kepczyk: tech is the new business model | gear up for growth

firm leaders can no longer ignore this conversation.

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technology is the #1 driver of firm value—full stop
firm size. geography. client mix.
all of it now takes a back seat to one thing: technology maturity.

sponsored by the balanced millionaire: the advisor edition by dr. jackie meyer |  see today’s special offer

“when you have the right technologies in place that are ideally suited for your client base,” kepczyk explains, “you can optimize production processes, standardize training, and share work efficiently. that’s why technology has become one of the most significant differentiators in firm valuation.”

standardized workflows, integrated systems, and shared data aren’t just operational conveniences. they’re what allow firms to scale without burning out staff—or partners. and they’re increasingly what acquirers, merger partners, and private equity groups evaluate first.

despite the constant headlines predicting job losses, kepczyk offers a calmer—and far more optimistic—view of ai’s impact on the profession.

“we’ve always evolved with technology,” he says. “the rote work becomes the easy stuff, and professionals move into reviewer, communicator, and advisor roles. there’s never been a better opportunity to grow advisory services.”

from automated document intake and client reminders to agentic ai that can assemble first drafts of tax returns, the work is shifting upstream. future cpas aren’t data processors—they’re decision guides.

kepczyk puts it bluntly. “accounting firms used to be tax, audit, and cas practices that used technology,” he says, borrowing from accounting today’s dan hood. “today, they’re technology firms that happen to deliver accounting, tax, and assurance services.”

in practical terms, that means technology must be treated like utilities—always on, standardized, secure, and unquestioned—so firms can focus on higher-value client work instead of managing chaos behind the scenes.

m&a, private equity, and why tech compatibility matters more than you think
as consolidation accelerates, kepczyk reveals what really makes—or breaks—successful mergers.

the most successful firms don’t let acquired practices “keep their stuff.” they standardize quickly, align workflows, and migrate data so teams can actually share work. firms that don’t? they become loose confederations of practitioners with shared expenses—and limited upside.

technology doesn’t have to match perfectly. but client profiles, service models, and digital maturity absolutely must.

the real bottleneck: people, time, and change fatigue
ironically, the biggest barrier to transformation isn’t software—it’s culture.

“there’s always a resistor,” kepczyk notes. “and firms can’t move faster than the slowest person.” kepczyk says to give rising managers and tech-curious staff time, authority, and credit to lead innovation. treat technology leadership as billable, high-value work—not an extracurricular activity. the firms that do this now will be the ones still thriving a decade from today.

other highlights include:

• firms that allow acquired practices to retain disparate systems struggle to share work and scale. 
• disruption will come from a combination of generative ai, machine learning, rpa, and agentic ai. 
• technology enables firms and professionals to specialize deeply in industries or client types. 
• firms should prioritize technology tools that address their biggest bottlenecks. 

more about roman kepczyk
roman kepczyk has spent nearly 30 years consulting exclusively with accounting firms, helping cpas effectively use information technology. kepczyk has been named one of the profession’s most recommended consultants by inside public accounting, one of the top 100 most influential people in accounting by accounting today, and a top 25 thought leader by cpa practice advisor. he is an advisory board member to the cpa firm management association and has served on the board of directors of the arizona society of cpas. 

transcript
(produced by automation. not edited for spelling or grammar.)

jean: hello. thank you for joining “gear up for growth”, powered by 卡塔尔世界杯常规比赛时间. i’m jean caragher, president of capstone marketing, and your host. today’s guest is roman kepczyk, director of firm technology strategy at rightworks. roman has spent nearly 30 years consulting exclusively with accounting firms, helping cpas effectively use information technology. he has been named one of the profession’s most recommended consultants by inside public accounting, one of the top 100 most influential people in accounting by accounting today, and a top 25 thought leader by cpa practice advisor. roman, welcome to “gear up for growth”. 

roman: thank you, jean. i appreciate being here at this time of year. 

jean: we’re in a special time, and i, again, so appreciative that you had time on your calendar to fit in our episode. i’m excited because we both know technology, it has always been a big topic, but i think especially now with just how much the technology and ai and pe, all of it is just swarming around us almost like a perfect storm, right? 

