Alisa McCabe grew her firm 20–40% year over year while cutting her client roster by more than half, and she’d advise any growth-minded firm owner to do the same.
A few years ago, Alisa McCabe did something that would probably raise more than a few eyebrows among accounting firm owners: she started breaking up with her clients. It wasn’t always because they were difficult to work with. In fact, lots of them were perfectly nice people she truly liked. Her team thought she’d lost her mind.
“We can’t get rid of clients,” they told her. “What do you mean we’re going to get bigger by getting rid of clients?”
But McCabe had a well-founded theory on how to grow her firm the way she wanted to grow, and over the next several years she would cut her client roster from nearly 100 down to 41—while consistently growing the firm 20–40% year over year.
Today, First Steps Financial is an 11-person, fully remote firm with clients across the United States, Canada, and the UK. McCabe runs the firm out of New Jersey, but her team is scattered everywhere. And the client pruning is a huge part of what made it all possible.
The Principle Behind the Pruning
What McCabe pruned toward is as interesting as what she pruned away. First Steps Financial specializes in three verticals: civil engineering firms, contractors (think electrical and HVAC), and—perhaps most unusually—women in life sciences. But regardless of industry, every client has to clear the same bar of being growth-minded, collaborative, and willing to treat the relationship as a partnership rather than a transaction.
And when McCabe says “partnership,” she really means it. Her team even sits in on one client’s sales team meetings, working hand-in-hand with the reps to streamline processes around things like invoicing and commission payouts.
“Other people might think it’s strange,” she says. “But they have a very large sales team, and we work hand-in-hand with them. They are hitting sales, and they are tossing them over to us—‘here, invoice this, invoice this.’ So we have to work together.”
The women-in-life-sciences niche grew out of a single moment at an industry event. McCabe was listening to a woman scientist speak about grant compliance—all the laborious reporting that’s required when you receive funding from agencies like NASA or the National Institutes of Health (NIH)—and how it was eating into time she’d rather be spending on the actual science. The science, in this case, was remarkable: the scientist had taken garbanzo beans, dehydrated them, sent them into low orbit, and brought them back to Earth with a meaningfully higher protein density. The result was a denser food source that could have life-changing implications in regions facing food scarcity.
McCabe notes that when it comes to venture capital investment in women in life science, representation is abysmal—barely 3%.
“Why? Because they’re so focused on trying to do everything that they can’t get the information out, even when they get grants,” McCabe says. “I really want to see women scientists succeed.”
Heeding Red Flags
Nowadays, client pruning is an ongoing discipline at First Steps Financial that starts before a prospect ever becomes a client.
For example, McCabe recently received an email from someone who needed bookkeeping help. She replied that she would be happy to chat—and directed the prospective client to either schedule a meeting using the link in her signature or to respond with some available dates and times.
“They emailed back, ‘I can talk right now,’” McCabe says. “So I said, ‘No, I’m sorry, but that’s really not gonna work for us. Can you just give me some times you’re available?’” She got the same response again and ended up politely declining the meeting.
She points to a Tim Ferriss podcast in which Ferriss described turning down a deal that looked perfect on paper but didn’t sit right in his gut—a deal that ultimately collapsed.
“I have done that,” McCabe says. “I have ignored my instincts and worked with somebody. And it was a disaster. Every red flag came true.”
Finance, she points out, is intimate. You learn everything about a client’s money—and by extension, everything about how they make decisions, handle stress, and communicate when things get hard.
Core Values and Talent Retention
The same instinct that shapes McCabe’s client roster has also shaped her team. And the team she’s built is, by any reasonable measure, extraordinary.
Her second and third-ever hires have been with her for over 13 years, and the firm hasn’t lost a single employee in about four years. When all 11 of them finally met in person for the first time at the Scaling New Heights conference in Florida last year, McCabe watched them clump together “like a swarm of bees.” They were a force to be reckoned with during a competition on the conference app where attendees could earn points for visiting booths. Her team members swept the top three spots, she reports proudly.
