Podcast | Redefining Growth from the Inside Out: The Next Chapter Starts with Structure, Culture and Collaboration
This article recaps the debut episode of Forward Focus, the newest addition to AAM’s Amplify podcast series. Hosts Mike Jones and Sam Pagel sat down with attendees at the AAM Summit 2025 to explore what true growth looks like in today’s accounting firms. Through a series of candid interviews, four thought leaders — Keith Ferrazzi, Jason Blumer, Kristen Lewis and Mark Jamnik — share how redefining culture, strategy and leadership from the inside out can create lasting impact.
Growth isn’t just a matter of marketing campaigns or lead funnels. It’s about building organizations that are structurally sound, culturally aligned and operationally equipped to scale. The next generation of firm growth will be powered not just by what marketing teams do, but by how they help the entire firm think and act differently.
That’s the central idea explored in the latest season of Amplify where we talk about shaping the future of growth from the inside out with Keith Ferrazzi, Jason Blumer, Kristen Lewis and Mark Jamnik. Their insights shows that marketers are uniquely positioned to lead not just promotion, but transformation.
The End of Silos
As the former Chief Marketing Officer of Deloitte and the best-selling author of Never Eat Alone, Ferrazzi knows a thing or two about building relationships that drive business. But today, his mission is eliminating the internal silos that are stifling innovation in professional services firms.
“The org chart doesn’t matter,” Ferrazzi explains. “What matters are KPIs and cross-functional teams aligned around critical goals. Marketers need to stop thinking of themselves as a department and start acting as sherpas, guides that bring people together to drive breakthrough outcomes.”
His concept of teamship reframes the marketer’s role as a facilitator of culture, collaboration and candor. And in an environment where conflict avoidance and deference to hierarchy are still all too common, Ferrazzi argues that marketers must be the ones to create “challenge cultures,” which he explains as safe, open environments where people can speak the truth and solve real problems together.
Scaling with Intention
If teamship is the cultural engine of growth, Blumer believes structure is the operational one. As co-author of Scale with Purpose and founder of Thriveal and Blumer CPAs, he’s worked with hundreds of firm leaders trying to grow and often failing because they outpace their capacity.
“Nothing grows accidentally,” says Blumer. “You have to build intentional systems that help people lead better, delegate smarter and track the right data. If you don’t plan your internal structure, your growth will eventually implode.”
That message is particularly relevant to creative, entrepreneurial firms, and to marketers who often operate in the gray space between departments. Marketers can play a powerful role in guiding conversations about service design, resourcing and internal workflows. All of these are necessary to support scalable, repeatable growth.
Visibility and Execution at Scale
While structure and culture are big-picture concerns, they show up in the daily work of marketers, too. Just ask Lewis, managing director of strategic growth at EisnerAmper. When she inherited a large, distributed marketing team, Lewis knew something had to change.
She implemented a shared project management platform (monday.com) and standardized how internal teams collaborated. “We were buried in emails and messages,” she said. “Now we have a system that tracks everything from proposal requests to campaign workflows and gives leadership real visibility into what’s happening and why.”
That transparency has not only improved execution, it’s made marketing more credible inside the firm. In a time when marketing ROI is under more scrutiny than ever, Lewis demonstrates how operational maturity can elevate the marketing function as a strategic partner.
Selling is Caring
Of course, no conversation about growth is complete without addressing sales. But Jamnik, co-founder of Kindred, believes that the traditional view of business development no longer fits the culture of modern accounting firms.
“We keep trying to get practitioners to sell when what they really want to do is serve,” says Jamnik. “They care deeply about their clients. They just don’t want to feel like they’re pushing something.”
That mindset shift — from selling to caring — has major implications for marketing. It changes how we train professionals, how we position services and how we create internal buy-in for BD activities. “It’s not about pitching,” Jamnik adds. “It’s about helping more clients in more ways.”
The Marketer’s Moment
What ties these four voices together is a shared belief that marketing can be a catalyst for firmwide transformation. Not by working harder in isolation, but by working smarter across the firm.
If we want to grow firms that are resilient, adaptive and truly client-centered, we must start inside with culture, systems and shared vision. Marketing is uniquely equipped to lead that charge.
As Ferrazzi puts it, “Growth is a team sport. And marketers are the ones who can bring the team together.”
Interested in hearing more? Listen to the full podcast episode, or see what else we’re talking about on AAM’s podcast, Amplify! This resource, and many more, are available to AAM Members. Find out what membership in AAM can do for your firm and your career as an accounting marketer.