Blake Oliver: Why Busy Season Is Optional

Busy season is brutal. The pay never feels like enough for the hours. The work gets repetitive. Most accountants accept this as the cost of the profession.

Blake Oliver doesn't buy it.

In this episode of Canopy Practice Success, Blake Oliver, CPA and founder of Earmark, makes the case that virtually every problem plaguing the accounting profession is self-inflicted. From arbitrary tax deadlines to billable hours models that punish the people they're supposed to reward, Blake argues that the profession built its own cage, and that the way out is simpler than most people think.

The conversation also covers the three types of data every accountant is missing, why bookkeeping is the most underrated foundation in the profession, and how Blake built a fully remote firm that evaluated people on output rather than hours — before that was common practice.

Whether you're grinding through your tenth busy season or quietly wondering if there's a better way to run a firm, this episode gives you a framework and the permission to think differently.

What You'll Learn

• Why Blake Oliver believes all the major problems in accounting are self-inflicted, including busy season
• How the billable hours model creates a direct incentive for firms to overwork their staff
• The three types of data every accountant needs to forecast a business: accounting, operational, and people data
• Why advisory services aren't a product you sell, but a regular meeting you get paid to show up to
• How to build a fully remote accounting firm that measures output, not hours
• Why bookkeeping is the strongest foundation for high-value accounting work
• How arbitrary deadlines like April 15th create workload crunches that firms can manage around
• What it actually takes to leave the traditional firm model and build something better

Connect With Blake

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/blaketoliver

Subscribe to Canopy Practice Success

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Transcript

Blake Oliver — Canopy Practice Success Podcast

Canopy Host (00:02) Welcome back to the Canopy Practice Success Podcast. I'm your host. Today I'm joined by Blake Oliver.

Blake is a CPA and one of the most trusted voices in accounting media. You may know him from his time hosting The Accounting Podcast, where he's helped firm leaders cut through the noise and understand what's really changing in the profession. He's constantly in conversation with firm owners, tech leaders, and innovators, which gives him a unique perspective on where accounting is headed and what firm leaders should actually be paying attention to.

Blake, welcome.

Blake Oliver (00:35) Great to be here. Thanks for having me.

Canopy Host (00:37) It's always nice to be on with someone who knows how this goes and can roll with the punches. I'm excited for our conversation.

Tell us a little bit about your journey. How much time you've spent as a CPA, how and why you pivoted — and then we've got a hot take you shared with me earlier that I'm excited to dig into.

Blake Oliver (01:02) I'm a career changer. I was a music major in college — I went to Northwestern University for cello performance. I wanted to be in an orchestra or play in a string quartet, but what I really wanted to do was play on film scores. So I moved to LA after college and was gigging around, playing cello, doing a lot of weddings, trying to break into studio music. And then the Great Recession happened.

Fun fact about entertainment and film: the last thing to get done in a production is the music, so it's the first thing in the budget that gets cut. It was not a great time to be an instrumentalist.

It was also around the same time that synthesizers were getting really good. You could buy a sound library — the Berlin Philharmonic sampled all the instruments in the orchestra and sold it for $300. So basically, my job got automated. I saw that it was going to be really hard to break in, so I started looking for something else. That's how I got into accounting.

I was good with numbers, good with computers, so I started doing some bookkeeping in LA.

Canopy Host (02:34) Of all careers.

Blake Oliver (02:45) I got into the cloud accounting realm really early. I discovered Xero and QuickBooks Online and realized I could do all of this remotely rather than driving around LA — which was a huge motivator. I started hiring bookkeepers, built my own firm doing cloud-based accounting and bookkeeping, grew that over five years, and was fortunate to have an exit. A CPA firm came along and wanted to buy it. Then I went into accounting tech.

As for being a CPA — I actually waited until after I sold my firm to get my license, so I've been a CPA for about 10 years now.

Canopy Host (03:30) I love that path. Especially the bookkeeping entry point, because you don't need your CPA to get started. And I know there's been a lot of conversation recently about the CPA requirements — the credit hours, the master's degree, firms getting creative about how they count internships. But bookkeeping is like the battleground for understanding business. It's such a great foundation.

Blake Oliver (05:18) If you don't know how to do your debits and credits, I don't know how you can be an accountant. I think every accountant should do some bookkeeping — we skip it too often. My understanding of financial statements is so strong because I actually made the entries. You meet so many CPAs who don't know their debits and credits, and that's unfortunate. Bookkeeping served me well.

Canopy Host (05:56) I heard recently someone say that bookkeeping is a four-letter word. Have you picked up on similar sentiments?

Blake Oliver (06:06) I mean, only if you're an elitist. Bookkeeping is foundational knowledge — it gets you to what I think is some of the most strategic work. When you have that information and you're focused on specific kinds of businesses, you become an expert in crucial data that can change people's lives.

Canopy Host (07:27) So what's stopping people from doing that? Because every accountant I talk to says they love their clients.

Blake Oliver (07:39) I spent a couple of years working at a software company called Giraffe — we made financial planning and analysis software. That's where I learned how to do forward-looking financial statements. And I learned that you need three pieces of data to forecast a business.

First, accounting data — that's the foundation. Second, operational data — the metrics happening in your business that drive sales and revenue. Website visits if you're an e-commerce store. Number of people walking into your store. Number of sales calls your team is making. These are the drivers of the eventual revenue or expense — and they're not in the accounting system.

Third, people data — salaries, hiring timelines, planned headcount changes. That drives your people expense, which is significant in most businesses.

The problem with accounting is that we focus only on financial data. We're missing two thirds of what matters.

Canopy Host (10:22) When you go about capturing those other two data points, does it require new skills? Or is it more about just getting access to the right data?

Blake Oliver (10:48) There's a lot of technology involved in collecting all of this, but you don't have to start there. My view is that if you want to increase your value as a bookkeeper or accountant, just start collecting the important data that isn't financial. You can do it in a spreadsheet. Work with the business owner to figure out what matters to them and how to track it.

Once you start doing that, you'll find ways to identify correlations between the metrics. When we get more people in the store, we make more sales. When the team makes more sales calls, we close more deals. As the accountant, you can help a business owner identify the drivers of their financial results — and then monitor and improve them.

Canopy Host (12:09) We had a guest recently who talked about a business owner who loved trade shows — but when you looked at the conversion rate from their website, that was actually more effective. And you'd never know unless you were tracking it.

Blake Oliver (13:03) Exactly. Maybe the team isn't following up on trade show leads well. There are numbers in everything, and we're numbers people. We should be looking at all the numbers, not just the financial ones.

Canopy Host (13:33) Any tips on how someone gets started collecting those other two types of data?

Blake Oliver (13:33) Have a conversation with your client. Talk to them about what matters to them. They're probably already tracking this in some way — it just might not be systematic.

I recommend framing it this way: when accountants want to sell advisory services, what they're really selling is a meeting on a regular cadence. Weekly, monthly, quarterly — different prices for each. In those meetings, you talk about all of this. The data collection is just to facilitate the discussion. That's what they're paying for — access to you, your analysis, your opinion.

So just start collecting the data and showing it to them. That alone will increase your value. Then get paid for the meeting where you share the insights.

Canopy Host (16:06) Which leads us to the hot take you shared with me before we hit record — that you believe all of the ills and woes of busy season are self-inflicted.

Blake Oliver (16:40) Yes. And I'll go even further — all the problems in the accounting profession that make it a not-great place to work, all of that is self-inflicted. We do it to ourselves. It doesn't have to be this way.

Canopy Host (16:46) Okay. Paint us a picture of how it can be different.

Blake Oliver (17:14) Here's why I joined accounting in the first place — and you might laugh. It's because it had great work-life balance. Very flexible. Good pay. Interesting work.

