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Not Just Sales, but Strategy, with Neil Barrow
John Randolph returns to the mic to sit down with Neil Barrow, founder of EnabledBD, on Episode 84 of CPA Life. Together, they unravel the real mechanics of business development in CPA firms, as Neil draws on his journey from structured software sales to the unpredictable world of accounting firm growth. Challenging the myth that business development is just about sales or personality, Neil frames it as a skill: one that can be built, measured, and tailored to each individual’s strengths. A discussion well beyond buzzwords, the pair focus on practical strategies for deepening client relationships, fostering accountability, and building systems that don’t box people in. If you understand it’s time to rethink what it means to grow a firm, to consider how even small, consistent actions can transform both culture and results, then check out part 1 of John’s conversation with Neil now.
Important Links:
About the Guest:
Neil Barrow started my career in software sales, but got talked into public accounting, where he led BD and origination efforts at two different firms for over eight years. He founded EnabledBD in 2022 and has since worked with over a dozen firms to build or enhance their BD functions, proving that BD is not a soft skill, it’s a system. Beyond EnabledBD, he also runs UndergroundBD, an online community for BD professionals looking for clarity, upskilling, and support.
Transcript:
Hey everybody, welcome to the CPA Life Podcast, where we spend time talking to leaders who are shaping the future of CPA firms, not only locally, but also on a national level. People who are really redefining growth, people strategy, and what it means to build a firm that’s both competitive and human centered, and today we’re going to be talking about something that every CPA firm leader wrestles with, and that’s business development that works, how it has to align with strategy and capacity and people planning. And to do that, we’re going to be digging into several topics today around BD with Neil Barrow, who is the founder of EnabledBD. Neil, nice to have you with us today.
Yeah thanks, John. Appreciate that. It’s going to be fun.
Absolutely. Little bit of an intro on your background and kind of fill in gaps a little bit as we talk. You spent several years leading business development at two top CPA firms, Whitley Penn and Lane Gorman. For those that may not be in the Dallas marketplace, Lane Gorman, depending on what ranking you’re looking at, is stereotypically the number one largest or number two largest local CPA firm in the Dallas marketplace. So a lot of understanding of what it takes to build a successful firm. And then you went out and launched EnabledBD, which is focused on training, coaching, consulting, helping professional service firms build intentional, structured, and repeatable growth systems. Is that about right?
That is a nice way to put what I do. I simplify business development for firms, yeah, but I like the way that you said that.
And I think simplicity is something that we need to lean into a little bit more. I think sometimes we overthink it, we overcomplicate it. We make it a little bit harder than it needs to be. There’s a scene that I’ve always kind of leaned into when it comes to business development running firms. There’s a scene from Remember the Titans, the movie with Denzel Washington, where he’s walking up when all the kids are getting on the bus and he hands the offensive playbook to the defensive coordinator and the defensive assistant coach, and they open it up and look at it and say something like, “It’s only two pages,” and he says something to the effect of, whatever offense it is that he runs, veer offense or whatever it is, he said, “It’s like Novocaine, just give it time. It always works.” And I think that there’s some simplicity to business development that we need to lean into a little bit more than the complicated way that we approach it. Is that kind of what you’ve seen with the firms that you deal with?
Yeah, 100%. I think when we look at business development for accounting firms, we’re always chasing the shiny objects. So, you know, if we’re not growing how we want to grow, then how do we get more leads in the door? But we’re not really maximizing the leads that we’re currently getting, or we don’t even know how many we’re currently receiving at the firm because everybody’s kind of running their own thing, which is, again, this is fine, but when we’re thinking about a strategy, is more leads a thing? Or if we’re at capacity and we’re turning down work, then that’s a different type of business development challenge. But they’re all related in how we approach and how our firm thinks about business development. Every culture is different, every leadership team is different, and so there is a simplistic way to think about business development that can work for every firm.
