Dawn Brolin doesn’t talk to anyone before 10 a.m. or after 4 p.m.
After 28 years of running her own accounting firm, the CPA and host of Financial Cents’ first virtual session in the Proudly Small series has stopped apologizing for the fences she’s built around her workday. And she opened the panel by asking four other firm owners what they’ve stopped doing, started doing, or changed since going into business for themselves—with a specific emphasis on the tweaks that have made tax season a little less chaotic each year.
What followed was 60 minutes of conversation that pointedly avoided the usual the usual tax-season-survival fodder. No one overhauled anything or rolled out a five-step total transformation framework. Instead, Katie Helle of Scaled Accounting Solutions, Laraine Hutcherson of Strength In Numbers Co., Angela Jenkins of Mindfull Money Matters, and Christine Salvatore of In Line Management talked about the small, yet powerful shifts they’d made in the off-season to make tax time a bit more survivable (dare we say even pleasant?).
Missed the webinar or want to re-live the magic? Watch the full recording here.
A few common themes emerged throughout the conversation that are worth paying attention to now, while the memories of Tax Season 2026 are still fresh. After all, as Dawn put it, “After a few weeks, the tax season nightmare starts to wear off. It’s like giving birth. You’re like, ‘Oh, that wasn’t so bad.’ We don’t want amnesia to set in and forget about what just happened.”
Now is the time to debrief
Better tax seasons don’t start in January. They start the week after the previous one ends—with a structured, brutally honest look-back at how it went.
Angela’s firm wraps this process into what she calls an “after-action report,” a term her admin (a military wife) borrowed from base operations. As things happen during the season—a client misses a deadline, a hand-off goes sideways, a process breaks—raw notes are logged immediately. After the busy season is over, those notes inspire changes to the standard operating procedure for clients going forward.
Katie’s team holds a company retreat in the off-season to debrief and start mapping out the next year. Laraine, whose firm now has 15 people, has created a multi-stage debriefing process that starts with an anonymous Google Form asking staff for their perspective on “the good, the bad and the ugly.”
Laraine doesn’t want her staff members to pull any punches. “I want to know, ‘What are you still crying about? What do you need more help with?’” she said. After collecting all the surveys, Laraine and the rest of the leadership team sift through all the feedback during a retreat in early March.
The piece most firms skip, she warned, is the diagnostic step after the venting. “Just because we know what is going wrong doesn’t mean we know why it’s going wrong,” she said. Fixing the problem requires more than simply identifying it. You also have to translate it into action: providing better training, implementing better tech, designing a better system, etc. And it’s important for those actions to happen ASAP so your team has the bandwidth to focus on them before things pick up again.
Boundaries built in the summer will be the strongest come February
The panelists had plenty to say about the importance of setting boundaries with clients, and they all agreed that the time to draw those lines is now—not when you’re already underwater. That way, the boundary can become a normal part of how your firm operates rather than a panic response.
Angela, for example, used to think she had to be available to clients every day. Now she takes meetings Tuesday and Wednesday afternoons from 1–3 only. No Fridays—and no giving out her cell number. She actually installed an old-school landline in her home office to serve as her business phone.
Laraine extended the no-Friday-meetings rule to her entire staff, not just leadership. Her reasoning, perhaps counterintuitively, is protecting the next week’s productivity. If your team takes meetings on Friday, she argued, Monday becomes a catch-up day for everything they missed, and they start their week already behind. She also cautioned against making yourself overly available in general.
“If you make yourself available, someone will schedule your time,” she advised.
Katie’s approach is overcommunication on the front end so the boundary holds on the back end. Her firm sends an explainer video with every client proposal, runs a series of email campaigns in the lead-up to tax season that explain what clients can expect, and routes all communication through Financial Cents’ client chat. Phone calls are off the table from the beginning.
Christine has layered in a hiring-and-training process designed to make busy periods less stressful for staff. As a self-described people-pleaser who tends to hire other people-pleasers, she and her team sometimes struggle to draw boundaries with clients. So, she trains them on a mantra she repeats often, especially during the busy months.
The bottom line is that boundaries are essential—and it’s essential to set them during the calmer parts of the year. Because once tax season rolls around and everything feels like it’s on fire, you won’t have the energy to create a boundary in the moment. You can only enforce the ones you already have.
Expectations begin with your team and trickle down to your clients
One of the sharpest reframes of the entire panel came from Laraine: “I actually think the expectation is better set with your staff than with your clients,” she said.
Her reasoning is uncomfortably true. You can tell clients that your standard response time is 24 business hours. You can even put it in the proposal and the engagement letter bearing their signature. But the moment a client decides their issue is an emergency, that 24-hour window evaporates in their mind—unless your staff has been trained to hold the line.
Laraine’s playbook for her team: respond within the promised window, but remember that the response can simply communicate when you’ll have an answer; it doesn’t have to be the answer itself. And if a staff member does reply to an email outside of normal business hours, Laraine tells them to schedule their response to send the next morning. Otherwise, you’re setting the expectation that you will respond to their messages at 9 p.m.
Angela has built expectations directly into her client contracts—and those expectations go both ways. At renewal, for example, clients initial in three separate places to acknowledge what materials they owe her firm and by when. If documents aren’t delivered, she invokes the 30-day termination clause.
