Courtesy Marshall Associates
By Susan Elise Campbell
Around the time Lynn A. Wadleigh, CPA was thinking of leaving the corporate world and into a career where she could be her own boss, her father, E. Peter Marshall, had decided to sell the CPA practice he had built over the past 40 years.
“I enjoyed doing financial statements for a senior management team,” said Wadleigh, whose accounting career spans more than 30 years. “But as my father was preparing to retire, I was thinking it was time to do my own business.”
Buying his firm, Marshall Associates CPAs, kept the business in the family and serving the community Wadleigh grew up in.
This was 2018 and Marshall was in his late 70s. His practice had grown along with his family and Wadleigh, her siblings, and their mother all worked there at different times over the decades.
“We all remember how busy the five of us were during tax season,” she said. “Raised in the CPA world,” Wadleigh graduated from Queensbury High School and SUNY Albany and got an accounting internship at Ernst & Young in Albany. She earned her CPA designation, started a career in public accounting, and planned to stay in it.
“I had an opportunity to take a position with KADANT, part of Albany International, the paper manufacturer,” she said. “By the time my father had his CPA and his own business.”
E. Peter Marshall started out with a degree from Sienna College and a local CPA partnership, she said.
“He quickly learned he wanted to be on his own working with small businesses in the greater Glens Falls region,” she said.
Wadleigh described the firm as a hands-on “boutique accounting business” that clients have stuck with “for 10, 20, 40 years or more.” But until recently she was not interested in this type of career for herself. She had been a senior manager and the CEO of Warren and Washington County ARC and one day realized she had met all her goals, she said.
“I just wanted to shed that kind of responsibility,” said Wadleigh. She would purchase the business so her father could retire and Marshall Associates CPAs could continue supporting the businesses her father had helped start and grow.
At that time Wadleigh’s sister was working at the practice and won the lottery.
“My sister purchased the building and I purchased the business,” Wadleigh said.
Later when the building sold to Stewart’s Corp., Wadleigh and her husband moved to 94 Glenwood Avenue in Queensbury.
“We were torn about moving out of Glens Falls, but we couldn’t find the right location,” she said. “This building is in between downtown Glens Falls and Lake George, is heavily trafficked and convenient, and has worked out well for us.”
Marshall Associates does the same fundamental accounting and tax services now that it did in the early years, said Wadleigh.
“The firm today has the same mission it did back then,” Wadleigh said. “We are a partner and advisor to small businesses and their different needs. It’s not just doing their taxes, but being an overall business support for the new things they are taking on. If we cannot help the client, we will point them to the right person who can, such as an attorney or insurance professional.”
Wadleigh said she and her small staff helped clients secure their PPP loans when they were made available at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic.
“It surprised me how much we really can help people,” she said. “You need such a different mindset in a local firm than on the corporate side, and our clients really appreciate what we do for them.”
Wadleigh is finding success in other places now, she said, “reaping customers and repeat business. People are reaching out for things that might not be tax-related and this shows they trust us as an advisor.”
Wadleigh has become a real estate broker and now can consult with clients about residential and commercial properties through Coldwell Banker Prime Properties in downtown Glens Falls.
“Marshall Associates CPAs is a way to honor the family while being part of the downtown Glens Falls and Lake George revitalization,” she said.
Visit www.marshallassociatescpas.com for more information.