The Third Layer Tax and Accounting Firms Are Missing

‍Intro

Welcome to the Growth Minded Accountant Podcast, where our experts share best practices on running your firm in the digital age. This podcast is brought to you by CountingWorks PRO. Let's get started.

Lee Reams II

Welcome to another episode of the Growth Minded Accountant Podcast. My name is Lee Reams II. I am the founder and CEO of CountingWorks, and I want to be the first to welcome you to 2026. This is our first podcast of the year. And believe it or not, Rebekah, who is my guest, our Chief Visibility Officer, this is season six of the Growth Minded Accountant. I can't believe we've already been doing this for five years. Is that crazy?

Rebekah Winters Barton

That is wild. It's great.

Lee Reams II

So that is the good news. We've built quite a following. We've had tens of thousands of people download our content. In the past years, we've been talking a lot about AI and how it's going to affect the industry and the profession. Today's topic is going to play on that, but I'm also going to start defining some things that we're seeing in the marketplace: the pain points that I'm hearing from our clients, what we see on LinkedIn, and what we see in our Growth Minded Accountant Reddit channel.

I'm going to give it a title here: the third layer, the hidden system most accounting firms don't know they're missing. What do you mean by that, Lee? I'm going to get into it. It's the client experience layer. I'm going to give you the full background, and I'm also going to talk a little bit about what I see now as the AI fear narrative. I'm going to address that. There are a lot of really good high-level talking points here.

Every accounting firm and every tax pro firm has three layers, but most run on only one or two. I'm going to explain that. It usually means tax prep or practice management tools, and then they have a missing layer. That missing layer is the reason your firm feels harder than it should to run. That's why you're running out of time. That's why you have clients that ghost you. That's why you have clients where you're thinking, why did I pick this client? Why am I working with them?

So let's start with a simple idea. Every tax and accounting firm has these three layers, but almost every firm owner that we talk to runs their business only on two of them. That missing layer is the one that makes everything—your onboarding, your client communication, your branding, payments, and client management—feel harder than it should. Today we're going to talk about the layer most tax and accounting firms were never taught to see but absolutely need to run a modern, profitable, low-stress practice in 2026.

Before I jump into this, I've broken this down like I usually do into different sections. Rebekah, I'm going to bring you in with client experience and hearing straight from the person who talks to our clients every single day: what they're seeing, what's working, what's not, and what their challenges are. But before I get into this, I don't know if it's because it's 2026 or because of what's going on in the world right now, but there is a ton of fear out there. I call it the AI fear narrative and what I think growth-minded accountants should understand about all this noise and how they should absorb and analyze what they're hearing.

The fear narrative we're all hearing is that AI will replace most jobs. Elon Musk has been out very notably lately because he's just raised $20 billion for his AI tool. He's also trying to drive the Tesla stock price and his robot narrative as much as possible because they just got overtaken in EV sales and cars. So there are reasons these people are out there using the internet and amplifying their messaging to make sure everyone hears it, so they drive their own results. But they're also trying to drive their narrative and their points of view on the world.

I'm a contrarian, I guess, in some respects. I believe society takes much longer to transition from one way to another. And it isn't just society. There are risks, laws, social pushback, power issues, water issues, you name it. So it's never as smooth as these predictors say. What are the loudest voices saying? AI will replace most jobs. Robots will do accounting. Universal basic income is inevitable. Professional services are obsolete. Knowledge businesses are obsolete. I heard Elon say robots are going to be doing surgery in three years. As awesome as these claims might be—and will they be there in the future? I 100% believe that—they come from people building the technology itself.

Elon Musk, Nvidia, and others are deeply embedded in the capability side of AI. If you notice, they are investing in each other's companies. So there's a lot of self-dealing going on. Of course, they're going to keep trying to sell this because they have to keep the money coming. In order to deliver on these promises, a huge amount of capital needs to be invested. That doesn't make them wrong. It makes them very one-dimensional. People closest to the technology often underestimate the friction of society. Maybe we're closer to it because we're in a friction profession like accounting. We're very wary of everything. We see the pushback more than anybody. It's taken us two years to get a big portion of our clients to start trusting AI tools themselves, let alone training them on how to use them.

