Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to Tiffany Vaught. We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.
Hi Tiffany, thanks for joining us today. Almost all entrepreneurs have had to decide whether to start now or later? There are always pros and cons for waiting and so we’d love to hear what you think about your decision in retrospect. If you could go back in time, would you have started your business sooner, later or at the exact time you started?
I started my business when I was 26, so I don’t wish I’d started it sooner…I wish I had started running it like a business sooner. Working on my business instead of in it. It took me a decade to realize that was two very different things. About 10 years in, I came to an inflection point because I was maxed out on the amount of clients I could service and I wanted to be able to impact more small business owners. I started to read a lot, listen to podcasts, talk to other professionals/colleagues and join professional groups. Then I understood that there are two types of business owners: lifestyle owners and value creators. I was a lifestyle owner up until that point. Everything in my business revolved around me, a lot of the knowledge, processes, client relationships, were all in my head. I made a decision that I wanted to be a value creator, and once I made that decision it changed every decision I made from that point on. Everything from how much I pay myself and take out of the company, where I spend my time, how I train my team, and so on.
Tiffany, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?
I’ve wanted to be a CPA since I was 16 when I saw a friend’s mom show up to our swim meet in a suit. She looked smart, empowered, in charge of her life, and I wanted to feel all of those things. I job shadowed a few of the CPA’s in my town and thought it sounded like a really interesting job. In college, I had a full academic scholarship and had also received a lot of scholarship award money, so I didn’t have to work, but I found accounting so exciting I worked multiple jobs simultaneously. I tutored accounting year round, had a tax internship during the year and an audit internship during the summers at Deloitte. Once I got started working at Deloitte out of college, I realized pretty quickly audit was too slow for me, so I moved back to tax because I loved the pace of it and the ability to advise clients. Over the next few years I worked with clients of all sizes and found that I really loved working with small business owners…they were scrappy, creative, and needed help. While I was in love with the work, I wasn’t in love with the physical demands of the job. No matter what size firm I worked for, I spent around 6 months of the year working 80-85 hours a week. I would fall asleep driving home and roll through intersections. I saw how the long term stress took it’s toll on my colleagues. I knew there had to be a better way, so at 26 I setout to create my own firm. What I’m really proud of today is that I have a company that provides high quality strategy/advisory services with excellent customer service to entrepreneurs and real estate investors from a highly proactive strategic standpoint. Us small guys are the backbone of the economy and play a huge part in our communities so we want to help them thive. We do this by aggressively seek ways to make our clients money through a focus on increasing their net worth with the goal of financial independence, which means we are highly collaborative with our client’s financial advisors, attorneys, lenders and other key advisors. While also providing much needed back office and fractional CFO support while they grow. And on top of that I’m equally as proud of the culture we’ve created at Encurio…it’s collaborative, supportive and we aren’t chained to our desks 6 months out of the year. Part of this has been defining our values and making sure that the clients we partner with reflect those. When outside advisors or new clients work with us for the first time, it’s usually a new experience for them to have their accountants be more deeply involved in their financial decisions and taking a more strategic and holistic approach, it’s extremely rewarding to find that extra $150k to pay for a client’s kids to go to private school, or add $500k to someone’s net worth by making some changes to their strategy and seeing the impact it will have on their lives not just today but long term. Now that our clients are getting older, we’ve been through quite a few business exits of varying size and each one is different. What I have watched over the last 20 years are entrepreneurs leaving millions of dollars in wealth on the table when they want to retire because they didn’t prioritize the right things, have the right advisors in place to educate them, and strategically plan and they don’t have enough to live on. Encurio’s next chapter will be to educate small business owners on how to plan for an exit because this must be done years in advance to really reap the rewards, and hopefully this will mean more financial security and legacy for the entrepreneurs that show up everyday and take risks to build their companies.
Let’s talk about resilience next – do you have a story you can share with us?
Oh there are too many to count, life is strange that way. But looking back, the day my daughter was diagnosed with stage 3 cancer was probably the hardest. She was 18 months at the time and it was April 1, 2016…and I was in the busiest 2 weeks of my year. Seems like things always choose difficult times to pop up. What was a routine dr. visit turned into not leaving the hospital as we were immediately admitted to the oncology unit and she went into surgery to get a biopsy. As my world turned upside down, I leaned into my strength…communication. I called my team and let them know what was happening and we quickly came up with a plan on how to get through the rest of tax season. I then communicated with our clients and all of my worry about not being able to properly service them evaporated as the words of kindness came flooding back. The grace and compassion they showed me in that time of my life was really amazing.
I would say the second thing would be back in 2018, I was going through a divorce and as we all know, those can be stressful. What added to the stress was the fact that my business partner was my soon to be ex-husband. We managed to split the client list and work that out, but it I had never managed this business entirely alone. Not having someone to bounce ideas off of, help make hard decisions, and split the administrative work was a very different emotional experience, but one that was essential to my growth. At first, no one would even let me lease office space because I wanted to start my own company and leave the old one behind, so even though I had a decade of business history…my “new” business (according to the Secretary of State) had only existed for 3 months and lessors were not exactly understanding. It took me until Nov of 2018 to finally get a lease and with tax season rolling around in January I had limited time to setup everything from phone systems, software, servers, the physical office, and getting my team situated, while being emotionally drained and trying to figure out how to be a single mother to a 3 year old while running a business. My tenacity got me through with the support of my family and team, but it was a rough few years, and I wouldn’t trade it for anything. It taught me so much about myself.
I think those two events have defined how I view my life today…and honestly, I now have a huge amount of respect for how strong I am and my ability to keep getting back up.
What’s a lesson you had to unlearn and what’s the backstory?
Ha, I’ve had to unlearn this many times over. I would probably say I had to unlearn being so independent which really is an ego problem. My entire life I was applauded for being independent and I reaped a lot of rewards from it. I had my first real job in 7th grade delivering papers in the morning and had multiple summer jobs because my family had limited funds and I wanted to be able to buy myself things I wanted. I remember thinking “well, if I want things I’ve got to do it myself”. I applied to scholarships and college and my parents didn’t even know. I just told them one day that I got into multiple universities and had a full ride and I’d like them to drop me off in August and that was that. Collaboration was foreign to me and I would get annoyed that my classmates and friends moved so slowly, procrastinated, or had goals that were too easy to attain. This resulted in years of doing everything for everyone and drawing to me people that wanted me to do everything for them, which is exhausting and just perpetuated my feelings that everyone was incapable of doing much on their own. Realizing that there are multiple ways to move about the world, do things and motivations was eye opening…and one that after a decade of having to relearn comes far easier to me now. My ego and independence kept me from learning from others, seeing different perspectives that have changed the trajectory of my business and life, and growing. It’s one of the biggest lessons I’ve had to learn and I’m grateful.
Contact Info:
- Website: encuriohq.com
- Instagram: @encuriohq
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/encurio/?viewAsMember=true
- Twitter: @encuriohq
- Yelp: https://www.yelp.com/biz/encurio-long-beach