beBetter 

A recent beBetter blog, Price is Rarely the Issue, generated some interesting comments and thoughts. One that really caught my attention was from a HORNE team member in Tennessee, David Friedt. David shared a humorous story about how a car salesman was attempting to make a car distinctive with some of the features.  

We are still experiencing the waves of disruption caused by the hard trend of baby boomer retirements. Companies and firms are feeling the void as they watch the mass exodus of knowledge, wisdom and experience walk out the front door into retirement. This baby boomer hard trend, as all hard trends do, provides us opportunities also. Besides the opportunities for so many team members to step up in roles and grow exponentially, we have the opportunity to listen and learn as these valuable team members hang up their cleats.

You may have read my blog, Why Do We Ignore Good Advice?, where I shared about my mom’s wisdom and how it usually turned out that she, in fact, did know best. 

For years I have heard jokes about how slow the public accounting profession is in being innovative or adopting changes in business practices. Odds are, you have too. My favorite has always been, “When did the CPA buy his/her first fax machine?” Of course, the answer is, “When the client called and asked, ‘What is your fax number? I’m trying to fax you something.’”

This blog is the second in a four part series on how we can lead in public accounting to take advantage of some hard trends

Blogging and still singing Bob Dylan’s “The Times They Are A-Changin’”, you might remember the line “You better start swimmin' or you'll sink like a stone.” With most CPA firms having a large percentage of their revenues tied to the value of billable time, we might be sinking to the bottom holding on to this time clock if we don’t anticipate some of the changes ahead. 

This blog is the first in a four part series on how we can lead in public accounting to take advantage of some hard trends.

As I prepared my outline for this blog on life in public accounting, I am reminded of the Bob Dylan song “The Times They Are A-Changin'.” Today, in the world of public accounting, we are in the middle of a robust, free-agency market for talent like we’ve never seen before. This free agency market is “A-Changin'” because millennials are exercising their choices for a career and they routinely find public accounting not meeting expectations. We are not actually changing how we work, despite the proliferation of adopted new policies promoting millennial values. And we haven’t given any thought yet to generation Z desires as they start entering the workforce in the fall of 2016. Simply, in the trenches, we are losing the culture war. 

At the HeadWaters 2015 Emerging Leaders Conference in Park City, Utah, earlier this month, I spoke to accounting leaders on four future hard trends that I see for both our profession and individual CPA firms. Hard trends are defined as things that will happen whether we like it or not. After presenting these four major hard trends that will continue to transform how we work in public accounting, I shared a story about Davis, our 9-year-old grandson to demonstrate how these hard trends are impacting many firms.  The story goes like this: