.jpg?token=2310a06ba95bc3816980ee0a7e34596d)
.png?token=60681b2b82928ed86c638ae536cee230)
Breaking the Tax Season Cycle: Finding Balance with Brenda Cannon
When Brenda Cannon realized that tax season chaos didn’t have to be a foregone conclusion, she set out to reimagine her entire firm. Brenda shares how she moved from the brink of burnout on Episode 86 of CPA Life, juggling 1,500 clients and sleepless nights, to building a practice where April 15th is just another day. She tells John Randolph that by introducing intentional scheduling, raising fees, and letting go of the “we’ve always done it this way” mindset, Brenda not only transformed her own work-life balance but also created SchedulEase, a tool now helping other accountants do the same. Along the way, she’s confronted industry resistance, client education hurdles, and the deeply ingrained beliefs that keep so many stuck in survival mode. Her story is a testament to the power of questioning tradition and designing a firm that truly works for its people.
Important Links:
About the Guest:
Brenda Cannon is the founder of Cannon CPAs and the creator of SchedulEase, a workflow and scheduling solution designed specifically for accounting professionals. With a career rooted in public accounting, Brenda has become known for challenging the industry’s long-held beliefs about tax season, burnout, and work-life balance. After building and managing a large firm, she intentionally redesigned Cannon CPAs to prioritize sustainable growth, client service, and the well-being of her team. Brenda’s innovative approach to scheduling and workflow management has helped her firm eliminate the chaos of traditional tax seasons, allowing for a more balanced and family-friendly work environment. She is also the leader of the “Take Your Life Back Tax Pro” community, where she supports other accountants in implementing systems that foster healthier, more rewarding careers.
Transcript:
Hey folks, welcome to another episode of the CPA Life Podcast where we sit down with firm owners, builders, and leaders who are really rethinking what it means to build a successful accounting firm in today’s marketplace. In this space, we spend a lot of time talking about real stuff: We talk about capacity, people, systems, leadership, and how firms that we’re working with are doing all they can to build an organization that supports the lives that not only we want, but their people want, and that they want as well, and the firms that they’re building currently are working for them and not against them, like stereotypical old school firms.
Today, that conversation hits right at the heart of that issue. Our guest is Brenda Cannon. She’s the founder of Cannon CPAs and the creator of SchedulEase, a workflow and scheduling solution built by a CPA for CPAs. Brenda didn’t just grow a firm, she’s intentionally designing the firm that she’s always wanted. Brenda, I’m excited to have you here with us. Welcome to the show.
Thank you for having me.
Hey, you’re more than welcome. One of the things that I love about following your story on LinkedIn and reading some of the stuff you’ve done is that you have been challenging one of the most deeply rooted beliefs in public accounting, and that is that tax season chaos, burnout, and exhaustion are just part of the deal that you buy into. And you’re really proving that with the right systems, the right boundaries, like we were just talking about, firm owners can really take their time, their energy, and their lives back without sacrificing client service, right?
That’s right. Historically, our industry, we have not had control over something as simple as when clients give us their tax documents. For our firm, we’ve always said, give us your tax documents, we’ll have it prepared in two to three weeks. We had no idea if we could have it prepared in two to three weeks because we had no idea who would give us their tax documents and when. So now we control that, and our work is smoothed out, it’s spread out evenly throughout the year. Tax season is a cuss word to me now. April 15th is just another day on the calendar. We do our year-end party and bonuses in December now, because our work is just pretty evenly spread out throughout the year.
One of the things that I want people to understand is this isn’t something that has always been the case for you, and it’s also not something that just happened by accident overnight. You’ve got a pretty traditional background moving into accounting. So walk me through where you started and kind of where you are today.
Sure. So yes, I kind of started the firm with what I was used to in the firm that I left. And then actually partnered with my husband and for a while we had another partner, so we had three partners and we grew to a point where we had about 1,500 clients and it was chaotic. I think part of the reason why we had so many clients, we weren’t billing enough. That’s another story, but in 2019 was kind of my breaking point. We gave our clients a deadline of March 15th. We said, if you get us your information by March 13th, we’ll have your tax return completed by April 15th. No idea how many clients would give us their information by March 13th. In 2019, on March 15th, 105 of our clients gave us their tax documents on that one day.
