From Chaos to Clarity: Kenji Kuramoto on Leadership, Churn, and Scaling an Accounting Firm That Lasts

If you’ve ever felt the tension between chasing growth and craving calm, Kenji Kuramoto’s journey is a playbook in hard-earned wisdom.

At WorkflowCon 2025, Kenji, founder of Acuity, opened up about the mistakes, pivots, and deep lessons learned over two decades of building, nearly breaking, and ultimately exiting one of the most innovative accounting firms in the US.

When Growth Becomes the Enemy

Kenji set the stage with radical honesty: even after selling his firm and stepping off the treadmill, he found the loudest chaos wasn’t external deadlines or team drama, but himself. The drive, the chase, the next experiment—these, he admitted, are double-edged swords for entrepreneurial leaders.

“I realized I was the biggest agent of chaos in my own life. The noise wasn’t just clients or Slack, it was me.”

This insight became the first “aha”: chaos is inevitable in firm-building, but when growth outpaces structure, chaos morphs into existential risk.

The Growth Phase: All Gas, No Guardrails

Kenji’s first act was classic startup: rapid client acquisition, a sales team that ballooned to nearly a third of the company (mostly fresh grads hungry for commissions), and the giddy thrill of a new client every day. The energy was infectious, but cracks appeared fast.

Despite revenue popping, cash flow dwindled. This was because Acuity was experiencing the leaky bucket problem: every new client cost more than they brought in, due to rampant churn. They didn’t just experience onboarding hiccups; they had clients leaving months before they broke even. The root cause was traced to a complete lack of retention systems. Burnout spiked, rework multiplied, and one day, Kenji had to face the music: the only way out was layoffs.

“I had to sit down and tell people that because of a mistake I made, they were the ones who had to leave. It was 100% my fault.”

Lesson #1: Growth creates chaos. If you’re not tracking churn, you’re flying blind.
Even for analytical accountants, it’s easy to obsess over new clients and ignore the back door. Kenji warns: “Don’t make the mistake we did, track retention, and start early.”

When Copycat Systems Create New Chaos

Licking their wounds, Acuity tried to get serious about scaling. Here, Kenji dropped one of the most counterintuitive insights of the talk: scaling and growth are not synonyms.

• Growth: All about new revenue, energy, and experimentation; little structure, high chaos.
• Scaling: Focused on margins, repeatability, process, and consistency.

Kenji, the visionary founder, admits this transition was uncomfortable. He felt forced to slow down, design processes, and, importantly, look outside accounting for solutions. They borrowed from SaaS, creating a customer success team staffed with outgoing non-accountants, launching NPS surveys, and layering on shiny new tech, but reality bit back.

The new hires struggled with the technical complexity of accounting. Clients were confused, and team members felt buried in dashboards, not relationships. The software, which was perfect for SaaS, was clunky and unfamiliar to accountants. Most painfully, the firm lost touch with what made it unique: technical depth, trust, and relationships.

“You can’t just copy someone else’s playbook and expect it to fit. Scaling only works when systems fit your actual culture and needs.”

Lesson #2: Copying trends is tempting, but best practices from other industries can backfire.
Kenji’s team learned the hard way that you can’t bolt SaaS culture onto a relationship-driven service business.

Clarity: When Systems and Culture Finally Align

Having lived through both kinds of chaos—too little structure (growth) and the wrong structure (scaling)—Acuity hit its stride only when it ruthlessly filtered out what didn’t fit.

Here’s what changed:

• Relentless focus on retention: Not just tracking churn, but dissecting why clients left, segmenting by service and cohort, and giving the sales team strict guardrails on ideal client profiles.
• Empowering technical staff: The people closest to the client problems got the authority (and autonomy) to solve them, cutting through bureaucracy.
• Independent QA: A “red team” to hold the firm’s own work to a higher standard than even clients expected.
• Listening as a discipline: Leadership’s job shifted from experimenting to communicating (during scale), and finally, to deep listening; detecting patterns, steering by signals, not noise.

Lesson #3: Sustainable growth is about intentional systems, ones that match your DNA, not someone else’s.

The Maturation of Leadership

Perhaps Kenji’s most striking reflections came as he described what calm leadership really means. For years, chaos was a proxy for importance; the busier and more essential he felt, the better. But true clarity meant stepping back, trusting the systems and the team, and only intervening when it truly mattered.

During Acuity’s eventual exit, this posture was key: the leadership team made strategic, non-reactive decisions, keeping the firm humming even while entertaining buyers, a process Kenji describes as “exhausting, but only possible because we’d built in calm.”

A Human Ending: The Ongoing Practice of Clarity

Kenji closed on a deeply personal note. Even after selling his firm, life is not a beach. Family struggles, new ventures, and personal loss brought fresh chaos. His advice was humble and clear: the “practice” of clarity never ends.

What does this mean for you today?

• Start tracking client churn, even if you’re small.
• Borrow ideas, but rigorously adapt them for your firm’s true strengths and culture.
• Build systems that empower your people, not just collect data.
• Practice listening by filtering for signals, not just reacting to noise.
• Understand that calm is not the end goal, but the foundation that lets you make wise, resilient decisions when chaos inevitably returns.

TL;DR:

Kenji Kuramoto’s keynote was a masterclass in scaling an accounting firm without losing your soul or your sanity. If you’re running faster than your systems, or patching together best practices from other industries, stop and ask: do your systems serve your people and your purpose? The clarity you crave is on the other side of intentional systems, ruthless filtering, and calm, listening leadership.