Practice Success Podcast

Have you wondered what it takes to thrive in the accounting industry? Or how the experts established their successful careers? Learn from industry experts with Canopy. In each episode of the Practice Success Podcast, Canopy takes a deep dive with accounting professionals, exploring their career trajectory, extracting advice for firms, and discussing the latest trending topics.

Practice Success Podcast is a business podcast hosted by Canopy, with 70 episodes on record and a Required Pod Score of 80.

Canopy hosts Practice Success Podcast, a business show with 70 episodes published.

Our AI reads these to draft pitches. Use them as grounding for a pitch that cites a real guest and a specific topic.

• 

  Episode #4

  Ep 4: Stop Running a $2M Firm Like a Solo Shop

  Sep 30, 202620 minS4

  Send us your thoughts or what you want to hear more about! Why Solo-Owner Habits Break Fast-Growing Accounting Firms With Lera Kooper, COO & Owner, Proactive Advisory Group Growing fast is easy. Growing without burning out your team, your clients, or yourself is the hard part. In episode four of this five-part series of Canopy Practice Success , host Luke Frye, CPA and Accountant in Residence at Canopy, sits down with Lera Kooper, owner and COO & Owner, Proactive Advisory Group. Her firm is scaling aggressively through acquisitions, so she's working through these questions in real time. Lera explains how she defines sustainable growth, why every system her firm builds is out of date within 18 months, and how she turns a big goal into three habits her team repeats a thousand times. She also shares the growth trap she's fallen into herself, the solo-owner habits she sees holding back acquired firms, and why she thinks firm owners who are uncomfortable with sales are doing their clients a disservice. The conversation closes with predictions on firms that wait on cloud and AI, the future of the billable hour, and why client relationships and advisory will make up most of the work in the next decade. If you own a growing firm, or you're thinking about how to grow without losing what made your firm work, this episode gives you a practical playbook from someone in the middle of it. What You'll Learn • How Lera defines sustainable growth: serving clients without underserving others or burning out the team • Why consistent client and team experience starts with standard operating procedures and a shared definition of good • How to break a big goal into KPIs and daily habits that make fast growth feel manageable • Why chasing every new idea leads to failing at five things instead of succeeding at one • Which solo-owner habits, like billing after the fact and undocumented procedures, hold back a growing firm • Why retention and upselling existing clients are her top two growth priorities for the next two years • How to reframe sales as recommending what clients need, and why not doing it is a disservice • Why firm owners who skip cloud and AI may end up accepting a lower acquisition offer Connect With Lera LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lerakooper/ Subscribe to Canopy Practice Success If you enjoyed this episode, be sure to subscribe and follow Canopy Practice Success wherever you listen to podcasts.

  ListenShow Notes
• 

  Episode #3

  Episode 3: Stop Managing Ghost Tasks

  Sep 23, 202622 minS4

  Send us your thoughts or what you want to hear more about! Why Your Best People Burn Out When Work Lives in Spreadsheets With Lera Kooper, COO and Owner of Proactive Advisory Group Capacity isn't an operations problem. It's a leadership one. In this episode of Canopy Practice Success , Luke Frye talks with Lera Kooper, COO and Owner of Proactive Advisory Group, about the hard calls a growing firm makes on time and staffing. Every yes is a no somewhere else, and Lera makes that trade deliberately instead of discovering it at the bottleneck. She walks through how she tiers clients, the math behind hiring versus optimizing, and what she says to a client when the firm has taken on too much. She also makes a direct case for keeping time sheets in a fixed-fee firm, not for billing, but as a diagnostic for whether a process has gone stale or a team member needs support. Then she names what she turned down. Marketing spend, Google Ads, and an offer to be acquired, because the client base she already has is the asset she'd rather work first. If you're protecting a high performer who's quietly buried, or deciding between a hire and a better process, this one gives you a framework and the numbers behind it. What You'll Learn How to tier clients before capacity becomes a crisis Why a $100K hire has to produce three times their cost How to tell a client you're at capacity without damaging trust Why ghost tasks are the real threat to your best people Why Lera keeps time sheets in a fixed-fee firm How an acquired client list becomes a lead list Why she turned off marketing spend on purpose Where a firm that skips cloud and AI lands in three years Connect With Lera LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lerakooper/ Subscribe to Canopy Practice Success If you enjoyed this episode, be sure to subscribe and follow Canopy Practice Success wherever you listen to podcasts.

