Many CPA firm owners wait until they’re ready to retire to ask who can replace them. Susan Stutzel, CPA, business performance coach, and co-owner of Partners Coach Inc., believes that question should start the day a new hire walks in the door. In this episode of The Accountant’s Flight Plan, Brannon Poe and Susan explore how developing leadership and professional skills at every level builds a stronger accounting practice and a smoother path to firm succession.
Susan brings more than 25 years of experience in public accounting, including roles at a top five national firm, a regional firm, a small business, and a Fortune 500 company. She has seen why succession plans stall: owners with no one ready to lean on, managers measured only on chargeable hours, and staff who never hear what the path to partnership looks like. One firm she worked with believed no one wanted to become a partner. Once someone asked, staff and senior managers said they were interested.
Brannon adds the buyer’s perspective. Many firm owners contact Poe Group Advisors years before they plan to sell, and that early start pays off. Buyers want great teams and well-run practices, and a lot can be accomplished in a few years. Susan notes that an owner who isn’t growing their team becomes the bottleneck, which makes any transition harder.
The Conversation Covers:
- How developing leadership skills early creates successors from within your CPA firm
- Why owners who stop growing their teams become the bottleneck to firm succession
- How one firm learned its staff wanted partnership once someone asked
- Why tying manager bonuses only to chargeable hours slows leadership development
- How AI is changing the way firms train the next generation of accountants
- Why buyers look for strong teams when evaluating an accounting practice
Susan’s advice for firm owners planning ahead is a shift in role: move from being the expert in the room to creating more experts in the room. The team you build today shapes the options you have when you’re ready to sell.
This Episode Is For…
This episode is for accounting firm owners planning a sale or transition in the next five to ten years, partners ready to identify and develop their successors, owners curious about what buyers look for in a CPA firm, and leaders wondering how to reduce owner dependence before stepping back.
BOOK RECOMMENDATION
Mindset: The New Psychology of Success by Carol Dweck
TIMESTAMPS
00:00 – Welcome and guest introduction: Susan Stutzel, co-owner of Partners Coach Inc.
02:35 – Why AI can amplify expertise but cannot build trust or lead an effective feedback conversation
04:19 – Professional skills are where knowledge transforms into real impact for clients and colleagues
05:11 – Is technical knowledge being commoditized, and what replaces it as the differentiator?
07:00 – Why managers need to unlearn how they were trained and rethink development entirely
08:34 – Why niche expertise got the profession this far and why it is no longer enough on its own
10:02 – Why Susan refuses to call them soft skills: these are business skills, and they are often the hardest to learn
12:36 – What it means to build a great place to work across hybrid and remote arrangements
15:41 – What firm owners should be communicating to high performers and what staff should be advocating for
16:02 – Case study: no one interested in partnership because the conversations simply were not happening
19:04 – Young firm owners building tech-forward niche practices and outearning traditional partners
23:28 – What courageous leadership looks like when there are no complete answers
25:28 – The Kubler-Ross loss curve and why your team has to work through what you already processed
27:12 – Growing yourself alongside your firm: why the owner who stops growing becomes the bottleneck
29:59 – What Susan wishes more CPA firm owners understood about leadership development
30:27 – The best firms start development at onboarding, not at partner elections
31:14 – The manager shift: running meetings, developing people, and still carrying chargeable hours
34:03 – Don’t wait until you want to retire to ask who can replace you
36:20 – Growing a business is a series of letting go, and you have to build the team to be able to let go
36:57 – Where to find Susan: LinkedIn and partnerscoach.com, including a free weekly Monday message for the profession
FAQ
When should a CPA firm owner start succession planning?
Susan Stutzel, CPA and co-owner of Partners Coach Inc., recommends starting the day new staff join the firm. Building leadership and business development skills at every level creates successors long before the owner is ready to retire.
Why do buyers care about a CPA firm’s team?
Brannon Poe, founder of Poe Group Advisors, notes that buyers want great teams and well-run practices. Firm owners who start preparing several years before a sale have time to strengthen both.
How can firm owners find successors within their own staff?
Susan suggests asking directly. Many staff and senior managers are interested in partnership but never hear about the opportunity. Open conversations about career paths often reveal future leaders already inside the firm.
What makes a CPA firm harder to sell?
When the owner is the bottleneck and no one else can lead client relationships or the team, a transition becomes more difficult. Developing capable leaders reduces owner dependence and makes the firm more attractive to buyers.
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.
Hi, welcome to The Accountant’s Flight Plan podcast. I have a wonderful guest, Susan Stutzel. One of our team members heard her speak at the Texas CPA Leadership Day in Dallas recently, and Barbara, who is actually on the board of the society, said you have to have her on the podcast. Welcome, Susan.
