever: how it improves both owner hours and cash flow for buyers
14:55 – Walking through the seven ideals: brand, services, clients, technology, process, engagements, team
16:34 – How to reinvent your service structure instead of just improving the existing one
17:18 – Defining the ideal advisory client: $1 to $10 million in revenue, regulatory complexity, data needs
18:47 – Where technology and AI fit within the Ideal Practice Model
19:05 – Why most accounting firms are under-contracted and what to do about it
20:13 – AI adoption in accounting: where the profession is now and how fast it is moving
21:22 – Mass AI adoption is 12 to 18 months away: why preparing now matters
21:40 – How Joe’s team is learning AI today: Claude, Copilot, and platform-specific training
22:30 – Xero, QuickBooks, and Intuit: how AI integrations are already changing daily workflows
23:05 – Go straight to the developers for AI training, not social media
23:32 – Scaling New Heights: ten hours of prompting strategy training co-led by Microsoft Copilot
24:08 – Joe’s story: his daughter, a butterfly named Alicia, and a mockingbird
25:54 – The moral: flap your wings and go, just watch out for the mockingbirds
27:01 – Book recommendation: “A World Without Work” by Daniel Susskind
28:10 – Why AI resistance is just wooden shoes in the machinery, and what to do instead
29:03 – Where to find Joe Woodard online: woodard.com
TRANSCRIPT
Brannon: I’m Brannon Poe, and this is The Accountant’s Flight Plan podcast, where you can enjoy engaging conversations about mergers and acquisitions and accounting practice management. Listen in on strategies to build a more fun and valuable accounting firm.
Welcome to The Accountant’s Flight Plan podcast. I’m excited to have Joe Woodard joining us today. We are going to focus on how CPA firm owners can navigate a shift toward advisory services. Welcome, Joe. Thank you for coming on.
Joe: It’s good to be here, Brannon.
Brannon: A little background on Joe. He is the founder and CEO of Woodard, a company that has been equipping CPAs, enrolled agents, and bookkeepers with education, coaching, and resources to build better practices. Joe has trained over 150,000 accounting professionals, which is an impressive number.
Joe: I have had a lot of years to do it.
Brannon: Well, it is a big accomplishment. Joe coaches accountants on everything from practice development and technology trends to strategic consulting. He is the host of Scaling New Heights, one of the largest and most respected conferences for accountants and bookkeepers worldwide. For the last ten years, Joe has been recognized by Accounting Today as one of the top 100 most influential people in the profession. He has been published in the Journal of Accountancy, CPA Practice Advisor, and his newsletter, The Woodard Report, reaches over 100,000 readers annually.
Joe’s work centers on the Woodard Ideal Practice Model, which focuses on seven key areas of operational excellence, from ideal clients and services to ideal technology and processes. His goal is to help firms standardize, automate, and modernize so they can spend less time on low-value work and more time delivering high-value advisory services. Thanks for joining us, Joe.
Joe: Thanks for reading the whole thing.
Brannon: It’s good to give people the context. Let’s get right into it. How did you come about doing this work? Were you a CPA?
Joe: Far from it. I have a bachelor’s degree in classical Greek, which in terms of commercial value is slightly above basket weaving. It’s a little harder than basket weaving, but being hard doesn’t mean you can sell it. It broadened my mind, which was good. But when the hard realities of the world hit, and I realized you cannot make money translating a dead language, I went to a temp agency. They placed me on my very first day at a CPA firm. The firm kept me around for a couple of months, watched me, and then approached me and said they thought I would enjoy what they do and offered to send me to the University of New Orleans to learn the work properly.
They basically turned it into a paid internship, but I never actually sat for the exam. I fell in love with the technology instead, went off and started my own practice. What we would today call a cloud accounting or CAS practice, back then we just called it QuickBooks and bookkeeping. We did all the regulatory compliance and financial advisory, which led me to wanting to help my peers do the same. That led to Scaling New Heights, which I launched in 2009. Then a coaching program, then a consulting division. The rest is history.
Brannon: Accounting found you.
Joe: Exactly. I think that is exactly where I was supposed to be.
