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"If your business depends on you, you don’t own a business, you have a job. And it’s the worst job in the world because you’re working for a lunatic!" , Michael E. Gerber, The E-Myth Revisited: Why Most Small Businesses Don't Work and What to Do About It     

October 2010. The day is etched in my memory, cold and sharp, like the sting of betrayal. I was sitting in my car, gripping the steering wheel so tightly my knuckles turned white. Just moments before, I had been fired. Fired from a job I thought was secure, on a career path I believed I was destined for. The words from my boss were still ringing in my ears: “We’re going in a different direction.” I was stunned. What did that mean for my direction?

And the knife in the back? Besides their recent glowing recommendation of me as I represented the company to the local chamber of commerce, they tried to get me to sign a one pager stating I was quitting…I assume to try to protect their Texas unemployment insurance rate.  

It felt like the bottom had dropped out of my life. Years of studying, late nights, and climbing what I thought was the “right” ladder had led to this: humiliation, anger, and a terrifying sense of…nothingness. But as I sat there, eyes burning with tears, I refused to let fall, something unexpected began to stir beneath the surface of those raw emotions. A spark. A flicker of defiance. And the faintest whisper of an idea.

Looking back, getting fired was one of the best things to ever happen to me. It was the push I needed to break free from a path that, while seemingly successful on the outside, was never truly mine. I had followed the well-trodden route: big prestigious firm, respectable job title, steady paycheck. But deep down, I felt empty. I was a cog in someone else’s machine, not a creator of my own destiny. I was trading hours for dollars, and the trade felt increasingly unfair. I constantly pushed boundaries everywhere I worked. No wonder I didn’t fit in.

I became more active on LinkedIn in 2025, and Sara Blakely as a top voice has become inspirational because she embodies the scrappy determination it takes to reinvent yourself. She started Spanx with $5,000 in savings, cold-calling hosiery mills until one finally gave her a shot.

She hustled, got creative, and built a billion-dollar brand out of an idea everyone else thought was crazy. Her journey reminds me that the best entrepreneurs are not necessarily the ones with the perfect résumé or plan, but the ones willing to take action when others hesitate. She did not wait for permission, she created her own opportunity.

As an aside, one day I got an email that looked like it came from Sara Blakely herself telling me how wonderful I was as a strong, fierce woman entrepreneur. To this day I have no idea who it was actually from. Yet I replied thanking “Sara” and asking if she might accept my long-sitting LinkedIn connection request.

She has millions of followers, and shocker, I am still waiting Sara! I laugh about it now because it felt like such a “me” thing to do to whomever sent that email. What I love most is how her creativity shows up in everything, even her latest innovation, Sneex. At first I thought, that is odd, luxury sneakers with a heel. But they stand out, they make me feel like a million bucks every time I wear them, and they are more comfortable than any other shoe I own.

One of the reasons I love LinkedIn is that it has allowed me to connect with some of the most amazing people, including my book agent, and thought leaders I admire greatly like Gino Wickman, Dan Martell, Candace Nelson, often through nothing more than a simple DM. Those connections have shaped my journey in incredible ways. If you are not already there, I highly recommend joining me on LinkedIn, where I publish an entire newsletter dedicated to the Balanced Millionaire lifestyle. 

A Quick Word of Caution: If you're reading this and thinking, “I already know all this,” or “My firm has it all figured out,” I urge you to pause. You might be used to being the smartest person in the room, many of us in this profession are. But for now, try to set that aside. Be open-minded. This stuff works, but your biggest enemies right now are procrastinating and questioning the advice before you've even tried it.

My mentor learned of how successful my pricing method was, and he was very excited to go tell his accounting firm about it because it was so win-win. The firm’s head wouldn't even let my mentor explain it. The accountant cut my mentor off and said, “We prepare 10,000 returns a year, and we have really good processes.” 

Well, no wonder we don't see or hear from you from January to April, because that's healthy! What I’m sharing here might challenge some of your assumptions, but it’s designed to help you break free from those very assumptions that are holding you back. 

The Illusion of Security: I started my career at Deloitte, one of the biggest and most respected accounting firms in the world. It was supposed to be the dream job, great pay, stability, a clear trajectory upward. And yes, I learned a ton. I honed my technical skills, navigated complex tax laws, and learned how to manage demanding clients.