Let me give our listeners a little overview. Susan is a CPA and a business performance coach. She is co-owner of Partners Coach Inc. and brings more than 25 years of experience in the profession, having worked at a top five national firm, a regional firm, a small business, and a Fortune 500 company. She brings a very broad, practical perspective on leadership at every stage. She went on to build her own nonprofit-focused practice, taught as an adjunct professor, and later earned her executive coaching certification, which led her into coaching, facilitation, and training, which she describes as her true calling. Today we are digging into a theme she is especially passionate about: the growing importance of professional skills for CPAs, and why those skills are becoming essential rather than optional as technology continues to reshape the profession. Susan, welcome to the show.
Susan: Thank you. It’s great to be here.
Brannon: I love this topic because I think we are very well aligned in our thinking. My first question: technical expertise and technology help CPAs do their work, but professional skills are what turn expertise into real impact. Can you unpack that?
Susan: I really think about it as three pieces: technical expertise, technology, and professional skills. Technical expertise is the foundation. You cannot be a great CPA without having the knowledge and really knowing your stuff. Now we are incorporating technology and AI more and more, which makes that expertise really powerful. We are able to analyze more information than we have ever been able to and automate tasks faster. We are doing things that were never possible before.
But here is where the conversation gets really interesting. Technology can amplify expertise, but it cannot build trust. Our profession is built on trust. Technology cannot walk into an office and have a conversation with a client that really digs into what is going on. It cannot help a leader talk to a team member and have a genuinely effective feedback conversation that motivates them to move forward. We need the human side of what we do. That is where professional skills come in.
I think about a CPA’s contribution in five different areas: technical expertise, talent development, creating an exceptional client experience, business development, and effective leadership. Most firms do a really good job of developing technical skills. We spend the beginning of our careers becoming technically proficient. But the other four areas are where we bring our humanness, the part that only we can provide. My message is not against technical expertise or technology at all. It is actually the opposite. Technical expertise will continue to be essential. Technology amplifies it. But professional skills are where we transform knowledge into real impact with clients and colleagues. That is one of the biggest opportunities CPAs have right now.
Brannon: Do you think technology is commoditizing knowledge in some ways, and that professional skills are what bring life to what might otherwise become a commodity?
Susan: It is a good point, and I think technology is heading that direction. But as CPAs, we still need those technical skills, especially right now. We have to validate and verify that AI is giving correct answers. I see clients working with firms where their clients are calling and saying, I did all this research with AI and here are the journal entries I did, and then the CPAs have to go back and explain why those did not work. Technology is not there yet from a purely technical perspective. Maybe it is getting there, but we are going to continue to need that technical knowledge as a baseline.
Brannon: Is it harder for younger people coming into the profession to develop professional skills, particularly with more remote and hybrid work arrangements?
Susan: I have heard that concern a lot, and I understand it. I think many younger professionals coming in are worried because of what they are hearing. But the way I look at it is we just need to do it differently. There are opportunities to spend more time virtually with someone even in a work-from-home arrangement. Many of us grew up in the profession in the office all the time, learning from and watching our supervisors and managers do the work. I think that shift is happening, and I think the other shift is that as AI handles more of the lower-level calculations and data entry, it is really up to managers, senior managers, and partners to look at development differently. We can no longer train the way we were trained. We have to think about how we bring newer staff up to speed more quickly, because they need to understand how to review information and look at things from a higher level without necessarily having done all of it the old way. There is a huge opportunity there. I hate to see young professionals not enter the profession because they think there is no place for them. The challenge is that if firms are not hiring at the entry level because they are not sure how to train new people to review work, that is a long-term detriment to the pipeline.
Brannon: Would you agree that professional skills are moving from a nice-to-have to a must-have, and that this is only going to accelerate?
Susan: Absolutely. The shift is happening because the nature of our work is changing. For a long time, technical expertise was our differentiator. We have watched the profession shift toward niche practices and more focused service areas, and that has gotten us this far and served us really well. But I am not sure that will continue to be the case. The question now becomes: what are we going to do with what we know? AI is going to do more of it. Technology improves every day. So now it is really about tapping into who we are as humans and how we build trust.
Can you sit with a client and take a complex situation and explain it in a way they understand? Can you train your staff and delegate work so they can take real ownership? Can you lead people through constant change when you do not even have all the answers? That is the human level that only we can provide.
