The firm grew from a side business to a reported $2.85 million
Peter Vander Wall introduces Ryan Bakke as the owner of Tax Strategy 365, a CPA firm serving real-estate investors. Ryan began posting tax, finance, and accounting videos after the pandemic interrupted the personal-finance class he had taught at his church. He missed the direct experience of educating people, so online content became a way to continue that work before it became a formal acquisition channel.
Their retrospective starts with about $100,000 of revenue in 2021 while Ryan still had his job. Ryan remembers 2022 at roughly $820,000 to $850,000, followed by $1.6 million in 2023 and $2.85 million in 2024. Peter frames the conversation around the changes associated with adding more than $1 million of top-line revenue in the last of those years. They organize those changes around three parts of any business: traffic, the offer and sales process, and fulfillment.
Organic content built trust before paid acquisition became predictable
For most of their work together, Ryan’s primary traffic came from a weekly podcast distributed through YouTube and Spotify, plus short-form content on Instagram, TikTok, LinkedIn, X, and other platforms. Peter says the important 2024 marketing change was a paid funnel built around a video sales letter. He reports that the campaign was producing roughly a six-times return on ad spend at the time of the interview, while also adding people to the email list who might buy much later.
Ryan calls the time before a sales call the conversation before the conversation. Someone who has followed his work for six months may already understand the brand, the firm’s point of view, and the problems it addresses. A person who discovered the firm that week is usually harder to sell. Paid acquisition helped create more immediate opportunities, but the older content and continuing email communication gave the colder leads somewhere to learn and warm up.
They do not recommend relying on a single channel. Ryan notes that costs and buyer behavior change through the year, and different prospects respond to different formats. Peter adds that an existing organic audience and a history of real sales conversations can help the advertising platform understand the type of person the firm wants to reach. In their model, paid and organic activity reinforce each other instead of operating as isolated campaigns.
Qualification mattered more than filling the calendar
Ryan argues that many accountants have an abundance of inquiries but a shortage of qualified leads. The distinction changes the target: he would rather speak with ten people whose situation and pain fit the service than one hundred people who cannot use it or are unlikely to value it. Peter connects lead quality to both the application rules and the words used in the marketing. The message attracts a certain kind of buyer before the form screens for more concrete conditions.
For Tax Strategy 365’s core strategy offer, the application did not allow someone reporting less than $200,000 of annual income to book Ryan’s sales calendar. The firm also looked for existing rental-property ownership. Those are Ryan’s criteria for a particular service, not universal thresholds for an accounting firm. Prospects who were not ready could continue through the podcast, YouTube channel, templates, boot camps, or another appropriate offer until their circumstances changed.
Ryan and Peter warn against responding to weak qualification by immediately creating a cheaper, time-intensive version of the main service. Their sequence was to make the higher-ticket tax strategy offer consistent and its delivery more streamlined before adding lower-commitment options. Ryan recalls that charging $500 for hour-long consultations once produced about $25,000 to $30,000 a month, yet those buyers rarely continued into the roughly $5,000 annual package. The calls delivered so much one-time value that the client no longer felt a need for the broader relationship.
The email list connected content, paid traffic, and the core offer
The firm’s traffic came from social posts, the podcast, a Facebook group for real-estate investors, and paid campaigns. Peter describes the email list as the central hub: once a prospect joined it, the firm could point that person toward an episode, the community, a useful resource, or an application when the timing made sense. Each road eventually led toward the tax strategy offer, with a down-sell or up-sell considered around that core rather than allowed to fragment it.
Ryan’s trust example comes from someone he met once at a holiday party. A year later, the man knew details of Ryan’s business and life because he had kept seeing Ryan’s Instagram content, even though Ryan barely remembered him. For Ryan, that encounter demonstrated how recurring media can create many one-sided relationships that later make an actual conversation feel familiar. Peter’s marketing goal is to shorten that trust-building period without discarding it.
They also became more direct about asking interested people to act. Ryan says an audience member who is ready for the next step cannot take it if the firm never presents an offer. Retargeting ads and more regular invitations let engaged followers raise a hand, while the cold funnel created a separate path for strangers. The quick conversions could support the immediate economics of the campaign, and the email list preserved the longer-term opportunity from people who needed months rather than weeks.
