Paving the Way for the Accounting Pipeline with Jennifer Wilson

John Randolph welcomes Jennifer Wilson to a two part conversation starting with CPA Life episode 36. Jennifer discusses her journey from BDO to founding ConvergenceCoaching, her deep history of driving technological innovation in business and accounting, and her understanding of the evolution of and challenges within the accounting industry. With a focus on the dynamics of remote work, they also explore the importance of establishing a compelling mission which your employees can feel like they are a part of, and which Jennifer says is exactly the salve needed to soothe the problems in the accounting pipeline. A member of the National Pipeline Advisory Group, Jen explains its role in trying to solve the pipeline problem, which she will delve into further in part two.

Welcome to another episode of the CPA Life Podcast, where we get the privilege to talk to some of the amazing firm owners, leaders, and industry professionals who, like us, are passionate about building a more modern-minded, people-centric public accounting world—a place where you can build an amazing career without having to sacrifice your family at the altar of your job to succeed. And today, we’re joined by Jen Wilson, who is a partner and co-founder of ConvergenceCoaching, a leadership and management coaching firm whose mission is to help leaders in the industry achieve success. Jen, welcome.

Hey, thanks John. I’m so glad to be here with you.

Well, one of the things that’s pretty consistent, Jen, with the folks that we’ve had as guests is that they don’t really toot their own horn real well, so I’m going to do that for you for just a minute. You’ve spent most of your career making an impact on the accounting profession as a previous partner at BDO, two accounting-focused software companies, and along with the amazing number of hats you wear at ConvergenceCoaching, you also wear a number of hats as a speaker, an author, and you’re currently serving on the advisory board working with the National Pipeline Advisory Group, which we’ll spend some time—we’re going to spend some time talking about that today. So Hopefully, we’ve hit the high points.

I think so, for sure.

So tell me a little bit about your accounting path. How did you evolve into this world? Because it wasn’t a traditional come out of college, accounting degree, audit, tax, move up the ladder kind of thing.

No, it wasn’t. Not even close. I went to school thinking I would study accounting. And then my junior year, I was working—I’ve always worked. I mean, literally, like, I can’t remember when I wasn’t having some side hustle as somebody would say. And so I was working at an accounting software distributor as the PC was being invented, and I got an opportunity to move to Southern California. And I left school my junior year and went out there and spent a year building a territory for this accounting software distributor, and then, was recruited by Sage, the predecessor to Sage, out of Irvine, California, to build a channel for them and became VP of sales, marketing, and customer services for those guys. I went on a 7 year wild ride, as a kid, you know? We took the company public, we took it back private, you know, sold it to a European entity. You know, we did a lot, we got acquired. I learned how to do M&A, you know, which was amazing. And it started with seven people working for me—when I left it had about 435.

Oh my goodness.

And I left just after my 30th birthday. And so that was a super incredible exposure to the accounting world, because our primary channel was accounting firms. And so that’s how I started to really learn about public accounting, about niche services, specialty service offerings, how the partnership model worked or didn’t. Just a bunch of things from that, and made a lot of contacts, spoke a bunch while I was there at the AICPA Tech Conference. Left there, I did a little consulting, found my way to BDO, ran a national consulting practice for them. So, again, in accounting, but technology still.

Right.

And then I left BDO to get in the baby business. I raised three daughters, and my first child was born as I was leaving BDO. And then I went back to school and finished my degree, and I decided to finish it in marketing. So while I was consulting, doing some work for Sage again, on a consulting basis, went back to school, and started figuring out what being a parent—the job of parent entailed. And out of that evolution, I met a guy named Jim Metzler, and we’d already known each other at Sage, but he was a customer of mine. I met him and made friends with him, and we decided to found this business, ConvergenceCoaching, which just celebrated 24 years the beginning of this month.

Congratulations on that. I was going to ask you about that because when I was looking at the dates of things, it looked like it was around a birthday timeframe for the start of ConvergenceCoaching.

It is, yep. We just had a birthday, our 24th, we’ve entered our 25th year, which is mind blowing, you know? I mean, it’s eye blink, is how it feels in terms of time. And sometimes when we talk about things, we’re trying to remember a project or talk about something that we did, and then we’re like, that was 14 years ago, you know? We just can’t believe it because it seems so—everything feels so recent, so compressed somehow.

