Introducing The Lifestyle Accountant Show with our host, Meryl Johnston.

Building team culture remotely with Karla Hourigan, founder of MAD Wealth.

How to avoid burnout and help your team set up great habits for remote work, with Tracey Newman CA and Product Manager, A2X.

Async Communication with Jack Thiel, Co-Founder of Early Adopters Hub.

Hybrid vs 100% remote teams with John Knight, founder of Business Depot.

How to work less and earn more, with Ryan Lazanis, CPA and founder of Future Firm.

How to build a lifestyle friendly firm with Nikole Mackenzie, founder of Momentum Accounting.

Invest in your remote workforce by running an epic team retreat, with Shaun Stubley, founder of Air Accounting.

Why your first hire in the Philippines should be a Manager with Isaac Smith, founder of TeamUp.

Lessons from a team that went remote, to in-person, and back again

with Natalie Lennon, Founder & Director, Two Sides

This episode is a bonus, solo episode where Meryl Johnston speaks about the hot topic of AI in accounting. She explores the advantages/disadvantages of AI, effects on team culture, as well as potential security risks involved.

This episode talks about working remotely as a digital nomad and the perks and challenges when running a firm using cloud technology.

In this episode we’re jumping back to a podcast recorded in 2018 about how we launched Bean Ninjas, created our own branding and website, and found a paying customer all within seven days.

Bonus Episode 2: Behind the Mic: Exploring Podcasting and Social Media with Blake Oliver.

This episode is a raw conversation about the breakup between the original co-founders of Bean Ninjas, Ben McAdam, and Meryl Johnston.

The episode was originally published on the TropicalMBA podcast and the hosts Dan Andrews and Ian Schoen have kindly given permission to republish it here.

In this episode, guest Jason Staats shares his journey from accounting firm owner to full-time content creator.

In this episode, we are talking about the art of saying no and other productivity hacks with Ryan Lazanis.

In this episode I’m chatting with Heather Smith about solopreneurship, micro firms, being a sole practitioner.

There are lots of terms for it, but it all comes back to wanting to run a small firm without a team.

Andrew Van De Beek shares his story of successfully navigating the end of a business partnership.

Does giving your team the opportunity to own equity encourage them to act like business owners?

Andrew Van De Beek has had 4 team members buy into Illumin8. In this episode, we walk through the details of each situation

In this episode, Jason Staats talks about making the decision to leave public practice. This was especially hard as it was a two-partner firm and he was one of the partners.

 In this episode, we chat with Matthew May. He’s a CPA who works with technology companies and the president of Acuity, a US based client accounting services practice.

In this episode, I chat with Christine Oliver about What It’s Really like to be a Partner at a Big 4 Firm!

Jason Andrew on wealth creation and holding businesses for the long term.

In this part 2 episode, we hear from Jason Andrew about acquisition opportunities in the accounting space.

In this episode, Sarah Parkinson walks us through three different acquisitions she’s made.

In this episode, We’re discussing why Tyler turned down a director role at a Big4 Firm and a partnership opportunity at a mid-tier firm and ultimately started his own firm.

In this episode she breaks down the process for us and shares some mistakes to watch out for in acquiring or selling a firm.

In this episode Meryl speaks with Alex Oxford, CMI from TaxValet. Alex is the founder and former CEO of TaxValet. These days he serves as their Visionary and Community Ambassador.

TaxValet is a bootstrapped sales tax services company with no investors or debt, which has scaled to about sixty employees.

This episode’s guest is Rob Pillans. He spent 10 years as an accountant at PcW and held leadership roles at several accounting firms including the GM role at Pitcher Partners in Sydney.

For the last 7 years, Rob has been running Planet Consulting which helps owners and managers run better accounting firms.

We’re focusing on leadership and management skills. We’re working through a series of challenging situations a new manager could face and discussing how to approach them.

In this episode, we’re talking with Luke Templin a CFO with a number of different businesses on the go.

