After years in corporate roles, Samantha Hallburn created a firm where people come before profits—and business thrives because of it.

The Disruptors
With Liz Farr

Samantha Hallburn, founder of PBS Accounting and Tax, didn’t set out to be an accountant. After a progression through sales, marketing, HR, PR, and a stint as ops manager for a telecom company, she was working in banking. Her business owner clients needed loans, but when she asked for financials, “they had no idea what I was even talking about,” she recalls.  

Instead of turning them away, she offered to help. “I started helping my banking clients by going to their offices on my lunch break, after work, before work, on the weekends, days off to help them be able to get me what I needed.” After one particularly bad day in the corporate world, she decided to “roll the dice” and create a full-time venture. 

 “I absolutely had no idea what I was really getting into, and that it was just going to be this snowball. And we grew so fast because there was such a need and such a demand,” Hallburn says.  

She built her firm “to be the antithesis of everything I hated about corporate America, and one of the things I did hate was that you were just a number, your real life didn't matter,” she says. The very name of her firm, PBS, stands for People – Business – Service.