Passion for Making Your Business a Success

Sarah Jones, CPA, is the founder of Sarah Jones CPA, a Houston-based firm serving clients nationwide. With a background in financial analysis and a master’s in accounting, Sarah specializes in helping seven- and eight-figure business owners with strategic tax planning, CFO services, and business coaching. Her firm is recognized for its vibrant culture and commitment to core values of heart, hustle, and happiness.

Sarah is the author of Fire My CPA and the upcoming Tax Free Millionaire, and is licensed as a CPA in Texas and an Enrolled Agent in all 50 states. She and her team focus on delivering personalized, high-value solutions that empower entrepreneurs to achieve their financial goals.

Transcript:

Hey everybody, we are back with another episode today of the CPA Life podcast, the podcast that from time to time, we sit down and dig deep into what some of the current trends are that firm leaders are really leaning into to build more modern-minded, people-centric CPA firms, where you’re not required to sacrifice your soul at the altar of your job to build a career in public accounting. And today I’m really excited about spending some time talking with a firm leader who’s pretty passionate and vocal about the importance of building a firm just like that, but also a firm that brings immense value to their clients. We’re joined by Sarah Jones today, who is the founder and the owner of Sarah Jones CPA, a firm based in Houston—we’ll say Houston. We’ll clarify that in a minute, Sarah, because if we say Conroe, people aren’t really going to know what we’re talking about unless they’re from Texas. So welcome to the show, Sarah!

Thank you so much, I appreciate you having me on.

So tell us, where is Conroe, Texas?

So I am from Willis, Texas, which is just one exit up from Conroe, and it’s about 45 minutes north of Houston. It’s a very small town. I’m very, very proud to be a Willis graduate. I love this town. Conroe actually has been on the top growing cities in the last couple of years, so a lot of people are moving here. We’re close to The Woodlands, which a lot of people know, by Lake Conroe. It is a great community and there’s a lot of people here and a lot of opportunity for sure.

There’s a ton of opportunity there. There’s also a ton of really nice golf courses there.

There is, for sure. Yes, my husband is a golfer and he partakes in that weekly.

Yeah, anytime I make it back—I say home because that’s where all of my in-laws are, that neck of the woods. So anytime we’re there, we get to play golf. I lived there for 10, 11 years, played a ton of golf up there. So, love that Houston area. Before we jump into what you guys are doing as a firm, what I really like to do is dig into folks’ backgrounds to get a better understanding of how they ended up on the path that you’re on. And you had a fairly nontraditional path into public accounting, right?

I did. So I actually wanted to be a doctor. I don’t even know if I shared that with you. My grandfather was a very famous dental researcher. He put fluoride in toothpaste and from a little kid, it was on me that I was going to be a doctor, and I hated it. I have the most squeamish tummy. I would have been an awful doctor. So I did my undergrad just in business and I actually went, I was a financial analyst and a budget analyst for about 10 years. So I have a really strong background in financial analysis, looking at that balance sheet, looking at the meat and potatoes of financials. I worked at a municipality and had great benefits, but they couldn’t give me a raise. And really what happened is they said, “Well, we can’t give you a raise, but we’ll pay for you to go to school.”

So I went and got my master’s degree in accounting and I was like, I actually really like this. So I got my CPA. I quit my full-time job in May of 2018 to start my firm. I started out just with my EA license and I got my CPA license in 2021, rebranded as Sarah Jones CPA there. I started out really, and I did tax, but what we really did was bookkeeping, just with a strong sense of—I say CFO, but it’s actually more coaching. How can I help? I want to take a business owner, “how can we help you be successful?” And I feel like that’s what really sets us apart. Our mission is build, protect, grow. We help our clients build their dreams, protect their assets, and grow their legacy. And of course, we’re not perfect, we’re human, but we really strive just to help our clients achieve their dreams. So, like John, if you came to us as a client, your path would be much different than somebody else. We use our roadmap. We have a custom-built roadmap that we have that everybody comes through during onboarding. And it’s really just, what is your end goal? How can we reverse engineer it and actually make this happen for you? And we just help you along the way. It’s really cool.