Capability versus adoption is a big deal. AI capability is advancing fast. No one can say it's not. But adoption does not move at the same speed. Just because someone is forcing something on you doesn't mean people are going to start using it. A huge part of the population in the United States has no idea what AI is even about. They just hear what they read in the New York Times or snippets on TikTok. Between what works and this idea that it replaces a profession, there are serious walls: regulation, liability, insurance, client trust, cultural norms, professional accountability, institutional inertia, and more.

Regulation also goes into what you're seeing in the entertainment industry, videos, the use of news articles, copyright issues, state regulations, federal regulations around AI. It's all over the place. Technology moves very fast, but society moves very slow. Professions move slowest of all, and I would say tax and accounting firms might be the slowest. There's no sudden robot takeover scenario in regulated, trust-based fields like accounting. History teaches us a lot of this. Every major technology shift followed the same arc. There was fear, and there is a lot of fear right now. Rebekah, how much fear is out there right now?

Rebekah Winters Barton

Immense fear. But I think you're right. Every technological shift and every shift ever has come with friction. Even looking back at history, steam engines scared people. Rail travel scared people. Everything new is scary at first, and then it eventually becomes less scary. We are definitely seeing a lot of fear still. I think this is so different from a lifestyle standpoint, and it's creeping into every aspect of people's lives. So it's causing more friction than perhaps some other types of technology would, because it affects day-to-day life in such a huge way.

Lee Reams II

I think part of what feeds that fear is exaggerated timelines. I'll give an example. I think it was 2016 when Elon said all cars would be self-driving. We're to the point where we have supervised self-driving cars right now. My Tesla has the ability now to do it. I have friends who totally trust it and say it's the greatest thing ever, but that was 10 or 12 years ago. We're still at the very beginning of that. Is that another 10 years before it's complete? Is that a 20-year process? What you're hearing today in the media, with Elon saying three years, two years, this year, is a big deal.

Keep following these talking points. You have task automation and role evolution. I think that is a huge part of this. I have a friend who is in the financing business, and they're concerned they're going to be eliminated by AI. I'm like, whoa, you're the client-facing person. You're there to make sure that the machines, instead of the underwriters who may have delayed you or put roadblocks in front of you, can expedite that in faster ways. In reality, you're probably going to be empowered to do more lending faster. Your job might even be easier. But the firm itself may cut or replace some jobs with automation tools and AI. There are always new winners. I like to think the tax and accounting firms that jump on this will be those new winners.

Computers didn't eliminate accountants. And accountants are still using old Windows machines. Spreadsheets didn't eliminate finance teams. The internet didn't eliminate advisors. These tools eliminate low-value work and undifferentiated firms. If you're a commodity and you're saying the same thing everyone else is saying, you're going to have a serious problem standing out. They also eliminate firms with no client experience. Technology doesn't eliminate a profession. It eliminates firms that fail to adapt.

So what is AI actually changing in the accounting space? AI is not primarily replacing judgment, trust, or accountability. Who is auditing the AI agent, for example? It is compressing time. We're seeing that now. It's automating repetitive tasks, which is wonderful. I think everyone would love that. It's raising client expectations. It's exposing weak systems. It's rewarding clarity and consistency. That leads to the real shift. The real risk isn't AI. It's the missing layer, and that's what we're here to talk about today.

Rebekah, I know you're excited. You're probably wondering if I'm just going to talk the whole time. The good news is I'm not, because my voice is already going out. So most firms are already overinvested in work-layer tools, like tax prep, accounting software, payroll, and team layers, which are things like Jira, Trello, workflow, and task management. They are completely underinvested in what we're going to talk about today: the client experience layer. AI doesn't break firms. It reveals where firms are incomplete. AI, to me, is a stress test. Firms with a client experience layer will pass. Firms without one will feel crushed.

We see this every day online in conversations that are happening. People talk about clients who ghost them for an entire year and don't come back until December. But if you had the client experience layer dialed in, expectations would have been set. Periodic touch points would have been set. They couldn't ignore you. You've already positioned it. The firms that don't do this are the ones feeling like they don't have enough time in the day to deal with the clients they already have. You're attracting the wrong kind of client.

