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Key Takeaways Before we went remote, the office was running a relationship-maintenance operation none of us noticed — and when it collapsed, we didn’t realize it until our clients started feeling like strangers.
I stopped pretending remote work is neutral: it has real costs that fall unevenly on client-facing firms, and until you name that honestly, you can’t actually fix it.
Running a small accounting firm in 2025 means answering a question nobody has fully solved: how do you build a business clients trust deeply when half your team is working from a spare bedroom two states away?
I have spent four years wrestling with it. The honest answer is that I got it wrong before I got it right. What I learned did not come from a management book or a productivity framework. It came from losing a client I should never have lost, in a way that had nothing to do with the quality of our work.
That experience changed how I run everything.
How I lost a client of seven years to a birthday
Not a missed deadline. Not a calculation error. A birthday. One of my remote staff members mentioned in passing that a long-term client had a milestone coming up. I nodded, said “great,” and did absolutely nothing with that information. Three weeks later, that client called, annoyed about something unrelated, and signed with another firm before the month was out. When I dug into it, the birthday was just the final straw. We had quietly become a transaction to them. They sent documents, we sent returns and somewhere along the way we stopped being people they actually knew.
That was the moment I understood what remote work actually costs an accounting firm, and it has nothing to do with productivity.
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