Luke runs a CFO firm called A2 advisers, a software product called FinDaily and two newsletters. He also spends most Fridays doing something in the outdoors with friends. Usually golf or fly fishing.

Prior to building his own firm, Luke has grown three CAS/coaching lines into over six figures, including top-100 regional firm.

Today’s guest is Nicole Meloni from Connected Accounting. She’s generally not client-facing but runs all of the other areas to make sure the firm is running smoothly.

She recently ran a cyber security project which included cancelling their contract with an IT-managed service provider and bringing it in-house.

Having some kind of data breach at a firm would be terrible. I see it as one of the major risks in our industry and something that we should all be thinking about.

On today's episode, I'm talking to Kelly Chard who is the founder of GrowthMD, an accounting firm providing specialised services to medical practices.

Earlier in the year I heard Kelly speak about how GrowthMD uses a waiting list strategy and only runs ‘client intakes’ for new clients at certain times of the year and I knew I had to have her on the podcast to talk about it.

Yarty Kim and his wife made the difficult decision to pause growth at their bookkeeping and tax firm A4E so they could focus on family.

Yarty Kim is the Founder of Growthier, Co-founder of A4E (bookkeeping and tax services company), and Co-founder of FP&HEY after starting his career originally at a Fortune 100 company.

This episode has Isaac Smith join us to talk about the benefits of building an offshore team in the Philippines direct rather than via a managed service provider or BPO.

He also breaks down the key steps to get started with the ‘direct’ model and we also talk about why it is a myth that hiring direct is non-compliant.

In this episode I’m talking with Tyler Caskey from the Bean Counters about Business Partnerships, Buy In Price and Salary Transparency.

Tyler is an experienced CFO and Accounting Partner with a demonstrated track record improving or maintaining high performance Finance and IT functions.

Our guest this week is Amy Holdsworth, who is the founder of Clarity Street to talk all things Tech Stacks for Accounting and Bookkeeping Firms.

Amy started Clarity Street over six years ago after having the realisation that none of the individual software providers in the ecosystem had the time or the knowledge of how all of the cloud apps should be set up, to provide an efficient client lifecycle with clean dataflows between apps.

This episode is about public speaking: how to do it better and why it is an essential skill for every accounting firm owner.

Meryl shares her own perspective on this as well as chatting with multiple guests on the topic, including past guests Tyler Caskey and Heather Smith, as well as Producer of The Lifestyle Accountant Show and keynote speaker, Eleanor Carey.

Our guest this week is Jaclyn Anku, here to talk all things online courses, education and community for accounting firms.

Jaclyn is small business and accounting community enthusiast who has spent more than 10 years developing scalable, compelling initiatives at leading SaaS companies, honing her ability to drive a dual bottom line. When she’s not busy creating programs that educate, motivate, and break the mold, you can find Jaclyn around the Bay Area with her husband and two beautiful girls.

As an accounting firm owner, why is building your network so important? On this episode we hear from host Meryl Johnston as well as past guests to hear stories and strategies of how they have networked to get clients, attract team members, business partners both online and in person.

Our guest this week is Brannon Poe, the founder of Poe Group Advisors (PGA) who are brokers in the accounting firm space to talk all things M&A - from trends, to things that have gone wrong and everything in between.

This week’s guest is Electra Frost who has scaled an accounting firm and sold it down again, in the process moving out of the city and getting to spend more time on the things she’s interested in: blockchain, crypto and Web3.

This week’s episode features a fantastic acquisition story of a CPA firm in the Real Estate niche with guest, Rachel Fisch. Following the successful acquisition of RealtyTax, Rachel went on to scale her time down in the business to be able to take on a role as GM of Dext.

This week we have Leigh Cummings on the show sharing her story about selling her bookkeeping firm. She had been running it for almost 20 years, described it as her baby having nurtured, built and grown it from the ground up. We hear how Leigh made the decision to sell, how she navigated the process with her broker, lawyer, weighing up the different offers, all the way through the transition and what she’s doing now post sale.