Why does fear-mongering miss this opportunity? Fear focuses on replacement. My colleagues are all talking about being replaced. We're all going to be on universal income and sitting on our devices all day watching Netflix. That sounds fun. Growth focuses on leverage. The firms that win in the AI era will own the client relationship. They're going to control communication. Remember, this is your moat. They're going to systemize onboarding. They're going to centralize trust.

What I mean by that is, as AI grows as a tool, all that data about your client should be in one ecosystem that your AI can read and use for proactive recommendations, perhaps even answering questions from your clients automatically. You can centralize all of this as one big knowledge base about your client. You can identify opportunities you wouldn't have seen before. Maybe there's a tax planning strategy. Maybe there are clients who aren't saving in 529 plans but should be because they have children. AI is going to be able to proactively recommend this, and then with tools, you'll be able to send out a proposal or communication saying, hey, you should be doing this, and this is why.

It also helps you tell a clear story and deliver a predictable experience. These are human experiential advantages, not computational ones. AI raises the floor. Your experience raises the ceiling. Our firms, hopefully the Growth Minded Accountant followers, should not be asking, will AI replace accountants? Instead, ask, which firms will feel easier to work with? Which clients trust instinctively? Which firms are visible to AI search? And which firms have a system clients can feel? That's where the opportunity lands.

AI won't replace accountants. It will expose firms that never built a client experience. Here's where we set the stage. What is the hidden friction in firms? Now we're going to jump into more of what this client experience looks like. I don't think most firms are broken. They're not just doing something wrong. They're running an incomplete operating system.

Tell me if this sounds familiar. Client messaging happens everywhere: emails, text, someone using Dropbox, and all these different tools. You send out a proposal and it sits unsigned. Then you have to chase it. What's the problem? Did it get delivered? Was it easy to pay? Or they approve a proposal, but now you bill them through QuickBooks. Payments trickle in, so you have cash flow issues. Clients don't pay you or don't pay you upfront. Onboarding takes way too long. There's too much human labor and too many admins involved. You're constantly repeating the same instructions over and over again. Everyone can feel that: feeling reactive instead of in control and running the whole year as if tax season never ended.

These aren't necessarily people problems. They aren't workflow problems. They are system problems caused by a missing layer. That layer, Rebekah, is the client experience layer. Let's define the three layers. The work layer is where the compliance happens: tax software, bookkeeping systems, and payroll tools. It gets the work done. The second layer is the team layer: workflow, task management, and practice management. This is how your team stays organized so you can handle engagements, client communications, and know what phase a tax return is in, for example. The third layer is the client experience layer, which almost nobody has. That's where onboarding happens. That's where communication happens. That's where payments happen, proposals get signed, messages flow, scheduling happens, clients understand their path, your story gets told, and visibility gets built. It's the layer clients actually feel, and it's what's missing in almost every firm.

Rebekah, I want you to start explaining what you see when you meet a client and try to explain what this is all about. Usually, what you see is a commodity. I don't own a position. I don't have any processes in place. I just go to work. That's obviously the problem we're trying to solve and get more people to jump on board. How do you go through these discussions with our clients when you're onboarding them, defining how they get out of that mess and into something more systemized?

Rebekah Winters Barton

A lot of what we talk about, especially when people get on the phone and say, I'm a generalist, which I hear sometimes 20 times a week, is that we really start to hone in on, okay, maybe you think you're a generalist, but are you really? A lot of the time, what we find over the course of our discussion is that there are a lot of things that set them apart.

When we do onboarding, one of the lines I say on almost every call is, we want to tell your story. We know tax and accounting firms can all sound very similar online. Can you tell me one thing that will help people connect with you or understand what your firm is really about? That's the moment when the light bulb usually goes on and they realize, oh wow, I actually do have something different or unique.