But I also learned that I didn’t want to spend my life buried in spreadsheets for 70 hours a week. The work was intense and the pressure high, but the fulfillment was lacking. I felt like a tiny piece in a massive puzzle, and I longed to create my own picture. So, I left Deloitte for a smaller CPA firm, thinking I’d have more of an impact. I imagined contributing to the firm’s growth, having a voice, making a real difference.

Instead, I found myself micromanaged, undervalued, and suffocating under someone else’s vision of success. My ideas were dismissed, my creativity was stifled. I was exhausted, not just physically, but emotionally and mentally. Ironically, the “safer” small      firm job made me even unhappier. Getting fired from that firm wasn’t just a rejection; it was a liberation. It forced me to confront a truth I had been avoiding I wasn’t meant to be an employee. I was meant to build something of my own.

The Birth of a Side Hustle: I had always harbored entrepreneurial dreams, but fear held me back, fear of failure, fear of losing control, fear of the unknown. Losing my job ripped off the Band-Aid. Suddenly, I had nothing left to lose. And that terrifying freedom was also incredibly empowering. In late 2010, I took a leap of faith and started my own CPA practice, as a side hustle at first.

During the day, I found a job teaching other accountants how to use emerging tax software, work I actually enjoyed, because I was helping  others adapt and thrive with new technology. But at night, I poured every ounce of energy into building my own firm. I answered client calls, prepared tax returns on my kitchen table, and learned every aspect of running a business by doing it.

I was driven. I was passionate. But I was also working around the clock. Clients were coming in (word gets around when you do good work and you actually return calls). I was making more money than I ever had before. I set my hourly rate at $150, quite good for a solo practitioner at the time, and on the surface, it looked like I was living the entrepreneurial dream.

But the reality? I was working myself to the bone, taking on every client who came my way, and tying my income directly to the hours I could physically work. I had escaped one burnout trap only to land in another of my own making. My business was growing, but I was burning out.

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The E-Myth Realization: Technician vs. Entrepreneur: This is where I had a major realization, thanks to Michael Gerber's The E-Myth Revisited. I realized that most of us who start our own firms are, at heart, technicians, not natural-born entrepreneurs. I was a great CPA, a skilled tax strategist. I knew the technical side of my profession inside and out. But I wasn't necessarily a natural at running a business.

I was good at doing the work, but not necessarily at managing the work or building a scalable, sustainable enterprise. Like many people, I had fallen into the trap of thinking, “If I’m good at thinking, good at doing the work, I'll be good at running a business that does that work.”

But that's a dangerous assumption. Running a business requires a whole different set of skills: marketing, sales, systems, and management. I was learning those skills on the fly, often the hard way. I was effectively creating a job for myself, not a business that could run without me.     

The "Aha" Moment: Hourly Billing Is Broken: The pivotal insight that changed everything came courtesy of a very complex tax return. I had a client who was a private equity investor. Their tax situation was a snarled web of K-1s and intricate financial transactions.

They had tried to prepare the return themselves and made a significant error, reporting a large capital gain as ordinary income, which inflated their tax bills by hundreds of thousands of dollars. I spent hours untangling the mess, corrected the return, and ultimately saved them about $150,000 in taxes.

The client was ecstatic (understandably), and I felt a surge of pride. But later that night, as I sat at my desk, drained, I looked at the numbers for that project. For saving them $150,000, I had charged a few hundred dollars, because my fee was based on my $150 hourly rate and the time it took. That hit me like a ton of bricks. I was solving huge high-value problems, but my earnings were capped by an arbitrary hourly rate that had no relation to the value I provided. The traditional model was broken.

My real value wasn’t in the hours I worked, but in the results I delivered. When I actually calculated my net income against my hours, my true hourly earnings were shockingly low. Remember that 40 dollars per hour figure? That was me. I was working myself to exhaustion and not being fairly compensated for the transformative value I was providing.

This realization was a turning point. I knew I had to break free from hourly billing and find a way to price my services based on value. This was the first step on the journey to becoming a Balanced Millionaire, an advisor who achieves financial success and reclaims their time and life.     

