Gabby Luoma on the Covid Crisis

Tax season turns into 'advisory season,' and a whole new niche is born. By CPA Trendlines ResearchGabrielle Luoma, long one of the profession's leading innovators, says the future under COVID-19 belongs to the quick and the smart, in this exclusive video interview with CPA Trendlines.Firms will need to deploy new services to attract new clients who may have not realized that they needed a firm like yours but now do.In this conversation, Luoma talks about what's going on in the business, what's going on with tax season, and what the future holds for CPA firms and the clients of CPA firms.Speaking from her base in Tucson, Ariz., the CEO of MOD Ventures is bringing some of her DNA to regional powerhouse Beach Fleischman through a joint venture. We start by asking abut "when it got real?"She responds, "We truly are affected by the whole world. We have clients in New York.  Things changed for them rather quickly. And when they started changing, we started realizing, 'Oh, my goodness, we're going to have to really buckle down.' In Arizona, we started seeing shutdowns mid-March. That's when things really got real for us because then we started seeing that the businesses that we work with on a regular basis – we're outsourced accounting, so we work with clients weekly, – we knew that we could be in trouble. We started working really hard on transitioning, and seeing what we needed to do to help our clients quickly."