Building the Infrastructure Behind a Referral Engine
How Testa CPA replaced ad hoc, owner-carried sales habits with a system built to run without her.
Testa CPA grew the way most owner-led accounting practices do: entirely on Lei Testa's shoulders. She ran sales, quoting, client onboarding, and referrals largely from memory, in her own voice, on her own calendar. Demand for the practice was real. The systems to carry that demand past Lei personally were not.
The Tonkin Group, in partnership with Ninestone Partners, built two parallel work streams to close that gap: one to systematize how Testa CPA sells and markets itself, one to remove Lei from the day-to-day operations that only she could run.
The Approach
- Buyer journey mapping
- Brand strategy
- Sales process & pipeline design
- HubSpot configuration
- Discovery question library
- Referral systematization
- Quoting handed off from memory to process
- Payroll & invoicing to a dedicated delegate
- CPA-level review to a named reviewer
- Onboarding & proposals to a Chief of Staff
Most owner-led practices stop at the first stream, treating a marketing plan as the whole solution. The second stream is what makes the first one durable: without it, every new lead the marketing plan generates still routes back through the owner it was meant to free up.
Results are grounded in a 90-day delivery arc against a 24-item Owner Dependency Map, tracked task by task rather than estimated after the fact.
An unplanned result: Lei has become an organic referral source for The Tonkin Group itself, sending unprompted introductions to other business owners who needed the same kind of systems work.
"I built this firm on my own memory and my own calendar for years. Tom built something better: a practice that runs without me. I can hand my team the keys for seven weeks and know it will still be standing when I get back." Lei Testa, CPA, CGMAOwner, Testa CPA
The 3-Year Transformation Roadmap runs through 2028, sequencing Testa CPA toward a 10-CPA, 100-advisory-client, $5M ARR practice positioned for acquisition. Year one — the last six months — focused on Owner Dependency Mitigation and the early stage of the Sales & Marketing rollout. Year two shifts to an advisory pod model with CFO and Controller service tiers. Year three targets the full acquisition-readiness package.
Case study prepared by The Tonkin Group, in partnership with Ninestone Partners.
Before You Go
Read Sincere Connections
Tom's book on turning authenticity into practice — the same discipline behind how he runs client engagements.
Get the BookDr. Tom Tonkin applies this same systems-first approach as Principal of The Tonkin Group, a fractional sales leadership practice built for law firms, accounting practices, and IT consultancies.
For accounting practices especially, this distinction matters: growth rarely stalls for lack of demand. It stalls because every system for winning and keeping clients still lives in one person's head. Closing that gap is what turns a book of business into a practice that can run, and eventually sell, without its founder.
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