Greg Toner kept only his best clients, raised prices, picked one niche, and grew his practice 15X.
While many CPAs accept any business that comes their way, Greg found success by being highly selective. He looked at his client list, identified the bottom 10% who weren’t getting value from his work, and let them go. Then he raised fees on the clients who remained. His team didn’t complain. His revenue didn’t drop. And the capacity he created allowed him to focus exclusively on serving veterinarians across Canada.
Today, Greg works with 360 vet practices from coast to coast. He doesn’t prepare tax returns anymore. He doesn’t do bookkeeping. His role has evolved into technical sales and high-level tax planning because he built systems that allow his team to handle the rest. When you niche down and get really good at solving the same 15 problems over and over, referrals fly and close rates skyrocket.
This is the third episode in our Power of Focus series, where we explore how CPA firm owners use focus as a strategic advantage. Greg’s story proves that the riches really are in the niches, but only if you’re willing to make the hard decisions first.
The conversation covers:
- How one APA spreadsheet exercise revealed which clients were holding him back
- Why $20K in lost revenue felt scary until he looked at the math
- How his team celebrated when the energy-draining clients finally left
- The mental hurdle of hiring expensive staff and why it unlocked exponential growth
- Why solving the same problem 100 times makes you a hero to your clients
Greg’s biggest lesson?. Once you niche down, you stop competing on price, you become the expert everyone refers to, and growth becomes inevitable. You just have to be willing to let go of the clients who don’t fit first.
This episode is for firm owners curious about the benefits of niching down, leaders ready to let go of unprofitable clients without guilt, practitioners wondering how to scale while working less hours, and anyone who wants to learn about narrowing their market to maximise scalability.
TIMESTAMPS:
01:55 – How firing the wrong Accounting clients changed everything
03:18 – The APA spreadsheet that made the decision obvious
04:14 – Why his team was happy to see clients leave
04:57 – No revenue loss, not even in the short term
05:19 – The dam holding back good clients
06:17 – Why he joined APA (opportunistic, not desperate)
07:01 – From sole Accounting practitioner to 15X revenue
07:28 – Evolving from doer to technical sales role
09:11 – The mental leap of hiring high-salary staff for your CPA firm
11:07 – Solve the same problem 100 times, become a hero
12:23 – Why niching down made CPA Firm growth rapid
13:26 – 10 leads a week, high close rate
13:50 – How 15 vet clients became 360 across Canada
15:18 – The horror film basement full of paper files
16:56 – Book: 10x Is Easier Than 2x by Dan Sullivan
BOOK RECOMMENDATION
10x Is Easier Than 2x by Dan Sullivan
TRANSCRIPT
Brannon Poe (00:02): Welcome to the Accountants Flight Plan podcast. I’m joined today by Greg Toner, who’s the founder of Vet CPA Professional Corporation. Greg’s a self-professed tax nerd who has built his entire practice around a single niche, which is serving veterinarians across Canada. From new graduates to established practices planning their exit, Greg and his team handle everything from bookkeeping to high-level tax planning for the veterinary community. It’s a great example of building a niche that allows you to go deep rather than wide. And I think people are going to get a lot out of hearing how he structured his practice and the unique challenges he’s seen building something so niche. And as our team always says, the riches are in the niches. So Greg, great to have you on.
Greg Toner (00:52): Great to be here. Thanks for having me.
Brannon Poe (00:54): Yeah. So you’re part of a series and we’re featuring some alumni from our Accounting Practice Academy. You were a great addition to the APA community. And I always love to come back and find out years later how people have implemented some of the ideas and tools from APA. And you just have been a glowing example of that. One thing that I think you did a really good job with, if memory serves, is you had a really nice approach to price increases. I think that was a big lever that you pulled. Can you just tell us how you raised your minimum fees, how you kind of let some clients go, and what did that do to your practice?
Greg Toner (01:55): Yeah, I think every accountant has people in their practice that are not really getting the value out of what you’re doing. They’re there, they need their taxes filed, they need some compliance help, but they’re not looking for everything that you’re offering. And those people are just dead weight and they’re taking up time, taking up energy. Inevitably, those are the ones that aren’t paying the bills. They’ve got extra requests. Those clients just aren’t worth having.
