The Growth Minded Accountant

Hosted by Lee Reams II from CountingWorks PRO

Business Education

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Episodes

137

Latest episode

Oct 2026

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EN-US

About the show

Hosted by Lee Reams II and CountingWorks PRO, "The Growth Minded Accountant" is your go-to podcast for independent tax and accounting pros ready to level up. We’re here to show you how AI, digital marketing, and cutting-edge tools — the kind that only the big guys had access to — can help you save time, win new clients, and keep your practice thriving. From leveraging AI agents to boosting ROI on every client interaction, we cover it all. Tune in to stay sharp, learn strategies that work, and make sure you’re always one step ahead. The playing field just got a lot more level — let’s go!

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60 recent

October 28, 2026Episode 4221 min

Your Tax and Accounting Firm's Website Works. But Is It Secure?

Your accounting firm's website is working. Your clients can access it. Your contact forms are functioning. Everything looks fine. But who's making sure the technology underneath it is actually secure? When critical PHP security vulnerabilities triggered emergency updates across the internet in October 2026, CountingWorks CEO Lee Reams woke up to an urgent Slack message from his DevOps team. They were already investigating the threat, reviewing infrastructure, and coordinating security updates. That experience raised an important question. How many independent tax and accounting firms actually know who's responsible for maintaining and protecting their websites? In this episode of The Growth Minded Accountant , Lee explores the hidden infrastructure behind modern websites, why an updated WordPress installation doesn't necessarily mean your server is secure, and how outdated technology can create unnecessary risks for your practice. He also examines a growing challenge facing the profession: protecting sensitive client information as artificial intelligence becomes more deeply integrated into everyday workflows. From website hosting and security patches to AI data minimization and vendor accountability, this episode is about something every accounting professional understands. Client trust. And why protecting it requires more than simply assuming somebody else is handling the technology. In This Episode, You'll Learn What the October 2026 PHP security vulnerabilities revealed about website maintenance. Why a functioning website isn't necessarily a secure website. The difference between updating WordPress and maintaining the underlying server infrastructure. Why accounting firms need to know who is responsible for security monitoring and emergency updates. How a compromised website could be used to impersonate your firm or target your clients. Three questions every accounting firm owner should ask their website provider. Why maintaining backups isn't enough unless you can actually restore them. How AI tools introduce new considerations around access to sensitive client information. Why data minimization, tokenization, and appropriate vendor protections matter. How to approach technology security without becoming an IT expert. Build a More Secure, Future-Ready Practice Your accounting firm depends on technology for more than marketing. Your website represents your firm. Your client portal supports important relationships. Your practice systems manage sensitive information. And increasingly, AI helps you work more efficiently and identify new opportunities. All of those capabilities depend on trust. CountingWorks PRO brings together your website, client experience, practice intelligence, and AI-powered workflows in a connected platform designed around the needs of tax and accounting professionals. Explore how CountingWorks PRO approaches security, client experience, and responsible AI. CTA: Explore CountingWorks PRO Security https://www.countingworkspro.com/security

October 22, 2026Episode 4150 min

10 Things Your Tax & Accounting Firm Should Never Have to Do Manually Again

How much time does your tax and accounting firm spend chasing documents, following up with prospects, sending deadline reminders, and checking whether work has been completed? Now multiply that across every employee, every day, all year long. The opportunity for AI isn't simply to make those tasks faster. It's to stop requiring your team to initiate them manually in the first place. In this episode of The Growth Minded Accountant , Lee Reams, CEO of CountingWorks, and Rebekah Barton, Chief Visibility Officer at CountingWorks PRO, explore 10 activities tax and accounting firms should be able to automate—and why AI agents are changing the way practices operate. From personalized prospect follow-ups and client onboarding to identifying advisory opportunities hidden inside your existing client base, Lee and Rebekah explain how intelligent automation can help firms become more proactive, responsive, and profitable. They also introduce a fundamental shift in practice management: Stop telling your software how to do something. Start telling it what you want to accomplish. Imagine asking your system to: Remind every nonprofit client about an upcoming filing deadline. Identify individual tax clients who still have missing documents. Find five clients who might benefit from tax planning or advisory services. Reengage dormant prospects who never scheduled a consultation. Show you what your firm accomplished automatically overnight. Instead of configuring every step, your technology increasingly understands the outcome, uses relevant context, and helps carry out the work. And importantly, AI doesn't replace professional judgment. It gives tax and accounting professionals more time to apply it where it matters. In This Episode, You'll Learn How AI can personalize and automate new prospect follow-ups. Why intelligent client onboarding should adapt to each client's needs. How to automatically identify and request missing tax documents. The difference between generic deadline reminders and context-aware client communications. How to reengage dormant prospects and former clients. How AI can analyze existing clients for tax planning and advisory opportunities. Why identifying an opportunity isn't enough—and how to turn insights into action. How automated review requests can strengthen your online reputation. Ways to deliver personalized marketing based on client circumstances. How a daily AI practice intelligence briefing can help you run your firm. Why keeping humans involved in important decisions is essential. Put AI to Work in Your Practice Your next competitive advantage isn't another dashboard or another software subscription. It's technology that understands your clients, recognizes opportunities, and helps your firm accomplish more without adding more manual work. With MAX Automations and MAX Practice Intelligence, CountingWorks PRO is helping tax and accounting firms move beyond managing tasks toward intelligent, outcome-driven practice management. Explore MAX Automations https://www.countingworkspro.com/max-automations Start with one outcome. Build from there.

October 7, 2026Episode 4037 min

6 Ways to Help AI Recommend Your Firm and Prospects Trust It

Your website says you understand your clients. Where’s the proof? A prospective client may hear about your firm through a referral, find you online, or ask ChatGPT, Claude, or Gemini for help choosing an accountant. Before reaching out, they still want answers: Have you helped someone like me? Who would I work with? What happens after I hire you? What do your clients actually say? In this episode of The Growth Minded Accountant , Lee Reams and Rebekah Barton, Chief Visibility Officer at CountingWorks PRO, explain six ways tax and accounting firms can make their expertise easier to understand, verify, and trust. They share an example of a construction-focused firm whose website communicated its specialty clearly but lacked the supporting evidence needed to strengthen the recommendation. Its positioning told one part of the story. Missing reviews, client examples, and process details left important questions unanswered. Lee and Rebekah walk through how professional bios, verifiable qualifications, clear onboarding expectations, client stories, honest reviews, and outside contributions can fill those gaps. Those details serve two purposes: they give AI tools more useful information to draw on when researching your firm, and they help prospective clients feel comfortable taking the next step. Getting recommended gets you considered. Building trust helps you get chosen. In This Episode, You’ll Learn The difference between explaining your specialty and demonstrating your experience. How to describe the problems clients bring to you in language they recognize. Why real photos, meaningful bios, and verifiable qualifications matter. How onboarding, meeting schedules, and pricing information reduce uncertainty. What makes a client story useful, even without a dramatic savings number. How detailed reviews add the client’s perspective to your marketing. Why your professional profiles should tell a consistent, current story. How articles, interviews, webinars, and industry relationships make expertise visible beyond your website. A simple exercise to test what AI says about your firm and identify missing information. Find the Gaps in Your Firm’s Story Your experience may already be there. The opportunity is to make it easier for someone researching your firm to see it. Start your Future Firm Blueprint . Our team will review your firm’s positioning and visibility, identify gaps and opportunities, and provide a practical roadmap. Start Your Future Firm Blueprint

September 30, 2026Episode 3940 min

3 Website Pages That Turn Referrals Into Clients — and Help AI Recommend Your Firm

A referral used to be enough. Someone mentioned your name. The prospect called. The relationship started. That is not how most buying decisions happen anymore. Today, a prospective client may hear about your firm from a trusted friend, business owner, attorney, or financial advisor—and then immediately research you online before ever making contact. They visit your website. They read about your team. They compare firms. Increasingly, they may even ask ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, or another AI assistant whether your firm is a good fit. And if your website does not clearly communicate who you help, why you understand them, and what working with you actually looks like, a referral you already earned can quietly disappear. In this episode of The Growth Minded Accountant , Lee Reams and Rebekah Barton, Chief Visibility Officer at CountingWorks PRO, break down three website pages that many tax and accounting firms overlook: Who We Help. Your Bio. How We Work. Each page answers a different question running through a prospect’s mind: Do you understand someone like me? Can I trust the person I’m going to work with? What happens if I say yes? Lee and Rebekah explain how firms can use these pages to turn expertise into visible evidence, reinforce referrals, reduce uncertainty, create stronger positioning, and give both prospects and AI systems a much clearer understanding of who the firm is built to serve. Because most firms do not have an expertise problem. They have a visibility problem. In This Episode, You’ll Learn: Why a referral is increasingly the beginning of the buying process rather than the end The three website pages many tax and accounting firms are missing Why a Who We Help page can be more persuasive than another generic list of services How to describe clients using their actual problems instead of accounting terminology Why positioning does not have to be limited to an industry niche How a stronger professional bio creates trust before the first conversation Why credentials alone rarely make a memorable bio How personal experience and professional expertise can work together without oversharing Why every important client-facing professional should have a meaningful bio What a How We Work page should tell prospective clients How explaining your process can reduce uncertainty and make it easier for prospects to say yes Why websites should demonstrate expertise instead of simply claiming it How connected pages, stories, examples, FAQs, and content create stronger evidence for prospects and AI systems Why clearer positioning may improve your chances of being understood and recommended in AI-assisted search And then I would make the Future-Ready Firm Blueprint the primary conversion link immediately after those resources rather than burying a generic demo CTA: Get Your Future-Ready Firm Blueprint

