- Key Insight: Here's why Intuit hired Dixie McCurley to lead its strategic shift toward accountants.
- What's at Stake: Whether Dixie McCurley can convince skeptical accountants that Intuit's strategic pivot is genuine.
- Expert Quote: "...treating the firm as a customer is not just a statement..." — Dixie McCurley, Intuit
In her new position, McCurley will be meeting with practitioners across the country about what they actually need from their technology to better support their priorities and address their struggles, then take what she learns to Intuit so it can better incorporate those perspectives into the product design process.
She will also be taking what she learns at Intuit directly to firm leaders to help them make the best use of the company's new capabilities in AI, automation and advisory to improve both internal operations and client service. McCurley noted that, as someone with a foot in both the technology and accounting worlds, she can help build understanding between two communities that have not always seen eye to eye.
"We're creating opportunities to listen to what the firms need. Sometimes, what a firm says versus what the technology people here might be two different things … I'm that person that can translate both sides," McCurley said in an interview.
Having made products and services for firms herself over the years, she has learned that without this understanding it can be easy to design something that, ultimately, does not fully address the actual needs of professionals and how they work day to day.
As someone who has also used many of these products, she has firsthand experience in realizing that a software solution a firm uses has not actually been made for firms but their clients. A longtime specialist in CAS, she said what she really needed was something that would help her firm scale from 10 to 100 or 1,000 clients. But all the software seemed designed for the clients themselves. While she could certainly help those clients with the solutions available, she lamented that these technology limitations made it highly inefficient.
"Technology companies kept building products for [clients'] businesses instead of building products for firms," she said. "Having sat for 15 years on the advisory councils for several technology companies, the firms kept repeating that we needed products that worked for firms to service a large number of clients that would help us with our growth, and that was the missing part. … Yes, we could do it, but it put us in the position to do client by client and expert by expert."
This created a technological constraint on how fast any individual CAS practice could grow. "With CAS being the highest growing practice for a number of years, and especially now, client by client and expert by expert doesn't scale, so we need products that scale," she said.
She believes that being able to provide a practitioner perspective from inside the company, drawn from not only her own experiences but those of everyone she talks to in the field, can help Intuit develop more useful and effective offerings for firms, which helps both sides of the transaction.
"In building products and services for firms over the years, sometimes a product may not land," said McCurley. "It may land for one business, it might work for that, but it actually doesn't land for the firm, and it might be something that would be table stakes. But to be able to have the opportunity to elevate something that could work for these top firms that's doing expert-led advisory services, I think it'd be really powerful.
While her efforts will begin with large firms, they are not going to stop there. Large firms have the resources and bandwidth to explore early concepts and products with Intuit without overly disrupting business operations. Once they have learned what they can from experimentation, testing, feedback and trial-and-error, they plan to bring the refined insights developed during that stage to the small firm community. McCurley noted that, much the same way having both an accounting and technology background lets her translate for both, having worked in both small and large firms allows her to understand the unique needs of each community.
"Throughout my career, when I was building a small firm, I would be in these rooms, and big firms would be like, 'Oh, you don't understand it because you're a small firm. You move like a speedboat.' But being at a big firm, when I was at a big firm, the small firms would be, 'Oh, you don't understand what we go through because you're at a big firm. You don't get it.' So I've had to bridge that up for about 20 years now, and with that, I think that there's a way that we can build things that work with both," she said.
These efforts will support another major part of her role, which is to explore the evolution of CAS and help find new ways that AI can support this field in concert with Intuit's other efforts such as its goal of training 1 million students in CAS in cooperation with university programs. The input she gets from the firms, as well as her own deep experience as a CAS practitioner, will inform how Intuit shapes its products for this area of the profession. She said she was especially excited to work with Intuit on this, as she believes that technology will allow CAS practices to scale at levels they never could before.
"These tools are now able to do things that I've been wanting to do for 20 years. And while it might not be the thing that is available today, I see the path and where they're going with their roadmap in six, 12, 18 months and [guiding that is] really the role I've always played as an early adopter and innovator of technology," she said.
A new direction
The new managing partner role is part of a larger effort to repair Intuit's relationship with the accounting community, which had become somewhat strained over the past few years. This was based on a number of factors, but much of it could be traced to how Intuit started to view accounting firms: more as a channel to acquire more customers than customers unto themselves. And this, in turn, was a reflection of a larger perception that the company was attempting to circumvent the profession altogether, fueled by actions such as the company encouraging people to
Simon Williams, Intuit's vice president of partnerships, acknowledged these were major missteps costing the company much faith with a community that formed a significant part of its userbase. He noted that trust "takes a lifetime to build, but it's very quick to lose it." Negative feedback from the accounting profession, he said, ultimately led Intuit to the conclusion it had made a mistake that it now must correct.
"It kind of forced us to take a step back and say: This relationship, with over 40 years of interest built around and on it, are we serving it in the way we should be? Are we getting the most out of it. Are we putting the most into it? And very quickly, we came to the conclusion that we weren't," he said.
This was more than a problem with public perception, as Williams noted this mindset had actually seeped into the company's product design, adding to the feeling that Intuit was not keeping accountants' needs in mind. "We realized that, hey, we weren't necessarily building products that were thoughtfully designed for the way that accountants were using them, and they were quite often the primary customer, so we needed to fix that," he said.
This is why having a managing partner in residence became important for Intuit. While the company has always engaged with the accounting community, McCurley is intended to be a voice inside the house, providing the accounting firm perspective not through external outreach but as an internal advocate for the profession. In this way, Intuit hopes to gain a more complete picture of the industry and provide insights that it cannot get through public forums alone. "Just having someone who is renowned and very well-regarded in the industry, who can come in and be an honest broker representing the industry within the firewall, gives her the license to look around and poke and see the way things are coming together," he said.
McCurley noted this perspective is needed not just for product design but for overall expectations in how the company interacts with firms. For example, one thing she really wants to impress upon Intuit is the practical challenges that come with tech stack adjustments, which in turn need to shape how the company approaches its implementation and integration strategy.
"I think what Intuit needs to hear from firms right now is that they've spent years developing workflows and building clients… They may have tech stacks with 25 or 35 different products. I don't think it's a reality that they can replace all those things at once. It's an ongoing strategic plan for where and when it is right to move tech stacks. I think we have to listen to that," she said, adding that "to accommodate that, I think, is a really big thing to include into the software."
What McCurley hopes to communicate to the profession is that Intuit is serious about its change of direction. In June, CEO Sasan Goodarzi
"On the opposite side of that, the practitioners need to hear from Intuit that treating the firm as a customer is not just a statement, it's a really big deal. I think it's the strategy that's going to really help firms create productized advisory services. I think that is going to help them realize they've got tools that can help their teams scale," she said.
This new strategic direction is shown not just by McCurley joining Intuit but also by new training and upskilling programs, as well as increased engagement with professional organizations, its new
"We absolutely recognize that this is a company whose success has been built with and on the shoulders of the accounting industry," he said. "We're leaning into that even more, and I think along the way in recent years maybe we lost sight of just how important this this relationship is, but we're very much doubling down on it,"
Introductory bullet points created by AI with editorial review.
