S3 Ep 1 - From 0-60 staff in 5 years with Alex Oxford from TaxValet

Today I’m talking with Alex Oxford, CMI from TaxValet.

Alex is the founder and former CEO of TaxValet. These days he serves as their Visionary and Community Ambassador.

TaxValet is a bootstrapped sales tax services company with no investors or debt, which has scaled to about sixty employees. 

Today we cover:

• [04:41] From product marketing at a sales tax software company to starting a sales tax firm
• [11:38] Hiring his mum as Employee #1
• [25:51] How to attract talented people when you can’t pay market-rate salaries
• [31:25] Why putting a 6 month freeze on taking new clients helped them to grow
• [33:22] How TaxValet structures their Org Chart with 60 staff. Hint: it’s not like a typical accounting firm and there are no ‘partners’. 
• [39:00] Rating clients as easy, medium, or hard in the sales process and using this as a factor in allocating their onboarding start date
• [47:05] How Alex stepped out of the CEO role 
• [51:29] Getting comfortable with team members giving advice in a high risk area like sales tax.

Here are a few parts of the conversation that stood out to me.

• Alex started the business because he kept hearing about the problem. When he was working at the sales tax companies, customers wanted someone to take care of the full process end to end. But the software companies didn’t want to do that which creates an opportunity for.

• I also loved hearing about how Alex structures his team. He doesn’t have ‘sales tax partners’ who are providing high-level advice for an expensive hourly rate. He’s broken down the process into lots of different parts from sales, to onboarding, 5 people doing sales tax registration opening and closing.

• We didn’t have a chance to get into Alex’s life outside of work. But he’s a great example of the Lifestyle part of the Lifestyle Accountant. He’s built an incredible company while managing complex health issues and finding time to travel and have adventures.

You can connect with him on LinkedIn or via the TaxValet website. 

This episode of the podcast is brought to you by sponsors 

Teamup: Hire top Filipino accountants without ongoing BPO fees. 

TaxValet: Sales Tax Done for You

Liveflow: Advanced financial reporting on autopilot

The Lifestyle Accountant Show is a podcast that helps today’s accounting firm leaders build successful businesses while living healthy, happy lives hosted by Meryl Johnston. 

For more information or to get in touch with us, head over to our website lifestyleaccountant.co.