Women-Owned Business Series: Kimberly from The Tara CPA Firm and TaxMove

Welcome back to our Women-Owned Business Series! Today we’re featuring Kimberly, founder of The Tara CPA Firm and TaxMove — a tax strategy firm and companion tool making proactive, year-round tax planning accessible to profitable women business owners, no matter their stage.

The inspiration behind The Tara CPA Firm came in 2016, when Kimberly watched a pregnant colleague FaceTime her toddler to sleep from her desk for the fourth night in a row during tax season — and realized she’d spent three years working to become her in ten. She built something else instead. Years later, she noticed another gap: business owners profitable enough to owe the IRS real money, but not profitable enough to afford a strategist, left with nothing but “file and hope.” That gap became TaxMove. Read more about her story below!

First, tell us about your business and anything special we should know about it or you.

I run The Tara CPA Firm (taracpafirm.com), a tax strategy firm for profitable women business owners, and I recently launched TaxMove (taxmove.io), a tool that makes proactive tax planning accessible to business owners who can’t yet justify a full-service strategist.

I started the firm in 2016 after leaving public accounting. During tax season I watched a pregnant colleague FaceTime her toddler to sleep from her desk — the fourth night in a row — and realized I’d spent three years working to become her in ten. I didn’t want that life, so I built something else.

TaxMove came from a gap I couldn’t stop noticing. There’s a whole group of business owners who are profitable enough to owe real money to the IRS, but not profitable enough to hire a strategist at $10,000 a year. They get told to just file and hope. Nobody had built anything for exactly where they are, so after sitting with the idea for about five years, I built it in early 2026.

Both businesses come down to the same belief: tax planning shouldn’t be a once-a-year panic. It should be a year-round strategy that lets you keep more of what you earned.

Why do you feel a connection to your work?

I have four kids, and they’re watching me whether I intend them to or not.

That’s most of it, honestly. I think a lot about what they’re absorbing – not what I tell them about money, but what they see me do with it. Whether I flinch when I look at numbers. Whether money is a thing we talk about openly or a thing that makes the room go quiet.

Because that’s how most of us learned. Not through a class, but by watching a mother who avoided the mail, or a family where finances were something you didn’t ask about. So many women I work with carry a version of “I’m just not a numbers person,” and they didn’t decide that – they inherited it.

That’s the piece that makes this feel bigger than tax returns to me. When a woman finally understands her own numbers and stops being scared of them, that doesn’t stop with her. Her kids grow up with a completely different default. They start further ahead than we did.

So I’m not just helping someone lower a tax bill. I’m helping her change what gets passed down. And I get to model that for my own four at the same time.

As a business owner, community is everything. In what ways do you serve your community, and how has your community served you?

Community is everything, and I wholeheartedly believe in community over competition. The ways that I serve my community are the same as the ways my community serves me:

– Sending clients to another company if it’s a better fit

– Mentoring new accounting firm owners or those making the transition out of a traditional public accounting role

– Collaborating on tax technical questions with other tax pros

– Celebrating, sharing and cheering each other on in our professional communities.

What advice would you give to others who want to start a small business?

Start paying attention to your numbers before you think you need to.

Most women I talk to wait until they’re “real enough” to look at their finances closely — like there’s a revenue threshold where you graduate into being someone who understands their money. There isn’t. And in the meantime, the habit you’re building is avoidance.

Here’s the thing nobody tells you early: once you’re actually profitable, options open up. There are real, legal strategies that change what you hand over to the IRS – how you’re structured, how you pay yourself, what you’re doing before December 31 instead of scrambling in April. But those only work if you know you’re profitable and you’re looking at it during the year, not after. You can’t strategize backwards.

So: look at your numbers early, even when they’re small and a little embarrassing. That’s the habit that pays you later.

What women inspire you and why?

More than any one name, it’s any woman who stays true to her values through every season of life and business — whether that’s scraping by, scaling up, or starting over. Sara Blakely is someone I always come back to: she stayed scrappy and true to herself all the way from selling fax machines to building Spanx.

What do you think are the most significant challenges for small business owners or women in leadership positions?

I’d say that one of the most significant challenges as a woman in business is that both of your jobs refuse to be delegated.

When you work for somebody else and something falls apart at home, there’s at least a structure around you – you take the leave, someone covers your accounts, the work keeps moving. When it’s your business, nobody’s absorbing that. And when you’re the mom, nobody’s absorbing that either. You’re the last line on both, at the exact same time.

So you end up making a hundred tiny calls a day that nobody sees. Who’s doing pickup, what can slip this week, whether the business gets the good hours or the kids do. (And then feeling weird about it either way.) That load is so heavy, and it never shows up on a calendar, so it’s rarely what people mean when they say “work-life balance.”

I hit that wall about eighteen months in. After hitting six figures in my first year (which looked great from the outside), I was completely fried. Pregnant again, underpriced, saying yes to everybody because I thought that’s just what building something costs. What actually fixed it was admitting the whole thing couldn’t keep resting on me alone. It still took me seven years to make my first hire, and I took a pay cut to do it, because I wanted to bring someone on the right way.

I don’t think we’re short on capable women. I think a lot of us are running businesses with zero slack built in, and then calling the exhaustion a personal failing when it’s really just how we set it up. That part is fixable; it just takes someone saying it out loud first.

Please plug any promotions, events, or recent milestones you have!

We just launched TaxMove (taxmove.io), a tool built for business owners who are profitable enough to owe real money to the IRS, but not yet at the point where hiring a full-service tax strategist makes sense. That gap is where most people get told to just file and hope, and I sat with the idea for about five years before finally building it. It walks you through proactive tax planning year-round, so April stops being a surprise.