Michelle Delker, Founder & CEO, William Stanley Group

July 2026 — Invest: spoke with Michelle Delker, founder and CEO of The William Stanley Group, about the firm’s growth, expanded tax and advisory services, and its relationship-driven approach to supporting entrepreneurs. “We want to work with folks where we can really provide a meaningful return,” Delker said.

What inspired you to found William Stanley Group, and how has that original vision taken shape?

My background is in accounting, and I fell in love with it in high school. I earned an undergraduate degree in accounting, a master’s degree in accounting from the University of Tampa, and became a Florida-licensed CPA.

I spent the first decade of my career with large, publicly traded companies, including a wholly owned affiliate of GE and Bloomin’ Brands. That environment gave me exposure to rigor, infrastructure, rules, regulations, best practices, and Lean Six Sigma. It instilled a strong work ethic and an understanding of what strong infrastructure looks like.

The second decade of my corporate career was with more entrepreneurial organizations. That environment taught me how to manage cash and work through fast-moving challenges. Entrepreneurship has electricity in the air, and I learned how to bridge the gap between large-company discipline and entrepreneurs trying to scale a powerful idea.

I later moved into healthcare, specifically skilled nursing, after my dad was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease. That is where I truly became a CFO. I learned that CFO work is not about debits and credits. It is about partnering with key leaders and helping operationalize the CEO’s vision.

After my dad passed in 2022, I started questioning how I could be more impactful and help build a better community. That was the genesis for starting The William Stanley Group, which began as a boutique advisory firm. We come in, roll up our sleeves, and grind. The magic is having both the operational and technical ability to execute, married with strategy.

Over the past year, a major milestone was buying a tax firm and transitioning the seller out. The firm had been built over 42 years and primarily served small businesses with business tax compliance. What I had learned over the years is that the magic is not made by putting numbers in boxes. It is made by understanding what a business is going to do, how we can improve it, and how to deploy the right strategy so the right numbers go into the right boxes.

We also bought a building in December. Having a physical space is important because it facilitates the level of intimacy and discussion needed to really understand what an entrepreneur wants to do. We were bursting at the seams, so the new space allows us to gather, speak with clients, and start turning the ship the way I want to sail.

As Tampa Bay continues to grow, how are you evolving the firm’s services to meet more complex client needs?

Our services are tailored to each entrepreneur. We typically work with high-growth organizations, and we are industry agnostic because many of the challenges entrepreneurs face are universal. What is different is their appetite for risk and how hard they want to go to achieve their goals.

We listen. Before taking on a new engagement, we spend between two and 10 hours scoping the business to understand its history, the entrepreneur, and the mission, vision, and values. Philosophical alignment is incredibly important to us. There are many businesses in the Tampa market, and we are still boutique, so we have limited capacity. Making sure we are rowing in the same direction is important for a successful partnership.

We evaluate the financials, hear the entrepreneur’s concerns, understand their goals and timeline, and then come back with what we think makes the most sense. Corporate experience and different finance leadership roles made me build teams and optimize operations. It is not often that we encounter something that does not fit within that skill set.

What has changed are the tools and the way we are able to support clients. There is a lot of discussion about automation and intelligence, and we lean into that responsibly, but always in conjunction with knowing the client and already having a plan. We are successful because we take the time to understand our entrepreneurs and what matters to them.

What trends are you seeing among businesses in the region?

Succession is a big conversation. We work with a lot of founders and second-generation owners, and many are evaluating exits at different stages of life. Succession is always top of mind, and we have to stay focused on regulations because there is often movement that can change strategy for clients.

Liquidity and access to capital are also major conversations. Many of our clients are in growth mode, so watching liquidity closely and making sure they have the right capital structure to expand is one of the biggest things we do.

Being industry agnostic is interesting because some clients have a lot of wind at their back, while others in different segments are facing headwinds. One universal truth I have seen is that many organizations are managing liquidity through payables. Their conversion cycles are stretching out, so we make sure mechanisms are in place to measure that cycle and create automatic triggers when it is time to collect.

Those things are important for entrepreneurs even when the market is strong. When the market tightens, that seems to be one of the first areas people begin to play with. For smaller organizations or companies hyper-focused on growth, every bit of liquidity matters.

How are you approaching recruitment, retention, and team development?

Before the seller of the tax firm finalized the transition, he introduced me to an incredible CPA. I fell in love with her and offered her a job on the spot.

Having been in the market for so long, I have met a lot of people. There are many stereotypes associated with accountants, and they are not always positive or true. What has been most exciting is identifying and nurturing some of the more recent talent entering the market.

One area where accounting in general could improve is adding more operational language to our discussions, rather than being so technical and focused only on regulations or accounting standards. The people building the team with us are operationally focused. They have CPA experience, but they have also worked in operational or leadership roles in entrepreneurial businesses.

When you talk in a way that makes clients uncomfortable or use phrases that feel overly technical, they may not ask questions because they do not want to look silly. Being able to metabolize complex information and share it in a way clients understand is the magic.

We want to work with folks where we can really provide a meaningful return, and also we want to work with folks that value and appreciate what we do. The same is true when we build our team. If someone’s goal is just to complete a certain number of hours, that is different from someone who wants to help an entrepreneur transform their business. We try to have fun every day because we really love what we do.

What are your key goals and priorities for the firm over the next two to three years?

When we launched a few years ago, I would not have imagined where we are today. Our goal is to better support the community. I graduated from high school here, started college here, met my husband here, and had our children here. This is our community. I have been here since 1995, and I feel incredibly fortunate to have been supported, loved, and nurtured by wonderful pillars of this community.

We want to give back in a meaningful way. In addition to the work we have been doing for the last several years, the goal is to build upon that continuum and support more small businesses at scale.

We understand the executive advisory piece, and we understand the tax piece. Our focus now is developing and delivering something meaningful for clients in that $1 million to $10 million range.