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.

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.

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.

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.

Matt Armanino traded a law career and a stint at PeopleSoft for the CEO seat at Armanino, a top-20 firm he once never imagined joining. He tells Randy on Episode 284 of The Unique CPA that nearly two decades later, he’s steering almost 3,000 people through what he considers the largest technology shift of his lifetime. Focusing on AI’s effect on billable hours, Matt explains why his firm shifting to value billing years ago, long before generative AI made it an absolute necessity. Culture, he says, is the real differentiator once technical knowledge becomes cheap, and Matt traces Armanino’s “build anything” philosophy back to a Peter Drucker quote and a Pat Lencioni exercise that took a full day to answer one question: “Why does Armanino exist?” Curiosity as a career advantage and a firm-wide bet on becoming indispensable rather than replaceable round out a discussion about what accounting looks like once knowledge stops being scarce and you have to differentiate yourself more than ever.

The first thing we learn on Episode 283 of The Unique CPA is that Randy has real trouble saying the word “multidisciplinary.” Once we’ve worked that out, we learn that his guest Mike Payne built his career on a bet that most professionals avoid: pairing a law degree with a CPA license instead of picking a lane. That combination became the foundation of BOSS Advisors, a firm he grew to $2 million before recognizing the ceiling of his own skillset. Rather than force growth he wasn't suited to drive, Payne sold the firm to Haga Kommer, a Midwest-based multidisciplinary group with plans for an employee stock ownership structure. Now serving as Chief Growth Officer, he's applying the same generalist philosophy that built his practice, and he argues that AI makes broad issue-spotting more valuable and accessible than narrow specialization, since professionals who can flag a problem can always bring in the right expert to solve it. Mike unpacks the mechanics of merging a law-and-accounting practice, the ethics rules that shaped it, and what business owners should weigh before selling to a larger platform.

Randy Crabtree sits down with Justine Lackey, founder of The Incubator, on Episode 282 of The Unique CPA. Justine originally built one of the earliest virtual bookkeeping firms out of necessity, long before “remote,” or even anything besides QuickBooks Desktop, became standard practice. Their conversation moves from the mechanics of scaling and selling a firm to the grief that follows a successful exit, and the anxiety that lingers even when everything goes right. Justine breaks down her four-S framework — systems, service, sales, skills — and makes the case for choosing the "right size firm" instead of chasing growth for its own sake. Threaded through it all is a shared conviction that accounting’s stress gets ignored far too often, and that the profession’s future depends less on compliance work than on the relationships built along the way.

Half of all offshoring relationships collapse within five years, and Anshul Agrawal has spent his career figuring out why. Randy Crabtree sits down with the founder of June15 Consulting on Episode 281 of The Unique CPA to unpack the real difference between renting offshore talent and owning it outright, as well as how that distinction shapes everything from culture clashes to client trust. Anshul explains why a “family emergency” means something entirely different in India than it does in the U.S., why firms chronically underestimate how long it takes an offshore hire to reach full productivity, and how AI will serve to expand the offshore talent pool, rather than shrink it. He reveals heartwarming anecdotes about everyone winning in these offshoring arrangements: what happened when one client’s new hires gave him back his evenings with his kids, and what it looked like to double an employee’s salary and watch him buy his first car. It’s a conversation about building teams that actually work for everyone, wherever they’re located.

Randy Crabtree sits down with Luke Frye, who’s gone from hand-stamping journal entries as a small-town government accountant to scaling Bench to thousands of customers, running his own firm through a messy business divorce, and now advising practices at Canopy. Their conversation on Episode 280 of The Unique CPA keeps circling back to a single, uncomfortable question: What actually makes a firm valuable, as opposed to just busy? Luke argues that key man risk, not revenue, is the real threat to most practices, and that hourly billing quietly rewards inefficiency while punishing the AI tools meant to help. He pushes clients to charge what they’re worth instead of discounting out of fear, and to build systems, like a real CRM, that let a firm run without its owner chained to it. Randy’s own transition out of the company he built nineteen years ago and into advisory adds real-world weight to the discussion. It’s a candid look at pricing, succession, and the mindset shifts firm owners tend to avoid until it’s too late.

