Meet George Bass: Marketing Consultant and Certified Public Accountant Manager

We had the good fortune of connecting with George Bass and we’ve shared our conversation below.

Hi George, what was your thought process behind starting your own business?
The Mesa Consulting Group was doing great until Covid. Over night all of our clients closed and no one was hiring our services. My wife had been running www.AlanaBassCPA.com for nearly 20 years and had been growing it organically at a very slow rate. The demand for her services were overwhelming in these shut-down times so Mesa dedicated 100% of our efforts towards managing her operations and marketing her CPA firm. The thought process involved meeting what our customers demanded and not what we wanted to offer so the two companies merged and now www.AlanaBassCPA.com is growing at a record pace and will soon be hiring more bookkeepers and accountants to handle the increased volume. As a Marketer and Salesman, I know that asking what people want instead of telling them what you have to offer usually results in a better chance of conducting business. It’s that thought process that has guided me to help grow www.AlanaBassCPA.com

Alright, so for those in our community who might not be familiar with your business, can you tell us more?
The Mesa Consulting Group got started when I was invited by KSU to speak to a Chinese corporation regarding Direct Marketing. I had been teaching Sales, Marketing, Sales Management and Direct Marketing as an Adjunct for both the Undergrads and the EMBA’s for several years and found that there was a demand for my services outside of the Visitor’s Guides that I had been running in Atlanta and Chicago. The Mesa Consulting Group took off like a rocket and eclipsed the earnings of the magazines within three years so I focused my energies on growing the group as I devised an exit strategy from print media. As I discussed earlier, Covid decimated our Consulting business but had the unintended consequence of creating a demand for my wife’s CPA services. So, I pivoted all of Mesa’s efforts to developing www.AlanaBassCPA.com into the thriving company that it is today. What I’ve learned is that flexibility for entrepreneurs is a necessity and an ability to jump out of your comfort zone is mission critical if you want to be successful in such a wildly unpredictable economy. The next challenge is to enjoy the journey because you only get one chance at it so you need to make it count.

Any places to eat or things to do that you can share with our readers? If they have a friend visiting town, what are some spots they could take them to?
It’s funny to ask a middle aged man from the suburbs where he’d take someone to show them the best time ever since I’m usually in bed by 10:00 pm. Plus, my free time is spent at Gracie Barra Georgia doing Brazilian Jiujitsu so it would be a different kind of guy that would like to put on pajamas and practice strangling each other. However, if you didn’t want to see my youngest lead the Kennesaw Mountain Marching Mustang Band at a Friday night football game, go shooting at the Georgia Firing Line or watch grown men roll around on a mat, I’d have to recommend starting at the Varsity in Midtown. There are amazing views and something really special about a naked steak and sweet vidalia onion rings. I’d show off a driving tour of Peachtree Street where the skyscrapers canyon the road like the Wilshire Corridor in Los Angeles and take you through the coolest commercial neighborhoods in any of the 50 states. I’m a huge fan of the Miss Daisy’s Druid Hills homes by Emory and always enjoy thinking about how I could renovate and build out to perfectly suit my wife and me in our retirement years. But ultimately, it’s the people in this town that generate the excitement which makes Atlanta thrive. For an SMA of 6MM, people will still stop and say “Hey” just because that’s what we do.

Shoutout is all about shouting out others who you feel deserve additional recognition and exposure. Who would you like to shoutout?
I’d like to give a huge shoutout to my wife, Alana Bass. She gave up a high paying executive position as a CPA to open a boutique shop that would allow her the time necessary to manage a work life balance between being a new mother and an entrepreneur. She managed to build a company that in 20 years is now a thriving corporation with international clients, major Atlanta area businesses, dozens of companies around the United States and countless tax customers. If it weren’t for her, I wouldn’t have a business to help take to the next level.

Website: www.MesaConsultingGroup.com www.AlanaBassCPA.com
Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/george-bass-mesa-consulting/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/webringexperience
Other: www.AlanaBassCPA.com