roman: absolutely, and it’s changing at a faster and faster pace. 

jean: right? and everybody just loves the change, right? isn’t everybody excited about all these changes that they have to think about regarding that topic? 

roman: well, we’re having a lot of discussions on change fatigue these days, and how do you minimize it or optimize the implementations. so, i’m sure we’ll talk about that. 

jean: i’ve got questions lined up for you. so, let’s start off with the risks to business or from competitors that firms face when they fall behind in their technology. 

roman: well, first of all, when they fall behind, they can’t be as efficient as their peers. so, as a simple example, when we talk about, like, tax return delivery or organizer delivery. anytime you have a manual process, you have to print stuff, stamp, send, and deliver, do all that. and then if it’s missing, you got to repeat the process. and because we have human intervention, there’s an opportunity to make mistakes. look at that compared to a process, for instance, like safesend, which thomson reuters has, which automates that. so, when you publish a digital organizer or you publish a final tax return, not only does it put it in the right place, deliver it to the right person, it also notifies them. it verifies their signature. and so, those firms that automate with the right technologies have a competitive advantage because they’re not spending a lot of administrative time messing around with those details. they’re more effectively working with the clients and, basically, have less exposure because of that. 

jean: we’ve come a long way, right? the first marketing job i had in an accounting firm, i can’t believe i’m going to say, it started at the end of 1985. and i remember those accountants and they had shelves and there would be folders of tax returns, and they would pull one off the shelf and bring it to their desk and work on it. and then they’d put it back on the shelf and somebody else took it. not even to mention like all the shipping. and you think about the way firms can do business today. it’s really staggering. 

roman: yeah. digital automation for those firms that have addressed it definitely have a competitive advantage today. and again, that’s changing to the next generation, which is all these artificial intelligence. or i’ll say, ai-related, because it also includes machine learning, robotic process automation, and other tools that the vendors are providing us. 

jean: now, you wrote a blog post called “how to increase your firm’s value with technology”, and you wrote about how that is the most significant differentiator for a firm when comparing and valuing a cpa firm ahead of size of the firm or where the firm’s located or their client base. tell us a bit more about that. 

roman: well, what happens when you have the right technologies in place that are ideally suited for your client base, then what happens is it allows you to optimize production processes, standardized training and learning, and usage within your firm. this is particularly important the larger you get, because we will share work and we need that standardization. so, for instance, if you don’t have work today or you’re finishing a project early, the workflow tool can assign you a job. and as long as you know exactly where to go to get the application, how to name it, the data files, and everything, you’re going to be significantly more efficient than calling me and say, “roman, can you send me those files, or can you give me an update?” and we’re seeing these workflow automation tools have that information at your fingertips, regardless of where you’re at, whether you want to work early in the morning, late at night, or if you have offshore employees who need access to that. so, the key is just having a digital standard in place so everyone in the organization knows how to work effectively to that standard, and they can help each other when there’s glitches. 

jean: and you also wrote about spending less time on tech means more time with clients. so, while that might be true, does that really happen? do they wind up spending more time with clients? 

roman: well, in the best case scenarios, yes, it does from the leaders in the firm who are really trying to get into an advisory capacity. but the reality is, is a lot of our firms are pretty much maxed out on their staffing just because the staffing shortages, so there’s always work in the pipeline and projects we need to get done and pushed out. again, having a workflow tool in place that automates that, clarifies it, does give you the ability to, at least, get ahead of those things. and then for those people that are proactive, and i think oftentimes it’s more in the management area, the partnership area, the owners of the firm who are proactively going after those types of advisory services, they do have the additional free time, or they spend that time focusing on those projects. but you’re right that at the staff level, there’s always another project in the hopper to be assigned to you because, particularly for the workflow tools that are very efficient at matching your skills with the type of projects that need to be done today. 

