How It Started: Paul Freidel on Ten Years in the Black Hills

October 7, 2026

Ten years ago, Paul Freidel started Freidel & Associates with one client and a makeshift office in the Black Hills. Here is how it began, in his own words.

I have a bit of a strange origin story. I passed the CPA exam at 17 (with one of the top 50 scores in the nation, if I can brag for one quick second), and after finishing my master’s I joined Plante Moran’s national tax office. Picture the five geekiest tax people in a 1,500-person firm. We worked on the biggest and most interesting deals the firm had: international, state and local, major transactions. Those years built my technical foundation. From there, I spent five years in industry as a controller and tax director in the Chicago suburbs, so by the time I started the firm I had about 11 years behind me, roughly half in public accounting and half in industry.

The firm itself really started with a place. In the summer of 2005, I visited the Black Hills and fell in love with the area in a way I hadn’t felt anywhere else. Two days after I got home, a client brought up moving their trust to South Dakota. It was the first time I’d ever heard anyone mention the state, and it felt providential. Serving as an individual fiduciary for trusts gave me a way to pay the bills, and I built the CPA practice from there.

When the time came, we sold our house and most of our vehicles, packed a 10-year-old minivan and a U-Haul, and drove west with the family. We rented a house south of town, and my first office was a little shack off the back, with the house on one side and the rock of the hillside on the other. There was no heating or air conditioning, so I kept a space heater under my desk (it kept blowing the circuit). With six kids at home at the time, we worked out a system: if something was hanging on my door, I was in a client meeting and everyone needed to be really quiet.

That first year was honestly kind of wonderful. I didn’t have many clients yet, so tax season wrapped up by March 1st and we went hiking every few days. The hard part was patience. A good thing takes time to build, and there’s no shortcut. The good surprise was how quickly this place felt like home.

About two years in, I moved into a 700-square-foot office on 3rd Street and hired someone ten hours a week to help with trust accounting. On her first day, she looked around and asked, “Where are the Associates?” That was the first time we actually lived up to our name.

From there, the referrals came slowly as people saw the work we were doing. I can’t point to one moment when it clicked. You keep doing the right things every day, and at some point you look up and realize it’s working.

If there’s one thing I want this firm to carry forward, it’s this: do the next right thing. Take care of your clients, take care of your people, and never cut corners on the work. Every good thing that’s happened here has come from that.