When Heather Hughes joined Renew Group in June 2022, her firm looked like a lot of accounting firms.
Two partners. Eight accounting and tax staff. A handful of admin. And 389 client groups — most of them small, transactional, and pulling the firm from one deadline to the next.
The numbers told the story before Heather did: 80% of revenue was coming from just 34% of the client base. Which meant the other 66% — over 250 client groups — were quietly eating the firm alive.
Heather's words: "I just thought, the harder I work, the better I'll do."
That sentence is where most firms get stuck. And it's where Heather's transformation actually started.
The first thing Renew asks firm owners to do isn't a pricing change. It's not a Pareto analysis. It's a mindset shift — and Heather knew she needed to take it seriously.
So she grabbed her laptop, walked away from her desk, and sat on her back porch. New surroundings. No phone ringing. No staff popping in. Just the mindset modules, the homework, and quiet.
Then she and her business partner Brent came back together — both having done the work independently — and talked through it. Aligned. Made decisions together.
It sounds simple. But this is the move most multi-partner firms skip, and it's why most multi-partner firms stay stuck. You don't fix your firm by working harder in it. You fix it by stepping back from it long enough to see it clearly.
When the first Pareto for Profit report came back, Heather saw something she'd never seen before: 166 clients sitting in what Renew calls the Insanity Zone. Below break-even. High volume. Low revenue. Constant emails, phone calls, tax notices, free work outside of tax season.
She knew these people. She'd known some of them for 15 or 20 years. They asked about her kids. She went to church with some of them.
So she did the hardest part: she didn't look at the names. She looked at the numbers.
By November 2022 — five months after joining — Heather and Brent had off-boarded 85 to 90 clients.
This is the part most owners worry about. Heather did too. Her biggest fear was that her name was going to be mud in Jacksonville.
It wasn't. Here's what worked:
Heather sat down to customize the letter provided to her by Renew, explaining the change in business model. They found another CPA who was a fit for the departing clients and made warm referrals. Admin staff fielded the first round of calls so the conversations stayed calm and human. When follow-up was needed, the letter became the script.
The result: out of nearly 90 clients, one was genuinely angry. The rest understood. Several invited her to lunch.
When it came time to define the new target client, Heather and Brent didn't decide alone. They brought the full team into a meeting and asked two simple questions: Who do we like working with? Who do we not?
The team named the industries and entity types they wanted more of, and the ones they didn't. That's how the target client got built — and that's how buy-in got built at the same time.
Then the transition happened. The 1040 volume dropped. Email volume dropped. Phone volume dropped. Everyone worked fewer hours. The relief was immediate.
Heather's firm is heading into its fourth Pareto report this year. The picture today:
Fewer clients, more revenue. The math doesn't add up on the surface — and that's exactly the point. When you stop trading dollars on the wrong clients, you free up capacity to serve the right ones at the right price.
We asked her directly. Her answer:
"Give it a shot. You really don't have anything to lose."
Then, echoing Perry Ghilarducci, one of our Resident Firm Advisors: "You'll wish you would have done it sooner."
Heather's firm isn't an outlier — it's what happens when you change the model instead of working harder.
If her story sounds like the firm you want, let's take a straight look at the one you have.