Change has never moved this fast, and accounting firms are feeling it everywhere: AI eating into bookkeeping and tax work, private equity reshaping ownership, generational splits over who’s willing to adapt. Matt Rampe, a change management specialist at Rosenberg Associates, joins Randy on Episode 279 of The Unique CPA to break down why partnership structures built for consensus often become anchors when speed matters most. He argues real transformation happens person by person, through vulnerability and trust rather than mandates from the top. While in theory, smaller firms can pivot like speedboats while giants struggle to turn, Matt points out that larger firms have their own advantages too, but both agree that billable hours must give way to value, tax preparers must at least consider becoming advisors, and that it takes a bit more than just an edict from above on “modernizing the firm” to get partners and associates alike past “that sounds great, but I’ve got a day job.”

Randy Crabtree steps away from tax season and toward retirement from Tri-Merit, joining forces with Jeremy Clopton of The Upstream Leader for a crossover conversation on Episode 278 of The Unique CPA. AI dominates firm conversations right now, but Clopton argues the real anxiety comes from chasing an uncertain future instead of holding onto what won't change: being the protector of public trust. That anchor reframes everything from staffing fears to succession planning. They dig into leadership structures at growing firms, the false choice between serving clients and running the business, and why hiring managers instead of developing them rarely works. Private equity and M&A come up too, with the two sharing a conviction that independent firms aren't going anywhere, and that the choice between selling, scaling, or staying small comes down to knowing who you actually want to be. Randy closes by dismantling the doom-and-gloom narrative around recruiting, pointing to rising enrollment numbers as proof the pipeline is healthier than the algorithm-driven headlines suggest.

Dr. Rachel Anevski quit high school at 16 and attended three different colleges to get her bachelor’s degree, then built an independent consulting practice for 13 years before folding it into Winding River Consulting this year. On Episode 277 of The Unique CPA, she tells Randy that the move rattled her more than she expected: she fought the firm’s processes, demanded to know the reasoning behind every new system, and found herself living, even sweating out the change management principles she’d spent a career teaching others. That tension runs through her explanation as to why the accounting profession keeps failing its own people through transitions. From partners who dismiss AI because they won’t be around to see its impact, to seniors whose formative years were scrambled by a pandemic no one prepared them for, there are many pitfalls you won’t see until the ground below is approaching. She traces her philosophy on succession back to a mentor’s blunt instruction to train your replacement, and pushes back hard on the idea that partnership has to mean sacrificing a life outside the firm to earn it.

Randy Crabtree and Terrell Turner team up to co-host Episode 276 of The Unique CPA, previewing what’s coming July 28th at Bridging the Gap 2026 in Charlotte. Four years in, the conference has moved past simply naming burnout and connection as problems worth discussing, with the focus now turning to implementation: accountability structures, longer workshop formats, and the potential for speakers to linger and chat with attendees in the future instead of disappearing once their time on stage is over. Tying directly into a session on loneliness at the top, Terrell reflects on his newly promoted manager, who quietly absorbed weeks of team burnout rather than raise it, feeling exactly the kind of isolation hits so many leaders, and reminding him how topical and on the nose BTG is every year. There’s a session Randy’s son is speaking at, which he’ll admit up front he’s a little biased about, and when talk turns to the gala’s NASCAR theme, “The Winner’s Circle,” they decide that there will be multiple winners this year, with scores of folks playing the roles of pit crew to each other, all of them just trying to help the next person get further down the road.

Small business clients are increasingly showing up to their accountants armed with AI-generated answers, and Ariege Misherghi thinks that's actually an opportunity. A Senior VP at BILL, Ariege has spent years watching the relationship between accounting professionals and their clients evolve, and she sees the current moment as the clearest stage yet for accountants to demonstrate what a professional truly brings. On Episode 275 of The Unique CPA, she and Randy also dig into what “AI native” actually means at BILL, why auditability is non-negotiable in financial automation, and why Ariege's number one piece of advice for AI-fatigued firms is to stop reading every email and start with one problem worth solving.

