IN PLAY: Larry J. Wolfe, CPA

Thanks to an eclectic list of mentors and clients, including prominent businessmen, clergy, and professional athletes, Larry J. Wolfe, CPA, built a successful CPA firm and career specializing in tax controversy. But long before starting his practice of Larry J. Wolfe Ltd., in 1982, Wolfe had other big career plans.

In college, he concentrated on two majors—biology and accounting—with the goal of attending medical school after graduation. That’s until his father passed away suddenly during his first week of classes. “With a mother, sister, and brother to support, med school was off the table, so I decided to sit for the CPA exam,” Wolfe notes. “As luck would have it, I flopped—totally failed it. On my third attempt, I passed.”

Wolfe began his accounting career working for a couple of firms, one being John R. Waters & Company. It was during his two years there that he grew a passion for work involving offers and compromises for the IRS.

Using that experience, Wolfe headed out on his own, sharing an office with the firm Whitfield and Renninger. Of course, sharing the office came with a caveat: He had to guarantee the firm 1,000 billable hours at $20 per hour and any additional hours could be used to solicit his own clients. “The problem was that I only had one client at that time,” Wolfe laughs. However, an insurance friend of Wolfe referred him to a carpet company on Chicago’s South Side where his luck would take a surprising turn.

“At that time, there were no North Shore accountants going down to the South Side to pick up business,” Wolfe says. “That said, it took me seven visits to convince and pick that client up.”

Wolfe’s new client would eventually become one of his many mentors. Like a lot of minority-owned businesses at that time, his client was undercapitalized, financially distressed, and owed the IRS a lot of money. “I had to go down to the IRS office on Western Avenue and get him out of tax trouble without knowing 100% of what I was doing,” Wolfe explains. “It ended up being that his tax returns were done wrong. I was able to amend the returns and get him almost $85,000 back. After he got his refund check, he showed it to everyone on 87th Street.”

Because of that success, Wolfe made a name for himself on 87th Street, picking up more and more clients with IRS and tax issues. One was also a well-known automobile dealer who gave Wolfe both a sales job and office to do his tax work. “I was still kind of shy and didn’t know how to talk to people, and during the lunch hour I would try to go out there and sell a car,” Wolfe says. “I didn’t make any money doing it, but I learned how to talk to people and negotiate. In many ways, I earned my master’s degree on the streets of the South Side of Chicago.”

Eventually, Wolfe’s success allowed him to open his own practice, which specializes in tax controversy issues with the IRS and the state and helping businesses turn around financially. More importantly, starting his own practice has given Wolfe the opportunity to assist in giving back to the community that gave him so much. Wolfe serves as an advisor to the Dempsey J. Travis Foundation, created by their late client who was a real estate entrepreneur, civil rights activist, and author. “Travis believed education was the key to success,” Wolfe notes. “The foundation has awarded approximately $800,000 worth of scholarships annually to minority students throughout the inner city of Chicago—including support for the CPA Endowment Fund of Illinois’ Mary T. Washington Wylie Internship Preparation Program.”

Knowing the value and power of having mentors to guide one’s career, Wolfe stresses one of the conditions of the scholarship program is that the students must have a mentor. “We don’t just want to hand out money,” he says. “We want them to succeed.”

Beyond mentors, Wolfe, who’s been a prominent voice and longtime volunteer among many Illinois CPA Society and AICPA committees, contributes his storied and rather untraditional route to success to having strong partners by his side—the most important being his wife, Linda. “She took me from ‘ragamuffin’ to a guy wearing a suit,” Wolfe says. “She’s my stronger, better half.”

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