That becomes our jumping-off point. From there, we start to build on how we tell a story that is your story: your firm story, not someone else's firm, not a general commodity firm, but what makes you different, what you bring to the table, who you serve, and what your core services are. We usually try to hone in on three to five core services that this particular firm offers that makes them different or that they're really good at. We don't want dropdowns of 10 to 15 things. It's so important, not only for search but for user experience, to offer something that is honed in and shows expertise.

I think that's a huge difference between Google and AI systems. While Google valued expertise in the sense of authority, AI really values expertise in the sense that you're putting into the internet ecosystem exactly what you specialize in and exactly how you can help people in a way only you can. So we go through a lot of discussion about what really sets you apart as a firm, because there's always something. Sometimes we just have to work through getting people to the point where they recognize that they are unique and not just providing a commodity service.

Lee Reams II

Right. And this goes straight into what the broken element of the client experience layer is in most firms. They are not attracting the type of clients they want to work with. That's the client who isn't listening to anything you give them for 11 months, and then in the 12th month, everything is a fire drill to get done. That is on you. You didn't set the expectations in your marketing collateral. You didn't set the expectations in your engagement letter or proposal, saying this is what you're responsible for and this is what I'm responsible for.

When does that aha moment come with our clients when they start thinking things through differently? They realize, wait a second, I'm complaining about everyone. They're all complaining about the same problems. I don't need to market. I'm too busy. I have more clients than I could ever deal with. But what's the problem there? Explain when people realize maybe this isn't the way I should be running my firm.

Rebekah Winters Barton

It's a little different for every firm, but a lot of what we do on the back end of CountingWorks PRO within Dashboard is geared toward the client experience layer. A lot of times, when we start going into playbooks—our automated drip campaigns for those unfamiliar with the system—or we start talking about narrative and telling your story, that gets a lot of people once they realize it's important to attract the right clients in the first place.

To your point, Lee, a lot of people think putting generic content out into the world is somehow going to magically attract clients, and that's just not how it works. Everybody and their brother has a website. Unless you are setting yourself apart in some way and showing clients what you do differently, then you are going to just be a commodity. I think that's one of the keys to the client experience layer that we haven't really touched on too much: showing people what you do differently and who you are.

That's part of the client experience. From the time they first visit your website, they need to know who you are, what you do, and what sets you apart from competitors in your area or field. I think the aha moment for people often comes when they start to see all these pieces come together visually within our system. If I have this story, I can send this marketing campaign, and that connects to this playbook, and that connects to these social media posts, and then we turn on blog automation. All of a sudden, you have this entire client experience layer that has proposals built in and engagement letters built in that they've never had before. It all clicks into place like puzzle pieces. Seeing everything come together as we go through the system and explain it is that moment for most of our clients.

Lee Reams II

What I'm trying to get across is that I'm not trying to sell CountingWorks PRO right now. I'm trying to explain that the client experience layer is made up of these little elements you can add. It starts with your branding, positioning, and narrative. How does the internet and the world see your firm? That's going to help you attract the clients you want to work with and start setting expectations.

But in order to have that client experience continue, it needs to fold straight into that first proposal that comes out. You've already given the talking points. You've said, this is how we work. Are we right for each other? Put that language inside your proposal and engagement letter. Even the way you do intake forms should be systemized. That makes it scalable and repeatable. Without this client experience, it gets clunky all of a sudden.

Now you have a client and they're dealing with your seven or eight different tech stack tools that you use to work with clients. I store files here. I do my workflow here. Clients email me here. I have tax planning software here. I have all these different tools. Most likely they don't speak to each other, or if they do, they're hard to learn. Your staff has a hard time understanding them and learning them, meaning they don't use them the way they should. More importantly, your clients, who are not seeing you on a regular basis, can't handle these complex software products and figure out where to go.

I just got an email from our CPA firm, and they literally listed six different products they're using. Which one do I trust when I get an email from this one? Did they say they use ShareFile versus Canopy versus Dropbox? I can't remember. Then I get a phishing email from my accountant and I open it, and I'm like, oh. So there's a lot of clarity needed there. That's why we're trying to understand how this client experience comes in, because that is the layer that's missing.

