A profile
Diana Akhmerova
Founder of Akhmerova Advisory. CPA, polyglot, Tatar-born, Seattle-based.
Diana Akhmerova, CPA
Founder of Akhmerova Advisory. CPA, polyglot, Tatar-born, Seattle-based.
Diana Akhmerova, CPA
Diana Akhmerova came to public accounting the long way around. She was born in the former Soviet Union, in a republic called Tatarstan, where she grew up speaking Tatar at home and Russian everywhere else. She immigrated to the United States, learned the craft at three of the world's largest accounting firms, rose through senior leadership in the private sector, raised her son alone as a single mother, and built her own multimillion-dollar fortune from the ground up.
By the time she founded Akhmerova Advisory in 2021, she had lived through most of the questions her clients now bring to her — and answered them, in her own life, with the rigor she now brings to theirs.
What follows is a longer version of that story, for the prospective clients who—reasonably—want to know who they're considering working with before they pick up the phone.
Diana was born and raised in the Republic of Tatarstan — one of the constituent republics of what was then the Soviet Union, today a federal subject of Russia, and one of the cradles of Tatar culture. She is ethnically Tatar; her mother tongue is the language of her people, not the official language of the country whose passport she carried.
She immigrated to the United States as a young woman with the clarity that only first-generation immigrants tend to have: the work was the way through.
She raised her son alone, as a single mother — doing the work of two parents while building the career of one. There were no shortcuts and no inheritance; every credential, every job, every milestone was earned in time stolen from sleep. By her forties, she was a self-made multimillionaire — a phrase she uses without performance, because it is simply what happened.
Diana began her career as an auditor at three of the world's largest accounting firms — PwC, EY, and BDO — auditing the kinds of companies you read about in the Wall Street Journal. She learned the craft of public accounting at scale, working with clients whose financial complexity rivaled the GDP of small nations.
She left to take on operating roles: first as Controller of a sustainability-focused startup, then as Vice President of Finance and Human Resources at a fast-growing data center company. Those years taught her something the audit room couldn't — what it actually feels like to be on the other side of the books, making real-time decisions with real-time consequences.
In 2021 — with the world reshaped by a pandemic that had upended every assumption her clients used to plan around — Diana founded her own firm.
The goal was simple and specific: to bring concierge-level counsel, the kind the largest firms reserve for their largest clients, to ordinary business owners and individuals navigating the most consequential moments of their financial lives. Less hierarchy. Less hand-off. More plain English. More attention.
What she built is not large. It is, by design, a principal-led practice — meaning that when a client picks up the phone, the person on the other end is not a junior associate or a relationship manager but the CPA herself.
…the next step is the same as it is everywhere else on this site. A focused 30-minute consultation, on Diana's calendar, at no cost. She does the listening; you do the deciding.