Out of 1,500 total?
1,500 clients, in addition to clients who gave us their tax documents prior to that date. So it was for our admin because they had to scan the documents that had been dropped off, and set up those projects, and it was chaotic for the preparers because we had a mountain of tax returns to complete in such a small window of time. We were working crazy hours. I mean, it would not be uncommon for me to email a client at 2:00 AM to say, “I’ve completed your tax return. It’s a little late to call you. Here are your numbers. We can talk about this tomorrow.” And my client would respond, “Go to bed!”
So I was to the point where I was thinking about changing careers. I was just tired of giving up my life a fourth of the year every year. Our friends would stop asking us to do things because they knew we would say, “No, we can’t” if it was in January through April—don’t even invite them because they’re not coming. And then in 2020 and in 2021, we had COVID, the extended deadlines. Then in 2022, it was late 2022, I was on an airplane listening to a Jason Staats podcast, and he talked about, why don’t you schedule your tax returns? What about that idea? You could control how much work you do every day. I thought that was such a great idea.
So I came back and we talked, I talked to the team about it and there were questions like, how can we implement this? Clients might not like this, you know, all the questions, but we did. The first year, we implemented it a little bit later, like we told our clients in January, we’re doing this, sent the calendar out on January 31st. I don’t recommend sending the calendar out on January 31st, that’s a real busy day. So we’ve improved it every year. Now we send the calendar out in December and we tell our clients, we need you to pick a date for 2026, by the end of December this year, so our calendar’s all planned out. And the date they pick is the date to give us all their tax documents. They have to pick a date that’s appropriate for their tax return. If they have a K-1 from a publicly traded partnership, they might need to pick a date in May or any partnership, they might need to pick a date in June or July, or it just depends on the client, their tax return, and they’ve done a pretty good job picking appropriate dates. And then we have their tax return completed by the end of the week, three weeks later.
Wow.
It has been life changing. So now we have a manageable number of tax returns to complete each week, and if we’re caught up like that Friday, like that’s three weeks later from when they drop off or they upload their tax documents, we have all those tax returns done by that Friday, we get that weekend off without any guilt because we are on schedule and up to date. It took me a while to take the weekend off without feeling guilt, but I’m better at it now.
So your firm today, prior to 2021, you’re doing 1,500 clients—I won’t say 1,500 returns—1,500 clients. And then from the standpoint of outsourced accounting, CAS services, tax work, what’s the balance and percentage of work in those two areas?
Well, so after 2019, we actually had a peaceful breakup with one of our partners, and then we had about a thousand clients. Then we made some other changes. We ended up being short a couple of CPAs, and we decided for our situation, instead of hiring, we would kind of clean up that client roster. So over the course of about four years, we let go of about 500 clients. So yeah, we had three different tax pros to refer those clients to, so it was a smooth process. But now most of our clients we do the accounting for, we don’t have catch-up accounting to do or accounting cleanup to do—we have some of that, but not as much. Those are all things to consider when setting up a calendar for scheduling tax prep. It can all be done, there are so many different ways to do it, to make it work for your firm. We have one accountant who does all the accounting for our clients. So when we get to January, most of our clients, the accounting is done, which makes the tax return pretty darn easy with clean books. And we have, I would say, 30 to 40% of our clients are business. The rest would be individual tax returns. We still have quite a few orphan 1040s, we don’t take as many new clients that are just 1040s, but we’ll take one if it’s an opportunity where we can do tax planning and more than just a simple tax return.
And I’m going to go out on a limb here and make an assumption that with a two-thirds reduction in client load, you are probably from an overall gross receipt or revenue perspective, close to where you previously were, but a headache level that is considerably less.
That is true. And I had a coach, Rebecca Driscoll, that actually helped me with this. I was nervous about letting go, but we did a pretty good fee increase at the same time. I was nervous about it. The last group of clients we let go were 376 at one time, and she helped me crunch the numbers and yes, our bottom line is better and we have fewer headaches. That is really hard for accountants to do, but if you kind of just crunch the numbers, “if we increase our fees, we can afford to lose this percentage of clients and just break even,” and you probably won’t lose that many clients if you raise your fees or you know, we’re going to let go of these clients, we’re going to raise fees for these clients. If these clients didn’t stay because we raised the fees, how many can we afford to lose? You don’t have to do 3 76 at one time. You could do a sample and see how that goes.
