David Daniel Garza
Certified Public Accountant
305 Kerria Avenue, McAllen, Texas 78501-1722
Phone: (956) 686-2304 / Fax: (956) 686-2308
Cell Phone: (956) 648-5021
E-Mail: dgarza@rgv.rr.com
How It Happened
Are Accountants Born, or Made?
Education:
Born, Corpus Christi, Texas, 1963.
Graduated Incarnate Word Academy High School, Corpus
Christi, Texas, 1981.
Graduated UT at Arlington, BBA in Accounting Information
Systems, 1985.
Texas Certified Public Accountant as of November 1990
Examination.
Married, Paola D. Wiernik MD* November 1997 (I wasn't
sure if this one went under Education or Work?)
*See www.DrPaola.com
for professional details.
Shana Bethany, 1st Daughter born May 2001, Austin, Texas.
Micaela Sofia, Baby born September 2002, Ogden, Utah.
Work &
Business:
Grocery Store Cashier,
Bagger, Stocker, 1973. - Grocery Store Meat Cutter,
Merchandiser, Manager 1977. - Multiple Store Management,
Bookkeeping Systems 1983.
September 1986 - December 1989 - Employment with Richard
J. Garza & Associates, CPAs, PC, Alice, Texas as a
staff accountant and developed a working partnership
selling computers and accounting applications software.
January 1990-January 1991 - Sole Proprietor beginning an
accounting office in Corpus Christi, Texas, and sole
proprietor selling hardware, networks and complete
accounting information systems.
February 1991-December 1994 - CPA / Shareholder in
Richard J. Garza & Associates, CPAs, PC, in Alice and
Corpus Christi, Texas. (Heavily based in Tax, with some
regular Audit work when either, researching
irregularities, writing reports, setting up new clients,
or preparing for peer review.)
January 1995 - January 1997 - CPA / Parner in Richard J.
Garza & Associates, CPAs, LLP, in Alice and Corpus
Christi, also traveling and developing a small clientele
in the Rio Grande Valley. (Primarily serving Physicians
in Rio Grande City).
February 1997 - August 1997 - Sole practitioner in Rio
Grande City, Texas, preparing Compilations, Tax Returns,
Cost-Based Reports, IRS Audit Representations and
Strategic Tax Planning exclusively for Select Clients and
Health Care Professionals/Organizations. (I Am No Longer
Performing Audit Work or Peer/Quality Reviews).
September 1997 - Present - Sole Practitioner in McAllen,
Texas, preparing Compilations, Tax Returns, Federal and
State Audit Representations and Strategic Tax Planning
exclusively for Select Clients (Oil & Gas, Health
Care Providers, Health Care Organizations, High Income
Individuals and Companies, and Taxpayers with unusual
circumstances.)
Current Client Set Includes: Health Car Providers,
High-Income Individuals (Federal and Other States),
Partnerships (Regular, Farm & Ranch, Oil & Gas,
LLCs and LLPs), C-Corporations (Including Entities in
"Controlled Groups"), S-Corporations (Regular,
Holding Company, LLCs, PLLCs and PAs), the occasional
Estate (706), Fiduciaries (1041), Federal Payroll (941,
940 and 945), Texas State Payroll (C-3 & C-4), Texas
Sales and Use (01-114, 01-115), Texas Franchise (05-142,
05-102), Heavy Vehicle (2290) and untold other tax
returns.
What it Takes:
Curiosity: Just like the
cliche' "If you want to be interest-ing, you've
got to get Interest-ed". Translation = All it
really takes to make it in life is a genuine curiosity in
the world around you. This must be the top of the
"D" triangle; "Desire" The other 2
D's that follow... are "Defense" and
"Discipline", explained next. I will let you
figure out which is which.
Work Ethic: There's simply no subsititute for effort. The
cliche' here is: "If you're not failing at
something, then you're not attempting anything."
Intuition: There's a world of difference between
"skill" and "talent". Skill has to be
learned, and is developed through practical application.
Intellectual talent is largely based on your speed and
level of information digestion and pattern recognition.
Talent is something that you're born with; it's a gift,
it's "natural". Skill can take you to a decent
place; but, only talent can take you to higher levels of
comprehension and achievment. You've must have them both,
and you must use them both. When even the truly gifted
rely on talent alone, eventually the world catches up
with them, and when their "luck" runs out,
(notice I used the word "when"), it's never
pretty. That's the nicest way i can explain it.
What I
Do:
Over the course of a few
sessions, what I do is establish systems of performing
tasks, and establishing business policies. These are
generally extrapolations of daily worksheet and task
documentation creation and automation. Emphasis is placed
on consistency, fairness, and profit. Consistency can
largely accomplished through a quality computer system.
Fairness can be pretty simple too, the main quality of
fairness can be acheived through non-discrimination in
general, and through a strict implementation of the
business chain of command. Profit is the tricky part.
But, without the first two parts properly set up, this
one will have to wait. In order to expect good luck, you
need to practice good form. And alot of business profit
motives can be 90% accomplished by attaining and
maintaining proper accounting systems, and performing
tasks in cohesive, and auditable ways. Accountability is
the only way I know to look back and get close to 20-20
hindsight; and it's the only tool I know how to use to
project data into the future with which to make current
business policies and decisions.
