Our Story
Nate Hagerty and the Birth of TaxProMarketer
At TaxProMarketer, we’re all about creating culture and values that attract and retain top-tier team members, and building lasting relationships with our clients so they can do the same with their clients.
There’s an interesting story behind how that became our focus as a company, and it starts with our founder, Nate Hagerty.
Nate Hagerty has worked exclusively in the tax industry since 2003. Pre-TaxProMarketer, Nate was the marketing director for a tax preparation practice based in Virginia.
Under his marketing leadership, he helped grow the company from a 50K/year firm into a multi-million dollar operation with 23 offices and over 400 employees. From 2003 until 2006, it surpassed the sales of well-known national franchises in its 15 market areas every single year.
As Nate dug into how to actually market effectively at the small business level, he uncovered an entirely new way of doing marketing. Like many other small business leaders, he had been fed a steady diet of “brand-building” marketing — the force behind snappy slogans for big brands behind the home plate of the world series.
But what he developed was an approach driven by cold, exhaustively-tested-and-tracked results that helped that four-employee tax practice turn into a regional empire in a very short amount of time.
This is the same philosophy that drives our marketing practices today.
Getting ready for one of many webinars
Agency of the Year
Alongside the president of that company, Nate Hagerty began coaching and consulting thousands of CPAs and tax practitioners across the country on what really works in growing a tax and accounting firm to the million-dollar level.
But there was a frustration that came along with coaching and consulting that an impassioned marketing whiz knows all too well. Nate watched too many of the tax professionals he coached struggle to implement the strategies he was giving them.
Because it is one thing to appreciate groundbreaking marketing concepts, and another thing entirely to actually put them into practice.
Enter… (drumroll please) ... the birth of TaxProMarketer
Nate decided to leave his marketing director role and start his own marketing agency, creating an implementation engine for the tax and accounting professionals he sought to help.
He began testing these “new” strategies with tax and accounting firm owner clients across the country … from high-end CPAs, “quick tax” operations, and everything in between, in every kind of market area, from Boston to Compton, CA. And the results spoke for themselves.
In the fall of 2007, once TaxProMarketer launched, Nate had an important choice to make… his first strategic hire. His options? A clone of himself (energetic, good at sales, and animated by vision) or an organizer (steady, patient, and complementary skill set).
In most startups, the clone almost always gets that job. But Nate would say that his decision to hire the organizer, Troy Lakey, was the best choice he ever made.
In its first several years, TaxProMarketer was a glorified freelance operation. It had three to five employees, a few simple marketing services, and a founder with an uncanny ability to draw a crowd and sell the services (slightly overwhelming the production team in the process). It became clear that the company needed to operate more efficiently and serve people even more effectively in order to grow.
Upon bringing in more staff and exploring more services to offer, TaxProMarketer grew into a full-service agency to the industry, and the TPM Digital Dominance method was developed in the process.
A culture like no other
During this season of developing a clear vision and trajectory for TPM, CEO Nate Hagerty and COO Troy Lakey began to see the value in developing another focus: company culture. Their choice to be intentional regarding company culture was born from a realization that, if culture isn’t defined, it just happens. It is formed over time by the individual values of the people that are brought in and the circumstances you face.
The team around the office from earlier days
As they made the transition from a sole-proprietor structure to a scalable practice, the need to establish a culture became evident, and Nate’s intentionality regarding company culture is one of the reasons our company has such a strong reputation in the tax industry.
What sets us apart from a plethora of other agencies and practices out there is our firm belief that, when there are standard operating procedures for how our business operates and how we deliver our services, there are also standard procedures for how we should treat people and communicate with them.
Today, the TaxProMarketer team, now led by CEO Christian Jones, is a widely followed and trusted voice and the foremost agency providing smart marketing for hundreds of accountants and tax firms throughout the country… and counting…
