The summary
- An 850-client firm acquisition absorbed with one new hire instead of the three Rocky estimates it would have taken without an integrated tech stack
- 250 Amish farm Schedule F returns processed through Juno on a paper-based organizer Rocky built and stress-tested with Dave before busy season
- A tech stack of "four or five main pieces", intentionally limited: Verito for cloud hosting, TaxDome for practice management, Juno for tax prep, Drake for the return
- Still adding clients post-tax-season. The inverse of the standard "fire your bottom 20%" growth playbook.
Tech stack
- Juno
- Drake
- TaxDome
- Verito
"By taking over that firm, we added one employee, is all we added. I won't say it wasn't hard, it was, but I can't imagine doing that without 3 other people if we hadn't had some technology running."
Rocky Lippold, Managing Partner, Freedom Accounting and Tax
The situation: building a second practice from scratch, designed around tech from day one
Rocky started doing taxes inside the Army to help service members and their families with multi-state filings the base resources couldn't handle. He built that practice over 23 years in uniform, sold it after retiring, and moved to Florida.
That retirement didn't stick. Five years of full-time RV travel with about 150 clients across the road, then a move back to Southwest Missouri to rebuild.
What he wanted was different this time:
"The first time, there wasn't a lot of tech, but there was some. And the second time, I've decided I'm going to get deep into tech and let it do as much for me as I can. That being said, I don't want to have 27 pieces in my tech stack."
The operating principle: do it from anywhere, with as few employees as possible. The constraint that defined the build.
"The ideal was to be able to do it from anywhere, at any time. And to depend on as few employees as you have to."
So Rocky deliberately kept the stack short.
"I've got it down to about 4 or 5 main tools, and they don't always do the very best at what they do, necessarily, but they're the best overall, and it keeps you from having to bounce around so much."
What he did: standardized on Verito → TaxDome → Juno → Drake, then acquired
The stack settled into four core tools, each serving a clear role: Verito for the cloud-hosted environment, TaxDome for practice management and the client portal, Juno for extraction and workpaper, Drake for the actual return.
With that stack in place, he closed on his first acquisition: an 850-client firm, November 1. 250 of those clients were Amish farms.
The Amish piece was the part Rocky was most worried about. Amish farms don't have digital documents. They write everything down on a sheet of paper and hand it to you. Rocky built a custom Schedule F organizer for them and sent it to Dave Haase, Juno's founder, before busy season to stress-test:
"The new firm that I acquired had 850 clients, 250 of those were Amish farms. I sent Dave a form and said, hey, this is the organizer we're using."
The first run-through caught everything correctly, including details like cattle purchase amounts that signaled "this is a farm return." The one wrinkle: a lot of Amish also do construction, so Juno sometimes routed the Schedule F items to a Schedule C.
"Well, we found a fix for that. We just put Schedule F on the top of the form. Now, they fill out this little organizer that's a Schedule F, you put it in there, Juno reads it and says, oh, Schedule F, I know where that goes. And so far, every time it's gone straight there and not to the Schedule C."
A practical, hand-rolled fix between a customer and the product team. The kind of feedback loop that turns a hard niche into a working workflow.
What changed: one new hire instead of three, returns done before the preparer sees them
The marquee outcome at the operational level:
"By taking over that firm, we added one employee, is all we added. I won't say it wasn't hard, it was, but I can't imagine doing that without 3 other people if we hadn't had some technology running."
The internal workflow Rocky is now standardizing for next season is front-loaded by design. The receptionist on intake does the Juno push before a preparer ever opens the return:
"While they're filling out the form, the receptionist takes their papers, scans everything in, puts it in TaxDome, puts it into Juno, puts it into Drake. By the time they've got their form filled out, they walk back to the tax preparer, and basically the return's done."
That admin-driven intake is the structural change. It means everything downstream of intake is already in the system before the preparer arrives, and the preparer's work shifts from data entry to review and judgment.
Adoption isn't uniform across a team, and Rocky was honest about that. One experienced preparer wasn't getting the time savings out of Juno because she didn't trust it:
"I had one preparer who just didn't trust it. She would run it, and then basically do the tax return on top of it."
He moved her to projects where her experience added more value, and the prep work shifted to the admin-driven intake flow.
Why it matters: the math on growth changes when the smallest returns stop being a tax
The traditional CPA-firm growth playbook is to fire the bottom 20% of clients and chase higher-margin work. That playbook assumes the smallest returns cost too much to serve relative to what you can charge for them.
Rocky is running the opposite play. Now that the prep work is front-loaded into a 7-minute receptionist-driven intake, the small returns are profitable again. He's actively considering staying open extra evenings to pick up the simple returns most firms turn away:
"I'm thinking about a couple nights a week staying open later and picking up some of these returns that we've kind of shunned. I don't know why we shouldn't be doing some of those."
A 1040 with two W-2s and a 1099 isn't a 15-minute hassle anymore. It's a 15-minute return at a real margin.
Sustainability: still adding clients, with hard-won lessons for the next adopter
Most firms come off a heavy busy season trimming clients. Rocky's still adding. His firm continues to grow on the same stack he assembled before the acquisition.
His advice for firms considering this stack themselves, hard-won the slow way: don't onboard new tax tech in January.
"There is a little bit of a learning curve. Get it while you've still got some extensions to do, so you can get in there and do the extensions and play around with it when you're doing 10 or 15 returns, not when you're trying to do 40 or 50 returns at a time."
Freedom Accounting and Tax continues to run Verito + TaxDome + Juno + Drake as the operating stack.
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This case study draws from Rocky Lippold's appearance on a Juno + Verito co-hosted webinar (June 2026), with Dave Haase, founder of Juno, and Jatin Narang, founder of Verito. Quotes were lightly cleaned for readability while preserving Rocky's framing and intent.
