Culture, Content and Compensation: Driving Success with Seth Fineberg

Veteran accounting journalist and consultant Seth Feinberg rejoins John Randolph for part two of their conversation on Episode 49 of CPA Life. They pick back up on the closing theme of the first episode, that accounting’s image problem is largely self-made, and changes need to be made to solve the pipeline issues and other pressing matters within the profession at the macro level. Seth also touches on more focused topics: purposeful marketing in the social media age, the importance of firm culture, and the necessity of stressing the value accountants bring to their clients. The thread throughout Seth’s insights is one of authenticity and trust: Two things that are vital in ensuring any individual accountant’s—or any firm’s—success in the market.

Transcript:

Thanks for tuning in to CPA Life, where we now rejoin John Randolph for part two of his conversation with longtime accounting journalist and consultant, Seth Feinberg. Seth expands on solutions to the pipeline problem, marketing with purpose in the social media age, establishing a firm culture, and more. Welcome to CPA Life.

And it was math. Like accountants do. They already figured out from early on, I need X amount of clients per year to make Y. In order to serve that amount of clients, for what I’m charging them, I have to work a certain amount of hours. That scenario, that wheel, that hamster wheel, is finally, there’s a lot of evidence that’s being broken, thankfully, but there’s a lot more work to be done. Accounting doesn’t need to tell a better story, it needs a better story to tell. And that’s not one of them because right now that’s still very much a reality for a lot of professions.

Well, and I would assume, Seth, that, and you know, tell me if you disagree—I would assume that if the work is interesting, it is subjective.

Yeah, well, yeah, I mean look, you got to find your passion. You find something that you connect with, whatever it is, you know. I know accountants that just work with law firms or just really work with restaurants or just work with, you know, like dental practices, whatever it is, like this is what they know. They enjoy it. Hopefully.

Yep. You’ve got to find out what it is that, what’s the Marie Kondo saying, it sparks joy.

Oh, yeah. What, does it spark joy?

What sparks joy for one person may not spark joy for another person, I mean…

Sure. You could love dirt. I love working in the dirt. I love dirt. And other people, I just don’t want to go near the stuff.

I’ll talk to a candidate in one phone call that says, I do not want to touch 1040 work. I don’t care how complex it is. I don’t care if there’s 55 K-1s and 13 Schedule Cs and not a single W-2. I don’t want to do 1040 work. And then I’ll talk to other people that’ll say, man, I love 1040 work.

Eat it up, eat it up.

Stick me in a corner, pile my desk up with 1040s, and I’m the happiest guy on the face of the earth.

Sure. By the way, both of them need to know each other.

Exactly.

Because there’s probably other work that they’re like, yeah, I don’t want to do, I don’t have time to do. Like some of the core bookkeeping work, they might be like, yeah, I have somebody else here to do that, or they outsource that, or whatever. You know, there’s definitely a lot more. You know, back to our earlier conversation about making connections and having a sense of community, this is one thing you can connect on. Someone could just be really great at doing something and really passionate about it and be like, oh, I want to get out of this business. Give it to them.

Yep. We’ve got a client here in the Dallas area that’s got a fairly decent size, client accounting services group that, in this particular, I mean, they have client accounting services that do work across a bunch of different industries, but they’ve got a particular group within their CAS operation that does nothing but client accounting work for churches. That’s it. And I asked him, how did you end up in that space? And the partner in that group said my dad was a pastor, my dad used to always get upset about the fact that he had a bookkeeper that didn’t understand the complexities of church accounting. And so, to your point, that is interesting and engaging work to him where somebody else it may not be. So, you know, again, finding, I think that each person has to find what it is that floats their boat and understand that there, there’s multiple opportunities out there.

Through the findings that you’ve looked at, does compensation come into play, some of the things that you’ve seen? Because again, some of the conversations that we have on the recruiting side of our business is, hey, I’m working a ton of overtime. I’m putting in a lot of hours. I’m doing a lot of stuff over here. And I’ll always ask people, you know, are you guys comped for your overtime? “No.” And inevitably I would say 65-70% of the time, what I’ll hear from people is if I was comped for that, I’d probably have less of an issue with it.

Yeah.

It doesn’t mean that they don’t want more balance in their life, but you know there’s a part of them that look at it and go, if I’m going to put in 60 hours, 65, 70 hours, I’d like a little bit more of the pie. And I’ve got a couple of clients that think that way. Their mindset is, look, if that guy’s working more time, I’m billing my client more time. And if I’m billing my client more time, he’s going to make money from it.

