Financial expertise built for founder-led and family-owned businesses.
Founder-led and family-owned companies deserve the same caliber of financial thinking that larger corporations maintain an entire department to provide.
Strawberry Hill is one of Kansas City's oldest neighborhoods, settled by immigrants who arrived with almost nothing and built something lasting anyway.
Croatian, Slovenian, and Serbian families put down roots on that bluff above the river and opened the kind of businesses that outlive their founders: butcher shops, bakeries, corner grocers, places still run by the third and fourth generation today.
That's exactly who we built this firm for. Not corporations. Owners who show up, work hard, and build something meant to last well beyond them. The name isn't decoration. It's the standard we hold ourselves to.
A background in investment banking and public accounting, applied where it's rarely available.
Strawberry Hill Accounting was founded on a background in investment banking and Big Four public accounting, brought to a segment of business that has been underserved by that level of expertise.
That background matters for a specific reason. Investment banking trains a particular discipline: building financial models, stress-testing assumptions, and evaluating a business the way a lender, investor, or acquirer would. Big Four public accounting trains a different discipline: rigor, documentation, and the standards that large organizations are held to. Few advisors serving founder-led businesses carry both.
Most firms serving businesses like yours are compliance shops. They file the return correctly and the relationship ends there. That work is necessary, and we do it well, but it is the floor rather than the ceiling.
Owners, not corporations.
Our clients are founder-led and family-owned businesses across the Midwest: trades and contractors, professional services, real estate, retail, manufacturing, restaurants, and the companies that supply all of them.
What they have in common is not size or industry. It is that the owner is close to the business, the decisions carry personal as well as financial weight, and there is no internal finance team to rely on.
Owners like this ask different questions than a public company does. Our practice is built around the questions you are actually asking.
Something most CPA firms don't offer, and structurally can't.
If you take one idea from this site, take this one.
A traditional CPA firm is built around compliance: file the return correctly, close the books, meet the deadline. That work is essential, and it's also backward-looking by design. It tells you what already happened.
Forecasting, budgeting, scenario planning, and reading a business the way a lender or a buyer would: that's a different discipline entirely. It's not an accounting skill. It's an investment banking one, and it's rarely available to a business your size, because the firms that have it are built to serve companies far larger than yours.
Meanwhile, CPA fees have been climbing, often for the same compliance work as before, delivered with the same once-a-year cadence. Higher prices haven't translated into more forward-looking service. In many cases the incentive runs the other way: a firm juggling hundreds of returns during filing season has no real capacity to sit with your numbers in July and build a forecast.
That's the gap this firm is built to close. Not a better version of what a CPA already does, but the layer most of them were never structured to provide in the first place.
How we work.
One point of contact
You are not routed through a call center or handed between staff members. The person who understands your business is the person you speak with.
Plain language, without exception
If a concept cannot be explained in terms that make sense to you, that is our shortcoming to fix. You should never leave a conversation having nodded along to something you did not actually follow.
An honest recommendation, not a full sell
Not every business needs every service. We would rather recommend the engagement that genuinely fits than place you in a membership tier you will not use.
Not sure where you fit?
Tell us about your business and we'll point you to the right starting place.