Bizora Brews

Adam Tahir
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  • Entrepreneurship

Welcome to Bizora Brews, the podcast where tax professionals share the stories behind their careers. Guests open up about their early beginnings, the turning points that defined their expertise, the challenges they’ve overcome, and the wins they’re proud of. You’ll hear practical advice for young accountants, insights on how technology is reshaping tax work, and thoughtful perspectives on the future of the industry. It’s real conversation, real experience, and real guidance for the modern tax professional.

  1. 5d ago

    The Great Equalizer - Michael Stephano (Stephano Slack)

    What does it take to turn a two person practice with a few hundred thousand dollars of business into a $35 million firm, when nothing in your accounting training taught you how to run a business? Michael Stephano is the Managing Partner of Stephano Slack, a top 200 CPA firm based in Wayne, Pennsylvania with roughly 130 people. A Villanova graduate and the son of a CPA, Michael made manager at Rainer and Co and partner at Carrow Doyle before leaving in 2004 to start his own practice with Blake Chapman. His career is a study in what happens when a strong technician decides to become a business owner. Together they explore the revenue thresholds where a firm owner has to change how they spend their time, from $1 million to $5 million and beyond. They walk through how Stephano Slack grew through acquisitions, why culture comes before price in every deal, and why Michael has walked away from deals after talking with roughly 250 firm owners. They also discuss private equity's push into the top 200, and why Michael expects technology to cut the people needed to double the firm by about half. Michael's first acquisition came when his mentor, Jerry Geisel, called to ask if he would buy his practice. That deal, and the Ken Slack acquisition that followed, were financed through seller payouts of 20% a year for five years and a bank line of credit, a model the firm used for 25 years. Tune in for a conversation about working on the business instead of in it, and why Michael calls public accounting the great equalizer.

  2. Oct 3

    Fail Differently - Bailey Spell (LedgerUp)

    What happens when a software engineer who hated writing billing code ends up building the AI agent that does it for everyone else? Bailey Spell is the cofounder of LedgerUp, a Y Combinator backed company automating billing, accounts receivable, and revenue workflows through its AI agent, Ari. Before LedgerUp, Bailey was a software engineer at Microsoft, where he helped take Viva Learning from zero to one. He then moved to San Francisco to join Respell, a workflow automation startup later acquired by Salesforce. His path runs from big tech, to a three person engineering team, to building inside the accounting stack with no accounting background. Together they explore why LedgerUp started as an AI bookkeeping firm doing the work by hand before automating it, how contract heavy voice AI companies like Bland and Happy Robot became its core customers, and why the billing inbox holds the context that actually speeds up collections. Bailey shares the August 2024 call with a CFO who brushed off bill amortization and said revenue recognition was the biggest pain in his business, the moment that pointed LedgerUp toward contract to cash. He also recalls the advice a YC partner gave the team: so many AI bookkeeping companies had already been funded that if LedgerUp failed, it should fail differently. Tune in for a conversation about building AI for billing, where a single invoice can touch twelve systems and the agent cannot be wrong.

  3. Sep 28

    Be Someone's Person - Dean Quiambao

    How does someone who calls himself a terrible auditor become the person clients ask for by name? Dean Quiambao is Chief Relationship Builder and Northern California Market Leader at Armanino, where he has spent the last 25 years. He joined in 2001, when the firm had two offices and 80 people. It now has 30 offices and close to 3,000 people. He started out planning to become a financial planner after interning at Charles Schwab, took one piece of advice about getting his CPA, and built his career under Andy and Matt Armanino. His arc runs from audit, to the partner track, to leading relationships for one of the fastest growing firms in the country. Together they explore how Dean turned a stalled start as a new partner into a new trajectory by making his fellow partners successful, why he believes losing teaches you more than winning ever will, and why he has spent the years since 2019 showing himself on LinkedIn instead of selling himself. Dean shares how Armanino won a publicly traded audit away from a Big Four firm by asking the audit committee chair one question: what would make choosing us safe? He also tells the story behind Armanino becoming Rillet's first partner. It started with a client conversation he overheard at an Operators Guild happy hour in February 2025 and led to a dinner in New York he almost skipped. Tune in for a conversation about building a career by helping other people win.

  4. Sep 26

    Fast to 97, Slow to 100 - Dave Haase (Juno)

    What happens when a firm owner decides the only real fix for busy season is building the software himself? Dave Haase is the founder and CEO of Juno, a tax prep automation platform built by CPAs for tax firms. He came into the profession sideways: a finance degree from Indiana, brand work at General Mills, and an MBA from Stanford. Then in 2015 he turned down a product management offer at Salesforce to buy his mother's Bay Area CPA practice. He earned his EA and CPA after the purchase and started out as a preparer inside his own firm. He then grew the practice through three more acquisitions, and it became the testing ground for Juno. Together they explore how Juno got accurate extraction and a working ProConnect integration without any public APIs. They also cover why a K1 with a few thousand possible fields is a completely different problem than a W2, and what it takes to sell software to accountants who expect ROI on day one. Dave also explains how automation pushed his own firm past 50% net margins, and why he expects Juno to get to 97% of a return quickly and to 100% very slowly. Tune in for a conversation about what AI tax prep looks like from someone who spent a decade doing the returns himself.

