CPA Steven Harris Focuses On Entrepreneurs And The Greater Good

Steven Harris, CPA

Firm: RubinBrown

Forbes Ranking: America’s Top 200 CPAs 2024

Steven Harris is a CPA’s CPA—and a champion of company founders. Starting his career with RubinBrown in 1999 after serving as an intern, Harris advanced to partner-in-charge of the firm’s Entrepreneurial Services Group—a role that resonates with this son of the owner and operator of a drapery installment business in North St. Louis.

In entrepreneurial services, local CPA firms work to nurture small clients, fighting in the trenches with them to make payroll, to gain financing and to take on investors. It’s a bespoke fit for Harris, a hustler who worked full-time catering at the Marriott St. Louis Hilton Airport while pursuing his degree, and who is praised by RubinBrown’s firm chair John Herber for his humility, charisma and leadership skills. Harris leverages teams that serve a diverse array of clients at RubinBrown, including: colleges, construction, gaming, healthcare, law firms, life sciences, technology, manufacturing, distribution, not-for-profit, private equity, public sector, real estate, transportation and dealerships.

In 2022, Harris was elected by his fellow partners to be managing partner of RubinBrown, a 72-year-old Top 40 firm serving both entrepreneurs and corporate giants. “Talent and technology, they go hand in hand,” Harris says. “It’s all about how your organization embraces technology and disruption. It creates so many new opportunities in how you serve clients and how you leverage teams.”

Harris has served more than just clients in the St. Louis community, having performed on the board of Barnes Jewish Hospital and Delta Dental of Missouri; he was honored in February as the 2024 Corporate Executive of the Year by the St. Louis American Charitable Foundation. And when asked to serve as a soothsayer, predicting future challenges to the CPA profession, he offers, “When you think about AI and machine learning, they’re here whether we like it or not. So how do we do this in a way that protects the firm and clients internally and externally? This impacts talent as you have to train and hire people who know how to navigate this world. From a talent standpoint, you need to reimagine what type of talent you need, where it’s coming from, and how you’re going to get it.”

Editor’s note: Henry Gardner contributed to this article.

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Steel Rose, CPA researches, surfaces, evaluates, relies on corroboration from respected accounting societies and associations to acknowledge the Forbes Top CPAs in America