Look, that’s definitely, you know, we’re talking about pipeline issues. I think there’s three and I came up with my own list and it seems to kind of jive for the most part with what a lot of folks who are doing deeper survey work into this area are doing, but I came out at the end of last year, go, you know, with an eye towards this year about what it’s really going to take for the profession to move forward. Not necessarily change. I mean, change happens, of course. For it to progress, for it to really be this welcome, you know, this place that you want a career that you want to go into and you want to see grow and do better. There’s three core things that have to happen.

One is, you know, the life-work balance issue that I talked about and everything that connects to just feeling like you have that. I’m not saying, you know, work less, play more, but being in a scenario where you feel like my life can come first, at the very least.

Number two, there has to be a considerable effort, not just check the box effort, but considerable effort towards diversity, equity, and inclusion throughout the profession as a whole. It’s past time. And it takes time for this to really take hold. Look, when I first started covering the profession 20 plus years ago, there was only, I think the statistics even coming all the way from the AICPA said that at CPA firm level leadership, there was maybe 2% were women, 2%. These days it’s 2% people of color in firm ownership, CPA firm ownership. And that’s just CPAs. CPAs make up approximately about a third of all professional accountants. Again, we’re not going into business and industry, but public accountants that we’re talking about here.

Number three, salary compensation. From the jump. You’re asking college students to work 60 plus hours a week, and you’re paying them anywhere between $56,000 and $65,000 a year? Hell no, that’s not going to sustain. It’s not going to sustain. And it doesn’t go up very much from there. Not for another 10 years. If you’re on like this whole partner track idea, you are putting in that time, you are putting in those hours. And if you don’t like it, there’s the door at some firms, but that’s got to change.

So, yeah. And if you look at comparable careers where you talk to people in similar other professional services, educated. You know, CPAs, in particular, they pride themselves on the fact that they go through all this schooling, all this training and certification and, you know, within their rights to do that because it’s a lot.

Absolutely.

And then continuing education and everything else. And hopefully you have the support of your firm that you’re working at for all of them. And then, you know, some other comparable career is making considerably more. You’re going, why? You know, there is a lot of upside potential in this career of accounting that we’re talking about here. But that compensation, you need to be paid for what you do and feel like you’re valued. And that’s where this whole idea of value billing came about. Accountants have a real hard time really not only accepting, but just expressing, explicitly, the value of what they’re really doing. I’ll hear them complain that, oh, my clients, they don’t understand. They don’t know all the work that goes into what I do. You make them understand and respect you by what you charge that shows that I respect what I do, and you’re paying me. And there’s that mutual, you know, there’s that mutual respect.

Yep. I agree. I think that there’s got to be an increased level of understanding of what it is that person does deliver the results that you ultimately see the benefit from as a business owner, an individual, whatever the case may be. I want to change the direction of the conversation a little bit, and talk about—

—I feel like all of this is really connected and that’s why we can kind of just talk around all this.

Absolutely, and it does kind of dovetail in what we’re talking about as far as, you know, showing that client value. In the world that we’re in today, it’s no longer yellow page ads or newspaper ads, or even just enough to have a website. In the world that we live in today, if you don’t have a content strategy as a firm owner, as a firm leader that begins to build your brand as a business, build your brand as a place to work, you know, I constantly say to our clients all the time in our Talent + Advisory piece of the business, somebody is going to create your brand. You can either do it or you can let the market do it, but somebody’s going to create it. Talk to me a little bit about what you’ve seen from a content strategy standpoint and kind of what you work with your clients on because that is a big piece of the marketplace that has got to continue to evolve.

Totally. So from an accountant perspective, I mean, it’s all connected. The majority of the folks that I work with, or I’m talking to about working with, the one need is to have a better connection, whether they’re selling to accountants or through them, because sometimes it’s a bit of both, depending on what the platform is, depending on what the service is.

Right.

Ultimately, you need the trust. You need that connection. Just as an accounting firm, whether they want to hire a recruit or they want to show their clients that they’re the pick if they know what they’re talking about, you’ve got to earn that trust and build it out, and you do that through content. It’s a really great vehicle. Now content can mean a number of things. At one point it was like, oh yeah, I’m blogging all the time, writing all this stuff. And now it’s that and everything else. It’s what we’re doing here. It’s webinars, it’s live events. It’s anything that’s going out. You establish and make that connection. But in order to do that, you really have to be explicit about your purpose. Don’t just copy what somebody else did. That’s not authentic.