  5. Sep 21

    No, Adapt, Or Embrace - Randy Crabtree

    What makes someone pull over at a phone booth in the middle of a workday, call his wife, and tell her he is quitting to become a CPA? Randy Crabtree is the founder of Tri Merit, the specialty tax firm he built around R&D tax credits starting in 2007, and the creator of Bridging the Gap, the wellness focused accounting conference now heading into its fifth year. He retired from Tri Merit two days after this conversation was recorded. Before any of that he studied computer science at Northern Illinois University, spent a year as a junior programmer at a large insurance company, spent another year selling soup to Chicago food jobbers, ran a generalist CPA firm from 1991 until he sold it in 2006, and built a real estate development company from zero to $220 million in projects before exiting in May 2006, months ahead of the crash. Together they explore the stroke Randy had twelve years ago and the four year mental recovery that followed, what three years of his Accountant Satisfaction Survey reveal about why people actually stay in this profession, and how firms should decide which technology to adopt now that AI has every accountant feeling like they are working two jobs at once. Randy walks through the first day Tri Merit was in business, when he left a client meeting holding a $20,000 deposit check against a projected $200,000 credit claim. He explains why he capped Bridging the Gap at roughly 400 attendees and handed the logistics to the Illinois CPA Society and Franklin Alliance for 2027. He also makes the case that Kodak and Fujifilm sold the same product and only one of them knew what business it was in. Tune in for a conversation about burnout, firm structure, and what accountants get wrong when change arrives.

  6. Sep 19

    Startup Inside the Startup - Naomi Owotumi of Jump

    What happens when a client tells their wealth advisor they got married, and the tax team only finds out after the return is filed? Naomi Owotumi is General Manager of Accounting at Jump, where she is building the accounting vertical inside a company that already dominates wealth management with more than 40,000 users across 14,000 firms. Before Jump she spent ten years at KPMG, first in financial services tax on regulated investment companies and partnerships, then in asset management tax technology, where she started and led a 40 person global data automation team spread across the US, Mexico City and India that delivered more than 500 solutions. Together they explore why big four accounting is a bubble that feels enormous from the inside until you step out of it, what actually happens when wealth firms acquire accounting firms and run tax as a loss leader, and where automation belongs across the rest of the client lifecycle once compliance is no longer the only thing worth automating. Naomi also gets into the year long busy season that comes from running RIC distribution season alongside extensions and filing deadlines, the Alteryx and ETL work that quietly replaced weeks of manual trial balance prep at a hundred entities at a time, and the advice she gives college students who are nervous that AI will automate the job before they ever get to do it. Tune in for a conversation about the convergence of wealth and accounting, and what a firm loses when the two sides do not share the same brain.

  7. Sep 14

    From the Ground Up - Kait Zech

    What happens to a profession when the jobs where people actually learned it start to disappear? Kait Zech is a Partner at PKF O'Connor Davies and the incoming president of the New Jersey Society of CPAs. She started in accounting before college, doing back office work for a sole proprietor in her hometown and eventually learning bookkeeping, individual tax and business tax there. From that came a local firm near Seton Hall, an Ernst & Young member firm in New York City auditing large private foundations, and 15 years at PKF O'Connor Davies, where she now works across the professional services group and the outsourced accounting practice. The arc runs from the smallest firm in town to one of the largest firms in the country without ever skipping the fundamentals. Together they explore why architecture, engineering and law firm clients need project level and personnel level data rather than a balance sheet and a P&L, how a second generation family business spent 18 months weighing an ESOP against developing the third generation against a sale to a third party, and why Kait believes the accounting pipeline problem belongs to firms rather than to college students. She also talks about starting college as an art major before running the numbers on that career, and about the registered municipal accountant license New Jersey requires before anyone can sign off on a government audit. The family business story ends somewhere she did not expect: they sold to a third party, opened a private foundation with the proceeds, and that is what finally pulled the third generation in. Tune in for a conversation about succession planning, the 150 credit rollback, and what firms owe the people they hire at the bottom.

  8. Sep 7

    I Own the Failure - Jerome Meyer

    What if the two years at a Big Four firm that everyone treats as mandatory are no longer worth what they used to be? Jerome Meyer is Vice President of Global Tax at AMD, where he leads a team of roughly 60 people covering every jurisdiction the company operates in. He got there without a plan. He grew up in Switzerland and southern Spain, came to Texas at 17 to play college tennis, went to law school in San Diego, and took an entry level job at KPMG because the financial crisis had closed the door on big law. He had no accounting background at all. The path from there ran through PwC, Deloitte's Global Strategies Group, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, and National Instruments before the AMD CFO called in early 2023. Together they explore what actually happens when a company at the center of the AI boom hands its tax department an AI mandate and most of the budget still goes to engineering, why Jerome believes a new graduate who is AI forward can now be worth more than a hire with two years of Big Four experience, and how he runs a 60 person global function by pushing decisions down while keeping ownership of any failure with himself. He talks about watching compliance work shift to the Hyderabad centers of excellence early in his career, and about the dotted line to supply chain tax at HPE that taught him more about the business than any planning role would have. Tune in for a conversation about running global tax inside a semiconductor company during the AI build out.

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About

Welcome to Bizora Brews, the podcast where tax professionals share the stories behind their careers. Guests open up about their early beginnings, the turning points that defined their expertise, the challenges they’ve overcome, and the wins they’re proud of. You’ll hear practical advice for young accountants, insights on how technology is reshaping tax work, and thoughtful perspectives on the future of the industry. It’s real conversation, real experience, and real guidance for the modern tax professional.

Information

  • Creator
    Adam Tahir
  • Years Active
    2025 - 2026
  • Episodes
    31
  • Rating
    Clean
  • Copyright
    © 2026 Adam Tahir
  • Show Website
    Bizora Brews

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