Chase Birky, CPA

CHIEF EXECUTIVE OFFICER & Co-Founder, Dark Horse Certified Public Accountants

Chase views himself as the anti-CPA. Feeling like an outsider within public accounting, he had difficulty reconciling the people, the work and the business model. He loved many of the people he worked with but, at the same time, was also burned out, lacking purpose and feeling depressed. He noticed those at the top didn’t seem any happier than him and had made substantial sacrifices in their personal lives to get there. This spurred an existential journey alongside a physical journey from the Big Four, to a small, boutique firm to starting his own firm where he would try to get to the bottom of why public accounting was so rife with misery and what could be done to positively disrupt the profession. Ultimately, he came to the conclusion that the traditional accounting firm structure (the partnership) and business model (the billable hour) was the problem.

The antidote to accounting as usual would be to build the anti-CPA firm, and to provide the platform for other like-minded accountants to build practices within this counterculture movement they called Dark Horse CPAs.

This firm has become a vessel for change not just in the industry, but in the careers and lives of accountants, equipping them with a sense of purpose and agency that precipitates self-actualization.