I began my career as a journalist before moving into the small business world in 2001, when I became a tax preparer at my family's multi-location tax business in Los Angeles, Pronto Income Tax. For several years, I used my tax season earnings to support myself while also writing professionally on a freelance basis--magazines, newspapers, websites, and creative writing projects.I found that while the tax business certainly is no pleasure cruise, I loved helping tax clients. I especially enjoyed helping our clients, mostly lower and middle income people, understand their own tax and financial situations. My goal and "secret sauce" as a tax preparer became: I won't just fill out your tax forms for our clients, I'll make sure you exit this process feeling educated, empowered, and encouraged. That approach worked well and I found myself doing 700 - 1,200 tax returns per year, while working alongside my father and numerous other Pronto Income Tax team members who excelled in their craft and mentored me and helped me grow.Roundabout 2008, I noticed that the tax clients I served appeared to value the "tax education" we provided to them equally, if not more than, they valued our service of filling out the necessary tax return paperwork. Hmmm...In 2010, searching for a new line of business for our mostly seasonal tax prep business, we started transforming our own employee training manuals into training courses that we planned to offer to our fellow tax professionals. We decided to focus on serving independent tax professionals, "underdog" type of operations like our own family tax business, under a "help the helper" model--if we could educate, empower, and encourage our fellow tax pros, those pros could then educate, empower, and encourage their own clients, and this would create a domino affect of awesomeness where people would actually know how taxes worked and why they should care, and so forth and so on. :) We released our first online tax course in September of 2011, becoming one of the first companies in the tax industry to offer online courses and online credentialing for tax professionals.Today we are an approved education provider with IRS, NASBA, and CTEC, and we have helped over 20,000 of our fellow tax professionals feel more comfortable and confident in serving their clients. We specialize in delivering convenient, relevant, and NON-BORING tax education that helps tax pros and their clients enjoy less stress and more success.Thanks for reading and I hope you are doing well.