Find your way: from disaster preparedness to succession planning, CalCPA resources and benefits for smaller CPA firms.

• Author: English, Damien
• Position: Cover story

Starting and operating a small CPA practice can be daunting, but CalCPA offers tools that have been helping CPA make the journey with a bit more confidence.

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"I would not be a solo practitioner without CalCPA and its resources," says CPA Jerry Sample, who founded San Francisco-based Paladin Accountancy two years ago. "I always feared that working alone would isolate and diminish me professionally and slowly reduce my competency to handle anything other than the simplest tasks."

Instead, after going solo and joining CalCPA, he found "30,000 virtual partners to bounce ideas off of' and fill the gaps in his knowledge.

Sample believes solo practitioners are the ones who can benefit the most from CalCPA, not only from the aforementioned network, but from the various hotlines, forums and alerts that address firm management issues, low-cost CPE and networking in their local chapters.

Johanna Sweaney Salt, CPA and chair of CalCPA's Management of an Accounting Practice Committee, agrees with Sample and also has reaped the CalCPA rewards as a solo practitioner.

"Six years ago, when I decided to go out on my own, I decided I better join some group," says Salt. "I joined CalCPA and, at my first chapter meeting, I sat at a table with a gentleman who happened to be an estate tax expert. I had no idea how valuable my new acquaintance would be until I got five 706 forms."

Even though Salt had encountered the Estate and Generation-Skipping Transfer Tax Return forms before, she had never been solely responsible for this particular type of work. A panic set in until she remembered her new CalCPA friend.

"I took my box of 706s, went down to my new friend's office and he went through them for me," she says. "Can you put a value on that? At my old firm, I didn't have that community to assist me."

Today, Salt and Sample, also a MAP Committee member, are involved in providing CalCPA members with the resources, both tangible and intangible, that small and mid-sized firms need to manage an accounting practice.

GETTING IN TOUCH WITH THE TANGIBLES

The tangible benefits are what drew Claremont-based Salt to CalCPA. Specifically, the organization's group health insurance and CAMICO, the nation's largest CPA-owned mutual insurance company and second-largest provider for accountants' professional liability insurance and risk management services.

Salt has turned to CAMICO for guidance with terminating a client and for help when confronted with an...