And I found in my practice, the best thing that happened was when I just said no to them and then raised the prices for the people that were getting the value so that the price was in line with the value that I was delivering. Because those people that are holding you back really skew your value of what you’re offering down so that you don’t have the same confidence in what you’re offering. I think that was the first piece—just trimming those people that aren’t seeing the value really makes a huge difference.
Brannon Poe (02:52): So I think for a lot of people listening, they find that it’s kind of a big leap that it requires to go up on your prices, go up on your minimum fees, knowing that some clients might not be willing to pay that or knowing that there’ll be pushback. How did you make that leap? How did you get the clarity of mind to go, “Okay, we’re doing this and here we go”?
Greg Toner (03:18): I think it was one of the first APA exercises where you list everyone that you’re working with along with their fees and you look at the people at the bottom 10% and you say, “Geez, if I didn’t have this money, what would my practice look like?” And then at the same time, “If I didn’t have to spend this time with these people, what would my life look like?” And it becomes a no-brainer when you look at it that way.
One of my lines with clients is if you can solve a problem with a spreadsheet, it’s not a real problem. And that’s one of those problems that you can solve with a spreadsheet. You look at it and it’s just math. You’re afraid of letting go of these people until you look at what the numbers actually work out to be. It’s really daunting. But once you look at the numbers, you’re like, “It’s $20,000 of revenue. I’m gonna find $20,000 of revenue next week.” Stepping away from that allows you to step into work that you’re doing a really good job of.
Brannon Poe (04:06): Yeah. Was anyone on your team resistant to these changes? Did anyone give you any pushback?
Greg Toner (04:14): Quite the opposite. People were happy to see those clients leave. Those are the ones that soak the team’s energy as well, not just mine.
Brannon Poe (04:22): Yeah, so it was a true addition by subtraction type of approach. And did it give you a lot of capacity to make other changes in your practice once you did that?
Greg Toner (04:33): Definitely. Cutting the C and D players allowed us to bring on more A clients and those clients are paying us effectively more per hour. Everything that we do is flat fee. We don’t charge an hourly rate, but we’re able to get more good work out the door with the time that we freed up.
Brannon Poe (04:49): Yeah. Financially, did you feel any loss, temporary loss from that decision or was it like you didn’t even notice it financially?
Greg Toner (04:57): I didn’t even notice it. Maybe if we got really granular looking at week-over-week cashflow or month-over-month cashflow, but I try not to do that. If you look at things on a quarter, you get a much better sense. And by the time the quarter was out, we were right where we should have been.
Brannon Poe (05:11): Yeah, it’s crazy how fast the capacity, if you create capacity in your practice, how fast it just fills back in.
Greg Toner (05:19): Yeah. And it feels like sometimes there’s a dam upstream that’s just holding back those good clients. And until you start to open that dam, you’re never going to see those good clients come along.
Brannon Poe (05:30): Yeah. So one thing interesting about Greg’s story is Greg actually purchased a firm through us many years ago before you took our Academy. You purchased a small firm. What led you to sign up for Academy? Because I feel like a lot of the people who decide to hop in hit a point in their career where they’re frustrated or they’ve got just a lot of pain points and they are ready to make a change. Was that true for you? Did you experience growing pains or was it more just opportunistic?
Greg Toner (06:17): I think more opportunistic. I looked at running a business. There are a lot of things about running a business that they didn’t teach me when I was learning, when I was going through accounting school or getting my CPA, right? It teaches you how to be an accountant, not to be a business owner. I was like, “Well, there’s gotta be someone out there that knows how to run a business.” The APA email hit me at the right time and it was one of those great opportunities where you’re not going to learn everything about how to run a business, but if you can pick up five or six wins—and with APA, I think it was five or six wins a week—it really makes a huge difference in your business. And that practice that I bought, my revenue now is about 15 times what I bought in that little practice. So it was a great foundation.
Brannon Poe (07:01): Yeah. What have been some of the points of your growth that were challenging, the most challenging? Or what have you run into that has been challenging along that way?
