Gretchen Roberts·November 27, 2023

Escaping Golden Handcuffs by Buying a Business | Gretchen Roberts Interview

Gretchen Roberts left a senior director marketing role in corporate tech (making roughly $200k-$500k all-in) to buy Adam Shay CPA, a ~$2M-revenue Southeast US tax, accounting, and financial advisory firm, renaming it Red Bike Advisors after closing in June 2023. A first-time buyer with no accounting background, she spent four to five months running her own proprietary cold-outreach campaign (about 1,000 contacts, 200 responses, 50 calls) influenced by Roland Frasier's 'Epic Challenge,' but ultimately sourced this specific deal through a broker after narrowing her criteria away from route-based and blue-collar businesses toward white-collar professional services with recurring revenue and modernization upside. She financed the purchase with a roughly 70% SBA loan, 20% seller note, and 10% equity at about 1x revenue, keeping the seller, Adam Shay, on as the firm's first virtual CFO client. The episode focuses heavily on her thesis for choosing accounting (essential service, low share of client expense, room for value-based pricing on advisory work versus compliance), the leadership lessons of her first months (overstepping during tax season, one-on-one trust-building, KPI transparency), and her forward plan to grow via a proactive/fractional-CFO service line and to solve the industry's hiring bottleneck by offering flexible, part-time accounting roles.

Deal facts

multiple: about 1x revenue
sde ebitda: not disclosed by seller; industry SDE margins cited as 20-40% of revenue depending on firm size
revenue: a little over $2 million
financing structure: SBA loan (~70%), seller note (~20%), buyer equity (~10%); seller note tied partly to first year's outcome
notes: Business bought June 2023, renamed from Adam Shay CPA to Red Bike Advisors (had to drop the name due to CPA licensing rules). 16 employees at time of interview, growing to 18. Seller Adam Shay stayed on full-time as the firm's first virtual CFO client-facing hire.

Why this business

Gretchen was a corporate marketing/technology executive making roughly $200k-$500k all-in who felt stuck in a cushy but unfulfilling senior director role (PowerPoints, travel, Zoom calls) at 45 and wanted a new decade-long chapter that scratched an entrepreneurial itch she'd had since running her own freelance writing business while raising her kids. She explicitly ruled out blue-collar/route-based businesses (she felt she lacked the personality to manage blue-collar workers and disliked route-based structures like waste management that cap growth) and a marketing agency (too close to what she'd already done for 20 years, no new challenge). She landed on accounting/financial advisory because it was a white-collar professional services business she could lead without doing the technical work herself, had recurring revenue, essential-service durability, low share of client operating expense (so clients don't renegotiate), potential to modernize a paper-and-Excel industry, and room to build pricing power via advisory/CFO services rather than pure compliance work.

What's working

Bought an already well-run, modern (cloud-based), team-oriented firm with strong existing culture rather than a distressed turnaround
Positioned herself to the team as the 'avatar' client and the person who runs the business so technical staff can focus on client work, rather than getting pulled into tax/bookkeeping details
Brought corporate-style KPI discipline and financial transparency (e.g., breaking out labor costs by department to expose gross margin issues) that the firm lacked
Did one-on-one hourlong meetings with every team member in week one to build trust and surface improvement opportunities
Seller (Adam Shay) stayed on as the firm's first virtual/fractional CFO client, which both retains his expertise and pilots a new service line
New client acquisition described as easy ('shooting fish in a barrel') given weak competition in proactive accounting services
Plans to differentiate on hiring by offering part-time, remote, flexible-hours roles to accountants who don't want all-or-nothing 70-hour tax season jobs, aiming to build a queue of applicants rather than having to recruit

What's hard

Learned the hard way not to pull the tax team into non-urgent initiatives (software migration, onboarding templates) during/near tax season; team pushed back and she had to backtrack
Team was outwardly agreeable but grumbled among themselves before someone eventually gave her honest feedback directly
Currently paying herself very little to preserve cash flow while stabilizing the business, covering post-acquisition costs like backfilling departed staff and new hires
Gross margins on labor were revealed to be too high due to inefficiency (manual work, chasing clients for documents) rather than under-pricing or overpaying staff
Recruiting/retaining accountants is an industry-wide bottleneck given a shrinking pipeline of accounting graduates
Had to walk away from two other accounting firm targets: one where the seller was too central to client relationships (not transferable), another where she and the seller couldn't agree on a price because the EBITDA was disproportionately small relative to revenue
Most accounting-firm brokers refused to even speak with her because she is not a CPA
Personal tendency toward workaholism; has to consciously balance driving growth against the reason she left corporate (to reclaim time for family)

Notable quotes

I buy opportunities not problems. I buy history not potential. I buy profitability not turnarounds.

It's not no money down, it's no money out of pocket.

I probably reached out to maybe a thousand people over the course of four or five months and I probably corresponded with 200 of those and I got on calls with probably about 50.

I am your business avatar. I am a small business owner and I don't even necessarily care about any of that stuff, just like our clients don't. I want you to do it for me and I don't want to get any notices from the IRS.