Scott Woodrow has worked with Michael Mazza and Detweiler Hershey for roughly 15 years. For most of that time, the work was compliance: tax returns, tax planning, and an annual reviewed financial statement for Sustainable Waste Solutions, the waste and recycling company he co-founded in 2004. When Scott acquired Aunt Wendy’s Kiffles in 2023, he did not simply bring the same engagement to a new company. He asked Detweiler Hershey to take on considerably more.
That distinction is the whole story. The relationship did not just last. It expanded, because the second business needed a different kind of help than the first one ever asked for.
“When we bought Aunt Wendy’s, there was no debate about who was handling the financials. I already knew.”
What the first 15 years looked like
Scott spent more than three decades in solid waste and recycling. He co-founded Sustainable Waste Solutions (SWS) in 2004 and built it into a landfill-free waste company serving large national accounts.
Detweiler Hershey’s role there was well defined and deliberately bounded. The firm prepared the company’s tax returns, handled tax planning, and performed an annual reviewed financial statement.
This was a traditional compliance relationship, and it is the model much of the profession still runs on. It is accurate, it is necessary, and it is fundamentally historical-looking.
When Scott and his partner eventually sold the business, Detweiler Hershey worked alongside them and their attorneys through the transaction.
Why the second business called for something different
Scott acquired Aunt Wendy’s Kiffles with business partners in 2023. Aunt Wendy’s is a family bakery in Bath, Pennsylvania, built over more than 20 years around a hand-rolled kiffle recipe passed down through four generations. Since the acquisition, the company has expanded production, moved to a clean-label and non-GMO product line, invested in automation, and grown distribution through direct online sales, QVC, and regional retailers.
The financial mechanics are nothing like a waste company’s. A hauling business is a service operation measured in routes, contracts, and fleet. A bakery is a manufacturer, with ingredient costs, inventory, production capacity, and unit economics, selling through channels that each carry a different margin structure and a different payment cycle.
More importantly, Scott was not inheriting an established internal accounting department. He was acquiring a family business and scaling it fast, which is exactly the situation where an owner needs financial information monthly rather than annually.
“Waste hauling and a bakery have nothing in common operationally. But the need for reliable numbers is exactly the same.”
What Detweiler Hershey does at Aunt Wendy’s
The current engagement covers the full accounting function rather than a compliance slice of it:
- Back-office bookkeeping, handled entirely by the Detweiler Hershey team
- Monthly financial statements, reviewed together with Scott rather than delivered and filed
- Accounts receivable management, which matters disproportionately in a business selling through wholesale and retail channels with different payment terms
- Two-year rolling forecasts, built to show where the business is heading and what the next stage of growth requires
- Tax planning, now coordinated with the operating picture instead of handled as a separate year-end exercise
In practice, that means one firm filling three roles that a larger company would staff separately.
Michael Mazza, Detweiler Hershey: “For Scott, we are the bookkeeper, the controller, and the CFO all in one. We are doing the back-office work, and we are also sitting down with him every month on his financials and building two-year forecasts so he can see what the next stage of this business actually looks like.”
This is the CFO and FP&A tier of Detweiler Hershey’s RAMP framework: Record and Reconcile through Plan, delivered as one engagement. The distance between that and an annual tax return is the distance between knowing what happened and knowing what to do next.
Why the monthly cadence is the point
The most substantive change between the two engagements is not the list of deliverables. It is frequency.
An annual compliance relationship produces one conversation a year, after the year is over. A monthly outsourced accounting relationship produces twelve, each one early enough to act on. For a company adding production capacity and opening new distribution channels, that difference determines whether an investment decision is made with current information or with a guess.
The two-year forecast does similar work at a longer horizon. For an owner two years into a growth plan, the useful question is not what last quarter looked like. It is whether the current trajectory gets the business where it needs to be, and what has to change if it does not.
“This is not like any other accounting relationship I’ve had. Most of them look backward and send you reports. This one is proactive.”
A team, not a single relationship
One point Scott raises unprompted is that this has never been a one-person arrangement. Over 15 years he has worked with an entire Detweiler Hershey team, and his description of the experience does not change based on who is doing the work.
“It’s not just Michael. It’s the whole team. Everything is streamlined and reliable, every time.”
That matters more than it sounds. A financial relationship that runs entirely through one individual is fragile by design. One that runs through a firm with consistent standards is what allows an engagement to expand from a single annual filing to a full outsourced accounting function without the quality changing on the way up.
The clearest endorsement is the one that costs something
Scott has spent 30 years around accounting relationships, and he has referred multiple other companies to Detweiler Hershey.
“I’ve recommended Detweiler Hershey to a number of other businesses. They are a trusted partner, not a vendor.”
A referral puts the referrer’s own credibility at stake, which makes it a more meaningful signal than a testimonial. So does the decision Scott made in 2023. After 15 years of a relationship that worked perfectly well as it was, he chose to give the same firm substantially more responsibility at a business he had just bought.
That framing shows up elsewhere in Detweiler Hershey’s client work. In the firm’s case study with Genzeon, a global technology solutions provider, leadership described the relationship as a co-pilot rather than a service provider and drew the same contrast between reactive accounting and forward-looking partnership. Two clients in unrelated industries reaching independently for the same description says something about the model.
What growing businesses can take from this
- A compliance relationship and an advisory relationship are different products. A firm doing an excellent job on tax returns is not thereby giving you decision-ready financial information, and in some engagement types it is not permitted to.
- Frequency changes what financial information is worth. Annual reporting explains the past. Monthly reporting and a forward forecast let an owner act while there is still time to act.
- A newly acquired business is the moment to reset the financial function. New ownership, a new growth plan, and existing processes built for a smaller company rarely fit together without rework.
Frequently asked questions
What is the difference between an accountant who sends reports and one who advises? A compliance-oriented relationship produces accurate historical documents, usually annually, after decisions have already been made. An advisory relationship produces current financial information and forward forecasts on a monthly cadence, so an owner can use the numbers to decide rather than to confirm.
Why would a business use one firm as bookkeeper, controller, and CFO? Smaller and mid-sized companies often need all three functions but cannot justify three hires. An outsourced engagement covers transaction-level bookkeeping, oversight and reporting, and forward-looking planning through one relationship, at a cost closer to one salary than three.
What financial support does a business need after an acquisition? Usually a rebuild of the financial function around the new owner’s plan, including reliable monthly reporting, cash flow and receivables management, and forecasting for the investments a growth strategy requires. Existing processes were generally built for the business as it was, not as the new owner intends it to be.
How long should it take to move from compliance work to advisory work? There is no fixed timeline, and it is often triggered by an event rather than a date. A new acquisition, a growth push, or a financing need tends to surface the gap between annual reporting and the information an owner actually needs.
Is your financial function built for the decisions ahead?
If your accounting relationship tells you what happened last year but not what to do next quarter, that gap is worth examining. Talk with the Detweiler Hershey team about a RAMP assessment and where your business sits today.