CPA Success Stories

Randall Hancock, CPA

Being your own boss is great, as long as you know how to be a good one. I have had my own accounting practice for 25 years, but had never really learned how to manage it properly. I was working about 2600 hours a year, little vacation time, and not much left for family life – except I had just gotten engaged and needed to create time for family life.

Dario Zanichelli, CPA

I started working in our family-owned business right after graduation twelve years ago. We have done well, but there is always room for improvement. When I started, our sales were around $100,000 a year and I want to bring it up to a million-dollar level. We were halfway there, but there was a limit to how much I could grow it. I was already working 75-80 hours per week during tax season, and well over forty the rest of the year, yet I wasn’t getting compensated for all the hours I was putting in.

Florida CPA Grabs Reins to Manage Practice Growth

George V. Famiglio, CPA, had been in practice for 13 years, and had availed himself of a wide range of business knowledge, before he decided to look into Sterling. With a degree in Accounting and business law, a Master's degree in Taxation, and other certificates, he was still looking for specific management tools for his own practice. He was successful and expanding, with eight people in the office, but wanted to be better able to manage that expansion.

Stanley Mroz, CPA

I have been in public practice for 27 years and was in a partnership for close to 17 of those years. In 1997, I moved to another area of the state and decided to go it alone, starting over with minimal clients and working six to seven days a week. I was not happy about the results I was achieving. I knew that there must be something else I could do to make more money and spend less time doing it! I knew there was something I was not doing but did not know what that was.

"Do I Really Want to Keep Doing this for Another 15 Years?"

I had been the controller of a small restaurant chain when I decided to enter public accounting. It was the hands-on client relationships and autonomy of a small CPA firm which appealed to me. At the time, my cousin had owned an accounting practice which I joined as an associate. Retirement-minded, my cousin later approached me about taking over his business. I became sole owner in November 1987, but due to circumstances beyond my control, I never had the “smooth transition” I had been counting on.

Carmela Davis, CPA

As the owner of a CPA practice, I found myself in the same boat year after year: broke, at my wit’s end and feeling like a time bomb about to explode. Although my practice was busy, the bottom line wasn’t there; I needed more profits and less personnel headaches. One day I received a mailer from Sterling and decided to give them a try.

My feeling was that I needed to hire more staff; Sterling showed me otherwise. The problem was not too few staff but too many doing too little.

Allan G. Bolden, CPA

In the fall of 1999, I took an inside look at my own CPA practice and realized that the growth had been lower than I wanted and after 12 years, I was “burnt out.” Being a sole practitioner with one full time administrative staff person and one part time CPA during tax season, I was having to do the majority of interviews during the day and preparing the tax returns late into the evening. This was not the way I wanted to continue working.

Sterling Was the Reality Check of a Lifetime

I wanted to change everything in my practice. I had been practicing for twenty years in Oklahoma and I was so tired of my accounting practice. I had an unhappy partnership arrangement that I did not want to face, and I was ready to quit my accounting practice altogether.

I know how to do the CPA side, that's easy for me, but I didn't feel like I was competent in managing people. I own my office building and had started three businesses (a CPA practice, a registered investment advisor investment company, and an insurance agency) and the growth was unbelievable and overwhelming.

Terry Lockie, CPA

I've been to two Practice Management Workshops since I started with Sterling in late 2005. Both have definitely helped. I've learned more in the seminars than I could have ever anticipated, data that explained much that I sensed, but couldn't define, such as what a "quality client" is and is not.

Ralph Eldridge, CPA

When I began my CPA practice, I excelled in accounting but I didn’t know how to manage my practice. My solution was to work longer, harder and do most of the work myself. My wake-up call came in September 2004 when, at the age of 47, I suffered a serious heart attack and had triple bypass surgery. I had nearly worked myself to death!