A management company, not a consultant.
Dental practices have DSOs. Medical and veterinary practices have MSOs. Hotels have management companies. Franchises have royalty systems. The structure is proven everywhere it exists: the operator does the professional work, and a management company runs everything around it, paid as a percentage of the top line.
Accounting firms your size mostly do not have that option. Private equity platforms buy in at $2M+ of profit. Below that, you are expected to run marketing, intake, billing, tooling, and hiring yourself, in the hours after client work. Signal exists for exactly that gap.
What lives inside the fee
The rule is simple. If a service is always-on and its marginal cost is software, data, or agent time, it is inside the percentage: outbound and local marketing, CRM and intake, invoicing and AR follow-up on current work, the owner dashboard, benchmarking, tool consolidation, payroll orchestration, the talent funnel, exit readiness.
If it requires hard third-party dollars, linear human hours, or a license we do not hold, it is out, and it is priced as its own percentage event or passed through at cost. Ad spend is yours, passed through. Historical AR recovery is a percentage of dollars actually recovered. Executive search is a percentage of first-year compensation. Nothing is hidden inside the base fee, and nothing inside the base fee meters by the hour.
The full catalog, in-fee versus add-on, is walked through line by line in the diagnostic readout. The fee structure itself is on the pricing page.
Where the fee ends, in plain words
Configuration in, construction out.
We configure, connect, and operate systems inside the fee. Custom software follows one rule: if three or more clients need it, we build it as a platform feature on our roadmap, free. If one firm needs it bespoke, it is a scoped project.
Automation in, bodies out.
We do not staff humans into your firm. Phone answering by humans, dedicated seats, IT helpdesk: those go to referral partners or separate engagements. The fee buys systems that run, not headcount that bills.
Orchestration in, production out.
We never touch returns, books, attest, or advisory. The day we did, we would acquire your liability and lose the one position that lets you trust us: we are structurally incapable of competing with you.
We review the data first. Then we agree.
The proposal is never a promise; it is a findings report. System access is never required before signing. Each step asks for the smallest input that still produces a finding about your firm, and every finding is reconciled to a number or a memory you already trust. You can check each one in your head.
Trailing-12 collections, total clients, business clients among them, headcount. We return your firm in four numbers against the peer set: a valuation range (flagged as an estimate, refined later), collections per head, revenue per client, and a read on the shape and sellability of your book.
A narrated walkthrough of your top clients. No documents. You narrate, the data organizes, and the output is the revenue-origin map: where the book actually came from, referral concentration, and what breaks if a key person leaves. This call is never a pitch.
Categories only, no client names, one click in QuickBooks. We return the displacement memo: what you are overpaying for, tool redundancy, and your margin against peers.
We return the recoverable-AR estimate: the collections leak, in dollars.
Two stacked numbers. Found today: displacement and found money, itemized from your own numbers; it must exceed our base fee before a contract is offered, and those items become commitments. Identified growth: benchmark gaps and demand opportunity, sized as ranges, prioritized, never promised in writing. Each half of the fee arrives with its own evidence attached.
If the diagnostic doesn't find annual value exceeding our base fee, we'll tell you you're not a fit.
The diagnostic is mutual underwriting. A firm with no immediate payback does not get signed onto these terms.
What changes when the agreement is signed
The connections happen inside the contract, not before it. Read-only, revocable access to your accounting, practice, and marketing systems is the first month's deliverable. You already hold full access to your own systems; what you have never had is the analyst. We never see passwords, we never store credentials, and you can revoke from the provider's side at any time.
The baseline gets verified. The trailing-12 number written into the agreement is reconciled against live data, so the fee is computed on a number both sides can see.
The dashboard goes live and the operating plan starts. Found-money items from the readout become commitments with owners and dates. Growth work begins against the prioritized plan.
And there is an off-ramp. If the verified numbers do not support the readout within the first 60 to 90 days, either party can exit and fees are refunded. You do not have to believe us; the agreement makes disbelief cost you nothing.
One number, two rates
5% of collections up to your baseline, 10% of collections above it. The baseline is your trailing-12 collections at signing, adjusted for inflation each year so ordinary price increases never count as growth. Billed monthly on prior-month collections. No attribution arguments, ever: growth is collections above the baseline regardless of source, and if the book shrinks the formula automatically charges 5% of actuals.
What we never do, stated proudly
Your production work: returns, books, attest, advisory. Being the payroll provider of record. HR and benefits administration. IT helpdesk. Those carry licensure, liability, or hours that scale with bodies, and they are why a CPA can trust the rest of the offer.
We run everything around the work. You do the work.