Surviving a Certified Professional Assassin

If there were such a thing as a business horror movie it’d probably start calm and cheery as 2014 did for me and my small business. There was money, great clients and everyone was getting along. Conversations tended to focus on our personal lives and the wonderful projects we were tackling to change the world. If anything life was actually a little too good.

The reality was that even though our clients were well served our business was neglected. We were focused on delivering great software and had passed the core of the business into the arms of a Certified Public Accountant that we hadn’t vetted and failed to properly check-in with. They paid our bills, recorded our spending, filed taxes; everything. Of course, we’d occasionally talk but the conversations were mostly about family, the weather in Greenville, tech… someone might toss out a number with “gross” or “net” but it didn’t register much and they didn’t insist that it register. We had no idea that CPA could easily stand for something much more dangerous.

The plot turn was precipitated by our growing profits which, as an LLC, stacked significant tax liability onto the partners’ personal tax returns. This acute personal pain is what made us finally venture into the dark unknown of our business’s finances; There had to be a way out of such high taxes. So we called our CPA and asked them…