Greg Toner (07:28): So the practice I bought was effectively a sole practitioner, one-man show, a couple of contractors doing some bookkeeping, but really everything was me. And I think back to what those days looked like now, I don’t do anything that I used to do back then. I don’t do bookkeeping. I don’t prepare files. I don’t prepare tax returns. Sometimes I don’t even review the tax returns. Really my role has evolved to be much more of a sales role, like a technical sales role where I’m meeting with clients, dealing with issues, talking about high-level tax planning. But none of that was what I was doing back then.
So I’ve had to grow up as my business grew up and I’ve had to figure things out. And sometimes you just say yes and you figure it out after you commit. And that’s worked out really well for me. I think hiring staff was a big challenge—getting through the mental load of saying, “Okay, I’m going to hire three preparers and that’s going to mean I don’t need to do the detail work.” And now, “Okay, well, I’ve got these preparers. I need someone to sit between those preparers and me because I don’t have the time to answer the questions in the way that they need to be answered.”
And then now that I’ve got that detailed reviewer, eventually getting to the point where I hired a tax specialist—it was a big chunk of cash, but I look at the opportunities that we’re taking advantage of now. All of those hires allowed me to get the firm to where it is today. So that mental load, it’s the same as we talked earlier about trimming your client base. There’s these clients that I don’t think serve the practice anymore. Getting to the point of hiring those people, I think there’s a harder mental hurdle to jump over. But then once you hire those people, you can do better work and more of it. Because like you said earlier, once you create the capacity, you fill it.
Brannon Poe (09:11): Yeah, it still takes a leap of faith though, right? Especially when you’re hiring a higher salary person, that’s a serious dive in some regards. I always marveled at your confidence to move forward. I think a lot of people are fearful and they stagnate, they don’t make those decisions quickly enough, and they suffer unnecessarily until they make that decision. I don’t know what it is about you that makes you decisive, but that is something I think you need to just appreciate about your management style or leadership style.
Greg Toner (09:58): Well, I appreciate that because sometimes being a little too quick to make decisions, that costs money too.
Brannon Poe (10:07): Yeah. Did you make any big mistakes along the way?
Greg Toner (10:13): I think I tried to go a little too broad at times, tried to get a little too far into consulting that I didn’t have the client base to support at the time. So I think having everything grow in proportion is important. Trying to get too deep in consulting too early, I spent a bunch of money that didn’t really pay off. Now I still have assets there that we developed that work and we can use going forward, but I jumped a little too quickly into that.
Brannon Poe (10:45): Okay. Well, on balance, that’s not too big of a mistake really, if you think about it. So what are some of the things that you feel like owners can do to strengthen their firm? What are some of the big things that they can do?
Greg Toner (11:07): I think building a practice where you’ve stepped away from working harder and you’ve found a big enough group of people that have the same problem and then you solve it once and then you just leverage that tech, leverage that process. Because once you’ve solved it once, maybe the second or third time you’ve revised it, but by the time you get to the hundredth time, it’s just like throwing free throws. Not that you don’t have to try at all, but the problems are very easy. They’re very easy to solve.
And I think if you can make those hard problems seem like easy problems, you’re just a hero to your clients. And then the referrals come. So rather than trying to solve everyone’s problems, just pick a small group and get really good at solving those problems.
Brannon Poe (11:55): Yeah. And once you started going all in on the veterinarian niche, you grew pretty fast. I think a lot of people think, “Well, gosh, if I rule out all of this other business, I’m just losing, right?” But what I’ve seen and it’s true for you—once you dedicated yourself to that niche, the growth is actually pretty rapid.
Greg Toner (12:23): Yeah. And I think there are two pieces that I stumbled into. I don’t know if I can say that I knew them going in, but the vet industry is large enough and the businesses are profitable enough and their problems are significant enough that there’s a market there. There’s some real pain there. And by getting into that niche, I’ve been able to get really good at the 15 problems that they need solved and get really good at analyzing the P&L.
