Q&A: The hiring rule this CPA swears by

Since launching just over a year ago, you started with one client and have grown to a team of several people. What drove that growth, and when did you first realize the firm was growing faster than you originally expected?

A few things have driven the growth: my existing relationships, since I spent about 20 years in public accounting, and then the unmet demand for a CPA firm that could handle assurance work for construction companies and provide value beyond just the accounting–like providing additional services that we knew growing construction companies would need, such as assistance with bank financing.  

The niche focus helped with marketing also–how we set up the website, what we talked about and then what I would talk about on LinkedIn. Probably in early 2026, when it became harder to keep up with incoming leads, and we were closing in on what we thought we would do in an entire year after Q1 ended. 

You’ve said that you typically hire ahead of demand and then grow more after adding capacity. How do you decide when it’s time to make that hire rather than waiting until the work is already there?

It's tough to hire in advance because of cash flow, but I guess the way I would think about it is how many reviews or tax returns would we need to get to pay this person's salary, and then how likely was it we could pick that many up over time based on our current pace, which should just accelerate as we become more established and more known.  

So if the math was like 10 reviews would cover this person's salary, and we were already halfway there, adding new work, then that was the rough estimation of, ok, we should probably hire someone and then the revenue will continue to come, and it lets us keep saying yes to good opportunities. So far so good.

Several of your hires have come from your existing personal and professional networks—and one came from a completely unexpected connection at a barbershop! What do you look for in a potential hire beyond accounting experience, especially when you’re building such a young firm?

I try to keep it simple. If someone is motivated and good with people (and that doesn't mean extroverted, just that they're likeable and care about others), then my philosophy is that you can teach them the accounting and tax specifics because they want to learn and are motivated people. And then they also care enough about what they're doing to want to do a good job and deal with clients and other team members; that's why their interpersonal skills matter.

You brought in a part-time operations person specifically to help your infrastructure catch up with your growth. What systems or processes were starting to strain, and what did you prioritize fixing first?

I think we brought them on early enough that nothing was really at a point where it was a problem–but again, that's a tough thing because of the cost before you really need it. However, knowing what we were doing at the time and where we wanted to go, we knew we'd have to get certain things in place to be as efficient as possible.

Even if something was doable without the ops structure, we still wanted to make things efficient, so it's easier to onboard and train people without accounting experience, less work is needed to reach the same result, and we can keep focusing on providing a high-touch experience without getting trapped in volume or unnecessary steps/work we could have avoided with proper systems and processes in place.

Step one was setting up workflow projects and getting our practice management system to a point where it was a primary resource for tracking and planning work, and then we also wanted to get our leads in there, too, to track those better.

You’re now considering your first offshore hire. What made you decide offshore support was the right next step?

This is something we had thought about before, and it gets talked about a lot in accounting firm communities and accounting firm-specific content on YouTube and LinkedIn, etc. So now that we have a good core group of director-level people and some local staff, we wanted to try this again before it was absolutely critical to have someone.  

And going through the process, there is a lot of good talent out there, and if we need to add capacity quickly in the future, this would be a good way to go again if this first test case works out. So we want to have as many staffing approaches as possible so we aren't held back by not being able to find people. Just like we work nationally and that's helped fuel our growth versus what would have been slower if we were just focused locally, why not expand the staffing reach as far as possible to make adding people easier?

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