Let’s talk a little bit about kind of how you’ve gotten to where you are today in running Enabled. You’ve moved from software sales early in your career into CPA firm business development. Tell me how that journey has kind of shaped the way you think about business development inside CPA firms.
I think when you look at going from a true sales environment into a business development environment at smaller mid-market firms, you’re going from a very structured environment to a less structured environment where, you know, before I had a playbook, I had coaching, I had management, I had support, I just needed to execute the playbook. So I had to just do the activity and do it well. Within a business development role, business development can be ambiguous, and so what I learned really early on is that it’s really about CPA firms use this all the time: We’re an entrepreneurial firm, right? And so you have to have that level of autonomy to go figure it out, and that’s based on a lot of different factors at that firm.
And then as I was talking to other business development professionals that were in either accounting or other professional services spaces like consulting, law, engineering, financial services, we were all kind of in the same way, pretty much we’re all in the same way, which is ultimately we were all trying to execute conversations and generate conversations with the same types of companies and the same types of referral sources and the same types of folks. And so when you’re in an origination role like I was, you had to have a plan, you had to be consistent, you had to execute that, but you had to figure it out on your own. There was no training, or here’s how you do it, or here’s exactly what we need you to do to hit your goal that we’re going to assign to you. And so there was a level of figuring out that I had to go through. And sales is not business development, right? There are components of sales to business development, but it’s not executed in the same way.
That’s a great way to put it. And I want to touch on that a little bit as we talk about this a little bit more. I want to understand your mindset a little bit, and I’m sure that people kind of question you about this because they have a stereotypical mindset of kind of something you just said that business development is sales, they’re interchangeable, they’re the same things. The reality is they’re not. And you often speak about business development as being a system, not a soft skill. What does that mean practically for CPA firms, for CPA firm owners that want predictable growth?
So some of my conversations with leadership whenever they’re exploring growth or business development initiatives for their firm, again, they come to me with what they feel like is their challenge, which is like, “Hey, we need more leads,” right? And that’s a common theme. Or, “Hey, we’re thinking about hiring a business development professional at our firm.” Whenever we’re having these conversations, I think business development at its core is really just two things: It’s deepening existing relationships and growing new right relationships. Like that’s pretty much it. But we try to overcomplicate that, and so a lot of people have this mindset in professional services that, “Well, I’m not a business developer,” because they think business development is going to happy hours talking to people you don’t want to talk to and that you’ll never talk to again. Which, again, that is a component, like that is an activity that you can do is go to the events, but that’s not necessarily what business development is practically, again, it’s deepening existing relationships.
These firms have hundreds, like thousands and thousands of clients. And have we asked them, you know, we’re recording this at the end of 2025, so have we asked them, “Hey, 2026 is coming up, what are your big priorities and how can we be helpful?” And so we have these kind of common mindset challenges of like, “It’s sales, I’ve got to go pitch somebody something. I’ve got to go out and network with people.” Which, again, like those are components potentially to business development, but that’s not actually what business development is. And so the first step is kind of getting out of our own way with some of the head trash that we have associated with what business development or sales actually is, and like understanding what it actually is so we can create a focused plan. You use the word system, process, structure. Again, those are very generous words to what I help firms do. It’s really centered around who are our clients that I need to be more intentional about and who are our best referral sources at our firm that we need to go do more things with.
How do you get past the thought process and mindset that people have when they hear “system, process,” and they think “confining, limiting, there’s a box that I’m going to play in and I can’t get out of that box.” How do you deal with that? Because there is the necessity in a business development capacity to have a system, to have a process, to have things that are measurable, and in my opinion, replicable, but you also don’t want to remove the individuality of the person that you’re dealing with.
