Distinguished Faculty

I'm a serial entrepreneur, and for 50 years my work in educational and professional publishing has been about building communities around content people trust and use.

In 1987 I founded Accounting Today as its publisher, and in 1989 I developed its CPE program because I saw that readers needed ongoing learning as much as they needed news. I went on to serve as President and Publisher of InfoWorld and as General Manager of Health Business Newsletters. I also built online communities of interest for Prodigy, General Internet Company, and About.com, and launched integrated print-and-online specialty retail businesses in markets ranging from boating and golf sportswear to maternity, party supplies, seafood, and music merchandise.

I've been senior business development advisor to CPA Trendlines.com for 20 years where I developed the "Heart of the Market" demographic concept. Today I direct the CPA Trendlines Academy resting on the 5 Industry Pillars. Our mission is to give accounting and tax professionals practical, forward-looking CPE on AI, client advisory services, compliance, and the future of the firm, so they can keep pace with a profession that is changing faster than ever.

Penny Breslin, MBA, is CEO of MoneyPenny, the outsourced tax, accounting, bookkeeping and back-office support firm she co-founded in 2014 with two of her former students. MoneyPenny works from offices in Chennai, India, and Cheyenne, Wyoming, and is known for its transparent model and its commitment to the safety and growth of its own team. Penny has spent her career helping accounting firms build capacity, tighten operations and improve the client experience.

Her work with accountants began with designing training for bookkeeping and accounting workflows. In 2002 she was invited to India to teach those workflows and the supporting software to chartered accountants, after helping set up outsourcing initiatives in several Indian cities. That hands-on view of how the work actually gets done is the foundation of what she teaches. With Damien Greathead she co-authored It's NOT Just the Numbers, published by CPA Trendlines, an 11-step guide to building a Back Office Support practice that takes firms past scorekeeping and into advisory work, and the two co-host the It's Not Just the Numbers podcast. At the Academy, Penny and Damien lead The CAS Playbook: From Scorekeeper to Strategist.

Bradley Burnett, J.D., LL.M., is a practicing Colorado tax attorney with 40 years of tax practice experience, concentrating on tax planning and tax controversy resolution. Before founding his own law firm in 1990, he practiced tax accounting with national and local CPA firms, served as a trust officer for a Denver bank, and ran the tax department as a partner in a mid-sized Denver law firm. He holds an undergraduate degree in accounting, a J.D., and an LL.M. in Taxation from the University of Denver School of Law Graduate Tax Program, where he later served as an adjunct professor, pioneering an employment tax course and teaching IRS practice and procedure.

Brad has delivered more than 3,700 presentations on U.S. tax law across all fifty states and abroad, and has written the texts of more than 40 CPE courses. He received the Illinois CPA Society's Instructor Excellence Award and has five times been the top-rated, most-requested instructor at CPA society annual tax conferences. At the Academy he leads the Mid-Year Tax Update, “Between the Deadlines” federal tax developments, and Form 1065 and K-1 programs, delivered in his trademark brisk, candid and witty style.

Erin Daiber, CPA, PCC, is a CPA-turned-leadership strategist and the founder and CEO of Well Balanced Accountants, a consulting firm that helps independent CPA firms grow firm value by increasing revenue, retaining and developing top talent, and transforming workplace culture. She began her career in the audit practice of EY and spent several years in private industry as a financial analyst. A stretch of burnout as a high-performing accountant led her to rethink how firms work, and to found Well Balanced Accountants.

Erin partners with firm leaders nationwide on the challenges that shape a firm's future: building leadership pipelines, preparing for succession, reducing costly turnover, scaling capacity, and adopting AI with a strategy in place before the subscriptions pile up. She is a strong advocate for firm independence and for investing in people as the foundation of firm value. Erin holds an active CPA license in California, the Professional Certified Coach credential from the International Coaching Federation, and a degree in accountancy from John Carroll University. She lives in San Diego. At the Academy she has led programs on practical AI adoption and succession planning.

