I’ll be honest — I wasn’t sure I was ready for Thriveal. But somewhere between drowning in tax season and finally coming up for air, I realized that joining was one of the best decisions I’ve made for my firm.

Let me back up.

How I Found Thriveal

I’d been listening to Jason’s podcast for a while. I knew of him, knew his work, and respected what he was building. But what finally made me upgrade my membership to the Ascent program was simple: the offering felt like it was designed for a firm like mine. It wasn’t generic. It wasn’t one-size-fits-all. It felt targeted — like Jason and Julie actually understood where we were and where we were trying to go.

The Disconnect I Didn’t Know How to Fix

Before Thriveal, my biggest struggle was the disconnect between the operational side and the technical side of running an accounting firm. If you’re an accountant, you know exactly what I mean. We’re trained as technicians. We learn a workflow, we master it, and we assume that’s the right way — because it’s the only lens we’ve been given.

What I didn’t have was a bridge between those two worlds. Jason and Julie became that bridge.

Being Pushed to Think Differently

What surprised me most about being part of Thriveal wasn’t the content or the tools — it was how much Jason and Julie challenged me. They pushed me to think outside the box, to question assumptions I’d held for years, and to genuinely consider what running a business looks like versus running a practice.

That distinction sounds small. It isn’t.

One of my biggest “aha” moments was realizing that the operations side of the firm deserved to be treated as its own equal side of the business — not an afterthought, not something the technicians managed on the side. Bringing in Janel as our operations person and elevating that role as a true equal has been a shift I didn’t fully anticipate but absolutely needed.

The other mindset flip? Business first. Not technical first. That reframe changed how I see almost every decision I make now.

The Hard Work Nobody Talks About

I won’t sugarcoat it — there were moments I wanted to quit. Tax season while simultaneously trying to work on the business felt like drinking from a fire hose. I was still sitting in the technician seat, and it was a lot. I remember thinking, I’m done. This is too much.

Julie saw it. She called it what it was — a black hole. And she was right.

But that’s also what accountability looks like. It’s not always comfortable. It’s not always convenient. When we were building out our organizational and accountability chart, Jason and Julie pushed back hard. They weren’t going to let me check the box and move on. It took more time than I expected and it was genuinely difficult — but we got to a workable product because they held us to a higher standard.

I also did something I almost never do: I shared the firm’s finances with Jason, Julie, and the Thriveal team so they could help me build a quarterly financial report. That kind of vulnerability doesn’t come naturally to me. But leveraging their experience to look at how we could do things better? Incredibly valuable.

Going Virtual — A Decision Thriveal Made Possible

Here’s something I haven’t even shared with Jason yet: I recently decided to close the office and go completely virtual, at least for the foreseeable future. The team is excited. I’m excited.

Would I have had the courage or the framework to make that call before Thriveal? I honestly don’t know. But thinking business-first, building a stronger operational structure, and having coaching support behind me made it feel like a real, considered decision — not a leap in the dark.

What I’d Say to Anyone on the Fence

If you’re working 50-plus hours a week, if there’s even a slight disorganization in the flow of work inside your office, if you feel like there’s a disconnect between how things are running and how they should be running — you don’t really have another option. You need someone outside the fishbowl, someone neutral, to observe and give you real feedback.

Accountability, better time management, better organizational flow — that’s what Thriveal offers. And for accounting firms especially, where we’ve been trained to see everything through a technical lens, having Jason and Julie come in with a business-first perspective is exactly the kind of outside view most of us have never had.

I’m still growing into the community — I’ll have even more to say about that after our upcoming event, The Summit. But what I can say right now is that Thriveal has already started reshaping how I think, how I lead, and how I see the future of my firm.

And that’s worth a lot.