Feb. 3—HIGH POINT — The target audience for Daymond Milam's new accounting office in High Point sounds wrong: new small businesses and struggling small businesses.

Milam understands why someone would be skeptical of that plan, but he's serious.

He has done it before, and he said he considers it an opportunity to serve the community by helping people who are struggling.

"I work with the fastest-growing segment of businesses," he said. "The people nobody wants to work with."

Half of all new businesses fail within their first five years, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Milam thinks most of them fail because they don't find an accountant who can help them.

"A lot of people understand how to get the money coming in, but they don't understand how to stop the money going out," he said.

In recent years Milam, who lives in Wallburg, put his thinking to the test, opening a new office for his Greensboro-based Solutions Accounting, Tax and Consulting in his childhood hometown of Warrenton, a poverty-stricken area in northeastern North Carolina, in 2018. He did it after mulling over something a friend told him: "A lot of people leave Warren County and do big things, but they never come back."

Milam decided to come back to "give back."

Although he grew up in Warren County and knew it had a high poverty rate, he was shocked by how many people he encountered could not read or write.

He found his business often providing lessons in financial literacy and guiding people to basic financial services they didn't know about — "Whatever your target market needs, you have to adapt and offer it," he said — and he struggled to help small businesses straining under the weight of COVID-19 restrictions that damaged businesses across the state.

It's a track record that makes him confident he can make a difference in High Point, which historically has had one of the state's highest poverty rates. If the new office is ready in time, Milam plans for it to open next week.

In fact, he said he feels called here — he had been planning to open an office in Kernersville, but when the chance came up to buy the former Byerly Law Office on E. Commerce Drive, which is next to a low-income neighborhood and across the street from the Guilford County Courthouse, he changed his plans.

"This just fell in my lap," he said.