Dillon Business Advisors: Building a Flexible Accounting Firm with Canopy

The 2025 Canopy Out of Office Award Winners

Dillon Business Advisors earned the Out of Office Award for building a firm where work-life balance isn’t aspirational—it’s operational. From flexible scheduling to eliminating blackout dates during busy season, Dillon Business Advisors’ people-first model empowers its team to thrive in and out of the office. Their “Team of 3” structure ensures every client is supported by multiple team members, while Canopy keeps tasks, notes, and communication centralized, so nothing slips through the cracks when someone is away.

By transitioning from high-volume tax prep to high-value recurring services, Dillon Business Advisors created a firm that runs on predictability, not chaos. 

As founder Marcus Dillon puts it, “Family time > financial statements.” 

And that mindset shows. Whether it’s attending a spring break trip or a destination wedding, team members are able to unplug without putting client service at risk.

Profile

Dillon Business Advisors is a remote-first firm built to deliver high-touch, year-round advisory services to growing businesses. 

Founded by Marcus Dillon in 2011 with a handful of legacy clients and a book of business from a retiring CPA, the firm has since grown exponentially through smart acquisitions, values-driven hiring, and a client roster that prioritizes partnership over paper-pushing.

Today, they serve as the outsourced accounting department for their clients, offering everything from monthly bookkeeping and tax strategy to business advisory and virtual CFO services.

While many firms talk about work-life balance, Dillon Business Advisors rebuilt their entire operating model around it. 

Their firm culture is intentionally designed to support working parents and flexible schedules, with part-time and remote roles embedded into the DNA of the business.

Building a Firm with Work-Life Balance

For Dillon Business Advisors, work-life balance isn’t a perk, it's a core principle. Their firm was built to support flexible hours and long-term career growth.

Here’s how they make it work:

• Flex Fridays: Everyone, including full-time staff, enjoys a half-day Friday, even during tax season.
• (Mostly) Remote-first operations: What started as a temporary shift in 2020 quickly became permanent when the Katy team saw clear gains in flexibility, productivity, and work-life balance. Today, that team is fully remote, while the newly acquired St. Louis office remains on-site during onboarding and integration.
• Core collaboration hours (10am–2pm CST Mon. – Thurs.): To accommodate different time zones and family schedules, team meetings and client calls are concentrated during a four-hour window. Outside of that, employees can design their workday around school drop-offs, pickups, and personal priorities.
• Moving beyond tax season chaos: In 2016 the firm made a major shift by eliminating one-off tax clients. They began transitioning away from seasonal tax prep and toward a recurring service model with predictable workloads. By exiting hundreds of misaligned clients, they protected their team’s time, energy, and overall well-being.

Revenue is up, boundaries are in place, and the team isn’t burning out to make it happen.

Canopy Workflow Make Remote Work Possible

Running a fully remote firm doesn’t just mean sending everyone home with a laptop. For Dillon Business Advisors, remote work works because their systems do the heavy lifting. And Canopy is at the center of it.

“We could not work remotely without Canopy. It’s that simple.” - Rachel Dillon, Firm Administrator

Before switching to Canopy, the team juggled multiple tools for client messaging, task tracking, and file sharing. That patchwork approach made it hard to stay aligned, especially when a task changed hands or a client sent a key document to the wrong inbox.

Now with Canopy, the entire team operates from the same playbook, no matter where they’re working.

“When someone closes a task, the next person immediately sees what needs to be done and when. Canopy keeps everything moving.” - Rachel Dillon, Firm Administrator

Clear roles and real-time visibility all in one central system make remote work possible and even easy for firms like Dillon Business Advisors.

Using Time Tracking to Power a Flat-Fee, Recurring Model

At Dillon Business Advisors, time tracking isn’t just for counting hours or a way to micromanage their employees. It’s how they build a sustainable, scalable firm. 

Although the team moved to a flat monthly fee model years ago, they’ve kept time tracking in place using Canopy. Not to bill clients, but to monitor scope, evaluate pricing, and ensure their recurring service model stays profitable as they grow.

Why Track Time Without Hourly Billing?

• Scope clarity: By reviewing time logs, they can spot when a client’s needs are creeping beyond the agreed-upon services.
• Pricing validation: Time data helps confirm whether each client is priced appropriately, or if it’s time for a fee adjustment.
• Team capacity: Canopy’s Insights feature gives real-time visibility into team workload, making it easier to balance projects and avoid burnout.

“We don’t bonus or penalize based on time, but we do use it to make sure our pricing is right—and to see when things are going off track.” - Rachel Dillon, Firm Administrator

Each client is supported by a Team of 3, which makes visibility and handoffs critical. That structure, combined with Canopy’s dashboards and automation, keeps the model running smoothly, even with a dispersed team.

This recurring model improved margins and made workloads more manageable across the board.

Building a Modern Firm

Dillon Business Advisors has proven that growth doesn’t have to come at the cost of balance or burnout. By aligning their service model, team structure, and technology around clarity and efficiency, they’ve created a firm where both clients and employees thrive. 

With Canopy, they’ve replaced patchwork tools with a single source of truth, powering smooth handoffs, proactive service, and a team that’s always in sync.