I like how you put that because I think that where accounting was is, “Let’s tell you where you’ve been,” and at the end of the day I don’t think that any of us—whether it’s you as a CPA firm owner or me as a recruiting firm, an advisory firm, talent advisory firm owner—none of us do what we do because we want to know where we’ve been. We do what we do because there’s a future, like you’re talking about: There is a goal in mind. For somebody, it may be a liquidity event. For somebody, it may be building a legacy company. For somebody, it may be as simple as, “Hey, I’ve got three kids that I want to put through college and I do not want them to graduate with a single dime of debt.” So I like how you put that and how you look at each individual holistically and differently. So was that kind of the mindset when you started the business, or has that been kind of an evolution for you over the last seven years?

It’s been a little bit of an evolution because, of course, as every entrepreneur, when you start out, you’re just trying to figure out and you’re going kind of by the seat of your pants. And what I found very quickly and what’s been really apparent to me recently is—you know, we were even talking about all of the AI tools and how our industry is changing. As a CPA, yes, I can give you a clean set of books, and yes, I can do a tax return for you, but there’s no inherent value there. My value as a CPA, as your advisor, is how can I help you 10x your business? How can I save you 30 percent on your taxes? How can I actually create—like, we have two books, we have Fire My CPA and we have Tax Free Millionaire that’s about to be published, and it’s all about how can I take you—your goals should be just as important to me as they are to you. I want to be just as fired up, and how can I create value?

Jim Rohn is probably one of my favorite old-school motivational speakers, and he talks about, you need to find the problem, you need to fix the problem, and that’s how you get paid. You have to create value. And again, I can do your books and I can do your tax return, but I’m not creating value. Any other CPA can do that. But I feel like Sarah Jones CPA and what we do and how passionate we are about your roadmap to success and putting you on that track, I think that’s where we stand apart. And I think that’s what makes us so valuable. And that’s what I’m really excited about sharing with the world.

I would completely agree. I think that those are the things that you can wrap value around that people see and get and understand because you’re solving problems for them in that situation. The firm today, how many people are in the firm? Are you guys predominantly local in nature? Do you have remote employees? What’s the setup of the organization today?

Yep, so we have 11, including me, there’s 11, and we’re all local. Some of us work halftime at home. Some of us are local, but we’re remote, but we have employees full time, 11, and then we have four that are completely remote: Two bookkeepers and two tax preparers that help us in a completely remote setting.

Have you always had that kind of a setup, or has it been something that you kind of evolved to and you saw the value in it, or from the beginning, was it that way?

It’s completely evolved. I feel like at the beginning it was completely on site, but again, I’m from Willis, Texas, and it’s a little town, and even you have shared with me, “Sarah, to get the caliber of people that you’re wanting, you’re probably not going to meet them all in Willis, Texas,” and having to grow in that mindset. And, yeah, so we do have a remote team. We have systems and processes in place. We have scorecards, we have KPIs, we have clear missions and values. So everybody is kind of on the same page of where we’re going. I’ve even told staff members this before, “I don’t care if you’re in Italy. If the client’s happy, go to Italy. I don’t care.” As long as we have great team players that can manage their time and hit the goals, I’m fine. So remote is completely fine with us.

Yeah, I think the firm leaders that lean into a true one size does not fit all, work from anywhere mindset—and that could be, hey, we’ve got people and we’ve got clients like this. We’ve got people that live in our area, and they’re in the office a day a week, two days a week, three days a week, or we’ve got people that are here every day. I’ve got a client in Dallas that one of the partners is in the office every day, and I asked him one day, why? He’s like, “John, I’ve got four kids under seven years old. I come to the office for a break.” But the flip side is we’ve also got clients that have people that live locally that they can’t be in the office. And so it’s as needed if they’re ever in the office, and then they’ve got people that live distributed throughout the country. So I think you’re right. I think that finding that talent that fits best with the firm, regardless of where they sit—unless, of course, you’re looking at crazy tax states, that’s a whole different issue—but, you know, other than that, depending on where they sit, you can make it work. Would you agree with the statement, though, that you have to be more intentional, and there is more work—I’m not saying egregious work—but there is more work as a leader to build an intentional environment and culture when it is remote?

