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Growth, Generosity, and Going Against the Grain with Nate Goodman
Nate Goodman’s path from church ministry to leading a fast-growing accounting firm is anything but ordinary. Episode 76 of CPA Life kicks off part one of John Randolph’s two-part sitdown with Nate, the founder and president of Goodman CPA, to unpack how his faith, passion for helping others, and commitment to God’s purpose have shaped his mission to challenge the status quo and build a people-first, purpose-driven practice. Nate shares insights on dealing with rapid growth, the lessons he learned from his firm’s early struggles, and the depth of his focus on generosity and community impact as a core firm value. He also discusses the firm’s focus on advisory services, the shift to subscription-based pricing, and how Goodman CPA is empowering business owners and transforming communities. Don’t miss this inspiring look at what it means to do accounting differently from the ground up.
Important Links:
About the Guest:
Nate Goodman is the founder and president of Goodman CPA, a fast-growing, people-first accounting firm. With a background in church ministry and business, Nate took a nontraditional path to becoming a CPA, driven by a passion for helping others and making a real impact.
After taking over his mentor’s practice, Nate led the firm through major growth by focusing on advisory services, work-life balance, and giving back to the community. He’s all about challenging the status quo in accounting, building a mission-driven team, and empowering business owners to succeed. Outside of work, Nate’s a proud dad of three boys and a big believer in making a difference—at work and at home.
Transcript:
Hey folks, thanks for taking the time out of your day to connect and join us here for a new episode of CPA Life Podcast. I’m excited about today’s conversation because I’m joined by Nate Goodman, who’s the founder and president of Goodman CPA, which is a six-year-old firm that has had some really amazing growth over the last few years and is going all in on building a more people-centric, advisory-focused firm. We’re going to dig into a lot of that today. So Nate, thanks for joining us.
Yeah, happy to be here.
It’s been a little crazy summer for you guys just from growth and what next steps look like, and we’re going to get into talking about all that. But before we do that, what I typically like to do is give people a little bit of a picture of where you came from and how you got to where you are today running your own firm. Was your background one that was kind of a traditional public accounting route background, or a little bit more nontraditional?
So I am a nontraditional accountant. My bachelor’s degree is in church ministry, student ministry. I have a heart for people. I thought I’d be a youth pastor, and now I’m a tax accountant, so.
Oh wow!
Yeah, God put me on a 180 there in terms of opening doors. But I started to get a heart for helping churches with finances, and then one thing led to another, I shook hands with a mentor of mine at our church on a Sunday morning, and I told him what my vision was of trying to help churches with finances. He told me, no one’s going to trust you if you don’t have either education or experience. I said, well, I have a church ministry degree and I have a master’s in business. He said that’s not going to cut it. So I came down to his office, I had just finished my master’s that spring. He said, I think you should go back to school and then sit for the CPA exam. That was 2019, and the week after that, I was re-enrolled in classes, and then we had our first kid that winter, and I started with him that December of 2019.
I had started doing some consulting work, very light, obviously not many people trusted me, and then I brought on my first client under my firm in October of 2019, as I started my accounting practice and had some mentors that I could say, “Hey, I’ve got people who will help me so you can trust me to do this.” I also started with that mentor at his firm doing taxes and COVID hit not long after that. I was sitting for the CPA exam and we had our newborn baby all in that same year span. So a year of learning, navigating the COVID crisis stuff—it was an incredible growing year. We finished the CPA exam and then the mentor who had hired me was also in his mid-80s, so by 2021, he said, hey, I’m ready to hang up my hat and actually retire at 85. So he offered to sell me his practice. I purchased his practice. Along the way, I was starting to do CFO services. I was doing some bookkeeping for churches. Then I started to get some businesses I was doing bookkeeping for. In the fall of 2021, I purchased his practice and it came with another person that was like his partner, who was also in his 70s.
In 2021, we had our second kiddo, so bought a business, had our second kid, we had bought a house by that point. In 2021, it was just so much growing and learning on how to run an accounting practice. It was just me in the beginning, and I hired my first bookkeeper and a director of operations. Then we had the opportunity to acquire the third person that was in our building, and that was in January of 2023. Between those timeframes, 2022 was a huge growing year of navigating running the tax practice—we had hired another CPA and made a lot of promises and underdelivered in those areas and learned a lot from hiring and learning how to bring people on. We really hit rock bottom in 2022. I was trying to price things myself, I didn’t have a lot of support, and I totally dropped the ball with the budget and running the firm itself.
