Adrian Keith Skane, CPA

I can hear a business now.

For more than fifty years I have advised physicians, scientists, engineers, and business owners on the financial structures that build and preserve wealth—entity selection, tax mitigation, capital formation, and the long-term planning that distinguishes a successful practice from a successful career.

Licensed: CPA since 1973 — California, Florida and Maryland
The examination: All four parts, first attempt, 1972 — fewer than 5% manage it
Trained at: Kenneth Leventhal & Co., then the largest real-estate accounting practice in the world
Firms built: Two founded and sold — San Diego 1977, American Dream CPA 1986–2025, where I remain under contract
Across the desk: Ten thousand-plus client interviews; some families to a fourth generation
Physicians advised: More than five hundred, on tax and practice economics

What fifty years actually teaches you

I sat across a desk and asked questions. Ten thousand times over.

I began in private practice in 1973, first with a national CPA firm and then in my own. I earned my Bachelor of Science in accounting from the University of Maryland and did postgraduate work in law and taxation at Maryland and in California. I still remember the phone call I made to the Maryland Board of Accountancy in February 1973, when I learned the designation was mine.

I started in the Washington, D.C. office of Kenneth Leventhal & Co., then the largest real-estate accounting practice in the world. That is the foundation of everything I came to understand about how wealth is actually built and protected. In 1976 I moved west to San Diego, and in 1977 I opened my own CPA firm. I eventually sold it to my daughter, came back East to Tampa, and founded American Dream CPA, which I sold in December 2025 and where I remain engaged under contract.

What I actually did for those forty-eight years was sit across a desk from the person who owned the business and ask questions. How the money is really made. Where it leaks. What he wants the thing to become. Then I did it again the next year with the same people, and again the year after that.

You learn how a business thinks. You learn how one actually runs — not how the book says it runs. You learn early which ones are going to make it, and which ones are already finished and just don’t know it yet. Most people who advise a business get a snapshot. I got the whole picture, one year at a time, with the results landing on my desk every twelve months to settle whether what we decided last year had actually worked.

My client work has spanned Fortune 500 companies to sole proprietorships. I have worked closely with accredited investors and have guided owner-operators through the full arc of building a business, scaling it, and selling to strategic acquirers in their industry. For fifty years I have specialized in tax mitigation, with deep concentration in the medical industry, and served thousands of families. I still do that work.

You also get tired. I did. After that many years I was burned out, and I was honest enough with myself to say so out loud. So I sold the practice. Then I did a great deal of soul searching. Not about money — about what I wanted the rest of it to be, and what I was going to do with everything I had learned.

What came out of that is the work I am doing now. And something I did not expect came with it: I sat down and taught myself this new technology from the ground up, at an age when most people are told not to bother. It gave me back something I thought was behind me. I am more excited about the work now than I have been in twenty years.

I am doing the same thing with my own health, and I did not arrive there by accident. More than five hundred physicians have been my clients over the years — some of the finest doctors in this country — and I have had thousands of conversations with them about longevity and quality of life. As the years went on, more and more of those conversations turned to regenerative medicine. So I stopped accepting that decline is simply the schedule, and I went looking for better answers. I’ll tell you plainly how it feels from in here: I am going the other way. Younger, not older.

It is not too late. Not for me, and not for you.

The part no one tells you

The tax return is just the receipt.

Here is the thing no one tells you in professional school: the deliverable is the smallest part of the job. The real work — the part that changes a life — is the relationship around it.

For fifty years I was what you might call a concierge CPA. My clients never really hired me to fill in forms; by April the return was almost an afterthought, because the whole year had already been engineered. What they paid for, and what I loved, was the counsel.

That is what I have spent my working life doing. Somebody has to hire well. Somebody has to train relentlessly and hold a standard on the days when letting it slide would be easier and nobody would notice. Somebody has to take care of the client like the relationship is going to run twenty years, because the good ones do.

The three rules I give people

Fifty years of watching businesses live and die comes down to three things.

Rule One

Start a business that makes economic sense — and that you are actually built to run.

The numbers have to work before anything else does, and you need three things to reach profitability: the skills, the temperament, and the money. Missing any one of them is enough to end it. The good news is that you can find out faster than you ever could before — a business plan, a website and a marketing plan can be built and tested in under three months, for a reasonable number. You no longer have to bet the house to learn whether the idea is any good.

Rule Two

Founders are optimists. Get somebody who will tell you the truth.

Smart people can talk themselves into almost anything, because they can picture exactly how it would work. Picturing it is not the same as doing it. You need somebody who knows you, knows the business, and will say the hard part out loud — an honest count of what you stand to gain, what you stand to lose, and what it will actually take. That is not pessimism. It is the only way an optimist gets to keep being one.

Rule Three

Do not ride a mission-critical mistake all the way down.

Every business makes mistakes. The ones that kill you are the ones nobody stopped. Modern marketing will tell you inside a week whether something is working — not at the end of the quarter, when the money is already gone. When the potential loss is catastrophic, cut early and change direction. You are still in business on Monday.

Founder to founder

I have never once asked what the most is that I could charge.