jean: right. i asked eric majchrzak a similar question during my episode with him, and he said, “jean, yes, logically, you would think that that opens up time to spend more time with your best clients, but what did we decide to do instead? just load more client work onto people.” you’ve created all these efficiencies, but it’s not necessarily turning into that extra advisory time with current clients. 

roman: i would agree with you. and that’s just the nature of a lot of the senior management, where we’ve been in that environment for 20, 30 years. the reality is, is most of our firms have more work than they can handle. it’s just they’re not really good at managing it and identifying what’s high-value work versus low-value work that they used to do. and when they’re tired, sometimes it’s easy to just pull off an easy return or do something simple rather than something that’s appropriate for your level of firm. 

jean: right. absolutely. let’s talk about client expectations for a minute because you’ve been talking about this workflow automation and how tech can make you more efficient. are clients expecting firms to have those automation processes in place, or is it more, “they got my tax return done or whatever the project might be, and i’m happy that it’s done?” how aware do you think the clients are? 

roman: again, that really depends on the type of practice you’ve got. i run the gamut of firms from 20-member firms up to, i’ve worked with, i think, 32 of the top 100 firms. and what we see is in a lot of those smaller firms, if they’re a 1040 production practice, there may be a history of certain people doing certain returns for people. and the expectation of those people is, “well, i always drop my paper off with roman and he does it,” and he thinks roman does it. you know, the employees do that. so, there is that expectation there at that level. but what we’re seeing is as firms become more advisory and focused on profitability and growth in the future, what they realize is they develop an ideal client that will use their tech stack of applications so that we can efficiently service that client and optimize their delivery on time and on schedule if they follow the rules. so, that’s why we see the adoption of these portal solutions that automate the ingress and everything. 

and so, again, i don’t want to always go, it depends, but absolutely, a client expectation is set from that first, initial meeting with the client. and if that first meeting was 20 years ago, unfortunately, sometimes that expectation carries forward. now, what we can do is we’re seeing a lot of firms, particularly those that are going to, like, fixed-pricing, value-building kind of models, you know, they set a higher bar, newer expectation of the services and of the digital tech stack you’re going to use in that firm. and so, from the get go, those people have a higher expectation, and they’re better integrated into the technologies that the firm is utilizing. 

jean: right, that’s a great point. so, with all the merger mania going on, you know, we can’t pass a week without… and the firms are getting larger and larger, it seems, doesn’t it? 

roman: mm-hmm. 

jean: excuse me. how important is the technology that a firm uses in the evaluation the acquiring firm might be using to evaluate whether a firm is a good candidate? like, if they’re really not advanced in technology, is that a red flag that you should just stay away? 

roman: yeah, it’s not a complete red flag. you know, you should have a matching profile similar, but applications can change. what i mean, say matching profile is this, if your firm’s going after business clients and advisory services, buying a 1040 production practice that uses draco into it, you know, at the low-end, makes no sense because the conversion is going to be so difficult. and matter of fact, when i go in and i do merger process optimization reviews on firms that are thinking about merging with another, we analyze their client base first to see, what kind of clients are you acquiring? can they be converted cost effectively? and what we see is, those 1040 production shops, if they’re acquired by another 1040 production shop, you know, particularly if they’re in that lacerte, ultratax kind of platform, they convert very easily, very effectively. but if you have a high level… like i have some firms on the coast that do family back office for billionaires and they might have 10 people assigned to a person. if you acquire a practice that doesn’t feel like that, people don’t know what to do and they can’t afford to pay the services to move up, you know, to produce those returns in the larger practice. so, we always look at the client base to merge. 

then there should be some compatibility as far as, you know, how digital they are. but again, we can train people in one tax season, actually in six months, how to use a firm standard if it’s already implemented. and if you look back at the last two decades, the most successful firms that were m&a, your mergers and acquisition independent firms, they had a model where they would literally bring them in, standardize the data, allow them access to history, but they would roll into the new products, the new processes, the procedures that the parent firm had. and they were the most successful mergers. the ones that let everyone keep their stuff and keep going, you know, they were pretty much just a group of practitioners that shared expenses, you know, that all ran independently and couldn’t share work. 

