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OUR FOUNDER'S STORY
Why Jackie Meyer, CPA, Founded TaxPlanIQ
Jackie Meyer created TaxPlanIQ in late 2020. She had rebuilt her own accounting firm around proactive tax planning and had already proved that model in her own practice in North Texas.
Her gross revenue went from
$350K $1M
Her client count dropped from
200+ 56
Her yearly
workload fell from
3,000hrs ~200hrs
However, one problem remained.
What she could NOT do was repeat the process at speed. Every plan meant manual research and manual math, with proposals being built from nothing. TaxPlanIQ became the software she wanted, but did not have.
The TaxPlanIQ Story… Told by Jackie Meyer Herself
It's October 2010, and I'm sitting in my car…
I had just been FIRED from a small accounting firm.
I had done everything the way you are supposed to do it. I started at Deloitte and lasted about a year and 10 months. I finished a master's in taxation at Southern Methodist University in 2009, after a finance degree at the University of Texas at Arlington. Before any of that, I was an anxious kid raised by a single parent in College Station, Texas. I left home at 15, worked, and finished high school a year early.
So I took the safe path, and the safe path fired me.
Getting fired was the best thing that happened to my career. I had nothing left to protect, which turned out to be a very new kind of freedom. In late 2010 I started my own practice as a side hustle. During the day I taught other accountants how to use tax technology. At night I answered client calls and prepared returns at my kitchen table.
I set my rate at $150 an hour. On paper I was doing well. In reality I had built myself a job with worse hours than the one I lost.
What Broke My Tax Firm's Pricing Model
A private equity investor came to me with a return he had prepared himself. Dozens of K-1s, a genuine mess. He had reported a capital gain sale as royalty income but overstated his income by hundreds of thousands of dollars.
I untangled it and amended the return for him. The correction saved him $150,000 in tax. My fee was a few hundred dollars.
So, that night I sat at my desk and did the math on my own business. Net income divided by hours worked. My real hourly value was $50.83, against the $150 an hour I was publicly charging. I was solving six-figure problems and getting paid like a clerk, since my price had no connection at all to what the work was worth.
My coach at the time asked me something I have repeated to hundreds of accountants since: "Who do you love working with, and what unique value can you provide them?"
My answer: High-net-worth executives with complicated returns. That was my answer.
So I went back to that same private equity client and proposed something different. A flat annual fee of $10,000, against roughly $20,000 in projected annual tax savings. He agreed on the spot. He was not buying my hours. He was buying the certainty that he would not make a $150,000 mistake again.
The strategies I put in place returned about 1,400% on what he paid me over time.
That engagement became the ROI Method of Value Pricing, the framework the AICPA now distributes to its membership and the pricing logic built into TaxPlanIQ today.
In 2014 I had postpartum depression after my first child.
That same year I worked 60 to 80 hour weeks and grossed about $350,000 with subcontractor help. I was a micromanager and the bottleneck in my own firm. I was diagnosed with chronic fatigue after a long stretch of not knowing what was wrong with me.
In 2016 I revamped the practice to lead with planning. In 2017 I went down my client list one by one and converted people to advisory packages. Some said no, so I let them go.
CPA Software Founder
Story Continues
About eight years into the firm, right before Easter, I was not at my desk.
My team at Meyer Tax was handling client requests without me. We had leveled the workload across the year so there was no single stretch that swallowed my life. My calendar had a block on it that said personal time. I took a walk, had a slow lunch, and spent the afternoon stuffing Easter eggs for my kids, a job my husband Mark had been quietly doing alone for years.
No buzzing phone. That was the day I understood I had built a life, not just a business. That morning is where the Happiness Audit came from, the quarterly self-check I now teach as part of the SHiFT framework.
In 2020 I built TaxPlanIQ, and the reason was simple. TaxPlanIQ collapses work. Upload a 1040, and the software matches strategies from a library of 130+, calculates estimated savings, suggests a value-based fee up front using the CURB (complexity, urgency, risk, benefits) framework, and drafts a client-ready proposal with your firm's logo on it.
Within a year, TaxPlanIQ had around 75 accountants using the software.
In 2022 I sold Meyer Tax, that had 56 clients at the time, for seven figures. The buyer was one of my own coaching students.
Of course, software alone does NOT get a firm to a paid engagement. I watched this pattern for years as a coach. Accountants build the plan and then stall. They second-guess the strategies. They hesitate to name a fee. They do not know which client to approach first. None of that is a technology problem, so no help center article has ever fixed it.
That is why TaxPlanIQ ships with people attached. Every firm gets real tax professionals who have sold these plans: the Advisor Accelerator is available for one-to-one coaching and training to help you build and sell your first plan, CCTA certification for essentially a "business in a box", weekly live sessions, and tax professionals on staff who will review your tax plans before you send them to clients.
I stepped out of the CEO seat in 2024, handing the role to Dave Lukas so I could focus on product and on the profession. My book The Balanced Millionaire: Advisor Edition was published by CPA Trendlines in 2025.
Today TaxPlanIQ supports 1,200+ firms who have identified $5B+ in client tax savings. The method behind all of it started with one amended return and one uncomfortable night of math!
