If you try to help everyone, you don’t help anyone.

The Disruptors

With Liz Farr

Salim Omar, CPA, opened his firm in 1996 after working as a CFO in a small investment boutique firm because he wanted to be his own boss. But the experience was terrible: “I found myself working long hours. I was not enjoying the work I was doing. Having the team was a revolving door.”

“There’s got to be a better way,” Omar said then. “If this is what entrepreneurship is, I'm not sure if I want it anymore.”

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Omar started reading and studying books by other entrepreneurs, many outside the accounting industry. “And I just took what they were saying and what they were doing in their business, and they were getting success, and I brought it back to my own practice.” After adding a few minor tweaks here and there, Omar, the CEO of StraightTalkCPAs, says, “My practice was very different to what it had been when I started it a few years back.”