That was a huge turning point, because that’s when we got plugged in with a coaching group. They helped us learn how to price things correctly. We really went full steam ahead into advisory services. That’s where we did the tax advisory, built around that, we repriced our CFO services, and we really started to accelerate growth. In fall of 2022, we acquired that firm and we sat around $400,000 in revenue once we had acquired everything. We had about $350,000 in revenue and the rest was organic. Then we had a 300% growth in 2023. That’s where Tax Advisory really took off. It was what people were looking for. I’ve always had this idea of, we’ve got to challenge the status quo, like tax season should not kill you.
Amen.
There’s got to be a way to do accounting and interact with clients, and advisory for me was the answer because it would spread the work out all year long. We didn’t have to obtain 200 tax prep clients to support another person’s salary. 2023, we started to nail down our mission of the firm, which is to financially empower business owners to achieve their God-given purpose. We’re on a mission to actually transform communities that we interact with throughout the U.S. Business owners that come in contact with our firm should have better financial clarity, be able to understand where they’re at, and not get hit with surprise tax bills. And if they have that extra money, our goal is they pour it back into their employees, into their families, into their communities, so we’re crunching numbers every day, but what we’re really doing is making impact in business owners’ lives, which is making impact in communities all over the U.S.
That started to get me jazzed about, like, I can get behind this, I can get excited about accounting and going to work every day because we’re actually empowering people. 2023, the growth, that 300% growth was a huge learning curve. We made lots of mistakes in process. In 2024, our team started to grow. We just finished the book Traction. What we’ve realized is we’re hitting a ceiling, and every time you grow, you have to learn to change and fix the process on where things are causing you not to be able to grow to the next level. For me, growth has always been about impact. So if we can create more budget for team members to come in, then hopefully our goal, it allows us to give a better work-life balance to other accountants and hopefully give them access to a mission-driven company where they can have an impact on their own clients as well. So I don’t know if that’s the long/short of it, right? Some acquisitions. We now have three kids, three boys. I’m a boy dad. Most days I go home and I get tackled and get wrestled. That’s just the life I live, but I love it. I want to be home as much as possible and I want my team to be able to do the same.
When you talk about mission focus, mission impact, I’m thinking about a firm owner that we had on the podcast earlier this year, Chris Johnson. One of the things that Chris took from a predecessor firm that he worked for early in his career, where he had a great mentor and brought it to his firm, was once a year, the owner of the firm would go to all of the employees—it started just kind of as a lark—and it turned into something that replicated every year, and Chris is now taking it into his firm, but he gives everybody in the firm $1,000 cash, and tells them, go make an impact in your community. Some way, somehow, go make an impact in your community.
What he did his first year was, him and another guy that he worked with—both of their kids went to school at a public school, he’s in San Antonio—I think it was his first year he did this, and one of his kids was telling him one day about a bunch of kids that eat lunch in the cafeteria, and they were talking about how hard it is for their families to afford to pay for lunches. And they went and took that money and paid for kids’ lunches for the rest of the school year for a group of kids. Those are things, I think, that when you start talking about mission-focused and mission-driven, it becomes more than just compliance.
I think that we’ve evolved into a world where compliance—and I’m not talking just in accounting, but I think anything that we’re doing as a service provider to our clients—anything that is just compliance, I think is table stakes. Really now what we’re doing is trying to understand, like you’re talking about, what drives our clients. What gets them excited? What motivates them? Let’s see what we can do to give them more resources—whatever those resources are: time, money, people—to do the things that light a fire for them, because that ultimately is going to light a fire for you. It sounds like you guys are on a path to allow you to do that.
A hundred percent. One of our company priorities is generosity. So currently, as we’re working to become as financially healthy and stable as we can, we set a percentage aside into our rainy day fund for the company, then we currently are setting aside 1% of our revenue for charitable giving. We have a few different sponsoring organizations that we go to, to sponsor once a month. Just recently, I was sending a message out to our team: “Hey, because of what you do, we were able to sponsor this organization this month. Here are some of the cool things that they’re doing.” Our end goal is to be able to give 10% of our top-line revenue, so every dollar that comes in, we just set aside 10% of it to go to these organizations. Because it’s not about making a bunch of money for me. It’s like, we as a team should be working to generate as much income as we can to be able to put it back into our communities and into God’s kingdom. So, that’s our—
Absolutely. Absolutely. Nate, do you think that coming into this business in a nontraditional path—you didn’t go to school, get an accounting degree, get your master’s degree, get your CPA, go to work for a Big Four firm, spend three years working 80 hours a week and, you know, going out at one in the morning with your buddies and talking about how, “Man, there’s got to be a better way”—not going down that path, do you think that prepared you more to be able to build what you’re building today? Or do you think that the learning curve maybe has been longer for you? What are your thoughts on that?
