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Within days of starting a new job as an accountant at the Iowa Manufacturing Extension Partnership (IMEP) at Iowa State University, Ying Sa was approached by an Asian custodian. He had received a notice from the Internal Revenue Service, which he thought said he owed $900. But after reviewing the letter, Sa informed him that he actually would receive a tax refund.

“He thought somehow I had the magic power and just turned that notice to be money he was getting,” Sa said. Word spread, and soon Sa had more than 20 people asking for accounting advice. This led to a side business, which she balanced with a career that took her from chief financial officer of IMEP to vice president of controllers at Wells Fargo Financial.

“It’s a practice that I have been doing ever since I graduated, just because in my ethnic group, I always have people who don’t speak English or don’t really know the rules in Canada or the U.S.,” Sa said. “So I never really had the luxury not to bother with it.”

Then donations began pouring in from her clients to construct the building that now houses Community CPA & Associates and to give Sa a year free of rent. The tan brick building, surrounded by Le’s Chinese Bar-B-Que, an Oriental gift shop and other Asian businesses on Second Avenue in Des Moines, was completed the same year Sa began working for Wells Fargo.

Finally, in January she quit her job as one of the top minority executives in Greater Des Moines to focus on serving the minority and immigrant population full time. Her mission is to help them become better established, so that one day they will be the people calling her to donate to one of the many charity drives she now is able to support.

An immigrant twice

Sa has been through what she calls the “immigrant journey” twice, going from nothing to getting established to eventually being able to serve her community.

She was born in Beijing to a Chinese father who had returned to his home country from Toronto when the communist government took over. Despite his belief in communism, the government considered him a spy and he spent two years in jail. Sa’s mother, from a once-well-off family, lost everything during that time.

“We were always struggling to be accepted by society, because we were not of Red roots,” Sa said. “Ever since I was a kid, I think my biggest thing was pleasing people, because my root system wasn’t good, so I had to be good.”

As soon as China re-opened to the rest of the world, Sa’s family fled to Toronto. She was 19.

Sa remembers being so poor that she would walk home two hours just to save 25 cents on a telephone call. She couldn’t afford law school, so instead she took a full-time job at Bank of America Corp., obtained a $3,000 scholarship, and began working toward a bachelor’s degree in economics and business administration at York University. She completed her accounting certification shortly after.

It was during this time that she made a promise to God that if he gave her a house to live in and if she could buy food without waiting for coupons (she was tired of eating spaghetti), she would never ask for anything else. She claims she has kept that promise since.

While at York, she also found her future husband, mathematics professor Steve Hou (who she originally thought was a student), and in 1996 – after Sa had become controller of an Australian company, managing its Canadian and Mexican divisions – they moved to Iowa, where he got a job as a professor at Iowa State University.

Sa came to Iowa with the intention of being a housewife, but within three days, she applied for an accounting position at Iowa State. In eight years she became the IMEP CFO. An executive search firm then drew her to Wells Fargo (“I was actually sold to Wells Fargo,” she jokes), where she was promoted to vice president in 19 months.

Meanwhile, her minority clients were encouraging her to leave the corporate world to focus on her firm. She had hired a manager and employees, whom she trained to handle the majority of the work while she was at her job. But eventually, both jobs took too much time and she wanted more time to spend with her three children (ages 13, 11 and 7).

“I will be 44 at the end of this year, and I just felt I should maybe consider slowing down,” Sa said.

But little has slowed down.

In charge

One day Sa arrived at her Second Avenue office at 7 a.m. to find a man waiting outside. He said he had been there since 4 a.m. because he couldn’t sleep thinking about his financial troubles. He had been turned down by three other firms.

“He just needed someone to be hard-working, sort out all the information and decide what needed to be done,” Sa said. “When I knew he came here at 4 o’clock in the morning, how could I not work? I was just totally shocked.”

Giving up her Wells Fargo job entailed a major cut in salary, Sa said, “but not satisfaction. I enjoy the direct touch to the community. At Wells Fargo, you get that, too, but that is not as much as this. This one you can see a client’s smile on their face, but at Wells Fargo, you just heard their smile.”

Since Sa came on board full time, “sales have grown tremendously for the last few months,” she said. The practice has served about 1,200 people and companies and has six employees, all of whom speak a second language. Two were hired this year for the tax season and have stayed on full time, which Sa hopes to repeat next year.

She also has invested a lot of money into upgrading technology, with the intention of opening other branches in the near future. She already has a license and the technology to open an office in Arizona, but is waiting for the right manager after two prospects fell through. She is in talks with one of the largest insurance agents for Latinos in Des Moines about opening a joint branch in the Cedar Rapids area as well.

Sa also wants to convert her husband’s firm, Iowa Mortgage Center, to a mortgage bank called IMC Financial, so that she can go beyond offering financial advice to her tax clients and begin making loans.

Her firm’s niche is dealing with immigrants’ tax issues, serving non-English-speaking clients and helping businesses with immigration or international investment issues, such as Ten Square International Inc., which primarily exports agricultural equipment to China.

The most exciting part of being a small business owner, she said, is the chance to learn. “When you run your own business, you are learning harder, because you have no boundary in learning,” Sa said. “You have to learn everything out there. When you work in a job, the learning kind of stops because your job responsibility ends there.”

As she runs between business meetings and family appointments, she listens to CDs of books written by leaders such as Bill Clinton and Donald Trump.

“People always think that large corporations are born mighty,” she said in regard to her latest favorite book, written by Sandy Weill, former chair of Citigroup Inc., “and they don’t think how they come through. But I’m very realistic about that and I think a large corporation is a result of a successful small business.”

The books also help her continue to improve her English. She also is working on Spanish with a “Rush Hour Spanish” CD.

Journey’s end

Since turning her CPA firm into a for-profit business, she has started Community Tax Clinic to help those who can’t afford her services. The organization will host its first conference this fall, called Immigrant and Minority Entrepreneurship.

She also helps with public speaking and other needs for the Chinese Association of Iowa. A couple of weeks ago, she helped answer phones for a Red Cross telethon to raise money for earthquake victims in China. The event brought in more than $8,000, with Sa receiving the largest donation of $1,000 from an elderly woman in a nursing home.

But a good part of Sa’s own money will go toward her children’s education. “That’s really our commitment,” she said. Her family travels each summer to places such as Portland, Ore., Florida and China to expose them to life outside Iowa.

The hardest part about transitioning to Canada and the United States, Sa said, was adapting to the cultural differences, such as hugging a client after a major deal is signed. In China, she explained, relationships are more private.

But her own immigration experience led to her mission.

“That’s really what I see as the journey of the immigrant, starting from establishing themselves, then helping others and then be a selfless part of society. But they need to get there,” she said.