Three years ago, I called my accountant and told him I would be leaving my employer to start my own business. He’d been my accountant for almost 10 years, so I thought he’d be happy to know that I would be utilizing more of his services. Literally, the next day, I got a letter in the mail telling me that his firm could no longer service my account. I was fired! They didn’t actually write the words “you’re fired!,” but they basically did.
I was standing outside in front of my house next to my mailbox when I read the letter. I was so confused that I decided to call him immediately to find out what was going on. The phone rang once and he answered my call. I told him I got his letter and asked if it was a mistake. He said, nope. Not a mistake. He told me that for the last few years his firm had struggled to find accountants, so they made the decision to work only with clients with simple tax returns (e.g., W2s only) and long-time, larger clients. In short, they didn’t have the staff they needed to adequately service clients in the middle. Their decision to let me go as a client was a fait accompli, so I had to move on.
I’ve since found another CPA, but it was not easy. I asked my new CPA if he’d had the same staffing problems as my previous CPA, and he said, of course. According to The CPA Journal, from 2014 to 2020, the number of accounting graduates decreased by 34%. In recent years, the number of students who were awarded accounting degrees is on the rise (Journal of Accountancy). While this is a positive trend, the number of graduates still isn’t anywhere close to where it was 10 years ago.
At Serac Ventures, we seek to identify paradigm shifts that create opportunities for investment. The decreasing supply of professional talent such as CPAs portends a need for technology to fill the gap. Hence, our most recent investment into Uprise. Uprise provides embedded tax and advisory services for small-to-medium-sized businesses and complex earners. A complex earner can be defined as someone with various streams of income that don’t fit neatly onto a W2. This may include freelancers, restaurant owners, healthcare providers, creators, real estate agents, and more.
Uprise doesn’t just automate away tax services and advisory services. Uprise’s technology helps their in-house CPAs to successfully service and do more for their clients than they could otherwise. The company’s competitive advantage is that their clients get the benefit of the human touch and a streamlined customer experience that eliminates the worries associated with meeting tax filing deadlines and/or misreported information.
The founder, Jessica Chen, is a thoughtful leader with deep experience in the fintech industry. What most impressed us about Jessica was not just her background, but her hyper focus on the customer experience. What she and her team have built at Uprise is the quintessential definition of a service-as-a-software company. Their technology increases customer throughput, enhances the customer experience, and maintains the human in the loop. There is so much chatter about technology replacing humans, especially in service-based businesses. The reality is that optimal business outcomes (in most cases) are derived when you have both — humans and technology.
We believe that Uprise has a tremendous opportunity now, and in the years to come, to positively exploit the integration of technology into a service-based industry. Millions of small-to-medium-sized businesses and complex earners struggle to file their taxes on time and to get answers from their CPA. These individuals need better service. And, due to the complexity of their situations, they need technology to align and organize things. Uprise is the solution.
We are excited to partner with the company as they transform the future of tax!