I actually heard this from a keynote address from a conference that my old job had hosted and the keynote was on how authenticity sells. More accountants really need to realize that when they’re marketing themselves to people who would eventually work there or that you want to work with you or your clients, potential clients. So, whether you’re recruiting or taking on new clients, you have to be authentic. And people these days consume an exorbitant amount of content. And they have that, for lack of a better term, that BS meter is very fine-tuned. Accountants know it. And that’s what I try to tell the companies and businesses that I’m trying to work with. I do work with that—you have to be upfront and real, like, the whole way.

They shouldn’t feel like, okay, you know, what’s your end game here? They should know it. Meaning they shouldn’t take this very traditional sort of marketing salesy type approach. You’ve got to build that relationship. You’re going to build that trust, and then keep it by being authentic, being upfront, being honest and everything in between. That’s how you grow a relationship and you sustain it. And content, I think is, you know, again, I might be biased, but I think it’s a very clear path. If you get the combination right, if you get the balance right, you get the messaging right. The tagline to my business, Accountants Forward, is “Building messaging and connections that matter.” If you’re not doing that, if you’re not taking the time to do that, then your potential clients, customers, or people that would want to maybe work for you are going to go elsewhere.

Well, and like you said, I think that we all have so much stuff flying at us so fast in the world that we live in today. We used to walk around with no filter on. We just took everything in because there wasn’t that much flying at us. But today we’ve got, you know, these filters that they’re tight, man. If anybody wants to control their mental well-being, that we’ve spent so much time talking about, you have got to filter the stuff that’s flying at you.

Have to.

And so I think that we’ve all, because of that, whether it’s through skepticism or just better able to, you know, tell what’s BS and what’s not, it doesn’t matter what drives it, we all have a higher filter of the stuff that flies at us and the stuff that doesn’t line up well, you know, what’s the old saying? If it looks like a duck, walks like a duck, acts like a duck, quacks like a duck, it’s a duck. The stuff that doesn’t bring value to you, you get rid of it really quick. Move on.

Yeah. For sure. And you know, in this profession, it’s a service-based business. People are going to be paying you for that. I have to know that every time I go on a call or anytime I’m trying to get new business, I have to be very explicit about what this relationship is and what it will be about, what I’m going to do as part of that, because I charge what I feel that I’m worth. Any accountant out there needs to, that whole idea of worth needs to really sink in. I think you’ll get more out of it. And maybe, yeah, maybe you won’t mind working sometimes, you know, the hours won’t be that much of a thing because you just, you love it. But in general, I don’t think you’ll have to when you know, like, okay, this is kind of when work stops for me and that’s all it is. Anyway.

I think that when you love what you’re doing and then you tie to that, that you feel like there is a solid value coming at you for the work that you’re putting out, the time on the clock stops being a big concern to you. Doesn’t mean that you’re working 18-20 hours a day. It just means you enjoy what you’re doing, and you’re not begrudging it because of what you’re getting in return. And I think a lot of that does come back to the value like you’re talking about, which is driven by what’s the message that I’m putting out there.

And I said this to you when we first started talking a little bit ago: I think what people need to understand is whether it’s like you’re saying, potential new business that I’m targeting or potential hiring that I’m doing, people are going to go look at your website, and then the next thing they’re going to do is they’re going to go to LinkedIn. They’re going to see if your company has a LinkedIn page. They’re going to see what content you’re creating and putting out there. They’re going to look at who the leadership is with the firm, and they’re going to look and see what that person’s putting out there. It still surprises me to this day, Seth, how many times I’ll go to a company’s LinkedIn page, or I’ll go to a leader’s LinkedIn page, and there’s nothing there. It may be current and updated in regards to work history, you know, their resume, if you will, but as far as valuable content, the things that they’re doing to position themselves as a leader in the market, non-existent. And I don’t know if that’s something you see as well.