jean: right. is it true, how’s the best way for me to put this, that the more established firms may not necessarily be the most advanced with their technology as opposed to smaller, more nimble firms, or dare i say, younger leadership? 

roman: well, you’re absolutely right that it is much easier for a small firm to adapt new technologies, implement, train, and roll it out because the training curve is usually smaller, and also, the location variation. usually, they’re in the same building or within the same region where they can get together and do that. i would say, some of the larger firms, i think of like, for instance, withum, they have mastered the art of standardizing and bringing on form. and they’re technologically astute. you know, they’re led by jim bourke. he is just a very smart person. he’s very concise. he has a great team behind him. and when they bring in firms, they get, basically, brought in and standardized very quickly. 

some of the other established firms, if they’re spread out across the country, and each managing partner does their own thing and there’s not a lot of work sharing, that’s where we see kind of that old school kind of philosophy where they’re at a competitive disadvantage. they’re very profitable. you know, they do their thing, but they’re probably not as profitable as they could be. and they may start losing clients if they don’t advance with these latest tools that make them less competitive. 

jean: right. and i think also, in that situation, their ability to cross-sell or what some people say, cross-serve, is more difficult because you’re not sharing the data. 

roman: absolutely. 

jean: or making the data available. 

roman: while you’re running as individual practice, management systems, individual document in management systems, individual portals. so, just something we standardize immediately in firms is, what is your directory and file naming conventions? and what you see is, is if you don’t have that as a firm, people don’t know how to go into another location’s files and properly access them, where to look, and find them. and so, they’re spending extra time, hours on any engagement, just trying to figure out where this data is. and then when they send it back, they might put it in the wrong place. 

so, again, when we see the masters that have done it on the m&a side, we see the private equity firms doing the same thing. they’re saying, this is the way it’s going to be. they’re standardizing it. and they do put emphasis on the people component of it. both, like i said, the large firms and the pe firms that their competitive advantages, they know for rapid standardization, we’ve got to do these specific things, get them on practice management, our workflow tool immediately. we can transition the tax application, but all the stuff that needs to be standardized as far as the tech stack, we need to roll that in. and we honestly think it should be within six months. but we realize, if you do it in february, it may not happen during tax season, and you might have to delay things a little bit. 

jean: right. yeah. so, tell us what emerging technologies you believe will be the most disruptive to the profession, say, in the next several years, three to five years. 

roman: well, it’s the whole artificial intelligence category, but that’s a combination of not only generative ai tools, which do the filling out the word choices, like, for instance, responding to email, but also, the agentic ai tools. and agentic ai tools is kind of the next evolution of what we saw was robotic process automation and machine learning that could be scripted by people to do certain things like close a month in, to basically, transfer accounts, to respond to accounts. and what we’re seeing is, these agentic ai tools are doing that much more efficiently. and all the accounting vendors, they’re starting to integrate agents into it. 

you look at, for instance, what intuit’s doing for a month-end close for importing credit card statements, those kind of things. those kind of processes are pretty much machine learning or rpa and steroids. and that’s what i think is going to really change how accountants do work. when we talk about something as simple as client document ingress. we started about talking about the process where we used to create organizers and mail them. well, the new version of organizers is actually creating a pbc list out of your previous years, ultratax, lacerte, or cch axcess tax program, sending that to the clients that, “you need to give us these documents,” putting them into a portal that will actually remind them that, “hey, your engagement letter said that you would deliver this to us by the 28th of february to get your return out by april 15th. if not, what we’ll do is we’ll extend your return to, basically, during the summer.” those processes can all be automated now. 

and that’s what we’re seeing is, i think, most of us are really good at the back-end delivery using tools like safesend or share safe from cch. now, we’re going to get good at the front-end integration. and then we’ll start to see the next processing level this year, which is not only getting the data out of the portal or the secure email solution, but bookmarking it, actually creating a first draft of the tax return with autoflow and these other tools. and then the human interaction happens actually later in the process, which again, increases efficiency for the firm. 

