Business Advisory

From Bottleneck to Breakthrough: Reorganizing Your Accounting Firm

7 min read

Apr 24, 2025 8:00:00 AM

Arriving first, leaving last, and reviewing every client document—sound familiar? For many accounting firm owners, this cycle creates a bottleneck that limits firm growth and takes a personal toll on your well-being.

In a recent episode of "Who's Really the BOSS?" podcast, Rachel and Marcus Dillon share how they transformed their $3 million firm, Dillon Business Advisors, from an owner-dependent operation into a scalable business.

**If you would like to receive CPE for the podcast episode related to this article, visit Earmark CPE.

From Bottleneck to Breakthrough: Reorganizing Your Accounting Firm

"The most common bottleneck in accounting firms? It's got to be the owner," explains Marcus. "The only way that owners solve for the bottleneck is they work more. Your car is the first one in the parking lot, it's the last one to leave. If you're virtual, you're the first one booted up and the last one out."

By reorganizing your firm with a structured "team of three" approach that assigns clear roles and responsibilities, you can transform yourself from your firm's biggest constraint into its strategic leader. Let's explore why owners become bottlenecks and how to break free from this cycle.

Why Owners Become the Bottleneck

Many owners operate under what Marcus calls "the fallacy that everything has to be done by you because you do it better than everybody else." This mindset leads to questions like, "Why would I train somebody when they might do it wrong or take twice as long as me?"

There's also comfort in staying within the structured world of accounting. "Out of everything in life that's uncertain, accounting has to equal and has to work," Marcus explains. "Maybe some people just want to feel secure in that little puzzle rather than break outside where life can get messy."

Rachel adds a practical perspective: "Owners just don't know who to delegate to and how to empower that person." Team members may appear too busy or seem to lack the right skill set or experience.

The Dillons experienced this firsthand. Their organization chart resembled a web with Marcus at the center—every project and all 16-17 team members pointing directly to him. "We were definitely at a bottleneck within the team," Rachel explains. "There weren't any more hours in the day that we could give. We had people calling that wanted to be clients, but it was difficult to say yes and feel confident we'd serve them well."

This creates what Marcus describes as the "law of the lid," where "your organization can only ever grow to the level that you feel comfortable with." Your firm hits a growth ceiling because there's simply no more of you to go around.

The Team of Three Solution

When the Dillons realized they'd reached a capacity ceiling, they implemented their "team of three" model—assigning each client a dedicated service team with three specific roles:

Client Service Manager (CSM): Handles bookkeeping, payroll, sales tax, and routine client communications
Client Controller: Provides tax preparation, tax projections, and accounting review
Client CFO: Delivers business advisory, strategy, and comprehensive tax planning

This structure replaced their previous siloed approach. "We had tax and accounting, some attest services. No one person was involved in all three," Marcus explains. "What happened in those silos stayed in those silos. Knowledge related to the same clients never got holistically applied."

Marcus shares an example: "We made an S-Corp election on a client and had different people doing the business returns and individual returns. When someone picked up the individual return weeks later, they didn't include the new W-2 from the S-corporation." These coordination failures prompted them to "bust the silos" with integrated client service teams.

Benefits of the Team of Three Structure

The team of three model delivered several immediate benefits:

Direct Client Relationships
"The clients develop a relationship with that person—that becomes their person on the team," Marcus notes. "If the client doesn't know who to talk to, they'll ask for you as the partner." With dedicated CSMs, clients knew exactly who to contact, reducing the flow of calls and emails to the owner.

Consistent Work Completion
Rachel observed that "the work got done—the accounting got updated, bank feeds got cleared, accounts got reconciled, payroll got ran. There was never an emergency, and sales tax got filed timely." The days of falling months behind disappeared.

Peer Learning and Support
The structure created natural peer groups—CSMs learning from other CSMs, controllers from controllers. "Your client benefits," Marcus explains, because team members are "learning together, and clients are on the receiving end of that internal team member improving." He describes how CSMs often help each other: "Who knows how to do this in QuickBooks? Another CSM will chime in, 'Let's jump on a call. I'll show you how to do that.'"

Service Continuity
"With the team of three model, if a team member leaves, you've still got the majority of the team in place to help serve the client," Marcus points out. This creates stability for clients and reduces risk for the firm.

Improved Profitability
By assigning work at appropriate skill levels, the firm became more profitable. "Instead of tasks being done at the higher billing and cost levels, you're able to spread that out," explains Marcus. "That's not dirty to talk about profitability. It's a business, and you try to make it as profitable as it can be within reason."