A lot of this stuff is done manually, or the communication is scattered. Bottlenecks occur normally. Clients become the delay point at times. You're chasing things. You're always reacting versus having a system that goes through. Nothing feels predictable. The firm is doing the job of three systems while only running on two. That is the source of the overwhelm. That's the realization, the aha: there are three layers. Oh my God, that explains everything. That is why tax season feels insane. That is why advisory always gets pushed off.

I think this is very important because part of the client experience layer should include automated, outbound, ongoing, year-round upsell campaigns to your client base. Whether that be tax prep clients to tax advisory, you're doing soft-sell blog writing, outbound emails, social media posts, and newsletter articles. Rebekah, explain why advisory is very hard to sell for most firms. They may see an opportunity only when they're talking to clients, but life happens year-round. People have life events and experiences year-round. If you're not already positioning yourself, how long does it take for someone to say, wait a second, advisory might be right for me? Then they start reading articles or seeing social posts, and it speaks to them. Why is that so effective?

Rebekah Winters Barton

I was going to jump in here and bring up segmentation. Segmenting your client list is so important, and it's something we still don't see a lot of people doing. It can be a massive game changer for you from an upselling standpoint. Life does happen all year, but different clients have different needs and different things happening.

If you have people who are near retirement, for example, they're going to have different needs than people who have kids getting ready to leave for college, or people who are selling businesses or starting businesses. It's really important to be in communication with these clients all year long so that you stay top of mind. You become the person they go to when they need financial advice. They're not going to the internet. They're not going to TikTok. They're not going to their mom. They're going to you because they trust you, because you've been in their inbox and on their social feed.

The more you can do to stay top of mind and provide relevant information to these different groups of people, the more you can become an advisor without even trying to, because they're going to trust you to give them the advice they need to reach whatever financial goals they have. They've been seeing this valuable, pertinent information in their inboxes, on their feeds, and on your website all year long.

That's where firms that really embrace what we're talking about today stand out: year-round touch points that other firms, just tax prep commodity firms, simply don't do. I think this is maybe one of the most important things we're talking about today from an implementation standpoint. It's not hard or challenging to implement a lot of what we're discussing right now, but having more marketing features, more email campaigns, segmented newsletters, and targeted social posts is going to play a huge role in your advisory business moving forward.

Lee Reams II

I'm going to go into the mentality that most firms have when they look at growth. Some might look at it as more marketing, more referrals, better workflows, new software, or even adding staff. But I think the growth layer and what we talk about when we say client experience is this: Apple used to be the example, and Amazon is probably the best in client experience right now. They have nailed the entire shopping experience and every pain point. They have made it so convenient that it is just second nature. You don't even think about spending money. You just go to Amazon, order stuff, and it's there the next day or same day. They have completely revolutionized the e-commerce side of the world.

When we talk about client experience, you're doing the same thing for your practice. This is the layer that controls how many referrals you're going to get. If you're excellent, overdelivering, and responsive, you're going to get more referrals from current clients. If you're top of mind, sending newsletters, communicating well, and proactively giving advice, you're going to retain more clients. They're going to be easier to upsell because they trust you. Your client satisfaction scores are going to be off the charts.

More importantly, your turnaround time improves. You're going to be so much more responsive because AI tools and systems are going to do so much more than they did before. You're not going to wait three or four days to reply to a client. Your perceived value goes up, and you can charge more. Your brand becomes more remarkable and more referable, and your capacity increases.

It's the one layer clients actually interact with, and that's what everyone in the tax accounting space forgets. People say, look at my tech stack. We had someone come in as a prospect and say, how does your platform replace these 12 tools? I guarantee you that staff doesn't know how to use all those tools. They have them because they think they need them, but they're not actually utilizing them. More importantly, how is that delivered to the client? That's the client experience. That's where the real value is.

This is the only layer that differentiates you, especially as knowledge becomes commoditized. The client experience is the thing that keeps moving your business forward. The work layer does the work. The team layer organizes the work. The client experience layer drives the business.

AI makes this even more urgent. We're in 2026, and let's start with the big transformation we saw in late 2025: AI search completely reshaped how people refer accountants to others and how they're introduced. AI doesn't read keywords. AI reads identity. AI looks for firms with a story, a niche, a point of view, and a clear experience.

