Tax & Advisory
Accent Financial Services
Tax preparation and strategy, accounting, and fractional CFO work for owner-operators and their families. The forty-year practice, rebuilt for the modern legacy builder.
40 yrsOf practice lineage
Start here
What brought you?
Four different people land on this page. Pick your door and skip the tour.
01
Work with me
Tax strategy, accounting, and fractional CFO work through Accent — or hotel and restaurant back office through Dayspring.
See the ventures →02
Book me to speak
Keynotes and working sessions for owner-operators. Delivered in the teaching register, never the motivational one.
Topics & availability →03
Have me on your show
Bios in three lengths, headshots, topics I can actually carry, and every appearance so far. Zero-friction booking.
Open the press kit →04
Come on mine
Unfinished Empires is my show about the half-built — the part most founders edit out. Guest spots are open.
Pitch an episode →
The throughline
Skin in the game on
Skin in the game on
every claim I make
Most people who talk about entity structure are reading from a textbook. I feel the consequences of every structural choice in my own cash flow — five entities across tax, hospitality, sales, media, and software. When I tell you how a hotel P&L actually behaves, or what reasonable compensation costs you in practice, that's lived, not borrowed.
I'm also the steward of a tax practice with forty years of history, and four decades of watching money compound does something to how you think. I'd rather you do the boring thing for ten years than the clever thing for one.
And I'm honest about the half-built. That's the whole premise of the podcast: the polished after-photo teaches less than the messy middle, and I'm comfortable standing in the messy middle in public.
Here's what's working, here's what isn't, and here's the part I haven't cracked yet.
About the credential
I'm an MSCTA — a master's-level credential in taxation — with 25 years in the accounting and tax industry and a fractional CFO practice. I am not a CPA or an EA, and I won't imply otherwise. When a matter needs one, I say so and bring one in. That's stated once here and not repeated down the page.
What I'm building
Five companies,
Five companies,
one operator
The entities are how the work gets done. Each one is real, running, and carries a number.
Method & Platform
Taxsmithing™
My approach to tax strategy: engineering positions the IRS recognizes, documenting them so they survive an audit, and integrating them into one stack that compounds year over year. Now a software platform.
In betaapp.taxsmithing.com
Hospitality Back Office
Dayspring Hospitality Solutions
Hotel and restaurant accounting for management groups — full back office, night-audit-to-financials, built by people who have actually run the properties.
Hotels
& RestaurantsManagement groups served
& RestaurantsManagement groups served
Software Studio
Dayspring IdeaForge
Where the platforms get built — the Taxsmithing app, an operating system for hotel management, and Forge, a practice-management layer for accounting firms.
3Platforms in build
Hotel Management
Elysian Hotel Management Group
Focused-service hotel management — operations, revenue, and the standard of care that decides whether a guest comes back.
Liveelysianhotels.ai
Media
Unfinished Empires
The podcast. Long-form conversations with builders about the part that isn't finished — because every empire starts as a sketch.
Launchingunfinishedempires.com
Free guide · the work I care about most
The Taxsmith's Guide to Paying Your Kids
This is my favorite move in the whole playbook: legitimately putting your own children on the business payroll. Done right, it lowers the family's tax bill and starts the next generation's wealth in the same stroke. Done wrong — and it usually is — it's an audit waiting to happen.
The guide walks the whole thing: which entity types actually qualify for the FICA exemption (this is where most people get burned), what "reasonable compensation" means for a twelve-year-old, the documentation that survives a real examination, and the three most common ways this gets done wrong.
The family-business strategy isn't original to me — Mark Kohler has been teaching it for years, and that lineage is honest to name. What's mine is the documentation system and the integration into a full stack.
No spam, no funnel theatrics. The guide, and about one useful email a month.
Free
The Taxsmith's Guide
Paying
Ryan Otto, MSCTA
Paying
Your Kids
Ryan Otto, MSCTA
Heard on
Twelve shows,
Twelve shows,
one conversation
Hosts keep asking about the same thing: how an operator thinks about tax, and what changes when you actually own the businesses you advise. Here are the ones you can listen to now.
Jul 2026
Business & Beyond
with Tania Bartolini — "What Every Entrepreneur Should Know About Taxes and Growth."
Feb 2026
The Tax Answers Advisor
with Marcelino Dodge, EA, CTRC — "From IRS Panic to Peace: How to Stop Running from Tax Debt and Rebuild Your Life." 46 minutes on the emotional side of tax debt, and the blacksmith metaphor behind Taxsmithing.
Aug 2025
Texas RoundUP — The Texas Insider
with Melissa Bill — breaking down what the new tax bill actually meant for Texas small businesses.
Every empire starts as a sketch. The brave keep building.
Launching soon
My show is about what it really takes to build something meaningful — not the Instagram version, the real version. Long-form conversations with founders and operators about the part that isn't finished yet: the near-miss, the thing they'd redo, the question still open.
I host it because I find the half-built more honest and more interesting than the finished case study. If that's the conversation you want to have, come be a guest.
Speaking
Bring me
to your stage
I teach; I don't perform. Talks are specific, built for the room, and full of numbers from businesses I actually run. If you want a motivational keynote, I'm the wrong call — and I'll happily point you to someone better.
-
Put your kids on payroll — legitimately
The family-business tax strategy, the entity-type trap that voids it, and the documentation that survives an audit.
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Running five companies with a small team
What it actually takes: the trade-offs, the unglamorous mechanics, and where the leverage really is.
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AI inside a real practice
What I've shipped, what broke, and what it changes for tax, accounting, and hospitality back offices.
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Reading your own numbers
A working session for owners who sign the returns but have never been taught to read what they're signing.
Now — updated August 2026
What I'm actually working on
- Getting the Taxsmithing platform through beta — the part where real preparers use it and tell me what's wrong.
- Building Forge, a practice-management layer for accounting firms, at IdeaForge.
- Recording the first season of Unfinished Empires.
- Saying yes to more podcasts than is strictly reasonable, because the conversations keep being good ones.
- Still figuring out: how much of the tax review work AI can genuinely carry before a human has to own it again. I don't have a clean answer yet.
The letter
One useful thing a month
No cadence theatre and no daily blast. About once a month I write up one thing I learned running the businesses — a tax move, a number that surprised me, or something I got wrong. That's the whole promise.
Unsubscribe whenever. I won't take it personally.