San Antonio Express-News (Sunday)
Accounting firm stays small to go big for its clients and employees
The offices of ATKG, an accounting firm on the Northeast Side, seem to have been designed with the goal of showing that happiness can be found in the world of invoices and spreadsheets, 1040s and 990s and W2s.
The walls are decorated with murals of sea turtles and hot air balloons. The common area has a pingpong table, a popcorn machine and a beer tap for afterwork get-togethers. The firm is overhauling its oak-shaded backyard, adding a fire pit and putting green.
“We just feel that a relaxed atmosphere is going to keep everyone happy,” said Allison Miller, one of the firm’s eight partners. “We’re not stuffy, suitand-tie with the green visor, or at a calculator all day. That’s not who we want to be.”
Along one hallway are framed photographs of employees achieving their “bucket list” goals — such as seeing “Hamilton” on Broadway or drinking a fine bottle of Bordeaux — thanks to the firm’s tradition of raffling off cash prizes of up to $2,500 to help them along.
Unlike many accounting firms, ATKG keeps a small roster, about 140 clients, that it can serve closely with its staff of 61 employees. It focuses on tightly held businesses in sectors such as ranching, real estate, and oil and gas.
Miller comes from a family of accountants. Her parents and uncle own a firm in Laredo that her grandfather founded after becoming friends with a CPA while serving in World War II.
She worked at the family firm while growing up and earned her bachelor’s and master’s in accounting at Texas A&M University.
After practicing for nine years at a national accounting firm, Miller joined ATKG in 2017, looking for a workplace that would allow her to devote more time to her family, including her now 6-year-old son. At large firms, accountants often work 80- to 90-hour weeks during the busiest times of tax season, she said.
“I was just working a lot of hours, and I knew I couldn’t be the mother that I wanted to be working a schedule like that,” she said.
Miller recently sat for an interview to discuss work-life balance, federal tax law and the importance of having family conversations about financial matters. The following has been edited for brevity and clarity.
Q: With all the accountants in your family, did you always know you were going to join the profession?
A: What’s funny is that I remember thinking when I was younger that I didn’t want to do what my parents did. I guess maybe a lot of teenagers feel like that — “I don’t want to be just like my parents.”
Back then I used to work at their office. When I took my first accounting class in college, I remember I called my mom and I told her, “Well, I liked it. So I guess I’ll be an accounting major.” And that was that. If I had to do it all over again, I would choose it. I think it’s in my blood,
and I enjoy it.
Q: Apart from a talent for numbers, what other skills should an accountant have?
A: Being able to talk with people. We’re on the phone with clients all the time. Being able to pick up a telephone and have a faceto-face conversation about technical topics is really important.
I would also say a love of learning. The laws are always changing. I feel like every year has been busy, but when the pandemic hit, it was just a slew of massive pieces of legislation that had a lot of tax implications. We always joke, “Well, maybe next year will be a slow year.”
But that’s never the case. There’s always something big happening in the tax world, so you have to constantly keep learning what the new laws are.
Q: What made you come to ATKG?
A: It really was looking for more time at home, or when I was at home, not on my computer.
I also felt like I was getting really good at just doing a lot of tax returns in a short amount of time. I didn’t feel like I was growing as an adviser, which is what I ultimately wanted to be. That’s one of the things that makes our firm different, is that we have a very selective client strategy. We only have about 140 clients, whereas most firms our size have thousands of clients. And we do that intentionally, so we can spend a lot of time developing relationships with each client, doing a lot of work for them. We’re not a tax return factory where you drop off your stuff before April 15 and then, “Talk to you next year.”
Q: On the firm’s website, I counted that 45 out of the 61 team members are women, including five of the eight partners.
A: That was one of the things that attracted me to the firm, that there were five partners and three were women. We’ve added three more since then, and two of those have been women.
We’re all working parents, and I think that sets a really good tone for the office.
It goes to show that you can have your cake and eat it, too. You can find fulfillment in your career and fulfillment with your family. We have a lot of working moms. I think they’re able to stay here and do work and be a mom because we don’t require crazy hours. We respect your time at home. We’re not going to call you in the evenings and tell you to get back online.
Q: As an industry, is accounting seen as being friendly toward women? Do you know what the ratio of male-to-female tends to be?
A: Back in the day, it was absolutely more male. I know that because my mom, when she took her first accounting course at (the University of Texas at Austin) in the ’70s, she vividly remembers sitting down in one of those big classrooms, and the professor said that he didn’t understand why the women were in that class, that they belonged in the secretarial classes.
Now, when you look at the statistics for universities, it’s more women than men. And at our firm, it’s certainly more women than men. We always joke that we need to figure out how to recruit more men here because the women outnumber them.
Q: You’re the director of the federal tax group. I would imagine that tax policy changes a lot between presidential administrations.
A: It does, and even within the same administration it can change a lot.
Effective Jan. 1, 2020 — right before the pandemic hit — we decided to break out and have designated groups for federal tax, state and local tax, estate tax and international tax. We decided to have people in charge of those groups because there’s always so many changes. It didn’t make sense, in our minds, to have everybody try to digest new legislation and learn it themselves. It made more sense for a few people to really dive in and learn it well.
We have pretty specialized clients. We like closely held businesses. We have a lot of restaurants, ranches, oil and gas. When we look at these new pieces of tax code, we look at what is really important to our client base. So that’s what these groups do.
Q: How do you educate yourself about changes in tax law? Do you actually go and read the laws?
A: Yeah. Because there were so many big changes happening last year, we decided to designate individuals to really follow one piece of a bill, or maybe the bill. But if there’s a specific program, like (the Paycheck Protection Program), having a team focused on that. Like the employee retention credit — we have a team that focuses on that, and they know those rules really well.
I headed up our PPP team. Every morning, I would go to the (U.S. Small Business Administration) website. I would see what new rules they released at midnight, because, I swear, they were releasing new FAQs at midnight every week. And I would go to Congress.gov, find the bill, read through the provisions.
I don’t know if you recall, or if you’re aware of all the changes that PPP had on the community, but it was just madness. The rules were pretty vague, and it was constantly changing. So it was just reading and reading and reading, and then trying to interpret that and share it with the office, share it with our clients. We had clients that were with these really large national banks and couldn’t get ahold of anybody. So we’re helping connect them with bankers that we knew and trusted to help them get those loans. It was madness.
Q: I saw on your website that you help families have difficult conversations about their businesses. What kinds of conversations?
A: What we sometimes see is you have one of the children who works in the business, and their sibling doesn’t. And I’ve seen it happen where mom and dad are going to leave the family business to the child that works in the business. And with the other child, “Well, we’ll give them the lake house.” And that may not be equitable, right? It may not be intentional. It’s just they didn’t think about that. And that can lead to some family drama.
Sometimes mom and dad have done a lot of estate planning, have a lot of different vehicles that they’re going to use for succession planning, a trust or a family partnership or something like that. And the children, who could be adults, don’t even know what that is. They don’t know what’s there.
Those types of conversations, they can be really nice and easy, or they can be really difficult. It just depends. We feel like we’re in a good position to bring up uncomfortable situations. They never want to talk about it, because when families talk about money and things like that, it can make them uncomfortable. We try to use that to our advantage as a CPA — we don’t mind being the bad guy that brings that up.