Stephanie Heredia, 30

Stephanie Heredia knows what it’s like to work for someone else. A desire for more control over her time led her into entrepreneurship, and she’s found her happy place as CEO of Taxes Tampa. 

One thing she enjoys about owning her own accounting firm is the face-to-face time she gets with clients. “In accounting, you’re not usually allowed to be the most client facing; unless you’re at the top of the pyramid, you’re behind a cubicle or desk,” she says. “I really like just talking to clients and the relationships.”

Photo by Mark Wemple

Those conversations help her assess what clients need and “just be able to listen to their problems,” she says. “They’re usually so big by the time they go to you that their anxiety is level 10.”

Heredia saw entrepreneurship as a possibility after seeing her stepmom, Donnetta Clayborne Stafford, go down that path herself as a self-employed designer. They’re opposites — Heredia is careful and conservative, her stepmom’s more of a risk taker — and they often disagree. “But somehow we find a middle,” says Heredia.

Her stepmom helped teach her to be curious about their differences and to take a few more risks. Another major lesson learned from her stepmother? “Just keep going,” says Heredia. “I know that’s so generic, but she just keeps pushing forward.”

Over the past several years, Heredia herself has served as a mentor at the Lowth Entrepreneurship Center at the University of Tampa. “If people don’t get foundational accounting knowledge, as they scale it becomes really hard to backtrack,” she says. “I’m giving them my experience from working with other people doing the same thing.”

Starting a business is a huge leap, and Heredia sees a lot of similarities between it and the work she did in her younger days helping her dad with his junk-hauling business. “They’re so interrelated,” she says. “When you’re starting a business, you feel like you don’t know anything, just like when you’re getting rid of everything you’ve owned. Both of those things are starting over.”

She enjoys helping others on entrepreneurial journeys of their own, whether that’s by recommending accounting software or walking them through their tax responsibilities. “So many people want to help other people or just be a resource,” she says. “People who have already been there and done that, they want people to ask them for help.”