Sarah Clayton | Managing Director
Freshwater Taxation

Sarah Clayton is the Founder and Managing Director of Freshwater Taxation, an award-winning Australian accounting firm she founded in 2012. A CPA and IPA-qualified accountant with more than 20 years’ experience, Sarah has spent the past 15 years experimenting with, growing, scaling and ultimately simplifying her own practice.
Today, Freshwater services more than 700 clients with no dedicated admin team, using technology and automation to keep Sarah personally connected to her clients while running a highly profitable, flexible practice. She is passionate about doing business differently, challenging traditional ideas of growth and building a firm that works for its owner, not the other way around.

Appearances:

Day 1 @ 12:30

I Scaled My Accounting Firm. Then I Unscaled It

When I started Freshwater Taxation 15 years ago, there was no roadmap for building an online accounting firm. There wasn’t the social media, technology advice, business content or endless stream of people telling us how to build, grow and scale that we have today. I largely worked it out as I went.

I priced too low, chased the mass market, built a huge client base and then built an increasingly large team to service it. Revenue grew, but profit, control and my connection with my clients went in the opposite direction.

Then came COVID, major changes in my personal life and a painful business experience that forced me to rethink what I was actually trying to build.

In this session, I’ll share what I got wrong, what I learned and how I gradually “unscaled” Freshwater. I reduced my client base, dramatically reduced my team, used technology and automation to remove administration, and focused on knowing my clients and becoming far more involved in their financial and business lives throughout the year.

Today, Freshwater services more than 700 clients with no dedicated admin team. I’m personally back at the centre of my client relationships, supported by a very small team. The business is more profitable than ever, and I can comfortably step away several times a year.

This isn’t a session about why you shouldn’t scale. Scaling works brilliantly for many firms. It’s my story of discovering that scaling wasn’t bringing me the business or life I wanted, and learning that sometimes building a better business can actually mean building a smaller one.

Sarah Clayton, Managing Director, Freshwater Taxation

Day 1 @ 14:30

Panel: The Firm of the Future

Optimizing Firm Profitability & Efficiency - Internal KPI Tracking: Monitoring the metrics that matter for firms—realization rates, utilization rates, and average revenue per client (ARPC).
Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs): Productizing your services so workflows run smoothly whether the firm partners are involved or not.
Trimming the Client Tail: Strategies for firing D-list clients to free up capacity for high-margin, A-list accounts.

Sarah Clayton, Managing Director, Freshwater Taxation

Lisa Martin, Executive Director, The Get-Sh*t-Done Accountant