The Professor Who Laughed at Me for Wanting to Work Less

My freshman year of college, I sat in a business law class where the professor went around the room and asked each of us for a 30-second answer: what did we want to do with our degree?

When it got to me, I said I wanted to start my own accounting firm — so I could work less, not more, and have real time for my family and friends.

He laughed. Out loud. In front of the whole class.

The implication was clear: cute idea, but you clearly don't understand this profession. Owning a firm means more hours, not fewer. That's just how tax season works.

I believed that for a long time. Most of us do. It gets baked into us early — in school, in our first public accounting job, in the culture of the profession itself. Billable hours are the water we swim in, and it's easy to assume they're the only water there is.

They're not. And I think our generation of accountants is in a rare position to prove it.

Why wealth management firms are buying up accounting firms

Here's something worth sitting with: wealth management firms have been aggressively acquiring accounting practices over the past few years. That's not random. I think it's because they see something we're still catching up to.

Wealth management firms and accounting firms both start from the same place — a genuine heart for service. But they've ended up in very different operating models.

Wealth managers are usually the primary financial advisor for retirees, working off AUM instead of the clock. Accountants are usually the primary financial advisor for small business owners, working off billable hours and compliance deadlines.

Put those two together and you get something powerful: a firm that can serve a family — and the businesses they build — across generations. Whether the business keeps running for decades or eventually sells and creates a liquidity event, there's a version of this profession where you stay the trusted advisor through all of it, instead of just the person who files the return.

Wealth management figured out how to do this with quality over quantity, profit without volume. Accounting firms, weighed down by the complexity of tax and bookkeeping deadlines, mostly haven't — not because we don't want to, but because the billable-hour model doesn't leave room for it.

Entrepreneurship on easy mode

I've heard starting an accounting firm described as "entrepreneurship on easy mode," and honestly, I don't think that's an exaggeration.

Think about what we actually have going for us:

• Everyone needs this. Every business needs a tax return. Every business needs books that are clean enough to make that return accurate.

• The work repeats. Every month, every year, on a predictable cycle.

• Switching costs are high. Once a client is onboarded, changing providers is a genuine headache for them — retention is naturally high.

• It's plannable. Recurring, estimable work means real capacity planning, not guesswork.

That's about as good a foundation as any service business could ask for. And yet, somehow, we still manage to get stuck in the same long hours and the same crushing deadlines that define the stereotype of this profession.

I don't think that's inevitable. I think it's a byproduct of a pricing and capacity model we inherited instead of chose.

The shift: hours for planning, not for billing

At Freedom Business Solutions, we still track time — but not the way most firms do. We're not counting hours to bill against them. We track client hours for capacity planning: how much work is actually coming in, so we can budget realistically and avoid the classic trap of overloading busy season.

Pair that with upfront, fixed pricing instead of the billable hour, and something interesting happens. Clients who pay upfront are more invested in the relationship — we've noticed they turn in documents faster, engage more, and treat the engagement less like a transaction. You collect the pricing data from year one, then adjust intelligently for year two. No time-tracking spreadsheets standing between you and your client relationship.

This is the same logic wealth management runs on. It's not a new idea. We're just applying it somewhere it hasn't fully arrived yet.

Where AI actually fits in

I want to be direct about this, because it's easy to get this wrong: AI isn't the goal. Efficiency for its own sake isn't the goal. Piling on more clients because you technically can now isn't the goal.

The goal is freedom — for the firm owner and for the client relationship. AI is just one of the more powerful tools we've had in a long time to actually get there, because it can compress the compliance and cleanup work that traditionally eats every spare hour during the parts of the year we're supposed to be building relationships instead.

Used well, AI doesn't replace the advisory relationship — it buys back the time to actually have one. That's the difference between a firm that uses AI to serve more clients at the same margin, and a firm that uses it to serve the same clients at a much higher level of care.

A challenge, if you're building or working at a firm right now

Look honestly at the culture around you — the one you're building, or the one you're currently inside.

Is it organized around efficiency and relationships? Or is it organized around the billable hour and how many hours can get pushed onto a timesheet?

There's a phrase I keep coming back to: happy chickens make the best eggs. A firm that takes care of its people and stays focused on client outcomes — instead of hours logged — tends to produce better work, not less of it.

I think this matters more to our generation of accountants than any generation before us. We're not chasing the traditional partner-track grind for its own sake. We want a career that doesn't require sacrificing the rest of our lives to have it.

This is just the start of the conversation

I'm not writing this because I have it all figured out. Austin and I are still testing a lot of this in real time at Freedom Business Solutions — pricing models, capacity planning, early AI tooling, all of it. Some of it is working. Some of it we're still adjusting.

But I'm convinced this profession is on the edge of a real shift, and I want to be a resource — and a collaborator — for other accountants who are building (or want to build) firms this way.

So I'll ask you the same thing I keep asking myself: how are you finding freedom in your firm — or how are you planning to build one that has it from day one?

I'd genuinely like to know. Let's keep the conversation going.