"It seams like yesterday we celebrated our tenth anniversary," notes Lisa Corcoran, founder of Alternative Financial Services. "Now, here we are at year fifteen. We certainly couldn't have gotten this far without our amazing clients and talented associates."

In 2003, AFS sprouted organically from a part-time job that Corcoran worked when living in New York City.

​By providing much-needed bookkeeping services and support to small business owners and busy professionals who don't have the time nor the knowhow to properly organize their financials, AFS quickly budded into a full-time business.

"AFS supplies the knowledge and expertise that every business needs but may not have. With AFS organizing the financial details, small-business owners are unburdened from those often daunting, yet critical, tasks and given the much-needed time and space to focus on running their businesses," says Corcoran. "Financial confidence gives them peace of mind and a higher quality of life."

Now Lisa and her four AFS associates create the foundation on which small businesses can place their trust to sort out their financial records and stay organized for accurate bookkeeping, payroll, and tax filings.

We thought, “What better way for AFS to toast our tenth anniversary than with a big wine-making event?” So, we invited a group of clients and colleagues to join us at Bacchus Winemaking Club in Toms River, NJ, where we completed the first and
second steps in creating our custom, hand-crafted red wine.

Together, our AFS community crushed a large box of Petit Syrah (60% of the blend) and 10 crates each of Cabernet Sauvignon (20%) and Sangiovese (20%) to create our special blend — for approximately 750 pounds of grapes. That’s a lotta grapes! We formed an assembly line and moved the crates of grapes into the crusher, which quickly lived up to its name. From there, the juice and skins were pumped into a big plastic vat. We added small, but vital, amounts of sultes and yeast to get the fermentation process bubbling. Along the way, the terric sta at Bacchus helped explain the entire process and answered lots of thoughtful questions.