Brannon: Well, let’s get into the shift. Moving from compliance to advisory. A lot of firms get stuck in heavy compliance and never break free enough to get into advisory. What do you see as the biggest obstacle to making that transition?
Joe: There are two: mindset and skill set. Most firms now have gotten to the place in their mindset where they know they cannot stay where they are. Before, it was more of a “you shouldn’t stay where you are because you’re leaving opportunity on the table,” but they still had a livelihood. New technologies would come along and be disruptive, but always in a positive way. Now we have artificial intelligence intersecting the profession. Tax is one of the first areas to be massively disrupted on the legwork side, and bookkeeping is close behind. It is already starting to happen. Firms realize now that they have to move into a full advisory model or they will not have a sustainable practice.
Our featured keynote presenter at Scaling New Heights wrote a book called “A World Without Work,” which is slightly hyperbolic in its title, but the core message is real: a lot of the work we do today is going to not be done by humans in the future, and practices are waking up to that.
To answer your question more directly, what is stopping firms is leftover mindset. Self-limiting thoughts. Who am I to tell a business doing $3 or $4 million in sales how to run their operation when I have a CAS practice under a million in revenue? All those thoughts come in. The truth is you know more about how to run their business than they do. The question is whether you know five things they should be doing differently. If you do, get in there and deal with those five things. That is getting over the mindset.
Mindset and skill set work together. If you can build the skill set, if you can teach yourself and your team how to do cash flow projections, build dashboards, look at key performance indicators, use predictive analytics, specialize in certain industries, and lean into regulatory compliance areas where you can go deep on things like sales tax nexus or HR compliance, those are new skills. But remember, there was a day you didn’t know a debit from a credit. You can learn new things. Even experienced practitioners are having to learn AI right now alongside the rest of the world. You go into it with a learning mindset, and the skill set builds the confidence, and the confidence helps with the mindset.
Brannon: I see so many practitioners get into a downward spiral where they are too busy to invest in new skills, putting too much pressure on their team, losing people, and then complaining about not being able to find replacements. Are you seeing capacity creation as one of the first things practices need to focus on?
Joe: Yes, and it is a chicken-and-egg problem. I hear this all the time. Someone looks at the Ideal Practice Model, sees two or three areas they need to work on, and knows that if they fixed those things it would drive increased profits and capacity. But they don’t have the money or the capacity to go do those things, so they feel stuck.
What we tell people is that the very first lever to pull is something you will not see listed directly on the seven Ideal Practice Model components. It is derived from two of them: ideal services and ideal clients. When ideal services and ideal clients come together, they produce right pricing. So what you can do right now is analyze your existing client base. Which clients are far less than ideal? Which ones are problematic, where you are spending more servicing them than you are earning? You are chasing documents, they are fee-sensitive, they are difficult with your team. Are names already coming to mind?
Using the Pareto Principle: 20% of your clients are generating about 80% of the goodness in your practice. They enrich your culture, your people enjoy working with them, you do not chase documents, and the profit margins are at or above your target, which should be around 66% gross profit margin. Now take the other 80% of your clients and subdivide it. The bottom 20% of that group can go. And the best way to get them to go is to adjust their price. Be aggressive with it, because you want them to leave.
Here is where the math gets interesting. Say you double the price on that bottom group and do not care whether they leave or not. If you double the price and half of them stay, you have the same revenue. If all of them leave, you get the capacity back. Either way, you win, as long as you have the operating capital to bridge the gap. Now you have broken the chicken-and-egg problem. You have capacity to go back through the rest of the client base and reprice more carefully and methodically, because you want to retain more of those clients. We have had firms do this process in a month or two. Larger firms may need four to five months. After that, you are flush with additional operating capital and you have capacity freed up.
Brannon: What we have found coaching clients through the same process is that most are not aggressive enough on the price increases. They think they are going to lose a lot of clients, and they almost never do. Sometimes they practically have to tell clients they do not want to work with them anymore because the prices are still not high enough to drive them away.
Joe: Exactly. And even if those clients stay at twice the price, at least they are paying you twice as much to be difficult. You can phase them out from there.
