Sell It, Then Build It: Scrappy Lessons From a Recovering CPA with Erin Daiber

11 minutes ago

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Erin Daiber is the founder and CEO of Well Balanced Accountants, a boutique consulting firm made up entirely of people from accounting and finance backgrounds. Her team helps independent CPA firms, mostly between $2M and $50M in revenue, build capacity and firm value so they can stay independent or plan succession on their own terms.

She is also a CPA and certified coach who started in audit at EY, worked as an in-house financial analyst, and then went out on her own after burning out as a high-performing accountant. On this episode of Scrappy But Successful, Jack Tompkins asks the question the show is built on: is Erin successful today because she is sophisticated, or because she is a little bit scrappy?

From a Cleveland Tool Company to an Accounting Degree

Erin grew up in Cleveland, Ohio, around a family tool company her grandfather started after leaving the Navy. As a kid she helped put parts together, and in college she worked the back office, handling invoicing and recording transactions, with the occasional shift in shipping and receiving. Her grandmother kept the company's books by hand, and Erin remembers watching her type out checks on a typewriter.

She also picked up a very different early lesson about money. A grandmother who grew up in the Depression era would pull envelopes of cash out of her linen closet when they went shopping, so for a while Erin assumed money came from envelopes tucked between the towels.

Accounting was not the plan. Erin started college thinking about graphic design, moved to business school, and told her family she wanted anything but accounting. Then a professor known for gatekeeping the profession told her she was good at it, and that was enough to change her major. She is candid that she was more of a good student and test taker than a natural with the small details. She also played high school golf, which she says built the competitive spirit she still has today.

Burnout, Busy Season, and Why So Many CPAs Become Recovering CPAs

At EY, Erin loved the people and the work hard, play hard culture, but the technical side of accounting never got her out of bed in the morning. She says close attention to detail took far more energy from her than it did from others, and she was working under leaders who, like many of us, wanted everyone to work the way they did. Eventually she was depleted and could not catch up.

Her take on why so many accountants end up calling themselves recovering CPAs is that the old expectation of extreme busy-season hours never went away, even though it was never normal. Busy season now looks like peaks and smaller peaks instead of peaks and valleys. She also thinks many firms skip helping people understand how they work early in their careers, which leaves them without the language to talk with their managers about it. Her firm now builds that kind of self-reflection into onboarding for new hires so they can thrive in the profession long term.

Coaching From a Parked Car and Selling It Before Building It

After leaving public accounting, Erin took an industry job that was supposed to be nine to five and was not, and a mentor suggested a coach training program. The program encouraged students to coach paying clients, so Erin coached over the phone from her car in the parking lot, at lunch and again for an hour or two after work, while keeping her day job. In those early days there was no ICP at all, just anyone willing to pay for coaching.

She pieced together revenue from a leadership program for salon owners built with a friend, small accounting conference talks around San Diego, and training work for another company's diagnostic program. About a year in, she decided it was okay to embrace accounting again, and committing to accounting professionals as her niche changed the trajectory of the business.

Her early mistakes will sound familiar to any consultant. She over-engineered everything to be perfect before it went out, and she spent time and money on online marketing funnels for what turned out to be a relationship business. Her motto is sell it, then build it, and she has sold training programs before the slide deck existed.

Staying Independent, Private Equity, and AI With a Strategy

Erin is passionate about helping CPA firms stay independent. She argues that both employees and clients need a range of firm shapes and sizes, from small firms to regional multi-office ones, because not everyone thrives at a huge firm. On private equity, she says it is the right call for some firms, but her personal view is that it is not good for the profession overall. Her suggestion to owners is to treat PE interest as a signal: investors see opportunity that firms are not tapping into themselves, so owners can ask how to capture it on their own.

On AI, Erin sees real potential to take over the transaction-level work that overqualified people get stuck doing, and she uses it herself as a brainstorming partner and for admin tasks. Her warning is that many firms bought AI products without a strategy, and once leadership starts asking what the spend is returning, they may ditch it altogether. Her team starts with a capacity diagnostic that sorts opportunities into quick wins, midterm projects, and long-term builds, usually beginning with whatever generates revenue or removes inefficiency fastest so the freed-up hours can be reinvested.

The episode closes with the scrappy versus sophisticated lightning round, covering her version of a ramen noodle dinner (coaching from the car), credit card timing, family reviews, and an inbox sitting at about 540 unread emails. Jack's verdict was 80 percent scrappy. To learn more, Erin invites you to visit her website, check out her CPA exam coaching cohorts, or catch her on the conference circuit.