The Radical CPA: How the 'New Firm' was Born

I started to use this newfangled payroll software that worked through the Internet.

Back then they didn’t call it the cloud. It was just payroll software that used an Internet browser. It solved my business problems of preparing paychecks, paying taxes and filing tax returns for my customers. The technology was PayCycle, a cloud-based payroll software.

 PayCycle (which has since been acquired by Intuit) fundamentally changed my firm and my life. All of a sudden payroll became one of the most profitable areas of our firm. It also became a catalyst to selling and packaging our other core services.

It was the beginning of something bigger.

I would never go back to working the way a traditional firm works. A lot of people don’t get it. The reason it’s so hard to understand is because it’s conceptually difficult to realize how using today’s tools can holistically change the face and infra-structure of a firm. The tools exponentially move you into rede-fining all your processes around communication, deliverables, pricing, even extending into your business model.

They Call Us the ‘Radical’ Practitioners

There’s an uprising of innovative CPAs in the accounting pro-fession. This group created a new support community that is no longer driven by the AICPA or the state societies. The establish-ment can’t control the conversation. In fact, they almost missed it. As it turned out, they found and promoted us in the “nick of time” for the rest of the profession’s benefit. The AICPA leader-ship team helped strategically place the leaders of our movement within the AICPA committees to promote faster change. Years later when I asked what they saw in us, I was told we were the business case example of the research they had conducted in the CPA Horizons 2025 survey. Now they endorse and support us.

But it didn’t begin with them.

When I first started doing this, I wasn’t aware of anyone doing what I was doing. Then I went to Twitter. That’s where I really met my peers. We were learning from each other from day one and that same community of support is still happening today.

Mark Koziel, vice president of firm services and global alliances at the AICPA, coined us “a movement” in the fall of 2010. A “radical” practitioner is a person who calls upon himself and others to rede-fine their firms and their lives by moving away from the traditional firm business model.

Why do we use the term 'radical'?

rad·i·cal

adjective \ ra-di-kl \

• very new and different from what is traditional or ordinary
• very basic and important
• having extreme political or social views that are not shared by most people

The term “radical” applies because what we are doing to our firms and indirectly to the profession is fundamental to its core. It’s abrupt, disruptive, unexpected and far-reaching. We are shaking up the status quo.

However, as you keep reading you learn that it’s not just us creating drama for the sake of drama. We are changing because our customers and the world are changing around us.

Some might also perceive radical to be a negative term. It’s not. Our movement is more likely following the happy expression, “that’s radical, dude.” We want everyone to learn and join us.

Originally published on CPA Trendlines, Feb. 21, 2016. For more content like this, sign up for The Radical CPA newsletter. Or buy the book, The Radical CPA: New Rules for the Future-Ready Firm.