beBetter 

When I was around nine years old, I ignored some sage advice from Mom and well, it ended badly. Shocked, aren’t you? 

Have you ever ignored your mother’s advice to later discover she knew what she was talking about? I seemed to have experienced that a lot growing up, but at the time, I really didn’t think she knew anything. Well, on this day, she did. 

Okay, today we may step on some toes (including mine) but sometimes we need to be a little uncomfortable in order to reach our full potential.  We will certainly never reach our full potential if we don’t get out of our comfort zones, so we should expect and want to be uncomfortable fairly frequently.  Comfortable is good, but uncomfortable is great and certainly more fulfilling. 

I frequently close internal communications to my team with “One Team One Direction.” Recently, one of our new team members asked, “What does ‘One Team One Direction’ mean to our leadership?” What a fantastic question, and I want to share exactly what those four powerful words mean to me.  

Recently, immediately following the morning service at church, my wife texted two of our dear friends, “Joey just shouted ‘Amen’ in the Catholic church and I am under the pew.”

Needless to say, that text led to lots of laughs at my expense.  Everything was true in her text except that she did not actually get under the pew (but she clearly wanted to).  As it was happening, I could feel her ease away from me and start looking in a different direction like she did not know me.  I have to admit, after faithfully attending different Catholic church services for over 15 years, I have never heard an amen.  So, I immediately understood her denial of my existence that Sunday morning.    

Recently, a team member shared a funny story with me that also has a great life lesson for us.  

She had recently celebrated her birthday and took some PTO that week to enjoy her love of fishing off the Gulf Coast.  Sounds like a great plan to me.  Since fishing is her favorite hobby, she was extremely excited about getting out on the water. 

There was a lot of interest and feedback on my last blog Be Empowered by Choosing a Growth Mindset which dealt with my internal struggles around my commitment to working out.  So, I thought it might be fun to share with you some stories of the people that I see at the gym nearly every time I go. I call them my workout buddies. It’s not surprising that organizations find some of these very people showing up for work on their teams, too.  As I have worked with team members to help them reach their full potential, I have encountered many of these individuals taking the same approach with their career as they do the gym.

I really struggle with the time and effort it takes to keep a regular workout routine, which I need for both my general health and to maintain a healthy weight.  Actually, I simultaneously hate to workout and love to workout.  I enjoy skipping a session, and I hate skipping a session.

All I could do was laugh recently when I couldn’t see the big picture although it was literally right in front of me.  I was preparing for an interview and I had requested a PDF of a recent presentation I had given on connecting the dots.  I received the PDF and pulled it up, looking for the 19 dots it should have. As I clicked through the pages though, I could only see 10 dots.  So I sent another request for the presentation with ALL 19 dots.  I click through the latest version, I see the same 10 dots.  So now, I assume that my request is misunderstood.  “Please send me the PDF with all 19 dots that includes…” and I listed the missing dots.  I mean, how hard can this be? Right?

I’ve noticed I make my biggest blunders when I get in a hurry and don’t think about what I’m doing. Just recently, I was given a sharp reminder when my impatience led to a cut finger. 

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: 

This blog is the fifth in a five part series adapted from the AICPA White Paper, Becoming the Firm of the Future, which is available here.

So many businesses today truly make a difference in their service to clients and their team members. I see it every day in public accounting as we make a huge impact for our clients and provide opportunities of growth for our team members. What concerns me, however, is that what you and I might know and understand, often lacks being passionately communicated to our existing and new team members. 

We are in a free agency market for talent like we have never seen before. Many times in the accounting industry we are losing top talent—or they are leaving our profession very quickly after that first bad experience. Headhunters will tell you that many professionals leaving public accounting firms today are not looking for another public accounting position, instead they are looking outside the profession. Michael Platt of Inside Public Accounting was recently stressing this to me as we discussed turnover in our profession. “They are not giving the profession a second chance,” he said.  

This blog is the fourth in a five part series adapted from the AICPA White Paper, Becoming the Firm of the Future, which is available here.

In his book Flash Foresight, Daniel Burrus points out the transformation that will take place due to extreme advances in processing power, digital storage and bandwidth.  This hard trend (meaning it will happen, whether we believe it or not) threatens the economic engines of almost all CPA firms which rely heavily on the chargeable hour (time) as the driver of value.  As things get faster and faster, we will have less and less value under this model.

What is the real relationship between time and value delivered?  For years, many in the accounting profession and, notably to his credit, Ron Baker, have pointed out the disconnect between actual value delivered and time incurred.   I’m afraid we do not have the luxury of continuing this debate.  It is time to focus on outcomes, deliverables and their value to clients. In the future, time will be less and less of a factor in many of the things that CPAs do today.   We must begin conversations with clients that help us understand what they value.  It is time to prepare for this hard trend, not ignore it, fight it or continue to debate it. 

This blog is the third in a five part series adapted from the AICPA White Paper, Becoming the Firm of the Future, which is available here.

When someone tells us one thing and then we experience or observe something much different, what do we believe?  What they tell us or what we are experiencing? Of course, we trust what we see and what we experience because that is our reality. 

The disconnect between what our team members see and what we say is the primary reason the accounting profession, and most businesses today, are struggling with culture and attracting talent to their team.  We are telling our team members and our recruits that we have changed, that we offer flexibility, that we believe in results not seniority. However, the experiences that people are having, the behaviors they are observing, and the way we are managing people has gone primarily unchanged.