Yep. At what point through this process did the epiphany hit you that tax season wasn’t a requirement, but really a system problem that could actually be solved?
Right. We realized as long as clients, we do tax projections to make sure clients know, let us do a tax projection if you need it so that you won’t owe, and we have a process for that, then you could even schedule part of your summer off if all you did was taxes, then you can schedule your work around your life instead of the other way around. The biggest challenge we’ve had, are our clients who are phobic about extensions. We’ve had to educate our clients quite a bit, I’ve had a lot of pushback. One of my clients said, “Brenda, I don’t think this is going to work,” and even a financial advisor that we have several clients in common, he called me checking to see if a client could contribute to an IRA if their income was ended at threshold. And I mentioned our calendar process, “Let me see where they are on the calendar. But maybe I could do a quick calculation,” and he mentioned, “Yeah, I don’t think they like this new calendar process.”
So we’ve lost a handful of clients—really not that many. But I will tell you, the clients who like this are our favorite clients. They’re the clients who are organized and responsive, and they like this structure. And it’s easy with new clients because we just say, this is how we work, and if they’re not okay with that, then they don’t need to become clients. But I think once clients understand the structure of this and how it’s a smoother process, they like it and clients don’t know what they don’t know, they don’t know that you’re really working 70, 80 hours a week to get it all done and you’re giving up time with your family and you’re being unhealthy. It’s so unhealthy to work those, to be sedentary that many hours a day. So we’re taking care of our health and I’m not going to apologize for taking care of my health. I’d like to live a long life.
Yeah. And isn’t it amazing how those things become a little bit more important to us as we age a little bit, and the ability to rebound from those nights is a little tougher and you start to just say that repetitive phase of “there’s got to be a better way.” That tends to be said a whole lot more, the more that we do it.
Mmm hmm. And I was just, I have hobbies. I want my weekends free. I was just tired of giving up my weekends. And another thing we’ve noticed through this is one thing is we’re more efficient, because we do get all their tax documents when we’re on that day and we tell them, if you don’t have all your tax documents on that day, then you’ll have to pick another day, and by that time it’ll be much later in the year because so many spots on the calendar, clients pick, they go fast. Spots on the calendar go fast, and we have another process to make sure they have everything on their day. We check that the following day to make sure we have everything. Because sometimes clients think they’ve given us everything, but they haven’t. And so we’re more efficient because of that. We’re not picking up, putting down tax returns because we’re waiting for information. And also we are not getting the status check emails and phone calls, the “just checking in on the status of my return.” We’re not getting that anymore, and that is so lovely.
Yeah, I think people don’t understand, and maybe they get it in general, but you don’t really equate the time component to it. I know on the recruiting side of our business so many times we’ll get a call from candidates that want to know, “Hey, have you heard anything? “Have you heard anything? Have you heard anything?” And you know, it’s all you can do to not say, “Hey, I need you to understand for every time that I’ve got to hop on the phone and let you know that I haven’t heard anything, that’s one minute that I’m not potentially on the phone with the client,” or in your case, “that’s one minute I’m potentially not solving a problem from a tax standpoint or working on your return.”
Exactly. And you don’t want to say that, but you really want to say that.
Yeah. It is the things you think that don’t come out of your mouth audibly. Hopefully.
Hopefully!
What were some of the biggest beliefs that you had to unlearn after doing this for 20, 25 plus years in order to build a firm the way that you wanted it to function?
I think the biggest belief is just that you have to get all these tax returns done by April 15th for clients who really want to file by April 15th. The deadline is September 15th and October 15th, we just need to make sure clients don’t owe. And what we try to stress to our clients is you’re going to have a client who’s spending more time just on your return, we can actually talk to our clients and visit with our clients and talk to them about maybe tax planning ideas. We just have more time. So I think the biggest belief was kind of going against industry standard. And I still get, I mean, I get pushback. People just on Twitter the other day, someone was like, “This is never, you know, tax pros are never going to go for it” Yes, they are, they are. And the idea is growing. It’s just, it’s a new idea and it’s a little bit against the grain, but it’s really picking up. And I tell you, I think for firms that are hiring, I think it would really help attract good young talent.
I think you’re right.
Millennials and Gen Z get a hard time, but I think there’s a lot we can learn from them because they truly want to have a work-life balance. And I was raised, you go to work and you be thankful if you get a day off. Don’t expect it.
Yeah. You know, Brenda, it’s interesting that you say that because one of the things that I’ve gotten some pushback on and on the recruiting side of the business, a lot of times we’ll hear about, “We’ve got a generation of people, two generations of people that don’t really want to work that hard.” And I push back on that a lot and I tell people, look, I don’t think that it’s that they don’t want to work hard. Now, I don’t care what generation, there are people that don’t want to work hard. I’ll give you that. I don’t care if it’s a, I don’t care if it’s an 80-year-old person or an 18-year-old person, there are people that don’t want to work. But I think that you were raised in a time, and I was raised in a time where, like you’re talking about, you go to work, you do your job, however long it takes to get it done, do your job, period, the end. And if there are people in your life or your life in general that have to suffer through that process, then that is just a product of what you’re doing, get over it. Just do it.
And we grew up in a world where the people that we went to funerals for were our parents as they aged, our grandparents, our aunts, our uncles, the older neighbor, the older couple that we went to church with, things like that. So death to us was somebody that affected people older than us. We’ve got a couple of generations now in the workforce that went through COVID and those kids buried classmates, and their young parents and their young aunts and uncles. And I think that those kids got a real taste of life and mortality, if you will. “Yeah, I’m not going to live forever.” A lot sooner than you and I did. You and I got that revelation probably in our 40s and 50s. I think that they got it in their late teens to early 20s. And they drew a line in the sand and said, “Man, there’s more to life than this.” There’s more to life than this.
And I’ve continued to say since then that I think the second part of that equation is that people believe that you have to love what you do. And I don’t think you have to love what you do. I think you have to enjoy what you do. I think you have to have fun at what you do. Mm-hmm. But I don’t think you have to love it. What you do may be the financial vehicle to allow you to do what you love. And that’s okay. There’s nothing wrong with that. We can have people working for us that are staff, senior, manager level people who don’t love what they do. They enjoy it, they’re good at it, they’re great teammates, but they’re not going to sell their soul.
Yeah, it’s true. And then you have a good point. Some of the young people that went through COVID have a “life is short” mentality, because they witnessed things that were hard to process, I’m sure.
Yeah! Things that you and I never had to process. At 18, 19, 20, 25 years old, we didn’t, we just, we didn’t have to process that. And I think that creating an environment in the culture like you’re talking about, that allows people to have a little bit more of, yeah, there’s going to be peaks, there’s going to be times where, hey, something happens, there’s a glitch, our hair’s on fire, we’ve all got to pull a little bit more weight. Okay. That’s part of being a team. That’s okay if it’s the exception, not the rule kind of thing. And I think that kind of brings me to my next question with you, when you started putting real boundaries around your time and around your availability, what surprised you most about how clients responded to that?
Hmm. I think most clients were just scared of extending. They thought they were in trouble. We just had to explain, you’re not at a higher risk of being audited. We’ve just sent communications out—the second year, I think, I still had some clients who were frustrated they were going to be extended, because when you do the scheduling thing, you used to pile up tons of returns before April 15, so now you’re smoothing that out. So many of those clients who got their stuff every year by March 15th, for the first time, they’re going to be extended. The second year, some clients were still frustrated and I got frustrated, so I just quickly did a Loom video. It was the most horrible video you’ve ever seen. But I didn’t even edit it. I just got on Loom and said, “This is why you don’t need to be concerned about extensions.” And I just went through, and I also talked about how this process will be better for them, we’re less likely to make a mistake, we have more time to look at their tax situation and give them tax planning ideas, and I just sent that Loom video. I used our texting software and just sent it in a text. One of my clients responded, “Bless your heart.” He could tell the frustration in my voice.
