Beyond survival mode: Redefining what you want your practice to be

Editor: April Walker, CPA, CGMA

(Part 3 of a series, “When the Numbers Don’t Add Up”)

Firms that just survive one busy season after another are not the same as firms that choose what comes next. During busy times, firms are always moving from one tax return to the next. The work is often quiet and structured and rarely urgent in a strategic sense. We as firm leaders tell ourselves the work will get done because it always does, and we push ourselves to the limit to meet the deadline or client expectations. We thrive on the excitement of busy season and the huge sense of accomplishment of checking off tasks each day.

A moment usually arrives around 7pm on April 16. The office is still humming from the night before, with whatever is left of the coffee going cold on the desk. The phones have stopped. The tax returns are out the door. Billing has started. The voicemail from the client who panicked at 4:55pm on April 15 about something completely unrelated to the deadline has finally been returned. And somewhere in the quiet, a question arises that has nothing to do with extensions or estimates: Is this the firm I want to run?

Part 1 of this series looked inward, at how leaders care for themselves and their teams while the work is hot (Gallegos, Hudson, and Lagarde, “Inside the Pressure Cooker: Taking Care of Yourself and Your Team During Tax Season,” 57–3 The Tax Adviser 68 (March 2026)). Part 2 turned outward, with members of the AICPA Tax Practice Management Committee weighing in on burnout, boundaries, and client fit (Walker, “Rethinking Burnout Boundaries and Client Fit,” 57–6 The Tax Adviser 56 (June 2026)). This installment is about what comes after the immediate fires are out and the “D” clients are gone. Then the harder question shows up: What kind of firm do you want to build?

Most owners are too tired to answer that during busy season. Many are just trying to make it to April 16 without another staff resignation, client emergency, or important deadline missed. It gets put off for later. However, “later” often becomes “never,” and the cycle continues. Performed with focus and intention, the work of answering that question separates a firm that chooses what comes next from one that simply grinds harder every year.

Survival mode is a choice, even if nobody voted for it

A firm that runs on adrenaline and in survival mode every January through April has, somewhere along the way, decided that is acceptable. The decision was never voted on in a partner meeting. It accumulated over the years with always saying “yes” to whatever was in front of you. We said “yes” to keeping the late–arriving client because the fee was decent, despite the strain it put on our people and the firm. We never updated the engagement letter because it was easier to say “yes” to doing it the way we always did it. We promoted a senior to manager without ever training them to manage because we were worried they would leave. We said “yes” to the due–diligence project from an important client in a hurry to close a big transaction, even though it came in on March 20, the turnaround time was short, and we knew it was going to push our people to work crazy hours. You can keep building up “yeses” over years in practice, but at some point, they go far beyond being accommodating and helpful to clients. You have created a toxic culture where the end justifies the means and the clients’ expectations and satisfaction far outweigh your people’s.

The human cost matters most, but a huge financial cost also shows up in turnover, recruiting fees, rushed engagements, and the slow erosion of pricing power when an exhausted team defaults to the work it already knows instead of the higher–value work clients need. There is a strategic cost, too, in firms that become difficult to sell, merge, or hand to the next partner class, because nobody wants to inherit a perpetual emergency. And there is an identity cost. Most of the partners we know got into tax for the puzzle of it, the relationships, the chance to be genuinely useful at a complicated moment in a client’s life. Survival mode is not why any of us signed up.

Too many firms still confuse exhaustion with commitment. Working longer is not the same as working better, and being the last one to leave the office, at 11pm, is not the same as being a leader. The firms breaking out of this loop have stopped pretending any of those things are equivalent.

The word “vision” in this column does not mean a poster on a wall or a slogan from a retreat three years ago but a deliberate answer to a hard question: What do we want this firm to feel like, look like, and produce (12 months from now, three years from now, five years from now, etc.)? And just as important, what are we willing to change to make that real?

Mental health as a design constraint, not an HR initiative

Firm leaders are starting to treat well–being as a design constraint instead of a wellness program. A wellness program is something you bolt on top of the work. A design constraint is the way you work.

We already treat other constraints as nonnegotiable. So why do we not apply the same discipline to team capacity, recovery time, and sustainable workload? Once we do, the whole conversation changes.

Taking on a new engagement is no longer just a question of “Is the fee appropriate?” It is also, “Is this work that we want to do, and can we deliver it without breaking our people?” The talk in almost every CPA firm is: “How can we continue to grow? How do we expand our services and provide higher–value advisory work?” But adding or expanding service offerings is no longer simply a marketing question. It is a staffing and culture question. Before even getting to “How much can we charge for this service?” the firm has to answer, “Can we do this without depleting the people who have to do it?” The well–being of our people — and of ourselves — is a fundamental part of any firm’s design.