Profit is logic. And there are apparently lots of
differents "kinds" of logic. (Many of which I
fail to understand). But in business, a good part of the
logic that will help you prevail is psychological.
Negotiation, interpersonal relations, and business
communications, to name a few. All I will say here, is
that failure in this department can add extraordinary
tension, and undue heartache to your everyday operations.
Why not just let proper logic prevail ?
Since I'll never win any beauty pagents, or have droves
of amiable followers; I'm forced to believe that I am
mainly used for my money-making and money-saving ways...
So, remember, my goal is not to be your friend. My goal
is to do what is best for you. Period. Like me, business
was simply not meant to be pretty, it was meant to serve
a purpose. And the sooner you adjust to this fact, the
better.
What I do, in a nutshell, is set up business systems,
establish time-tested tools, and provide logical business
policy alternatives that have been largely successful for
others, and are designed to provide for your attainment
of calculated business potential.
My Way:
My way has turned out to be
an effective combination of the "old-fashioned"
way, and the "new", technological way. But,
somehow, only one of these factors is allowed to take the
driver's seat at a time. Yes, it's the usually the
old-fashioned values that usually supercedes all else.
It has recently come to my realization that I have
benefitted from the unfortunate circumstances of others.
I call it a "generation-skipping" situation. As
circumstance would have it, I was born to a pretty old
father. He was almost 50 when i was born. My father was
an orphan. He was raised by a very old aunt. His aunt was
raised by grandparents, the way many people were a few
generations back. You get the picture. There were never
really a whole lot of "regular parents" along
the way. And I think this somehow caused an abbreviation
of the distortions that can get in the way of the direct
passing-down of "old-time" knowledge.
Serious older people don't mess around. They pretty much
get straight to the point, and then stick to it. If
things were still taught in such a way, we would live in
a much stronger world. Long after my father's death, I
can still hear his voice saying things like "If
it sounds to good to be true, it probably is."
(That's the nice version...as I got older, he had a way
of amplifying lessons in more attention-getting words.
Here's his real "adult" version "If
somebody ever tries to give you something for free, cover
your ass with both hands cuz you're about to get
skrewed.") And, to this day, it's a rule in our
house. When the phone rings with someone offering
something "Free" or anything that even sounds
"close to free", they too must learn the rule -
"We don't accept free things in this house;
Period." (Dial-Tone.) This rule saves boatloads
of time. Many of these are simple economic rules, like
this one regarding Credit Cards... "Don't buy
things you don't need, with money you don't have".
These old-fashioned lessons are my "advantage",
and maybe it's the reason that even since I was a young
man in my twenties, clients as old as 50, 60 and over 70,
have come to me for a little bit more than plain ole
vanilla accounting advice. I think that maybe they listen
to these stories, because the words ring true to their
own home values. And it's the very same reason that I
still seek them (and their books) out for more words and
lessons on history and that enlightening straightforward
old-time advice.
My
Mantra:
"Life is not about quantity." -Me
This is one of my favorite sayings. I find myself
repeating it all the time. And it may sound funny coming
from an accountant. But accounting is not life,
accounting is mostly quantitative. And life is mostly
qualitative. The older I get, the more I realize this.
So, I haven't necessarily lived my life very well. I
spent the first two-thirds of my life focused stricly on
working and getting things done. Don't get me wrong, I'm
glad that I did; but that part is over now, and it's time
to "live smart". (as opposed to just
"working smart".) It's time to maintain the
truly important priorities in life, and advise people
accordingly. Because all the money and hard work in the
world cannot make up for lost time. It has taken most of
my life for me to realize that for every experience i
had, i missed out on another. So, now, I have to move
slower, and make the most informed selections that I can
for myself, and the people around me. Time is short.
The Bottom Line:
If you go to sleep at night, and wake up in the
morning thinking about accounting, YOU are a true
accountant. It's that simple. Believe it or not, simple
solutions even work on big problems. But, everybody has
to learn this lesson for themselves. And the way I
learned this lesson of life was simply by succeeding in
small ways at doing my daily business tasks. Before I
knew it, being an accounting workslave somehow graduated
into becoming a tax accounting taskmaster; which, in
turn, became a tendency to relocate and sprout accounting
offices. Yes, I was born to be an accountant. When I was
once asked what I would rather do for a living if I
wasn't an accountant, my answer was "I'd like to
count money". It was the easiest thing I could
imagine. Ummm, what's wrong with that picture? Counting
money is accounting! Bottom line - accounting must be in
my blood. I count everything, and I see accounting in
everything. Even when i look at art, I wonder, how many
brushes did that take? How long did it take to paint
that? What was the cost of the canvas and the paint? What
will the profit margin be?
Accounting is the best thing about me, and the worst
thing about me. The best thing about me must be that I'm
handy to have around when calculations need to get done.
The worst thing about me is that I'm not always a bundle
of fun with a bowl of cheeries on top. And, about the
only places i can relax is at a show, or at the beach,
where I'm overwhelmed by the natural beauty, the number
of sand granules, and drops of water in the ocean. In
things that are all too much, in just all the right ways.
In ways that can't be counted. In ways that can't be
measured. In natural ways. In analog ways. In ways that
there's no accounting for...You get the idea... Now go
surround yourself with beauty...
Peace...
