The summary
- Per-return capacity multiplied by removing manual data entry: from one return at a time to 10-50 returns per hour through Juno
- Smaller-fee clients stay profitable, so the firm doesn't have to fire the painters, concrete workers, and tattoo artists most CPAs have already priced out
- A remote-first firm built on automation from day one, with founder in Georgia and clients across multiple states
- Workflow standardized on Juno + TaxDome to free Adam for the consulting work the firm wants to grow
Tech stack
- Juno
- TaxDome
- Drake
"Juno lets me do a tax return for a reasonable cost. I don't have to manually enter all this data for every single tax return. I can do 10 an hour, or 50 an hour. That changes things, and I can pass the savings on to these people."
Adam Manning, Owner, Nomadica Solutions
The situation: a firm built around the clients other CPAs won't take
Nomadica Solutions doesn't look like a typical tax practice. Adam Manning started it two and a half years ago to help a single friend with tax returns. By his own account, the firm grew almost without his approval, and most of the growth came from one community: tattoo artists, freelance contractors, painters, concrete workers, e-commerce sellers, and the small shop owners who employ them.
"We really specialize and focus on the self-employed, the freelancer, contractors, subcontractors. The painters, the concrete workers, those type of folks that are branching out on their own that need a little bit of guidance. Coincidentally, the majority of those people are artists. The majority of our clients are artists, specifically tattoo artists."
The work is genuinely complex. Adam's book includes LLCs, S-corps, e-commerce operators with multi-platform inventory, shop owners with W-2 employees, property managers with rental income, and a long tail of 1099 contractors. The clients need real advice. They also can't pay what a typical firm charges senior CPAs to do compliance work.
Adam's framing of the problem is unusually direct:
"There are a lot of families out there, a lot of companies that are doing what they can to provide for their family. If I'm out chasing the biggest clients, they all get left behind. We want to include them because we want everybody to be successful. So how do I do that effectively so I can also feed my family, and so can they?"
The constraint that defines the firm: serve the clients larger firms have priced out, and do it profitably enough to sustain a real business.
What they did: built remote-first, then standardized on Juno + TaxDome
Two structural decisions shaped the firm's operating model.
Remote-first from day one. Adam is in Georgia. His first client was in Ohio. He never had the option to sit across a desk and walk a client through their return, which forced the firm to be far more rigorous about intake, documentation, and process than most early-stage practices.
"Because of that, we were forced to do this level of automation and organization. I don't have the luxury of sitting down and having a face-to-face interview. We're forced to ask all of the questions. Not just 'did you have health insurance' and the answer being 'yes,' but 'did you get it from the marketplace?'"
Standardized on Juno + TaxDome. As the firm grew, Adam needed a tax prep stack that could keep per-return time low enough to make the unit economics work at his clients' price points. He brought in TaxDome for the portal and workflow side, then added Juno for the prep side.
"When I picked up TaxDome, I realized a lot of workflow systems that I was lacking. So now we're implementing that. Now that my bookkeeping side and the fractional side are picking up, we're funneling that into tax as well. Having these workflow processes in place is absolutely changing things. I'm becoming more organized."
The combination of TaxDome handling client-facing workflow and Juno handling document extraction and return prep let Adam build the operational backbone before adding more revenue on top of it.
What changed: efficiency unlocked the ability to keep serving smaller clients
The most concrete shift is what Juno changed about Adam's prep time per return. Where he used to type data into the return one document at a time, Juno now extracts and validates the source documents up front. Adam frames the impact in throughput terms:
"Being able to do a tax return for a reasonable cost is huge, and every business owner out there needs that. Juno lets me do that. I don't have to manually enter all this data for every single tax return. I can do 10 an hour, or 50 an hour. That changes things, and I can pass the savings on to these people so they can continue to do the work that they need to do, and they're not getting a bitter taste in their mouth about their tax preparer."
That throughput change is what makes the rest of the firm possible. A tattoo artist working out of a shop, a concrete subcontractor billing as a 1099, an e-commerce seller running inventory across Amazon and Shopify. These are clients who need a real return and real advice, and who walk away if the price gets too high. The standard CPA-firm answer is to fire those clients and chase higher fees. Adam's answer is to drop his per-return cost low enough that the math still works at the price point those clients can actually pay.
What Adam is unwilling to automate is the relationship side:
"It's important for me to know that when my clients reach out to me and they contact me, that part is not automated. They have somebody that knows them and cares about them. My process was created with you in mind. I automate a lot of things that they'll never know about. But when it comes to them speaking to me or our interaction, that part is not."
The split is the operating principle: automate everything the client doesn't see, keep the human in the parts they do.
Why it matters: efficiency lets a firm choose a different growth model
The standard CPA-firm growth story is a scaling-up story. Acquire higher-value clients, raise prices, fire the bottom 20%. That model works, and a lot of firms run it well.
Nomadica is running a different play. The firm's premise is that there's a large and growing population of small-business clients who need real tax and bookkeeping support and can't afford the firms that have priced them out. The only way to serve those clients profitably is to make the per-return economics work at a much lower price point. That's what Juno's role inside the firm is. The efficiency on the prep side is what creates the option to keep serving the smaller-fee clients at all.
Adam's larger view of where the industry is going:
"The days of somebody going and working a job for 30 years and then retiring with a pension are long gone. Even the days of working four or five jobs in your career with a 401(k) that follows you, those days are shifting. The younger generation is looking for work-life balance, and some of them say, 'I don't want to deal with that at all, I'd rather work for myself,' and they become freelancers. So they need the advisory and the tax support more than any other generation before. But they also don't necessarily have the revenue to pay what companies used to pay."
Increased workload, smaller per-client revenue, and a category of small businesses that needs the advice. Juno's role inside Nomadica is to make the throughput math work without dropping the quality of the return, so the firm can keep saying yes to those clients.
Sustainability: an automated back office, a human front of house
Nomadica's growth plan is built around two things expanding: the fractional CFO and tax strategy services that Adam wants to push the firm into next, and the volume of self-employed clients in his niche who keep finding him. Both depend on keeping the per-return prep time controlled.
"What I'm really excited about is continuing to grow this fractional piece, and integrating it so we're not just tax focused. With AI and automation, we're trying to prepare to become a broader company to service all kinds of needs other than just tax."
The firm continues to run Juno + TaxDome as the operating stack across its bookkeeping, tax prep, and advisory work.
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This case study draws from Adam Manning's appearance on the Modern Tax Pros podcast, hosted by Juno founder Dave Haase. Quotes were lightly cleaned for readability while preserving Adam's framing and intent.
