Scott Scarano is an eccentric entrepreneur with the heart of a lion and the soul of a housecat. Scott loves approaching problems from a different perspective and analyzing solutions. Scott’s "Why" is empowering all growth-minded entrepreneurs, in his reach, to thrive and prosper. Scott’s Padgett team is filled with passionate advisors with unique personalities who share the same virtues of empathy and integrity in everything they do. Scott did the school thing and has the credentials, but his real value comes from his questioning mind and grit to push through any adversity.

He began his career as a public practicing CPA. He eventually embraced his passion for technology and merged it with his experiences in public accounting and transitioned to the IT Director of a multi-office regional CPA firm in the Baltimore, MD area. Learning from the challenges of maintaining the technology for a firm, Byron established Simplified Innovations Inc, a subscription-based IT Dept focused on servicing the needs of CPA Firms, which he successfully exited after 8 years. Later, Byron joined the accounting automation startup Botkeeper and led the build of the post-sales teams from Series A to Series C and ultimately functioned as General Manager/Integrator. Now as the VP, Client Success at The B3 Method Institute, he helps organizational leaders to find their Business, Balance & Bliss while designing the accounting practice they desire that they can build and scale. Byron lives on a small horse farm in Maryland with his future wife, Nikki, and a gaggle of animals, including his dog Trinity. His extremely proud of his accomplished daughters, one a civil engineer and the other a student-athlete at the University of Pittsburgh where Byron regularly cheers on the Women's Lacrosse team, #H2P!

Keila Hill-Trawick knows what it's like to drop a steady job for a small business dream. Before starting Little Fish Accounting [http://littlefishaccounting.com/], Keila worked on accounting and auditing projects for various federal agencies, a natural progression after holding senior-level accounting and finance positions at corporations like Home Depot and Georgia-Pacific. Today, Keila helps small businesses thrive through her transparent, easy-to-understand approach to accounting. In addition to her full-time work with Little Fish, Keila is co-founder of Accountants of Color [http://accountantsofcolor.co/], a safe space for Black Indigenous People of Color (BIPOC) accountants to engage, grow, and build their firms.

Ashley is a CPA that works with UHNW individuals and family groups and their related entities - mostly trust and estates, family partnerships and charitable planning.

She is also an early adopter of generative AI technology (think ChatGPT and BingChat) and enjoys finding ways to help firms incorporate it into their tax, accounting and financial planning practices. On the heels of that, she's a big fan of folks learning about automation in general (and Power Automate in particular). What AI won’t be able to do, automation can. And if it can’t, maybe we need an agent (a bot).

And finally, she's a big advocate of CPAs that work with small and medium-sized businesses on the tax side to (responsibly) add more services around financial planning. Oftentimes we’re the only “money matters” person in a client’s life and financial planning encompasses so much more than just stock portfolios. We can help make a positive difference not only for their business but for their personal financial matters as well.

Korey Cournoyer is the Co-Founder and CEO of STRMS, as well as Partner and VP of Corporate Development at GrowthLab FaaS. With a natural nack of understanding and optimizing workflows, Korey works with his development teams at STRMS to develop customized automated workflows for accounting firms, ensuring stability and scalability with their internal processes. In addition to STRMS, Korey works at GrowthLab to drive strategy and transformation across teams, technology, and processes. When he's not focused on innovation, you can probably find Korey looking for new software and technology to geek out on.