In 2016, Salvador Alvarado opened Xtrategist with a conviction so simple it almost sounded naive: construction companies deserve a CPA who actually understands construction. Not a generalist who treats a general contractor the same as a dental practice. Not a tax preparer who shows up in March and disappears in April. A real partner who knows the difference between a percentage-of-completion schedule and a cost-to-cost calculation, who understands what a surety underwriter is really looking for, and who can explain it all in English or Spanish at the kitchen table.
That conviction came from years of watching builders get bad advice. Salvador had seen general contractors miss six-figure deductions because their CPA didn't know the construction code sections. He had watched bilingual business owners lose deals because no one in their accounting firm could speak their language. And he had seen too many contractors hit a growth ceiling not because of the work, but because their financials weren't ready for the next bonding tier.
Built on what was missing
The first years were quiet. A small office. A handful of contractor clients. Long nights learning the surety industry from the inside out. But the conviction held: every client got the strategy, the responsiveness, and the bilingual fluency they had been promised.
The construction industry has more tax complexity, more regulatory exposure, and more cash-flow risk than almost any other sector. It also has the fewest CPAs who actually understand it. We built Xtrategist to fill that gap. Salvador Alvarado, Founder & Managing CPA
Word spread the way it does in this industry: one project manager telling another at a job site, one owner recommending a friend at an industry breakfast. The clients who joined in those early years are still with us today. Many have grown from a single crew to multi-state operations. We've grown with them.
A bilingual practice, by design
By 2018, the firm was doing something almost no other CPA practice in Atlanta was doing at scale: providing the full spectrum of CPA services in both English and Spanish. Tax planning. Financial reporting. Bonding support. Year-end strategy. Not translated documents, but real bilingual partnership at every level of the engagement.
For Spanish-speaking contractors, this meant being able to ask the hard questions in their own language. For their English-speaking partners, sureties, and bankers, it meant nothing was lost in translation. It became one of the firm's defining strengths.
Beyond Atlanta, across the Southeast
By 2021, our clients were running jobs in three, five, sometimes ten states. Multi-state tax compliance is one of the messiest problems in construction finance, and it's the kind of problem that compounds quietly until it suddenly costs hundreds of thousands of dollars. We built out a multi-state practice to make sure that never happened to one of our clients.
Today Xtrategist is a senior team of CPAs and accounting specialists serving commercial contractors, technology founders, and professional services firms from Atlanta to Florida and beyond. We still believe what we believed on day one: that the financial side of a business should make growth easier, not harder.
What we're still building
Ten years in, the firm has grown, but the conviction has not changed. Every engagement is led by a senior advisor. Every client gets a real strategy, not a transactional return. Every conversation can happen in English or Spanish. And every year we add to the playbook of what works specifically for the industries we serve.
If you're a contractor or business owner who has felt the friction of working with a CPA who doesn't really understand your world, we'd like to talk. The next chapter of this firm gets written one client at a time, and we'd be glad to write it with you.