I also have to say: I hate the term soft skills. These are business skills. These are professional skills. There is nothing soft about them. They are often the hardest to learn. The human side of the profession becomes more valuable as we integrate more technology, and that is why I believe professional skills are no longer the nice-to-have add-on or the one fun session at a conference. They are going to be front and center.
Brannon: With so many firms taking on outside capital, merging, and growing larger, how do you think that affects this topic?
Susan: It is an interesting landscape. The news every day is full of mergers, acquisitions, and private equity entering the profession at a rapid pace. I do not think there is one right answer to all of it. What I am seeing is that firms choosing to stay independent are choosing to be intentional. They are asking: if we intentionally want to stay small, or if we want to grow toward a future that might include acquiring other firms, or even a private equity opportunity, how do we develop our people to get there? They are really asking what they want the firm to look like in the future, not just continuing to grow because clients are growing and pulling them along.
There is a more intentional shift happening. Firms are asking how to be a genuinely great place to work across all the different working arrangements out there, and how to build a real firm identity so it does not come down to one or two partners working insane hours alongside a couple of committed managers. The goal is to build one firm with a clear vision and a clear path forward, where technical development and professional skills development are happening side by side so that people do not arrive at the manager level completely unprepared.
Brannon: Developing people seems like it needs to be a consistent, almost constant investment. What would you say to both the younger people coming into the profession and the people responsible for leading them?
Susan: Both need to be fully involved. When I was growing up in the profession, my idea was to get on a ladder and go straight to the top. There was a clear path: staff, then senior staff, then supervisor or manager, then partner. I think now we are living in the most opportune time in the profession. It does not look like a ladder anymore, and it does not necessarily even look like an upward arrow. We get to create what it looks like. I encourage firms to communicate what the opportunities for development and growth actually are, who the high performers are that the firm can invest in, and what the path to partnership looks like in the next five to ten years. But I also talk to staff and say: what do you want from your career, and how can you advocate for yourself, raise your hand, and really step up?
I worked with a firm that came to us saying they had no one interested in partnership. When we got in and started asking staff and senior managers about their career aspirations, they actually were interested. The conversations simply were not happening. They did not know who to talk to or what to talk about. More open communication about what opportunities exist makes an enormous difference.
Brannon: One complaint I hear from firm owners is that younger people do not have the ambition that previous generations had. What is your read on that?
Susan: I hear that a lot, and in some cases I think there is truth to it. But I think we also have to recognize that for the first time in history, we have five generations in the workforce at once. The oldest generation said, I had to work my tail off to get here and just figure it out, and they should too. Gen Xers said, I was willing to bootstrap up because that was what was expected. Millennials started saying, I see that you did that, but I am not as interested in that path. And the younger generations are asking: do I want to be partner? Maybe. But do I want to work 80 hours a week? No. That is a shift in perspective about what matters.
And there is a lot we can learn from each other. The way previous generations got where they did has real validity. But there is also validity in asking whether that is really what we need to be going forward. As someone from an older generation, I need the younger people around me to show me how to use AI in new ways, because they are growing up with technology that many of us had to learn on the fly.
Brannon: We sell a lot of virtual firms that are tech-forward and niche-focused. Some of the youngest firm owners I have talked to have built amazing tech stacks, grown rapidly, and are making more money than some of the partners we see in traditional firms, while working fewer hours. That tension is real.
Susan: And I think that is partly why private equity found an opening in our profession. The profession has in some ways not capitalized on the opportunities within it as well as it might have. If there was not an opening, private equity would not be interested. CPAs are really good at being CPAs. They are not always as strong at thinking about the whole business. And that is often because the partners I talk to want to think more strategically, but the deadline is always coming. If they have not built a team with the capacity to support them and take over the doing of the work, they do not have time to look at the business as a whole. Some of my favorite work is going into firms and saying: let’s get away from the office, do an offsite, and have conversations about what you want this firm to be. And I hear over and over: I just do not have anyone I can lean on, or they are not ready. But that depends on who you ask. Those are some of the tough conversations we have to have as a profession.
Brannon: What does courageous leadership look like when navigating this level of change and uncertainty?
Susan: Courageous leadership really comes down to leading through uncertainty, because we are never going to have all the answers. The landscape ahead of us is changing too fast to wait until everything is laid out. We have to be courageous enough to say: I am ready to take a step forward, and I know enough about where we are going, but I still have questions. That is where we surround ourselves with others, whether in the firm or in our network, and say: I do not know everything, but I am ready to move forward.
It leans on two principles. The first is certainty: even when everything feels uncertain, we lean into the certainty of who we are as a firm, what our vision is, what our values are, and what is unchanging that we can stand on as we move forward. The second is relatedness: we are all in this together, we are going to make some mistakes, and we are going to keep taking steps forward even when some of those are steps back because we are learning through the process.
