From Garage Grant Applications to Cross-Border R&D Tax: The Swanson Reed Timeline

Swanson Reed’s Service Evolution

Where It All Began

Our firm’s story began in 1984 with Joe William Norris, a retired General Motors engineer and inventor. Following the closure of the GM Australian assembly plant, which he had helped design, Joe founded Reed & Co. later that year and began assisting his former automotive parts and transportation clients from GM, first in the United States and then in Australia, by providing independent expert technical engineering reports for their grant applications, patent applications, and R&D tax credit claims. Joe’s primary goal was to help fellow innovators fund and protect their work for commercial success. He named the firm in tribute to his first commercialized invention: the Reed Diving Board. This lightweight, cantilevered design was a personal triumph funded by a $75 Innovators Prize he won in 1959 (equivalent to about $1,000 today). That modest prize allowed him to secure his first client and build and install his prototype in the pool at a coworker’s home on Reed Street in Fort Worth, Texas.

Though the diving board never reached mass production, it sparked a lifelong philosophy. Joe realized that if just $75 could bring his prototype to life, helping other inventors secure even small grants could be the exact catalyst they needed to achieve their dreams. A dual citizen of the U.S. and Australia, Joe continued to invent while expanding his consultancy.

Through his work at various GM factories across the U.S. and Australia, Joe built a strong international professional network. Leveraging these connections, by 1989 he had successfully grown his solo practice into a four-person micro-business servicing automotive parts and transportation businesses he had previously worked with at GM in Australia and the United States. Unfortunately, the early 1990s recession and increased travel costs to the United States forced him to downsize his business to a two-person team and focus solely on the Australian market.

Despite his continued optimism, Joe was never able to scale the business back to its 1980s peak, but he always had his wife, Betty, by his side. She always picked up the slack with administrative duties when Joe didn’t have the cash flow to pay professional staff. Reed & Co. was in continuous operation until early July 2008, when Joe’s wife, Betty, became ill.

By mid-July 2008, the U.S. economy was rapidly deteriorating and Betty’s illness was worsening, so Joe’s family decided to suspend the operations of Reed & Co.

Passing the Torch

Joe’s tenacity and passion for supporting innovation were inherited by his grandson, Adam Rogers. Adam lived with Joe for most of his childhood and was deeply influenced by his grandfather’s frustrations regarding the barriers people faced in documenting and commercializing their ideas.

By July 2008, Adam was a mechanical engineer like his grandfather and saw an opportunity to save Reed & Co. with the R&D tax credit expertise he had gained through his grandfather’s business, his work at Deloitte and PwC since 2005, and his work as a university academic in the years prior to that. Adam wanted to continue using the name “Reed & Co.” but wanted a crisp domain and web presence. He learned that the domain name “reed.com” was taken, so he expanded the name to Swanson Reed.

The expanded name was a deliberate combination of Joe’s original trading name, “Reed,” and a road called Swanston Street. Adam decided on the name while he was walking on Swanston Street in Melbourne, Australia, and talking on the phone to his friend and future business partner, Damian Smyth, who would later become Swanson Reed’s CEO. Damian suggested that Adam drop the “t,” leading to the brand name “Swanson Reed.” In hindsight, “Swanson Reed” became a fusion of two street names: “Reed,” the street where Joe secured his first-ever client in 1959, and “Swanson,” derived from Swanston Street, where Adam decided that he wanted Damian to become his business partner one day.

In late July 2008, Adam officially took over Reed & Co.’s operations and relaunched the firm under its new brand name, Swanson Reed. Adam’s very first client was an innovative automotive braking company for which Joe had helped broker a deal with the U.S. military years earlier, although the deal ultimately fell through. Seeing the product’s potential, Adam wanted to follow in Joe’s footsteps by helping the company relaunch it in the United States, creating an opportunity for Swanson Reed to re-enter the U.S. market at the same time. Although Damian was not yet officially a member of the firm, he cautioned Adam against pursuing this plan immediately and advised him to focus on the local market first. Damian routinely offered Adam business advice without compensation and helped make the 2008 relaunch of Swanson Reed successful.

Navigating Uncertain Times

In September 2008, just six weeks after launch, the 2008–2009 global financial crisis hit. Adam was forced to suspend business development in the United States entirely to focus on the most profitable market at the time: mining companies based in Queensland and Western Australia.

Due to the high travel costs, the firm faced significant funding challenges, but Adam was determined to make it work without any external help. Adam’s aversion to debt came from his grandfather, Joe, who believed that bank loans or third-party funding could create conflicts of interest for professional services firms.

In October 2008, the family crisis and ongoing financial woes forced Adam to discontinue all technical report-writing services relating to competitive grant preparation and patent applications and to focus on the activities in which he had expertise, namely R&D tax credit preparation and advice. Adam immediately added the tagline “Specialist R&D Tax Advisors” to the Swanson Reed logo, signaling to the market that the firm now focused exclusively on R&D tax credit preparation services.

Adam’s strategy of shifting the firm from broader innovation consulting to an exclusive focus on R&D tax credit claim preparation was becoming increasingly difficult to sustain. When the financial crisis began in September 2008, Swanson Reed had more than half a million dollars in outstanding receivables. From October 2008 through April 2009, the great majority of these accounts remained unpaid, leaving the business without sufficient cash flow during that period. By early May 2009, the family was considering closing the firm down again, or at least putting it “on hold” until Adam could get his mortgage payments under control and focus on protecting his marriage.