September 23, 2026Episode 3844 min

AI Knows Tax Law. But Does It Know Your Client?

AI is getting remarkably good at tax research, document analysis, summarization, and identifying patterns. But knowing the tax law is only part of the equation. The harder question is whether AI understands enough about the individual client to recognize what actually matters. In this episode of The Growth Minded Accountant , Lee Reams is joined by Mike Gleeson, Director of Tax Intelligence at CountingWorks PRO, to explore the next evolution of AI for tax and accounting firms: client intelligence . A tax answer can change based on seemingly small differences in a client’s facts. The same is true for advisory opportunities. A business sale, retirement decision, real estate transaction, income change, financing need, or unresolved conversation may completely change what the professional should be thinking about. That is where context becomes critical. Lee and Mike discuss how modern AI systems can combine tax intelligence with client history, documents, prior conversations, financial information, and other signals to help tax professionals recognize opportunities that might otherwise remain buried inside the firm. They also explore why AI-generated information should not all be treated the same. Firms need to distinguish between verified facts, estimates, and AI-inferred information , while maintaining appropriate consent, professional review, and human judgment. The goal is not autonomous tax advice. It is better preparation. Better context. Better questions. And ultimately, better decisions. Because AI may know the law. Client intelligence helps it understand the situation. And the professional still decides what to do. In This Episode, You'll Learn: Why knowing tax law is not the same as understanding the client How small differences in client facts can completely change a tax answer Why specialized tax intelligence can outperform a generic chatbot for professional work How AI can organize client history, documents, conversations, and financial signals How firms can identify advisory opportunities before clients know to ask Why personalized client intake may replace generic questionnaires How smaller firms can use AI to deliver a deeper level of service without adding equivalent headcount Why verified facts, estimates, and AI-inferred information must be clearly separated How consent and data-use rules affect client intelligence Why professional judgment must remain at the center of the process CountingWorks PRO Platform Learn more about MAX Practice Intelligence, AI Workflows, client context, and the broader CountingWorks PRO platform. Explore the platform

September 16, 2026Episode 3734 min

Everyone’s Afraid of AI Agents. Here’s What They Actually Do.

What AI Agents Really Look Like Inside a Tax & Accounting Firm AI agents are suddenly everywhere. So are the predictions about what happens next. Some envision autonomous systems replacing huge portions of human work. Others imagine AI wandering through businesses making decisions nobody authorized. The reality inside a tax and accounting firm is much more practical. In this episode of The Growth-Minded Accountant, Lee Reams and Rebekah Barton break down what an AI agent actually is, how firms can control what it sees and does, and where professional judgment still belongs. The most important distinction may be the simplest: Capability is not permission. An AI system may be capable of drafting an email, analyzing a tax notice, reviewing client information, identifying an advisory opportunity, or preparing work for a professional. That does not mean it should automatically have permission to send the email, make the tax decision, access every client record, or execute the recommendation. That is where architecture, permissions, security, and the human in the loop matter. The model Lee and Rebekah discuss is not autonomous professional judgment. It is autonomous preparation. The machine prepares. The professional decides. And when that distinction is understood, AI agents become much less about replacing accountants and much more about giving professionals a level of context, preparation, and client intelligence that was previously impossible.

September 9, 2026Episode 3641 min

Stop Scaling Accountants. Start Scaling the Firm.

How Tax & Accounting Firms Can Grow Without Adding Complexity at the Same Rate as Revenue For decades, the basic growth formula for a tax and accounting firm was fairly predictable: Win more clients. Hire more people. Add more software. Try to make everyone more efficient. It works, until it doesn't. As firms grow, something unexpected often happens. The most experienced people in the organization become the bottleneck. More client work creates more questions, more reviews, more exceptions, more supervision, and more decisions that eventually work their way back to a partner. Revenue grows. But so does partner drag. In this episode of The Growth-Minded Accountant, Lee Reams and Rebekah Barton explore a different way to think about scaling a tax and accounting firm. The question isn't simply: How do we make our accountants more productive? It's: How do we design the firm so growth doesn't require complexity, headcount, and partner involvement to grow at the same rate? AI is part of the answer, but this isn't simply an episode about AI. It's about building a better operating model: allowing technology to prepare work, capturing institutional knowledge, using client intelligence to identify opportunities proactively, standardizing repeatable processes, and reserving your most valuable human talent for the decisions where professional judgment actually matters. The principle is simple: AI prepares. Humans decide. And the goal isn't to remove people from the firm. It's to stop making your best people the operating system of the firm.

