Tax Day is finally in the rearview mirror, and if you’re like many practitioners—with the phones quieter, the inbox manageable, and the September extension wave feeling comfortably far away—the temptation right now is to coast. Resist that temptation. Summer is the only stretch of the calendar when both you and your best clients have the bandwidth to think strategically; furthermore, this summer, there is a deadline-driven opportunity. In this article, I’ll walk through three moves every practitioner should be making between now and Labor Day. The first move has a hard statutory deadline of July 10, 2026. The second move is about turning your highest-value client conversations into billable advisory engagements. And third is about tending to the practice itself because a tax practice, like a garden, doesn’t survive without care.
Help Your Clients Implement a Fortune 500 CFO Strategy
For decades, some of America’s largest corporations have used a financial strategy that gives their CFOs greater control over insurance costs, helps them finance risks the commercial market handles poorly and creates an opportunity to retain underwriting profit when losses come in below expectations. Approximately 90% of Fortune 500 companies have captive insurance subsidiaries.¹ Historically, the economics favored organizations with substantial capital, large insurance programs and the resources to support their own insurance operations. Small and midsize businesses rarely had the scale to justify the cost and complexity. That equation has changed. A mature network of specialized insurance professionals and structures now allows qualifying privately held businesses to pursue many of the same risk-financing advantages. Federal tax law can further improve the economics for certain smaller insurance companies. For CPAs and tax professionals, this creates an advisory opportunity. The challenge is recognizing which clients could benefit and what conditions must exist before recommending it.
