Sammy Mattingly and Fred Ott went from high school lifting partners to business partners, building their own bookkeeping firm in Louisville. Their plan was simple, and they’ve kept it that way.
Sammy Mattingly can't walk into a grocery store or a restaurant in Louisville without running into someone he knows. Louisville is where he grew up, and after college at the University of Kentucky in Lexington, it's where he chose to build his firm. In the firm's first four months, he and his co-founder went to every networking event they could find, and within two months, they knew everybody. "It's a big, small town, small, big town," he says. "Whichever way you want to put it, it's home."
That co-founder is Frederick Ott, and their friendship started with very little talking. They met on their high school football team, and the coach paired them up as lifting partners. "We were probably the two smallest guys on the team," Sammy says. "So they put us together, and we never talked. We would just lift."
Shared classes in sophomore year turned them into friends, and they went on to college together. Along with another friend, they joked for years about starting a business, without ever taking it seriously.
"It felt kind of inevitable that we were going to go all in and build something pretty big."
In time, both of them felt the itch to build something of their own. Sammy is a CPA who began his career at PwC in Louisville, and he still speaks warmly of it. "It was really important in my career journey," he says. "But I just think I have a lot of entrepreneurial spirit and drive." One night, he watched a YouTube video about starting a bookkeeping business.
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With his CPA background and Fred's finance background, the technical side didn't worry him. He and Fred talked it over for about two minutes, then wrote a five-week plan that they stuck to. "The biggest piece," Sammy says, "is just actually taking a leap."
"Simple is better, less is more."
That spirit shapes how they run the firm. They would rather run on a handful of strong tools than a long list of average ones. "A tech stack of three to five really powerful tools is going to be a better business than 10," he says. "Simple is better, less is more," he says. When Jugal reached out on LinkedIn about Aqqrue, Sammy was cautious. With earlier AI tools, he had "seen enough mistakes and enough kind of yes-man answers in the accounting sense." On top of that, the firm was too busy for him to spend hours learning something new.
What won him over was the effort. In June, Surya and Jugal flew to Louisville to onboard the firm in person. "If the founders of the company fly in and do a hands-on onboarding for two days, they believe in their product," he says. Sammy learned how to talk to it, and Fred picked it up the week after. Today, every client runs on the same set of tasks. The work Sammy loved least gets pushed down, and the team spends its time on problems that need real thinking.
Building an excellent practice
Sammy used to follow the old advice to start each day with the hardest task. For a bookkeeper, that usually meant reports. Now, he and Fred spend their mornings on marketing. That might mean coffee with a tax preparer, a networking event, or recording LinkedIn posts and YouTube videos, with client work kicking in later in the day.
He posts on LinkedIn every day and never asks for anything. Some posts are lightly funny takes on accounting, some are tips for owners doing their own books, and some are commentary on the industry. The hardest part was putting his face on all of it. "I had to get over the fear," he says. "When your face is on everything, it's more personalized."
It has turned him into someone people come to. Accountants at CPA firms message him regularly to ask how they could start a firm of their own. Asked whether a young CPA should join the Big Four or go out alone, he's honest. A Big Four start is worth it for most people, he says, because of where it can take you. Entrepreneurship is for those who feel the pull.
His own goals are straightforward. He wants to keep growing, keep serving Louisville and the clients beyond it, and build an excellent firm. "Super simple," he says, "but so much goes into that."
