Hartford Business.com
August 28, 2008
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As 16-year-olds, Michael Sabol and his buddies worked hard having fun at their summer jobs in the warehouse of the Germany-based Muelhens & Co. perfume factory in Stamford.
“The highlight of the job was driving the forklift around,” Sabol said.
And they didn’t always keep their focus on the packaging task at hand … such as the time Sabol and his friends were sent to clean out a storage room containing piles of powders and perfumes.
“We drenched ourselves in the stuff and thought we were hysterical, but it was the kind of thing we could have gotten fired for,” Sabol said.
Sabol, a Stamford native, first saw the “Help Wanted” sign at the factory and went to work to earn money before college. The job not only gave him a paycheck, but also showed him the value of an education.
“I would look at the people on the production lines, the warehouse people that weren’t educated and see them in this monotonous job,” Sabol said. “It was really eye-opening.”
Sabol took his father’s advice as an incoming freshman at UConn and studied toward an accounting degree.
The summer between his junior and senior years, Sabol got an internship at Bank of the Southwest in Houston. The work was basic, scheduling and low-level tasks, but it was experience in accounting.
Sabol’s first stint as staff accountant was at Rusconi Cahill & Larkin, then Deloitte & Touche. Seven years later, he approached Jim Mahoney with an idea to open their own firm. The result: Mahoney Sabol & Co. has been in operation in Glastonbury since 1990.
Sabol comes from the audit and accounting side of the business, while Mahoney is a tax professional. The two specialties are two different worlds. But like the founding partners, they complement each other.
“It started out with just the two of us sitting and looking at each other, working from the ground up,” Sabol said. “Once we got rolling, we took every person we knew or didn’t know out to lunch. It was a lot of fun, but a lot of work.”
The firm grew from the two founding partners to a team of five, then to ten and now 40 employees.
“It was a simple feat to manage everyone when we were just starting out,” Mahoney said. “You take care of employees and take care of clients. It’s not much more complicated than that.”
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