For many tax professionals, growing a tax business traditionally meant one thing: prepare more tax returns.
Want more revenue? Find more clients.
Want to make $1 million? Build a bigger tax season, hire more preparers, extend your hours, and process thousands of returns.
But David A. Perez, founder and CEO of Tax Maverick, argues there is another path.
Instead of building a business around the number of tax returns you can prepare, tax professionals can build a higher-value firm around tax strategy, advisory services, premium pricing, recurring revenue, technology, and systems.
Perez has spent more than 18 years in the tax industry, filed more than 50,000 tax returns during his career, and built an eight-figure tax advisory practice. Today, his company, Tax Maverick, helps tax professionals transition from traditional compliance work into higher-value advisory services.
And on Tuesday, September 15, 2026, David Perez will bring those lessons to Las Vegas, presenting “How to Build a $1 Million Tax Business” live during Emprende Tax @ AVANCE Global at the Bellagio.
Here are some of the principles behind the model.
1. Stop Thinking Like a Tax Preparer and Start Thinking Like an Advisor
The first major shift is understanding the difference between tax preparation and tax advisory.
Tax preparation generally looks backward.
The client earned income, bought property, paid employees, made investments, created entities and completed transactions. At tax time, the tax professional reports what already happened.
Tax advisory looks forward.
Instead of simply asking:
“How do I prepare this client’s return?”
the advisor asks:
“What decisions can this client make before year-end that could improve their tax and financial position?”
That changes the nature—and potentially the economics—of the client relationship.
Tax Maverick describes tax advisory as proactive work involving areas such as planning, entity structure, timing and strategy rather than simply filing a return after the fact.
For tax professionals trying to build a million-dollar firm, this distinction is critical.
A tax return can become the beginning of the relationship rather than the end.
2. Increase Revenue Per Client, Not Just the Number of Clients
Consider a tax firm with 2,000 clients paying an average of $400.
That produces:
2,000 × $400 = $800,000
Reaching $1 million under the traditional model may require hundreds of additional tax returns.
But there is another lever:
Revenue per client.
Suppose a firm has 1,000 tax clients.
If only 100 qualified business-owner or investor clients purchase a $5,000 annual advisory engagement, that represents:
100 × $5,000 = $500,000
The firm doesn’t necessarily need thousands of additional clients.
It needs to identify which existing clients have problems valuable enough to justify higher-level advisory services.
Tax Maverick’s model specifically focuses on helping firms move beyond compliance fees toward advisory engagements that can range from approximately $5,000 to $25,000, depending on the engagement and client opportunity.
That changes the math of building a seven-figure tax practice.
3. Your Existing Tax Clients May Be Your Biggest Growth Opportunity
Many tax professionals already have the raw material for an advisory business sitting inside their CRM.
Consider the clients who:
- Own an LLC or S corporation
- Own rental real estate
- Operate multiple businesses
- Employ workers
- Have significant 1099 income
- Earn high W-2 compensation
- Are buying or selling businesses
- Are acquiring investment properties
- Have multiple entities
- Are accumulating significant wealth
These taxpayers frequently have needs that extend well beyond preparing Form 1040.
The opportunity is to develop a process for identifying those clients and determining which ones could benefit from proactive planning.
Instead of spending the entire year searching for another 1,000 tax-preparation clients, a firm can ask:
Which 50, 100 or 200 clients in our existing book of business need more sophisticated help?
Your book of business isn’t simply a list of tax returns.
It can become a pipeline for advisory services.
4. Package Tax Strategy as a Product
One of the challenges facing tax professionals is that they frequently provide valuable advice informally.
A client calls.
The tax professional answers a question.
The client asks whether they should create an S corporation.
Another client asks about buying a rental property.
Another wants to know whether they can hire their children.
The professional spends hours researching, explaining and strategizing.
And then bills very little—or nothing—for the advice.
A scalable advisory firm needs a defined product.
That means establishing:
What does the client receive?
What is the process?
What is the price?
How frequently do you meet?
How is the strategy documented?
How does your team deliver the engagement consistently?
Perez’s Tax Maverick model emphasizes standardized pricing, packaging and presentation, creating a repeatable process for selling and delivering advisory rather than treating every engagement as an improvised consulting project.
5. Learn to Price Based on Value
Moving from a $500 tax return to a $5,000 or $10,000 advisory engagement requires a different pricing conversation.
The question becomes less about:
“How many hours will this take?”
and more about:
“What is the economic value of solving this problem?”
Imagine identifying a legitimate planning opportunity that could potentially save a business owner tens of thousands of dollars over several years.
The value of the engagement isn’t necessarily determined by whether the analysis required five hours or 25 hours.
This is one reason advisory businesses can have fundamentally different economics from high-volume tax preparation.
Tax Maverick teaches a pricing framework intended to move tax firms away from undercharging for advisory expertise and toward premium-value engagements.
6. Build Recurring Revenue Outside Tax Season
One of the biggest weaknesses of the traditional tax business is seasonality.
January arrives.
Revenue accelerates.
