How Leaders Can Close the Alignment Gap, with Rob Brown

Randy Crabtree is putting his relationships and experience to work for companies he believes can make accounting better. On Episode 294, part two of a special episode of The Unique CPA, he tells Terrell Turner that as he takes on advisory and board roles, he's choosing partners whose passion for the profession goes beyond profit. He explains how those relationships become hands-on work, from regular calls about a company's priorities to introductions that get its people in front of the right audiences. And when organizers ask Randy to build conference panels, he brings some of those partners along. The opportunities are growing, but he's setting limits on travel to make the pace sustainable. Underneath it all is a condition he brings to every partnership: "Be nice and have fun." Randy's next chapter is taking shape around helping others move forward without losing sight of how he wants to work. Get the full show notes and more resources at TheUniqueCPA.com

Randy Crabtree left Tri-Merit after nearly 40 years in the profession, and the shift hit him before he knew it. At Bridging the Gap 2026 in Charlotte, he came to realize he was quietly mourning the loss of a firm he built, without even recognizing the feeling. And yet nine or ten weeks later, people keep telling him he looks younger, so Terrell Turner, Episode 293's host, and Randy, unpack why. On part 1 of this special two-part episode of The Unique CPA, they start with the audience's overwhelming vote to rename the podcast, then trace Randy's path from that sense of loss to genuine excitement about his next phase. Randy urges anyone in the second half of their career to stop riding it out and make the transition from "doer to mentor, to an advisor." He challenges what leaders get wrong about change: they communicate far less than they think, so the people around them feel that gap. His plain message to us all is that we have to better communicate what's going, touching base "100 times" more often than we think we need to, to keep that gap from broadening. Episode 293 also begins with a special announcement about the future of the show – don't miss it! Get the full show notes and more resources at TheUniqueCPA.com

Rob Brown returns on Episode 292 of The Unique CPA to unpack, among many other things, what he calls the "alignment gap," the chasm between decisions made behind closed doors and what the rest of the firm actually sees, feels, and hears. When partners spend months absorbing a deal or preparing for a big change, and all staff get is a 30-minute town hall, panic sets in. Rob identifies three breaks: a time gap, a language gap, and a channel gap. Partners talk capital and succession, but staff rightly ask one question: "What happens to me?" Randy connects this to survey data showing that middle managers have been hit hardest by stress during periods of change, particularly the current one where that change is so rapid. Rob also lays out red flags that leaders miss when managing change: quiet town halls, the "meeting after the meeting," the subtle shift from "we decided" to "leadership has decided," indicating a lack of ownership, and discretionary effort quietly disappearing. And the biggest indicator, turnover, is a lagging indicator, because by the time someone resigns, they lost faith six months ago or a year ago. The fix starts with honesty and goes from there. Get the full show notes and more resources at TheUniqueCPA.com  

Randy and Terrell team up on Episode 291 of The Unique CPA, as each of them sat down with a returning BTG attendee at Bridging the Gap 2026 in Charlotte. Angela Jenkins found the conference through a tip from Nayo Carter-Gray, who told her it was the only accounting conference focused on wellness. She booked it that same day. Angela recalls the yoga room, the speakers who weren't parceled off from attendees, and the boundaries she took back to her remote team, like hours of operation between eight and four and no late-night client conversations. M. Katie Helle, a three-time attendee, tells Terrell why the conference's small size matters for networking, particularly for introverts, and raves about Jennifer Diamond's improv session that peeled back layers accountants rarely show at the office. She also shares the little workflow takeaways she picked up from Al-Nesha Jones' session, which didn't amount to a full overhaul, but rather a few aha moments she could implement the very next week. Get the full show notes and more resources at TheUniqueCPA.com

After 25 years in accounting and finance, Lisa Poslusny discovered that switching careers didn't switch off the pressure. The same overwhelm she felt juggling deadlines and deliverables followed her right into health coaching, which led her to mental fitness. On Episode 290 of The Unique CPA, she explains that mental fitness is not mere positive thinking, but rather, the ability to catch the unhelpful thought patterns that drive automatic reactions. Randy and Lisa dig into how the strengths that make accountants great, like high standards, analytical thinking, having answers for clients, being a trusted advisor, and so forth, can spill over into perfectionism and self-judgment that drain energy without producing better work. Lisa walks through what those patterns look like in real moments, like the accountant who glances at a client email at eight o'clock and feels compelled to respond instantly. But there is a simple alternative: ten seconds of focused attention to shift your brain out of stress mode. Get the full show notes and more resources at TheUniqueCPA.com