Scott Showalter has spent more than 50 years in accounting, with 33 of them at KPMG, the last 22 of which were as a partner. Since 2008 he’s been bringing that experience into the classroom at NC State’s Master of Accounting Program. That unusual vantage point gives him a clear-eyed read on the talent pipeline debate: On Episode 274 of The Unique CPA, he pushes back on some of the doom-and-gloom narrative, pointing to graduate school applications up 72% nationally last year, and credits much of NC State’s own steady enrollment to actively recruiting career-changers, including a Broadway makeup artist and a PhD violinist who found their way to accounting in search of stability. Host Terrell Turner also covers with Scott what firms get wrong when they recruit on campus and the limits of internships as a proxy for real work. They also look at why AI in accounting education is less about replacing fundamentals than about rethinking how those fundamentals get taught, and who’s ultimately responsible when the technology gets it wrong.

Randy is put in the unusual position of being a guest on his own show at Bridging the Gap 2025, as Terrell Turner sits down with him just hours after a keynote that left much of the room in tears. On Episode 273 of The Unique CPA, our final entry in this special Bridging the Gap series, Randy talks about his speech, which was years in the making and drew on pivotal moments from Randy's early career, including a firm where he was nothing more to them than a billable hour and the contrasting leadership that shaped everything that came after. There’s also a lot of focus on BTG itself and what it’s grown into. At the heart of it all is Randy's conviction that accounting can be the greatest profession there is, and that changing the culture, not just the workflows, is how we get there.

Terrell Turner sits down with Lisa Simpson of the AICPA, who leads the organization's Transforming Your Business Model initiative, live from Bridging the Gap 2025 on Episode 272 of The Unique CPA. Lisa makes a compelling case that the old model, with its long, billable hours where firms carry too many of the wrong clients, is not only unsustainable, but actively unnecessary. Firms that have right-sized their client base are almost universally earning more the following year, not less, because they can finally deliver the kind of advisory value clients will actually pay for. She traces how the pandemic's visible toll on practitioners sparked a broader reckoning inside the AICPA, and how that translated into concrete tools, peer stories, and low-cost resources now available to firms of every size. Lisa also touches on the cultural inertia that slows change down, and why technology is making that resistance increasingly hard to justify.

Recorded live at Bridging the Gap 2025 in Denver, Randy Crabtree sits down with founder of LiveCA, tech commentator, and full-time glamper Chad Davis for a wide-ranging conversation that captures exactly what makes BTG different from every other conference on the calendar. On Episode 271 of The Unique CPA, Chad talks about why he rerouted his entire week just to be there, and the two get into the real tension Randy is wrestling with: how do you grow something without killing the thing that made it worth growing in the first place? Shifting to Chad’s upcoming session on what accountants should actually care about in tech right now, they discuss the mental health dimension of overwhelm that rarely gets named, and why having an operating framework like EOS changes what you actually do with the ideas you pick up at a conference. A candid and camp-themed conversation.

Recorded live at Bridging the Gap 2025, Terrell sits down with Questian Telka, co-host of the She Counts Podcast and a late-diagnosed ADHDer, for a conversation that goes well beyond the typical conference interview. On Episode 270 of The Unique CPA, Questian talks candidly about what it meant to finally receive her diagnosis as an adult, the moment she describes as “my whole life makes sense to me now,” and how understanding her own brain became less about labeling herself and more about having a user manual. She moderated a panel at BTG where three highly successful CPAs reframed ADHD not as something they succeeded in spite of, but often because of, like a “superpower.” It’s a perfect example of what Bridging the Gap does differently from other accounting conferences, and why the profession needs these conversations happening at all times, not just once a year in a hotel ballroom.

Continuing the conversation at Bridging the Gap 2025 in Denver, Randy Crabtree sits down with Krystal Joiner from the conference’s marketing team on Episode 269 of The Unique CPA for an honest look at what goes into making BTG what it is. Krystal talks through the months of behind-the-scenes planning that attendees never see, and why the relaxed, connected energy on the conference floor doesn’t happen by accident. The tone, she explains, gets set long before anyone lands in Denver, through social media, sponsor relationships, and every touchpoint along the way. There’s also a candid moment about what it feels like to finally arrive at an event you’ve spent half a year building. With BTG Charlotte on the horizon, Krystal is confident the best is still to come: “We just get better.”