Yeah. So I think you honed in on a key point there is there’s not a system that would work for everybody. Like it’s all individual based. We’re all different people. What works for you, John, is not going to work for me, because I won’t do it or I don’t want to do it. And so some people like, “Hey, you’ve got a podcast, I’ve got a podcast.” But other people might not want to ever be interviewed on a podcast, right? So there’s a lot of different things as we think about the components to structure. I think it’s more how I view it’s more a framework, and it’s kind of choose your own adventure with guardrails. So here’s what we know can work from an activity perspective within these buckets of business development on where we need to spend our time, but you can choose where you want to spend your time on what you’re going to be most consistent at.
A lot of the professionals that I’m working with at firms, because where we initially start is at the individual book of business owner level. So who is the relationship tied to at these clients? And then we kind of build, that’s our foundation that we can build upon. Some of our folks that are at capacity, that are more of our technical partners, or senior managers, or managers, we need to encourage them to spend their time in the conversations that they’re already having and just have better conversations. And we need to provide how to do that. Here’s some suggested things, and then we’re actually going to have you either report on your activity or we’re going to measure that in some regard. But it’s not, you don’t need a robust CRM, you don’t need anything more than an Excel spreadsheet and someone who cares to manage this. And that’s where, again, a lot of these firms need to start.
Yeah. I think that so many times we think that there’s got to be some type of a platform that we’re working within. So I’ve got to, I’ve got to go make this big investment in Salesforce, and then I’ve got to create the pipeline within Salesforce and I’ve got to create the tracking metrics and no, Excel is going to work good enough for us.
I’d say this a lot to firms, like, I can give you all the best practices, but if you’re not going to do them, they’re not best practices. So like, why don’t we just start again practically to generate conversations that matter, and then we’re getting conversations coming into the firm. So how are we executing those better?
You know, we touched on this before we started recording, and I wanted to dig into this a little bit. The firms that you talked to, or even the prospects that you’ve had conversations with, do you see that there’s a bigger challenge in regards to new business development, bringing in new customers, or digging in deeper into the relationships that we have, and either cross-selling opportunities or just expanding what already exists there?
Yeah, so when you look at most firms, they feel like, and this is probably true, that – and when I suggest that, “Hey, we’ve got all these clients, we need to go and talk to them intentionally, bring them new ideas,” because we know what the number one reason why a client will leave the firm, it’s because they’re not being communicated with how they want to be communicated with, either with proactive advice or with check-ins or with a conversation. And so we know that to be true, but every firm tells me that they are good at it. Like that’s in your proposal. I don’t even have to have you send me your proposal to know that client communication and proactive advice is part of your messaging within your proposal. And so we need to start being intentional about making sure that we are executing on that promise to our clients. And most of our professionals, they like being valuable to their clients, but sometimes to be valuable to our clients, we need to understand what their expectations are around communication, and how to execute on that to be proactive and intentional even when we’re busy.
And so I think that, going back to your question, I think that most firms come to me, whenever they feel they have a lead problem. We need more leads. We need more opportunities. “Man, Neil, if I could just get in front of more opportunities, we would just crush it.” That could be true, for sure. But I’m coming in at a practical standpoint and saying, “Hey, well how do we maximize the opportunities that we’re currently having?” And so there is this kind of, maybe friction to both is like we feel pulled to go generate new opportunities, but we also know we need to cross-sell, and we’re relying on our people just to go and do that. And I think it’s a both like, “Okay, how can we be intentional about being focused around generating the new ideal clients that we want, and then also how do we go and better serve our clients?”
And I think that mindset comes down to when we hear cross-selling. When I hear that, or when a professional hears that, they’re saying, “Okay, well you’re asking me to go to my tax client and pitch CAS services,” and that feels bad and awkward. I don’t want to do that. But if we can shift our mindset from that. I know that they’re struggling getting me their information and getting clean financials to me, and so if I don’t bring this up to them, I’m doing them a disservice. Like that’s the mode that we need to kind of shift our mindset, because if we can do that, then we can learn how to ask those questions to where it doesn’t feel uncomfortable and it doesn’t feel like you’re pitching people.