So let me ask you this. When you look at the 24 year legacy of what you guys have done, are the problems from 24 years ago and the challenges from 24 years ago that you were coaching on drastically different than today, or are a lot of them the same type things that you’re dealing with? I mean, we’re dealing with people, so I gotta believe there’s gotta be some of the things that are still the same.

Yeah. I mean, I have to say both. There are some things that have not changed, and there’s a little bit of me that wants to hang my head in shame, you know, that we haven’t been able to move the needle on those things. Then there’s a lot that has changed. Like, for instance, so when I went to work at BDO, I was their very first remote person. I lived in Plattsmouth, Nebraska, but I was a Detroit office based partner. And their IT guys were like, what are you guys doing to their leadership? You know, how can we set this woman up with video conferencing, and all of that? She’s in this town of 6,000. You know, there’s just and back then, you know, high speed, forget it. It was dial up or maybe, the beginning of some sort of the very beginning of ethernet type technologies there for us in our homes.

And so, you know, I have worked remote and hybrid forever, and I’m a pioneer, personally a pioneer in it, but also our organization has been pied pipering it, we study it, we have a benchmark survey, it’s about to have its seventh edition since 2014 when we first started studying the practices for remote and flex in public accounting. That has changed. You know? Like, you look at that, you know, one guy told the story in a recent panel, that, you know, when I came into his firm and talked about remote work, He got upset and threw a pen across the room, and it’s true, he did. We were talking about mandatory Saturdays, and we were talking about no longer mandating physically where people worked, and it was so confronting to all that he believed he he threw a pen. And he was like, you know, I’m embarrassed by my impulse control problem, but second, you know, I couldn’t be of a more different mind today than I was then, you know?

And so the pandemic helped with that, of course, but we had a ton of clients already there, way before the pandemic, figuring out borderless reach for clients and people, and really figuring out lifestyle—that you can create a lifestyle where you can still have a big job and a lot of commitments, and maybe a lot of hours, but not be as chained as the physical paradigm requires. And so, anyway, some things have changed, some things are the same, sadly.

You know, when you talk about the dynamics of remote culture, one of the things that I found interesting coming out of COVID, in talking to firms that were dead set against it—mentally, they weren’t remote, but physically, in the way that they operated, they had remote employees. They had a partner in Houston that ran a product line there with two employees in Austin. And yeah, they were maybe in a physical location that the rent was paid by the company, but they had remote-deployed people that weren’t in the main office in Dallas or the main office in Tulsa. And I don’t know why they had a tough time seeing that, but it took a lot of firms that we were dealing with a little while to get their head around the fact that, you know, I guess we have remote employees.

We’ve been saying that forever. If you’re multi-office, quote, unquote, whatever “office” means, you already were doing remote hybrid. You know, if you put people out on an audit, clients, that’s actually remote work. And you’re supplying them equipment and, you know, it’s just such an interesting thing that we had such a stop to think about it being part of our flexible talent programs. And the main reason is because we do have a whole bunch of paradigms or mindsets that are pretty entrenched in those of us that have been around for a while. You find this entrenched thinking. One of them is I think you’re more productive if I can see you.

Yeah.

And I, you know, like, I want to physically watch you work or walk by you working or see you at work, and that gives me confidence that you’re being productive. And we call that a trust problem. You know, like, not trusting that my people will do the right thing, not trusting that they’re professionals, that they’re self motivated, you know, like somehow thinking they would take bigger breaks, or be lazier or something when they’re working from home. And that’s just such a sad way of thinking about, you know, our people.

Right.

Our people are called to something, you know? Like all of the problems that I think that we have in our firms related to talent, they could be rooted in a couple of things. And one is, you know, our people need to be called to something with us. So we’re called at Convergence to transform leadership, one person at a time—transform thinking, transform leadership, both at the organizational level, but at the individual level—every human being, every person we touch to talk to, that’s what we’re called to do. We wake up every day trying to say, how can we elevate leadership? How can we be better leaders? What the latest in leadership evolution and thinking, and how can we help others, right? So trying to call ourselves to that, like, is what we’re doing that, you know, and hey, guys, remember why we’re doing this!

Yep.