This is not about losing a professional edge or adjusting to the work habits of a different generation. It is an overdue understanding and acknowledgment that mental health must be met with the same operational rigor we already apply to engagement scoping and quality control.

If you could rebuild your firm today, what would it look like?

Try this with your leadership team: Find two hours to meet, preferably somewhere other than the firm conference room. Close the laptops. During the meeting, pretend that no constraints exist. The client list, the org chart, the service mix, the office space, the technology stack: All of it is on the table.

Then work through four sets of questions, in order:

• Who are the clients we would serve? What makes them the right fit beyond the fee?
• What services would we offer? What would we refuse to offer?
• What would the team look like — how many staff, seniors, managers, administrative support personnel, etc.? What does the workflow look like for this new firm? What kind of week are we asking people to live?
• Where does technology apply? Where is human judgment nonnegotiable?

We’ve done versions of this with our own leadership teams and with peers. The answers vary; the gap does not. The firm that exists and the firm the partners want are almost never the same. That gap is your strategic agenda for the next three years. The rest of this column is about how to start closing it.

Many of us built our careers in an environment where overwork was normalized and even celebrated and rewarded. Reimagining the firm can feel, oddly, like questioning the system that helped us succeed in the first place. That tension is real. But imagine, if you will, a new paradigm built on the following four interconnected pillars.

Pillar 1: Workflow built for capacity, not throughput

Most firm workflows were built to push work out the door. That made sense when volume was modest and the team had additional capacity. It does not work now. Complexity is up, talent is scarce, and clients expect faster turnaround on everything from a routine Form 1120–S, U.S. Income Tax Return for an S Corporation, to a multistate nexus question that turns into a six–state filing project. A workflow optimized for throughput will always push capacity to its limit. It will consume your bench of talent, your fees, and your weekends, roughly in that order.

Some firms do not have a staffing problem so much as they have a problem prioritizing work and setting client expectations to meet staffing capacity. The firm’s workflow and priority system is simply first in/first out, with everything receiving the same priority: Get it done now. Hiring more people will not fix that.

A workflow built for capacity addresses instead: How do we deliver excellent work at a pace people can sustain for 48 weeks a year, not eight?

Engagement intake stops being informal. A new engagement is scoped, priced, and staffed before it begins. It is not renegotiated halfway through when the Schedules K–1 come in wrong and the Sec. 174 capitalization issues turn up in workpapers nobody reviewed at intake. Internal deadlines take priority over statutory ones, with deliberate slack built in for the late documents, the amended forms, and the client who calls on April 12 with a quick question that turns into an hour’s discussion about a Sec. 263A inventory issue requiring a full tax memo. Overtime gets tracked by person, not just by engagement, because chronic overtime concentrated in two or three people is a leading indicator that the model is broken, not a sign that those people are unusually committed. And managers get permission in writing to adjust the process when the schedule needs to be adjusted.

None of this is exciting work. It is the unglamorous operational lift that separates firms that scale from firms that just get bigger and more stressed. If you do nothing else after reading this, pull last busy season’s data and look at the engagements that were profitable on paper but corrosive in practice. The realization line will tell you one story. The hours by person will tell you another. Most partners reading this can probably already picture the exact client file that caused the unnecessary late nights in March.

Pillar 2: A service mix you chose

Many firms have a service mix that grew the way a garden grows when nobody is weeding it. A client asked for something 15 years ago, you said “yes,” and now it is a line of business that two people understand and nobody loves. Multiply that pattern across a few decades, and you end up with a practice that does a little of everything, with margins that are strong in some places, mediocre in most, and quietly negative in corners no one has had time to examine.

Here is the uncomfortable part: Most of us already know which service lines should go; we just haven’t said it out loud yet. A four–lens screen helps make it concrete:

• Does this service line align with where the team wants to develop expertise?
• Does it produce margins that justify the risk, the review burden, and the talent investment?
• Does it attract more of the clients we want or more of those we are trying to avoid?
• Can we deliver it at a quality level we would without hesitation be proud of?

Service lines that fail two or more of these tests may be better suited for transition, referral partnerships, or a deliberate price increase — either to improve the economics or to direct the work elsewhere.

One of the best things about our profession is the range of services we can offer. But that same range is also one of its more challenging parts — knowing where to stay focused and what to leave alone. Every firm’s list is different. What matters is that the list is focused and built around a real talent bench, not a wish list.