Brannon: And from the mergers and acquisitions side, clients who go through this process add real value to their practice. Valuation goes up significantly.
Joe: That is because a buyer is not just looking at revenue. They are looking at profit margin and revenue per full-time equivalent. That ratio gets driven up significantly with correct pricing. Another metric we look at heavily is clients per million. If you are not at a ratio of at least 32 clients per million in a CAS practice, you need to take a hard look at your average pricing. On a CAS portfolio, the target average is around $2,500 per month. You will have some clients above that and some below, but that is the benchmark.
And I know some listeners are thinking: Joe, my accounts are $200 to $500 a month. That comes back to mindset and the definition of an ideal client. A $200 client is not the ideal client for the practice you are building. When ideal services and ideal clients come together at the right price, things change. The concern that you cannot handle larger businesses is a mindset block. The work is the same. More bank accounts, a little more complexity. But if you know debits and credits, job costing, departmental tracking, revenue accruals, it is mostly transaction volume after that point.
Brannon: Pricing is definitely the first lever. And from a valuation standpoint, buyer interest comes down to two primary metrics: owner hours and cash flow. Pricing improvements drive both of those in the right direction. Can you walk through the seven ideals at a high level?
Joe: Absolutely. The first is brand. And brand is much bigger than a logo. Brand is your story, your corporate identity, your vision, your mission, your purpose. Woodard’s brand is not just a logo and a website. Our vision is we enrich business through business advisors. Our driving purpose is we empower business advisors. The story gets reflected in everything we do, and then back into the logo. If you look at our logo, the letters are solid, thick, and connected, because we wanted to be a strong, stable presence for the accounting profession as technology and staffing pressures increase.
Brand is not a logo. If you start with the logo, it will not reflect the story. Start with the story. Then, the first place to triage the practice would be pricing. From there, go immediately to service structure, which is the ideal services component. How could the service structure be even more compelling? Think of it like the transition from Apple II to Macintosh. Steve Jobs did not start from the Apple II and make an Apple III. He completely reinvented the computer. Do the same for your practice. What does Practice 2.0 look like? Build it almost like a new startup around the right services, bring new clients into that model, price them right from the beginning, then start transitioning clients from your old model into the new one.
For the ideal client component, you are looking for businesses that need a fully formed CAS practice. That means regulatory compliance, whether that is payroll, sales tax nexus, HR compliance, business licenses, anything requiring them to work with third-party jurisdictions. You want clients who also need to understand their financial data so they can make smarter decisions. What we have found is that the sweet spot is businesses with $1 million to $10 million in revenue, with three to four million being the ideal center. Below $1 million, the economics rarely work. Above $10 million, there is a gravitational pull toward bringing the finance function in-house. Within that range, you then want to identify a niche, which is a whole conversation on its own.
Technology is the fourth ideal. There is a lot of AI in that conversation right now. Process comes next. Then how you engage with the client, which includes your master services agreement and statements of work. Most accounting firms are significantly under-contracted. A one or two page engagement letter is not sufficient when you are responsible for a client’s sales tax nexus studies, HR compliance, and ongoing advisory work. Finally, team: the combination of in-house staff and off-sourced services.
So the seven ideals are: brand, services, clients, technology, process, engagements, and team.
Brannon: You touched on technology and AI at the top of this conversation. Do you feel like adoption is happening as fast as the people closest to AI tend to think it will?
Joe: It depends on which segment you are looking at. You have your 10 to 15% early adopters who are already aggressively on the front lines, building AI agents, streamlining processes, making the humans who remain more productive. Then you have the mass adoption wave, and then lagging adopters. The good news for most listeners is that if you feel like the train has left the station and you missed it, that is not accurate. AI developers are still building many of the cars on this train. It is one of the fastest technological developments in human history, but the mass adoption curve has not hit yet.
If you are heavily using AI right now, you are in the top 10 to 15 percentile of the profession. But do not use that as a reason to wait. Mass adoption in the accounting profession, in my view, is 12 to 18 months away. You need to be preparing now, learning now. If you start the learning process now, you can be ready for the adoption phase when it arrives in six to twelve months.