Adam had married in 2007, but spending half the year away from home for work, compounded by the firm’s financial difficulties, was putting considerable strain on his marriage. At one point, he had invested so much in the business that his personal finances had deteriorated severely, and he was denied a credit card to cover basic living expenses. For a short time, the couple relied on his wife’s income to make ends meet.

Recognizing that he could not run Swanson Reed alone, Adam asked Damian to help him manage the business so he could focus more on business development. Damian had been advising Adam on an ad hoc basis since the firm’s first launch in July 2008 but had not been involved in day-to-day operations. Between May and August 2009, Adam slowly introduced Damian to the day-to-day workings of the firm, and in mid-August 2009, Damian agreed to formally step in as a partner and CFO.

In September 2009, Adam relaunched Swanson Reed again, this time with Damian by his side. Thanks to Damian’s tenacity, Swanson Reed attained positive cash flow almost immediately, allowing Adam to spend more time on business development. Adam’s newfound focus resulted in the firm securing the R&D tax credit work for a billion-dollar global mining services company in late October 2009 — work that would by itself provide enough revenue to weather the remaining years of the financial crisis. Without Damian’s insight and leadership at this critical time, Adam noted, Swanson Reed would have failed by year-end.

Expansion and Global Reach

In June 2011, the U.S. economy had begun to recover. Adam relaunched his U.S. expansion plans and returned to the United States to reconnect with Joe’s former business contacts in Dallas–Fort Worth, Houston, Austin, San Antonio, San Francisco, Missouri, and Florida. With Adam’s renewed focus on the United States, Damian hired Andy Nguyen to help him manage the Australian client base. Andy would later become a principal and the Australian firm’s administrator.

On July 1, 2013, Damian assumed the position of chief executive officer of the Swanson Reed group. Andy became Damian’s second-in-command.

Between July 2013 and June 2014, Adam, who, like his grandfather, is a dual citizen of the United States and Australia, spent most of his time traveling between the two countries, attempting to re-establish the U.S. connections and business relationships Joe had previously maintained.

Between July and December 2014, Adam officially relaunched Swanson Reed in the United States and hired Kenneth Flesher to manage Swanson Reed’s Southern, Eastern, and Midwest divisions. Kenneth had previously served as a finance manager at Sara Lee in Paris, Texas, and was a family friend whose connection to Adam’s family spanned generations. In fact, Kenneth had lived next door to Joe in Arlington, Texas, in the early 1960s, before Joe’s move to Australia. He often recalls Joe or Betty “clipping him over the ears” as a child for, as he puts it, “getting up to no good!” Kenneth retired from the firm in late 2019.

In early 2015, the firm restructured yet again, this time recruiting Cherie Jones as director of operations. Cherie and Adam continued to work closely on mergers and acquisitions (M&A) activity for the group.

In late 2015, the U.S. R&D tax credit was made permanent under the Protecting Americans from Tax Hikes (PATH) Act, providing greater long-term certainty for businesses investing in research and development. Following this change in the law, in January 2016, Adam permanently relocated from Australia to the United States so that he could focus exclusively on building the U.S. practice.

From late 2015 until the COVID-19 pandemic, Swanson Reed expanded significantly in the United States and other countries through the launch of its proprietary software product, TaxTrex, and its R&D tax credit and innovation training workshops and webinars, called innovationCAFE.

Further international growth followed. In early 2017, Swanson Reed registered its first U.K. operations and expanded into Ireland, Canada, Singapore, and New Zealand later that year.

In June 2018, Swanson Reed made a major breakthrough in the U.S. market by winning a large contract with ADP (Automatic Data Processing, Inc.), a major U.S. payroll provider, to assist its clients with R&D tax credit preparation services. This contract helped Swanson Reed expand its recognition among CPAs across America.

In early 2020, Swanson Reed launched its innovation policy metric, inventionINDEX, and later that year launched Swanson Reed’s Patent of the Month program, an award presented monthly to companies that file the most innovative patents.

In June 2020, during the peak of the COVID-19 pandemic, the firm launched R&D Tax Academy, a global online training and education platform for R&D tax credit professionals and affiliated stakeholders.

In early 2025, with the global economy fully recovered from the pandemic, the firm decided to invest in the development and launch of its proprietary AI mock audit software, creditARMOR, and expanded into Italy later that year.

In mid-2025 and mid-2026, Swanson Reed acquired AusGrant and Grant Ninja, respectively, to build its network in academia and to bridge the gap between government funding approval and payment by offering non-dilutive advance financing to companies waiting on grants and research and development (R&D) tax credits. The AusGrant and Grant Ninja businesses continued to operate separately and independently of Swanson Reed, allowing Swanson Reed to maintain its exclusive focus on R&D tax credit preparation and audit advisory services.

Today, Swanson Reed operates in eight countries, employs over 60 people, and has secured over US$1.5 billion in R&D tax credits for its clients since its founding.

Joe Norris’s legacy remains alive and well, with three family members still sitting on the Board of Principals: Sharon Skerman, Norris’s daughter; Lyle Norris, his son; and Adam Rogers, his grandson.

Our Core Belief

“We believe the best expertise comes from complete focus. That’s why R&D tax credits are all we do.”