I’m an Accountant, Not a…

It’s raining on Saturday afternoon and I’m really in the mood to do nothing. I’m okay with that as we all need these moments to recharge. Flipping through the channels, I pause on a bass tournament for about ten minutes but start scanning again. There’s nothing on that is drawing my interest.

Now, I’m off in the crazy, never-viewed channels and there it is, one of my favorite shows growing up – Star Trek. Captain James T. Kirk is commanding the Enterprise. I love Spock. One of my favorite lines is “Beam me up, Scotty.” Scotty is the Chief Engineer. The other character I grew to love was “Bones” who is Dr. McCoy. He loves to tell Captain Kirk, “I’m a doctor, not a (whatever he felt he was being unreasonably asked to do).”

How many of us are playing Bones in the accounting world? As we see our business changing, our clients having more urgent needs, how often are we saying, “I’m an accountant/accounting firm, not a…” Do we have Bones’ mindset? I’m afraid we are thinking it too often and we are helping our competition and clients put us in the narrow, tight definition I call the Accountant’s Box.

Today, we are and can be so much more than accountants and historians.

We are technology companies, project managers, systems & internal control experts, cyber assurance professionals, advisors, critical thinkers, data scrubbers and analysts, strategic advisors, digital leaders, roadmap developers. We are so much more than just accountants. We are accountants PLUS! I hope we avoid and fight the mindset of the status quo, “I’m an accountant/accounting firm, not a…”