It’s interesting that you use that example, because there’s a client that we worked with recently that was looking to grow their CS practice. It had been an afterthought like it has been for years for a lot of firms that are more established. I was talking to the director or the partner that’s over that group, and we were talking about the fact that probably about 90% of their current client base that they service are one-off, clean up financials for the tax department kind of thing. What he’s been struggling with is getting the other partners to understand, “Hey, you realize that if we could talk to these clients about us doing this on a more consistent basis, that me calling you and saying, I need you to bang on your client to get me the information that I need to effectively do this job, those problems would go away for you and make their lives better.” And you know, he was talking about how that is one of their biggest struggles.
Yeah, and it’s a problem at most firms, right? And it’s a challenge to solve for, and I think it’s, again, I think you’re also dealing with capacity constraints is like, “Hey, like all of our professionals, they have day jobs,” and business development is a small piece to a larger piece depending on the season, depending on the skillset, depending on the want to, how much they built the muscle over time. And so I think it’s unfair for us as leaders to ask our people like, “Well, hey, just call your clients. Just ask them if they need CAS stuff, go take them to lunch.” Which is what we hear often, without providing that how to and support. And some kind of collegial accountability. I’m a big fan of public shaming where, hey, we need to show like who is doing what, because I think you can go and hide, like you can get very like, hey, I’ve got work to do, I’m too busy to do this stuff. But we know that it’s in the best interest of serving our clients and serving our community and being the trusted advisor if we do these things and generate conversations and ask good questions. Provide advice, but again, how to, and how do we make it easy at each of our firms looks different, and where to start looks different at every firm.
Yeah, and I think that it’s important because I’m with you. My saying for years is, people will respect what they expect that you will inspect. And if you’re measuring it, they will respect that if you’re consistently measuring it. But the flip side of that is if we’re measuring it, but I’m not showing you how to succeed in that measurement, then it’s really failure on my part as a leader, because I’m expecting you to perform at a certain level, i.e., “Hey Neil, congratulations. You’ve been promoted. Now you have a $350,000 a year, $400,000 a year BD quota that I need you to hit, and we’re going to measure you against all the other people at your level consistently on how you do that, but I have no earthly idea how to tell you to do it or go do it. Just watch Bill over there because Bill’s great at doing it. And you can probably pick up a couple of things from Bill.”
Yeah, you’re exactly right. I think it’s providing that level of support and the how associated with it. I think that’s the biggest opportunity because I, you know, I tie it back to our service lines, like we wouldn’t bring on, like recruit a tax manager, and then not train them on our software and how to do it and what’s expected of them. Like we would, or maybe we would, I don’t know. But we wouldn’t do that.
We shouldn’t do that!
We shouldn’t do that. So why would we, why do we think that business development is any different? And the answer to that is because we think it’s a soft skill, we think it’s a personality trait, and it’s not. It’s an intentional skillset that we have to develop just like anything else.
So in, if I hear you right, what you’re saying is, hey, it’s a muscle. Everybody has that muscle, unless you were born with a birth defect, everybody has that muscle. Some may develop that muscle better over time. With the work that they’re putting in, somebody may get bigger biceps, we all have biceps, but this person’s may get bigger for whatever reason than this person. It doesn’t mean this person doesn’t have it. They just may not ever develop it to this level.
Yeah. It’s like, exercise and business development, the similarities are very, kind of go hand in hand, the similarities between exercise and business development because it is a skillset and it’s a muscle to develop. And so oftentimes I’m going into firms and I’ve got to get you to go to the gym. Like, I’m not going to put you on a 12-week program immediately and change your diet and exercise and have you take on all this stuff because you’re not going to do it, it’s going to be overwhelming. And so a lot of the times we’ve got to step in the gym. And what I view that stepping in the gym as, is looking at our book of business and the clients we serve, and really thinking about what activities do I need to do to help grow my muscle, right? Help grow the relationship. And so if we can start there, and then we’ve got people that have been going to the gym for a long time, and that’s the thing about these firms is you have all the different – people are on a BD journey and it’s just starting out. Or, “Hey, congratulations, you’re a manager now you need to go do BD.” It’s like, “Well, what the hell? Like I don’t, like what, like where’d I even start?” All the way to, “I’m the rainmaker. I don’t want to be put in the box. I’m doing my own thing.” And those people need to be supported differently. And what they’ll do and what the exercises that we’re going to ask them to do are going to be different.
