Lea Graf of Sterling Tax & Accounting, Founder and CPA in Sarasota

Lea Graf is the founder and president of Sterling Tax & Accounting, a CPA firm based in Sarasota offering tax planning, bookkeeping, virtual CFO services, and strategic tax planning for small businesses. She graduated from the University of South Florida and worked in public accounting before starting her own practice in 2013, building it from a solo operation into a firm that now serves clients nationwide.

Graf moved to Sarasota in 2001, a move she's described in a phrase that's become something of a personal signature: she left "the icy tundra of Minneapolis, Minnesota" for Florida. That mix of Midwestern directness and Florida ease shows up in how she runs the practice, straightforward with clients, but built around genuine relationships rather than transactional tax prep.

From solo practice to a full firm

What started as one CPA's practice in 2013 has grown into a firm with a dedicated Strategic Services team, a Tax team, and an Accounting team, more than a dozen people in total, each holding some level of QuickBooks ProAdvisor certification. That structure lets Sterling Tax & Accounting offer more than seasonal tax prep: virtual CFO services, ongoing bookkeeping, tax resolution work, and estate planning support sit alongside the core tax practice, positioning the firm as a year-round financial partner rather than a once-a-year stop.

The firm's specialization list has grown alongside its headcount. Sterling now serves industries including medical and physician practices, real estate, and professional services, each with their own dedicated resources on the firm's site. That kind of industry-specific focus is unusual for a firm that started as a single practitioner working with whoever walked in the door, and it reflects a deliberate decision to go deep in a handful of areas rather than try to be a generalist shop for every type of small business. 

A medical practice and a real estate brokerage have very different bookkeeping needs, different billing cycles, different compliance concerns, and building dedicated resources for each rather than a one-size-fits-all approach is part of what lets the firm grow past the limits of a single generalist practice.

The team itself tells that growth story almost as well as the client list does. Sterling's roster today includes CPAs, enrolled agents, and bookkeepers who've joined from public accounting firms, private industry, and even outside fields entirely, several with more than two decades of experience apiece. One senior tax specialist joined in 2025 after a career spanning a Big Four firm and a multinational enterprise before running her own practice; a tax manager on the team has been in public accounting since 1997. That mix of deep individual experience layered onto a firm that didn't exist a little over a decade ago says something about how quickly Graf built something worth joining.

The paths that brought people to Sterling vary widely, and that variety is part of what makes the team distinctive. One team member came to accounting after a stint as a level designer at an independent game development studio. Another spent 14 years managing a chain of college bookstores before switching to bookkeeping. A third grew up racing sailboats in Sarasota and even lived aboard one before finding her way into finance. None of that reads like a typical accounting firm roster, and that's largely the point: Graf has built a team around people who bring a genuinely wide range of backgrounds to the same disciplined, QuickBooks-driven approach to client work.

An Advanced Certified QuickBooks ProAdvisor

Graf's QuickBooks credential is more than a line on a bio. As an Advanced Certified QuickBooks ProAdvisor, she holds a distinction only a small number of CPAs carry, one that lets her assess a business's accounting setup quickly and propose a solution that actually fits how that business operates day to day, rather than forcing every client into the same template. That expertise has become part of the firm's identity: nearly every team member at Sterling, across tax, accounting, and client-facing roles, holds some level of QuickBooks ProAdvisor certification, a deliberate standard Graf has built into how the practice hires and trains.

For clients, that translates into a practice built around proactive tax strategy rather than reactive filing. Sterling's own marketing centers on saving clients real money each year through strategic tax planning rather than just processing returns after the fact, an approach that depends on the kind of hands-on financial visibility QuickBooks expertise makes possible. It also shows up in how the firm structures its client relationships: rather than a single point of contact who disappears after tax season, clients get access to a broader team built specifically around ongoing financial strategy, not a once-a-year filing appointment.

That structure matters most for the small business owners Sterling tends to attract, people who need more than someone to sign off on a return once a year, but don't have the budget or the need for a full-time, in-house CFO. Virtual CFO services fill exactly that gap, giving business owners access to higher-level financial strategy on an as-needed basis rather than a full salary line. For a small business owner deciding between hiring an in-house controller and outsourcing that function entirely, that flexibility can be the difference between getting a real financial strategy and going without it altogether.

A life built around Sarasota

Graf has two sons, Hudson and Archer, and has spent more than two decades putting down roots in the Sarasota community well beyond her office. She's a member of the Junior League of Sarasota and has served as both Treasurer and Chair of the organization's Simply Sarasota Cookbook Committee. She counts leading the volunteer team behind "Simply Sarasota: From Fresh to Fabulous," a community cookbook published in October 2018, among the things she's most proud of, a project built entirely by volunteers rather than a professional publishing effort.

That kind of local, hands-on involvement mirrors how she's built the firm itself: not by chasing the fastest possible growth, but by building something durable, one client relationship and one community commitment at a time. It's a pattern that shows up again in her own team, several of whom have moved to Sarasota from elsewhere in the country, from Connecticut, from Tennessee, from Ohio, and describe that same kind of long-term, roots-first thinking in their own bios on the firm's site. For a firm built almost entirely around trust and long relationships, having a team that's chosen to actually settle in the community it serves isn't a small detail.

That community-first approach extends to how the firm talks about itself publicly, too. Rather than leaning on generic marketing language, Sterling describes Graf's approach as a blend of directness and warmth: someone who tells clients exactly where their numbers stand without softening it, but who builds real relationships alongside the straight talk. It's a small detail, but it's consistent with everything else about how she built the practice: personality and precision in equal measure, rather than one at the expense of the other.