  ListenShow Notes
• 

  Episode #2

  Episode 2: Delegate Authority, Not Tasks

  Sep 16, 202622 minS4

  Send us your thoughts or what you want to hear more about! Why Delegating Tasks Without Authority Keeps Firm Owners Stuck With Lera Kooper, COO and Owner of Proactive Advisory Group Define Good, Episode 2 of 5: Delegate Authority, Not Tasks What does it actually take to hand off a piece of your firm? In this episode of Canopy Practice Success , Luke Frye talks with Lera Kooper, COO and Owner of Proactive Advisory Group, about the gap between delegating tasks and delegating authority. Lera is based just outside Seattle with team members nationwide, and she treats her own workload the way she treats any inefficient system. She maps it, audits it, and redesigns the parts that don't hold up. Lera explains how handing over authority forced her to get specific about the result she wants instead of the path someone takes to get there. She describes why she documents processes as burnout prevention, how she separates "only I can do this" from "I've always done this," and what happens when the work you're best at is no longer the work worth your time. The conversation then moves into predictions. Lera agrees the profession has a talent shortage, and she argues the bigger problem is a shortage of firms people want to work for. She makes the case for scoping and billing upfront, building teams that move into advisory work faster, and staying remote capable by design. She also shares the habit she uses to protect her attention: no Reels, no TikTok, no YouTube Shorts. If you run a firm and you're still the bottleneck on work someone else could own, this episode gives you a practical place to start. What You'll Learn How Lera restructured her role by handing over authority, not just tasks Why clarity about the result matters more than control over the path How documented SOPs prevent burnout instead of creating busywork How to tell "only I can do this" apart from "I've always done this" Why Lera calls the talent shortage real and misdiagnosed, and names the shortage of firms people want to join as the bigger problem Why Lera made roughly six hires this year and still said no to three to five good candidates per role Why scoping and billing upfront protects client trust better than invoicing in arrears Why Lera stays off short-form video to keep her attention span intact Connect With Lera LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lerakooper/ Subscribe to Canopy Practice Success If you enjoyed this episode, be sure to subscribe and follow Canopy Practice Success wherever you listen to podcasts.

  ListenShow Notes
• 

  Episode #1

  Episode 1: Treat AI Like a New Hire

  Sep 9, 202624 minS4

  Send us your thoughts or what you want to hear more about! Why Treating AI Like a New Hire Beats Chasing Every Tool Treat AI Like a New Hire (Define Good, Episode 1 of 5) With Lera Kooper, Owner and COO of Accountability Services Most AI conversations start with the tool. This one starts with the job description. In this episode of Canopy Practice Success , host Luke Frye, CPA, Accountant in Residence at Canopy, talks with Lera Kooper, owner and COO of Accountability Services, about the rule that keeps her firm's AI adoption grounded: onboard a new tool the same way you onboard a new person. Lera explains why she hands AI the tasks that require the least professional judgment first, how she sets expectations and weekly check-ins the way she would for any team member, and why a year spent documenting SOPs turned out to be the real prerequisite. She also gets candid about one rollout her firm paused, not because the tool underperformed, but because no one owned the standard for how to use it. Her words: "we haven't had the resources to go in and define good in our use of that type of tool." The conversation also covers what changes when bookkeepers and staff accountants spend more time in front of clients, where automation still stalls today, and how small firms can use their speed to close the efficiency gap with much larger ones. If you're deciding what to hand to AI next, or trying to work out why your last rollout stalled, this episode gives you a practical order of operations from someone running it inside a fast-growing firm. What You'll Learn Why Lera Kooper onboards a new AI tool the same way she onboards a new hire How to sort which tasks belong with AI and which still need a person What "defining good" means, and why documented SOPs make AI easier to trust Why an AI rollout without a clear champion ends up on pause instead of in production How AI meeting notes freed an admin to move into operations, workflow, and client experience Why her bookkeepers and staff accountants sit in front of clients more than they did three years ago What still has to happen with bank connections before bookkeeping is fully automated How small firms can close the efficiency gap with large firms, and where technology stops being the answer Connect With Lera LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lerakooper/ Subscribe to Canopy Practice Success If you enjoyed this episode, be sure to subscribe and follow Canopy Practice Success wherever you listen to podcasts.

  ListenShow Notes
• 

  Episode #37

  Luke Frye on Why Tax Season Is the Best Time to Start a Firm

  Aug 26, 202625 minS3

  Send us your thoughts or what you want to hear more about! In this episode of Canopy Practice Success , Luke Frye explains how he built his own tax practice to $500,000 in recurring revenue in a little over four years without raising a dollar. He walks through the math on a single S-Corp client, six touchpoints a year instead of one, and why the quarterly projection is the piece accountants undercharge for most. Luke also compares what he learned as the first accountant at Bench.co, where Facebook ads drove growth, with what he had to do on his own: chambers of commerce, BNI groups, and teaching classes at camera stores to reach photographers. He explains why he runs his sales pipeline in HubSpot with the same rigor his partner runs the client list, why he's a Deming guy about visualizing work, and why he thinks accounting firms should stop building their own software. The conversation closes on private equity and succession, and Luke's argument that you should decide how your partnership ends while you're still happy in it. If you're building a firm you actually want to own, this episode shows how recurring revenue comes together one touchpoint at a time. What You'll Learn Why Luke built his practice around single member LLCs and S corporations, the entity he calls "everyman's entity" How one S-Corp client turns into six touchpoints a year instead of one Why handing clients last year's safe harbor number undercharges for the answer they actually want How treating your sales pipeline like a client deliverable will double your sales Why March 1st to April 15th is the best window to launch a new firm, when every other firm has stopped taking clients What Luke burned through before year three clicked, including his savings and credit cards How automating proposals, e-signatures, payments, and invoices saves 40 hours a week for two months Why "playing not to lose" costs firm owners more than the software they refuse to buy Why you should decide how your partnership ends while you and your partner are still happy Why Luke thinks firms should buy software instead of building it, and what maintenance really costs Connect With Luke LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lukefrye/ Subscribe to Canopy Practice Success If you enjoyed this episode, be sure to subscribe and follow Canopy Practice Success wherever you listen to podcasts.

  ListenShow Notes

Recent guests on Practice Success Podcast. Study who booked and why before you pitch.

Based on semantic analysis of episode topics and host coverage, this show is a strong guest fit for executives in:

Industry fit is computed by PitchCentric using vector embeddings of the show's episode catalog.