Microbusiness Profile: Washington Accounting Services

Posted on | July 21, 2009 | 2 Comments

Over the last few months, we’ve heard fairly often about “forced entrepreneurs” or “accidental entrepreneurs.” Those are the folks who get laid off during economic downturns, can’t find a job, and end up starting a small business out of something like desperation.

Usually, we are told, the proprietors of these little desperation enterprises set them aside as soon as the labor market improves. As to that, it is difficult to say without relevant research. All I know is that the number of nonemployer firms does not decline in the wake of an economic recovery.

Or, at least, that has not happened since 1997, when the Census Bureau started publishing annual nonemployer numbers. We’ll have to wait to see what happens when the job market recovers from the current recession.

And, of course, in spite of the encouraging “think how many corporate icons were launched during recessions” mantra, survival for both established small firms and start-ups is even more challenging than usual these days.

All of which is why the story of Washington Accounting Services is both gratifying and encouraging — because it is a story that defies just about all of the conventional wisdom cited above.

Washington Accounting Services is a financial services outfit headquartered in Waldorf, MD, in the Washington, D.C. metro area. It is owned and operated by Tiffany Washington.

(To demonstrate the degree of serendipity involved here, when she went looking for office space, the place she eventually leased happened to be located on Old Washington Road.)

Tiffany is a CPA who got laid off in 2007. When her initial job search proved unsuccessful, she began working as an independent contractor and from there, Tiffany says, “it just bloomed.”

“I said, ‘I think I have a business here, I need to structure it’,” she told me during our telephone interview.

Among the other things she did to structure her fledgling firm, Tiffany joined the National Association for the Self-Employed (NASE). And that was when the next chapter in her business adventure began.

She applied for and won a $3,000 Business Development Grant from the NASE, part of the $350,000 in grants awarded by the organization over the last three years. The award was announced in October 2008 and she received the money the following January. Tiffany used the proceeds to upgrade her software, lease an office and hire a temporary, part-time assistant.

Doesn’t sound like much, does it? The software and the office allowed her to use her time much more efficiently. The technology helped to streamline processes for her but more important was the office space. Since she wasn’t comfortable inviting clients to visit her home office, Tiffany was traveling to her clients homes to meet with them and the commutes were eating up her time.

With commercial office space, she could allow them to visit her. “If it took me an hour to drive to my client’s home and an hour to meet with them, then a single client visit was taking three hours. If my clients come to me, I can see three of them in the amount of time it used to take to visit just one,” she explained.

Those three simple steps were amazingly effective. Tiffany has seen her company’s revenues triple; she says she earned more money in the first quarter of this year than she did in all of 2008. As of June, Washington Accounting Services was on a pace to earn between $175,000 and $200,000 in 2009.

Given the spectacular return on investment that Tiffany realized from her grant proceeds, it should surprise anyone to learn that the NASE, following up, awarded her an additional $30,000 gift “in recognition of the excellent small-business practices she employed to catapult her start-up venture into a successful business.”

The whole thing reads like a movie script, doesn’t it?

When asked about her biggest business headache — and you may be wondering what she could possibly have to complain about at this point — Tiffany voices another common microbusiness complaint: not enough hours in the day.

Interestingly, because of all this wonderful good fortune, she has found herself working on the business, rather than in the business. That, according to the small business gurus, is precisely what you are supposed to do in order to be a successful small business owner.

But Tiffany is very big on customer service and she frets that her work to grow and improve her firm is taking her time and focus away from her clients. Right now, her temporary assistant has become permanent and is upgrading her skills so that she will soon be seeing clients and helping to prepare their taxes. That will free some of Tiffany’s time.

She is also considering hiring another assistant before the end of the year.

Tiffany Washington told me that she does not have any long term plans to grow into another Ernst & Young. She would be perfectly content if Washington Accounting Services “never grew another inch” but, at the same time, she will not get in the way if the fates decree that the firm is destined to grow still more.

In some ways, it almost does not matter whether this young firm grows past micro size eventually. As a “forced” entrepreneur who started a small firm during a recession, it is enough that Tiffany Washington’s business is an unambiguous success.

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