The best time to fire a draining client is yesterday
No one takes on a client with the expectation of having to part ways with them. But unfortunately, it does come with the territory of running your own firm. And ignoring signs of bad fit almost always leads to problems down the road—something Christine certainly learned the hard way.
She once had a client who paid monthly and on time for the majority of their two-year engagement. Then, they started slipping, falling a month behind, then two. She followed up diligently but only got partial replies. Still, she assumed the relationship was solid enough that the situation would resolve eventually. Unfortunately, it didn’t, and she ended up taking the client to small claims court.
Three wins and three appeals later, she had a court order saying the client owed her the money, but by then he’d moved states and she wasn’t able to enforce it.
The panelists all agreed that difficult clients never become easier in the throes of tax season. Instead, they almost always get worse. So, it’s much better to nip the relationship in the bud early if you know it’s going to drag down your staff. After all, as Christine advised (quoting one of her mentors), “It’s so much harder to find a good team member than it is to find a client.”
That principle now drives how she decides which clients to keep on her roster. If a client is straining a good staff member she’s already invested in, the client goes.
Of course, firing an accounting client is easier said than done. Angela was blunt about how hard it can be emotionally. “I cried the first time I had to fire a client,” she said.
When separation is the best path forward, Katie and Laraine both stressed the need to document everything, preferably in writing, so when the conversation happens, you’re working from a record, not just your memory. (And so if legal action does become necessary, you have a paper trail to back up your case.)
At the end of the day, if you need to end a client relationship, it’s much better to pull the plug in July, August, or September than it is to wait until January or February. That way, you have the bandwidth to do it cleanly, replace the revenue if you need to, and start tax season with a roster of clients who actually respect your firm’s time.
If you’re considering letting a client go, you may be interested in our Client Termination Letter Template for Accounting Firms.
“Better” isn’t bigger; it’s balanced
When Dawn asked the panelists what a better tax season actually looks like, none of them said “more clients” or “more revenue.”
For Katie, better means manageable. During tax season, that’s three tax drop-offs a day, Tuesday through Thursday, with no overtime for her or her team. “I got burnt out, and what’s better for me is not doing that,” she said. “I have a seven-year-old involved in activities and I want to be part of that.”
Laraine’s firm doesn’t do returns, which means their deadlines are hard; their files have to be handed off to CPAs on time. That can put a lot of pressure on her team. So for her, better means a well-supported staff. Care packages go out in the third week of January. Overtime is restricted by policy, and it’s pushed up to leadership whenever possible.
Christine’s version is narrower and deeper: curate the client base, grow with the clients she likes, and expand into more services instead of chasing new logos. “I’m focusing more on growing what I already have,” she said. “Then word of mouth spreads.”
Angela’s version is a calmer start to the year. If her team does its job well every month—keeping clean books, organizing all their documentation, and handing everything over to the CPAs on time—then January takes care of itself. “I know the work is going to get done,” she said. “It’s more about how is it going to get done?”
The common thread: to define their version of “better,” each firm owner worked backwards from what they truly wanted out of their life, whether that’s more time with their family, a healthy team culture, work they enjoy, or a peaceful start to the year. Then, they reverse-engineered their processes and policies to deliver it.
One thing to do this week: map out the what, why, when, and how
Dawn closed by asking the panel for their suggestion on one thing every firm owner should do this week to set themselves up for a better tax season in 2027, before the memories of 2026 begin to fade. While totally unplanned, their answers formed a single, sequential framework:
- What: Talk to your team. Find out what worked and what didn’t during the last tax season, in their words. “Owners aren’t always in tune with the problems,” Katie said. If you have a team you want to keep, that conversation should be the foundation for everything else.
- Why: Don’t stop at identifying the problem. Pinpoint the cause, too. “Just because we know what is going wrong doesn’t mean we know why it’s going wrong,” Laraine emphasized. The diagnosis determines whether the fix lies in training, tech, a new system, or a process change—and it usually takes time to put into place, which is why it’s important to start sooner rather than later.
- When: Don’t wait. Schedule it now. “I love summer because we slow down with client interactions,” Angela said. “No one wants to talk to us in July and August.” Her recommendation: do this work between the Fourth of July and the second week of August, before the busy fall season and the back half of the year fill in. “Plan it now because it’s already June!” she advised.
- How: Map out what needs to happen from now through the end of the year, client by client and month by month, so that when January comes, you’re ready to go. “Know what you need to build out every month to keep it clean for a smooth handoff come tax season,” Christine said.
Dawn added one more piece of advice: relearn your tech. “When you’re in the thick of it, you put off learning new features,” she said. But tools like Financial Cents add improvements all year, and the off-season is when firm owners actually have the capacity to absorb them. “Tech might have solved for your problems already,” Dawn explained.
The Proudly Small series continues
Dawn wrapped up this session with a closing line that underscored the mission behind the Proudly Small series itself: “Small firms are the backbone of accounting, period. Just like small businesses are the backbone of America.”
This was the first of four sessions. The next one, “Charge What You’re Worth and Keep Clients: Pricing, Positioning, & Onboarding,” happens on June 4 and tackles the operational decisions that determine, long before tax season, which clients you end up with in the first place.
Check out the full session description and save your spot here. Hope to see you there!
And be sure to visit our full Proudly Small hub to read more about the firm owners on our panels and add your firm to our Wall of Small Firms.