It is, and it’s been challenging. I remember probably a year ago, a year and a half ago with my team, I almost stomped my foot, it seemed like, and I talked about, we have to have systems. I don’t care if we shut the door, we have to have systems because we can’t scale. So we’ve done that work, we’ve worked with a great team. We have our missions, we have our values, we have our engine values, we have our playbooks, we have our SOPs, we have clear, distinct KPIs and scorecards for every team member, so that regardless of where you are, you can be successful. It’s laid out very clearly, the expectations. How you can succeed in this role. And, to me, I almost look back at the first—I mean, when you don’t have that, it doesn’t matter how good your team is. You know, it’s been said that good people would be broken by bad systems or vice versa. And it’s really true. And I’ve seen that in my firm. So that is really, really important to me, to any new team member, that it’s, “Hey, this is what we’re about. This is our goals. This is exactly what’s expected of you. Let me know if there’s any questions. How can I help you to be able to hit this?” Because without that, it’s chaotic. I mean, and I’ve been through that in my early years for sure.

Yeah. And I think that whenever we talk to candidates so many times about why you’re frustrated, why you’re leaving, what’s prompting your desire to make a move from this firm, rarely is it, “They don’t pay me enough.” Rarely ever is it that issue. It’s either work-life balance issues—they’re working ridiculous hours in a stereotypical traditional firm—or, “I don’t know what tomorrow is going to bring,” and I don’t mean the stability of the firm. I’m talking about their individual career. I don’t know expectations. I don’t know what I have to do to get promoted. I don’t know what I have to do to be regarded as a top performer in the firm. There’s so much gray, and I think that by nature, we may think we don’t want parameters, but I think at the end of the day, all of us want to be able to look at a scorecard and want to know, “Hey, how am I doing?”

There was a point in my career, I worked for a firm personally, where it was very clear—it didn’t take me long to realize that in this monthly ranking, we got the people at the bottom part of the ranking, sometimes they got fired. So, I had a real clear job in my mind, and it was, I need as many people between me and the bottom of that list as I can humanly possibly get, because I want to make sure I’m keeping my job. It could be as simple as that, but if you know what measurement looks like, I think you’re going to be a lot more successful as an employee and a lot happier as an employee. And I think you guys probably have found that as well.

Yep, and I’ll tell you, there’s something on my whiteboard that was told to me that I still have up there and it says, “To be unclear is to be unkind.” And without that, I go a hundred miles an hour. I’m a typical entrepreneur. I am passionate and I’m going, but if I cannot slow down and give clear direction, that is on me. That is a fault of me, and I’m going to be very clear and we’re going to have very clear expectations to set people up for success. We’re very fast-paced. I will be honest with that. I go a hundred miles an hour. I have new ideas all the time, but for the right person, that’s so exciting. Kind of like the candidates we’re talking about, they were like, “I just want a firm that I can grow in and actually bring ideas to the table.” I would love that, but we have to couple that with really clear expectations because if you’re going a hundred miles an hour without that, you kind of detour and you end up hitting the guardrail and you crash the guardrail, you know?

Absolutely. One of my mantras for years has been that rules and expectations need to be clear, not fair. We’ll deal with equality and fair[ness] once we have clarity, but until we have clarity, nothing else matters. We need to know exactly what needs to be done. So I completely agree with you on that. From a pricing standpoint, when you look at your current pricing structure, are you guys leaning more into a subscription-based pricing model? Do you still have fee-based, hourly-based clients, or how do you guys structure that, and has it always been that way?

So, we have not—I’ve never done hourly-based pricing. So as I shared with you, I’ve been part of Andrew Argue since 2018, on and off. We are very value-based, and in fact, we’ve done a rebranding and we are only working with seven- and eight-figure business owners that we can create massive value for. Our three tenets are: we help you increase your profits, increase your cashflow, and we help you decrease your tax liability. And if we can’t do that, we really are not—again, we’re not giving you that value because anybody can do bookkeeping, anybody can do a tax return. We really want to set ourselves apart and really help clients and businesses really 10x their business. That’s where our value is, we’re a trusted advisor.

