Decode your energy signals, redesign your calendar, and stay sharp even when you're running low.

Accounting ARC
With Liz Mason, Byron Patrick, and Donny Shimamoto
Center for Accounting Transformation

As the calendar flips and the pace of work accelerates, many accounting professionals find themselves running on fumes. The holidays are over. Travel lingers in the body. Busy season looms. And yet, expectations snap back to full speed almost overnight.

In this Accounting ARC, Donny Shimamoto, CPA.CITP, CGMA, and Liz Mason, CPA, take on a topic many professionals quietly struggle with but rarely discuss openly: how to work through fatigue without burning out—or dialing down performance.

• MORE Accounting ARC: OCR, Research Bots & Meeting Assistants: What Actually Helps Now | Return Season is the New Stress Test | Small Firms May Have the Biggest Advantage in 2026 | Downgraded: What the DOE Said About Accounting | Savage: Using Your License as a Megaphone | Baker: Interpreting Pricing Psychology | Don’t Get Fired by Your Own Automation | What Amazon Doesn't Tell You | Royalties, Residuals, and Reality Checks | ARC-SLC

Their conversation is refreshingly candid, practical, and grounded in lived experience. And it challenges one of the profession’s most persistent myths: that being tired means you’re doing something wrong.

Both hosts open the episode admitting they are exhausted—but not from overwork. Shimamoto is coming off a stretch of nonstop weekends filled with visitors, events, and travel. Mason is freshly jet-lagged after nearly two weeks in London, balancing client work with museums, family time, and international flights.

The point lands quickly: fatigue doesn’t only come from too much work. It comes from full lives.

And pretending otherwise, they argue, is where professionals get stuck—pushing through exhaustion with guilt instead of strategy.

State societies can evolve into engines of innovation, education, and workforce resilience.

Big 4 Transparency
By Dominic Piscopo, CPA
For CPA Trendlines

At a time when the accounting profession is undergoing its most rapid transformation in decades, Jen Cryder, CEO of the Pennsylvania Institute of Certified Public Accountants (PICPA), is quietly redefining what a state CPA society can (and arguably should) become.

• MORE Dominic Piscopo | MORE Private Equity | MORE Pay & Compensation

In this episode of the Big 4 Transparency Podcast, Cryder joins host Dominic Piscopo to discuss how advocacy, revenue diversification, and technology investment are converging to reshape the future of the CPA profession.

Cryder, who spent 15 years in public accounting before joining PICPA more than a decade ago, now finds herself at the center of national conversations around licensure reform, continuing professional education (CPE), and the evolving definition of what it means to be a CPA. While state societies have historically focused on a relatively narrow set of services, Cryder argues that the profession’s accelerating rate of change has expanded that mandate dramatically. “For most of our 130-year history, the definition of a CPA was fairly static,” she notes. “In just the last few years, that list of issues has become infinite.”

Beyond revenue and margins, buyers are scrutinizing teams, culture, and operational health.

The Disruptors
With Liz Farr

Brannon Poe, founder of Poe Group Advisors, says the key to a successful firm transaction is fit.

“I think having a good deal is really about having a good fit,” he says. Besides technical skills, “you have to have management styles that mesh well, you have to have client service philosophies that are aligned,” he explains.

• MORE STREAMING:MORE STREAMING: Oliver: Build a Biz that Runs Without You | Daiber: Use Succession as a Growth Strategy | Cannon: Busy Season is Self-Inflicted | Carroll: When One Person Can Break the Firm | Rampe: Build a Roadmap Even When the Road's Not There | Chang: Killing SALY, One Agent at a Time | Vanover: 5-Star Firms Don't Bill by the Hour | Kless: Profit Is a Result. Flourishing Is the Purpose | Whitman: Build Culture on 'Progress,' Not Change | Shein: No PE? No M&A? No Problem | Hood and Weber: Time to RISE | Proctor: Turn Dumb Ideas into Brilliant Solutions | Carter-Gray: How 1 Poor Review Strengthened the Firm | Hartman: Upwork to “40 Under 40” in 3 Years |

For sellers, choosing the right buyer matters as much as the price. “I find that the sellers in particular, who keep their focus on fit and choose the right buyer, usually are the happiest with their exit.”

The last few years have created favorable conditions for accounting firm sales, but not for everyone.