Hello everyone, and welcome to The Upstream Leader Podcast. I’m excited to be with you here today for what is going to be a solo episode. It’s been quite a while since I have led one of these solo episodes, and I thought the timing was right—I’m coming off of several meetings with managing partners from around the country and into Canada as well, talking about what is on their minds as they are leaders of accounting firms today. As you would imagine, in those meetings, we talked about a variety of topics, from growing the advisory side of the firm, making new partners, what does private equity mean, what about M&A activity, can you stay independent, how do we develop people, how do we retain people—all of the various topics that you would expect to come up in a meeting of managing partners.
But what I really want to do is focus on three of the most important topics that we discussed that seemed to be themes that were consistent across all the meetings, regardless of firm size—whether it’s a firm that’s around the $5 million mark or a firm that’s over $250 million—there were three themes that really rang true and were consistent among all of the conversations, and I thought, what better place to share those than here on the podcast? So the three points that I want to talk about today are consistency related to intensity—I want to talk a little bit about how to change the assumptions that we have about our people—and what does it mean to have accountability and expectations in the partner room? By the end of the episode, I hope as we go through each of those topics, that I’ll provide you with some form of reflection, some actionable items that you can use to go back and improve in that area within your firm.
With that, let’s jump right in. The first thing I want to talk about is the idea that consistency beats intensity. That is something that at times can be frustrating. I’ve heard some quotes related to that, used to, in a way, create excuses. I don’t know a better way to put it—create excuses for poor performance or poor results, and it’s almost something that people hide behind where they say, “Oh, well, you know, slow and steady wins the race. I don’t have to get those home runs right now. I’m just going to stay consistent.” I don’t want you to confuse or think about “consistency beats intensity” in that way. I am not talking about low performance that is considered to be consistency over time. Instead, what I want to talk about is the importance of really committing to a system of progress—a system that relates to culture, a system that relates to experience—that is based on consistency over time, rather than simply a flash in the pan or a one-time intense experience.
So, where did this come up in the conversations? The first place that this theme came up in conversations with managing partners was related to client experience. Client experience was something that firms of all sizes we were talking to were concerned with, which makes a lot of sense because in 2025, client experience is so much more than “What does the audit report look like? What does the tax return look like? Did I get a consulting report from the firm?” When we’re thinking about client experience in 2025, it’s really how does the client feel in working with you? The expectation is you are going to provide high-quality client service, but high-quality client service and a high-quality client experience are not the same. And in fact, not all clients are going to get the same experience. We want to recognize that the high-end clients, our best clients, they’re going to get a slightly different experience than the majority of our clients, and as a leader, it’s that idea of abandoning parity. It’s not a free pass to provide anyone a poor experience, so please don’t read it as that—everyone is going to get a good experience; the best clients are going to get a great experience.
And we expect this. This is not a new concept in the accounting profession. It’s something that we get a little bit more uncomfortable with than most. But there are plenty of industries out there that we all take part in that do this. Any loyalty program that you’re in, where you get rewards for being one of their top customers or top clients, you know that you get a better client experience than somebody that isn’t. So, it’s not to say that this idea is foreign, it’s just not something that we always think about within the context of the accounting profession.
Now, when we get back to this idea of “consistency beats intensity,” a good client experience, and even beyond that, a great client experience is not about what you do one time. It’s not about, did you invite them to The Masters or to The NBA finals or to some big performing arts event or to a Broadway show. It has very little to do with did we wine and dine them one time so that they are now all of a sudden thinking, “Oh wow, that’s a great experience.” Instead, it’s all about what we are doing all the time with that client? What is the consistency in our client experience? What does that look like? Do they know that we’re going to be responsive? Do they know that we’re going to provide them insights, that we’re going to check in on them throughout the year? Do they know that if they’ve got a question and they call us, that we’re okay taking questions and that we’re not looking to bill them necessarily for every single interaction because we’re trying to create that experience of where we are their advisor and we care about them, and we’re willing to take those phone calls? Those things that we do one-off, the ad hoc things that may be big events, that’s the intensity side of it. The novelty wears off the intensity. However, the value and the experience that come from consistency transforms how your clients think about working with you.
