Is Growth Overrated? ‘Lifestyle’ Accounting Firm Owners Redefine Success

The typical benchmarks of success for smaller certified public accounting (CPA) firms are evolving. While financial and operational metrics, client retention, and other key performance indicators will always be important for assessing a firm’s health and viability, more firm owners across the country are adding a new performance category to the mix: how well the businesses support their personal priorities. In fact, these firm owners are intentionally building and structuring their practices to primarily support the pre-defined lifestyles of their choosing.

Although the specifics of lifestyle firm priorities vary by owner—be it travel, family, faith, health, hobbies, or general flexibility—the ultimate goal is simple: prevent work from taking over life.

Balancing Priorities

Jason Blumer, CPA, CEO of Blumer & Associates CPAs PC, a Greenville, S.C.-based advisory firm serving design, marketing, and creative agencies, learned from experience that too much growth for a smaller accounting firm can have a big impact on lifestyle. As a young CPA, Blumer took over his father’s firm but struggled to balance work and life. This led him to found Thriveal, a CPA network that inspires counter-cultural firm owners to embrace their entrepreneurial creativity within the profession.

As an advisor to other firm owners, including those interested in putting lifestyle first, he says the definition of a lifestyle firm is one “where the owner’s lifestyle can be primary and nothing in the firm’s structure or team takes that primary focus away.” Essentially, you can “do what you want,” he says, by targeting enough profitability to support that lifestyle.

Of course, as firms start to expand and need more structure as meetings and client demands multiply, working from the airport or ski lodge doesn’t always work. “Finding balance becomes hard when intentions are competing against each other,” Blumer acknowledges. “Often, we find we’re trying to live one way, but it conflicts with how our work is set up.”

Aligning work and values isn’t an easy task—and doing so requires a lot of thought about trade-offs. Sometimes, the questions that firm owners need to ask themselves can veer into being philosophical.

Michael Meihaus, CPA, is the owner of Meihaus CPA, a small firm based in Escondido, Calif. that specializes in defined contribution retirement plan audits. When building his firm, Meihaus, a father with young children and a “very finite amount of time,” says it was critical to identify and define what he wanted to prioritize: “The endless pursuit of money has been shown to be meaningless. You really have to consider what you care about and what price you’re putting on those things.”

Blumer agrees. He counsels firm owners to evaluate their own personal goals without making comparisons to the curated images of other people’s houses, cars, and vacations on social media: “Ask yourself what a lifestyle firm means and if you’re building the right runway to meet your goals.”

Navigating Hiring and Growth

Although the size of lifestyle firms can vary, Blumer points out that many lifestyle firm owners rely on, well, themselves. This shouldn’t come as a surprise, and the support of one or two others, such as an administrative professional to help with the calendar and a part-time accounting professional to assist with client work, is usually sufficient to support the firm. But those who aspire to grow beyond themselves will need to find the sweet spot, and that means being intentional about hiring and growth.

“When you think about hiring, you have to be careful that it won’t detract from your goals,” Blumer warns. “Employees generally seek career growth and advancement, so you have to be clear with them on whether the firm is set up to offer that or not. Of course, if you want to offer those opportunities, you’ll need to be aware that growth may be needed—and that can mean the end of your lifestyle firm as you originally envisioned it.”

Notably, misalignment of expectations can create frustration among employees, Blumer adds: “If you find yourself with a team of five or seven people, but you’re still putting only your lifestyle first, it will create tension. People are going to wonder why you’re camping all the time while they’re doing all the work.”

In other words, you must also become mindful of your employees’ lifestyle wants and needs or hire those whose align with yours.

For Meihaus, employing other people was part of his goal as an owner. He thinks hiring at a lifestyle firm will naturally have a lot of variability by owner: “Often, it just comes down to how you’re wired and how you think about it. Managing people brings its own set of challenges and stresses, so you need to carefully select people and decide how to maximize their contributions.”

Knowing yourself and your strengths and weaknesses is also key. When Meihaus stepped out on his own, he quickly discovered that the administrative side wasn’t his strength, so he brought on someone for that work. He later hired an operations manager, which opened time and energy for him to focus on sales.

Meihaus also relies on outside resources, such as a consultant who performs his quality control reviews. “Larger firms have access to more internal resources, but smaller firms may need to outsource services to make sure things get done right,” he explains.

Finding Your Niche

Importantly, focusing on lifestyle doesn’t mean setting low standards. Instead, lifestyle firms are taking a more intentional approach to the types of services they offer and to whom.