But I think it’s a matter of just kind of educating clients. Someone has to read—so have you heard that someone has to read something like seven times before they actually pay attention to it? Yes. I think that’s so true. Sometimes if you are going to start scheduling tax prep, you’re going to have to tell your clients about it a few times, before they actually start. And then extension education, again, you’re going to have to repeat it a few times that it’s okay. It’s going to take clients a while and I feel like we’re working against the world because you turn on the news in early April and the news station will say, “You have two weeks to get your tax return prepared.” And I’m yelling at the TV, “No, you have six more months.”
Yeah, I think you’re right. I think it’s that fearmongering that goes on out there. This big concern about, you know, what happens if I don’t, I’ve got to get it in, I’ve got to get it done. And so many times, also, especially since COVID hit, the IRS and the Treasury have been so apt to move a tax deadline when the wind blows really hard in some area of the country. And so, you know, you’ve got somebody that’s stressing about getting all their documents in because they’ve got to get the return done by April 15th, and the IRS has pushed the deadline back for Mississippi to June 15th, and nobody in Mississippi really understands that.
Yeah. Oh, Florida. I think they’ve had so many, they don’t even know what their deadline is anymore because of hurricanes and everything.
Yeah, I think you’re right. I think it’s just this perception of a misunderstanding of what we think we understand. So let’s talk a little bit about Schedulee ase, the software that you’ve created. It really didn’t start as a product idea, did it?
No. So when we decided to start scheduling, we were trying to figure out how we’re going to do this and track everything, and the only software we could find that came close was Calendly. And it worked, but it caused some confusion because Calendly has times, so people thought they had an appointment or they thought they needed to bring us or upload their tax documents at that certain time. So it caused a lot of confusion, and then tracking it was hard to do with Calendly. We did use an API through Make and Airtable, but still there were problems with that. If a client used a different email address, Make wouldn’t pull it over to Airtable because it couldn’t match the email. There was a lot of admin work, tracking who’s picked a day, who hasn’t.
So I have a client who’s a software developer and I visited with him about exactly what we needed, and I asked him if he could create something and he did. So I didn’t create it, I just had the idea. He created SchedulEase, so it’s specifically for this: We set up the calendar, so many slots a day, however we want. We tell our clients we’ll have your tax return completed by the end of the week, three weeks later, after you give us your tax docs. So next year, I know we’re going on vacation the second week of May, so three weeks prior, we have no spots available on the calendar. Then we come back from vacation, we’re not playing catch up. We don’t have prior weeks we have to catch up for. And then three weeks prior to the week leading up to April 15th, no spots available on the calendar, so we get to that week, we can make sure extensions are filed, we can do any last minute calculations for payments with extensions for the clients who did not schedule tax projections like they were supposed to, like in November and December and early January. So we just have time, and we can get ahead of schedule, we’ve got a three-week window. We just don’t want to get behind schedule.
But scheduling is working really well. We send the calendar out and let’s say a couple of days go by, we can send a reminder to clients who still haven’t picked a date. It will filter out those clients and send a reminder and then we can export to Excel so we can keep notes and so forth. And you can have as many calendars as you want in Scheduleease. So in your firm, if tax preparers work on the same returns every year, they could have a separate calendar. One of our customers, they’re doing a separate calendar for each type of entity. I think it’d be a great idea to have a calendar for early filers, like your clients who are okay to file early, they get all their tax documents, they have a calendar, and then your clients you need to file later, then they would have a separate calendar. There’s so many ways to do that. We also started an online community called Take Your Life Back Tax Pro, and it’s free for anyone who subscribes to SchedulEase.
So tell me about that community. Tell me what the goal is there. I think I’ve got an idea with just the name, but if you’re talking to somebody and you tell them about this, how do you describe the community and the value to them?
