My father passed away unexpectedly in April 2020, during tax season and at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic. Moving home to care for my mother and grieving, I could no longer avoid thinking about my professional future.

For seven years, I had followed the traditional path in public accounting while wondering if there was another way. Losing my father forced me to figure out what I actually wanted to build.

A Chinese saying often repeated in my family, “After the bitter comes the sweet,” guided me on what followed. In 2020, I left a $90,000 salary and started fresh with no clients, no safety net, and no limitations on the type of firm I could build.

Today, I run a solo practice generating more than $600,000 in annual revenue and serving over 300 clients nationwide. To prevent burnout, I build 12 weeks of unplugged time into my calendar each year.

What changed? A lot, but most importantly, the way I think about trust, time, and the work itself: Technical competence is a given. People skills earn trust. Boundaries provide clarity.

HOW TO MAKE A DIFFERENCE IN A SOLO PRACTICE

Four structural choices make a difference in my solo practice. They are integral to how the firm is designed, and they aim to earn trust early, align expectations clearly, and make a CPA easier to choose and harder to replace. (To determine where your practice stands, see the sidebar, “Test the Design of Your Firm.”)

1. Set boundaries to prevent exhaustion

Lack of demand or skill doesn’t usually stall small or solo CPA firms. Exhaustion does.

Studies suggest the profession is structurally prone to burnout. The rate of exhaustion is more than twice as high (99%) among accountants than among U.S. workers overall (44%), according to a 2022 study by the University of Georgia and FloQast and a 2024 research series by the Society for Human Resource Management.

Early in my career, I believed growth meant saying yes — to every client, to every service, to every exception. That approach worked for a while, but it came at a cost. My calendar filled up. Decision fatigue set in. I spent more time managing scope creep and rework than delivering the advice I was hired for.

The warning signs were subtle. I was busy and producing good work, but my judgment felt strained. That is when I realized the issue was not workload.

Many practices are built in ways that drain the owner long before they can scale. Over time, the CPA becomes the bottleneck. Decision quality declines. Even good clients begin to feel the friction.

My solution is designing a business that shuts off, that has time off built in as a requirement. For example, I take six weeks off after April 15 and another six weeks after Oct. 15.

I do not start work until the client uploads their prior-year tax returns for my review. No exceptions. This filters out clients who are disorganized, unresponsive, or not serious. It protects my time and sets the tone for the entire engagement.

Try picking one boundary to set for the quarter. Write it down, communicate it, and hold the line. Clear boundaries reduce friction, eliminate ambiguity, and protect your most valuable asset: your judgment.

2. Make expertise visible

A referral rarely leads directly to a call anymore. Instead, it leads to an online search. Prospective clients look up the CPA’s name and scan the firm’s website to find signs that the person they were referred to actually understands their situation.

In my practice, I focus on stacking signals that speak before I do: More than 100 five-star reviews. First result when someone searches for a CPA in Pasadena. Credentials that signal depth: CPA, enrolled agent, Master of Science degree in taxation, and active member of the AICPA.

On LinkedIn, I teach other CPAs about practice management, pricing, and what it means to run a modern solo firm. When prospects see other professionals learning from me, they see me as competent before we speak.

To see whether your reputation is doing the selling, try Googling yourself. What does someone see in the first 60 seconds? If the answer is unclear, strengthen one signal this quarter.

3. Talk value before fees

When fees come first, every detail is evaluated through that lens. When risk and outcomes come first, the fee becomes context.

In my practice, I stopped leading with price and started leading with questions: Take, for example, a real estate investor who intended to hold rental properties inside an S corporation. The legal title to the properties was never transferred. Despite that misalignment, prior-year tax returns reported the rental activity at the entity level.

Rather than forcing the real estate into the S corporation to match the paperwork, we stepped back and asked: “What is the cost of getting it wrong?” We evaluated the long-term consequences: Ownership for tax purposes follows legal title. Transferring appreciated real estate into an S corporation would have eliminated the step-up in basis at death and locked in significant embedded gain, creating unnecessary tax friction for the client’s heirs.