Josie Parr, CPA, MST, owner of Josie Parr CPA LLC, a small, niche-based firm based in Sarasota, Fla., spent much of her career at a large regional firm where she worked long hours and lived what she describes as a “compressed and stressed lifestyle.”

Recognizing that she loved doing taxation work but didn’t want to pursue the traditional trajectory of a tax career, she decided to start her own firm. “I didn’t do everything right at first, but ultimately I learned how to build a successful firm,” she explains. Parr attributes much of that success to the choice she made to offer “white-glove tax strategy services” to a small number of clients.

“That structure gave me balance. Now I’m able to do work that I love and enjoy my life,” she says, noting that she works about 20 hours a week for fewer than 50 tax clients, a schedule that gives her time for running her second business, Solo Tax Coach LLC, where she coaches other solo practitioners on building their firms.

Finding a niche should be a strategic choice, Blumer says, who points to volume-heavy work like payroll and bookkeeping as potentially huge value areas for lifestyle firms: “You can have 50 clients who don’t need you that much and you can do the work at night or on weekends. When all the clients look the same, a lot of the work can become very process oriented.”

Parr has experienced this too, sharing that her niche practice allows her to better market to her target clients and saves her from having to rethink and reinvent new strategies for every client.

Meihaus adds that lifestyle firm owners can find opportunities in work that others don’t want. In his case, he saw that he could offer a unique value proposition in the “super-niche area” of employee benefit plan audits. “There’s so much opportunity out there for those who are paying attention,” he says. “Pick the right field, build good processes, and offer a better, more responsive service model.”

Leaning Into Automation

Technology has driven, and in many ways is accelerating, the lifestyle firm trend. According to Parr, social media has been one of the biggest drivers, both in terms of concept exposure and access to resources: “It’s so much easier now to find other people who are creating these firms for insight and inspiration and to build your own brand and channel through it.”

As social media makes it easier to market firms, other technologies are creating the efficiencies needed for small firm owners to 28 | www.icpas.org/insight manage work and life. Automated tools have helped small firms build processes, and artificial intelligence (AI) is playing a role too. According to a 2024 CPA Practice Advisor/Canopy survey, 57% of respondents expect more work to be automated in the next five years. Eighty percent of respondents believe they’ll use more AI in the next three to five years.

Parr says much of the industry is looking for automation to improve their processes. She uses a virtual assistant that automates messaging and reminders for clients. “I don’t need five employees to do things like I would’ve in the past,” she says.

Blumer notes that AI will replace some roles and expand others. For example, administrators can take on more volume as tasks become automated. He also cautions that firms need to be conscious of security risks associated with AI. “You need to have your safety protocols in place,” he says, noting that some small firms will need to consider hiring for tech and security roles.

Entrepreneurs of the Future

Operating a lifestyle firm doesn’t equate to an easy, stress-free work life. But for those with a business and entrepreneurial mindset, the reward—whatever that’s determined to be—can be worth the risk.

“You get to be in charge of everything, but there’ll still be problems,” Parr stresses, who learned that setting boundaries and managing decision fatigue is important. “At first, I felt pressure to scale and grow, but then I realized it wasn’t even necessary to be successful. You just have to set up the right model—with the clients and revenue that works for you. When you focus on that, the rest of it all falls into place.”

Blumer agrees that the ability to say no is important for lifestyle firm owners: “If you want to stay small, you have to be just as intentional about it as those wanting to grow. Entrepreneurs are often wired to say yes, but you’ll have to say no to a lot of opportunities.”

The concept of lifestyle firms may also have the potential to attract more CPAs of tomorrow—especially those who might not want to invest in the 80-hour workweeks that previous generations were accustomed to.

“I absolutely think that lifestyle firms are an opportunity for the future of the industry, especially for entrepreneurial types who see a vision for a client service model or for creating relationships and clients for life,” Parr says. However, she recommends that those interested in designing their own firms spend time working for an established firm first to develop their knowledge and skills.

Meihaus agrees that aspiring firm owners should hone their expertise before striking out on their own, but he believes that some of the most attractive industry opportunities of the future will be in small-firm ownership: “There’s a lot of work out there that’s too small for big firms but can be wonderful little niches if you have an entrepreneurial mindset and desire to control your own destiny.”

He also encourages those thinking about the lifestyle firm as a career option to remember that there can be back-up plans: “If you’re business-minded and take a responsible approach, why not try it? The worst that can happen is you may need to go crawling back to a former employer. But if you leave a firm with dignity, you can often get rehired.”

As Meihaus says: “If I hadn’t tried, I always would’ve wondered what could’ve been.”

Clare Fitzgerald is a freelance writer covering the accounting, finance, and insurance industries.

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