The reason for the community is mainly to help tax pros implement and set up their calendar and then communicate with their clients. We have some templates in there, suggested communications, and there are some hangups with setting up calendars. I think accountants, we overthink things and we worry about upsetting clients. I don’t know if other industries do this, but I feel like we’re a little extreme, so we talk through that: We have a minimum of one live event every week, we have other events, but those are about setting up your calendar, any problem you are running into, and then into January it’ll probably transition to how’s it going, are you staying on schedule and how are clients doing with this? Are they getting you all their tax documents, things like that. We do other things related to taking your life back. We’ve had some guest speakers talking about raising fees, letting clients go. I think we’re going to have a guest speaker talking about boundaries. Just all the things related to taking your life back.
Not letting the business run you, but you run the business.
Or the clients run your business!
Yep. That’s even a better point. For the person that hears about Scheduleease, that doesn’t know what it is, that looks at things and says, “Hey, well how does this integrate with, or how does this work with Canopy or my tax software that I’m using in UltraTax or CCH, or I’m already working with these, does this sit with that? Can it sit with that?” What’s different about it? How do you address that question or those questions?
So for now, SchedulEase is a standalone software. It is simply for clients to pick a date to give you all their tax documents on that day. It just rolled out in September, so the software developer wants to make sure everything is working great, and it has been. He’s been adding some features as we go. I think after January, new customers will slow way down, because once you get into January, you’re on the rollercoaster, you’re not making any changes. So then in May or even in the fall, it’ll pick back up, and we can look at the future more. But for now, he just wants to make sure everything’s running smoothly. In our community, people are making suggestions. Now, you can see how many slots at the bottom of the calendar, so you don’t have to manually add it, it keeps a running total, things like that. Trying to think of some other features he’s just added. It makes it easier for clients to, when they pick a date, go pick a month instead of just scrolling down. Just little things like that he’s adding. So I don’t know about integration into other software, that’s kind of down the road.
So right now it’s a standalone system that just really takes on the scheduling process of what can we do to control the chaos versus the chaos controlling us kind of thought process.
Yeah. And I will tell you, there is so much psychology to what we do, when you have a manageable number of tax returns to complete each week. We know three weeks later we have to have these tax returns completed, and if those tax returns are completed, then we get that weekend off. I had so much guilt taking a weekend off, like, why do I feel guilty? It’s because we’ve been indoctrinated that we are just supposed to work these crazy hours until April, and it was a process for me to get used to taking a weekend off in February, March, and April. It’s so messed up, and I think back prior to doing this, we worked long, crazy hours and one of our employees, I remember it was 5:00 PM and I heard the door, she was leaving and I thought, “Why is she leaving? It is just 5:00 PM. We have got so much work to do. She didn’t even ask!” I think about it now and I think I am so messed up that I would be acting that way. She has every right to go have dinner with her husband. Like, my mindset about all of this has shifted and now I really kind of regret some of my leadership skills in prior years.
Well, I think so much of that is just behaviors that were ingrained over the years of doing what you did, the way that you did it and the way that other people did it. So, you know, you’ve said we don’t have tax seasons anymore. You’ve posted a lot about that. We’ve talked about that today. For a firm owner that’s listening who feels stuck in survival mode, the “we’ve always done it this way” mindset, where would you tell them to start, if in the other side of their brain they’re going, “There’s got to be a better way.”
Well, I would encourage scheduling tax prep, and it is a little bit later to start that now. I think, if you start it late December, early January, you’d still have time to communicate with your clients. But what you could do if you were thinking about scheduling tax prep, start talking to your clients this next year and say, “We want to control the workload, so we’re going to schedule tax prep next year and we’ll be sending out communications about that, but the important thing to know is there’s a chance you’ll be extended and we owe you taxes, so we’ll be sending out communications.” Our firm, we schedule these calendars out in the fall for tax projections. We have clients we do that for already, clients that are on a monthly engagement, but our clients that are not, our just standalone 1040s, we send that calendar out, and they pick a day to give us their year-to-date tax documents so we can control that workflow also.
That’s the biggest hurdle—letting clients that might owe tax let you do a tax projection to make sure they won’t owe tax. I would just be communicating with clients about that, and for all of our new clients, even our 1040 alone clients, our minimum fee includes one tax projection. So they might as well let us do it, November, December, early January, because they’re paying for it anyway. So that’s how we handle new clients. I would just start communicating with clients and then if they wanted to join our community, the community’s free if you purchase Scheduleease or it’s $30 a month, and they could start seeing other firms that are scheduling tax prep and how well it’s going and how they’re getting weekends off and maybe be encouraged by other firm owners.