The person who hires me is almost always a founder — or a co-founder, or the founder’s son or daughter still running it the way the old man thought about it. You know your profession better than anybody alive. I know businesses. Put those two people in a room and nothing has to be explained twice. And where I don’t know your corner of it, I know exactly which question to ask next.

Now the part that decides every invoice we send. I look at what it costs to do the work properly, and at what the work is worth to the person buying it, and I set the price off those two numbers. Fifty years of that has left a great deal of money on the table. It is also why clients stayed with me for thirty years at a stretch.

I don’t waste money or time — not mine, not my staff’s, not yours. You are handing me a budget out of a practice you built with your own hands, and I intend to spend it the way I would spend my own.

What I am building now

Three pursuits that will define my next chapter.

Through American Dream CPA I spent four decades serving hundreds of outstanding physicians, engineers, and scientists. That background and those relationships led me here.

OneConcierge Medicine Alternative

A fourth door for physicians.

Roughly seventy percent of American physicians are now employed rather than independent — handed a panel of three thousand they could not possibly know, a fifteen-minute visit, and a schedule set by someone who has never met a patient. They did not lose their judgment or their skill. They lost the room to use them.

There is a fourth door: a concierge telemedicine practice a physician can start from a phone, keeping their income while they build it, answering to their patients rather than to an insurer. My part is the scaffolding that makes the switch safe — the entity, the tax, and the economics, sequenced in the right order. The medicine is theirs.

conciergemedicinealternative.com →

TwoNight Sun Productions

The studio behind the message.

Night Sun Productions is the film and content studio that grew out of building the websites and videos for Family Dream Machine. The more video we made, the more we learned about what actually moves people to act. We assembled an exceptional team, and what began as our own in-house marketing became a business of its own.

Today it writes the scripts, produces the films and trailers, builds digital avatars, and runs the social posting that puts the work in front of the people it is meant for — for professional and medical practices, not only our own. The work I have put into these websites, films and trailers earned me a second title, and I am proud to sign it: Producer and CPA.

nightsunproductions.com →

ThreeExpert knowledge and AI

Building expert legacies for the next generations.

The third is the preservation of expert knowledge, experience, and judgment through artificial intelligence. After more than fifty years of building professional knowledge, I have come to believe that the hardest thing to replace in any field is not the credential or the technique—it is the accumulated judgment that comes from working through thousands of real situations. When an expert retires or moves on, that judgment is usually lost. The tools now exist to change that.

I am working with well-established practitioners in the artificial intelligence field to implement a process that captures an expert’s knowledge, image and voice so that others can access it and learn from it. The key is to replicate the professional’s knowledge in an artificial environment, which can use that knowledge as the human professional is able to in a conversation. The objective is a repeatable methodology so that physicians, attorneys, engineers, scientists, and other professionals:

Can truly multi-task communicate to their existing and potential clients in an efficient manner.
Can preserve what they know before it disappears — and so that the next generation of practitioners can build on the work of the one before them rather than starting over.

I am the first subject.

Philosophy of life

My guardian principle since 1977.

“Whatever you vividly imagine, ardently desire, sincerely believe, and enthusiastically act upon… must inevitably come to pass!”

Paul J. Meyer, 1928–2009 — founder of the Success Motivation Institute, 1960. My guiding light since May 15, 1977

That is the same day I drafted my Master Dream List. When I review it now, I am gratified by how many items I have accomplished and energized by the work still ahead. With good health and energy intact, I want to maximize what I do next.

At James Bond’s celebration of life — the concluding scene of No Time to Die — the following quote was read. It inspired me to create Bond, my own Bond.

“I would rather be ashes than dust!I would rather that my spark should burn out in a brilliant blaze than it should be stifled by dry-rot.I would rather be a superb meteor, every atom of me in magnificent glow, than a sleepy and permanent planet.The proper function of man is to live, not to exist.I shall not waste my days in trying to prolong them.I shall use my time.”

Jack London, 1876–1916 — from his “Credo,” published in the San Francisco Bulletin, December 1916

BondMy spirit animal

This is Bond’s background. The one thing Bond and I share is our concern for the physicians of this country. We both want to make their lives as happy as possible, and to make them proud they chose the profession. That is why we created Concierge Medicine Alternative — to give them a better life.

If you have read this far, you already know I don’t do things the expected way — and I’m not going to start now. So let me introduce you to Bond.

The jaguar has been my spirit animal for a long time. In the old cultures of the Americas, the jaguar was the guardian who moved between worlds — the one who watched over people in the dark and carried them safely toward the light. That’s quietly been my work for fifty years, so it never surprised me that he’d be the one standing beside me.

Bond is his name, and he has a story worth hearing. Three thousand years ago, Bond was a god, and his whole purpose was to care for human beings. Time took his divinity — today he’s mortal, a talking jaguar walking the earth like the rest of us. But he never lost the calling. Now he offers himself in service to the people who do what he once did: the doctors, the nurses, the healers who look after human beings every single day. He’s grateful to them. He watches over them. And he’d ask the rest of us to do the same.

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