Would your firm survive without you?

You sold your tax firm in 2023 for seven figures. What decisions made your firm valuable enough to eventually command that size of sale?

A few years before I sold the firm, I realized something: I was the bottleneck. Everything somehow came back to me. Questions, decisions, problems. And I think a lot of firm owners eventually find themselves in that same position. So I made a conscious decision to change it.

One of the biggest turning points was reading “Traction: Get a Grip on Your Business” by Gino Wickman and actually implementing it. We wrote down our vision, improved our processes, created accountability and focused heavily on training.

Instead of just sending my team to CE courses and hoping they came back better, I started training them myself. I wanted them to understand how we actually did things inside our firm and why.

For about three years, we just kept improving. Eventually, I noticed the team didn’t need me as much anymore. Problems were getting solved without me. The firm could operate without everything going through me.

I didn’t build all of that because I knew I was going to sell. But when the time came, it made the firm much more valuable. The buyer wasn’t just buying my job. They were buying a company that could actually run without me.

What surprised you the most about the process of selling your tax firm?

I had never sold a business before, so when I started the process, I really didn’t know what I was doing. That’s why one of the best decisions I made was hiring a broker.

I know a lot of firm owners look at that 10% commission and think, “Why would I give up that much money?” I thought about it too. Then our broker brought us five interested buyers in the first month. That changed my perspective pretty quickly. We spent about five months talking with different firms, and that was actually really valuable. I started understanding what buyers cared about and what our firm was really worth.

By the time we were ready to pull the trigger, everything moved quickly. We ended up selling before the next tax season started. Looking back, the 10% wasn’t just paying someone to find a buyer. I was paying for someone who knew how to guide me through a process I had never been through before.

Now you run a tax community, but you didn’t start that venture immediately after the sale of your firm. What was life like in between selling the tax firm and launching Level Up Quest? What made you realize it was time to start something new?

After the sale, I didn’t immediately leave. I stayed through tax season and helped the new firm understand our processes and transition everything over. Then, about 10 months later, something interesting happened.

They didn’t need me anymore. And honestly, I was relieved. A lot of firm owners stay around for two or three years after selling. The fact that I could step away that quickly showed me that everything we had spent years building actually worked.

But then my wife asked me a very simple question: “So… what are you going to do now?” And I didn’t have an answer. She was actually the one who pointed something out to me. She said, “You loved training your employees. And training was a big part of how you grew the firm. Why don’t you do something with that?”

That stuck with me. When I was building my firm, I didn’t have a mentor. Most of what I learned was self-taught. I made mistakes, figured things out, tried again and slowly got better. I also saw a lot of people gatekeeping what they knew. I’ve always thought that if I had someone guiding me back then, I probably could have grown twice as big in half the time. That’s really where Level Up Quest came from. I wanted to become the person I wish I had been when I was building my firm.

How did you figure out what you wanted to do next? What was it about teaching and building a community for tax professionals that ultimately felt like the right next chapter?

When I started thinking about what I actually enjoyed most about running my firm, training kept coming back to me. But I never liked traditional training.

I’ve gone to plenty of CE seminars and webinars where I’m sitting there thinking, “How much longer is this?” I’ve literally fallen asleep during some of them. At some point, you’re not even there to learn anymore. You’re there because you need the CE hours.

I never wanted our training to feel like that. At my firm, we’d play Pictionary to explain tax concepts visually. We’d do group presentations so people could build confidence explaining things. We’d play Jeopardy to help reinforce what they learned.  People were laughing, competing, talking and actually participating.

That’s what I wanted to recreate with Level Up Quest. I didn’t want another place where tax professionals just sit through lectures. I wanted to build a community where people are excited to learn, willing to get outside their comfort zones and can actually see themselves getting better. For me, that’s the fun part.

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