Patricia Quintana-Perron climbs accounting ladder in San Antonio

Patricia Quintana-Perron (3rd from left, top) and family.

Like many high school graduates from the Corpus Christi area, Patricia Quintana-Perron began her college education at Del Mar College to prepare for higher level courses at Texas A&M University-Corpus Christi. What her advisor at Del Mar would recommend in 1987 would change the course of her life.

“My advisor was George Dunson and I told him I was interested in becoming a paralegal,” she recalled. “He looked me straight in the eye and said, ‘Why sell yourself short?’” Quintana-Perron admits she was taken aback, but upon some reflection, she realized he was right.

By 1990, Quintana-Perron earned a bachelor’s degree in business administration with a double major in accounting and management from A&M-Corpus Christi. While working her way up the ladder from staff to senior accountant for Boudloche, Dornfield and Squyres, P.C. and Collier, Johnson and Woods, P.C., she earned her master’s in business administration with an emphasis in international studies. By January 1995 she was working as an accountant at the Hanke Group in San Antonio after her husband, Patrick J. Perron received a transfer in assignment with his employer, KPMG.

“I admit it, for some reason, I have the need to do everything quickly,” Quintana-Perron laughed.

Quintana-Perron became a shareholder and principal at the Hanke Group in 2000, at age 30. She provides accounting, tax and business consulting services for companies and individuals and also serves as her firm’s Service Industries Niche Director.
“People’s finances are at the crux of what rotates their lives, so it’s been a pleasure to help them,” Quintana-Perron noted.
Quintana-Perron was no stranger to crunching numbers even before her college education. “I took a bookkeeping class in high school and began working as a bookkeeper at my father’s paint and body shop,” she recalled. “In 1987, my father was diagnosed with cardiomyopathy and we all had to chip in working various jobs. Mine focused on accounting”.

But her parents always stressed the importance of seeking a college degree. And Quintana-Perron and her sisters heeded their parent’s sage advice: two of her three sisters also have their degrees from the University. “We’re all work-a-holics,” Quintana-Perron admits about she and her siblings. “Mom and dad taught us that hard work pays off.”

Priscilla Inez Quintana is a lead technologist in the Chemistry and Serology Department at CHRISTUS Spohn Shoreline and is currently pursuing a physician’s assistant degree. Younger sister Jessica Quintana-Rodriguez has both her bachelor’s and master’s in counseling from A&M-Corpus Christi and is currently teaching school in the South San Antonio Independent School District.

Even Quintana-Perron’s husband, Patrick, earned his degree in accounting from the University.

“Patrick and I had many of the same accounting classes at the University. I always chose him to be in my study groups because I thought he was the smart one,” laughs Quintana-Perron. “Of course, he always jokes that we never got much studying done.” They were married in 1991.

Quintana-Perron said her favorite memories of the University are centered on the fact that the smaller classes allowed for more personal attention from professors.

Achieving shareholder status at such a young age has garnered Quintana-Perron some notoriety. The San Antonio Business Journal recently named her one of San Antonio’s 40 “Rising Stars” in a feature named “Forty Under Forty.” She was also profiled in a recent issue of San Antonio Woman magazine.

Quintana-Perron says that she will never forget, though, her family-centered values instilled in her by parents Jesus and Gloria Quintana. “They taught us to put God first, then our family and then our work, exactly in that order,” Quintana-Perron noted.