A new financial services firm called Bull Moose Financial has opened in Milwaukee’s Historic Third Ward.
Located in a 2,700-square-foot space in the Mayer Building at 342 N. Water St., the firm was founded by Mike Bark and Rob Joyce. Bark, Joyce, Andrew Witt, Leslie Heisner left financial services firm Edge Advisors to form the new company in September, and have hired on one additional employee.
Bark in 2012 was a founding partner of Edge Advisors, which until recently was based in West Allis. Edge in January 2015 opened an office in Appleton and when the four employees left, it closed its West Allis office. Edge helps dental and health care business owners with mergers and acquisitions, recruiting, accounting, tax, wealth management and marketing.
Bull Moose is more industry agnostic in its approach, and will narrow in on primarily tax and accounting services, Bark said. Among the new industries it plans to target are manufacturing and hospitality.
“I think it was a matter of at Edge, we were trying to do too many different services and we just wanted to focus back on accounting, tax, and have a more streamlined thing,” Bark said. “There were businesses we were getting opportunities to bid on (at Edge) that we wanted to be more diverse in the clients that we were taking.”
The former Edge employees took about 70 corporate clients with them to Bull Moose, he said. As it brings on new clients, Bull Moose plans to provide a more personalized approach for small companies than some of the larger accounting firms in the area.
“There’s been a lot of consolidation in accounting,” Bark said. “It’s hard for (big accounting firms) to have empathy for what that (a small business owner) might be going through because they’re part of this big large corporate organization that doesn’t have to worry about, ‘OK, how do we meet payroll’ or some of these things.”
