What firms actually charge.
Pricing, margins, capacity, compensation, and the figures people usually leave off the slide.
Rebecca Driscoll + Charlie Barmore
What running one actually takes.
Real numbers, hard conversations, and practical fixes from two CPAs who have built, sold, and are still running accounting firms.
Built one.From the work up.
Sold one.After changing how it ran.
Still running one.With the consequences live.
Why this exists
Most firm owners have never seen inside another firm.
They hear the cleaned-up conference version after everything worked. Real Firms is about the middle: what firms actually charge, where the calendar breaks, how owners make the hard call, and what the change costs before it pays off.
What we cover
Proof before opinion.
Specific numbers. Decisions with consequences. Useful fixes from people who have to live with the result.
What owners almost never say out loud.
The client, partner, staffing, and identity questions underneath the operating problem.
What changed inside the firm.
The calendar, workflow, technology, and management decisions that made the work take less.
The research
The State of AI in Accounting Firms
We asked 437 practitioners how AI is actually being used inside firms, what is stopping everyone else, and where the profession is heading. No vendor paid for a mention. Free to read, with no sign-up.
437practitioners surveyed
45%still early in adoption
1 in 9want to see how other firms work
Who is talking
Still close to the work.
Rebecca and Charlie come at the same questions from two different points in the firm-owner journey. That tension is the point.
Built one. Sold one.
Rebecca Driscoll, CPA
Rebecca led the pricing, client selection, staffing, and workflow changes inside her own practice before selling it. She now works with firm owners full time.
Still running one.
Charlie Barmore, CPA, CFE, CVA
Charlie does the work, reviews it, and signs it inside a Georgia practice running today. He builds and tests AI workflows with the operational consequences still attached.
The work underneath
Three ways into the firm.
Real Firms is the shared point of view. These are the places where the community, implementation, and rebuilding happen.
AI Lab for Accountants
Accountants building useful, safe AI workflows together. Also called AI Lab or ALFA.
The Collaboration Room
A peer community where firm owners can ask the pricing and partner questions out loud.
Fix Your Firm
Hands-on work for tax-heavy firms ready to fix the fees, the client book, and the calendar.
Take something useful
Free tools from real work.
Stay close to the work
We will send something when it is worth sending.
What we built, what broke, and the occasional thing we think the profession has wrong. The list opens soon.
Until the newsletter opens, email reaches both of us.
hello@realfirms.co