jean: right. so, where do you stand on all the talk about accountants losing their jobs and, we’re not going to need those lower-level people. but how does that work? because you don’t need lower-level people, and then all the upper-level people, you know. 

roman: they’re all retiring or aging out. we’re seeing that in the profession. 

jean: is it, like, the last person in the room? like, turn off the light, and that’s the end of the profession? 

roman: no, i think… 

jean: how do you think it’s going to impact the job market and going into it? 

roman: we’ve always evolved with technology. you know, we’ve heard in our career many times that first, spreadsheets were going to put us out of business and the pcs, then it was computer accounting programs, then it was the cloud, then it was offshore, all these things. yet in each case, you look at your statistics, firms made more money and, basically, we’re grinding more and more work than they can handle just because, the opportunities to be an advisor have expanded and expanded with it. 

so, i think what will happen is, new hires out of school will have to be trained not on just being wrote preparers or auditors, but almost at a managerial, reviewer type level. and that training will change to help them. you know, all the road stuff becomes the easy stuff that, when we used to have to foot, you know, use a 10k to foot numbers, that’s the input phase we’re going through right now. and so, in the future, we’ll be becoming better reviewers, and then we’ll be trained to be better communicators and advisors, helping the client not only understand the data, but make decisions that’s better for their business. so, we still need that connection, i think, between the advisor and the client to grow. and there’s never been a better opportunity for people to do that, particularly if i was at a school and i already used those tools, i can get up to speed and be competitive very quickly. 

jean: right. and wouldn’t that mean, being a cpa would be even more exciting and interesting to the young ones as they’re deciding what they want to do with their career? 

roman: absolutely. i think one of the things that’s changed is, it allows us to have the opportunity, all the internet and technology, to become highly specialized in the area we want to be specialized in. and i think because we can work any place, any time, with anyone, one of the key differentiators will be the niches or the segments that you focus on as a firm. i mean, i have three firms that do nothing but mcdonald’s and little caesars franchises, and they’re very successful, good at it. we’ve seen examples of this. we have some that do nothing but sports people or entertainers or distributors and manufacturers, trucking companies. and what happens is, if you have a passion in something, you’ll be able to pursue that and do fun accounting. 

i was in new york and i met with a local firm. and one of the people that was an accountant there wanted to be on broadway, was excited about that. and she became an accountant for all the shows, and she couldn’t have been happier. and so, i think what happens is in this environment, because we can be so broad, we can become very specialized and do the type of accounting we want to do. i mean, because we all know, tax people love tax, auditors, love auditor, all they want is stay in it. you know what i mean? they love auditing. so, i think this technology allows us to do more of what we want to do and less of the junk stuff that we had to do in the past. 

jean: right. that’s a great point. and it warms my heart whenever a guest mentions niche marketing because that is right. it’s not rocket science. and it is, the most successful strategy to grow a firm is to focus on different industry and service areas. and what you’re telling us is that technology is going to make that even better. 

roman: i’m in a niche. i only do cpa firms. 

jean: right? yeah, me too. 

roman: i will be honest, i did three law firms, and i swore after each one of them, i never do another law firm. and luckily, the third time i listened to myself. but accounting firms, what i find is, is they’re very nice people. they’re reasonable people. they understand finance, which is good. in most cases, there’s more people with less ego than there are people with too much ego. so, we can get a reasonable discussion, communication, and make decisions that we’re all willing to live with. that’s what i love about the accounting profession. 

jean: right. so, how should firms evaluate which technologies to prioritize now versus later? 

roman: okay. what we always take a look at is, is where are the pain points in your organization? where is the, like, bottlenecks, stacks, whether it’s at the scanning, like, to have to make a bunch of phone calls to remind clients that stuff is due? is it getting your clients to pay? these kind of things. whatever that pain point is. and then identify the solutions that your peers have already implemented successfully, okay? and my general rule is, is if you want to evaluate a product, ask the vendor to give you references of three firms that are similar or larger size that have done exactly what they’re trying to sell you, and they’re, at least, a year into it, so they’ve rolled over a year. and we find that once you do that, it minimizes your risk of making a bad decision. 