Again, it goes beyond the client service side of things—it’s the experience throughout the rest of the year as well. And that’s why it’s important that every client has a good experience while they’re working with you. Clients of all types expect to have a good experience working with you, and your best clients, they want to have a great experience, even after the service delivery is complete. You may not be working with them again for another nine months. What can you do to make sure that they are still getting a good experience? Is it education? Is it checking in? Maybe it’s lunch, maybe it’s coffee, just to see how business is going? But that’s got to be something that is consistent that they come to expect over time, and they value over time.
But this idea of “consistency beats intensity” is not just a client experience thing; it’s a people experience thing as well. And as you’re listening to this episode, we are in the throes of tax season. For many, they’re thinking, “Yeah, we’ll get back to the people experience side of things, maybe in May, maybe late April if we’re lucky, but probably in May.” Consistency means that we care about the people experience, even in the busiest of times. No, that doesn’t mean that we work 30 hours a week during the tax season and take it to extremes. I’m not saying that, and I hope nobody takes it that way. But we can’t only care about our people for two weeks in the summer when it’s the employee appreciation picnic, the annual meeting, or whatever it may be. We can’t only care about our employees when we do the annual appraisal or maybe the semi-annual appraisal or whenever we do raises. We’ve got to care about our employees and we’ve got to care about the employee experience always, throughout the year. We’ve got to create that level of consistency that we care, that we’re trying to help them grow, that we’re trying to help them learn, and we’ve got to do that consistently throughout the year.
It’s a philosophy that we also use at Upstream when it comes to learning. We believe that teaching is best done with consistency throughout the year rather than intensity in short bursts. We want to help create a culture where people want to learn on a regular basis. That’s why you’ll see in our programs, our New Manager Academy, our Emerging Leaders Academy, our Advanced Partner Academy, everything is throughout the year, rather than simply for three days or four days or five days at once—instead, it’s over the course of the year. Consistency beats intensity: that applies to learning, people experience, client experience, and creating culture. The culture that you have within your firm is a product of the consistency in how you show up from a behavioral standpoint throughout the entirety of the year, not just at one time when you say, “Okay, today’s the day we build culture. We’ll ignore that again for three more months, and then we’re going to have another day where we build culture.” It doesn’t work like that. It’s all about consistency in showing up on a regular basis.
What I would encourage you to do: Think about where you show up with intensity rather than consistency. Maybe you’ve got those check-ins where, “Yeah, I’m going to check in once a year. I’m going to check in once every six months, and I’m not going to think about it again.” What could you do to change that? For your best clients, for your people, for your culture, for your fellow leaders, for yourself as a leader as you’re developing? What if you were to shift your mindset and say, “I’m going to focus on consistency. Maybe it’s not going to be this big of a thing once a year—instead, it’s going to be incremental things throughout the year that reinforce my commitment to whatever it may be: client experience, people experience, learning, culture. It’s going to reinforce that commitment throughout the year rather than just being one time a year or twice a year where that novelty wears off.”
The second point I want to talk about is that in our profession, we need to flip a bit of our assumptions, and I’m going to focus on one of those. When talking with partners, one of the things I often hear, and it came up again in these managing partner conversations in a few different ways, is that there is a general belief right now, and interestingly, it’s at all levels, which leads me to believe it’s probably not true if everybody’s thinking it about everybody else—there’s a misperception there somewhere. But there’s this belief that our people should know more than they do and that they are capable of less, which is why so often we don’t delegate. We’re not pushing work to the people that should be doing the work. We’re not challenging our people to rise to the occasion, to step up, to become the rising stars, the rock stars that we know they can be. We sold them on that idea that they were going to be that person when we hired them. I say this to firms almost all the time: it’s not like anybody’s got the recruiting line that we’re going to hire the mediocre and decent. Everybody hires the best and the brightest. My contention is, then why don’t we start treating them like that?
To do that, we’ve got to change that assumption. We need to stop assuming that they should know more and they are capable of less. Instead, I want you to start assuming you’ve got a responsibility to educate them more, and they are capable of more than you will give them credit for. So instead of saying, “Why don’t they know this? Why can’t they do this? I gave them an assignment,” instead, why don’t we flip that mindset a little bit and say, “If I were to educate them on my expectations, check in with them to see what they know and what they don’t know, to position them with the resources they need to be successful, what if we then trusted them to take that forward?”
