Patrick Camuso's success rides on his commitment to going deeper, rather than wider.
Camuso studied accounting and finance at Montclair State in New Jersey. While in school, he interned at Deloitte for three years before joining the Big Four firm full time in its financial services practice. There, he did taxes and accounting for mutual funds, hedge funds, private equity companies and more.
But making partner at a big firm was never the plan. "My intention, basically since I was a teenager, was actually to open my own CPA firm," Camuso said. "I always viewed this profession as my vehicle to wealth building."
Camuso used every spare moment of his free time to learn everything he could about finance and accounting. That rabbit hole led him to Bitcoin in 2013, when cryptocurrency was still a nascent asset. He immediately saw its potential as an accounting technology — "It's basically a ledger," he said — and saw the opportunity for himself.
"It was either going to be starting to look at staying in either the Big Four or a corporate environment long-term, or taking the dive and going on my own," he said.
He left Deloitte and founded Camuso CPA in 2016. He ran himself ragged in the first year taking on any client he could and establishing himself as an expert in the field of digital assets. To build his network and credibility, he produced online content for his social followers, spoke to crypto investors online and in their Telegram groups, and held in-person meetups in the Charlotte, North Carolina, area where he is based.
Camuso's firm has grown with the ever-evolving digital asset industry ever since. He started with just Bitcoin investors and miners, then added Ethereum and ICOs, then various blockchains, then decentralized finance and nonfungible tokens. His firm serves digital asset investors across many types of protocols, assets and blockchains. He also works with Web3 companies, helping them set up, implement and maintain accounting systems, and helping with tax preparation. He has about 150 individual clients and 20 business clients.
There are other accounting firms specializing in digital assets, and more are joining the space, but it's still a limited group. Camuso says his firm is different, thanks to his eight years of experience and his recognition as a credible thought leader in the space. His firm is also strict about due diligence. Other firms lack the same commitment, he says, based on his experience working with clients who've switched to his firm from another.
And managing the books and preparing taxes for these highly technical companies requires a unique tech stack of his own — or several. Camuso regularly tests new software to understand its capabilities and drawbacks. But the technology can vary from client to client based on business models, and none is plug-and-play. When Camuso founded his firm, he could count the number of crypto accounting solutions available on one hand. Now there are over 50, with more being developed.
"Even to the degree that we do leverage these technologies, it's also important that we don't fully rely on them and that we trace transactions through the block explorer," he said. "We do a deep due diligence method, and we leverage these to save time and effort on the reporting and aggregation portion. We're not blindly plugging them."
Learning the hard way
While Camuso started with a thorough knowledge of the accounting aspect of the job and came to master his specialty, he knew nothing about the day-to-day aspects of running a firm, like pricing, marketing, hiring, training and employee management. He had to learn that the hard way.
"It's challenging for an accountant to find a position where they're going to fully learn how to run a firm from someone else. I think you'd have to probably get really lucky and find a good position at a smaller firm and see all their workflows. I didn't go that route, so I had to learn on my own a lot."
Camuso said he was drastically underpriced in the early years of his firm: "Compared to when I started my firm, it's night and day. Like it's a complete joke."
Hiring wasn't easy either. Camuso struggled to find prospective employees with the right skill sets, and most hires still require around six months of training because of the complexity of the work. He has tried using recruiters in the past, but he found that he personally needs to screen his candidates. Now, with four employees, he has a better hiring and interviewing process, which includes a case study. He is looking to hire a couple more employees this summer as he anticipates being busier with an uptick in crypto activity.
And working with clients dealing with volatile assets, his business rides on bear and bull markets. In crypto bear markets, his revenue takes a hit: "I get crushed each time and do worry about business continuity."
"When we do have these bear market drops, it's not like I'm usually losing most of my clients," he continued. "We're keeping almost all of them because they're so deep into it. It's just that they may come that year, and their fee may be 20-30% less because they're just not having the same level of complexity."
To stabilize his firm against these fluctuations, he wants to bring on more business clients rather than individuals. He's also focused on staying ahead of developments — new ways of doing business, new protocols, new assets, new blockchains, new tax issues and new accounting issues — and identifying emerging tax issues that his clients haven't even been raising yet.
Looking forward, Camuso wants to expand his online content, like building his podcast into a full educational platform for crypto and digital asset investors. He hopes it will build a community around the firm.
"I'm hoping it can — not in the short term — in the long-term perspective, become almost like a recruiting engine to where I have maybe 10 people that have gone through all these preliminary videos and courses."
Starting a firm wasn't easy, Camuso said, but he encourages other accountants to do the same as long as they're aware of the commitment it requires.
"I definitely took a big leap of faith leaving Deloitte. But this was something I was personally motivated to do basically my whole adult life. So it was an easy choice for me, and I definitely don't regret it," he said. "I've been able to earn more than I could have ever earned working at any company. I've been able to build more skills and build my profile up more. Starting my own firm, for me, has been extremely challenging and required a lot of hard work, but extremely rewarding."
This story is part of new series on how accounting entrepreneurs launched their practices. Look for more
