The Advisory Advantage: Why Advisory Is Hard to Scale—and What Worked for Paro

The accounting profession is in the midst of its most significant transformation in decades. Client Advisory Services (CAS) is now the fastest-growing practice area, with firms projecting 99% growth in the coming years, according to the 2024 CPA.com and AICPA CAS Benchmark Survey. Yet buried in the industry’s own benchmark data lies an uncomfortable truth: the vast majority of CPA firms remain trapped in compliance work, unable to deliver the strategic financial guidance that growth-stage companies desperately need.

For CEOs and CFOs seeking strategic financial partners, this gap between industry aspiration and execution creates both challenge and opportunity. Understanding which providers have genuinely made the advisory leap—and how they did it—can mean the difference between finding a true strategic partner and settling for a compliance vendor dressed in advisory clothing.

Why Most CPA Firms Struggle to Transition From Compliance to Advisory Services

The numbers tell a stark story. According to the 2024 CPA.com and AICPA CAS Benchmark Survey, while over 60% of CPA firms now claim to prioritize advisory services, the reality beneath the surface is far less encouraging:

• 39% of firms don’t offer business insights services at all
• Less than one-third report more than 10% of CAS revenue from business insights advisory
• 65%+ of CAS revenue still comes from transactional accounting and controllership services
• Only a “small set” of firms generate significant revenue from CFO or business insights services

The Journal of Accountancy (September 2025) captured the human dimension of this challenge in blunt terms when it wrote of one firm’s journey to shift its practice from focusing on compliance work to advisory: 

“Buchman’s firm, for example, tried to shift its people too quickly from performing compliance work to tackling high-end advisory work. Some staff found the new responsibilities so overwhelming that they considered quitting. …”

This is the fundamental constraint: accountants trained to prepare tax returns and reconcile bank statements cannot suddenly transform into strategic advisors who build financial models for investor presentations, develop scenario analyses for board meetings, or provide fundraising guidance. The skills are simply different.

How Paro Built Scalable Client Advisory Services Using a Marketplace Model

Against this industry backdrop, our company, Paro, has quietly executed one of the most successful compliance-to-advisory transitions in the industry. Our internal data, covering 10K+ client engagements and more than 1.5K finance professionals, reveals a fundamentally different trajectory.

The Quality Shift: Fewer Projects, Dramatically Higher Value

Comparing Q4 2024 to Q4 2025 in Paro’s direct-to-business (inbound) channel, our annual contract value increased by 54%, revealing the transformation. 

The pattern is clear: Paro is winning significantly larger engagements, the hallmark of successful advisory positioning. But the service-level data is even more striking. In the same period:

• Our CPA/Accounting Advisory services grew 131%
• Our CFO services grew 46%
• Our Financial Planning & Analysis (FP&A) services grew a whopping 322%

These aren’t incremental improvements—they represent a fundamental repositioning from compliance service provider to strategic advisory partner.

Five Key Requirements for Scaling Accounting Advisory Services Successfully 

While traditional CPA firms struggle with multi-year transformation journeys that often stall, Paro executed its shift through five interconnected strategic pillars:

1. Advisory-First Talent Strategy

Rather than retraining compliance professionals—the approach that caused CPA firm staff in the example above to “consider quitting”—Paro built a marketplace of more than 1,500 pre-vetted experts who already possessed diverse advisory skill sets. This includes former Big Four professionals, Fortune 500 finance leaders, and seasoned fractional CFOs. We accept less than 2% of applicants, ensuring that every expert can deliver strategic advisory work from day one.

The result: instant access to professionals who can deliver investor presentations, financial modeling, fundraising support, M&A due diligence, scenario analysis and more. In other words, work that compliance-trained accountants simply cannot perform.

2. Demand Generation Expertise for Advisory Services

Selling advisory services requires fundamentally different marketing than selling tax preparation. Paro’s digital marketing team developed specialized expertise in generating demand for complex advisory engagements—reaching CEOs and CFOs seeking strategic guidance rather than business owners looking for basic bookkeeping.

3. Consultative Sales Training

Sales consultants who excelled at selling “cookie-cutter” compliance services—standard tax packages, monthly bookkeeping retainers—required extensive retraining in consultative selling. Advisory engagements demand deep discovery conversations, custom scoping and the ability to translate client pain points into tailored solutions. Paro invested heavily in this transformation.

4. Technology Platform Built for Advisory Complexity

This may be Paro’s most significant differentiator. If you build a platform to handle advisory services, it can handle compliance services, but not vice versa.

The implications of this philosophy are profound. While most compliance firms implement practice management with cookie-cutter workflows and standardized engagement letters designed to fit those workflows, Paro recognized that advisory clients rarely have identical pain points. The scope of work differs from client to client.

