Tax Maverick

  The right time to invest in formal tax advisory training is before you lose a client or an associate over the gap, not after. That's the blunt answer. We learned it the expensive way — by waiting until both had already started to happen before we finally wrote the check. We're partners at a mid-size firm. Solid client base, decent margins, the kind of practice that looks healthy on paper right up until it isn't. What Formal Tax Advisory Training Actually Means Every firm does some version of informal training. A partner explains a decision, an associate tags along to a client meeting, someone learns by osmosis over a few years. That's real, and it's not nothing. Formal training is different in kind, not just in degree. It's structured curriculum, staged skill-building, and a budget line — not a hope that osmosis eventually works out. We used to think we were "already doing" advisory training because mentorship happened here and there. We weren't....

  Tax advisory is forward-looking guidance from a CPA or tax professional that shapes your decisions before they ever show up on a return — not the once-a-year scramble of handing over a shoebox of receipts and hoping for the best. That's the short answer. The longer answer is basically our story: for years we treated tax season like a storm to survive, and it wasn't until we brought in real advisory support that we understood how much money, time, and sleep we'd been giving away without knowing it. We Thought We Were Just Bad at Taxes Every March, it was the same routine. We'd gather everything, hand it to our accountant, and wait to find out whether we owed money or, less often, got a little back. Nobody ever asked us what we were planning to do next quarter. Nobody asked about the equipment purchase we were considering, or whether we should've structured a hire as a contractor versus an employee. We just filed, paid, and moved on. For a long time, we figured tha...

  Tax advisory services for CPAs pay off the moment your compliance work is full and your income has gone flat anyway. For me that was March of my sixth year running the practice. I filed 341 returns that season, worked 71 straight days, and closed the year within four thousand dollars of the prior year's net. Same grind, same result. That is the tell, and I ignored it for two more seasons. The Client Who Made It Impossible to Ignore A landscaping contractor had been with me since 2016. In February he mentioned, almost in passing, that he had sold a skid steer and a rental duplex the previous August. Both with no planning conversation because he never thought to call and I never thought to ask. I ran the numbers. A structured installment sale and a serious conversation in October would have moved somewhere north of eighteen thousand dollars for him. Instead I entered figures into boxes and invoiced him $650. He was not angry. He thanked me. That was the part that stung. Three Signa...

  People keep asking me what is tax advisory, usually in that half embarrassed tone accountants use when they suspect they should already know. Here is my answer, and it is short. Tax advisory is forward looking work. You examine a client's entity structure, income timing, retirement setup, and compensation strategy before December 31, then recommend legal moves that change what they end up owing. Compliance records history. Advisory rewrites it while there is still time. I run a four person practice outside Boise. We did returns and only returns for eleven years. Good returns, on time, no notices. And every April I would sit across from a contractor who cleared four hundred thousand dollars, hand him a bill for eighty six thousand in federal tax, and watch his face do that thing faces do. Then he would ask the question that eventually broke my business model. "Why didn't you tell me sooner?" I did not have a decent answer. That bothered me for about two years before...