If your firm does not have a narrative or client experience, you're not feeding these AI tools your story. You're invisible to humans because they're on ChatGPT and you're not being referenced there. You're also invisible to the search algorithms. Narrative becomes infrastructure. Rebekah, we've walked around this, but what are the things we're seeing that move the needle and get our clients involved in those conversations? Reviews, case studies, FAQs, that kind of stuff.

Rebekah Winters Barton

Geolocation is huge. It's been huge and remains huge. We want to see you putting out content that's localized. There are all sorts of ways you can go about this, whether it's social posts pertaining to your local area, blog posts pertaining to your local area, or the top 10 tax tips that dentists in Minnesota need to know. That kind of thing can be really helpful when it comes to AI.

Another thing we're seeing is the FAQ page. If you don't have an FAQ page on your website, you're already behind. AI references FAQ pages all the time. Gemini, Perplexity, ChatGPT, they all love frequently asked questions pages because they answer very specific questions. Sometimes they're questions people are actually searching, and they provide very clear answers that the AI system can easily understand. It can say, hey, I know this is the right person for my user based on this information. That's really key.

Having a cohesive story across multiple platforms is also important. Within my industry, we call it multi-channel. Multi-channel would mean your social media profiles say the same thing as your website, which says the same thing as your profile on Medium, NewsBreak, or TaxBuzz, and that says the same thing as your bio on a place where you've guest blogged.

Having a cohesive narrative that says, hey, this person specializes in working with pediatricians in Dallas, they have 25 years of experience in the tax and accounting space, and they're looking forward to serving modern pediatric firms that are looking for tax and accounting advisory, can differentiate you. Use that terminology everywhere across the internet. Make all your content relate back to this core idea, and you're going to be in really good shape from an AI search standpoint moving forward this year. It becomes the building block.

Lee Reams II

I was going to say, Rebekah, you nailed it. Explain or continue on the idea that AI knows the searcher. It has memories of what this person is all about. So when you put in those terms—the exact niches, services, experience, designations you have—it starts matching what the person is asking for. Someone might say, I'm a small business owner looking for QSBS stock help, and the AI will look for correlations around who can help this person with that complex setup. If you have all this content created and it's in your narrative, the AI starts matching. It's like a dating algorithm. That is the one takeaway everyone needs to understand: you need to have more information, not less. The best way to test that is to ask AI or ChatGPT about your firm and see if it says what you think you are. Explain how you help our clients communicate that to AI engines.

Rebekah Winters Barton

One thing to remember is that AI knows the searcher in a way that no other type of algorithm ever has. The more personal information you're willing to put on the web, the more likely you are to get recommended because you're showing personality.

As an example, I love Star Wars. My AI knows that I love Star Wars. I was recently looking up restaurants and put nothing about Star Wars in the prompt, and it recommended a Star Wars-themed pizza place to me because it knew I loved Star Wars from past conversations.

That's something to remember: these threads talk. Someone might have 50 threads in ChatGPT, but the memories are all in one place. If you love fly fishing, for example, and someone who loves fly fishing is searching for a small business accountant, and you happen to be a small business accountant who enjoys fly fishing, you are very likely to be recommended to that client based on things that seem completely irrelevant to your business because it knows their interests and thinks you might be a really great fit.

The takeaway is not to be afraid to put personal things on the internet. You don't have to get crazy personal or tell people your kids' names, but expressing your hobbies, your love of travel, or your love of certain activities can be a really great way to get recommended. Nobody is really thinking about it, but it works because the system knows its user. If you align with that user in ways you might not even be thinking about, you're going to stand out much more to the AI system. That's another direction we can go and something important I talk about with clients when they're reticent to give us information.

Lee Reams II

Awesome. That's the best example we've given, and I think it really breaks it down. We've walked all around why firms should install and invest in the client experience layer. What changes immediately when you do this? Onboarding collapses from days to minutes. You save hours and hours, and the labor component alone more than pays for any software you're using. More importantly, communication starts centralizing. You can start putting all this context in one brain.

