The accounting firm’s secret weapon is hospitality, not technical expertise. Here’s why.

A man called ahead before bringing his father to dinner at fine-dining restaurant Eleven Madison Park. It’s one of the most celebrated restaurants in the world, with three Michelin Stars and numerous awards.

But the man’s father was more of a Budweiser and steak guy than a fine dining enthusiast, and the son knew the experience was going to feel foreign to him. He wasn't calling to ask for anything special. He just thought the staff should know.

When they arrived, the staff wheeled out what looked like a champagne cart. But it was filled with every variety of bottled Bud they'd found at the neighborhood bodegas.

The father didn't remember a single thing he ate that night. But he'll never forget how he felt in that moment.

That's the principle at the center of Will Guidara's book Unreasonable Hospitality. Will was the co-owner of Eleven Madison Park at the time. And this very concept, the way patrons feel when dining at the restaurant, has everything to do with your firm, your clients, and your competitive edge.

Service and hospitality aren't the same thing

Will ran Eleven Madison Park for years and, in 2017, it held the top spot on the World's 50 Best Restaurants list. You would think that owning the world’s best restaurant would mean Will’s central insight is all about food. But it’s not. It’s about the difference between service and hospitality.

“Service is the thing you’re doing,” he explains. “Hospitality is how you make people feel when you do that thing.”

What does that mean for the accounting industry? Service is filing the return, delivering the management report, answering compliance queries. Hospitality is what your client experiences throughout all that. Do they feel heard? Do they feel like a priority? Do they hang up the phone feeling more confident about their business than at the start of the call?

Most firms are good at the service part, but few are deliberately excellent at hospitality. And many of the reasons accounting clients churn have nothing to do with technical quality. They leave because they felt like a number, because they didn't hear from anyone until they reached out, and because nothing about working with the firm felt personal.

Some may argue that accounting is a ‘traditional’ profession, but that doesn’t mean client relationships need to be dry. Keila Hill-Trawick from Little Fish Accounting refutes that very connotation:

“I know accounting has traditionally had a reputation for being transactional and maybe even a little boring; but I don’t think it has to be that way,” she explains. “We can absolutely maintain our professional standards while creating experiences that make our clients feel seen, heard, and genuinely cared for.”

For Keila and her team, it’s about ensuring every interaction with a client is an opportunity to demonstrate that they made the right choice in working with Little Fish. “We’ve created that environment by focusing on a memorable client experience by showing up authentically and creating space for our clients to do the same.”

Some firms use client experiences as a serious measure of success. “We focus on the client relationships, not conversion rates,” says Jennie Moore, owner of Moore Details. “Our objective is to please our clients so that they would never consider leaving us, and because of this, our retention rate is high.”

The moat you think you have

But here’s the tricky part. Will makes a claim that's hard to argue with: no matter how good your service is, someone will eventually come along and build a better one. “This is not a subjective statement,” he says. “History has proven it to be true.”

For accounting firms, that ‘someone’ might be another firm. But consider for a moment that it’s AI. The technical work that once separated a good firm from a great one is exactly what AI handles faster and more cost-effectively every year. Technical advantages erode. They always have.

The advantage that doesn’t erode is the loyalty built when clients feel genuinely cared for, known as individuals, and treated as something more than a file in a queue. That kind of trust takes a long time to build, but it’s worth it; relationships are one thing AI cannot replicate.

Drew Carrick, a CPA and content marketing strategist, names what that advantage actually is. “Experience is uniquely human,” he writes, “and is one of the only items of high value that rapidly depreciates with commoditization—because human care and emotion cannot be commoditized.”

This concept is something Dan Gertrudes, founder of GrowthLab Financial Service, has built into the structure of his firm. “Run your firm like a product company,” he says in Karbon’s The Future of Accounting ebook. “Standardize the journey, build a data foundation early, price outcomes not hours, and make hospitality your moat while agents do the work.”

What ‘unreasonable’ hospitality actually means

The title of Will’s book might seem like hyperbole. But it’s not. It’s a standard that every single employee of the restaurant upheld.

The most successful people across any discipline, he argues, are relentless in bringing the best version of their work to life. Unreasonable hospitality means applying that same standard to how your clients feel—not as a nice extra layer on top of the technical work, but as something you pursue with the same rigor.

Think about the standard your firm holds for technical accuracy: the review processes, the checks, the professional obligations. Now ask: what’s the equivalent standard you hold for the emotional experience of being your client? If you don’t have a clear answer to that, you don’t have one.

3 things hospitable teams actually do

Will identifies three behaviors that makes unreasonable hospitality work in practice:

1. Be present. Care so much about the person you’re with that everything else falls away. They should feel like you’re fully invested in the conversation, free of distractions.

2. Take what you do seriously, but take yourself less seriously. Don’t let your firm’s internal standards prevent you from doing what genuinely helps a specific client. If ‘that’s not how we do things’ is the reason you can’t serve someone better, perhaps the policy isn’t serving your firm.

3. One size fits one. Every client is a unique person, not a segment or a type. The best gestures, the ones that build loyalty and generate referrals, are bespoke. They require knowing who you’re actually dealing with.

A lot of firms tout offering personalized services. But do they offer personalized hospitality? Personalized hospitality is a lot rarer, which is exactly what makes it so powerful when a firm pulls it off.

One way Keila and her team do this is by adding personal touches to the client experience year-round. Did your client tell you that they just got married? Had a baby? Experienced a loss? They celebrate milestones, send condolences, and recognize life changes with thoughtful gestures like cards or small gifts.

“These small but meaningful efforts make a big impact,” explains Keila. “They turn everyday interactions into moments of connection and care, transforming your service into an experience clients truly value—and can’t help but recommend.”

Build the system behind the gesture

The Budweiser cart feels spontaneous. It wasn’t. After Eleven Madison Park reached the top of the World’s 50 Best list, Will created a dedicated Dream Weaver role: a staff member whose sole job was to help the rest of the team execute personalized moments for guests, every night, at scale. The warmth guests experienced was real, but it was produced by a process.

What would the equivalent look like in your firm?

It doesn’t require much: a note on a client timeline in your practice management system that captures what they care about outside their business, what’s happening in their life, what keeps them up at night. A habit of reviewing it before any significant interaction. A culture where that information is noticed, remembered, and occasionally acted on in ways that have nothing to do with the invoice.

Joe Carufe, founder of Good Measure, calls it scaling intimacy. “The value proposition of accounting firms into the future won’t just be fast service,” he says. “It’ll be customized, intelligent service at scale. That’s how the best firms will scale intimacy. And that’s how they’ll win.”

That’s the referral your marketing budget can’t buy, earned not because the work was flawless (your clients already assume that), but because working with your firm felt like being looked after by someone who actually cares.

Technical expertise gets your client in the room; hospitality keeps them there.