Case Story:
Frazier & Deeter
How an Accelerated Leadership Pipeline Helped Triple Firm Growth
The Challenge:
A Looming Leadership & Succession Gap
Based in Atlanta, Frazier & Deeter is now one of the nation’s
fastest-growing accounting and advisory firms, serving clients
across the U.S., Europe, and India, from Global Fortune 1000 companies to fast-growing private enterprises.
A decade earlier, the firm faced a pivotal challenge. Senior partners were approaching retirement, and F&D lacked a scalable way to develop rising professionals who could inherit major client relationships and fuel long-term growth. The question wasn’t
whether to invest in leadership development; it was how to do it with
the intentionality and rigor the moment demanded.
That clarity sharpened after Managing Partner Seth McDaniel attended a talk by TDE CEO Andy Fleming. Their early
conversations revealed a strong alignment: TDE’s methodology matched F&D’s culture, and the firm’s ambition aligned with what a deliberately developmental system could unlock.
Over the following months, Seth, Andy, and the F&D team collaborated to design a development approach that would:
- Accelerate the pathway from manager to partner
- Prepare emerging leaders to lead and grow key accounts
- Build a sustainable, internally owned development system
When I heard Andy talk about “deliberately developmental” organizations, it clicked. That was the direction we needed to go.
The Solution:
Building a Growth Accelerator the Lead FD Story
The partnership between Frazier & Deeter and TDE produced Lead FD, a comprehensive leadership and development initiative built on TDE’s Developmental Sprint® method. The initiative focused on rising leaders from manager through principal, with senior partners serving as mentors and champions.
From the outset, Lead FD was designed to become part of the firm’s DNA:
-
Self-sustaining
internally owned, repeatable, and scalable -
Universal
effective for leaders with 2–20 years of experience -
Immediately applicable
focused on real leadership and client challenges -
Data-driven
identifying common developmental needs and self-limiting patterns across the cohort of rising leaders
What Made It Different
Most professional services firms treat development as a solo pursuit; you advance by outperforming your peers, not by growing alongside them. Lead FD flipped that script.
Cohorts of rising leaders worked through the Developmental Sprint® together, uncovering hidden assumptions, testing new approaches, and learning from peers facing similar challenges, all while doing their actual jobs.
The power came from doing it together: everyone growing at once, in the same direction, with similar intensity. Four-week cycles created more change than months of isolated effort.
The cultural shift extended beyond participants. Developmental relationships took root, and a shared growth mindset began to permeate the broader firm.
Leader and Firm
Breakthroughs
Across the cohort, a consistent pattern emerged. Many rising managers and principals uncovered Big Assumptions related to business development. Beliefs such as “I need to always offer something or they won’t want to meet with me” limited their confidence and constrained their potential.
Through targeted experiments, participants tried new relationship-based approaches with clients and prospects. They discovered that authentic curiosity often opened more doors than polished sales techniques. They gained momentum and generated new opportunities.
TDE’s digital tool also revealed cohort- wide themes that gave firm leadership a clearer picture of how to adjust mentoring, messaging, and support across the firm.
One Principal’s Accelerated
Path to Partner
One rising principal believed every conversation with a prospect needed to end in a sale. That was the Big Assumption she surfaced in Lead FD. Through curiosity-based experiments, she learned to focus first on understanding the client’s world and building the relationship before proposing solutions. The results came quickly:
- Two new opportunities within the first week
- A rebuilt approach to BD based on trust and insight
- Partner within a year
Her story reflected a broader pattern the firm could now see, support, and scale.
The Results:
Ten Years Later
A decade in, the results speak for themselves.
F&D has nearly tripled revenue and climbed from #63 to #41 in the IPA Top 100 rankings. Lead FD alumni now make up a significant share of the firm’s new partners, exactly the succession pipeline Seth set out to build. The firm has retained its rising talent at remarkable rates: only three departures among Lead FD participants in the five years after the initiative launched, and none to competitors.
The industry has taken notice. F&D has been repeatedly honored as a Top 50 Firm, a Best of the Best Firm, a Best Firm to Work For®, and a Best Firm for Women in Leadership. In April 2025, the firm received a strategic growth investment from General Atlantic, a validation of F&D’s trajectory and fuel for its next phase of expansion.
What started as a response to looming retirements became the foundation for a decade of growth.