This is important because AI systems in closed platforms like ours can look at this data and say, based on KPIs, growth rates, missing elements, age, demographics, industry, and profession, these are the things that likely connect, and these are strategies this person might want to do. That opens you up to advisory on steroids. Proposals get signed. They don't get left in the ecosphere. Payments happen automatically. Clients stop checking in to see if you're working on things because they're in a process and they can see the structure. They know they're in the review stage or wherever they are.

It starts freeing up those two or three extra check-ins that you have to reply to if you want to be responsive. Otherwise, you start looking non-responsive. Advisory becomes doable. It becomes part of your process. Tax season stops feeling like trench warfare and everything starts becoming more predictable. Firms that do this are not necessarily smarter, luckier, or better staffed. They just have all three layers, and that completes it. That's going to make you a very successful firm.

Most accountants think running a firm is supposed to feel really hard. With AI, if you're using it, it's not. It only feels hard because you've been running it without this layer that holds everything together. Again, I want to remind you that this is your moat. Private equity firms have learned this. They're buying up firms and trying to commoditize everything, and they're wondering why clients are leaving or why clients are upset. Your relationships are your moat. Invest in them. Protect yourself. Do not let AI tools, tax prep tools, or bookkeeping automation tools replace you. You want to expand your advisory services. You want to become more valuable.

The moment you start seeing the three layers working, you won't go back. I think we've covered this. I hope I've communicated it as well as we could. I wanted to address a couple of things. The AI fear narrative needed to be addressed, so I may have gone a little off script. But I hope we have figured out what this client experience layer is all about.

I always look at it as all your client-facing digital touch points and how that goes to your back end. Is everything super simple to learn? Do you need 30 days of training for your staff to understand software? Don't use it anymore. AI should be able to do things intuitively. You should be able to prompt your software and it creates an output. I should be able to say, hey Max, I want to create a proposal for a CPA firm, and I'm doing CFO advisory services. They're located in San Diego. They have three dental offices. They're doing around $12 million in revenue. I want to have a very comprehensive review that includes their individual tax prep, etc. I just did a prompt to Max. Max would create that proposal. I could review it, make a change, click send, and it's off to my client.

I could also create an engagement letter that automatically kicks out with the same language and talks to them as a dental professional. Then, when that's signed, I have an intake form. What may have taken hours and hours is truncated into minutes. More importantly, your client experience is that much better. Think of all the time you're winning back. This is a system, not just a tool. It's a system that gives you your time back and, more importantly, your control.

The work layer gets the work done. The team layer keeps your staff sane, hopefully. Right now, the team layer is one of the biggest battles because of clunky software. I'm hearing that from more and more people. I think AI-built, AI-first tools are going to start replacing all that. The client experience layer is the layer that finally gets your firm to run the way it was meant to. I'm hoping 2026 is the year accountants stop running barefoot and start getting into the full capabilities of what advisory, AI, and this technology change can do for them.

That is our first episode of the Growth Minded Accountant for 2026. It was a long one, and it's setting the tone for a lot of things. We're going to start breaking down even more details. I think just the takeaway from Rebekah on how AI sources who they talk about based on the content you're putting out there paid for your time today. Whether you're working with CountingWorks PRO or not, go look at your own content. Rewrite it. Make sure it's really answering every question a user would have.

Think about this: ChatGPT, in some ways, becomes a salesperson for you. The more information you're putting out there for it, the more FAQs, questions, answers, preferences, types of clients you work with, and how you work, the more it can see. The more transparent you are, the more likely it's going to match you with more people. Think of it as a dating app in some ways.

That is a wrap on this first episode. Again, thanks for all the commentary. Whether you agree or disagree, I love the banter. If you have not joined us on the Growth Minded Accountant Reddit, you may not be a Reddit fan, but there's a lot of really good information. Think of it as an ongoing forum where we're posting a lot of takeaways, free strategies, and tools. There's nothing salesy on it at all. Go to Growth Minded Accountant and definitely start following it. Again, thank you for being a listener. We look forward to engaging with you all year in 2026. Please spread the word, and hopefully you gained a lot of intelligence from this. Thank you.

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