What the show is about.
Four strands, one question underneath all of them: what actually made this business bigger, and would it work for anyone else?
Fifty years in business is the whole point of this show.
Renice Lystra has spent five decades running, fixing, and growing businesses. She is outgoing, genuinely curious, and very hard to bore, which turns out to be the right combination for this job.
She asks the question a guest was quietly hoping to avoid, then leaves enough silence for a real answer. That is the format. There is no script.
More about ReniceOff the Books.
A course library for Freedom From Accounting clients. Taxes, QuickBooks Online, money, how to handle clients, and whatever else keeps coming up, answered properly and sitting there whenever you need them. New ones go up often. Invite only.
See what is in itBe on the show.
We are booking season one now. You do not need a media kit or a following. You need a business and something you learned the hard way.
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Send a note
Tell us what your business does and what you are working on right now.
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A short call
Fifteen minutes with Renice to find the conversation worth recording.
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Record in Queen Creek
One session at the studio. Editing, publishing, and clips are on us.
Season one is close. Want to know when?
One email when the first episode publishes. Nothing before it, nothing after it.
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Season one is being recorded.
There is nothing to watch yet, and we would rather say that plainly than fill this page with placeholders. The first episodes are in the chair now.
What an episode is.
One guest, one business
No panels, no round tables. One person who built something, talking about the part of it that was hard.
Recorded in person
Everything is recorded face to face at the studio in Queen Creek. Conversations go differently when people are in the same room.
No script
Guests get the subject in advance, never the questions. What you hear is the first time anyone said it out loud.
Get one email when it launches.
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Off the Books.
A course library for Freedom From Accounting clients. The questions we get asked most, answered once and answered properly, so the answer is there at eleven at night when you actually need it.
Renice has given most of these answers on the phone a hundred times. This is the same answer, written down, with the parts people usually get wrong called out.
Already have access? Sign in takes you straight to your courses.
What is in it.
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That is a sample rather than the whole shelf. New courses go up often, usually because enough people asked the same thing in the same month. What you see also depends on the size of your business, because a one person shop and a company with forty people do not have the same problems and should not be handed the same courses.
Who is answering.
Renice founded FreedomFromAccounting in Chandler in 2007 and still runs it. Its clients sit between a quarter of a million and twenty million dollars in revenue, which is the reason these courses are sorted by the size of your business rather than handed out in one pile.
The QuickBooks material comes from someone who once sat with developers building a custom patch between QuickBooks and an auto glass system, not from someone who read the manual. The tax material comes from a firm that took on business tax preparation and resolution work in 2025. The money material comes from having been CFO of a homebuilding company and finance director of a startup airline, which are two very different ways to learn what a bad month looks like.
How you get in.
Off the Books is invite only. It is built for Freedom From Accounting clients, plus a small number of people we ask directly.
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Ask for an invite
Tell us what you run and roughly how big it is. It takes a minute.
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We check
If you are already an FFA client you are most of the way there. If you are not, we still read it.
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You get a link
The link is good once and it sets your password. After that, signing in takes your password plus a six digit code we email you, every time.
Ask for an invite.
A podcast studio in Queen Creek, Arizona.
Telos Studio exists because most business advice is written by people who have never made payroll. This one is not. Every episode is a conversation with someone who has run a real company in this state, about what worked, what it cost, and what they would skip if they started again.
Telos is the Greek word for the end a thing is aiming at. It seemed like the right name for a show about why anyone builds a business in the first place.
Renice Lystra, host.
Renice founded FreedomFromAccounting in Chandler in 2007 and still runs it. The firm works across several states for businesses somewhere between a quarter of a million and twenty million dollars in revenue, doing monthly managed accounting, tax strategy, and the coaching owners need at the point where growth stops being fun.
Before that she was a partner in a CPA firm in Oregon, finance director of a startup airline, controller at an auto glass company, and owner and CFO of a homebuilding company in Pinal County. She has made payroll in a lot of different industries, which is the qualification that actually matters for this job.
In 2021 she took over the CPA practice her late husband Terry had built, and in 2025 folded its business tax preparation and resolution work into her own firm.
Fifty years of doing it, and she still wants to know how you did it.
Common questions.
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Tell us about your business.
Applying to be a guest, asking a question, or just saying hello. It all arrives in the same inbox and Renice reads it.
Where we are
Queen Creek, Arizona. Guests record in person at the studio.
If you are applying
Include what your business does, how long you have run it, and the one thing you learned that you wish someone had told you earlier. That last part is usually the episode.
When we reply
It is a small team, so the answer comes from a person rather than a system. Usually within a few days.