So I can take some of the CFO-type experience that I’ve had in the past and then bring that into an owner-managed business and help them track key metrics in their business and understand the levers for growth and what is good growth and what’s bad growth. And once you get really good at an industry for that, the referrals just fly. I talked to 10 leads this week and our close rate is really high.
Brannon Poe (13:26): I really think niching down is the best thing that’s happened to my business because it allows you to target your marketing as well.
Brannon Poe (13:35): How did that journey begin? How did you go from having a few vet clients to having them all over Canada?
Greg Toner (13:50): So the firm that I bought through Poe Group had 15 vets and then growing up, my dad was a pharmaceutical rep for the vet industry. So I knew the lingo. I knew some people in the industry. So when I worked with those 15 vets, I helped a couple of them sell, helped one larger association sell, picked up other clients in the city and it was like, “Hey, I think there’s something here.” And then I reached out to some contacts I had in the industry and said, “This is what I’m going to try to do.”
And then around that time COVID happened and everyone got okay with talking over Zoom. So that unlocked a lot of the country for me in one shot. So from London, Ontario, I have clients literally from the Atlantic Ocean to the Pacific Ocean. And it’s amazing. We work with 360 vet practices across Canada right now and it’s growing. And that’s really powerful because it’s a big snowball. Once you get deeper and deeper and deeper, you understand the pain points and it just becomes easier.
In terms of the path, I had a little bit of an unfair advantage in my dad’s experience and some of those industry contacts, but then took that and bolted it together with the experience I’d had here in London and leveraged it.
Brannon Poe (15:04): Nice. All right, I’ve got two questions left. I always like to ask a funny story of our guests. Do you have a funny story you can share or a memorable story?
Greg Toner (15:18): So the guy I bought the accounting firm from, he’s an older accountant and loved paper. I go into the due diligence process, “Where do you keep your files?” He’s in this like a hundred-year-old building and he takes me down to the basement, which looks like it’s from a horror film. And he flicks on the lights and it’s one of those pull cord down from the ceiling, bare light bulb. And there are boxes everywhere. And they’re not like uniform banker boxes with clear labels on the front. They’re like old paper boxes that are half fallen apart. And I was like, “Oh my God.”
And the real joke is I’m still paying money every month to store those boxes because I need to keep them for another, I think we’re down to 18 months left. You need to keep them for another 18 months and then we can shred most of them. But just seeing all that paper. And now my firm is paperless. And I had intentions of being paperless when I started there and it’s like I went back and I had to figure out, “Okay, where do you buy those world boards that I used to use when I first articled?” And I bought world boards because it was an entirely paper practice and the administration behind paper is a bit of a pain and you spend a ton of money on it.
Brannon Poe (16:30): Have you had to go back and find files?
Greg Toner (16:33): Twice.
Brannon Poe (16:30): Yeah, that’s the funny part. It’s like you maintain this giant storeroom of all these old paper files and you never have to really go and look for anything.
Greg Toner (16:45): Yeah, you never have to touch them. Or one gets roughed up and you email the lawyer and the paper was there.
Brannon Poe (16:49): Yeah. All right. Last question. Book recommendation.
Greg Toner (16:56): So you’ve probably heard this one before, but 10x Is Easier Than 2x by Dan Sullivan. I think the concept of thinking about what does your practice look like at 10 times really trims out a lot of the bad paths and bad decisions that you can stumble along, whether you’re just trying to double. And just taking that concept, even now it’s like, “Okay, well, what does a $50 million firm look like? Will the decision that I’m making today support a $50 million firm?” And then if no, then maybe we want to look at something else because it’s going to hurt us in the future.
Brannon Poe (17:30): It really is a powerful concept. Once you like, there’s a very narrow, maybe one or two ways to get there, right, from where you are. And once you’ve revealed that, it’s such a motivator too, right? It’s so powerful, not just for you, but when you share that vision with your team. So, well, Greg, what’s the best way for people to connect with you online?
Greg Toner (17:57): Yeah, LinkedIn, I’m there. That’s probably a good spot. Or if you want to shoot me an email, [email protected].
Brannon Poe (18:05): Love it. Well, Greg, thanks for coming on.
Greg Toner (18:08): Perfect, thanks for having me.