Absolutely, and every client that we talk to is different. A lot of the clients that we work with are subscription-based model environments, some do track time, some don’t track time, you know, internally, for internal purposes. Is that something that—what are your thoughts on that? And what are your thoughts behind it?

So we do that. We did not for a long time and we integrated it into QuickBooks Online so that our staff accountants and our bookkeepers and our managers do track stuff by time. But it’s really just to make sure that we’re aligning our prices with the value. And for example, if we have a client that all of a sudden our time goes way up, hey, we really need to look at this engagement. Are we having scope creep? Are we doing more than what we said we were going to do and make sure we monitor that? That’s what we’ve started doing and it’s been really powerful for us.

Have you found that when you look at bringing people on into your firm from a people standpoint, have you found that there is a certain type, culture, personality, ideal type fit that works with you guys when you look at, “Hey, this is what we need in our organization?”

Yup, so I say this very jokingly and I’m very tell-it-like-it-is, we’re very different. Our entire office is hot pink, we have bougie chandeliers, we have green velvet couches. I really make it fun. We’ll have 90s rap on one day, we’ll have Christian music on the next day. It’s really somebody—I mean, you have to have, you know, I’m very big on the personality test, like we talked about. So, like, you have to have that attention to detail to be in this industry, but you do have to have a little snap. We love what we say, our core values: hustle, heart, and happiness. You need to be a hustler. You need to have that grit. You have to have that heart. You have to be passionate and you have to have a great attitude.

Listen, clients call sometimes and they’re not nice, and that’s just part of it. That’s in every industry. And you have to just have a great attitude and dust yourself off and pick yourself back up again. That’s really kind of the core of what we are and I think that’s what—really, I went through my coach with this and making our core values and it’s heart, hustle, happiness. That’s what I am. I’ve got heart and I’ve got more hustle than anybody I know, and I would be very, very welcoming of anybody that would have those core values to work at our firm for sure.

And I think that when you find somebody that has those core values, there’s so many more intangibles that go into who that person is with those things at the core of who they are. They’re not somebody that, you know, things didn’t go my way today, I’m going to pack up my stuff and I’m going to walk out. You know, there are people that are going to fight through things and I don’t mean physically fight through things, but they’re going to sit down and say, “Hey Sarah, can I talk to you about something? Something happened today and I don’t necessarily understand, I don’t necessarily agree, but I want to talk to you about it.” And I know that we’ve talked about this, you’d rather have somebody that has that forthright of a personality in your organization than the person that keeps it all inside and walks out the door and never tells you why.

Absolutely. I’m very direct and I prefer directness, because, you know, it’s kind of in marriage, when you don’t—when you bottle something up, there’s that fight seven years later and you’re bringing up the same stuff. You’ve got to get it out, you dissolve it and you talk about it like adults and you get past it.

Yep. My wife and I have a marriage coaching and marriage mentoring ministry in business and I always talk to couples about—rarely, if there’s not conversation that occurs in a good marriage, rarely are the fights you’re having about the thing you’re fighting about. I call it “the salt in the green beans,” and the reason why I call it that is my parents one night when I was 13 years old, got into a fight about the salt in the green beans. The issue was not the salt in the green beans, the issue was there were some things that were going on in their marriage I didn’t find out about it until seven or eight years later, but there were some things going on that they were fighting through that they just weren’t talking about. And it led to that issue. And I think it’s the same thing at work. Like you’re talking about, if you’re not willing to talk about those things that do pop up, you do end up fighting about the salt and the green beans, and it really is not the issue at the end of the day.

Yep. I can completely resonate with that for sure.

When you look at the future of the firm, the next 12, 24, 36 months, what does that look like from a people standpoint, from an ideal client standpoint? I’m sure there’s some things that you guys have talked about—hey, where we are today and where we want to be tomorrow. What does the vision look like for you guys?