April arrives.
Tax season ends.
Revenue drops.
Then the cycle starts again.
A million-dollar tax business should increasingly ask:
What can we sell from May through December?
Tax planning naturally creates year-round touchpoints.
Business owners make decisions throughout the year involving:
- Payroll
- Entity structure
- Estimated taxes
- Retirement plans
- Equipment purchases
- Real estate
- Hiring
- Investments
- Business acquisitions
- Year-end planning
Those decisions frequently cannot wait until February or March.
That creates an opportunity for the tax professional to evolve from someone the client sees once per year into a year-round financial and tax advisor.
7. Use Technology and AI to Increase Advisor Capacity
There is still a capacity problem.
If every advisory engagement depends entirely on the owner of the firm manually reviewing every return, researching every strategy and creating every presentation, eventually the firm hits another ceiling.
Technology can help standardize parts of that process.
Tax Maverick, for example, uses AI-powered software to analyze client tax information against a library of vetted tax strategies and help advisors identify potential planning opportunities and build recommendations.
But technology by itself isn’t the business model.
The more important combination is:
Technology + expertise + standardized processes + pricing + client delivery.
That allows the firm’s intellectual property to become a system rather than knowledge that exists exclusively inside the owner’s head.
8. Build Systems Before You Pour Fuel on Marketing
One of the most important lessons for a growing tax firm is that more leads don’t automatically produce a better business.
Imagine doubling your marketing tomorrow.
What happens if:
- Your pricing is inconsistent?
- Your sales process isn’t documented?
- Your staff can’t deliver advisory work?
- Every client still needs the owner?
- There is no standardized onboarding?
- There is no fulfillment workflow?
You haven’t necessarily doubled the business.
You may have doubled the chaos.
Tax Maverick’s growth framework identifies a key scaling problem: firms can add volume faster than they build the infrastructure required to service it.
Before aggressively scaling acquisition, build the machine that will handle the clients.
9. The Owner Eventually Becomes the Bottleneck
Perez’s framework maps tax firms across several revenue stages.
One particularly interesting stage is the $600,000-to-$1-million range.
At this level, the primary constraint often becomes the owner.
The owner may still:
- Close every major client
- Review every strategy
- Solve every employee problem
- Approve every decision
- Manage important client relationships
- Handle operations
- Lead marketing
The business cannot grow beyond the amount of work one person can personally supervise.
Tax Maverick describes the $600,000-to-$1-million stage as the point where “the owner” becomes the wall: everything runs through one individual, limiting how much the firm can produce, sell and deliver.
Breaking the million-dollar barrier therefore requires more than sales.
It requires delegation, processes, people and leadership.
10. Build a Business That Can Operate Without You
There is an important difference between being a highly paid tax professional and owning a valuable tax company.
If revenue stops when you stop working, you’ve built yourself a job.
A scalable tax business needs:
Documented processes
Standardized services
A trained team
Technology
Recurring revenue
Consistent pricing
Client acquisition systems
Management infrastructure
The ultimate objective isn’t simply to reach $1 million in revenue.
It is to create a business capable of moving from:
$1 million → $2 million → $5 million and beyond
without requiring the owner to personally perform proportionally more work at every stage.
Perez knows this transition firsthand. According to Tax Maverick, he ultimately built an eight-figure tax advisory practice before creating Tax Maverick to teach and systematize many of the lessons learned along the way.
The Million-Dollar Tax Business Formula
There isn’t one magic strategy that creates a seven-figure firm.
Instead, the model looks something like this:
Tax Preparation → Tax Planning → Advisory
More Clients → More Revenue Per Client
One-Time Transactions → Recurring Relationships
Hourly Pricing → Value-Based Engagements
Owner Knowledge → Documented Systems
Manual Research → Technology-Enabled Workflows
Owner Does Everything → Trained Team
Tax Season Business → Year-Round Business
That’s the fundamental shift.
The million-dollar tax firm of the future may not be the office that prepares the most tax returns.
It may be the firm that creates the most value from every client relationship.
Learn From David Perez Live at Emprende Tax @ AVANCE Global
Tax professionals will have an opportunity to hear these strategies directly from David A. Perez, EA, founder and CEO of Tax Maverick, during Emprende Tax @ AVANCE Global 2026.
How to Build a $1 Million Tax Business
Speaker: David A. Perez, EA
Day: Day 2 — Tuesday, September 15, 2026
Event: Emprende Tax @ AVANCE Global
Location: Bellagio Resort & Casino, Las Vegas
Conference: September 14–16, 2026
AVANCE Global 2026 brings together thousands of entrepreneurs, executives, investors and business leaders at the Bellagio in Las Vegas for three days focused on business growth, capital, leadership and Latino economic prosperity.
For tax professionals, the question going into the 2027 tax season shouldn’t simply be:
“How many more tax returns can I prepare?”
A much bigger question is:
“How do I turn the tax business I already have into a million-dollar advisory firm?”
On September 15 in Las Vegas, David Perez will help tax professionals start answering exactly that.