On Wednesday, Shannon sat down with Seth Fink for a live conversation about how he rebuilt his firm — fewer hours, better clients, and a business that finally works for its owner.
If you missed it, the recording is below. If you were there, here's what's worth hearing twice.
1. "This last tax season, I averaged 59 hours a week — the lowest ever." Back in 2015, the year his team threatened to quit at the post-tax-season debrief, Seth was averaging 108–109 hours a week for twelve straight weeks. He didn't get to 59 by working smarter in the moment — he got there by rebuilding the whole business underneath himself.
2. "We don't lift a finger for anybody without a signed engagement in front of us, agreeing to the price." No more free work, no more scope creep absorbed as the cost of doing business. Every service lives inside a defined, priced engagement now. Year one of making that shift, Seth dropped 20% of his client base — and grew revenue 12%.
3. "Addition by subtraction — getting rid of the wrong clients first is what gives me the bandwidth to grow the right ones." Seth cut his client base in half. His average price per client went from $964 to $5,700. That's not a coincidence — that's the whole strategy.
Linda Day asked the one a lot of the room was probably thinking: how do you actually switch from a scarcity mindset to one of abundance?
Seth traced it back to 2020 — watching how much clients needed the firm during the pandemic, and running their first-ever webinar that outperformed what their own peers were offering. That was the moment it flipped for him: "More people need us than we need from them."
Thirty minutes, no slides, no pitch. Just a firm owner who did the work, explaining how.
