practiceprofile
The first six months
BY DANIEL HOOD
CPA Sam Levy shares the challenges of starting his own firm
AT A GLANCE
Firm:
Levy Tax & Consulting LLC
Headquarters:
Atlanta
Managing partner:
Sam Levy
Staff:
4. 5
Year founded:
2010
Client base:
App. 700 individual clients,
325 business clients
Selected services:
Tax preparation and planning;
small-business accounting;
QuickBooks set-up and training;
business consulting and advisory
services.
Sam Levy gave a lot of thought to the name of the accounting firm he launched late last year. He didn’t like “Levy & Co.,” and “Levy & Associates” was already taken. His choice eventually came down to “Levy Tax & Consulting” or
“Levy Tax & Advisory Services,” and he picked
the former.
“Answering the phone ‘Levy T&A’ just
didn’t sound right,” he said with a laugh.
Many accountants dream of seeing their
name on the door of their own firm. The
difference between dreaming about it and
successfully realizing it often comes down to
exactly the sort of careful thought and painstaking attention to detail that determines
whether your dream name is already in use
— or has an offputting abbreviation.
In some ways, it was the prospect of that
hard work that led Atlanta CPA Levy to his
decision last August to form Levy Tax & Con-
sulting. “Basically, I was looking for my next
challenge,” he said. “I’ve been in a tremen-
dous growth mode over the last four to five
years. I have some strong leadership abilities,
and I like to be in charge, so I felt like moving
forward would represent the pinnacle of my
career and I was ready to give it a shot.”
Before giving it a shot, though, he gave it a
lot of thought.
A MAN, A PLAN, A FIRM
Over the course of his 16 years of practice,
Levy had worked at two small-to-midsized
firms, and had been a partner at the second
since 2004. With his client list exploding, he
first considered the possibility of launching his own firm in 2009, but decided to go
through one more tax season and continue
building his clientele.
After tax season, he began planning. “
Between August 15 and October 15, I spent many,
many hours planning to make the move,” he
said, carefully examining everything: “Office
space, how to notify my partners, how to notify, maintain and service clients, doing a budget and financial analysis, contacting a bank
for a line of credit, calling an insurance agent
Levy and company: (from left): Kyle Askew, Ira Blecker, Christie Love, and Levy.
for health and general liability. I spent hours
looking at projections, what-if scenarios,
did an entire budget, talked to the software
company, talked to my furniture sales rep, to
my IT guys. I worked on this for two months,
every evening.”
It helped that, from six years as a partner,
he understood how a firm worked, and the
sort of expenses involved. He was able to look
back at his monthly billings for previous years
to gauge his potential top-line revenue. That
data, along with projections for staff hours
and what he was willing to pay, as well as ac-
tual quotes for everything from rent to office
supplies to computing expenses, went into
Excel spreadsheets for analysis. “I just ran
different profit-loss scenarios, and got com-
fortable with the idea that I could actually do
this and be successful,” he said.
BUILDING THE BLUEPRINT
Running the numbers was only the beginning; turning them into reality required nailing down a vast array of details, and all in a
