This National Black Business Month, which is the month of August, VI- ZIONS Newspaper is shining a spotlight on Michael Horsey and his accounting firm, Horsey, Buckner & Heffler (HBH). Michael G. Horsey, a certified public accountant (CPA), is chairman and CEO of Horsey, Buckner & Heffler, LL. The managing partner is Kia D. Buckner, CPA.
Horsey, Buckner, and Heffler, one of the larger minor- ity-controlled certified public accounting firms in the Delaware Valley, offers audit, assurance, and tax services, accounting and business advisory services, and banking relationships. HBH was officially established in June 2017 and is affiliated with Heffler, Radetich & Saitta LLP (Heffler), a full-service accounting and advisory firm serving a nationwide client base of small to medium-sized businesses, law firms, governmental agencies, and not-for-profit organizations.
Michael Horsey has more than 40 years of experience in audit, taxation, and financial analysis, with a focus on serving not-for-profit organizations, state and local government agencies, and private clients. Prior to joining Mitchell & Titus, Michael spent several years at Coopers & Lybrand, now PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC), and Johnson & Johnson Co.
Michael attended Roman Catholic High School and earned a Bachelor of Science degree in economics from the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School of Finance and Commerce. According to Michael, while in college, he paid attention to who was getting the jobs and making excellent money. It was accountants. His next move was to enroll in the CPA program. “I managed to get hired by a firm called Coopers and Lybrand (C&L). I worked for C&L, one of the big eight accounting firms. During that time, we had such firms as Price Waterhouse, Arthur Anderson, and you had Arthur Young and all those firms. Coopers and Lybrand was one of the more progressive firms that hired minorities and women back in 1978. I was there for six years. I knew I wasn’t going to make a partner because of the ole boys network.”
That didn’t matter, according to Horsey, who said he always knew he wanted to own his own business one day.
“I eventually went to work for Leevy Redcross,” he said. “They were purchased by Mitchell and Titus. Mitchell and Titus was the largest minority-owned CPA firm in the country at the time. I worked with Mitchell and Titus for 32 years and ascended to partner and was the managing partner for the Philadelphia office for sixteen years before I retired. During the time I was working with Mitchell and Titus, the firm grew to a $40 million firm, and we became a member of Ernst and Young. We
did that for six years. They had a mandatory retirement age of 60. I retired seven years ago and created this regional firm, Horsey, Buckner, and Hefler. This allowed us to jumpstart our organization quickly.
“We’ve grown the firm very substantially since our inception,” said Horsey. “The key for us, aside from offering top-quality professional CPA services, we also want to be another option for minorities and women to have a CPA career. We’ve got Mitchell Titus, CPA firm. We’ve got John Milligan CPA firm, and you have our firm on the scene to help provide opportunities for young minority CPAs. We develop intern relationships with colleges in the area.”
Horsey added, “A year after we created our firm, we made national news. We’re the firm that was responsible for finding the $32 million dollars that the city couldn’t find. We’re the firm that found the money. That helped jumpstart our CPA firm for sure.”
The Pandemic Shined a Light on Small Businesses
It was during the COVID-19 crisis that Michael Horsey said he and his colleagues were reminded that too many small Black-owned businesses are not where they should be with their financial reports, business plans, and tax reporting.
“During the pandemic what we learned was that a lot of our small Black-owned businesses in Philadelphia didn’t have records to show proof to support the staff that they were paying, etc., which made a lot of them miss out on a lot of opportunities that were being offered by the government,” Horsey commented. “That mentality is systemic, and it goes all the way back to slavery where we had to hide everything,” he said. “We had to hide our ability to read and learn. We had to develop secret societies and fraternities because of the white aggression. People didn’t realize it until now, but when you talk about Tulsa, Oklahoma, and what happened there, the venom we were fighting against then, and even now, makes it a part of our history, to not show all our information.”
Michael Horsey said he and his colleagues are determined to educate African-American business owners, sports figures, families, and others as to how to get their finances in order using a certified public accountant. As Horsey put it, “People do better when they know better.”
“There’s money out here to help small businesses,” said Horsey. “There’s grant opportunities, there’s financing mechanisms, trust me there’s help out here for small business owners.
