Black Women in Accounting and their Success Stories

As a researcher in the DEI realm who specifically examines the Black experience in accounting, I was particularly interested in the success story behind Davis Davis & Harmon. This tale bucks the failure and limited growth trend that often bedevils Black business, which is no mean feat to avoid. Frequently, Black women-owned businesses succumb to discrimination from conventional lenders, leading to reduced or nonexistent access to capital to grow their organizations (Stearns Bank, “The Four Most Common Challenges Facing Black Women Entrepreneurs,” Feb. 28, 2023, https://tinyurl.com/yfzsmcru). According to the Fearless Fund, African American women entrepreneurs received less than 1% of venture capital funds of the $288 billion conferred to firms in 2022. This reality was further undercut by a Supreme Court ruling banning the Fearless Fund itself from making specific monies available to Black women entrepreneurs, citing the practice as discriminatory (M. Scarcella, “U.S. Appeals Court Blocks Grant Program for Black Women-Owned Businesses,” Reuters, Jun. 3, 2024, https://tinyurl.com/2hdnvpuf). Against this backdrop, this column explores the remarkable success of a Black woman-owned sales tax firm over the past two decades.
Questions & Answers
Anton Lewis: Thank you so much for taking time to speak to us. To get started, please give a general overview of your pathway to becoming successful.
Chanel Christoff Davis: As a partner group we basically took what we had learned working for the likes of Arthur Andersen, Deloitte, and at the time Price Waterhouse—we worked for all of them, we suffused those experiences into our organization. We infused culture and a sense of social responsibility. Meaning that we now imbue a sense of being technologically advanced and really leaning into, you know, thinking about the future of accounting using artificial intelligence and other technologies to benefit our clients.

However, it wasn’t like that at first. The path we started on was to bid on a contract with the Texas State Controller’s office. They were looking for auditors to return as contract employees to increase their bandwidth. They wanted to add additional coverage to increase compliance. My husband started his career at the Texas State Controller’s office and he transitioned to PwC [PricewaterhouseCoopers] as a sales tax consultant working in tax technology when we bid on our first government contract. That was in 2001. We worked from home, just the two of us. We pulled together a team of friends that we knew were also auditors to help with the workload and so we had a little team and we did that for a number of years.
But I felt like we couldn’t scale up our business solely with government contracts. Instead, we pivoted and set out to build a business-to-business firm where we would service mid-sized to large corporations and support them. Over time, CPAs started calling us on behalf of their clients. We began to gain a reputation as a group who came into audits and were really helpful, answering lots of questions, and who would sit with clients and walk them through complicated processes. We started to acquire a reputation around time and efficiency. Luckily, just as our brand was increasing, we had the good fortune of the Supreme Court ruling in the case of South Dakota v. Wayfair. This judgment held that internet-based sales were now taxable under economic nexus rules. That’s when we became established; when we went from being the stepchildren of the tax world to being the cool kids! That Supreme Court case wasn’t until 2018, which tells you how tenacious we are. It was really a story of preparation, timing, and skill meeting opportunity. Alternatively, we could have given up in the 2010s because we couldn’t get enough of a client base. But if we had, then we wouldn’t have been around for the creation of the internet sales tax rule change. We would have folded before that if we hadn’t stuck to it.
Lewis: What do Black professionals need to know about success? Is there anything that Black Women professionals in particular should know?
Davis: I mentor a lot of Black women who are aspiring entrepreneurs. The first thing I do is I tell them to give me their pitch. Pitch to me. Tell me who you are and what you do. Typically, it sounds something like this: “You know, I’m a marketing executive, I’ve spent, five years, six years, seven years in so and so in corporate settings and I’ve decided to spin off and start my business serving XYZ. I can do anything for anyone in the marketing industry. I can do it for any industry. I can do it for any type of operation, big or small…” Eventually I say “Stop. Focus. What’s your actual area of expertise? Who is your ideal customer? What is it you specialize in?” Unfortunately, a lot of times Black and Brown entrepreneurs feel like they need to do everything for everybody. And I tell them “No! Focus on expertise first and build that vertically.”
That would be my biggest tip for success. At Davis Davis & Harmon we over-specialize, over-service, and provide expertise to our client base so that they’re like, “you guys are speaking our language,” and because of this they feel extremely comfortable with us. We already know what their pain points are. To be successful in my firm, we have to be extremely good at what we do. We are exceptionally focused on service and delivering the best possible product to our client. It’s a huge differentiation point for us against our competitors. We are fully committed to being a trusted advisor to our clients.
Lewis: That’s the theory—how easy are you finding it in reality? What I hear you saying is required, is a bunch of interpersonal skills. And yet we know that one of the big problems that Generation Z is having is with the soft skills piece. That has to be a massive block to being a trusted advisor, and on top of that you have other groupings of Color, African Americans, maybe Latinos, some First Nations as well, who may have to navigate societal cultural difficulties around these things. How are you dealing with this?

