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The staffing crisis hitting small tax practices right now is real. Experienced preparers are retiring, taking decades of institutional knowledge with them. New hires need more training than ever. And the work keeps getting more complex. For many practitioners, just keeping up feels like the goal.
But some small practices are not just surviving these challenges. They are genuinely getting better, year after year, even with lean teams and tight resources. Research on what makes high-performing teams exceptional suggests that their advantage has less to do with who they hire and more to do with how they operate.
Create a Culture Where Learning Is the Job
The best teams experiment constantly, even when things are working. In a tax practice, that might mean testing a new review workflow, piloting a different client intake process, or trying an AI research tool on a small set of returns before rolling it out firm wide. The point is not to change everything at once. It is to always have something in progress that generates new insight. Practices that stop asking questions eventually fall behind, not because they made a dramatic mistake, but because they quietly stopped improving.
Equally important is making it safe to surface problems. If your team only brings you good news, you have a cultural issue, not a staffing issue. A simple habit of asking "what are you stuck on?" in weekly meetings normalizes challenge, invites honesty, and turns individual roadblocks into shared problems that the whole team can solve together.
Stop Managing From a Distance
One of the clearest findings from high-performance research is that the best leaders stay involved in the actual work. In a tax practice, that means sitting with newer staff during complex returns, reviewing files alongside your team rather than above them, and staying close enough to the work to spot where the next improvement needs to happen. That is not micromanagement. It is modeling. When your team sees that no task is beneath you, they bring their full effort too.
Treat Feedback as Fuel, Not Judgment
The fastest way to rebuild a shrinking knowledge base is to make feedback a daily habit rather than a seasonal event. Short informal conversations about what went well on a return and what could go differently next time build skills faster than annual reviews ever will. When feedback feels like support rather than criticism, people stay curious and engaged precisely when they are most tempted to just get through the work.
Connect the Work to Something Larger
Practitioners who retain good people tend to be clear about why the work matters. Your clients are small business owners navigating a tax code that was not written with them in mind. That is genuinely meaningful work. When your team understands that, standards rise on their own.
The practices getting stronger right now are not the ones that have solved the staffing problem. They are the ones who have made continuous improvement part of how they work every single day.
Dr. Christine Gervais is a licensed CPA, using her skills to help businesses grow and achieve their fullest potential. Christine has a Master’s degree in accounting from Southern New Hampshire University in addition to holding her CPA license for over a decade. Notably, Christine is a nationally recognized speaker providing education to other CPAs on how to best serve clients as well as instruction on a wide variety of topics for business owners on how to maximize success. Christine prides herself on the value she can bring to clients with her extensive tax knowledge and provides strategic, forward-thinking financial strategies to help clients grow. When not behind her desk, you can find Christine spending quality time with her daughter and stepson or tending to the family’s excessively loved farm animals.
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