4 articles
The KPIs that built successful accounting firms — utilization, AHR, profit per partner — were designed for a world where humans do all the work. When AI becomes a production participant, those metrics aren't wrong. They're just no longer enough. Here are three metrics I think matter now — and I want you to challenge me on every one of them.
AI compressed the cost of solo founding a CAS practice to near zero. Your best people know this. The question isn't how to prevent departures — it's whether your firm offers something a solo practitioner can't replicate. Four things make the difference, and all of them are buildable.
Your review queue doesn't distinguish between files that need your judgment and files that are clean. So you review everything — and become the bottleneck. The fix isn't better delegation. It's building systems that tell you where your attention actually matters, so you can stop being the dragnet and start being the editor.
A Harvard study found individuals with AI were 3x more likely to produce top-10% ideas — not because of tool skills, but because AI gave them the confidence to act on their instincts. Your team has the same instincts. The question is whether your firm builds the conditions where confidence follows — or watches your best people build it somewhere else.