now, sometimes you need a very specific bleeding up decision. but in most cases, there’s off-the-shelf software that when optimized will specifically do what you need, like on the engagement letter process, we have tools like ignition, for instance. we can integrate payment systems with quickfee or cpacharge, these kind of things. there’s specific tools that already work. when you pick a bleeding-edge solution that hasn’t been proven, you’re going to go through multiple iterations. and we’re seeing that in some of, for instance, the audit binder tools, when we look between the big three out there, it’s better to stay on your old tool until one of them becomes the prevalent one, because there’s always areas where you can improve productivity in your firm that help with collaboration with clients on the front-end and the back-end. 

and that’s one of the big changes we’ve seen in the surveys we’re doing, is that we used to talk about collaboration just within our firms. but now, we have to be just as connected with our clients, which brings up the whole idea of making sure you have an enterprise-class secure infrastructure as well as an enterprise-class security infrastructure. and you can pretty much integrate your clients into that as well to be secure for them and for you. 

jean: right, right. yeah. because that’s obviously a huge deal and on just making sure that the data is safe. 

roman: yeah. and that’s what, like i said, at rightworks, we’ve been able to focus on specifically the plumbing, all of the hardware software applications. so, they pay for their it infrastructure like utility, allowing them to focus on implementing applications that work successfully. and then i think you know, i’m on the cpa firm manager associations advisory board, and we just finished our it survey. and we saw that, like, 60% of the firms are using a managed security provider, 12% are using, primarily, thomson reuters, cch. so, they get enterprise-class tools, infrastructure, security, all that built in. and that allows the partners and the staff focus specifically on implementing new solutions or evaluating implementing standardizing. 

jean: so, what’s the biggest barrier to the implementation that that firms face? 

roman: we all have a resistor curmudgeon person. and it’s not necessarily the oldest person in the room, or sometimes there’s people that are technology adverse, or they don’t want to change and all that. and so, in many cases, we cannot move faster than the slowest person. and so, i think learning and training is going to become a key skill of successful firms in the next two years, because, as i mentioned in the beginning, the rate of change we’re going to experience the next couple of years is going to be incredible. 

and what i’m seeing is we probably won’t switch our primary tax application, but we are seeing firms very unhappy with their practice management, particularly in reporting. they’re unhappy with how much they’re paying for document management. their portal solutions, they might have three disjointed solutions. and what we’re seeing at the smaller firm, and you talked about the speed that these people can move at, we’re seeing great solutions like sorbonne, stanford, jetpack, canopy, in the middle size, karbon, firm 360, that are integrating really good, not only practice management, but workflow document management portal into a fluid stream. so, they’re learning really different features of one application, and then they’re getting the benefits of the new features that are rolling out, a lot of which are based on ai capabilities. 

jean: right. all of this is just amazing to me. 

roman: that’s an exciting time to be an accountant. 

jean: and i’m so happy there are people like you who understand how well that works. so, in your opinion, what does the firm of the future look like as it relates to technology? 

roman: well, you know what? i’m going to honestly refer to dan hood, who said that accounting firms used to be, basically, tax audit and cas practices that use technology. but today, they’re technology firms that happen to deliver services such as accounting, tax, or assurance services. and see, that’s what we see, is you’ve got to have a solid platform that allows… again, it’s like, becomes utility. like microsoft office, we don’t question how it works, what it works. we just pay for it. it works. we got to have that standard infrastructure, and then we got to focus on our clients. what do we need? how can we serve them better? what tools do that today? and so, that’s why we say, the emphasis is that, you know, the technology of the structure is the core, but how can we, basically, help the client with the right applications, make it easy for them, and make them part of our team, as opposed to someone on the outside? 

jean: right, right. you may have answered this already, but i’m going to ask you anyway. what should firms be doing today to prepare for the next decade ahead? what’s the first step, let’s say? 

