What’s on your bucket list?
Maybe you want to travel the world. Spend more time with your family. Pick up a hobby you’ve been putting off. Or maybe you’d simply like to leave the office at 3:30 without feeling guilty about it.
Whatever your answer is, Sean Duncan believes your accounting business should help you get there—not stand in the way.
That was the central message of “Choosing the Right Client,” Duncan’s presentation at GrowCon 2026, held in Salt Lake City, Utah last May. As President and Founder of SMD Consulting & Accounting, LLC, Duncan challenged accounting professionals to think differently about the firms they’re building, the clients they accept, and even the way they define business success.
His message was refreshingly personal: Build the life you desire first. Then design the accounting firm that can pay for it.
Start With Your Bucket List, Not Your Client List
Duncan didn’t begin his presentation by talking about revenue, pricing, niches, or tax strategy.
He started with a bucket list.
Where do you want to go? What do you want to see? What experiences do you want to have? Duncan even created a workbook to help attendees put those goals down on paper.
As he put it:
“If you don’t know what you want to accomplish, how are you going to get there?”
The exercise wasn’t just for fun. Duncan sees the bucket list as the destination and the business as the vehicle that gets you there.
That’s an important distinction for accounting firm owners. It’s easy to build a business around whatever clients happen to walk through the door, only to discover years later that the business you’ve created doesn’t support the lifestyle you wanted.
Duncan encouraged attendees to reverse that process.
First, decide what you want from your life. Then define your perfect accounting firm around it.
What Does Your Perfect Accounting Firm Look Like?
Once you’ve defined the life you want, Duncan recommends getting specific about the business required to support it.
What services do you want to offer? How much money does the firm need to generate? How many hours do you want to work? What kind of culture do you want for your employees?
Duncan shared that he travels frequently, leaves work around 3:30 each day, and has built a workplace where employees aren’t expected to maintain crazy schedules.
His point wasn’t to brag. Quite the opposite.
It was by design.
In 2017, Duncan made a dramatic decision: he fired roughly two-thirds of his existing clients and began transitioning toward a subscription-based advisory model. At the time, there wasn’t much of a roadmap to follow, so he learned through trial and error.
“I screwed it up so bad for so many years. I don’t want you to screw it up,” Duncan said.
Today, those lessons have helped him build the type of firm he actually wants to own.
Your Clients Are Supposed to Help You Get There
Once you know your destination and understand what your ideal firm looks like, you can finally answer an incredibly important question:
Who should your clients be?
Duncan’s advice was to create written profiles describing your ideal clients. He recommends developing two profiles—one general and one focused on a niche, or preferably two niche profiles.
His own firm, for example, focuses heavily on plastic and orthopedic surgeons and video game developers. The second niche isn’t an accident: Duncan loves gaming. By deliberately choosing that industry, he’s able to spend part of his professional life talking about something he genuinely enjoys.
“If the industry exists, then the money is there,” Duncan said. “You guys can do this.”
Instead of waiting for ideal clients to magically appear, Duncan encouraged accounting professionals to actively pursue them.
Choose your customer, choose your future.
Stop Trying to Be Everything to Everybody
For accountants trained to solve whatever problem gets placed in front of them, becoming selective can feel uncomfortable.
Duncan believes that’s part of the problem.
“Way too many of us think we’re supposed to be good at everything.”
Defining an ideal client isn’t about excluding people arbitrarily. It’s about identifying the clients, industries, needs, personalities, and working relationships that fit the firm you’re trying to build.
That includes considering the impact clients have on your team.
Duncan emphasized that accounting professionals aren’t their clients’ employees. A healthy engagement should be collaborative, with mutual respect for expertise and boundaries. When a client consistently creates stress, ignores boundaries, or negatively affects employees, keeping the revenue may not be worth the cost.
For Duncan, protecting the team comes before protecting a bad client relationship.
Audit Your Current Client List
Of course, defining the perfect client is much easier than dealing with the clients you already have.
Duncan offered GrowCon attendees a simple exercise for getting started.
Take your existing client list and compare it with the future firm you’ve just defined. Highlight your ideal clients in green. Highlight clients you enjoy working with but who aren’t necessarily a perfect fit in yellow. Then use blue for everyone else.
And don’t assume every client has to fit neatly inside your niche. Duncan shared the example of a coffee shop he continues serving simply because he enjoys working with them.
The exercise isn’t about ruthlessly cutting clients. It’s about seeing clearly how closely today’s firm resembles the business you actually want to own.
Your Future Firm May Require Leaving Some Clients Behind
Here’s where things can get uncomfortable.
The clients who hired you today didn’t sign up for the business you want to operate 10 years from now.
As your services, pricing, boundaries, and ideal client profiles change, some existing clients won’t make that journey with you.
And Duncan says that’s okay.
When he began transforming his firm in 2017, he knew he would lose clients. Today, only one client from that original group remains.
But losing clients doesn’t necessarily mean losing revenue. Duncan recalled raising prices while expecting roughly half of the affected clients to leave. Instead, almost all of them stayed.
It was an important reminder for attendees: you may be underestimating what good clients are willing to pay for the value you provide.
At the same time, Duncan cautioned against choosing a niche based solely on passion. Your ideal clients still have to generate enough revenue to support the business—and you.
A firm that isn’t profitable can’t serve anyone for very long.
Remember Your Most Important Client: You
Perhaps one of Duncan’s best pieces of advice had nothing to do with selecting clients at all.
He encouraged accounting firm owners to schedule dedicated “work on the business” days with no client noise or day-to-day distractions.
Think of it as a meeting with your firm’s most important client:
You.
These are opportunities to step away from deadlines and deliverables and think about where your business is actually going. Duncan encouraged attendees to give themselves enough quiet time to get bored, explore ideas, and think creatively about what they want next.
And don’t wait until you magically “have time.”
Make the time.
Because choosing the right clients is ultimately about much more than improving an accounting firm’s profitability. It’s about deliberately deciding what you want your career, business, and life to look like—and then building toward it.
Choose Your Clients. Choose Your Future.
One of the most powerful themes to emerge from Duncan’s GrowCon presentation was the amount of control accounting firm owners actually have.
It’s your firm.
You can decide what services you provide. You can choose which industries you specialize in. You can establish boundaries. You can raise your prices. You can say no to clients who aren’t a good fit.
And you can build an accounting business that funds the experiences sitting on that bucket list instead of preventing you from ever getting to them.
That’s also why events like GrowCon matter. Duncan reminded attendees that the value of a conference isn’t limited to presentations or continuing education credits. It’s also found in conversations with other firm owners, relationships with vendors, new ideas, and the opportunity to step away from daily work long enough to think differently about your business.
So, before you add another client to the calendar, Duncan’s presentation suggests asking a different question:
Will this client help me build the firm—and the life—I actually want?
Ready to Build Your Accounting Business on Your Terms?
Universal Accounting Center helps bookkeeping, tax, and accounting professionals do more than develop technical skills. We help aspiring and established firm owners learn how to build, market, price, and grow businesses designed around their goals.
If you’re ready to start your own accounting firm, find better clients, expand your services, or create a business that gives you greater control over your time and income, we’re here to help.
Contact Universal Accounting Center at 435-344-2060 or schedule an online consultation to talk with our team about the next step for your accounting business.
