Principal Conference

The accounting profession faces new challenges, from remote work to market consolidation and a technology revolution. These shifts impact how firms pursue growth. Despite staffing hurdles, growth remains key. To remain successful, strategies must adapt to market conditions. We explore the three main avenues for growth: acquiring new clients, retaining existing ones, and expanding relationships with new services, enhanced scale, and M&A. Key objectives include: · Understanding market shifts: We examine trends from past eras to today, showing how these have reshaped strategic priorities and business models. · Defining growth goals: Learn to identify the core parts of a growth objective and align your strategies to achieve them. · Client-centric growth models: Discover a model for assessing client needs and aligning solutions · to increase client relationship value. · Strategies for inorganic growth: How to become a market consolidator. · Gain practical insights on fostering growth in today’s professional landscape.

This session is available to registrants only.

The world has changed—and so must our approach to professional skepticism. In environments shaped by information overload, AI-generated conclusions, and accelerating complexity, the ability to think critically and skeptically is no longer just a professional requirement. It is a leadership advantage. Yet most approaches to skepticism remain rooted in outdated mechanical checklists and superficial doubt—tools designed for a simpler time and a more predictable information landscape. This session introduces a dynamic new model of skeptical reasoning built for the environments leaders actually face today. Through powerful live demonstrations and interactive exercises, participants discover the hidden psychological and contextual forces that shape judgment—often without their awareness. They explore the three dimensions of skepticism and learn how to calibrate their thinking to the reliability of evidence, the demands of the situation, and the culture of the organization. The result is a more precise, more adaptive, and more trustworthy form of professional judgment. For principals and partners whose reputations depend on the quality of their skeptical reasoning—and who lead teams of professionals whose judgment must be developed and trusted—this session delivers both personal insight and practical leadership application. The best leaders don’t just think skeptically themselves; they build organizations where skeptical thinking thrives at every level

This session is available to registrants only.

In today’s environment, partnership must mean more than production and tenure. This session challenges partners to redefine enterprise ownership — focusing on growth contribution, talent development, collaboration, financial stewardship, and strategic leadership. Through structured discussion and practical frameworks, partners will examine common accountability gaps and explore tools such as scorecards and performance dialogues that reinforce consistent standards across the firm. Participants will: · Clarify expectations for enterprise-level partner contribution · Identify behaviors that strengthen — or weaken — firm performance · Explore accountability systems that support growth and succession · Commit to one measurable leadership shift

This session is available to registrants only.

You can’t put culture on a balance sheet. Yet it predicts—more reliably than strategy, technology, or individual talent—which firms will thrive and which will stagnate. The question is not whether culture matters. The question is whether leaders can learn to read it, build it deliberately, and shape it in ways that outlast any single individual. This session introduces a transformative framework: the organization as a social immune system—a living, dynamic network that, like the human immune system, either protects its host from dysfunction or, when compromised, allows problems to spread quietly until they become crises. Understanding this system is one of the most powerful tools available to leaders building lasting, high-performance firms. At the center of the session is a striking finding from MIT: in a landmark study, researchers tracked employee communication by having people wear high-tech sensors. The results were decisive. Communication patterns—not individual skills, not knowledge, not technical expertise—were the single most predictive factor of team and organizational success. The patterns of how people connect, share information, and respond to each other outperformed all other measured variables combined. For principals and partners responsible for building the culture and future of their firms, this is not a peripheral insight. It is the central one. Drawing on organizational psychology, systems science, and behavioral research, this session equips leaders to see their organizations the way a skilled diagnostician sees a patient: by reading the signals that most people walk past every day. What gets said in meetings—and what doesn’t. Who connects to whom. How information flows under pressure. How trust compounds or erodes through small, unremarkable moments. These are not soft concerns. They are the real architecture of firm performance—and firm succession.

This session is available to registrants only.

In this half-day workshop we will cover: • How to communicate when stakes are high • Boardrooms, investor presentation and internal decision forums • The Science behind confident, credible communication • A clear understanding of how the brain processes messages, and how structure, pacing, and intent change how messages land • Using story as a strategic tool for executive communication This is a working session where participants practice and pressure-test their communication, leaving with tools they can apply that same week. By the end of the workshop, participants will learn how to integrate stories into conversations, meeting and presentations in a way that feels precise, relevant, and commercially grounded

This session is available to registrants only.

Whether you or someone in your firm is nearing retirement age, being promoted, considering a sabbatical, or just concerned about the fact that you’re carrying too much responsibility for your firm, the issue of succession planning is probably weighing on your mind. Worse yet, the topic may feel overwhelming to address. We think you may be putting off your succession planning unnecessarily – it’s easier to get started than you think. Attend this session to gain strategies for hurdles that prevent most firms from success planning, including: • Overcoming the psychological barriers involved in retirement • Creating and managing an operational transition plan • Identifying successors for the retiree’s clients, referral sources, and internal assignments • Establishing knowledge transfer and mentoring relationships that work • Developing new roles that leverage retirees’ wisdom and abilities • Aiding the retiree in creating a powerful possibility for their future • Managing setbacks as they occur Leave this session with clear actions you can take to make succession a strategic and ongoing process in your firm!

This session is available to registrants only.