Now if you go talk to a lot of accountants and ask them if they like accounting, a lot of them will say no. They do it because it's a steady job. They'll tell you it's not flexible, the pay is bad for the hours they're working — 50, 60, 70 hours a week for six months a year — and the work is boring.

I had the exact opposite experience. And I think it's because I didn't go into accounting the traditional way. I was a career changer. I wasn't influenced by the typical way large CPA firms are run — a model that's been around for decades.

Blake Oliver (18:42) Most large CPA firms run on a billable hours model, where the hours you work are your value to the firm. They incentivize everyone to work as many billable hours as possible. Very little work-life balance, especially during busy season. And people do the same work over and over again — after a year in the same position, it's just rinse and repeat. People aren't happy. But it doesn't have to be that way.

Blake Oliver (20:25) When I built my firm, I built it to be a place I actually wanted to work. I don't work well nine to five. I wanted a job where I could work when I'm inspired and stop when I'm not. Accounting is great for that — everything is on a computer, everything's paperless. There's zero reason you need to be in an office.

My firm was fully remote from the start. Everyone could work on their own schedule from anywhere. We evaluated people not on hours, but on outputs — how many clients were they serving? How much revenue were they bringing in? We're accountants. We care about revenue and profit. Who cares about hours?

Canopy Host (22:08) That makes total sense to me.

Blake Oliver (22:20) The reason firms require people to be in the office is because most managers at large CPA firms have never learned how to manage properly. So they default to walking around and talking to people — which does work, but there are better ways. We can track output and metrics. We don't have to supervise by proximity.

And if the concern is team culture and camaraderie, plenty of firms handle that with quarterly off-sites. You save all the money you'd spend on an office and use it to fly your whole team somewhere once a quarter for a few days. You pack it all in — all the socializing that used to happen in 10-minute increments now happens in a few days. It works.

Canopy Host (24:03) Let's talk about pay. Because on paper, accounting salaries look solid. But in practice?

Blake Oliver (25:03) The pay isn't bad on paper, but it's bad when you look at how many hours you're actually working. Those hours over 40 in a week are worth way more than the first 40 — because those are your free time, your vacation, your life. If you're giving up 10 to 20 hours a week, those hours are worth two, three, four times what the billable hour rate says they are.

If you're working those kinds of hours, you should be making what a doctor makes. The hourly billing model is the root cause — it creates a direct incentive for the firm to work you as many hours as possible. And because accountants are exempt from overtime, there's nothing stopping them.

The only fix, if you want out, is to go work for yourself. You can make more money on your own. It's hard at first — you'll take a hit for a year or two — but it's the only real path to changing that equation.

Canopy Host (30:25) Blake, you're not the first person we've had on who's shared these sentiments, but you've said them in a much more direct way. And I appreciate that you've also given people tools and frameworks — not just "start your own thing," but here's how to build something that actually makes the impact you want to make.

Blake Oliver (30:25) And it's all self-inflicted. Tax season is a perfect example. Why does this country have a single filing deadline for everyone? Why April 15th? There's no reason it has to be that. Some countries tie your filing due date to your birthday month — it spreads out the work for the IRS and for accounting firms. The smart firms are already doing this themselves, scheduling work from January through April and extending anyone who doesn't get scheduled.

Same with SEC quarterly reporting — we invented quarterly financial statements. There's no reason we couldn't move to twice a year, like the rest of the world. All the research shows it would make no difference to the information investors get. It just creates twice as much work.

We've only had these reporting requirements for about a hundred years. We've only been using time tracking for about a hundred years. We could drop both of them. We just need to stop accepting that this is how it's always been.

Canopy Host (33:02) Blake, thank you so much. This was eye-opening. I hope listeners took away so much — especially your point about the three key data types and helping CPAs transform beyond bookkeeping into real advisory work.

Thanks, Blake.

Blake Oliver (33:35) Thanks for having me. Great chatting with you.