If your firm does three things well and 12 things in a mediocre fashion, your future is in the three things you do well. The other 12 are somebody else’s growth strategy. The hard part is saying that out loud in a room full of partners and peers, especially when some of them built their book of business around those 12.

Pillar 3: Culture as the operating system

“Culture” is the word people reach for when they cannot quite explain why one firm is successful in retaining its people while another firm churns its people faster than a Tesla going zero to 60 mph. A firm’s culture is real, and it is built one decision at a time. The firms thriving aren’t the ones with the loudest values posters or most charismatic leaders. They are the firms where leadership behavior, scheduling decisions, compensation philosophy, and feedback rhythms all point in the same direction.

If you want a culture where people stay, partners have to model it. That means actually taking the vacation, not just announcing it. It means scheduling the 9pm email for 7am so the senior on the receiving end is not lying awake wondering if they need to respond now. It means the partner who tells a new senior to take a long weekend does not then ping them about an issue with a stub–period Form 5471, Information Return of U.S. Persons With Respect to Certain Foreign Corporations, while they are gone. These small actions reverberate through the system.

Culture also lives in the structural choices most firms underinvest in. How often do you have real and meaningful one–on–one conversations with your people? Does the firm have a feedback loop that flows up as well as down? Does the firm train managers to set them up for success, or were they promoted because they were strong preparers? And then there’s the toughest question that many firms don’t ask: Does your compensation model truly reward the behaviors you want or just the amount of hours billed or tax returns delivered?

Pillar 4: Technology as the enabler, not the hero

It is impossible to write about a firm’s vision and future in 2026 and ignore the terms “artificial intelligence” or “gen AI.” AI is already reshaping every aspect of our job. It is reading source documents and performing various tasks with them. It is summarizing meeting notes with action items for individuals based on the conversation during the meeting. It is writing first drafts of research memorandums on complicated tax questions that historically took hours if not days to research and draft. It is reviewing and analyzing spreadsheets and client financials and identifying anomalies in source documents such as trial balances and depreciation schedules. It is efficiently handling routine tasks that can consume a lot of human capital and time.

The temptation is to treat technology as the answer to capacity problems. Buy the platform, deploy the model — problem solved. Some firms are implementing AI into processes they never properly standardized in the first place. That is not transformation. That is accelerating dysfunction.

The firms getting real leverage have done the unglamorous work first. They have standardized engagement letters, cleaned up workpaper conventions, documented their processes, and created and disseminated easy–to–use templates. Then they layered in the AI tools to accelerate the work that was already in process. The result is not a smaller team but one doing higher–judgment work, with first–pass extraction and reconciliation handled by software. The question for firm leaders is not whether to use AI but what to do with the time it gives back.

From vision to motion: The first 90 days

Vision statements and documents are easy to write but also easy to ignore. The bridge from aspiration to reality is built in 90–day increments. After the leadership team has answered the four rebuild questions listed above, pick three initiatives to begin this quarter. Maybe they are a service line review, a workflow pilot on one team, and a culture audit through anonymous staff input. The point is that the list is short, the owners are named, and the check–in dates are on the calendar before anyone leaves the room. The rest of the wish list goes in a file marked “next quarter.”

Then communicate. Tell the team — in plain language — what you are working on and why, without committing to outcomes you cannot guarantee. People will forgive a leader who tries something hard and adjusts on the way. They will not forgive a leader who promises change and then disappears. Most of us have worked for both. Movement, even if imperfect, is what tells people the firm is actually being led.

The firm you build on purpose

Tax season will keep testing the firm. The deadlines will not get lighter, the legislation will not get simpler, and talent will not get easier to find. None of that is changing.

What can change is whether the firm shows up to each new season by accident or by design. The firms that will look back in three years and feel proud of what they built are the ones doing this work now, while it is still quiet enough to think. Survival is what happens when nobody is choosing. Vision is the choice to stop letting the next busy season decide what kind of firm you run.

The numbers will keep adding up. The question is whether the people behind them still want to be there when they do.

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Contributors

Mark Gallegos, CPA, MST, is a partner with Porte Brown Accountants & Advisers in Elgin, Ill. Brandon Lagarde, CPA, J.D., LL.M., is partner, Tax Services, with EisnerAmper in Baton Rouge, La. April Walker, CPA, CGMA, is senior manager—Tax Practice & Ethics, Public Accounting, for AICPA and CIMA. Gallegos and Lagarde are members, and Walker is staff liaison, of the AICPA Tax Practice Management Committee. For more information about this column, contact thetaxadviser@aicpa.org.