And so sometimes I think, you know, we feel like I’ll put the person out in a cube in front of my office, and they’ll be super productive and motivated. Well, no, they’ll be productive and motivated if they’re called to a mission or a ministry in your organization—if they feel bought into it. Doesn’t matter where they are. They’re going to give you their best.

Yep. They’re going to do all that they can to deliver for you regardless of the geography associated with it. One of the things that through my career as I ran small firms and could have a direct impact on you know, the three, four, five people that were working for me to now running 20, 30, 40, 50, 60 people most of them in one geographic location, but some deployed in other areas, you know, I think one of the things that you have to recognize and realize is the bigger that sphere grows, the higher the likelihood, yes, you are going to have outliers that push the envelope.

You are going to have people that you know, like, we’ve got a client that last year, we were talking about the prospect of moving their business to at least a hybrid model, because they were full time in office. And the managing partner had a great heart, and his answer was fine, we’ll just let everybody starting next week work with him all one day a week. And I was like, no. No. Pump the brakes, because they’re a firm of 52 people. And I said pump the brakes. I don’t—while I think your heart’s in the right place, do you have the systems in place to measure that and manage that? Do you have the people in place to do it? Do you have the technology in place to do it? Because I promise you with 50 to 55 people, you’re going to have 8–10% of your firm that are going to look for ways to work around the system. And those people are going to ruin everything for the 45 to 50 people that are doing what they need to do. And your reaction when you see overall productivity go down, because four or five people aren’t as productive, your reaction is going to be stop it—everybody back in the office. And now you’ve taken something away from people, and they’re not going to be happy about that.

So I think that one of the challenges that as you grow that sphere, you’ve got to understand you’re going to have to have better systems and processes and leadership in place, because you are going to have some people that will look for ways to to finagle throughout the system. Do you see that in the coaching that you guys do?

Yeah! I mean, I love your example, because, you know, I love that the guy is trying to be nimble, and he’s trying to be quick, and I love that. You know? And I think I’d rather have that these days than over-preparation, overthinking. I do like that, you know, you raised a few, just kind of critical success factors like is the technology in place, you know? Like, we could quickly shoot ourselves in the foot by moving so fast that we haven’t made sure that everybody’s got the bandwidth, and they have access to shared files, and, you know, the security and privacies in play and all those really great things. You know, so there is some preparatory.

On this issue of, like, you know, the bell curve of human behavior where you’re going to have, you know, the, you know, the people at the front of the jump rope of your firm pulling on that rope as hard as they can with all their might, all the time, thinking about it, and eating it for lunch, you know, every day. And then people on the back of the jump rope pulling it against it, trying to figure out how to do the least. I guess that that is, you know, something that could be expected. If we have relationships with our people, though, which have to be leveraged, relationships, because one owner can’t have relationships, and daily or weekly interactions with people when there are 52 of them—I mean, so we have to leverage those relationships and we have clarity of who the shepherd is for each of our people, that shepherd or career advisor or talent manager or whatever you call that person, you know, some people would call it a supervisor—I’m not in love with that word, but whatever it is, we’re super clear who’s assigned to who, regardless of whose work they’re doing. They don’t have to assign to the people whose work they’re doing, they just, we have to have shepherds for everybody.

Right.

As always, we’re really clear who’s supposed to be doing that regular check-in, who’s supposed to be checking on capacity and workload and roadblocks and motivation and contentment, and how can I help you? You know, how can I make you more successful today, this week, not by every 6 month check-in on performance that’s way too distant to really make a difference. If we have that in place at your example, if there were going to be an 8–10% your number that we’re going to cheat the system or whatever you want to call it, kind of grind to a halt because they were no longer visible, that’ll be quickly spotted, if we had the right regular interaction with them.

And, clarity, the other thing is, John, and this is I’m going to say it, and then we probably need to jump ahead and not do it because it’s such a rat hole, you know, we can’t measure off hours. So we always say at Convergence, you know: deliverables, output, results. What have you delivered? What is finished? What products were produced? What files came off your fingertips, and moved to someone else? What outcomes, deliverables, results have you produced? And we try to have people think in that output mindset, instead of the input: I worked hours, I was available, I was logged into teams, I was, you know, I was checking email, all that stuff. That’s work, but it’s not production.

Right.

