An interactive field guide that teaches CPA-firm marketers and BD pros to think — and talk — like the partners they're trying to influence.
A small diagram on purpose — one file, one CDN, one form service, and the visitor's own browser. The smallness is the $0 argument made visible.
The interactive data-flow diagram is built for a larger screen.
Open the full diagram in its own tab ↗
Built as the takeaway companion to an AAM Summit 2026 session on the business of running an accounting firm. Marketers at CPA firms are expected to drive growth but are rarely taught firm economics — utilization, realization, leverage, partner draws — the language partners actually use. The site closes that gap with a reference they can keep using after the room empties, and doubles as a lead-gen asset.
A single-file interactive site structured as a three-act arc: what a CPA firm is, how service and industry mix work, and how decisions get made. Its standout is a live Profitability Calculator that converts abstract metrics into a visceral payload — a small utilization drop, expressed as dollars per partner per year. It also carries a searchable 61-term glossary across nine categories, a five-tier difficulty quiz built off that glossary, a busy-season calendar heat map, a curated AI-prompts library for marketers, and a personalized Next Steps section that adapts to the reader's role. Real light and dark modes (not inverted), a five-step font-size control, and a QR-aware email gate round it out. Every interactive system runs client-side in one self-contained HTML file, with Formspree as the only external dependency — no backend, no database, no server cost.
The Profitability Calculator as a teaching device. It is not just arithmetic — it is a translation layer that turns utilization, realization and leverage into a dollar figure a marketer can carry into a partner meeting. The hard design call was making the model simple enough to be intuitive and credible enough to survive a partner's scrutiny at the same time.
Two-gate progressive capture layered over three-lane personalization. A polite-but-deliberate conversion funnel sitting on top of role-based content adaptation, with per-lane progress persistence — all in localStorage, no auth, no server.
The whole thing ships as one self-contained HTML file. Every one of those systems runs client-side, with Formspree as the only external dependency.