Yeah, there’s definitely been learning curves for what a process should look like for tax season. My mentor Jim Skidmore—we were paper-based. I used a red pencil still during tax season and a 10-key calculator, and I would tape my calculations to the workpapers. What I did learn from him is that he took a risk on me and he was extremely generous for me and cared and helped give me flexibility for my family when I was having kids. I want to be able to pay it forward because he invested a lot into me, and that was a huge win. But I also think coming from a nontraditional background, you don’t get stuck in the mindset of, “This is the way it’s always got to be.” So, there are benefits to it, and I think there would also be benefits from going the traditional route. So, pros and cons on both sides for sure.
And I think you touched on this—more a validation question. Do you think that it has allowed you to look at stereotypical mindset processes and ask why? I know that, again, something you said when we first started recording, that tax season shouldn’t be as chaotic as it is. I’m not a tax person—I’ve provided services to the industry for a number of years—but it’s always perplexed me, two things: one, there’s this, and I understand we can’t move tax dates, and there is some crunch to that, I get that, but people shouldn’t act like it’s a surprise. It’s there. It’s kind of like, you know, with a house full of boys, I’m sure that at least one of your kids is the type of kid that likes to scare everybody. So, you know, it’s one thing if you don’t know he’s around the corner, it’s a whole other thing if he says, “Hey Dad, I’m going to go hide around the corner to scare you.” Tax season doesn’t hide around the corner. We know where it is. We know what those dates are.
And then the other thing is, from the standpoint of people and hiring and capacity, it always perplexes me on this side of the desk when I get phone calls from clients of, “Holy crap, it’s December 3rd. I need to hire three people. I should have called you four months ago.” You know? So do you think having that nontraditional background has allowed you to look at things and go, “Man, that doesn’t make sense. I know this is how everyone does it, but I don’t get it?”
A hundred percent. Yeah, I think coming into it, it was like, immediately from the beginning, it was about how can we do things differently and ultimately disrupt the status quo of the accounting industry as a whole? It wasn’t my end goal to grow a big firm in the beginning. It was really for me to just have work-life balance with my family. And then with how much Jim poured into my life—when he made the offer for me to purchase his firm, I knew I couldn’t go it alone. I knew I wouldn’t want to grow, flatline, and just be like, “We’ll just maintain and hope for the best.” So, I know if you have a company and have employees and team members, you’re going to have to do something to build something. So my wife and I prayed a lot about that, hey, if we take this step, it’s going to mean we’re going to try to build something, as opposed to me just being the self-employed tax preparer for a few folks. That was a big hinge point for us, but it was also, yeah, I think coming at it from the perspective of, “Well, if we do this and we can open up opportunities for other people to experience a firm that’s challenging the status quo of accounting, then, yeah, I hope we can do that.”
I had that happen on LinkedIn, in terms of status quo, I posted something about entity structuring, and it’s gotten so much mixed perception—“You can’t do that,” and blah blah blah! I feel like that’s pretty creative, and I think the strategy there, the idea of challenging the status quo, goes beyond just the day-to-day work. It also is hopefully helping clients think creatively about their opportunities that they can take advantage of.
Yeah, I think that we all, in whatever space you play in, get into ruts. I’ve mentioned this story a couple of times in the past on other podcast episodes. When we were coming out of COVID, there was a client that I had—ended up selling his firm recently—but he was in a suburb in the Dallas area, and it’s not an easy suburb to commute to. Trying to find people for them was not an easy task. We kept talking about the prospect of remote work. He finally called me one day after we talked about it for almost a year. He said, “Hey, I think I’ve got the reason why we’re not doing this.” I said, “Okay, what is it?” He said, “Because I don’t want to.” I kind of laughed, and he said, “But there’s a follow-up to that.” I said, “What’s that?” He said, “I’ve also come to the realization that that’s not a good enough reason.”
And I think there are so many things traditionally, in any business, but especially in accounting, that are traditional that you do, and if someone really was honest about it, the answer would be either, “Because that’s the way I want it done,” or, “That’s the way I’ve always done it.” So I think coming from the direction that you have, it’s giving you the opportunity to ask some questions and ask some whys and challenge some status quos that not only impact your firm but also your clients, and I’m sure that you’ve seen that from your clients’ perspectives as well.
Yeah, a hundred percent. I think it’s been fun finding other communities now, and that was something I really missed out on in the beginning—other CPA firm owners, now that there are communities out there that I could be a part of, hearing from them and finding other like-minded folks, it’s like, I’m not the only one thinking about this. Other people, and it’s getting to think together about how to address these issues and opportunities in accounting, has been a lot of fun.