The sales process had to move from Ryan to the firm
By the start of the period discussed, Tax Strategy 365 had two sales representatives and later added a setter. That team structure introduced a tension: Ryan’s public content made prospects want Ryan, but a company that depended on him for every sales and client call would remain difficult to scale or eventually transfer. The marketing therefore needed to preserve Ryan as a visible authority while setting the expectation that the buyer was hiring Tax Strategy 365 and its team.
Ryan says the founder-led model helped when the firm was small because prospects could speak directly with the owner who would also perform the work. The limit appeared when monthly revenue stalled around $40,000 to $50,000 and the company could not create new business while Ryan was away. Before his 2023 honeymoon, he hired his first salesperson. The representative had been a client and had a sales background, giving that person both professional skill and firsthand belief in the service.
The sales message changed with the handoff. Instead of selling access to Ryan or describing only an attractive end result, the representatives spent more time demonstrating that they understood the prospect’s present tax problem. Peter and Ryan argue that a firm earns the right to propose a solution after it has clarified the buyer’s pain and its consequences. Because the company—not Ryan alone—could solve that problem, the identity of the person delivering each step became less central to the decision.
Hiring a tax strategist required a transfer of authority
Fulfillment became the next constraint after traffic and the offer were working. In spring 2024, Ryan hired Austin to take over most day-to-day tax strategy calls. Austin had already held a similar role in a similar accounting firm, which gave Ryan evidence that the technical work would be familiar. Ryan kept one weekly call for the broader client group, but most other strategy delivery moved to the team.
Clients did not automatically trust the new expert. Early on, some heard Austin’s answer and then asked Ryan whether it was correct. Ryan responded by making clear that Austin knew the work better than he did and by featuring Austin wherever clients and prospects learned: pre-call material, joint webinars, boot camps, and a podcast. The repeated appearances let Austin demonstrate expertise instead of depending on a job title to confer authority.
Peter connects the transition to the owner’s ego. A founder may enjoy being the smartest person in the room and the destination for every question, but that makes the founder the upper limit on the organization. Ryan’s willingness to hire someone stronger in the operating role, allow him to outshine the founder, and direct trust toward him was part of leaving fulfillment without weakening the client experience.
A focused niche made tax preparation easier to systematize
Ryan had stepped away from day-to-day tax preparation earlier. He credits the real-estate focus with making the work more repeatable: the firm encounters a bounded set of events such as buying, renting, and selling property, so it can build questions, workbooks, templates, and automations around those patterns. Assistants communicate with the client and collect documents, preparation and review follow, and a U.S.-based CPA performs a second review, communicates with the client, and delivers the return.
The system was not presented as infallible. Near one deadline, a senior reviewer had to step away for a family issue. With no second line of defense, Ryan canceled a trip and returned to the work. The corrective discussion is operational: avoid leaving a cluster of returns until the final days, identify the next qualified person who can step in, and retain enough capacity through the slower part of the year that the owner is not the only emergency backup.
Peter connects staffing stability back to the other two parts of the business. Predictable lead flow and a clear offer help the firm keep capable people employed beyond tax season. That consistency can improve life for the team and make the firm more attractive to strong employees. In this story, delivery capacity is not a separate back-office concern; it depends on the marketing and sales engine feeding the organization year-round.
Human relationships remained part of the scaled service
Ryan closes by emphasizing personal contact in a virtual CPA firm. His longest client relationships often included an in-person meeting. He and Peter discuss seeing clients at real-estate conferences, a client gathering held around an event in Nashville, and plans at the time to experiment with Tax Strategy 365’s own in-person events. Ryan also kept the weekly client call so people continued to see him and feel his support after most recurring work had moved elsewhere.
They see those relationships as a defense against accounting becoming an interchangeable commodity. The firm can automate and delegate delivery while still giving clients a connection to Ryan’s point of view and the company’s story. Peter contrasts a highly efficient but impersonal experience with a more relationship-intensive one; Ryan’s firm was choosing team-based operations without abandoning visible human involvement.
The interview ends with Ryan’s belief that new firm owners still have substantial opportunity because relatively few accountants consistently publish useful content and many smaller practices remain highly owner-dependent. That is an opinion about the market, not a forecast. The concrete lesson from his own story is narrower: growth required the firm to keep finding the current bottleneck, strengthen the people and systems around it, and move Ryan out of work that a capable team could own.