Leaders also have to over-communicate. One of the challenges I see is that leaders have talked about a decision so many times internally that it feels like old news to them. But by the time that message reaches their team, people are asking: I do not understand where we are going, why are we doing this? It has maybe been communicated once, but the team has to go through all the same human emotions that the leader has already worked through. Think of the Kubler-Ross loss curve: as a leader, you have already processed it. Now they have to. Over-communicating is how you lead them through it.
And vision is not just communicated. It has to be lived out. When people see that this is not just something the firm says, but something the partners walk every day, that is what makes the difference. When they start to see actual traction toward the vision, then they believe it.
Brannon: What does growing yourself alongside your firm mean, and why does it matter for people approaching a transition?
Susan: We spend a lot of time thinking about how to grow the firm, and that usually comes down to numbers and revenue. But we do not always talk about how to grow as a partner or as a leader. The problem is that if a partner or owner is not growing themselves, not just from a professional development perspective but also growing their team, they become the bottleneck. Growing is really about not just increasing your own technical skills, but growing the next generation alongside you so that you start to think differently.
Every step of the way, from staff to in-charge to manager to partner, there are not just technical skills needed but also business skills. As a staff member, you are going through the motions of the work. As you move toward manager, you start to see the why behind it: this audit matters because it allows the client to go out and get funding to expand operations. At the partner level, you have a relationship with the client where you really understand who they are and the industry they are in, and you are bringing ideas for where they can grow. That requires communication, listening, and understanding that goes well beyond technical knowledge.
We have to shift from being the expert in the room to creating more experts in the room. Working on the business rather than in it. Building up teams. That is what leadership is. And I think that is the fun part, especially as the technical piece is getting easier with technology.
Brannon: What do you wish more CPA firm owners understood about leadership development?
Susan: I wish they understood that some of the things they have learned along the way are not things people just have to figure out on their own. Leadership development is not something that suddenly arrives when someone makes partner. It is something you build all along the way. The firms doing this really well start with staff. They put together strong onboarding programs that introduce some of these perspectives early. What does it mean to show up in a professional environment versus a college environment? What does it look like to dress for the moment, whether working from home or going to a client? Then at the senior level, what does it look like to run a client meeting, keep it organized, and stay on track?
And then there is the manager shift. Firms have put someone in a management position because they did great work, and now that person has a team and still has all their chargeable hours to hit. If bonuses and promotions are based on chargeable hours, they are going to prioritize chargeable hours. Development suffers. I wish more firms would see that it is about more than billable hours. It is about how we are developing people and ourselves. Performance goals and development goals are two different things, and accountants struggle with that because they want to put a number on everything.
Business development is the same. It does not start when you make partner. If it does, that is why a lot of people do not want to be partner: they say I do not know how to do that and I am not interested. But if we develop those skills sooner, through networking, relationship building, real connections and conversations, it becomes something meaningful and rewarding rather than something that feels like making a sale.
Bottom line for firm owners: do not wait until you want to retire to look at your firm and ask who can replace you. That question needs to start the moment your people walk in the door.
Brannon: I can attest to that. A lot of firm owners reach out to us many years before they want to sell, and I think that is a smart move. Buyers want great teams and good practices, and a lot can be accomplished in a few years. This has been a great conversation. Last question: do you have a book recommendation for our audience?
Susan: Absolutely. I love reading leadership development books, and anything by John Maxwell is wonderful. But one I would specifically recommend for leaders in firms is “Mindset” by Carol Dweck. I recommend it because once you get into leadership in a firm, it really is about a mindset shift. While much of her research was done with students from a psychological perspective, it applies so directly to life in CPA firms and how we lead. As a leader and a firm owner, the mindset required to lead well is genuinely different from all the skills that got you to where you are.
Brannon: I like to say that growing a business is a series of letting go.
Susan: Absolutely. And you have to build the team in order to be able to let go. When everyone has room to move, when the leader is letting go and growing and everyone can follow accordingly, it builds a really dynamic organization. It is hard to let go, especially when you have built it from the ground up. But it is so worth it.
Brannon: Susan, what is the best way for people to find you online?
Susan: I spend most of my time on LinkedIn, so you can find me there under Susan Stutzel. Also check out our website at partnerscoach.com. You can sign up there for our weekly Monday message, which is written specifically for the accounting profession. It is a short message to kick off your Monday with some ideas, tips, or a perspective on what is happening in the profession right now.
Brannon: Love that. Thank you so much, Susan.
Susan: Thank you.
