By Jessica Irving Marschall, CPA
April 28th, 2026
MAS LLC | www.MarschallTax.com
Like most CPAs serving small businesses, we have been underwater with demand for tax advisory services. Our specific client base, small businesses (whether pass-through entities or small C corps) and the individuals running them, sits in a difficult middle space. The excellent larger firms in our region simply do not have the bandwidth to serve smaller clients well, and what has filled that void are firms that are, frankly, causing problems.
Our business model rests on a simple premise: clients deserve responsive tax advisory services, even when they cannot allocate $2,000 to $5,000 a month for tax work. I am notorious for my quick response times, partly by design and partly because if I do not respond quickly, my 50 year old brain will be fried by the backlog. Responsiveness is not a luxury service, rather we consider it the baseline of competent advisory work.
What We Are Seeing in the Market
One of our new clients arrived recently with a relatively simple return: a Schedule E and a new business. The prior firm inexplicably had her make an S election prior to profitability, sat on her books for months without reconciling them, and went silent until April 15th, at which point they wanted to charge her for an extension. This is not an isolated story. Many of these firms operate with high turnover and are so inundated with work that they cannot respond competently or promptly to anyone. Many times clients are shifted from one staff accountant to another without a designated contact.
We currently have a little over 400 clients. Despite our 25 incredibly brilliant team members, I still have contact on ALL clients. And fortunately or unfortunately for clients, this means they receive 2 a.m. texts and/or emails from me micromanaging their tax lives…and I refuse to change this despite my team’s begging of better boundaries!
We also see the strip-mall version of this problem, where professionals with a two-week data-entry training course are doing things like depreciating land or deducting full mortgage payments on a Schedule C for a small part-time business. These errors are not minor and expose clients to audit risk, penalties, and significant downstream tax exposure. We handle quite a bit of clean-up from audits from these strip mall organizations. Their “audit protection” does not appear to protect very much and they charge some hefty fees for their services.
Why We Are Opening Our Doors Again
For the past few years, we have only been taking referral clients. Unfortunately, very few of those referrals were local to our Fredericksburg area. This year we changed course by bringing on an additional five team members, and our team members tend not to be transitional. They like to work with our firm for years.
Part of that retention is by design. Across all four of our companies (MAS LLC, The Green Mission Inc., Probity Appraisal Group LLC, and GM-ESG), we have built a working environment that reflects the realities of adult life:
- No set work schedule. Everyone moved to remote work post-COVID and stayed there. You work when you work and get things done.
- No designated vacation or sick days. If you or a child or other family member is sick you take care of them. We all keep each other in the loop and cover when someone is gone.
- No clocking in or out, and no micromanaging of when work happens.
- Full healthcare and 401(k) benefits, even though we are technically small businesses and do not need to legally provide these benefits.
- Compensation that keeps pace with the ever-increasing costs of living in our area.
As a mother of five, I recognize that the US school day, child care logistics, illnesses, and family responsibilities are simply not conducive to a 9 to 5 work day. We do not need to know who worked when. We need the work to get done well and on time. That is the standard. We like our employees to be alive, healthy, and paid well enough to actually thrive. It is amazing what this model does for our company…our employees work harder, are less likely to leave, are healthy and can pay their bills and our firm continues to grow.
Our Local Focus
We are now actively working with Fredericksburg-area small businesses and accepting new clients from our home community. Our goal is to alleviate some of the strain on our brilliant CPA colleagues in this area who are drowning in work, and to help local clients avoid the two extremes we keep encountering: unresponsive larger firms on one end, and undertrained preparers making consequential technical errors on the other.
A Network for Simpler Returns
Not every client needs a firm like ours. We are also building out a referral network for individuals who need simpler tax services, such as basic 1040s with W-2 income and mortgage interest. We maintain a list of qualified accountants and CPAs with a lower price point and the bandwidth to take on these simpler returns. The best part of that list is that those professionals know when to call in a firm like ours if a return becomes complicated and will always check in with us with questions.
We also have a few local bookkeepers, with whom we have worked for years, that we are happy to refer to clients, along with a trusted group of financial advisors and local legal professionals to round out the network.
Looking Ahead
Expanding MAS LLC alongside our other companies felt frightening for a few minutes before we dove in. Connecting with new clients and doing our best to bring large-firm expertise to a small-business client at a small-business budget is genuinely energizing work. We are excited to get started.
If you are a small business owner or individual taxpayer in the Fredericksburg area looking for responsive, technically sound tax advisory work, we would welcome the conversation.
And as we updated a few months back, we expanded our small business QSBS practice area, which layered with exciting provisions like Opportunity Zones can be a great option for small businesses who produce a tangible or intangible assets…along with a spate of other requirements, which you can ready about here:
Jessica Irving Marschall, CPA, ISA AM, is President and CEO of MAS LLC, The Green Mission Inc., Probity Appraisal Group LLC, and GM-ESG. She has 26 years of CPA experience and serves clients nationwide on tax advisory, valuation, deconstruction appraisal, and ESG advisory matters.