Damien Greathead, MBA, is co-founder of Beyond Numbers and an accounting technology and growth leader with more than 17 years of experience helping accounting firms and the software companies that serve them grow. He has worked with hundreds of firms around the world on evolving their business models, moving them from compliance work toward advisory services that clients value.

Damien's career has run through some of the best-known names in accounting technology. He led accountant and advisor marketing for Intuit QuickBooks, headed marketing at Practice Ignition, and was Vice President of Business Development for North America at Receipt Bank, now Dext. CPA Practice Advisor named him a 20 Under 40 Vendor Superstar. Earlier he co-published CFO Services with Chris Frederiksen. With Penny Breslin he co-authored It's NOT Just the Numbers, published by CPA Trendlines, an 11-step process for building a Back Office Support practice that frees accountants to add context and advice, and the two co-host the It's Not Just the Numbers podcast. At the Academy, Damien and Penny lead The CAS Playbook: From Scorekeeper to Strategist, and Damien covered client advisory services in New Skills for a New Age.

Jody Padar, CPA, MST, known across the profession as The Radical CPA®, is one of accounting's foremost visionaries and a co-founder of XcelLabs, the training and technology platform behind the AI-X movement, which helps accountants build AI fluency and stronger advisory skills. She pioneered the cloud-based firm model, turning her own Chicago-area practice, New Vision CPA Group, into a technology-forward, paperless firm, and has since held leadership roles at high-growth fintech companies including Botkeeper and April.

Accounting Today has named her to its Top 100 Most Influential People list for more than a decade. She is the author of three books published by CPA Trendlines: The Radical CPA: New Rules for the Future-Ready Firm; From Success to Significance: The Radical CPA Guide; and Radical Pricing, her blueprint for moving firms from selling time to selling outcomes. She writes regularly for CPA Trendlines and Accounting Today. Jody earned her BBA from Saint Mary's College and her MST from Northern Illinois University, and lives in Door County, Wisconsin. At the Academy she leads the AI-First Firm Accelerator Series and The Firm of 2030.

Hitendra R. Patil is one of the accounting profession's leading authorities on client accounting and advisory services, accounting technology and firm innovation. He is CEO of Accountaneur, LLC, a consulting firm that advises CPA firms, fintech companies serving accountants, and outsourcing providers on growth, advisory positioning and technology integration. Across more than two decades devoted to the profession, his leadership has spanned accounting, tax, payroll, SaaS, AI and offshore delivery, including running the global CPA outsourcing business at Datamatics Business Solutions.

Accounting Today has named him one of the Top 100 Most Influential People in Accounting for multiple consecutive years. He created the TRUE Advisor® Framework, a step-by-step system for building, pricing and scaling advisory services that clients value and pay for. His best-selling CPA Trendlines books are True Advisor®, Client Accounting Services: The Definitive Success Guide, and Accountaneur: The Entrepreneurial Accountant, read by accountants in more than 18 countries. His newest book, PE Deal Ready, shows CPA firm owners how private equity already scores their firm, whether they plan to sell, merge or stay independent. At the Academy he leads the TRUE Advisor CAS Mastery Series.

David Podell is the founder and CEO of Business Benefits Consultants, a firm that designs and manages employer-sponsored benefit plans, especially defined benefit and cash balance plans, as tax strategies for business owners. He began his career about two decades ago as a financial advisor and still runs a separate advisory practice. He founded Business Benefits Consultants after recognizing that the large-deduction tax strategy space was full of complexity and short on systems.

CPAs, tax professionals and financial advisors across the country commission his firm as an outsourced partner. The team vets and performs due diligence on the plan designs and combinations available in the marketplace, then custom-builds the right fit for each company, so the accountant can bring these plans to clients and stay fully involved in them. David shows tax advisors how business owners can move profits out of the business on a pre-tax basis while building retirement savings, including plans with annual contributions above $1 million. He has lectured widely as a specialist in defined benefit and cash balance plans, has been featured in Forbes, by the AICPA and in CPA Practice Advisor, and is a frequent podcast guest on tax planning for business owners.