And we try to have people think about, like, you know, what am I producing that is contributing to this mission of ours, and have I produced enough today, will I produce enough this week? And if I can’t, what’s going on with me personally or professionally that’s blocking that? Have I communicated that so there isn’t a trust breakdown if my production is off. And if we have good relationships with our people, first, we don’t probably hire as many cheaters, you know? Like, we have good screening and we do a better job there. But also we’re calling them to the mission, so they’re like, at my last place, I just thought I was grinding along, but at this place, these people keep trying to, like, get me excited about it, and I find myself falling into a little bit of enthusiasm for this stuff. And we can accidentally call them out of whatever that is, the malaise that they might have had. And then those that are not producing that we can’t call out of that, we can help them work somewhere else, and find a place where they can be inspired.

And you said we need better leadership when we’re hybrid or remote—I would say we need better management. And it’s the same management we should have if we were all under one roof. We should still have the shepherds. We should still have the check-ins.

Yeah. I think that in a remote type setting from my personal experience, it calls for more intentionality of those management processes, of those standards, of those deliverable expectations, and focusing like you said on, hey, what is the output? You know, my thought process and mindset with us has been, for the most part, I don’t really care when you do it. Let’s just get it done. Yes. The flip side of that, though, is also talking to your people like I’ve had to and get people to understand that, hey, look, I don’t work at two in the morning most of the time. And most of the time, our clients aren’t working at two in the morning. So even though you may need to unplug sometimes in the middle of the day, there’s times where we may need you to plug back in because at two o’clock in the afternoon, that’s the only time that a client can connect with us. So, you know, I think there’s the ability to manage that with flexibility and let your people do the things that they need to do as long as the deliverables are where they need to be.

Yes. For sure.

One of the things that I want to touch on, and maybe more than touch on, is something that has been kind of white hot on your radar lately, and that is the National Pipeline Advisory Group. Because, obviously, that is a big issue in the industry right now. We can do all that we can right now to work with what we’ve got, but the reality is the back end of that pipeline has a lot of people coming out of it. We’ve got to do something to get the front end of that pipeline to begin to offset a little bit what’s walking out the back door, whether through retirement or leaving the industry, whatever it may be. Talk to me a little bit about the Pipeline Advisory Group, what that is, and the work that you guys are doing, and what some of the outcomes that you guys are hoping to pull from that.

Awesome. So, glad to do that. The National Pipeline Advisory Group is a group that was convened by the AICPA Council last May. It is a group of 22 independent and very diverse stakeholders who have come together a lot. We’ve had at least five multi day in person meetings and too many two hour video calls to count. At least one a month. Tons of working group time. We have representatives there from large firms, midsize firms, small firms. We have state society representatives. We have regulators. We have finance and accounting department folks from industry. We have three academics. A pretty good mix.

The AICPA has a seat, NASBA has a seat. AAA, the academic profession, is represented. And most of our stakeholders represent those, what I’ll call, segments, but they also belong to other communities and are bringing those community perspectives, as well. And so we have been meeting and talking about pipeline. And the first thing we had to do in our first meeting was say, what does pipeline mean to you? What are we doing? And by the way, we are building a strategic plan to figure out—our mission is to grow the number of people who choose a career in accounting.

Mmm hmm.

Some number of whom will go on to become licensed. So one, this number isn’t all CPA only—it’s not. It’s the entire accounting profession, and the top of the funnel being as big as we can get it. And then what does the pipeline mean to you? Well, you know, we decided that it means our focus for our strategic plan starts in middle school, high school, goes through college to graduation, exam, preparation through passing, licensure, and then one to firm years of employment, either in industry, or in firms. And that we’re examining what we would call that part of the pipeline life cycle.

Got it.

You just referred to the back end, which we would say is part of, like, you know, 20 years plus maybe, to retirement kind of a deal—the back end—but you’ve got one to five years employment, six to ten, you know, you’ve got these phases in people’s careers when they either stay or they go, right? They either build their career or they leave, and then we do have a decent number retiring like all professions, like our entire country has, this massive baby boomer, you know, slow, but steady progression, off the employment cliff, into something else. And so we’re not focused on that back end, we’re more focused on this front end. But we are taking pipeline a little bit different in that we’re going to that one to five years of employment and looking at it. And some say, wait a minute, that’s really like HR or employee retention or something. You know, why is that part of your pipeline discussion?

We’re saying, well, all the studies show that if people are working in that one to five years, they’re talking about it, on Reddit and Glassdoor and Fishbowl, and at the kitchen table and you know, at school, you know, if they’re an accounting major and they’re going to change their major or whatever, they’re all talking about it at different—they’re talking to people that work in accounting and chose something else, they’re, you know, they’re related to them or they need them somewhere, and they hear these sad stories of, you know, employment isn’t all that we hoped it would be.

Right.

We don’t love our jobs. That is affecting the pipeline. So we were called to be data driven. So we have studied the holy heck out of this. And that’s reading a lot of research that was already done in the last few years, and a ton of research that’s been done during the time that we have, since we’ve convened, and we’ve just been eating the research up and comparing it and finding common themes. And all of the research on pipeline, really, up to this point, John, has been focused on the barriers, the hurdles, the problems. Everybody’s got studies out there to say, what makes you quit? Why’d you quit? Or why didn’t you pick accounting? Or, what would be the problems in choosing an accounting major? Those kinds of things.

And so we’ve studied that, and we’ve come up with six theme areas that we’ve been working on strategies.

Okay. Can you talk about what those six areas are?

I can. So the six things—none of these, by the way, you will not be falling off your chair while I share them with you and neither will the listeners, because I, you know, we talked about them in different ways and more white piecemeal, we talk about these things. Okay, so one is tell a better story.

Amen.

And this is at the macro level, but really at the micro level. So I have personal, like, pet observations here: One of my personal pet observations is we all would like somebody to blame for the pipeline problem. If we could find somebody, you know, some institution to say, hey, guys, fix it, we would because we’re not looking in the mirror very hard when we’re thinking about pipeline.

Yep.

We’re not so, you know, we’re looking for somebody to solve this for us. And in reality, right now, just go read the #TaxTwitter hashtag. Man, right here this week here in spring busy season, go read it. The stories being told there are, of, you know, horrible clients and terrible records, and Sundays given up to the cause, and things like that. There’s not a lot of joy expressed, and there’s not a lot of look at the cool stuff I get to do with this wonderful lifestyle that this affords me, or the cool vacations I have. Now some people are doing that, I’m not saying nobody’s doing that. But the overarching story we tell on the public side is the red badge of courage for how brutal our busy seasons are and how hard we work and how overwhelming we are and all that stuff.

And I think that voice is so loud, Jen, to your point—you’re right, there are people that are doing the opposite, there are people that are telling good stories, but that other voice is so stinking loud, getting the word out is tough.

I tell people, no more kitchen table complaining. You know, like, especially the minute you have kids, you know, the minute you have kids at your table, that are over the age of three or four, telling them that how hard and terrible your job is, is a definite way to not ever let them consider a job there, but also they’ll tell all their friends. “Oh my gosh, my mom’s job is a nightmare.” you know, “don’t do that.” So we’ve done kind of a good job of branding the wrong things. We’ve got to tell a better story individually and collectively. We have to tell it, by the way, earlier.

Most accounting majors chose their major, like almost half of them, before they started school. So they’re middle school, high school decisions. And so part of telling a better story isn’t just to stop complaining, it’s get out there and talk to middle schools, talk to high schoolers, talk about how cool your job is, talk about the wealth that hit it has afforded you the the difference making opportunities in clients’ lives, the cool relationships, the technology board, profession we have, the fun we have, the relationships we develop through these kind of network experiences you and I are having here where we become friends, and we make up this big network of friends. We’ve gotta talk about that at middle school, high school, and go out on campus and offer to talk to college students, business majors.

Yep.

And accounting majors, kind of tell a better story. There’s tons of resources. AICPA has them. State societies have them. AAA for academics has them. I mean, there’s lots of resources to tell a better story.

Let me let me interrupt you there because you talking about that, there’s something that popped into my head, and I hadn’t really thought about this. I’ve got two clients, both in the Dallas area, both about the same age—my age, our age, late 50s, I think one of them may be 60, early 60s. One has built a firm, three kids, had the intention of one of the kids going into accounting, possibly take over the firm. Kids want nothing to do with accounting. Nothing.

Yes.

They’ve all gone down other paths and are doing something else. So he’s trying to figure out what does chapter two look like. Okay? Other firm, two kids. Both kids are a part of the firm. He had no intention of his kids becoming accountants. His kids are accountants. They went and did other stuff. Now they both work for him. They are chapter two.

Yep.

In both of those instances, I was talking to, went to lunch with partner one, no kids. Asked him why did they not do this? And he said, honestly, I’m probably to blame. They saw—and I’m, as a parent, and also as a coach myself and also talking with my wife and I have a marriage coaching business and we talk to people, one of our phrases is, “more is more is caught than taught,” and kids are are great at that—so his kids saw what he did, but they also heard what he said.

Other firm, about six months ago, went to lunch with him and his two kids, and one of their other partners. And through the course of that conversation, I didn’t ask him, I asked the kids. So tell me why you came. Both of them said the same thing: Dad always talked about how much fun he was having at work. Dad always talked about the fun work, the fun clients, the difference he was making in businesses. You know, one of the things that we saw from some of our friends whose dads or moms were in public accounting, they work crazy hours. And for some reason, dad and his people at his firm, they never did. I mean, they work, you know, long hours, during busy season, but comparatively speaking, it wasn’t what other firms were doing. And, again, it’s telling that better story. Two black and white examples where you’ve got kids’ legacy in the firm, and one doesn’t.

Yeah. I think there’s a lot to what you’re saying there, you know, it’s the example, right? But part of what I hear in that story is something else that I don’t think most of us that are entrepreneurs, or small to midsize business people really fully appreciate, and that is that we are not victims to our business. They are our businesses. We gave birth to them. We can raise them up to be the business we want, and we do not have to accept the stuff that is crummy and doesn’t work. It doesn’t mean that it’s all easy. You can make it all whistle while we work all day, right? You know, entrepreneurship is not without hardship. But you can choose the clients that you serve. You can choose the services that you offer. You can choose the price points that you’re trying to work at. You can choose, you know, how you’re going to serve clients, how digital they’re going to be so you can minimize inefficiencies, and you could decide, you know, the kinds of clients that give you joy and feed your heart and give your people joy and how to have more of those. You can go find them—clients need us, they’ll come to you because they’ll get that you are really into their story and their stuff, and they’ll they’ll flock to you. And so it’s not like, no. I have to accept all this stuff. It doesn’t work for me because it’s the only way to pay the bills.

That’s kind of a, I’m going to call it like a victim, you know, kind of mindset. Like, I have to accept what comes to me instead of I can cause and generate and manifest it and make it happen. And young people are certainly more attracted to the latter, not the former, right?

Yep.

Almost every Gen Z has a side hustle—they’re already entrepreneurially active in high school and in college. They are interested in trying to make things happen. And they don’t want to come in and work for a firm that’s acting like, well, everything happens to me, you know, we can certainly sit around and say, well, regulation, I can’t control that. No, you cannot. You could decide, though exactly how you’re going to address regulation, which services you’re going to be involved in, whether you’re going to expose yourself to all the services with all the regulation, or specialize. You know, you can hire people who love regulation and they eat up the tax code, and they love change, and they can spit it right back out and exactly how we’re going to address it with clients. And you don’t have to be the one that does it if it’s not your thing.

You know, there’s just ways to innovate and manage and lead through stuff that doesn’t work. And some of it is removing it. You know, like I said earlier about our, our folks that we can’t get inspired up on their tiptoes about our mission and ministry, maybe they can’t work here anymore. We can’t just accept that they aren’t, and that they don’t feel it, and that they don’t want to stay and then but we need them to grind. “Stay here and grind with me, please.” That’s a quick way to get people to quit around them. Nobody wants to work with grinders. You know? And so we act like, well, I can’t swap them out. You know, somebody would say to me fix the pipeline, Jennifer, because we can’t swap them out, because there’s nobody available. Well, Yes there are. You could hire people at distance. You know, you can run a hybrid remote model. You can—there’s all kinds of people available to you will be attracted to your exciting, inspiring vision.

We hope you enjoyed part one of John Randolph’s conversation with Jennifer Wilson of ConvergenceCoaching. Be sure to catch part two on May 1st by subscribing on your favorite podcasting app, and you can find links, show notes, and more at CPALifePodcast.com. We’ll see you next time on CPA Life.

Important Links:

ConvergenceCoaching

Jennifer Wilson on LinkedIn

National Pipeline Advisory Group survey

About the Guest: