Why I Left an Accounting Technology Giant to Join a Tax Technology Startup

I love working with accounting and tax firms. As a marketer, they are my niche and my passion. More on that in a minute. So, why choose to give up a stable job as a high performer working for a corporate household name in the accounting profession to join a tax technology startup? 

Allow me to explain.

I served 400+ accounting firms in the company I came from, all of whom were in what we defined as the ‘mid-large’ space. That space included firms that ranged (in my geography) from having a few people up to firms that had close to 100 total employees.

I’m fascinated by the business of public accounting, mainly because of the amount of change happening right now. Yes, technology is driving a lot of it, but there are also some external factors that have an impact, like the fact that Millennials account for nearly 50% of the global workforce and have different professional expectations than the prior generations who started most of today’s firms. What’s more, as pointed out in this Fast Company article from 2/21/20 ,”…Millennials are now the fastest growing segment of Small Business Owners.” And, small business owners are the coveted prize clients for accounting firms I work with.

In all of the conversations and meetings I’ve had with firms, a few of the common denominators that would come up consistently were:

• “We need people- do you know anyone?” Finding talent and keeping it is a challenge for many firms, and I firmly believe a focus should be put on establishing a vision and culture that attracts the talent. (This will be a topic for a completely separate blog post.)
• “Scanning and auto populating tax returns makes sense, but our real bottleneck is at the review level.”  I heard this over and over. How had tax technology not addressed this before?
• “We know we need to focus on growing our advisory services, but we don’t have time.” If there was only a way to free up time and increase capacity at the partner level to focus on business development….
• “We want to make our [workflow] processes more efficient, but we don’t want to change tax software.”

Then I met Pat.

At a conference in May 2019, I was standing in line to grab lunch and started chatting with the person in front of me. He mentioned that he has an accounting firm and was also working on bringing a new cloud-based tax technology tool to market. Having brought a software company from concept to launch several years ago, I was interested in hearing about his venture. Over lunch, he told me how he had grown his firm and that the tax technology he was currently developing to bring to the market place is the same tool he used to scale his own practice. Essentially, he was using it to both train inexperienced preparers and reduce his final review time to minutes. It worked well, allowing them to file accurate returns with zero tax notices from mistakes.

What’s more- his advisory business took off naturally, because he had time to have the conversations about what was “in” the returns and bridge to small business owner conversations around projections, cash flow, and financial management.

My interest was piqued. 

Never seeing myself as a ‘sales person’ to the firms I worked with, my goal was always to offer real business value to the firms beyond selling software and appearing on a leaderboard. 

One thing that almost always came up during conversations about automating the 1040 tax prep process was, “that’s great, but our problem isn’t with preparation. Our bottleneck is at the review level.” With returns stacking up on partners’ desks as the April 15 deadline approaches, seven day work weeks are a reality for many partners that time of year.

When I say my interest was piqued, it was because I finally had discovered a solution to suggest to firms needing to find more capacity at the partner level during tax season to drive advisory opportunities. And, a tool that provided built in quality control in the form of tax verification without partners having to manually tick and tie every input in a return. 

In my mind, I saw TaxExact as a very compelling solution (designed by a CPA for his firm) that addresses a giant need in just about every tax firm I’ve worked with.

The more I learned, the more interested I became.

A few weeks after we met, Pat reached back out to me. I had shared my experience with him about my own software launch, and added that ‘if you need someone to bounce things off of who has been through the process, I’m here and happy to help.’ It turned out that development was well underway at that point, and he wanted to talk about market positioning, messaging, and business models- things that are second nature to me after 25+ years in sales, marketing, and leadership roles. 

As I learned more about Pat’s vision and actually experienced the software (what is now TaxExact), the gears were turning quickly in my brain. I saw beyond the game changing value of  this unique tax verification tool. I saw tax technology that would naturally train inexperienced and/or seasonal tax preparers, elevating the quality of their work that lands in final review. I also saw a cloud-based tool with an intuitive interface that helps tease out advisory opportunities that often get overlooked when time is compressed. And, finally, I saw a tool for firms who still use Excel (or even Asana or Trello or other manual methods) to track the statuses of 1040 returns in the heat of the season. This has become paramount with so many firms having to manage work remotely to some degree. 

Fast forward to today.

Having assembled most of his executive team and Board of Directors, Pat had one key position left to fill. It’s a very big decision to leave a large, stable corporation with a household name in the accounting industry, at the top of my game. That said, I’m a person of faith, an entrepreneur at heart, and the opportunity with TaxExact appealed to my genuine drive to help independent public accounting firms advance, compete, and grow their advisory services revenue. So here I am. And, I couldn’t be more excited to bring this new tax technology to market early 2021!