We corrected the reporting to align with actual ownership. Prior-year returns were amended, the rental activity was removed from the S corporation, and the income and expenses were reported directly by the individual going forward. The correction was completed for a fixed $8,000 fee, reflecting the scope and risk involved.

The client was unaware of the issue; it surfaced during our review. The decision was not about fixing forms. It was about protecting judgment, reducing risk, and preserving favorable estate outcomes. When clients understand the stakes, pricing becomes secondary to confidence in the outcome.

Before any pricing conversation, calculate the cost of inaction and lead with that number. Clients who understand the stakes rarely ask for discounts. They ask better questions.

4. Explain the ‘why’

CPAs recognize patterns from experiencing the same issues again and again in different forms. Recommendations based on this experience represent informed decisions, but clients may not understand why, for example, a seemingly simple approach isn’t advisable or why it’s detrimental to wait.

Take, for example, an S corporation owner who asks why they cannot simply pay themselves a $50,000 salary on $300,000 of net income. Instead of citing IRS guidance, describe what you have seen happen: the audit triggers, the payroll tax exposure when compensation is deemed unreasonable, and how the IRS evaluates comparable wages for similar roles in similar markets.

Make your reasoning explicit. Instead of saying, “I have seen this before,” explain what typically happens next, where similar situations break down, and which facts change the outcome.

The client now understands the landscape, not just the rule.

Clients are paying for the confidence that their CPA understands the entire landscape.

This is where due care shows up in modern advisory work. Due care is not just technical accuracy. It is judgment based on competence, diligence, and experience that can be explained and defended.

As technology accelerates, this human judgment becomes our primary value. (See, “5 Human Competencies CPAs Need in the AI Age,” JofA, May 1, 2026.) Software can organize data, draft memos, and flag anomalies. It cannot explain why a particular structure makes sense for this client in this situation. It cannot read the hesitation in a client’s voice. It cannot take responsibility when something goes wrong.

The next time you give advice, pause and explain the reasoning. What pattern are you seeing? What typically goes wrong? What makes this situation different? Make the implicit explicit.

WHAT MATTERS

In a call with my AICPA Leadership Academy cohort earlier this year, we were asked what we were most proud of. It wasn’t revenue or growth. It was clarity. Our answers were consistent: Better boundaries. Clearer decisions.

The Chinese saying my family repeated was never about success. It was about endurance. The bitter was not leaving a $90,000 salary. It was sitting in my childhood bedroom in 2020, grieving my father, and wondering if I was making the worst decision of my career. The sweet is not revenue. It is having built a practice that protects the life around it.

I get to decide how I work, when I work, and why I work. That freedom did not come from luck. It came from intentional structure.

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Test the design of your firm

Answer yes or no. If you answer no to three or more questions, start with one change this quarter.

• Do prospects understand what makes you different before the first call?
• Can someone find proof of your expertise online in under 60 seconds?
• Do your credentials and reviews signal competence early?
• When you quote a fee, does the client already understand what is at stake?
• Can you explain complex reasoning without jargon?
• Does your calendar protect recovery time, not just client work?
• If you stepped away for two weeks, would your practice continue to function?

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About the author

Angel Zhen, CPA, E.A., MST, is the founder of Angel Zhen CPA, a virtual tax practice based in Pasadena, Calif., serving real estate investors and high-income solopreneurs nationwide. He is a 2025 AICPA Leadership Academy graduate, recipient of the 2025 CPA.com Innovative Practitioner of the Year award, a 2026 Forbes Best-in-State CPA, and a 2025 CPA Practice Advisor 40 Under 40 honoree. To comment on this article or to suggest an idea for another article, contact Jeff Drew at Jeff.Drew@aicpa-cima.com.

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