The advisor who lives five years ahead

Every Monday morning went the same way. A chief operating officer would start the week building a report, one location at a time. Her company had grown from four locations to 16, and putting the numbers together took six hours. By the time she got to the actual analysis, she had two hours left in the day.

Dixie McCurley, a partner at accounting firm Cherry Bekaert, had one question for her. What would she do with that time if she didn’t have to spend it building the report?

“I really listen to what they need,” Dixie says of her clients, “and then I put together the strategy and the plan for how we’re going to accomplish it together.”

It was never about the services

Dixie started her own accounting firm 15 years ago, back when she thought the job was mostly about what appeared on the invoice. It took a couple of years of false starts to learn otherwise. “It wasn’t about our services,” she says. “It was actually all about the client.” She joined Cherry Bekaert four years ago, when it was a $250 million firm with about 23 offices. It’s nearing $700 million now, with more than 46 offices, and Dixie has spent those years as the firm’s growth partner, more often on a plane or a Zoom call than not, making the case for outsourced accounting to companies that didn’t know yet that they needed it. Colleagues call her the closer.

The trouble starts a few million dollars later

QuickBooks, Dixie says, is close to perfect for a sole proprietor, and most small businesses can run it themselves without much trouble. But what works at one size doesn’t always fit the next. She’s opened client files that ran fine when the business was smaller and found seven or eight problems with how the data was kept. Customers never coded. Vendors lumped together. A chart of accounts built for $500,000 in revenue that stopped making sense at $5 million.

One client signed an outsourced accounting contract with Cherry Bekaert three years ago, when the company was doing $1.2 million in revenue. At the renewal meeting, Dixie expected to find something like $6 million. Instead, $17 million. “I was delighted and surprised,” she says. The setup that had served the business fine at a smaller size hadn’t kept pace. That meant her team had some catching up to do; adding customer analysis, vendor analysis, and departmental reporting, the kinds of things a $17 million business needs that a $1.2 million one doesn’t.

She oversees client relationships that can run to hundreds of company files, and logging into each one separately isn’t a plan, it’s a queue. What she pictures is one view across all of them. A general manager doesn’t drive to every location to find out how it’s doing, she watches the scorecard. Dixie wants the same thing—to know which clients need attention, whose margins moved, and who to call before they call her.

Turns out, she had better things to do

The chief operating officer with 16 locations got her answer. Cherry Bekaert’s outsourced accounting team consolidated her location-by-location numbers into one report, ready before she started work Monday morning, replacing the six-hour ritual of building it by hand. “I would love it to all be captured for me when I show up on Monday morning at 8:30 AM,” she’d told Dixie, “so that I can start analyzing it all day.” That’s close to what happened.

Freed from the report-building, she told Dixie and the company’s CEO something that surprised even them. She believed she could double sales, not by working harder, but by spending the time she used to spend on spreadsheets coaching her location managers instead, one teaching the next. The CEO, in the room when she said it, wasn’t sure he believed her. The company went on to grow from 16 locations to 30.

Before they hit the wall

Multi-entity reporting is where that instinct shows up most. Dixie talks about Intuit Enterprise Suite’s dimensional reporting features like someone who has already pictured them inside her clients’ businesses. Departmental reporting, entity-level connections, and vendor requirements, built in from the start. “What I see with IES especially is you guys are building that layer of complexity in there for that mid-sized business,” she says. To her, it’s the layer that helps the systems keep pace with the business.

It’s the same instinct that made her an early convert to outsourced accounting, long before most firms called it client advisory services. “I’m very patient, too,” she says. “I live five years ahead. I’m known for that, that I’m an early adopter.”

The conversations spreadsheets can’t have

That shift shows up across Dixie’s entire practice, not just with one client. For years, the accounting profession measured itself by how fast and accurately it could code transactions, what she calls the 80% of the job that used to eat most of the day. As automation takes on more of that coding and reconciliation work, she wants her teams spending 80% of their time the other way—analyzing, planning, and talking with clients about what the numbers mean.

“We’ve got to shift into a trusted business advisor mindset,” she says. That means teaching clients things the income statement never taught them, like how to read a balance sheet, or how the three sections of a cash flow statement tell different parts of the same story.. Increasingly, it means telling the story of the business out loud, in scenario-planning sessions, because the client is usually too busy running it to step back and see its shape.

If she could ask AI for one thing right now, it wouldn’t be faster bookkeeping. It would be a record of which of her recommendations paid off for a client, and by how much, so she could look back and see what her advice actually changed.

What time makes possible

Dixie still thinks about the chief operating officer who got her Monday mornings back. To her, that story gets at what good advice is supposed to do. It makes room for someone to run their business better.

Asked to sum up what she does, she doesn’t reach for a title. “I’m an entrepreneur at heart,” she says. “And one of the things I found along the way was that I was really good at the numbers. So if I can help other entrepreneurs understand their numbers to be able to grow great businesses, that really energizes me, and it has a global impact in our world.” It’s the same math, scaled up. Give someone back the hours the numbers used to take, and watch what they build instead.