This didn’t happen by accident. McCabe started First Steps Financial with a specific vision in mind: a remote firm built for women who needed work-life balance, whether that meant being home with kids, caring for aging parents, or simply having a different relationship with work than what most traditional accounting positions offered.
“At the time, technology wasn’t there just yet,” she says.
But she pushed forward anyway, hiring CPAs and women with master’s degrees in finance who wanted professional growth without sacrificing their personal lives. About six years ago, she layered on the Entrepreneurial Operating System (EOS) framework from Gino Wickman’s book Traction, which gave her a structured way to hire in alignment with her firm’s core values: be innovative, be a team player, be kind, and take ownership.
Those values are integrated into everything the team does. They’re on each employee’s mousepad, offering a constant reminder of how First Steps Financial shows up every day. They are also integrated into the team’s daily standups and quarterly state-of-the-company meetings.
And they are present in something McCabe is especially proud of: the firm’s quarterly volunteer rotation. Every quarter, a team member picks a charity that’s meaningful to them, and the whole firm does something to support it. One quarter, they made blankets for Project Linus, a nonprofit that gives blankets to children in transit between foster homes. McCabe bought blanket-making kits for everyone, told them to do it with their families, and had the finished blankets shipped to the organization.
“That was really fun,” McCabe says. “It was such a cool thing that we got to do together, because even though we were separate, it’s a shared memory for everybody.”
The Painful Part of Growth
For all of her success, McCabe is refreshingly unwilling to make growth sound easy.
The path here wasn’t a straight line, either. In fact, First Steps Financial wasn’t always called First Steps Financial. McCabe originally named it Small Business Solutions—until she received a cease-and-desist letter from IBM, which had apparently copyrighted the phrase for its own corporate use.
“I thought, ‘I don’t think I have enough money to fight IBM,’” she says, laughing. “Just saying.”
The rebrand became an opportunity to name the firm with intention. First Steps Financial reflects what the firm actually is: the first step a business owner takes when they’re ready to offload the side of the business they don’t love.
What didn’t change, through any of it, was the engine behind the growth: McCabe’s own love for the work. When her six kids—yes, six—were still at home, she’d be up at four in the morning, working until six before getting everyone fed and out the door. She was back in her office by nine before breaking for after-school sports and dance rehearsal. Then, she’d wrap up emails at nine or ten before bed. Perhaps the wildest part of all? She didn’t use an alarm clock for those pre-dawn wake-ups.
Birds, Bikes, and Boarding Passes
McCabe’s youngest child is now 18 and headed to college. The other five are out of the house, which means she and her husband finally have time for hobbies and travel.
A couple of years ago, they moved to a house that’s near an 80-mile bike path, with an eventual plan to take weekend rides with bike-mounted backpacks, hopping from one bed-and-breakfast to the next.
They play pickleball and tennis. They ski. And they identify birds—a hobby that sounds quaint until you learn that the Merlin Bird ID app lets you collect bird species the way kids collect Pokémon.
“It’s like Pokémon Go for adults,” she says with a chuckle.
She’s also leaving soon for a two-week trip to Italy. Her team’s instructions to her on the way out the door: We don’t want to hear from you. And she intends to comply, if only to set an example.
Making it All Worthwhile
When you ask McCabe what she’s most proud of in her professional journey thus far, the answer has nothing to do with revenue or headcount.
First, it’s the clients she’s had the honor of serving—particularly the ones who have grown their businesses enough to sell them. One of those businesses actually sold this year, and the new owner kept First Steps Financial on—which McCabe considers the ultimate compliment.
The second is her team—the people who’ve been with her for years, through thick and thin. The team she’s watched grow not just professionally, but as people, and who’ve changed her in return.
The math behind the firm’s growth, in retrospect, isn’t really paradoxical at all. McCabe built it not to maximize what was possible, but to optimize for what truly matters. Fewer clients lead to deeper relationships, greater specialization, and a team of experts who know what to do without being told.
“It can be done, and it is incredibly rewarding,” McCabe says. “You just have to focus on what you want to happen and you’ll get there.”
First Steps Financial is based in Princeton, New Jersey. Learn more at firststepsfinancial.com.