I think sometimes the ability to see it in action is really kind of the proof for people, especially in an industry and in a business that has been doing things the same way for so many years. On the recruiting side of the business, we’ll talk to candidates about firms like yours. So many times, and I’ve said this before on a lot of our podcasts, 80 to 83% of the candidates we talk to, initial conversation they say, “I hate what I do. Get me out of public accounting.” It all boils down to quality of life, really what it all boils down to. After we talk to candidates for a while, what they finally realize, it’s not what I do that I don’t like, it’s where I do it, we’ll ask candidates, “If we could find an environment, if we could find a culture, if we could find a firm that gives you 95, 99% of the things that you love about what you do, and takes away 99 to 100% of the things that just drive you crazy, would you at least be open to hearing about another firm, another opportunity in a firm like that?” Of that 80%, let’s call it 80%, half of those people say, “Yes, I’m open, because I love what I do. I really love what I do.”
Of that half of those people that say yes, I always say there’s about half of those people that have what I refer to as the “Bigfoot Theory” mentality. That is, I’ve heard of firms like that, I’ve seen fuzzy pictures of firms like that. But I don’t believe they exist. But I’m willing to look, and I think sometimes, like you’re talking about your community going into this tax season. If somebody has heard that this is a possibility, hey, for 30 bucks a month, you could step into a community, watch how people are doing it, learn from them, and then take that step sometime in 2026 to start taking more ownership over your processes.
Yeah. And speaking of people you’ve talked to that hate where they work, I’ve had a number of people reach out to me and say, “I would love to schedule tax prep, but my boss won’t even talk about it. He won’t even listen to me.” I’m like, “Could I please talk to your boss for five minutes?”
And sometimes I think that’s all it takes is just that conversation to at least get people to question. May not get them to change, but at least get them to question and see that, hey, there could be, absolutely could be a different way. So yeah, Brenda, this has been such a powerful conversation and what you’re building really goes far beyond a scheduling tool or a firm success story. I think you’re helping firm owners rethink what’s possible when they stop accepting chaos as normal and start designing systems that really support the lives that they want to live. So if there’s folks out there that want to learn more about you, want to learn more about what you’re doing, want to learn more about Scheduleease, or just want to have a conversation about, “Hey, talk to me, this is what I’m trying to accomplish,” where can people find you, number one, and number two, what’s the easiest way for people to get ahold of you?
So like you probably used my Scheduleease email address, it’s Brenda@SchedulEase.net. There’s only one E between “schedule” and “ease.” And I’m on Twitter, @BSueCannon. I’m on LinkedIn, I think I’m just Brenda Cannon on LinkedIn. I don’t really remember, but I talk a lot about it on the socials. But they can always feel free to tell me, and I’m always happy to do a Zoom meeting and visit with them about their situation.
I’ll make sure that we have all that information in the show notes below. For anyone listening who feels stretched thin, overwhelmed by the calendar or a lack of a calendar, or stuck in a reaction mode, Brenda’s story really is proof that a better way exists. So Brenda, thank you for sharing your journey, your insights, and really the work that you’re doing, not only to help your firm get better at what you’re doing in delivering service, but also helping the profession move forward. I think what you’re doing is a great thing. So thank you very much and congratulations on the success that you guys have had so far.
Well, thank you for having me. I appreciate that.
You are more than welcome. For those of you that are listening, thank you for tuning in to CPA Life. If you found value in today’s episode, be sure to subscribe and share it with a firm owner or someone in your network that feels stuck and doesn’t know that there really is a better way to build a life that doesn’t have to be a sacrifice everything or everyone to build a successful career, that there is an opportunity outside of what you think is traditional about this industry, it’s just a matter of buying into a better CPA Life. So until next time, have a great day.
We hope you enjoyed today’s episode. Be sure to subscribe on your favorite podcasting app, leave a five star rating and visit our website for links and show notes at CPALifePodcast.com. We’ll see you next time on CPA Life!