Real Numbers
What firms actually charge, and how.
Build the firm you
wish you had.
The 60-hour busy season. The billable hour. The client book you didn’t choose. None of it was built on purpose. It accumulated, and got handed down.
Whether you’re rebuilding the firm you have, taking over one someone else built, or starting fresh and refusing to do it the old way, we show exactly how other owners did it. The numbers, the scripts, the workflows. Nothing held back.
AI in the firm.What it can actually take off your plate.
Pricing and capacity.Fees that hold, and room to breathe.
Client conversations.How to communicate the changes you make.
Most firm owners have never seen inside another firm.
Most accounting firms were never built. They accumulated. Clients came, work got done the way it’s always been done, and one day the owner looked up at a 60-hour-a-week job nobody ever designed.
So we have a profession where people have strokes, and plan pregnancies around filing deadlines, and call it normal.
Some owners got out. They repriced, put AI to work, cut their hours, and made the firm serve their life instead of consuming it. But how they did it stays hidden, because this profession gatekeeps what works.
Real Firms opens it up. We show exactly how: the numbers, the scripts, the workflows, the conversations. Start with what you’d actually want if you could have it. Then we help you build it: capacity, pricing, AI doing the heavy lifting, and boundaries you can hold without becoming someone you don’t like.
Everything we know, out loud, every week.
Proof before opinion.
We have talked to hundreds of firm owners about how their firms actually run. The same four threads keep coming up, and everything we make hangs off one of them.
Hard Conversations
What owners almost never say out loud.
AI That Buys You Time
Real workflows, running in real firms, not demos.
The Fix
The operational rebuild, start to finish.
Why we talk about AI so much.
Everyone already knows what needs to change. The reason it never happens is that changing anything takes capacity you don’t have, and getting capacity used to mean hiring, which you can’t afford until you reprice, which you can’t survive until you have capacity.
AI is the first thing that breaks that loop. It gives you room before you hire and before you raise a fee.
It isn’t the point. It’s what finally makes the rest possible.
What AI won’t fix.
AI creates capacity. It doesn’t create margin. If you’re underpriced, automating the work just means you’re underpriced faster.
It won’t tell you what you want your firm to look like. It won’t fire the client who texts at 9pm. It won’t hold a boundary for you, or have the conversation with your partner you’ve been avoiding for four years.
That’s why this isn’t an AI channel. AI is one lever. Pricing, capacity, client selection, and boundaries are the others, and those are the ones that actually change your life.
Your firm’s exit value is being decided right now.
Most owners find out what their firm is worth at the worst possible moment: when they try to sell it. By then the number was set years ago, by whether the client relationships belong to the firm or only to you, whether anything is written down, whether the work is compliance or advisory, whether you are the only person who can do any of it.
Goodwill is 70 to 85% of a CPA firm’s value. That isn’t your building or your software. It’s whether your relationships survive without you in the room.
Here’s the part nobody mentions: the work that gets you home earlier is the same work that makes the firm sellable. Documented processes, transferable relationships, pricing that holds, capacity that doesn’t depend on you. One set of changes, two payoffs.
The State of AI in Accounting Firms.
We asked 437 practitioners how AI is actually being used inside firms, what is stopping everyone else, and where the profession is heading. The headline finding: about 90% of reported AI use is research and drafting emails, and almost nobody is touching the production tax workflow. No vendor paid for a mention. Free to read, with no sign-up.
90%of reported AI use is research and email drafts
45%still early in adoption
437practitioners surveyed
Still close to the work.
Rebecca and Charlie come at the same questions from two different points in the firm-owner journey.
Rebecca Driscoll, CPA
Built and sold a CPA firm. Now runs The Collaboration Room, AI Lab for Accountants, and Fix Your Firm, all with one goal: helping firm owners build practices that leave them happier and healthier. Would rather build the tool than sit through another webinar about it.
Charlie Barmore, CPA, CFE, CVA
Charlie does the work, reviews it, and signs it inside a Georgia practice running today. He builds and tests AI workflows with the operational consequences still attached.
How we help.
Real Firms is the shared point of view. These are the places where the community, implementation, and rebuilding happen.
AI Lab for Accountants
Accountants building useful, safe AI workflows together. Also called AI Lab or ALFA.
The Collaboration Room
A peer community where firm owners can ask the pricing and partner questions out loud.
Fix Your Firm
Hands-on work for tax-heavy firms ready to fix the fees, the client book, and the calendar.
Free tools being used in real firms.
Can you put client data in that tool? The AI Tool Safety Index checks 228 of them against each vendor’s own binding terms. If you use AI anywhere near client work, start there.
Open the Tool Safety IndexWhen we know something, you’ll know it.
What we built, what broke, and the occasional thing we think the profession has wrong. The list opens soon.
Until the newsletter opens, email us.
hello@realfirms.co