Yeah, I think that there is something so important about community, whether that’s in your personal life, your marriage, your work, whatever it is. There’s something just so genuine about community, and it can be as simple as sitting in a room and not saying a word, but just listening and you sitting there going, “Oh my gosh, I’m not the only guy that struggles with that. We’re not the only firm with clients like that. Oh, I thought we were the wrong people in this picture, it’s not, everyone’s dealing with this same challenge.” There is a lot of value in that. So when you look at your firm today, is there a particular vertical that you guys spend more time in than another, or are you industry agnostic?
Yeah, as of the middle of last year, we started to do—like, we do a quarterly planning meeting as a leadership team, then we do an annual state of the union or state of the company with the whole team and talk through opportunities and what we’re trying to do as a company and get feedback from the whole team. But the middle of last year, we decided that it was time to start to niche down. And we looked at our client base and said, who have we really enjoyed working with? That’s where we came across folks in a direct medical care space. Those are people that don’t accept insurance, but they are providing services directly to the patient. This movement has started to really grow, and the physicians and business owners in that space have particularly been incredibly enjoyable to work with, and their model aligns with our model, so there’s a lot of shared values.
So we started to double down in that space. We lost focus towards December, and then we started reading the book Traction, and it was like, it’s time to get laser focused on what we’re doing. So for us, we look at it now, that’s the industry we want to be in, we’ve identified our target list, we are now 100% going after that, and all of our marketing spend and everything is going towards that specific group, because they’re ultimately going to change healthcare in America, and the way it’s going, we want to be a part of how we can help create sustainable businesses in that arena by helping people understand pricing, building a good budget, having a good tax plan, having a proactive team that’s talking with them throughout the year instead of just once a year in tax season, and the response so far has been overwhelmingly positive. It’s been a lot of fun to make connections in that space.
So now we offer that benefit to our employees, like hey, if you come in, we’re going to pay for you to go see a direct primary care physician. You can schedule a meeting with them or schedule an appointment with them within one week, you can text them if you want to—we want you to experience the benefit of that industry, so then when you’re doing the bookkeeping for them or you’re prepping the tax return or sitting on an advisory call or prepping a budget, you’re also like, “Wow, I’m helping this organization provide this to other people, and it’s going to transform and make a big impact on other people’s lives.” So that’s a long answer to “are we niched or not,” but yeah, that’s the industry we’re primarily focused on.
Well, I think it goes back to understanding that if you align those things and attach them to values and vision and firm, those things start to become a lot more intertwined and have a lot more weight behind them. So in the direct care space, is it anyone and anything from a specialty vertical or, you know, I know that there’s people that do dentists, there’s people that do functional medicine doctors, there’s a lot of different things. I’ve got a client that does nothing but medical aesthetics docs. So, are you guys, again, pretty agnostic through that or is there another layer of focus there?
Yeah, if you were to go to the center of our ideal client profile and hit the target on the bullseye, that would be direct primary care. So your family doc you go to once a year for your annual physical, but that’s the person you call when somebody’s sick. One of our clients has a tagline that’s basically like, “Everybody needs a doctor in the family.” So that’s our primary, but then as you circle out from there, chiropractors, therapists, mental health counselors that don’t accept insurance—they’re direct to client pay on a monthly subscription or something like that—would be inside of our vertical as well. But the center of that dot is primary care.
Got it. So, when you look at the makeup of your business today, are you guys predominantly subscription-based pricing? Has it always been that way? Was there a pivot towards that path? What does it look like today? What was it in the past?
In terms of our own services, yeah, in the very beginning when we started acquiring those firms, it was like 50/50 in terms of annual tax prep and then a monthly or quarterly subscription. It’s now to the point that the tax prep is about 10% of our revenue, and 90% is subscription-based packages—either tax advisory, and then our monthly accounting team package is what we’re doing now.
And I think that’s really where the value comes in that you’re providing to your clients. I don’t know if you have read anything or listened to anything that Ron Baker has ever talked about from the standpoint of pricing. Ron is a subscription-based pricing advocate—he’s preached it for probably about 30 to 40 years. Written a couple of great books on it. Had Ron on my podcast about a year ago, two years ago, something like that, and one of the questions he threw out was, “If you as a firm owner gave away for free your compliance work, what would you charge for?” And trying to get leaders to understand compliance isn’t going to change somebody’s life. It’s going to keep them compliant. It’s going to keep the IRS off their back. But outside of that, you didn’t start your business, I didn’t start my business just because we wanted a business. There’s a reason behind it. There are things that we want to accomplish. There are things that you want to transform. The way you do that is you run a highly profitable, well-run business, and to do that you need people to help guide you along the way.
We hope you enjoyed part one of John Randolph’s conversation with Nate Goodman. Part two will air September 10th. Be sure to subscribe, rate us five stars, and visit our website at CPALifePodcast.com for links, show notes, and more. We’ll see you next time on CPA Life!