The key mindset shift is what Rachel calls "delegate to elevate, not delegate because you don't like doing the work." The purpose isn't to reduce owner workload—it's to develop the next generation of leaders within your firm.

Step-by-Step Implementation

The Dillons took a deliberate, phased approach to implementing their team of three structure:

Start with Client Service Managers
"We started with that CSM role," Marcus explains. This established direct client contacts who could handle routine tasks like bookkeeping and payroll, immediately redirecting everyday questions away from the owner.
Owner Fills Multiple Roles Initially
"For a while, for most clients, I actually sat in the client controller role and the client CFO role," Marcus shares. "When I was reviewing whatever the CSM sent to me, it was all Marcus from then on out."
Delegate the Controller Role Next
"That next step after we got the CSMs built out was the client controller role," Marcus continues. "Who else could be involved in reviewing the accounting, helping prepare the tax return, and delivering those results?" This middle layer provides quality control while further removing the owner from day-to-day operations.
Train Others for the CFO Role Last
The final step was identifying team members who could handle the advisory position. "The last step was finding people who could be brought into that client CFO role to help lead team members and clients."

Rachel emphasizes that when delegating reviewer responsibilities, they started with less complex clients "to give them confidence" and implemented "processes and checklists" to maintain quality standards.

Addressing New Bottlenecks

The implementation process revealed an important insight: eliminating one bottleneck often creates another elsewhere in the system.

"I don't think I'm the bottleneck still," Marcus reflects. "If I look where the biggest bottleneck could be now, it's that client controller level because they're right in the middle of everything. If they get bogged down with their review, they can't do tax, advise clients, or help with tax projections."

Their solution was to add support positions:

Client Service Manager Assistant: Helps with routine weekly CSM tasks
Tax Assistant: Supports controllers with tax preparation

"What we're building out is that tax team," Marcus explains. "Controllers don't have that same resource for tax as CSMs do for accounting. We're investing in a tax team that can support the controllers so they have more options than just working in a tax program alone."

Starting Points for Smaller Firms

Not every firm is ready for a complete restructuring. The Dillons offer alternative approaches:

"For teams with four people or less, or owners who aren't ready to reorganize, there are still ways you can delegate things," Rachel advises.

Some practical starting points include:

Outsourcing administrative tasks
Using a virtual assistant for email management and scheduling
Outsourcing your firm's own accounting and payroll

Rachel cautions against one approach they tried: "We delegated some administrative responsibilities to the spouse. That's probably not the advice we would give." As Marcus humorously adds, "You go on vacation, your email follows you, assuming you take your spouse!"

For firms in the middle of busy season, Marcus recommends: "Document what's painful. Write down what has been painful the last few weeks. Where does pain exist today? What's in your way? Then revisit it after tax season."

Transformative Results

The impact of their restructuring fundamentally changed the firm's capacity and profitability:

"We looked up and with 16 or 17 people, we were able to do that same work with only 12 to 13 people," Marcus shares. This efficiency improvement created "excess capacity," allowing the firm to either grow or make strategic decisions about team size.

The structure also created space for owners to focus on strategic initiatives rather than production work—"aspects of the business that really move the needle more than just production work."

For the Dillons, this transformation enabled them to pursue growth through acquisition. With their new structure, they've successfully integrated another accounting firm and applied the same model to that business.

Take Your First Step

The transformation from bottleneck to breakthrough begins with understanding your team's natural strengths. "What we've done is accumulated a great team from a variety of backgrounds," Marcus explains. Some excel at client interactions, while others prefer focused technical work. "You play up to people's strengths—what they naturally gravitate to."

Whether you're ready for a complete restructuring or looking for incremental changes, the journey from bottleneck to breakthrough begins with a single step. Start by creating an org chart of your current structure, documenting pain points, or identifying simple tasks to delegate.

The Dillons' experience shows that accounting firm owners don't have to remain trapped in the cycle of overwork. With thoughtful restructuring and a commitment to developing your team, you can transform yourself from the firm's biggest bottleneck into its strategic leader—creating a more valuable, sustainable business.

Ready to dive deeper into strategies for reorganizing your accounting firm? Listen to the full episode of "Who's Really the BOSS?”, and stay tuned for part two, where Rachel and Marcus will share additional approaches to increasing capacity in your firm.

If you would like to receive CPE for the podcast episode related to this article, visit Earmark CPE.

Rachel and Marcus Dillon

Rachel and Marcus Dillon, CPA, own a Texas-based, remote client accounting and advisory services firm, Dillon Business Advisors, with a team of 15 professionals. Their latest organization, Collective by DBA , supports and guides accounting firm owners and leaders with firm resources, education, and operational strategy through community, groups, and one-on-one advisory

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