But again, it’s in that framework: Here’s the boxes and here’s the exercises that you can do. Now we’re going to help you put together this plan for you, and then we’re going to support you in being consistent in your plan, because you’re going to have capacity, family, you’ve got all this stuff going on. So we need you to be consistent and not take on too many bites. How many times do we join an association or an organization and we show up and then we get busy and then we don’t go for two or three months? Well, is that actually worth our time to go do that? Probably not. So I think about it like muscle building for sure.
A lot of firms may look at this problem and we’ve seen this with some clients that we’ve talked to over the last couple of years. There’s been a lot of firms that are in our target market, mid-market firm size, small to mid-market size firms that have had this thought process of, “Look, I’m just going to go out and hire a business development person. I’m going to let that person be the rainmaker for our firm before hiring a BD professional.” What are some questions that firm leadership really needs to be digging into and asking themselves to ensure success?
That is a great question, John. You know, coming from the BD role, thinking about, you know, what I described as kind of having an entrepreneurial mindset, you’ve got to just go take action, you’ve got to build it, you’ve got to figure it out, I think what a firm can do to set development, if they’re considering hiring a business developer, because that’s a lot of the conversations. “Hey, we’re thinking about hiring a business developer. No, go talk to Neil first.” And like, let’s get organized and ake sure that this is success. Because hiring somebody cute to go to all the events is not a strategy. So we have to have somebody that can execute and develop a plan, and so how do we do that? Is because when we think about, again, going back to mindset, we think it’s being an extrovert is being good at business development. That gives you the motor to go out and do a lot of activity. So those folks are actually more inclined to do business development because that’s something that feeds them. And so that’s what we think business is. But when you think about what we need to do to succeed in hiring a business developer is we need to give them a starting kit. Like, we don’t have to go through a full-blown, here’s exactly the playbook that you need to run, because honestly, does leadership, are they prepared to do that? Can they do that exercise on their own? So we need to give them a starter kit, which is, who is our ideal client? Like, who are the best clients at the firm? What problems are we solving for them? What outcomes are we helping them achieve? Why did they originally come to us? Because that will help create focus.
So if we’re a smaller firm and we do a lot of real estate and construction and, I need to know what my best and like what I can go win with compelling stories today, and then I can tie that to the partners that are also really good at closing business, because business at all is a team sport. And so if I’m a business developer and I’m in charge of going out and generating new opportunities and new conversations for the firm, then I need to be able to generate that and then have confidence that our team will have a great first meeting and will give us the best likely outcome of a good outcome, which is a new client. If I don’t have confidence in that, then it’s really difficult for me to go and do business development, and so I have to have a focus around how am I going to do that, whether that’s private equity, real estate, whatever industry, whatever size of company, whatever problems we’re solving for business owners or CFOs, like, I’ve got to get pretty clear about that, so then I can give this to the business developer for them to go and learn more about our firm, meet the partners, and then find the areas where they need to spend their time. So it’s focused, so it’s not just going out into the market and just being the face of the firm, I hear that a lot. “We would just want somebody to be the face of the firm,” which again is fine if you find that person that can go figure it out. Where we struggle is we’re setting ourselves up for frustration and not success when we don’t give them some focus areas around what we’re great at and which partners to partner with on the most likely good outcomes for the firm.
Thanks for joining us for part one of John Randolph’s conversation with Neil Barrow of EnabledBD. Part two will air December 31st. Be sure to check out CPALifePodcast.com for links and show notes. And join us next week. Merry Christmas from all of us at CPA Life!