One of the big challenges right now in the profession is the pipeline. Everybody wants to talk about the pipeline. There’s just not enough accounting students. Looking at a lot of the trends, higher education enrollment isn’t projected to necessarily go up, which means that collectively there will be fewer college graduates, which almost by definition means there will be fewer accounting graduates. It’s not just a profession issue, it’s across professions, it’s across industries, so we’ve got to start figuring out how to get people from where they are to where we need them to be. One of the best ways that we can do that is to assume that we’ve got a responsibility to teach and that they are capable of way more than we give them credit for. How do we do that in practice? Because that sounds great. “Okay, wonderful, Jeremy. Yeah, that’s exactly what I’m going to do. I’m going to assume that, but what if they don’t show up?” What I find in most instances from talking with firms across the profession, across the US, Canada, and firms of all sizes and types, is the way that most partners today were developed when they were early career professionals. So when we were their age—everybody’s least favorite phrase, mine included—when we were their age, there was a partner that believed in us. Almost everyone listening to this, if you’re a partner, if you’re a leader in a firm, you can name the person that believed in you early in your career. I’d almost go out on a limb and say, 95% of you can remember that person by name because they had that big of an impact on your career. You had somebody who was willing to say, “You are capable of more.”
I still remember the partner that did that for the very first time for me. This was before I got into the forensics practice. I was early in my audit career and the partner’s name was Charles Rogers. Anybody that worked at the firm that I started my career with that ever got a phone call from Charles, you know exactly who I’m talking about. And you knew he had the utmost confidence when he called on you and said, “You’re going to go in, you’re going to go do this project.” And I remember I was, I think, six weeks into my career. That detail’s a touch fuzzy. It’s been longer than I care to admit. And I remember him calling me up and saying, “Jeremy, you’re going to go lead a review.” And I said, “Charles, I’ve never done a review in my life. I’m six weeks out of college. I don’t know what I’m doing.” He goes, “That’s fine. I’m going to teach you what you need to know and you’re going to be able to do this.” Sure enough, we sat down in his office, he gave me the shoebox of documents—because it was back in the day—we went through everything, I prepped, I got ready, we went over it, he asked me questions and gave me some insight, and I went in the field, did a review, and did the exit interview with the clients. And I remember thinking, “Never in my life did I think I was ready for that,” but Charles did. And he saw it as his responsibility to ensure that I was set up for success so that I could go out and be successful. He didn’t do the work for me. He prepared me to go do the work on my own, and was there when I had questions.
Nearly every accounting firm leader that I talk to today has that same story. The names are different, the times are different, what they did was different, but the principle of the story is the exact same: Somebody believed in them before they believed in themselves. They set them up for success and allowed them to go out and be successful. My question is, why don’t we do that today? And the most common answer that I get right now: “We’re just too darn busy. We are too busy to assume that people are capable of more because if we assume that and we are wrong, we’ve got to catch it up on the back end. If we give them too much and they struggle, what if we have, we’ve got—we’re so busy, we’re afraid we’re going to lose people.” And all that we’re doing is taking the work on ourselves as partners, perpetuating the issue that everybody looks at a partner and thinks, “Man, they’ve got to do a lot of work. When nobody else gets the work done, it all falls on the partners here.” We’re doing that for the people, I’m using air quotes, “for the people,” yet the people are still looking at us and saying, “Yeah, it’s great to be one of the workers, but I don’t want to be the one that everything falls onto. We’re actually not helping ourselves.”
I want you, and it’s one of the very few times that I encourage people to go back and do things like when we were their age, but that is one of the best things from early in my career and decades ago in the profession that seems to be missing today: because we’re busy and we’re afraid we might lose people if we push them too much. But I’ve got to tell you, if we don’t take the time to assume that we’ve got a responsibility to teach them more and set them up to be successful, and then provide them with the confidence that they can go out and be successful and assume that they are capable of it, and give them the freedom to be successful, which also means giving them the freedom to make a mistake every now and then—if we don’t do that, we never will have that next generation. It’ll become a self-fulfilling prophecy because we will never give them the opportunity to be as successful as we wish they could be. The longer that we hold the opportunities for success from them, the longer it will take them to develop.
If you’re in a firm right now and you’re a leader and thinking, “Man, I really wish I could figure out how to have more people to delegate to, how I could get people ready,” I’m just going to tell you right now: they’re not going to be ready until you put them in a position to be successful and then educate them on what it takes to do it. Stop assuming that they should know more and they’re capable of less. Start assuming that you need to teach them and that they are capable of more than you ever thought possible. What I’m going to ask you to do is, again, a little bit of reflection: Where are you doing this? Are there situations where you are holding stuff back because they’re just not ready yet? And if that’s the case, start to think about, well, what if I operated under the assumption that they are ready? They just need the opportunity to go out and prove to me that they’re ready. What can you do?
