Beth Franklin

Words by Holly Harrison

Beth Franklin used to work at a “more traditional” accounting firm.

She’s careful to give her old employers and coworkers a lot of credit—saying they’re nice people who care deeply about their clients and who do excellent work. But she doesn’t deny that the average CPA isn’t exactly the life of the party, and the average CPA firm might not be a place where you want to hang out.

Fox Tax is different. They’re a team of tax specialists who put their collective passion for art and music into helping creative types nationwide make a business out of their art. If the dichotomy of left brain and right brain is to be believed, a tax prep firm with an art gallery in it is the epitome of “unlikely collaborations.” That’s probably why they’ve been at Giant Steps, a forum that celebrates and enhances that very concept, since year one.

We talked to Beth—one of Fox Tax’s Giant Steps presenters—about what it’s like working on the business side of art.

“Paddle Party” on display at Fox Tax HQ

How is the cast of number crunchers at Fox Tax different from staff at other firms?

I’ve worked at a couple of more traditional CPA firms before coming back to Fox Tax, where I interned when I was a senior at Augsburg. At other firms, I always felt like I wasn’t working with the clients I wanted to work with. There was such a barrier because of the cost and the process. When I met people at events, I didn’t feel like I could say, “Hey, I work in this kind of anonymous office building south of the Delta hangar at the airport in Bloomington. Come on in.”

People hear about CPAs and lawyers and most of it’s true—the cost of getting services is pretty high.

So when you’re talking to an artist who just wants help getting started, it’s hard to feel accessible to them. I think that sets Fox Tax apart from other CPA firms—that we have a desire to work with real people who represent the meat of our city and our artistic community, and not just in Minneapolis but around the country. The dollar sign isn’t the one thing that’s fueling our relationships with clients.

You walk around the office during tax season, and everyone’s somehow so upbeat and chipper and almost refreshed. When clients come in, it’s reenergizing—it’s almost like seeing an old friend once a year. You get to catch up. Then the clients leave for the day and it’s like a vacuum of energy. The fact that we’ve been working sixteen-hour days hits and everyone powers down.

It can’t be easy spending sixteen hours solving people’s problems while being present and upbeat.

Working at Fox Tax is a lot more fast paced, a lot more demanding than a traditional CPA firm, in part because we don’t have the typical tiered structure that means an individual worker is only doing one small part of each return.

You’ve gotta want it. You’ve gotta be a little bit outgoing. You’ve gotta be a cheerleader, a coach, a therapist at times—and not to mention also be able to do a damn good tax return.

Still, all of us here have said, “I’d do this job for free.”

Beth’s office

What can other businesses learn from Fox Tax?

It blows my mind that CPA firms haven’t recognized this overwhelming population of people in the middle. The segment of the population whose taxes are a little more complicated than typing in numbers off a W-2, but who can’t afford to go to a big or even mid-size accounting firm. And it’s remarkable to me that more businesses aren’t just paying attention to the people who have a loyalty to consuming locally. You just don’t see it in the accounting and finance world—people who brand themselves as that accessible, affordable, homegrown.

Are there other businesses that you recommend to artists?

Oh gosh all the time. We get questions like, “Who can we talk to about insurance?” Or, “I need a financial planner.” Or, “I need to draft a legal contract.” We don’t try to do everything. We do taxes. We sometimes provide some bookkeeping services and business consulting.

We’re real big on referring to other strong, trusted partners and we’re in a great city to do so. We refer a lot of people over to the classes that Springboard for the Arts puts on. And even things like Giant Steps, which is one of the rare professional development conferences that apply to people in a creative industry.

We refer people to Friedman Iverson and Davis Law—K. M. Davis works out of the CoCo offices, which is like the definition of accessibility.

Options Insurance—we refer a ton to them because Sarah used to work in advertising and she’s such a relatable person. I trust her to be kind and generous, and she’s genuinely interested in her clients and having the best results for them.

We’re always trying to find bookkeepers. We find a good bookkeeper and we have them completely full in weeks.

Looking up at Fox Tax

What type of creative has the most challenging tax return?

Anyone dealing with inventory. So, visual artists making work to sell or musicians creating albums and merchandise—tracking that can be pretty hard. It’s even more complicated for musicians in the digital age—how many albums are they making? Well, they’re basically infinite—so how do you measure the cost of creating each unit? I’ve read articles on the accounting in the music industry, and they don’t have answers for that. And none of this accounts for sales tax, which varies widely from state to state. That keeps us busy and on our toes.

Do you think it’s true that most artists can’t do numbers and number people can’t do art?

That’s actually kind of the anecdotal start to our Tax Talks and presentations at Giant Steps. Everyone’s first line of defense is, “Well, I’m not good at math.” The first thing I say is, “You can add. And you can subtract. And that’s about the extent of the math you need to do to do this.”

You don’t need Calc III to do your taxes.

Certainly at some point small businesses might need to take on a bookkeeper or have QuickBooks, and then another set of skills is required. But other than that, it’s easier than people think.

As for number people not doing art: people ask all the time, “Is this your stuff?” [Motions to the art on her office walls.] Here [motions at ten key calculator] is my art. I tried learning a couple of instruments one time, but y’know. It’s just a different way of thinking. I get trapped in the details.

I’ve certainly seen people master both. It’s an exceptional group of people that can fit within that Venn diagram.

Beth’s office

What’s happening in the gallery space right now, and when’s the next show starting?

Right now we have a fundraiser show for One Heartland, a nonprofit that provides camp experiences for youth and families dealing with significant health challenges or social isolation. They curated this show and had a bunch of artists paint on oars, the sales of which go straight to the organization.

After this goes down in August, we’re gonna go dark just because it gets so hot in these old Northeast buildings. Having art up on the walls when it gets really really hot is just…not a good idea. So we go dark until the fall, then we’ll have Jon Aller in. He’s—I had to ask how to describe him—he’s “a classical painter with a modern twist.”

One Heartland’s “Paddle Party”

What’s a question you wish someone would ask you?

I don’t know what people even want to know from me. People always wonder, I guess, did you know you wanted to be an accountant? Like, did you know you always wanted to be doing this?

I think that people assume that when you’re ten years old you want to be a marine biologist. Or a teacher.

I think people who come in as clients may have known what they wanted to do because they started showing some talent as an artist, certainly by the time they were in high school or college. But I didn’t know I was gonna get into tax until after I had graduated.

I was gonna go down a path to get a music business degree. I figured business, because I didn’t know what else at the time, and the music industry, because it really interested me. And if you’re gonna learn business, you might as well end up in a community, in an environment where you’re gonna be able to fuel your passion.

Sometimes I still wonder, “How did I end up here? This is my skillset? This is what I got? A tax accountant?” [Laughs.]

Beth’s office

Do you ever think, “This is it for me!” Or do you find yourself wondering about career #2?

I don’t know what else I’d want to do. I’m completely satisfied. And sometimes I’m like, “Man, I found this really early. Am I gonna be happy in this career for another forty years?” Which is insane to me, to think about forty more years in a career.

I haven’t lived for forty years. What does forty years even feel like?

Exactly. So that’s really overwhelming. I try not to go down that rabbit hole because I start, like, sweating. And breathing really heavily.