Celebrating 50 Years of Fagan & Fagan: What We’ve Learned About Doing This Right
Key Takeaways
Fagan & Fagan has delivered relationship-driven accounting for small business owners since 1976, with an intentionally personal and selective approach.
We have 50 years of experience, helping our clients navigate economic cycles, tax changes, and complex business challenges.
We pair modern tools with enduring values of quality, integrity, and personal attention.
In 1976, my dad, Richard “Ed” Fagan, started his public CPA practice in Long Beach, California, with a simple approach: do exceptional work, treat clients like family instead of file numbers, and be there when they need you.
That’s still how we operate today.
If you’re looking for a story about explosive growth and aggressive expansion, this isn’t it. We’ve never tried to be the biggest firm.
What we’ve built instead is a practice where clients stay for decades, where we know their families, and where we can actually do the deep work that moves the needle for their businesses.
This year marks 50 years of Fagan & Fagan. I’ve been thinking about what that milestone actually means — not as a celebration of longevity, but as a chance to share what we’ve learned that might be useful to you.
What 50 Years in Business Has Taught Us
When you’ve been doing this long enough, you see the same patterns play out across different decades, different industries, different economic cycles.
Here’s what’s actually stuck:
Tax returns have zero value. Tax strategy has massive value.
I’ll say it plainly: nobody cares about a tax return. It’s a compliance document that has to get done. The return itself doesn’t help you make better decisions or keep more of what you earn.
The value is in the strategy and planning that happens before the return gets filed.
But here’s the problem. If a client is slow in getting us their information, we end up stuck doing backwards-looking work. We’re finishing tax returns in August for a tax year that ended in December. By that point, they’re nine months into the new year. Things have completely changed.
What good does that do anyone?
We focus on proactive tax advisory. Early planning gives you options; late action forces compromises.
You can’t work with everyone. And you shouldn’t try.
Early on, we realized that trying to serve everyone meant serving no one particularly well.
Our best clients share certain traits. They’re organized, they’re responsive, and they actually want to use their financial data to make decisions. We’re a strategic partner to them, not a personal assistant.
When we got more selective about fit, our work improved dramatically — as did our client’s happiness. We could go deeper because we had the bandwidth to truly understand each client’s business.
If that sounds like a fit for you, fantastic! We would love the opportunity to learn more about your tax and accounting needs.
Cash flow matters more than revenue.
I’ve lost count of how many business owners come in excited about revenue growth but stressed that they won’t be able to cover basic expenses because cash is tied up.
You can grow your top line and still run out of money. Growth is actually one of the most common ways businesses destroy their cash position. If I could get every business owner to track one thing obsessively from day one, it would be cash flow.
Accounting always comes last. That’s a problem.
Accounting is nobody’s favorite part of running a business, so it typically gets dealt with last.
The problem is that when you treat your books as an afterthought, you lose the ability to be proactive. Instead, you’re always reacting — to the IRS letter, to the surprise tax bill, to the cash crunch you didn’t see coming.
The clients who get the most value from working with us are the ones who genuinely want to understand what’s going on in their business. They have a thirst for that clarity. They don’t just hand us a shoebox of receipts and hope for the best.
Relationships compound over time.
Our longest-standing clients are no longer just business relationships. We know their families. We’ve watched their kids grow up. We’ve helped them through expansions, downturns, retirements, and transitions.
That history matters. When you know someone’s business for ten or twenty years, you have context that’s impossible to replicate with a new accountant who’s just looking at this year’s numbers.
What Hasn’t Changed
The tools are completely different now. When my father started Fagan & Fagan, everything was manual. Paper files, physical meetings, handwritten returns — those are things of the past. Now, we operate remotely with cloud-based, secure systems and automation that would have seemed like science fiction in 1976.
But the actual work hasn’t changed. You still need someone who understands your business, asks the right questions, and has the judgment to know when something doesn’t look right. Software makes things faster, but it doesn’t replace critical thinking.
We’re still a father-son practice, even as roles have shifted. We’re still selective about who we work with. We still believe that doing deep work for fewer clients beats doing shallow work for many.
What’s Next for Fagan & Fagan
I don’t know exactly what’s in store for Fagan & Fagan in the next 50 years. What I do know is that we’ll keep doing what we’ve believed in since the beginning. We’ll continue building long-term relationships with the right clients, staying proactive instead of reactive, and never treating accounting like something that can be rushed through.
If that resonates with how you think about your business, we should probably talk.
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Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)
Q: What types of clients do you work with?
A: We work primarily with established businesses and franchise owners, typically earning $300,000 or more annually, with business revenue in the $750k to $10m range, who value proactive financial advice. Our best-fit clients are organized, responsive, and genuinely interested in using their numbers to make better decisions.
Q: Do you only work with clients in Southern California?
A: We were founded in Long Beach and have operated from the Cerritos area for the past 50 years, but we serve clients remotely across the country. Geography matters less than fit. If you value the proactive, relationship-driven approach we’ve built over 50 years, location isn’t a barrier.
Q: What makes Fagan & Fagan different from other CPA firms?
A: Honestly, we’re picky. We’ve learned that the best outcomes happen when there’s genuine alignment between what a client needs and how we work. We focus on tax strategy over tax returns, we build long-term relationships instead of transactional ones, and we treat your business like it’s our own.
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