Here is what I have done in my own company: everyone is going through Claude 101 and 201 courses on the Anthropic website. Selected team members are going through Copilot training because we use a combination of tools. And I tell people: lean into whatever AI features are being added to the platforms you already use. Xero just announced a partnership with Anthropic and launched their own AI-powered features. If you are a Xero user, go look at those features and run them through their paces. Intuit has already signed deals with Anthropic, Gemini, and OpenAI. If you use QuickBooks, go through the 101 training on those platforms. They are already integrated.
The good news: you are not behind. And anyone listening to this podcast loves to learn, or you would not be here. Go learn this. Go straight to the developers for your training rather than social media, where the quality varies significantly. And if you want a structured track, come to Scaling New Heights. We have ten hours of prompting strategy training co-led by the Microsoft Copilot team and Randy Johnston, one of the top technology voices in accounting, to make sure it is relevant to accounting firm workflows. You will not find anything like it in the conference space this year.
Brannon: I have got a couple more questions before we wrap up. Do you have a good story to share, business or personal?
Joe: I do, and I have woven this into several of my keynotes, though I have not shared it recently. When my daughter was very little, about five or six years old, we ordered a kit where she could raise a butterfly from a cocoon. It came with a net cage and all the materials. The whole process took weeks. The butterfly emerged, we fed it, and eventually came the moment where you let it go. My daughter had been prepared for this from the beginning. She knew she could not keep it. She had named it Alicia.
So we walked out onto the front porch, she held out her hand, the butterfly fluttered for a moment and then took off. I turned to look at her face, expecting to see that sense of wonder. And Brannon, at that exact moment, a mockingbird came and grabbed that butterfly, scooped it up, and ate it.
Brannon: Oh no.
Joe: My daughter did not quite see what happened. She saw the mockingbird fly by and the butterfly was gone, but she did not see it get eaten. She turned to me with wide eyes, and without missing a beat, I lied straight to my daughter’s face. I said, “See? Alicia’s not going to be alone. She’s already made a little bird friend.” Because what are you going to do? She did not connect the full story until about five years later, and by then she understood. But at five years old, you do not tell her that.
Now here is the moral. If you feel like you are a butterfly and you are ready to emerge into advisory services, financial planning, analytics, and artificial intelligence, please do go. Flap your wings. The skies are blue. Just watch out for the mockingbirds.
Brannon: I love that. I did not see that coming at all.
Joe: Neither did the butterfly.
Brannon: Last question: a book recommendation for our listeners?
Joe: I will come back to what I mentioned earlier in the episode. “A World Without Work” by Dr. Daniel Susskind. He is an Oxford professor and an economist, globally recognized for using economic principles intersected with technology to forecast the future. In 2015, he wrote “The Future of the Professions,” which predicted a remarkable amount of what is happening in 2025. His newest book, “A World Without Work,” is the one most relevant to AI and what is coming for the professions. And even though he is an Oxford professor and economist, he makes it genuinely readable. It is also a strong audiobook.
Brannon: People are understandably cautious about AI, but I think the only real option is to embrace it and learn it. You cannot stop it.
Joe: Exactly right. There is a historical term worth knowing here. The word “saboteur” comes from the French word for wooden shoe, “sabot.” During the onset of the Industrial Revolution, textile workers threw their wooden shoes into the machinery to try to stop it and protect their jobs. You could not stop the machinery with wooden shoes then, and anything we do to resist AI is just more wooden shoes. If we know it is coming, the best thing we can do is learn it and respond. Ignore it or react to it, and you will not be fine. Learn it and respond, and you will be.
Listeners, you have survived other technological changes. You will survive this one too.
Brannon: Great way to end our time together. What is the best way for people to find you online?
Joe: It’s simple: woodard.com. One W, not two. If you add the extra W and go to woodward.com, I cannot tell you where that will take you, but it will not be to me.
Brannon: We will put that in the show notes. Thank you so much, Joe. This has been a great conversation.
Joe: It has been great to be here, Brannon. Thank you.