Don't allow fear to rule your life and decisions. You have to evaluate every opportunity, like the things presented in this book, as an investment with a cost/benefit. If the ROI is there, just do it. In The 4-Hour Workweek, Timothy Ferriss observes, "People will choose unhappiness over uncertainty."

This insight highlights a common human tendency to remain in unfavorable situations rather than face the unknown. Ferriss suggests that the fear of uncertainty often outweighs the discomfort of unhappiness, leading individuals to stay in unfulfilling jobs or lifestyles simply because they are familiar. He encourages readers to confront this fear, arguing that embracing uncertainty is essential for personal growth and achieving a fulfilling life. 

At the heart of this blueprint is the ROI (Return on Investment) Method, a transformative value-pricing strategy I created specifically for advisors. We will explore it in depth in Chapter 5. This method not only showcases the tangible return you deliver to your clients, but also, within the SHiFT framework, emphasizes the return on you as an individual (your time, expertise, and energy). I didn’t like the fuzzy value pricing theoretical guides out there, so I created my own tool that the AICPA is currently releasing to members!

On the practical side, the ROI Method is an actual calculator and framework that shifts the focus from billing by the hour to charging based on the measurable financial impact you deliver. By quantifying tangible results, such as tax savings, increased cash flow, or reduced liabilities, you can price your services in a way that truly reflects their strategic value. We advisors have an unfair advantage here: we find client savings for a living. While many professional services struggle to make their value tangible, we can often calculate it in dollars and cents.

Implementing the ROI Method enabled me to quadruple my revenue while significantly reducing my client base, and it can do the same for you. The method is built around understanding and leveraging the CURB factors.                  

In practice, you assign a score from 1 (low) to 4 (very high) for each CURB factor, average them and convert that average to a percentage multiplier.      

For example, if Complexity = 3, Urgency = 4, Risk = 4, Benefits = 3, the average is 3.5. That suggests pricing around 35% of the quantified savings or value you provide. So, if you estimate saving a client $100,000, a fair fee might be 35% of that, or $35,000. 

(We’ll walk through this step-by-step later.) By aligning your pricing with value in this way, you not only increase your revenue potential but also deepen your client relationships, because you’re demonstrating a clear win-win.

You can take this quick self-assessment right here or go to Jackie.CPA for the digital version with automatic scoring, personalized feedback, and extra tips to strengthen your entrepreneurial skills. The online version will also help you track your progress over time.

This quiz will help you gauge your entrepreneurial confidence across the skills you will need to launch and grow a seven-figure business. 

Instructions:

For each statement, give yourself:

1 point if it is true for you most of the time

0 points if it is not true or rarely true for you

Scoring

8 to 10 points = You have strong entrepreneurial confidence and are ready to take bold action.

5 to 7 points = You have a solid foundation with some areas to strengthen.

0 to 4 points = Your confidence is still developing and the coming chapters will give you tools to grow it quickly.

Now, here is the twist…This quiz is adapted from the Entrepreneurial Self-Efficacy Scale which is a research-backed way of measuring entrepreneurial confidence. I have modified it to also highlight two critical roles from the Entrepreneurial Operating System (EOS): the Visionary and the Integrator.

If your first five questions scored higher, you naturally lean more toward being a Visionary. This means you are the big-picture thinker, idea generator, and opportunity spotter. In the early stages, that means your first hire will likely need to be a worker bee who thrives on executing your ideas and keeping the details moving.

If your last five questions scored higher, you have strong Integrator skills. This means you have the ability to turn ideas into systems, processes, and results. In that case, your first key hire may be someone who brings bold ideas and relationship-building skills to the table.

In the beginning, most entrepreneurs wear both hats. Knowing where you are strongest will help you decide what kind of help to bring on first and how to design your path to becoming a Balanced Millionaire without burning out. 

In the chapters that follow, we’ll ignite that spark into a flame. I’ll show you how to overcome the common obstacles that hold so many firm owners back and share the exact steps I took (and that many others have since taken) to build a practice and a life that matter.

Ready to embark on this journey? Next, we design the life and practice you want, then build goals to match.

If you made it this far, I’m impressed — and grateful. 💜

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