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Making it work in Wausau
Father and daughter CPAs team up for success
By Marcia Tillett-Zinzow
Grant and Melanie Smart are a father-daughter team who share similar interests beyond their CPA credentials. One of these is a partnership in Grant Smart Co. — where it’s their differences that make the business work. Melanie and her dad both love the outdoors. She loves gardening and works outside in her yard whenever she can — spring, summer and fall. Grant loves outdoor sports. For years, he’s had season tickets to Badger football games and occasionally enjoys a Packer game at Lambeau Field. They also both love animals. Grant has two dogs and a cat; Melanie has two dogs and three cats. She started college as a pre-med student, in fact, thinking she was going to be a veterinarian. Then she discovered she fainted at the sight of blood. So she earned a bachelor’s degree in science and then went to Plan B: accounting. The office is where father and daughter go their separate ways. “I like the corporate world, and she likes the tax part,” said Grant. “I don’t like tax very much, and I never did.”
The company man
Grant graduated from UW–Madison in 1956 and went to work for what was then Wipfli Ullrich & Co. in Wausau. He was licensed as a CPA in 1960. Born and raised in Marathon County, where Wausau is the county seat, it made perfect sense for Grant to go with Wipfli Ullrich, and he’s never been sorry. He retired from Wipfli LLP in 1997 after being with the firm for more than 40 years. “I was in the right place at the right time,” he said. “I didn’t make any moves, got married, had kids — and our families were from Marathon County, so we never moved away. It turned out to be a good decision.” In its most positive definition, a “company man” is one who has built a relationship with their employer based on loyalty and trust. Such was Grant, who worked for Wipfli until he reached the firm’s mandatory retirement age of 60. He has pleasant memories of working there — lots of them. “When I started there, Wipfli was a firm of about 15 people, and John Ullrich was managing partner. It was a one-office firm, and we started growing by first setting up offices in the region — Marshfield, Wisconsin Rapids, Rhinelander and so forth,” Grant said. According to Wipfli’s website, the firm now has 45 offices in the U.S., two offices in India and nearly 2,200
Grant is a huge fan of Wisconsin Badgers football and the Green Bay Packers.
employees. The website also states, “The firm’s expansion across the Midwest was propelled by its founders’ determination to recruit top talent and provide ongoing training for its employees.” Grant helped recruit some of that top talent. For 25 years, he was the main recruiter, regularly visiting the largest Wisconsin university campuses to talk to students about coming to work for Wipfli. “We were the top firm in the area, so we had a leg up,” he said. “We were able to get the smartest kids, the ones in that 4.0 GPA range. Then we had smart people to help build the firm, and that was part of our growth strategy.” Grant worked with numerous manufacturing and trucking companies as well as auto dealerships during his career with Wipfli. He also helped some of Wisconsin’s best-known companies when they were startups. One of these was Tombstone Pizza. “They had about $100,000 in sales at the time,” he recalled, “and in about 20 years, they sold the company to Kraft Foods for $150 million.”
The professional student
Melanie got hooked on tax partly because it involves research. She attributes her love of research to her degree in science. But she also is a perfectionist, and that’s a valuable trait to have in tax practice.
Melanie works with a staff member to ensure mailings get out to clients in a timely manner.
After graduating from UW–Whitewater in 1991, Melanie went to work for a Wausau firm that did mostly tax, and she got her feet wet there. She then worked for a large corporation in Wausau and found the accounting work to be too routine for her liking. She left that job in 1998 and went to work for her dad. The corporate job “wasn’t very challenging, whereas tax gives you that challenge,” she said. “You have to do a lot more research, so to me it’s just a little more exciting. I’m not sure too many people would explain it that way, but that’s how I see it.” In addition to her bachelor’s degrees in science and accounting, Melanie also has minors in math and English as well as credits toward an information technology degree, which she plans to finish in the future. “I’m a professional student,” she joked. When asked about her English minor, she explained that when she was in college at UW–Whitewater, all accounting majors were required to take a certain number of credits in English so that accountants would be able to write better letters. “So I decided to use those credits for an English minor,” she explained. Her writing skills came in handy during the governor’s COVID-19 Safer At Home order. Tax practitioners pivoted, sometimes daily, to understand numerous tax changes brought about by stay-at-home orders throughout the country that took people out of the workplace and closed many a business door. Melanie took numerous tax seminars — sometimes daily — and participated in many webinars on the Paycheck Protection Program and other loans and grants designed to help small businesses weather the lockdown. Much of the information had to be communicated to clients.
Melanie stands outside the Grant Smart Co. office in Dudley Tower.
“A lot of our clients still like to get things in the mail, so we were sending out a lot of letters — often one or two a day,” she said. “While everyone else was sitting at home, we were actually very busy.”
A Smart future
In addition to Grant and Melanie, the Grant Smart Co. also has two administrative staff, rounding out the office to four members of the organization. There had been five on the team
““It’s been kind of a fascinating life, to be honest. In fact, it’s been very exciting. And the best part of all is that I’m still doing it!” — Grant Smart
until Grant’s wife (Melanie’s mother) passed away in 2017, leaving a vacancy in the office and a hole in their hearts. They will add another accountant to the staff in the near future. If you ask Melanie what the future holds, she will tell you without hesitation that the plan is to shape the firm into a tax and virtual CFO business. They’ve dabbled in virtual CFO already, with Grant supplementing his client base as CFO of Bauer Trucking, based in Medford. “We do all of the heavy lifting here in our office, including their financial statements and such,” he said, “and then I spend one day a week out there. It’s about 50 miles away.” Melanie said they will hire another CPA and develop the virtual CFO service as soon as they can. The basic framework is already in place, but they’ve had to put off the launch a couple of times. The first time they tried, her mother was diagnosed with cancer. Supporting her during her illness and working through the grief of losing her threw them off track for a couple of years. They shifted their launch plan to 2020. “We were going to do it this year after tax season, but then COVID-19 hit, and tax season was extended. So our plans to advertise and hire another CPA were pushed out to September,” Melanie said. If you ask Grant what the firm’s future looks like, he will tell you that whatever happens, he’s not going anywhere. “I’m one of those guys who will probably work until the end,” he said. As he reflects on his career— which began with 41 years at Wipfli and has progressed to owning his own firm and teaming up with daughter Melanie — he is satisfied. “It’s been kind of a fascinating life, to be honest,” he said. “In fact, it’s been very exciting. And the best part of all is that I’m still doing it!”
Marcia Tillett-Zinzow is a Wisconsin freelance writer and editor. Contact her at mtzinzow@icloud.com. While many were furloughed during March and April, Grant and Melanie Smart remained very busy due to the nature of their business and the COVID-19 tax and law changes. The building that houses their office — Dudley Tower in downtown Wausau — was practically vacant during the lockdown, but the Smarts carried on. They easily complied with social distancing by communicating with clients only through email, phone calls and letters. But it got a little lonely.
Concerns about being exposed to the virus in the office were eased by a conscientious maintenance staff and a state-of-the-art building. “All high-touch areas are disinfected twice a day, and hand sanitizers are located at all elevator and stairway entry points,” said Melanie. “In our office, we switched out the natural cleaner we had been using for more of a bleach solution to wipe down door handles and light switches and such.”
But one of the best ways the 10-story Dudley Tower protects its occupants is by purifying their air. “The building has a special air-filter system that disinfects the air with ultraviolet light,” said Melanie. “It was installed when the building was constructed because the owner wanted something that would accommodate allergies and respiratory conditions.”
That feature alone made staying in the office just as safe — or possibly safer — than staying at home.