Angela M. Stockbridge is a Partner in the Taxation Practice Group at Falcon Rappaport & Berkman LLP, where she is building the firm's dedicated ERISA and employee benefits group. An employee benefits and executive compensation attorney, she advises employers, plan sponsors, executives and human resources professionals on qualified and nonqualified retirement plans, group health plans and voluntary benefits, with a focus on tax-efficient strategies.

Her practice covers M&A deal diligence, complex 409A and 280G matters, fiduciary governance, and plan compliance and corrections under ERISA, HIPAA and the ACA. She represents plan sponsors under IRS and Department of Labor audit, assists with Form 5500 filings, and files correction applications under the IRS Employee Plans Compliance Resolution System. Her perspective comes from three vantage points: law firm practice, in-house counsel roles at two publicly traded Fortune 500 companies, and earlier work as a benefits consultant and HR professional. She has advised start-ups, pre-IPO companies, privately held businesses and public companies nationwide. Angela earned her J.D. from Cornell Law School. At the Academy she presents Retirement Plan Compliance Red Flags for CPAs.

Danielle Tewes, CPA, is a tax transformation leader and Senior Vice President of Strategic Accounts at K1x, where she helps some of the largest organizations in the U.S. modernize their tax compliance. Her focus is the volume and complexity of Schedule K-1 and partnership data, and how technology and automation can turn that data from a compliance burden into something firms and investors can use.

Danielle brings more than 15 years of experience across public accounting, tax and tax technology. Before her current role she served as K1x's Vice President of Client Success, leading the client success managers, implementation specialists and product support teams that deliver K1x solutions. Earlier, she was a leader in Crowe's tax technology practice and spent years as a tax practitioner serving clients across the country on federal, state and international compliance and consulting matters, specializing in tax-exempt organizations and large institutional investors that receive a high volume of K-1s. She speaks regularly at state CPA society and AICPA conferences. Her Academy program, From K1 Chaos to K1 Capital, is available on demand, and she joined New Skills for a New Age to show how AI-driven automation removes the grind from tax compliance.

Ben Vickery is an AI builder who works on the practical side of AI adoption in accounting firms. He is the developer behind Navi by XcelLabs, an AI coaching platform for accountants that turns unstructured information such as emails, calls and meetings into insight, and the founder of TaxFlow, a tax workflow platform serving accounting firms.

Alongside those products, Ben builds AI automation inside CPA firms, from streamlining client communication to automating the repetitive work that eats up a firm's day. His approach starts with three questions every firm should ask: which tasks are actually worth handing to AI, how to do it without putting client data at risk, and where human judgment still wins. That builder's view shapes his teaching. Instead of surveying tools in the abstract, Ben shows firms how to build an AI assistant that reflects their own voice and standards, connect AI to the email, calendar, storage and accounting applications they already use, and decide when to automate a workflow, when to buy software rather than build it, and what should stay human-led. At the Academy he co-leads the AI-First Firm Accelerator Series with Jody Padar.

Kristin Zhivago is a B2B Revenue Growth Architect and CEO of Zhivago Partners, the revenue growth services firm she founded in 2017 to help mid-sized B2B companies compete with more digitally savvy rivals. Her work rests on one premise: growth happens when you replace assumptions with customer truth. She and her team find where revenue is leaking, map the real buying journey, and rebuild sales, marketing and service around how customers actually think and buy.

Kristin began by co-founding and running a tech agency in Silicon Valley, then spent decades as a revenue coach and interim marketing executive, leading sales and marketing turnarounds for companies of every size. She has personally conducted thousands of customer interviews and coached hundreds of CEOs, founders and leadership teams, for clients ranging from IBM, Siemens, Dow Jones and Synopsys to growing software and service firms. She is the author of Roadmap to Revenue: How to Sell the Way Your Customers Want to Buy and Rivers of Revenue, and hosts The CEO Blind Spot podcast. For accounting firms, she brings a practical method for finding and removing the hidden sales stoppers that keep a firm from growing.