The Aguiar Group Team (click each name for their profile)
Jennifer de Leon, CPA
Accounting Manager and Business Developer
- 20 countries and 72 major cities visited around the world
- 13 years playing classical piano competitively
- 3 college majors: accounting, finance, humanities
- 120 words per minute as her average typing speed
Jennifer knows how to bring seemingly opposite disciplines together in a practical manner. She’s left-brained and right-brained, she majored in business and liberal arts, she craves international travel and local involvement, and she’s a CPA that plays the piano. Though she is full of such paradoxes, she demonstrates that she can be successful in a wide variety of situations, whether it is working at a Big Four accounting firm, backpacking in Eastern Europe and Africa, doing due diligence audits for mergers and acquisitions, or performing a Bach concerto. Thus, it’s no surprise that her two roles at The Aguiar Group also require opposite skill sets: technical accounting and business development.
Jennifer joined The Aguiar Group in November 2010 from Ernst & Young LLP, where she worked in the Seattle audit practice for four years. During this time, she worked on clients ranging from small biotech start-ups to multi-billion dollar companies in the manufacturing and technology industries. She has worked internationally in the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, and Canada but recently chose to work for The Aguiar Group as a result of her heartfelt interest for small businesses and entrepreneurship. She is responsible for developing new service lines, participating in public relations and marketing activities, providing interim controller/CFO services, and performing technical GAAP research for clients.
Jennifer also is the Lead Instructor of Western Washington for Becker CPA Review and teaches the Audit and Financial portions of the CPA exam. She serves on the Board of Directors for The Village Net, a microfinance organization for women entrepreneurs in Africa, and has worked in rural villages in Kenya to implement accounting systems for tracking loan activity. She also serves on the Board of Directors for the Bellevue Chapter of the Washington Society of CPAs and the Board of Trustees for the Washington CPA Foundation. As a result, Jennifer has received numerous awards, including the WSCPA Outstanding Chair Award (2008), Ernst & Young High Impact Awards (2007 and 2008), the Matteo Ricci College Lifetime Achievement Award (2006), the SU Accounting Department Chair Award (2006), and the Beta Alpha Psi Outstanding Member Award (2006). She also was recently featured as one of twelve CPAs in the United States on This Way to CPA, the student website of the AICPA.
Jennifer earned two Bachelor of Arts degrees from Seattle University in 2006 (Magna Cum Laude) with a triple-major in Accounting, Finance, and Humanities. She is an active member of the Washington Society of Certified Public Accountants and the former Chairman of the New Professionals Committee..