And I’m going to call back—I think it was, it might have been episode three or episode two of our podcast, with Solon Angel—way back in the beginning, he talked about the idea of orange zone failure: How do we push people? How do we give people the opportunity to be successful and support them, and it’s okay if they get to the orange zone. They’re going to make mistakes. They’re going to learn from those mistakes. It’s going to be just monumental for their career if they can learn from those mistakes, but we’re not going to let them get to the red zone, which is catastrophic, where it hurts them and it hurts the firm. How can you change your operating procedure to do that? How do you build more time in to do that? It’s not that you need more hours, it’s that you need more lead time. It requires more planning. You can’t do this a week before a deadline. You can do this five weeks before the deadline.
If we don’t, we’re not going to have the sustainability and the longevity that we want in our firms because we’re going to hold back the people that are so capable of rising and becoming successful. And we’re just going to keep them where they’re at because we don’t believe they’re ready yet, while they’re just sitting there wishing that they had more opportunity to prove that they could be ready. And if somebody is thinking, “Well, then I sure wish they would come tell me that they’re waiting for that opportunity,” give them the open door to do that, then. Early in their career, most people are afraid to go to a partner and say, “I want more responsibility,” because so often they’re met with, “When you’re ready, we’ll give it to you.” So, if you wish your people would come to you, go to them and say, “How many of you want more? How many of you wish you could get to the next level faster? How many of you wish you could succeed at a higher level? How many of you are ready for that?” And I can almost guarantee you’ll have people raise their hands. The high performers in your firms want opportunities to be successful. Those are the ones that you want to provide those opportunities to.
Point number three: Last item that I want to hit on this solo episode is accountability and expectations. I had a partner recently share with me in a meeting, they said, “Jeremy, we have great accountability at all levels except for in the partner room. We don’t hold each other accountable there.” That theme came up over and over again in the managing partner meetings over the last couple of months in talking about how do we get partners to be accountable? Partner accountability, in my view, comes down to three things: You’ve got to have clear expectations, you’ve got to have great feedback, and you’ve got to have a willingness to be held accountable.
The clear expectations, again, come in a few different buckets. At the partner level, I always encourage you to have non-negotiables. What are the values of the firm? The non-negotiables that if you’re a partner, you will abide by, otherwise, you will not be a partner. By the way, that’s a short list. That’s a handful of things, but they’re the most important things that all partners within the firm must abide by.
Second is they should have clear behavioral expectations. For this, we use a balanced scorecard approach at Upstream. We use a balanced scorecard across six categories, the sixth of which is goal-setting: Partners need to know what they should be doing and what does success look like. One of the things that we do better at all the other levels of the firm is we are very clear on what success looks like: “Here’s what you have to do to be successful, here are the behaviors, here are the metrics, here’s how we evaluate it.” And then we get to the partner level. Arguably the most important high-value level in the firm. These are the owners of the firm, the people that are driving the firm forward, and we say, “You’re a partner. You know what to do. Go do it.” If I could peel back the curtain for just a minute here and say, most partners are still trying to figure out, “What am I supposed to do? Because if I’m not told anything else, I’m going to go serve the clients and I’m going to teach the people, but I’m probably not going to run the business.” And that’s not what partners do. As I had a managing partner share with me recently, they said, “Jeremy, one of the things I’ve realized is none of my partners have ever owned a business. Here we are asking them to be business owners and operate as business owners. None of them have experience in that. None of us have training in that.”
Leaving the partner level free to simply say “You’re a partner, you know what to do,” is one of the highest-risk behaviors that you can have in a firm. I would argue expectations at the partner level should be way more specific, way more deliberate than the expectations at any other level in the firm. Why would we lay out accountability and expectations greater at the staff and senior level than we would at the partner level? I know somebody’s thinking, “Well, that’s pretty simple, Jeremy, because they don’t know what to do yet. They’re fresh outta school.” That’s true. But are we really willing to say it’s more important to hold the new college graduate accountable at this granular level than it is to hold the owners of the firm accountable to doing the things that are in the firm’s best interest? I find that hard to believe.
