Clients at Hovey and Company joke that you shouldn't drink the water. Babies keep arriving. Meghan Hovee runs a predominantly women led accounting firm in Kansas City, and she has built it on a bet most CPA firms aren't willing to make: that women can have careers and full family lives without either one collapsing. Four kids in, nearly ten years in business, two offices across Kansas City, and tax seasons that cap around 45 hours a week. This conversation gets into how she got there, why she left big four after nine months, and what she learned the hard way about hiring, culture, and delegation.
What You'll Hear
- Why clients joke don't drink the water at Hovey and Company
- How Meghan left a big four accounting job after only nine months
- The non traditional path from bank teller to CPA to firm owner
- Why she and her husband chose quality of life over keeping up with the Joneses
- How the E Myth by Michael Gerber reframed her decision to scale
- The rules of thumb that keep tax season capped near 45 hours a week
- Why she hires for character and aptitude and teaches the skill set
- How learning about visual, auditory, and kinesthetic processing changed her team
A predominantly women led accounting firm that isn't slowing down
Meghan Hovee owns Hovey and Company, a small Kansas City accounting firm focused entirely on small business clients. The team is predominantly women, which wasn't a marketing plan so much as a consequence of how she hires and what kind of workplace she built. The firm offers a narrow set of services: tax, accounting, and related advising. Two offices now, one up in the Briar Cliff area north of the river and one on Ward Parkway to the south, so they can serve both halves of the metro.
The running joke inside the firm is that clients should not drink the water. Team members keep getting pregnant. Meghan has four boys of her own, and she started the business and started having babies at roughly the same time. She is up front about how much of her thinking on this was personal before it was strategic. She grew up expecting to be a stay at home mom. Then she got her CPA, started serving construction crews and print shops and other small business owners, and realized she was equally passionate about the work and about being home with her kids.
That double passion is baked into how the firm operates. Meghan wants clients well served and she wants her team to stay. She talks about wanting the firm to be a contradiction to the common assumption that a woman either pauses her family to go hard at a career or pauses her career to be present at home. Hovey and Company is trying to prove, on a daily basis, that she doesn't have to choose.
From bank teller to big four to out the door in nine months
Meghan did not walk a straight line into accounting. She took two years out of high school for a volunteer program before ever starting college. She bounced from a community college in Nebraska to Rockhurst University in Kansas City, fell in love with the city, and stayed. Along the way she thought she would go into education, then psychology. What kept pulling her back was a part time job as a bank teller. She loved it.
She didn't know much about business as a field of study. She knew accounting dealt in numbers, and she knew she liked the teller window, which also dealt in numbers. That was enough to pick a major. By her junior year she was on an accounting track, and she kept going all the way to her CPA.
Her first real job was in big four accounting, which she describes as a prestigious and intense track for a new CPA. It lasted nine months. The hours weren't the problem. She had a strong work ethic and would go on to put in equivalent hours building her own firm. The problem was the lack of human connection. Stuck behind an Excel sheet day after day, she missed the person on the other side of the counter, the client who was happy to see her. Walmart did not care whether she got the number right. She did.
She briefly chased a financial planning path, even getting series licensed and learning the CFP side, before deciding she would rather leave investments to financial advisors and focus on tax, accounting, and teaching business owners how to run the back office well. That's when she started Hovey and Company. Her plan was a few tax returns and slow growth. Instead it exploded.
The E Myth moment and the decision to build a firm instead of a practice
When demand took off, Meghan ran into the classic small business fork in the road. She could stay a solo practitioner and keep tight control of a capped client list, or she could build a firm and try to change the way her industry serves small business. The crack in the existing model was obvious from her inbox. Nine out of ten new inquiries sounded the same. My CPA stopped answering my email. My CPA was fine last year and now I can't reach them. The supply and demand in accounting, especially below the big corporate dollar tier, was badly out of balance.
She read the first few chapters of The E Myth Revisited by Michael Gerber. That was the book that reframed the choice for her. She had been the accountant, the owner, and the technician all at once. If she wanted to scale, she had to build a business, not just do the work. She asked herself which one she actually wanted to do, and she decided to scale.
Scaling meant keeping teammates longer than the industry norm. To do that she had to give them the same thing she loved about being her own boss: autonomy, a results orientation instead of a micromanaged clock, and a workplace that could absorb real family life. She designed the service model around that. Clients get outsourced accountant style support year round, not just a tax return once a season. Team members get a schedule and a culture that survives April. Both sides compound over time, which is why she calls the model fruit of a lot of planning and reviewing and strategizing.
How they actually keep tax season around 45 hours
Meghan is blunt that tax season at Hovey and Company does not look like tax season at most firms. Most weeks in the busy stretch cap around 45 hours. An individual accountant may hit 50 or 55 for a couple of weeks. She is proud that April 14 and 15 get calmer each year, not louder.
The rules that make that possible are not glamorous. Clients have a deadline to send documents in or they get moved to extension. Response time commitments run in both directions. If you send us documents by this date, expect questions by this date so you can be filed by this date. Accounting firms notoriously go dark once you send your paperwork in. Hovey and Company holds itself to the opposite.
The other piece is the year round service mix. Because the firm doesn't live or die on tax season, the calendar is smoothed out by ongoing accounting, advising, and bookkeeping work. Tax heats up but it doesn't hockey stick. They also have an explicit view of who is and isn't their client. If you're shopping on price, Hovey and Company isn't for you. If you want your CPA to push the boundary on compliance, also not for you. Those parameters aren't arrogance. They're how the team stays sane.
Meghan frames the whole system as boundaries plus structure equals happier people on both sides of the engagement. She also credits her husband Luke, who stayed home for about a year and a half with their kids, as a critical piece of how the family made this math work. The short lived big four grind taught her one thing. The long run firm she runs now taught her that sustainable pace isn't soft. It is the whole strategy.
Hiring for character, aptitude, and the learning style reveal
The hiring philosophy at Hovey and Company has not changed much in ten years. Character and personality come first. Skills are trainable and in most cases the firm wants to train them in house anyway. What Meghan did add over time was a third gate: aptitude. They had teammates who fit the culture perfectly but were never going to love the accounting work. Culture fit plus wrong role is still the wrong hire.
They also slowed down the hiring process itself. A candidate will typically go through a quick virtual screen, a more traditional in office meeting, and then a casual coffee with a few team members. Different contexts surface different things. The extra time is intentional. Meghan wants people to stay, so she invests in the front end.
The mindset shift she keeps coming back to is openness to difference. The single most game changing professional development she points to is a training on visual, auditory, and kinesthetic learning. Before that training she was annoyed when certain teammates wanted another meeting or another conversation to talk something through. After it, she understood their brains needed that processing, the same way her brain needed to decide and move on in three sentences over email. Now she proactively offers a 15 minute call instead of resenting it.
She uses her integrator Kelly as an example. Kelly test drove a car to her own driveway to make sure suitcases fit before buying it. Meghan, a visual processor, buys a car because it looks pretty and will hold four kids. Neither approach is wrong. Put them on the same team with clear roles and the firm runs better than either of them could run it alone. Meghan also adheres to the hire slow, fire fast principle, which for her means being very clear up front about what behavior is and isn't acceptable so that parting ways, when it happens, is clean and fair.
About Meghan Hovee
Meghan Hovee is the owner of Hovey and Company, a Kansas City accounting firm focused on small business tax, accounting, and advising. A CPA who started the firm after a short stint in big four accounting, she has built a predominantly women led team across two Kansas City offices while raising four boys with her husband Luke. The firm will mark ten years in business in September.