Hilliard Management Group

Five stars for their bookkeeping class series offered through the local SBDCs. Ted is usually the one that gives them & he knows his stuff. I’ve taken all of the classes a few times & it’s great to refresh on the tools I don’t use on a daily basis.
One star for their consulting business. A few reasons. They’re super disorganized — nobody responded to my emails sent to the contact address listed on their website and I got a disconnected/​error message when I tried to call the contact # listed on their website. The only person that responded to my emails was Ted — which is great, but he’s not the one that makes the apts with the team. It took weeks to get a hold of somebody to talk about making an apt & there is a rotating door of admin assistants over there. Last week, I had an apt with one consultant, who never showed up. I sent him emails, called his cell, called the admin, and called the office. Am I supposed to hang around and wait for him, or can I go on with my day? Half an hour later, a different consultant came — said that the scheduled had been changed around. Nobody notified me. The second consultant — while super nice & easy to work with — couldn’t answer half my questions.
I don’t pay somebody else $ 75/​hr to end up doing the work myself. If Hilliard was concerned that my questions/​needs would be too difficult or complicated for the consultant, they should have asked me what they were in advance. Everything — from making the apt, to the actual services rendered — was sloppy.
Hilliard is asking us to pay them to get us organized. If they’re not organized themselves, I don’t see why I should believe that they have the skills to set up those systems in my company.

I would not recommend this company to anybody. My business contracted them in the beginning about a year ago. We were hoping they would make our accounting easier. They came in and did about 5 hours of work, charged us 600 dollars, and left us looking at each other like what do we do now. Our accounts were what they set up, but our accountant look at the accounts and was really confused. We ended up having to pay our accountant a lot more for the time it took him to figure it out. My recommendation is to just work with an accountant and have him/​her help you set up your accounts.

I worked with Sandra Garsele of Hilliard several times, and she brought my business’s «financial records» (if I can call them that) back from the dead and got them up to speed in no time. She also taught me how to do my bookkeeping the right way, the first time, so I don’t have to sink so far behind ever again. Sandra was fabulous to work with — no-​nonsense but light-​hearted too. Thanks!