Episode 329 | The Profit Answer Man I Peter McCarroll
There is a tab open in your browser right now that you have not touched in three days. It says ChatGPT or Claude. You have had it for months. You told someone at a peer group you were doing AI, and technically you were not wrong. You opened it. You asked it something. You closed it.
Meanwhile, the accounting firm your $6M roofing company uses just cut the time to close your year-end file by 40%. The HVAC company two zip codes over started sending its maintenance clients a monthly cash flow snapshot. It costs them almost nothing to produce. It is keeping their clients from ever calling you.
You are not behind because you missed a trend. You are behind because you stopped at lever one.
The 90% of the Time You Are Not Using
Peter McCarroll has run Fuel Accountants in Toronto for over 15 years, nine of them as a Profit First Professional. Two years ago he stopped treating AI as a tool he checked occasionally and started building it into the center of how his firm operates.
He describes the gap between those two modes with an image that sticks. Imagine you hired a full-time employee, paid them a salary, and they sat in the corner of your office 90% of the time waiting for instructions. That is your AI subscription. Occasionally you walk over and ask it something. Then you go back to running your business exactly as before.
His diagnostic is simple. If you are not occasionally maxing out your plan, you are probably not using it enough to matter. That is not an argument to buy more. It is an argument to demand more of what you already pay for.
Most owners pull one of three levers. Lever one is the only one most ever reach.
Lever One Is a Floor, Not a Strategy
Lever one is cost. Doing more with less. Faster proposals. Bridging gaps between software systems that do not talk to each other.
At Fuel Accountants, one of those gaps sat between Jane, a health practice platform, and Xero. The integration had been discontinued. Peter’s team was pulling reports from Jane, reformatting them in a spreadsheet, and entering numbers into Xero by hand. A prompt now takes a screenshot from Jane and generates the journal entry ready to post. Seconds instead of minutes, across every client who uses Jane.
Real. Worth doing. Also, as Peter says, the lowest-hanging and lowest-value fruit. You can only compress costs so far before you hit bone. The business pulling only lever one is playing defense while the business that figured out lever two is rewriting the pricing rules.
The Decision You Are Making Alone That You Should Not Be
Lever two is decision quality. This is where AI stops being a productivity tool and starts acting like a partner.
Peter made one change to how he uses Claude that altered everything he produces. He told it: do not tell me I am doing a good job. Your job is to make my ideas better, not confirm them. Challenge me.
What comes back is not a polished version of what he already thought. It is a document that has been stress-tested, with the gaps in his assumptions surfaced before they turn expensive. He brings 15 years of client knowledge. The AI brings the challenge. The result beats what either produces alone.
Rocky applies the same logic to client relationships. Every Fathom transcript goes into Google Notebook LM, building a searchable database of every conversation over months or years. Before a call, AI surfaces what was discussed across the last 10 sessions, how the client makes decisions, and the themes showing up across multiple clients at once.
A $4M plumbing contractor whose owner has resisted a price increase for two years is not a mystery. The pattern is in the transcripts. The AI names it before the meeting starts. That is lever two. You walk in already knowing what you are walking into.
The Revenue You Are Not Building Because You Think It Costs Too Much
Lever three is revenue, and almost no one is looking here.
The question most owners are not asking: what could I now bring to market that was previously too expensive to build?
For Peter’s practice, that means CFO-level reporting for clients who could never have afforded the staff hours it required. AI prepares the framework. The partner reviews and refines. The client gets advisory depth that would have meant two extra hires five years ago. New revenue from existing relationships, zero new customers.
For a $5M HVAC company, it might mean a monthly operational health report for service-agreement clients, flagging renewal risk before a competitor calls. The report takes minutes. The relationship strengthens. Churn drops. That is not a technology project. It is a revenue lever that was not available before.
The constraint that kept these services out of reach was always labor. AI does not remove the need for human judgment. It removes the barrier to entry for everything surrounding it. That is the ceiling a lever-one owner never sees from the floor.
Rocky’s Perspective
Here is what I see when a $7M owner tells me they are already using AI: they mean they have the subscription. They opened it. They used it for writing. And they have no idea what is happening in their market compared to the owner who made a different decision 18 months ago.
Peter calls it competitor compression, and the math is simple. If your competitor runs an AI system that reviews their year-end files automatically, their partners spend less time reviewing and more time with clients. They handle more volume. They price more aggressively. They respond faster. Every advantage compounds, and it all came from a decision made before most owners had their first serious AI conversation.
The owners I worry about are not the ones who decided against AI. That is a choice. I worry about the ones who believe they are using it. They have the tab open. They check the box in their head. And they are losing ground to someone who is not checking boxes, but building infrastructure.
There is a Profit First angle here too. The owner who never built the reserve, who kept saying she would handle it in three months, is now in a forced sale. She did not choose the moment, the buyer, or the timeline, because there was no vault to buy her time when revenue dropped. The vault is not savings. The vault is options. AI on levers two and three is the same thing: decision-making space. You stop being the bottleneck and start being the strategist.
The One Thing to Do Before Your Next Meeting
Before your next meeting with a prospect, client, or key vendor, give your AI tool every note, email, and message you have about that person or company. Then give it one instruction: identify the patterns in how this person makes decisions, and tell me the one risk I am most likely to underestimate in this conversation.
Do not use it to write your pitch. Use it to challenge what you think you already know. That is lever two. One meeting, zero added cost. You will learn more about what AI can do for your business than any webinar would teach you.
Once you see it work, the question is no longer whether AI fits your business. The question is how much ground you gave up while telling yourself you were doing the AI thing.
You came in with a tab open you had not touched in three days. You can leave with a specific use for it before the week ends. One meeting. One prep. One look at what lever two costs you to keep ignoring.
The forced sale happens slowly, then all at once. The competitive gap works the same way.
Aboout Peter McCarroll
Peter McCarroll is a Chartered Accountant (NZ), CPA (Canada), and the founder of The AI Accountant — the only AI training and implementation platform built exclusively for CAS practices. He runs a full-service accounting practice at Fuel Accountants, where he has spent the past two years deploying AI across real client workflows. Peter helps accounting firms move from experimentation to operational transformation — not with theory, but with systems built inside a working practice.
Links
Website: theaiaccountant.ai/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/petermccarroll/
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@TheAIAccountant-ai
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Music provided by Junan from Junan Podcast
Any financial advice is for educational purposes only and you should consult with an expert for your specific needs.