At Bridging the Gap 2026, James Donovan of the Accounting Leads Now Podcast sat down with Camden Bean, founder of Ping for a live conversation. Camden traced Ping's evolution from a basic note taker into a platform that detects upsell opportunities and generates proposals before a client meeting even ends, and told the story about the now-legendary ping pong ball jacket stunt that got the team escorted out of Intuit Connect. Suddenly, Randy crashed the conversation, accidentally becoming the first repeat guest on Accounting Leads Now, and forming the basis of Episode 289 of The Unique CPA. Randy shared the mistake of taking on every client when starting out and why leaning into a niche makes work stop feeling like work and more like what you "get to do" every day. Together, they push past "advisory" as a buzzword toward concrete playbooks, sales funnels built on real leads, and the reminder that as crazy as things may feel with AI, the robots aren't going to kill you. Get the full show notes and more resources at TheUniqueCPA.com

Okorie Ramsey built a legacy statement around six words: "To live a life that mattered." As Vice President of Sarbanes-Oxley at Kaiser Permanente and the first African American male to chair the AICPA, he's spent his career turning that philosophy into action. He launched the National Pipeline Advisory Group, grew accounting enrollment for three straight years, and brought HBCU students into the profession through the Balance Sheet Bash, among many, many other contributions. On Episode 288 of The Unique CPA, Randy and Okorie dig into the AI governance gap threatening the profession's role as trusted advisors, why the next generation of accountants needs more than technical skills to thrive, and what it means for seasoned leaders to shift from doing the work to pouring knowledge into those coming behind them. Okorie is also blunt about leaders who treat AI as someone else's problem, as well as about the point where staying in a role you've outgrown becomes its own kind of comfort and complacency. Get the full show notes and more resources at TheUniqueCPA.com

Douglas Slaybaugh has spent close to 10,000 hours coaching accounting leaders, and he's seeing something he doesn't like: partners drowning in chargeable work, admin, and meetings. They then don't have any capacity to do the one thing that actually matters, sit across from a client and talk deep strategy. He calls it the partner bottleneck, and it's pushing experienced professionals toward burnout and early retirement. On Episode 287 of The Unique CPA, Doug tells Randy that AI could be the fix, creating capacity at lower levels, but he fears firms will just fill that space with more compliance work, thanks to the same "Parkinson's Law" that has governed public accounting for decades. Doug further unpacks what faces accounting firms, like how "advisor" has become a pretty hollow, ill-defined buzzword if firms aren't careful to identify what it means to them. He also tells of a coming client retention war, with pricing pressure from above, below, and outside the profession entirely, which makes the current situation in the profession mission critical. The firms that figure out how to turn practitioners into true advisors will hold their clients, but the ones that don't may not. Get the full show notes and more resources at TheUniqueCPA.com

Most firms measure AI adoption by efficiency gains and dashboards full of green checkmarks. Jennifer Harrity, author of The Human Cost of AI, argues on Episode 286 of The Unique CPA that the real numbers worth tracking are psychological safety and burnout. Associates who once learned judgment through repetition now babysit AI agents instead, quietly losing the muscle memory that built professional skepticism in the first place. Managers absorb the overflow, catching hallucinated outputs while their own workloads climb 40% or more. Jennifer traces how polished corporate messaging about "freeing up time for higher-level work" collides with a workforce doing more, understanding less, and afraid to say so. Randy then connects this to survey data showing rising dissatisfaction even as productivity climbs, and together they map out what leadership grounded in honesty and psychological safety could look like, and why firms that teach fundamentals before automation will be the ones still standing when the dust settles. Get the full show notes and more resources at TheUniqueCPA.com

Tom Angelo started his career above a pizzeria, hired as the first staff accountant at a three-partner firm in New Jersey. He made partner at 28, built an IT services arm years before "digital transformation" became a buzzword, and eventually merged his own firm into HBK. Now its second CEO in 75 years, he's steering the company through Catalyst 2030, a strategy built around industry-led teams rather than geography. On Episode 285 of The Unique CPA, he and Randy Crabtree dig into how HBK weighs acquisitions, why cross-selling remains stubbornly difficult even with the right incentives, and what AI can and can't replace when it comes to clients who have built their businesses over generations. Tom also stresses that with new hires going forward, the focus should be far less on data entry, and far more on curiosity and client-facing comfort.  Get the full show notes and more resources at TheUniqueCPA.com