Paro’s technology platform addresses this through three purpose-built capabilities:

• AI-Powered Statement of Work Builder: Enables advisory consultants to create customized scopes tailored to each client’s unique problems—not force-fitting needs into predefined service packages
• AI-Based Pricing Recommendation Engine: Reads the documented scope and recommends appropriate pricing based on complexity, expertise required, and market benchmarks—eliminating the underpricing that plagues advisory work
• Instant AI Project Planning: Once an engagement is won, the platform generates a comprehensive project plan instantly—something that would be impossible in a compliance firm with legacy practice management tools, and time-consuming even in advisory firms with modern tech stacks

5. AI Agents That Bridge the Compliance-to-Advisory Gap

Perhaps most innovatively, Paro has developed AI agents—including a Tax Minimization Agent and a Growth Advisory Agent (also known as the Financial Health Analysis Agent)—that ease the transition for compliance-oriented resources into advisory work. These tools augment human expertise, allowing professionals to deliver sophisticated advisory insights that would otherwise require years of specialized experience.

Two Paths: Paro’s Journey vs. The Traditional CPA Firm

The contrast between Paro’s transformation and the typical CPA firm journey illustrates why this transition remains so challenging for traditional players.

The table below compares traditional CPA firms with modern accounting advisory platforms like Paro across talent, pricing, technology and scalability.

The One-Stop Shop Advantage: A Rare Capability

For growth-stage companies, the ideal finance partner offers comprehensive capabilities—from foundational bookkeeping and tax compliance to sophisticated CFO-level strategy, FP&A, fundraising support and M&A advisory. The ability to scale services as a company grows, without switching providers, represents enormous value.

But how rare is this comprehensive capability? The numbers are sobering:

• ~88,000 accounting, tax preparation, and bookkeeping firms operate in the United States
• Just 500 firms make the IPA Top 500 ranking (the industry’s premier benchmark)
• 206 firms participated in the CPA.com and AICPA CAS Benchmark Survey (self-selected CAS-focused firms)
• Of those, only a “small set” generate significant CFO/business insights revenue
• 39% don’t offer business insights services at all

What makes Paro’s position even more unique is the combination of this comprehensive capability with the marketplace model’s structural advantages: no geographic constraints, AI-powered matching to the right expertise, and the ability to scale services dynamically as client needs evolve.

What This Means for CEOs and CFOs Seeking Strategic Partners

The implications for growth-focused companies are significant:

Question Advisory Claims Carefully

Many firms claim advisory capabilities they cannot actually deliver. Ask for specific examples: Have they built investor presentations? Developed financial models for fundraising? Supported M&A transactions? The proof is in the execution, not the marketing.

Evaluate the Talent Model

Is your potential partner retraining compliance accountants to do advisory work? Or do they have access to professionals who have actually delivered CFO-level strategy, fundraising guidance, and sophisticated financial modeling? The difference matters enormously.

Consider Scalability

As your company grows from $1M to $10M to $50M+ in revenue, will your financial partner grow with you? Can they handle your bookkeeping today and your Series B preparation next year? The transaction cost of switching providers is substantial—finding a partner who can scale matters.

Assess Technology Sophistication

Does your potential partner use technology built for advisory complexity, or are they forcing your unique needs into cookie-cutter workflows? The ability to create custom scopes, AI-powered pricing, and instant project planning separates modern advisory platforms from legacy compliance providers.

The Advisory Imperative

The CPA industry’s 99% projected growth in Client Advisory Services reflects genuine demand: growth-stage companies need strategic financial guidance, not just tax filing and bank reconciliations. But the industry’s ability to deliver on this demand remains constrained by talent limitations, technology gaps and the inherent difficulty of transforming compliance professionals into strategic advisors.

Paro’s data demonstrates what’s possible when the structural constraints are removed. By building a marketplace of pre-vetted advisory talent, investing in AI-powered technology purpose-built for advisory complexity, and developing specialized demand generation and consultative sales capabilities, our platform has achieved what most CPA firms aspire to but struggle to execute.

For founders, CEOs and CFOs seeking true strategic financial partners—professionals who can help navigate fundraising, build sophisticated financial models, provide board-level strategic guidance and scale with your growth—the question isn’t whether advisory capability matters. It’s whether your current or prospective partner can actually deliver it.

About the Author

Saum Mathur has 29 years of experience in driving business growth by leveraging leading-edge business concepts, AI and technologies. He is a progressive and results-oriented executive who thrives on challenges and opportunities. As the Chief Operating Officer at Paro, a platform that connects businesses with freelance finance and accounting experts, he leads the marketing, sales, product management, technology and revenue operations for the company, with the mandate to grow the company efficiently and sustainably.