Oh, yeah. I mean, there’s not a whole, well, only because I don’t think there’s a lot of thought and forethought really put into it. I think, you know, the idea that some accountants have a website is still, believe it or not, relatively new. I know. 2024. But there’s some firms that just didn’t get around to it or didn’t see the value in it or, you know, eventually just kind of begrudgingly like, okay, I need to have something up there, and it shows. Because you’ve almost practically copied and pasted something that you saw. In some cases verbatim and other cases just in look and feel. You’re reading about things like, oh, you know, we value our firm culture. It’s such a thing. Like, okay, well, what is that? We’ll throw around the word culture like it’s like, you’re just going to automatically magically know. Oh yeah, I get you. What is it? Because it’s such a unique and individual thing. And it is something that can separate you from another firm. But what is it? Can you say?

I know on my site, not that I’m the be all end all or anything, but I know it was important for me to have a mission statement and a vision statement, and my approach was to say what I do. And what I believe, and then of course the services that I offer, and I’m explicit about it.

Yep. I think that when people can look and see, hey, this is what this guy stands for, this is what this guy believes—

—or this firm, or you know, that’s what we’re talking about here. You should be able to say that. In fact, I’d go a step further, is that you should be able to ask anyone who works for you, or works at your firm, and they’ll be able to answer in kind.

Yep. And I think taking it a step farther, Seth, if somebody can go to your website and see, this is what this firm stands for, or this is what this person stands for, and then they go to LinkedIn, and they see the content you’re creating, hey, guess what? It kind of speaks the same language as what this guy said he believes in. He’s saying some of the same things, or she’s saying some of the same things that they said on their website, or—

—Yeah, you echo it, maybe you don’t use the exact same words, but it’s like, it just, it ties in. And to me, and I know you know this, John, that’s good content.

Yeah.

That’s good content marketing. Really. It’s that you have the connection.

Yep. It begins to kind of bring all of that together.

I want to thank you for spending some time with us today and really kind of digging into a lot of different points that we kicked around. If folks are interested in learning more about you, the services you provide, or they just want to reach out, like you said, pick your brain, begin some discussions about some possible solutions or challenges that they might be facing, what are some of the best ways that people can get a hold of you?

I make it easy. There’s one key way.

What’s that?

You type my name into your URL, SethFeinberg.com. You will find me, you will find my website. You’ll find everything that I just mentioned about what I do, why I do it, why I believe in it, and all the services I provide. And if you want to just schedule a conversation to either talk about my services or just pick my brain about things, you can, very easily. I’ve got a weekly newsletter that I put out as well, so you can sign up for that. It’s free. Some of the folks who may be subscribed also, I’ve got a nice little partnership with the folks at CPA Trendlines. So, if you’re a subscriber to CPA Trendlines, you probably already know me because you’ve been getting my newsletter too. They’re kind enough to put it out to the larger ‘verse. But if you’re not, that’s totally fine. You can just sign up on my site and then read more about me.

And then of course, yeah, you’ll see some tiebacks to, to my LinkedIn. I’m pretty active on social. I do a lot of listening, as I said, too, and I’m very open to sharing my thoughts. So thank you for providing me with that and I’m not at my full voice today, as, one of, one of the things that I preach a bit to accountants is that you need to have an “other” in your life, something other than, oh, I’m an accountant. Okay, great. What else do you do? Oh, I’m a parent. Okay, fine. That’s cool. What else do you do? What occupies your time? What’s your passion? And I sing in a band. There you go. And we just got off a several day tour. And so I’m just kind of feeling it a little bit, but I feel great. I feel jazzed. I mean that I got to go out in the world and do that. But I also do, you know, I do a lot of speaking and stuff too.

Well, I think that, you know, kind of some of the things we’ve talked about, it’s, that music. It’s that passion that, that fills your heart up, that allows you to then give from the overflow. And I think that is.

You’ve got to fill that bucket.

That’s hypercritical. So again, Seth, thank you so much. We’ll have your website address in the show notes for anybody to be able to click that and get to you. And to our listeners, I want to say thank you to each one of you for carving out just a little bit of your time to spend with us today. I know how valuable your time is. So thank you for choosing to spend some time with us today. If you enjoyed what you heard today, make sure that you subscribe to the podcast so that you don’t miss any of the upcoming conversations that we’re going to be having with other leaders like Seth Feinberg as we talk about the future of the industry and what the prospects of that CPA Life can look like. Until next time.

We hope you enjoyed today’s episode. Be sure to subscribe on your favorite podcasting app, leave a five star rating and visit our website for links and show notes at CPALifePodcast.com. We’ll see you next time on CPA Life.

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Accountants Forward

Seth Fineberg on LinkedIn

Culture, Content and Compensation: Driving Success with Seth Fineberg

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