Today we’d like to introduce you to Sean Duncan.
Thanks for sharing your story with us Sean. So, let’s start at the beginning and we can move on from there.
I am the first in my extended family to get a college degree. I originally pursued accounting (and ultimately my Masters degree in Accounting) for the sole purpose of becoming a special agent in the FBI. At the time, the FBI looked for Law, Language, and Accounting degrees as primary areas of focus.
In 2003 I had my final interviews scheduled with the Bureau and came to the realization that if I continued further, I would be stepping into a career that turned me into an absentee dad and husband. After a LOT of soul searching, I realized that being a dad and husband was more important to me than chasing bad guys. I declined the final interviews, and withdrew my name from candidacy.
At this point, I had a Masters degree in Accounting that I, honestly, didn’t want. I didn’t intend to be an accountant in any traditional sense, and I had to reevaluate everything at the age of 30.
Over the next couple years, I struggled with what I was supposed to do with the career portion of my life. At some point a couple years later, I realized why the Bureau was so attractive to me: the job mattered. The results you can achieve as an agent can actually help people and make a real difference. Once I had that realization, new opportunities opened up to me.
Ultimately, I realized that there is a vast marketplace of small business owners that desperately need someone to teach, coach, strategize, and advise them on running a business, taxes, entity selections, bookkeeping, and a host of other areas in and around accounting. In addition to the huge opportunity, there is a very limited group of professionals that focus on the small business owner.
The experience and expertise I had developed in over a decade of my professional career could be used in a way that actually makes an impact on families.
Helping a small business owner turn a business from making $20,000 a year to $200,000 a year changes that family’s future. Building strategies to reduce taxes by tens and even hundreds of thousands of dollars puts kids in college and gives families a quality of life they may not have known without the assistance.
SMD Consulting & Accounting was created with the primary goal of helping the small business owner. Over the last 11 years there have been evolutions in our business model, but the core values are the same. We have information that can help, and we do.
Now I have a business that I KNOW helps people, a wife and three awesome kids that I actually get to see and play with, and am able to present opportunities for professional growth for my team of employees. Staying on target with my core values that I first identified when pursuing the FBI is what keeps the firm pointed in the right direction.
We’re always bombarded by how great it is to pursue your passion, etc – but we’ve spoken with enough people to know that it’s not always easy. Overall, would you say things have been easy for you?
No way. Like any business owner, I have made a ton of mistakes.
The most painful: hiring the wrong people.
The most frequent: underpricing our services (giving stuff away for free).
Other: spending money in the wrong places, incorrect marketing decisions, picking the wrong vendors, and saying ‘yes’ too much and over committing myself.
So let’s switch gears a bit and go into the SMD Consulting & Accounting story. Tell us more about the business.
We are an accounting firm that specialized in consulting small businesses. We are known for being “not your typical CPA” and being able to actually explain complex concepts in English so that there is utility in the information and not just buzzwords and jargon. We actually care about the people we are helping, and I repeatedly see my team more stressed about things on behalf of the client than I think the client realizes.
We used to prepare tax returns but have recently moved away from offering that service to focus solely on consulting and accounting. We manage the books for people, clean up messes, solve IRS issues, develop business plans, create tax savings strategies, and help with a host of other services that don’t neatly fall into a bucket of accounting. We are consultants that happen to be accountants.
I am most proud of the team I have now. They are genuinely good people that ‘get’ the core values and want to be part of something bigger than just showing up to work. They want to help.
Has luck played a meaningful role in your life and business?
Luck is always there. Honestly, the insanity that is the growth of Frisco and surrounding communities is pure luck. I didn’t move here to strategically grow a business, I moved here because it was the right place to raise a family. I was VERY aware of the business growth, but I cannot claim to have realized it would be this kind of ‘once in a lifetime’ growth. If I had found the right home in Colorado, Florida, Illinois, or a host of other states that would have met my needs at that time… I could have just have easily been building a business there.
Bad luck is just part of business. I believe that you have back up plans on top of back up plans to be prepared for negative surprises, but you cannot anticipate everything. People get sick, accidents happen, and the unpredictable occurs.
Contact Info:
- Address: 8765 Stockard Dr.,
Suite 603,
Frisco, TX 75034 - Website: smdaccounting.com
- Phone: 469-252-4547
- Email: info@SMDACCOUNTING.COM
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/SMDConsultingAndAccounting/?ref=br_rs
Image Credit:
doritart.com
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