You’re a Great Accountant. But Do You Know How to Launch and Run an Accounting Business?

One of my favorite business books is Michael Gerber’s The E-Myth Revisited. Gerber describes what he calls the “Fatal Assumption”: believing that because you understand the technical work of a business, you understand how to run a business that does that technical work.

For accountants, that’s a particularly easy trap to fall into.

We’re good at numbers. We understand financial statements. We understand taxes, margins and cash flow. Many of us spend our careers advising business owners. Surely we should be unusually well prepared to become one ourselves.

Not necessarily.

Accounting prepared me to understand businesses. It didn’t prepare me for what it felt like when every need exceeded the resources available to meet it. Do I spend the money on marketing or technology? Increase prices now or wait? Fix the process or launch the promotion? Serve the clients we already have or invest in what we’ll need six months from now? And let’s not even get into hiring.

Entrepreneurship is its own profession.

Think about the investment you’ve made in mastering yours. College, licensing, CPE, mentors and thousands of hours of real-world experience. For many of us, it took a decade or more before we felt truly accomplished at our craft.

Why would we expect to jump into a completely different game called entrepreneurship without making a similar investment in learning how to play it?

Freedom? I’d Call It Flexibility.

Entrepreneurship is frequently sold as freedom. After more than 25 years of doing it, I’d use a different word: flexibility.

I’ve had extraordinary flexibility as an entrepreneur. I’ve also thought about my businesses, employees and clients at midnight, on vacation and during plenty of times when I technically wasn’t “working.” When you work from home, it’s even easier for the business to expand into every available corner of your life unless you deliberately create structures and boundaries around it.

That doesn’t make entrepreneurship bad. I love the game. But we should stop selling the fantasy that owning a business automatically makes you free.

And we should especially stop suggesting that starting a business is a good solution to an immediate money problem.

It’s hard to create from financial survival. A new business usually needs money before it reliably produces money, which means starting one because you desperately need more income can actually make the original money problem worse.

If you’re in a two-income household, I’m a big believer in maintaining one dependable source of household income while you’re proving the new business. That stable source doesn’t necessarily have to be a paycheck—it could be another established business with dependable recurring revenue—but somebody needs to keep the financial floor from moving underneath you.

If you’re a single parent or sole provider, entrepreneurship isn’t off the table. I would simply be much more intentional about building leverage and support before making the leap. Give yourself a defined period—perhaps three to six months—to prove that you can consistently attract quality clients who are willing to pay appropriate fees while you build sufficient runway and support around you.

Being hopeful that it will work isn’t enough.

Before making a major leap, I’d want evidence that the business model works, the system works and, importantly, that you will work the system.

There Isn’t Just One Path

We originally created the CPA MOMS model as an marketing agency and training company almost 20 years ago, which we ultimately franchised in 2020. We every business model iteration, the system was largely designed around one traditional entrepreneurial journey:

E → S → B → I

Employee → Self-Employed → Business Owner → Investor.

The franchise put rocket boosters on that journey by giving accountants leads, systems, technology, coaching, community, a brand and a business model rather than requiring them to figure out everything from scratch.

I still believe that pathway can work. I also wouldn’t recommend it as broadly today as I once did.

If I were building that model again, I’d want a more seasoned aspiring entrepreneur with substantial financial stability, strong mentors and coaches, a proven system and significant operating capital. Personally, I’d want someone to have access to at least approximately $100,000 that could responsibly be invested in building the business without jeopardizing the household.

Why? Because E → S → B → I is probably the hardest path.

You have to create almost everything: clients, revenue, reputation, processes, systems, culture and team. You’ll make mistakes because there are things you simply cannot learn until the consequences belong to you.

The upside is that you really do learn entrepreneurship. Once you’ve built something from nothing, you’ve developed capabilities that can’t simply be purchased.

But there’s another route I would encourage far more accountants to consider today.

Path #2: E → B → I — Buy It

Instead of leaving your job and creating an accounting practice from zero, what if you acquired one?

A good existing firm may already have clients, recurring revenue, employees, systems, processes and a reputation. Rather than spending years trying to create an economic engine, you’re buying one that already runs.

For many accountants who know they want ownership, this is the path I would investigate first today.

Of course, there’s a rather important phrase in that sentence: a good existing firm.

Buying somebody else’s trash can take you from zero to negative very quickly. The business has to be bought at the right price, on the right terms, with the right financing and after serious due diligence. You need to understand client quality and concentration, pricing, profitability, team retention, technology, seller dependence and what happens to revenue after the founder walks out the door.

We’ll explore that later in this MBA series because there is a lot to unpack.

There’s also something an acquisition cannot give you: entrepreneurial judgment.

You can buy a business. You can’t buy the experience it took someone else to learn how to build one.

If you’ve never had to sell, lead a team, make payroll, price services, allocate scarce capital or make decisions without knowing whether they’ll work, acquiring a successful company doesn’t magically give you those abilities. You’ll need to deliberately surround yourself with people, systems and advisors who can help close that gap.

Path #3: E → I — Maybe Don’t Leave Yet

This is the path I think gets overlooked because entrepreneurship has become so romanticized.

What if you have a great accounting career, earn very good money and don’t actually need to leave?

Stay.

Use your earning power. Control lifestyle inflation. Invest your surplus cash. Work with good advisors. Accumulate assets and allow time and compounding to do some of the heavy lifting.

Eventually, you may create enough investment income and wealth that working becomes optional.

Then, if you still want to own a business, you can enter entrepreneurship from a completely different place. You’re not asking a new business to pay the mortgage next month. You don’t have to take the wrong client because you need the revenue. You don’t have to accept a bad deal because you’re desperate to escape your job.

You can enter the game because you want to play it.

There’s a lot of power in that.

So Which Path Is Right?

That’s the wrong question if we’re looking for one universally correct answer.

A better question is: Which path makes the most sense for me, given the life I actually have right now?

Maybe you want to build. Maybe you’d rather buy. Maybe the smartest move is to keep earning and invest. And maybe you know you eventually want one of the first two, but right now you need to spend six months building the financial and operational bridge that makes the leap responsible.

None of those choices makes you more or less ambitious.

That’s really what I want MBA: Mastering the Business of Accounting to be about. Not glorifying entrepreneurship, but understanding it well enough to make better choices about whether, when and how you want to play the game.

We spent years mastering accounting.

Now let’s master the business of it.

Whether you're ready to build, buy, or simply start learning the business side of accounting, you don't have to figure it out alone. Connect with a community of women in accounting who are asking the same questions at cpamoms.com/start.