roman: well, i think we need to get ownership buy-in because they’re the ones that release the time for that. and what i suggest, like, when we started to do the ai thing two years ago, and then agentic ai hit in february this year, in 2025, and is rolling forward, it’s changing everything. we need to designate people who are monitoring this. and i think firms should have, at least, one person in the tax side, one in the insurance, one in cas, one administration who are given time. and what i mean by that is, is they’re being held accountable for spending, let’s say, two hours a week meeting with their peer groups. 

i’m a big promoter of the associations. you know, i work with… i think we have 75 bdo firms. i do six or seven bdo events as well as the other associations out there. but having opportunities to get together with other people who might be two or three months ahead of you in one area, you might be ahead of them in another area. but sharing that knowledge collaboratively very quickly, finding out what’s working, what’s not, and basically, implementing solutions that are proven that’s out there. but you’ve got to allocate the time to the people and you’ve got to listen to them. and so, we recommend, you know, traditional cpa firm mentalities as we send a managing partner or the tax lead to all these conferences. no, no, we need to send the seniors and managers who are excited about it, who are using generative ai already in their day-to-day life and get their insights and talking to their peers who are really doing cool, cool stuff, and making it work and being efficient and doing it consistently while reducing the risk to the firm. 

jean: right. yeah, that’s a great point because you do need the ones who are interested and knowledgeable and give them, you said, the time, but also, the responsibility or the bandwidth, if you will, to help make these changes in their firms, you know, to give them these leadership opportunities as it relates to technology. 

roman: and we do see is, some of the old school firms, you know, they still have charge out requirements. and so, i know when we see that, we’re like, “oh,” based on… yeah. but the reality is, is if we give them chargeable credit for that time, then when it’s valued as well as the highest billable rate, because it is the most valuable work the firm can do, is improving efficiency for all of us. and when they give us the time, the accountability, and then the resources to attend webinars or conferences, that’s when we see good adoption of these things, or at least, good awareness. and having those experts meet, maybe every other week, to discuss what they learn, they all improve, they standardize quicker, and they educate the rest of the firm when they implement a new product. 

jean: right. yeah. that’s wonderful. so, my last question is a bonus question. 

roman: okay. 

jean: okay? what is a moment in your life that taught you an important lesson that you still think about today? 

roman: well, do you want a technology one or career one? 

jean: no, no, no, it doesn’t… no, actually, not technology, no. 

roman: okay. i was i was blessed to have a managing partner that when my first son was born… i was in a traditional firm in arizona. i was a partner in charge of it. and my first son was born. he said, “it’s real easy to get caught in the cpa world.” particularly for me, i was doing taxes and accounting work, and i was running the technology on top of that. so, i was busy year around. and he said, “don’t miss your kids growing up.” and i thought about that, and that actually put me in a situation where i was able to… i walked away from the firm, and with his blessing, and basically, started consulting so that i could spend more time with family, to do trips. and people that know me know i plan my vacations a year in advance, and then i fill in the rest. so, i’ve always worked that backwards. 

and i have to credit mel anderson from henry & horne for giving me that advice because it changed my life and put me in a situation where i got away from tax, and i got into technology, which i loved. and i got to do technology in the summer, whereas… you know, i’m based out of phoenix, arizona. so, traveling all summer is not a bad thing. and then enjoying the tax season is the best time to be in arizona for hiking and biking. and that opened the door for triathlons and other stuff. so, i credit mel anderson for putting me on the right track. 

jean: oh, my gosh. that was advice before… it was cool, right? because everybody talks about it now. 

roman: he was wise before most people were wise, too. 

jean: right, right. oh, my gosh. and that is great advice, right? because time passes quickly, and there are occasions that are not going to be repeated. so, it’s great when you can participate in that moment. 

roman: absolutely. 

jean: great advice for everybody there. well, i’ve been speaking with roman kepczyk, director of firm technology strategy at rightworks. thank you, roman, for sharing your technology insights with us today. 

roman: my pleasure. it’s always good catching up with you. 

jean: yes, absolutely. and thank you for tuning in to “gear up for growth”. be sure to check us back next time when we focus on another topic crucial for accounting firms aiming for smart growth in today’s competitive marketplace. i’ll see you then. 

posted on january 9, 2026