Davis: I’ll tell you one thing, when we go out to find employees or staff, we’re blessed. Like I said, we have built a great brand in our market. Whenever we put out a message on LinkedIn that we’re hiring, the firm is flooded with resumes. We’re very fortunate in that way because we have a number of Black professionals keeping an eye on our firm. They watch us and share our stories. I am immensely thankful to have a community of people watching and cheering us on. So, when we’re named one of the fastest growing private owned companies in America, when we put that on social media, young professionals share our story. They comment and congratulate us. Our process for interviewing and onboarding a new person is so extensive because as an organization we have to ensure potential colleagues are communicative and can articulate thoughts. It is key that they are solutions-oriented and are team players because our firm is very much a family environment, which is why we want to get to know them a little bit before we hire them. It’s essential that our colleagues are high on emotional intelligence. It’s our secret sauce for us to be successful in what we do. Positively, because of this, we’ve received great feedback; they love working with us! They value our responsiveness and nimbleness with tricky issues.
Lewis: What blocks or hindrances have you experienced and what were your solutions?
Davis: The biggest challenge for us is access to networks, access to the C suite, access to letting the CFO and the CEO know that we exist. Just being able to reach that level to expose them to our brand and what we do is always a challenge. We’re still at it, you know, we’re still trying to increase our brand awareness with this audience.
Nonetheless we’re quite lucky that a lot of our existing clients refer us a lot, so we have a ton of referral business. But there’s still a large sector of U.S. business who still don’t know we exist when we meet them for the first time. It’s our biggest hurdle, getting our story out there to the masses.
Lewis: If they wish to claim success, should a Black or Brown accountant stay in the profession, or do as you once did and strike out on their own?
Davis: I think success looks different for different people. Entrepreneurship is extremely difficult, requiring eternal optimism. We ourselves have been through at least four economic downturns. Our business began on October 1, 2001—that was the month after September 11th. It was the worst time. Fortunately, in some ways, we were too young to know that at the time—so thank God for youthful naivete. Then we went through Hurricane Katrina. That was another horrible recessionary time. Then we went through the real estate bubble bursting, yet another horrible recessionary time period. And now we’ve lived through the pandemic of COVID-19!

“Overall, we’re very proud of grooming the next generation of high-performing, specialized Black tax professionals.”

It’s tough. You have to be pretty positive that things are going to turn around when things look bad. Continuing to be resilient and tenacious when you are told “no” time and time again. One must possess the strength and persistence of a lion to forge forward when people are telling you that, no one’s ever going to trust a Black firm to do their U.S. global taxes. You have to have a really strong internal constitution to move forward and prove them wrong. Basically, that’s why it’s not for everybody. Nevertheless, I personally believe we need people in all sectors, in addition to public accounting at organizations. We need people in industry, Fortune 500, and midsized firms. We need Black and Brown people across the spectrum of U.S. business to make this work because at the end of the day we need diverse people on the other side of the table.
Lewis: Finally, what is next for Chanel Davis of Davis Davis & Harmon?
Davis: Even though we’re twenty-three years into our firm I feel like our story is just beginning. During the pandemic we branched out into several new industries. Now we’re not only doing telecom and technology, but we also work in oil and gas and retail. For me, I can see this continuing—diversifying, spreading our wings and expertise to other industry sectors in this manner. We are also looking to expand our footprint with more offices in different regions; for example, D.C. is a potential option. Overall, we’re very proud of grooming the next generation of high-performing, specialized Black tax professionals. We have been given this privileged position to provide career opportunities and to provide knowledgeable expertise in a very niche sector of the tax world. It is an honor for us as a firm to share this opportunity with Black people and expose amazing tax jobs to the community. We don’t take it lightly, so we want to continue to do that work and continue to mentor and teach Black professionals in the arena of sales tax.
Lewis: Thank you for an engaging interview, and we at The CPA Journal look forward to the continued success of Davis Davis & Harmon.

Postscript
At this juncture in our society, many who embody difference have cause to feel fretful, isolated, and maligned. Perhaps no more so than Black professional women. At these moments of inflection, I find tales of success and fortitude to be a much-needed balm, healing the harm of today’s negative environment and showing the way toward a brighter future. Chanel Davis shows us that hard work and fortitude pay dividends and that treating colleagues as true family, instilling trust, and good service begets good business. Most importantly, it is key to stay the course despite headwinds—be it making difficult decisions to leave the certainty of blue-chip accounting firms for the vagaries of entrepreneurship or discovering the importance of specialization when striking out on one’s own. In these most trying times for many, Davis is another testament to the success of Black women; this is a template we all could stand to praise and follow, no matter our color or creed.

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