I believe that we have got to hold partners accountable, first and foremost, if we ever expect accountability at the other levels. That is the very definition of tone at the top—if you want to create a culture of accountability, you want to create a culture of high performance, it starts with your partner group. If partners expect accountability, they have to demonstrate accountability first. If their people see them essentially abiding by the principle that “Yeah, I know it’s important, but I’m a partner, I don’t have to do that,” they will lose all respect and that will undermine the culture. A culture of accountability is not a byproduct of top-down enforcement. A culture of accountability is a byproduct of example-setting from the partner group. That’s what we’re trying to do. That’s what you want to create. To do that, you’ve got to have clear expectations for the partners. You then have to have feedback mechanisms in place.
I encourage partner groups: you should be providing feedback to your partners on their performance. If you’ve never done this before, you want to start monthly—at least frequent, I would say quarterly. Every partner should know, are they performing in the firm’s best interest on at least a quarterly basis. Are we really willing to say that it’s okay to go a whole year and not let the owners of the firm know what they’re not doing well? You all probably already know, but my rule on evaluations is no surprises in the annual evaluation. If you think that’s important at the staff level, it’s beyond important at the partner level. You get to the end of the year and you say to another partner, “Hey, just wanted to let you know you haven’t put the firm first in the last eleven and a half months ever since you made this decision, and then you’ve been making bad decisions ever since. We didn’t want to tell you because, well, we don’t really do feedback at the partner level, but just so you know, you’re not operating very well.” Are we really willing to let eleven and a half months go by without that feedback? We have got to do better. If we can get that feedback in and we can convince our partners that we should have a mindset that is open to accountability, we are going to have a better firm.
If you can get your partners bought into the idea of clear expectations, clear feedback, and a desire to improve, the firm’s performance will improve. Because if your expectations lay out what every partner should do, and then every partner gets the feedback that helps them perform at a higher level, I’ve seen very few firms where every partner raises their level of performance and the financial performance of the firm doesn’t go up as well.
So again, I’m going to encourage you with a little bit of reflection here: If you are struggling with accountability at the partner level, which of those three pillars is missing? And maybe it’s more than one. Is it clear expectations? Is it a willingness to provide clear, candid feedback to fellow partners? We should have the best camaraderie, the best relationships, yet often we are afraid to say to a fellow partner, “I need to provide you with some meaningful feedback.” Or is it that you’ve got a partner group that is not open to that feedback and accountability? Which of those three pillars is missing in your firm? How can you improve that?
That’s my reflection for you. Focus on you first. The natural inclination is you’re going to look at those three things and say, “Well, these five partners here, this is all their fault.” I’m not asking you to talk about the other partners yet, but for you: which of those is missing? And if you’re doing well in all three of those, I applaud you. If you’ve got a partner that is struggling, rather than telling them, maybe share the episode. Maybe they’ll reflect on it as well. What can they do to improve their willingness to know and clarify what the expectations are for them. How open are they to feedback? How willing are they to accept and give feedback? Do they have that mindset that is open to change? That’s what I want you to do going forward.
As I said, these three points for firms of all sizes were the most common across all of the meetings over multiple weeks. Again, consistency beats intensity. What are you doing all the time? That’s what matters. That’s what’s really going to define the culture, the experience, what people think of with your firm.
Second point, make sure that we are assuming that people need some education, rather than assuming they should know everything and then assume they’re capable of more than we give them credit for. And finally, if we are going to build a culture of accountability, it starts with the partners. That is not top-down enforcement. Instead, we want top-down example-setting to drive that culture of accountability.
Again, it’s been a while since I’ve done a solo episode. I hope that this is helpful to you. Some of the books that were talked about—I know we almost always share a resource here—some of the books that were talked about, Unreasonable Hospitality was one that came up time and again. Excellence Wins by Horst Schulze—that came up, and I’ve recently re-read that book. It’s a phenomenal book. I would highly encourage you to look into that one: Excellence Wins by Horst Schulze. He was the co-founder of the Ritz Carlton. The way that they lead things there at that hotel chain—a wonderful, wonderful book, not only on the client side but also on the people side of things as well.
Thank you so much for joining me today on The Upstream Leader. It’s worth reiterating and saying if I haven’t said it explicitly before: Leadership is not about having all the answers. It’s simply not about that. Leadership is creating a system of consistent habits and behaviors that lead you to long-term success. That “consistency beats intensity.” Leaders are consistent. They’re always looking to grow and get better, drive themselves and their firms forward. With that, I hope you all have a wonderful day. Can’t wait to talk to you again on The Upstream Leader.
