Robert Kim
tax firm owner · Phoenix, Arizona
Press play — energetic intro, then the conversation
J This is Jennifer from the UpTax Podcast Room, and today I've got Robert Kim with me. Robert Kim, so great to have you on. R Thanks for having me on the show, Jennifer. I've been looking forward to this one. J Same here. So set the scene for us — you run a firm out in Phoenix, right? Tell me about the practice. R Yeah, we're based in Phoenix, and we're a pretty classic individual-return shop. We're doing around fifteen hundred individual returns a year now, which honestly felt impossible three years ago with our old setup. J Fifteen hundred returns is no joke. Walk me through what busy season used to look like before you changed anything. R Brutal, honestly. January through April, my staff was pulling twelve, thirteen hour days. We'd have return quality slip because everyone was exhausted, and clients would call asking why things were taking so long. J And I imagine the instinct at that point is, okay, we just need more bodies. R Exactly. That's the trap, right? You think the answer is to hire an accountant, maybe hire a bookkeeper too, throw more people at the volume. But then your payroll balloons and suddenly you're working just as hard to cover salaries. J That's the margin collapse trap we talk about all the time on this show. Firms automate the wrong piece, or they just add headcount, and the profit just evaporates. R That's precisely what happened to a buddy of mine at another firm. He scaled his return count but his take-home actually went down because he was carrying so much more overhead. J So what made you start looking at other options instead of just hiring your way through it? R I actually started evaluating tax preparation outsourcing. I looked seriously at building an offshore team, contracting preparers overseas, managing that whole relationship myself. J That's a real question a lot of firm owners wrestle with. Build the offshore team yourself, or find a platform that already does it. What did the math actually look like? R Building it myself meant recruiting, training, time zone headaches, quality control from scratch. I ran the numbers and honestly the cost per return wasn't even that much better once you factored in management time. J Right, because your time as the owner isn't free either. R Not even close. That's when a colleague mentioned UpTax to me, and I figured I'd at least take a look. J And I'm so glad you did, because this is genuinely why we built UpTax the way we did. Tell listeners what it actually does for you. R So the AI drafts the return first. It pulls in the documents, categorizes everything, builds out a full draft return that's honestly shockingly close to final. Then there's an offshore review layer that checks it before it ever lands on my desk. J So you're not filing anything sight unseen, obviously. R No, no, definitely not. My team still reviews and we still sign off before anything moves forward. But the heavy lifting, the data entry, the first pass, that's already done. J That's the piece people miss about AI tax preparation. It's not replacing the CPA, it's replacing the grind before the CPA gets involved. R Exactly. My preparers used to spend forty minutes just building a return from scratch. Now they're spending ten, fifteen minutes reviewing a draft that's already mostly right. J So walk me through the actual result. You said forty percent more returns without adding staff? R Yeah, we went from around eleven hundred returns to over fifteen hundred this past season, same headcount. I didn't hire an accountant, I didn't hire a bookkeeper, nothing. Same five preparers. J That's the dream scenario for automating your tax practice, honestly. More volume, same team. R And the margins actually held. That was the part that surprised me most. I expected some efficiency gain but I thought maybe I'd have to eat some cost on the review layer. Instead my profit per return actually improved. J Because you weren't paying offshore management overhead or recruiting costs, you were just paying for the platform. R Right, and it scales predictably. I know roughly what it costs me per return, versus building my own offshore operation where costs can creep in ways you don't see coming. J This is exactly how we think about how UpTax supports CPA firms. We're not asking you to trust a black box filing engine, we're asking you to let AI handle prep so your licensed team can focus on judgment calls and client relationships. R That trust piece mattered a lot to me. I was nervous handing anything to AI at first, but seeing the draft quality and knowing there's a review layer behind it before it even gets to my desk, that changed my mind fast. J What would you tell another firm owner who's sitting where you were, staring down another brutal busy season and wondering if they should hire? R I'd say run the numbers on hiring an accountant versus what a platform like this costs, honestly you'll be shocked. And don't build your own offshore team unless you really want a second job managing it. For us, UpTax was genuinely a game-changer. J I love hearing that, and not just because it's our show, ha. It's genuinely why we do this work. R No, I get it, but it's true. My stress level this past season was night and day different. My staff actually took weekends in March, which hadn't happened in years. J That's the real win, right? Capacity without burnout, growth without collapsing your margins. R Exactly. And next season I actually want to grow the client base further, because now I know we have the capacity to handle it without scrambling. J Robert Kim, this has been such a great conversation. Thank you so much for sharing your story with us. R Thanks again for having me, Jennifer, this was fun. J For everyone listening, if you're a firm owner wrestling with busy season staffing, go check out UpTax and book a demo at uptax.ai. See what AI tax preparation can actually do for your practice. Thanks for tuning in, we'll catch you next time.