September 2, 2026Episode 3547 min

Does Social Media Actually Grow a Tax & Accounting Firm?

Why Social Media Is Becoming Part of Your Firm’s Trust, Referral, Search and AI Footprint Most tax and accounting professionals aren't trying to become influencers. They're busy serving clients. Many already generate business through referrals. And spending five hours a week creating Instagram posts or learning the latest TikTok trend probably isn't high on the priority list. So the skepticism is fair: Does social media actually help grow a tax and accounting firm? In this episode of The Growth-Minded Accountant , Rebekah Barton, Chief Visibility Officer at CountingWorks PRO, is joined by Alex Lue, VIP Account Manager , to look at social media from a much more practical perspective. Social media isn't about chasing followers or becoming internet famous. It's about creating visibility, familiarity, trust and authority before someone needs your services . And that role is expanding. Prospective clients may see a LinkedIn post, watch a YouTube video, hear about your firm through a referral, check your reviews, visit your website and increasingly ask ChatGPT, Gemini or another AI system about you before ever reaching out. That means your social presence is becoming another part of the evidence people, search engines and AI systems use to understand: Who are you? What do you know? Who do you serve? And should I trust you? Rebekah and Alex break down how tax and accounting firms can approach social media without turning marketing into another full-time job. The goal isn't to be everywhere. It's to become known before you're needed.

August 26, 2026Episode 3437 min

Why the Future of Accounting Firm Marketing Is a Living Website, Not More Content

For years, tax and accounting firm websites followed a familiar pattern. Design the website. Launch it. Add some service pages. Maybe publish a monthly article or newsletter. Then leave it largely untouched until the next redesign. Templates made websites more affordable, but they also created another problem: thousands of firms began looking and sounding remarkably similar. The same service descriptions. The same stock photography. The same tax articles. The same promises about being a “trusted advisor.” Now AI has introduced a third possibility. Instead of publishing the same content occasionally, firms can publish enormous amounts of it almost instantly. That sounds like progress. It can also become AI slop at scale. The opportunity with AI isn't simply to produce more content. It's to build a website that continuously understands what the firm knows, who it serves, what it wants to grow, what its clients are asking, what is changing in the market and where new opportunities are emerging. In this episode of The Growth-Minded Accountant, Lee Reams II and Rebekah Barton explore why the traditional accounting firm website needs to evolve from a static digital brochure into a living growth system. The shift is from: Static website → Living growth system Content calendar → Opportunity engine Generic information → Demonstrated expertise More content → More relevant content Because when everyone can publish unlimited information, the competitive advantage isn't the ability to create content. It's having something worth saying.

August 20, 2026Episode 3345 min

The New Tax & Accounting Marketing Funnel Has No Funnel

How AI Is Compressing Awareness, Consideration and Decision Into One Conversation For decades, marketing followed a fairly predictable funnel. A prospective client discovered a problem. Searched Google. Read a few articles. Visited several websites. Downloaded a guide. Received a few nurture emails. Checked reviews. Compared firms. Eventually, they scheduled a consultation. AI is beginning to compress that entire journey. Today, a business owner can ask ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity or another AI assistant: “I own a construction company doing $4 million a year. My accountant handles my taxes but doesn't do much proactive planning. Am I missing opportunities? What should a proactive advisor do differently? What should that cost? And which firms near me work with businesses like mine?” One conversation can move that prospect through awareness, education, solution research, consideration, comparison and due diligence. The funnel hasn't disappeared psychologically. It's being compressed technologically. And that creates an important new reality for tax and accounting firms: The prospect can now self-nurture. In this episode of The Growth Minded Accountant , Lee Reams II and Rebekah Barton explore how AI is changing the traditional buyer journey, why website traffic may become a less complete measure of marketing success, and why firms increasingly need to think about whether they are understandable, provable and ready when a high-intent prospect appears. The bigger shift is simple: The funnel didn't die. Our control over it did. And the firms that adapt should focus on three things: Be Present. Be Provable. Be Ready.

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