Yep, so revenue-wise, I feel like we’re going to easily 3–4x our revenue, and the reason why is, I mean, we have some great marketing pieces. We have our book that we published last year, Fire My CPA, but we’re just about to release Tax Free Millionaire, and it’s actually a little old school, but I’m really liking it—we are literally going to do book tours in different cities, and penetrate each market, and go and just educate and empower people that, “Hey, you’re a seven-figure, eight-figure business entrepreneur, business owner? We can save you 30, 40, 50 percent on your taxes. And this is how we’re going to do it, and we’re then going to take all those dollars that you would have given to the IRS, and we’re going to fund a tax-free millionaire lifestyle for you instead.”

So it’s a completely different mind shift, like I said, only working with seven- and eight-figure business owners that we can just add massive value to. Because again, our industry is going to be completely obliterated by AI. And I’m excited for it because it’s going to take away all the stuff that is—it’s necessary, but it’s not valuable. I want to focus on how I can give massive value to my clients and transform their lives. Help them achieve their goals and then reverse engineer it back, and we kind of go alongside them and make it happen. Yeah, I’m getting all fired up now. I mean, I’m very excited for the future of my firm, for sure.

One of the things I meant to ask you is, you know, you’re in Willis, Texas—you’re from Willis—you’re in Conroe, but your client base is a geographically dispersed client base all over the country, correct?

They are. We have clients not in every single state, but pretty much everywhere. So I am a CPA in Texas, but I’m an EA licensed in all 50 states. And we do CFO work and tax work and we do a lot of tax planning work for clients all over the United States, for sure. We don’t do international tax, but all over all the U.S.

Yeah, that’s a whole other ball of wax that you don’t want to open up.

Nope, I’m busy enough just with U.S. tax.

There are firms out there that do a great job with that, and I’m sure that you probably gladly partner with them with clients that have those needs, but it’s not something that you need to deal with, right?

Absolutely.

Well, obviously, what you and your team are building is demonstrating to the rest of the marketplace that there is a better way to build a business in this space. If there are firm owners, firm leaders that have questions about, “Hey, how have you done what you’ve done? We’ve been kicking this can down the road about changing or doing something different. We’d like to pick your brain.” Or if there are people out there that are stuck in a “we’ve always done it that way,” old-school firm environment that are contemplating a career change, what is the best way for people to get a hold of you and have a conversation with you?

Absolutely, email me, call our firm. So my email is sarah—with an H, Mama always said it was spelled the right way with the Bible—it’s Sarah@SarahJonesCPA.com. Call our office, it’s (936) 228-2231. What I’ve always been really blessed with is I’ve learned from an early age, when you see something that you want or somebody that you want what they have, true leaders will always share what they have. And I’m always more than willing to pour out. And it’s always been told to me, whatever you want, go find somebody that’s doing it and don’t copy them, but see what they’re doing that makes them successful and put that into your practice. So more than happy to share my wealth of knowledge, my little wealth of knowledge compared to other people as well. The more that we help others, it helps us grow as well.

Awesome. Well, I’ll make sure that all that information is in the show notes below and, Sarah, I want to say thank you again for joining us and talking a little bit about where you guys have come from and what you’re building, you continue to do a great job.

Thank you so much. I really appreciate your time and having me on.

Hey, you’re more than welcome. If you guys enjoyed this episode, leave a comment below and make sure that you subscribe to the show so that you don’t miss any of the future conversations that we have coming up with firm leaders like Sarah, who are putting a stake in the ground and saying, “Hey, something’s got to change in this industry.” And these are leaders that aren’t just talking about change, they’re actually making that change happen to create a more sustainable and exciting CPA Life. Until next time.

We hope you enjoyed today’s episode. Be sure to subscribe on your favorite podcasting app, leave a five star rating and visit our website for links and show notes at CPALifePodcast.com. We’ll see you next time on CPA Life!

Passion for Making Your Business a Success

Important Links:

About the Guest:

Transcript: