Retelling Accounting’s Story: An Eye on the Profession with Rob Brown

Rob Brown, former high school math teacher, part-qualified accountant, stroke survivor, and more, is the founder of Accounting Influencers and the host of the Accounting Influencers Podcast series. He serves professionals in the accounting, legal, and finance professions as an event host, conference chair, influencer, ambassador, recruiter, interviewer, panel moderator, emcee, and keynote speaker. His expertise includes reputation, executive presence, talent differentiation, branding, firm development and succession, recruitment, retention, and disruption.

Rob’s Accounting Influencers Roundtable, AIR, helps influencers and companies better serve the accounting world. AIR’s keynote event is a bimonthly influencer speed networking event held over Zoom. He is also the author of Build Your Reputation: Grow Your Personal Brand for Career and Business Success, published in 2016. His TEDx talk, entitled The Personal Brand of You, has amassed nearly 400,000 views on YouTube.

Transcript:

Hey everyone. Thank you for joining us today for another episode of the CPA Life Podcast, where we spend time digging into what it takes to build a modern-minded, people-centric firm in today’s highly competitive talent landscape of public accounting. Today, we are continuing with our series that we’ve been in the middle of for the last few weeks, where we’re spending some time talking to a number of talent leaders and talent advocates who focus on the challenges and needs that CPA firm leaders are facing in today’s market. Today, we are joined by Rob Brown, who brings a unique perspective to the table as CEO of Accounting Influencers, a professional, trusted members-only organization for individuals and companies operating in the accounting vertical. On top of that, Rob is also the host of the Accounting Influencers and the Accounting Talent podcasts. He’s a conference chair for multiple accounting-focused organizations, a professional interviewer, a panel moderator, and an employee brand and employer brand advocate within the accounting industry. We’re going to talk about a lot of those things. In the meantime, Rob, welcome to the show.

Thank you, John. I’m exhausted just hearing all of that. I didn’t realize I did so much. I must lay a few things down.

Yeah, it absolutely is a mouthful, but when you start looking at all the things you do, sometimes we take a step back and go, “Do I really do all that? No wonder I’m gassed at the end of the day!”

Well, we all wear so many hats, don’t we? And on top of that, father and husband and everything else. We do a lot of things to a slightly better than average standard, don’t we?

We absolutely try to, and I think that you do an excellent job with that—with the content that you put out, with the work and the advocacy that you put forth in the accounting space. I want to spend some time talking about those things today. But before we dig into a lot of those challenges, issues, and some of the possible solutions—I don’t know if they’ll be the right solutions, but we can offer some, to those things that the accounting industry is facing today—let’s take a little bit of a stroll through your background and give me a snapshot of how you brought your career to where you are today.

Former high school math teacher; I did four years in the UK, four years in Hong Kong in an international school, but got to the point where I felt I was just coaching kids to pass tests. I started to plan a route out of teaching and took a master’s in human resources, and thought training development would be a good fit for my skill set. I ended up doing some training as an associate for a guy who worked with accountants. He was an accountant at Baker Tilly here in the UK, and he taught accountants how to network and win referrals and get that kind of business. So, I learned from him and ended up doing it my own way. For 20 years, I ran something called the Business Development Academy working with bankers, accountants, and lawyers, but mostly accountants.

In 2016, I had a stroke, which was very unexpected, and a brain hemorrhage, which just forced me to simplify my life. When you have moments like that—a fork in the road—I had a very big accounting firm in the UK that was very loyal to me throughout my rehab. At that point, I laid down everything apart from accountants, and I started a podcast called Accounting Influencers because I wanted to be more well-known in the space. I was a little well-known, but not very well-known. So I started scouring the universe for people that influenced accountants, people that accountants listened to, and interviewed them to find out what they were all about. I enjoyed that so much, being that interviewer, that podcaster, that I stopped doing the business development and the training stuff and started to run a group, as you said in the intro, for influencers.

You also mentioned the advocacy for CPAs—I am a part-qualified accountant. I took a degree in accounting after I finished high school because I thought I wanted to be an accountant, but I killed that dream and became a teacher. So I “get” accountants, and I think they’re doing an amazing job, and there’s not enough people advocating for them. I know you in CPA Life, you shine a light on some of the great people running firms and how they’re doing things differently and trying to blaze a trail and be a pioneer. So yeah, let’s definitely talk about that. Accountants are the guardians of business, the gatekeepers of data, and they occupy such a critical role. But sadly, the accounting profession—you call it an industry; we call it a profession because we put it on a par with the legal profession, the medical profession. And actually calling it an industry might be part of the problem, John, because it puts you down in blue-collar territory.

That’s a great point.

It’s not the “esteemed profession” it should be. So we call it an industry, and I don’t like it. The tech industry… the accounting industry, for me, describes all the tech companies and everything surrounding the accounting profession. One of the things we could all do is tell a better story about accounting. In CPA Life, I love what you’re doing in shining a light on what’s good in the profession and the great people in it.

You know, there’s so many people that are doing so many things well, and I think that you’re right, Rob: we minimize so much of the work that’s done. But when you think about the fact that, you know, in the space that we’re in today with the accounting profession—and I like the way that you put that—when you think of where we are in the accounting profession today, if we continue down the path that we’re heading down, where we have fewer people doing the work, less talent available to do the work, that is going to begin to drastically impact the trust that the public has in overall business, in investment, in banking, in managing their money. All of those things begin to come into a bigger question if we don’t have the right people in the profession doing the work that needs to be done. And you’re right, it’s a story we’ve got to tell that’s better.

Well, there’s a couple of things you brought out there. You mentioned the word “trust.” It is at a premium these days. Trust in the government, trust in the armed forces, trust in the judicial system, trust in the education system, trust in politics—it’s at an all-time low right now. Trust in relationships—divorce is at an all-time high. Trust in social media—we don’t believe stuff, there’s so much hype out there. So, is accounting a profession we can trust? It doesn’t do itself any favors with some of the audit scandals and the errors that occur in the news. So that’s one thing. But to the point of, let me ask you this: whose responsibility is it, do you think, to be the voice of the profession? Or who’s responsible for the brand of accounting as a career choice, John?

You know, it’s interesting—that’s a very interesting question because I think that so many people would say as a profession, especially speaking to the younger audience, it’s the professors, it’s the colleges that are helping build that story and tell that story. But at the end of the day, can you trust that story? Because, you know, in the world that we’re living in here in the States, I know that you’re overseas in the UK, but in the States, we’ve got all the wonderful stuff—regardless of how you feel about it, support or not support—going on with Elon Musk and Doge. And you know, the simple philosophy of “follow the money.” If you follow the money in the accounting programs in today’s marketplace, that money is coming from large Big Four firms, large corporations. And so there’s always going to be a bent to point kids towards that path. And once they get on that path, that is a path that is designed to grind and churn and not put people in a place to tell a great story. There’s a lot of challenge between “how do we tell a better story” and “how do we protect those that have a desire to tell a better story coming out of college?”

So let’s have a look at what you’ve said there. You’ve tried to lay some of the responsibility at the feet of the academics. You’re right, they do have a role to play, but by the time budding accountants get to the professors, they’ve already chosen accounting as a career because they’re probably majoring in accounting. But there is that. There’s the Big Four—they have a big responsibility because you’re right, they shape what most people think of accountants. And that is the nirvana for many people coming into accounting—I’ve got to be in a top four firm. And the Big Four firms play on that because they will try and cream off the very best coming out of universities and put them through the grind, as you say, and chain them to a desk for 10, 15 years and make them big money. But they will extract a pound of flesh for that.

We could throw in the state societies, the professional bodies, the governing bodies of accounting, and say they’ve got a role to play. We could lay the brand of the profession at the foot of every accountant, CPA, out there to say “We’ve all got a role to play.” The problem is that if you lay it at the feet of one stakeholder, they’ve just got one point of view, one perspective on this. If you lay it at the feet of everybody, then nobody does anything, because everyone thinks everyone else is going to do it. It’s like climate change—if you say it’s everyone’s job for the environment, then I won’t recycle because everyone else is going to do it. So it’s a tricky one. But we do know the brand of accounting is strong in that it’s got a lot to offer. But you’re right, we don’t tell a good enough story. I like what you are doing in that you’re digging it up—I said shining a light on it. You are trying to focus on what’s good in accounting and the great things that are going on, but we could all tell a better story.

Yeah. I think if, if we all look at it as, as it’s my responsibility, as you were saying that. I thought about a situation, Rob. Years ago, I played baseball growing up through college, a couple of years out of college, and ended up coaching my girls, playing softball.

Wow.

With my youngest daughter, coaching her team, we went through a period of time where every time something would happen in a game that wasn’t what was supposed to happen, the mindset with the kids, when we’d sit back and kind of do a rehash the next day in practice about the game, a lot of times the mindset was, “Well, you know, I thought Sally was going to get it. I thought somebody else was going to do this. Well, the reason why I didn’t run as hard is because I thought that Sarah was going to get that.” And so I just had this idea, two days later, it was raining outside, we had practice in the gym at a local school that we had some ties to, and I had a box. I took this box and put it in the shape and kind of carved it up a little bit—I like to do a little handy work—put it in the shape of a casket. We put the casket on a table and I had all the girls come in and said, “Hey, before we have practice today, we’re going to have a funeral.”

Whoa!

“We’ve had a teammate pass away. Our teammate’s name is ‘Somebody Else’.”

Very good!

“Somebody Else is no longer a part of our team. Somebody Else is no longer going to be able to get that ball. Somebody Else is no longer going to be able to get that hit. It’s going to be your responsibility.”

I see what you did there. That’s really good.

And I think that in the accounting world, we’ve got to get to a point that we recognize and understand that “Somebody Else” is no longer a part of the team. It’s me, it’s you, it’s everybody else, and we’ve got to tell a better story.

Let’s turn this into a True Crime podcast for the moment. And there’s a—I don’t know if you know this, but I think it’s in Robert Cialdini’s book on Influence. He talked about an experiment—not an experiment, it’s something that happened in New York. There was a tenement square and a murder, somebody got mugged and murdered in the middle of this. And you can picture all the apartments in a quadrant type thing. All four sides, all looking on, and 117 people saw this woman getting stabbed. She got stabbed multiple times, died. Nobody called the police, nobody.

And when they interviewed all the witnesses afterwards about what happened, “Why didn’t you call the police?” “Well, everyone was looking at it. I thought everyone else would do it. I thought the police had already been called. I thought it was done.” Somebody else. And nobody ended up calling the police. Police arrived hours later just as an incidental call—”by the way, we’ve got a dead woman lying in the buildings here.” So, yeah. Crazy story, a little bit gruesome, but goes to your point of, we’ve all got a responsibility, we can all do something.

Yep. We can’t assume that somebody else is going to do it, and if we all pick up and lift a little bit of that weight, it tends to be a lot lighter when many hands are put to the work. Which kind of leads me to a question that I wanted to ask you, and we talked a little bit about this when we were kind of catching up before the phone call: There is a piece of a business that you are starting to roll out to some of your audience and some of your clients where you are helping tell a better story. You’re helping people tell a better story. Tell me a little bit about that and kind of what the vision is with that and what the end result that you’re hoping to be able to deliver with people.

You just asked me about three questions there, which is what a good podcast interview should do! As an interviewer myself, like you, I’m used to curating stories from very smart people. Look at the average accountant: technically super smart, very well qualified, excellent at what they do, passionate, really caring. However, they don’t brand themselves well, they don’t create thought leadership, they don’t have much of a personal profile—some do, and you’ll know a few John that are out there a little bit more as an ambassador of their brand, as an advocate of their own firm. But they don’t tell stories well. They’ve probably got a marketing department if they’re a big firm saying, “I wish you’d write some more thought leadership. You’ve got the domain expertise, you’ve got the experience. You know about the ins and outs of tax law and audit and everything else. You are working with a particular niche.” But these accountants don’t do it. They’re not bred to do it. They don’t want to put thought leadership out there. They don’t have the time. They don’t know how to write an article. They’re not comfortable going on a video, turning on a webcam, or whatever it is, and creating some content.

But they need to do it for a number of reasons. First, it’s great to attract new business for the firm, and that never does any harm. Second, it’s great to build employer brand of a firm saying, “Hey, these are our people. This firm is a great place to work. This is the kind of thing that we are doing. This is what we talk about. This is why we should be an employer of choice for you talent out there.” Another reason to do it is relevance. You can easily become redundant in this world with technology overtaking all of us, with business changing so fast. If accountants want to be that trusted advisor, they need to be seen, to be talking the language of business, and putting content out there that says commentary on what’s happening. The political situation, accountants would have a lot to say about how business is changing so fast, and what Trump and everyone else are doing. So, and just for personal brand and career capital, it’s great for accountants and leaders to be seen putting things out that say, “I’m important, I’ve got something to say, I’ve got a crusade. I want to be a force for good. I want to right some wrongs. I want to bust some myths. I want to own a narrative. I’ve got important stuff to say about my world and the business world.”

So with all the objections that an accounting leader might come up with, or a firm owner, to not produce content, I’m saying to them: let me as an interviewer, as an industry or a profession expert that knows the right questions, let me interview you for 30 minutes a month. Give me 12 months, and every month I’ll interview somebody in your firm that has something to say. Even if it’s as simple as, “John, what’s been on your mind this month? What’s caught your eye this month? What have you been thinking about this month? What kind of conversations have you been having with clients this month? What problems have you solved this month? What are you doing next month that’s exciting? What ventures are you going into in the next few months?” All of these questions bring out great stories. “How have you wowed and delighted a client in the last few weeks? How have you helped a client of yours?”

So when I interview accountants like that, they’re never short of something to say, and because we position it as a fireside chat and a conversation, it’s authentic, it’s personal, it doesn’t take much prompting. But out of that 30-minute interview, me and my team will create some thought leadership pieces, some LinkedIn pieces, and some video snippets that can be branded up with you, your personal brand, your firm’s logo, and everything else. It’s almost a done-for-you package to say to that person, to that firm, “Hey, take this and put it out there on the social channels.” And John, I know you work with people who do this for you because you put out some great thought leadership stuff. It takes that bit of structure and process and somebody actually sitting you down and saying, “Right, John, what’s on your mind?”

Yep.

So, my proposition is taking a lot of the pain out there and making it easy for them and making it quick for them because they don’t have the technical expertise to do the videos, they don’t know what to talk about, so we’re making it super easy to access and make something happen.

I think it was Dale Carnegie in his book, How To Win Friends and Influence People. One of the things that Dale Carnegie talked about is everybody loves to talk about themselves and their jobs. Ask people about their family, ask people about their personal interests, ask people about the things they enjoy doing outside of work. But more than that, also ask them about what they do at work and what they’re passionate about at work. People love to talk about those things.

That’s their identity, isn’t it?

Absolutely, it is. And I think that, like you said, when you structure it as a fireside chat, when you structure it as just having a conversation, there’s so much that flows that when you start to be able to take that knowledge that somebody has and put it into a video type format—and you and I have talked about this over the last couple of years that we’ve engaged—video, for lack of a better way to put it, video engages, video sells.

Yeah. It’s the currency of attention, John. Particularly for the younger generations, and by younger, I mean under 40, maybe under 50. We’re all on TikTok and YouTube and everything else, so don’t tell me video doesn’t work in getting people’s attention.

And it’s something that people will pay for. It’s something that will drive people to you as an individual, you as a service provider. And then again, goes back to the initial thing that we were talking about, you having a voice to be able to tell a better story in this space and in this industry. Because there’s some really pretty cool stories that I know that when you’ve sat and you’ve talked to industry insiders, industry experts, there’s some really cool stories that come out of successes they’ve had, clients they’ve been able to solve problems for, wins that their firm has been able to have, things they’ve done to expand their organization when it comes to people and talent. So there’s so many things that you can pull out of that.

You know, one of the challenges that we face a lot of times whenever we start talking to clients on the recruiting side of our business about candidates, a lot of times clients will come back to us and say, “Hey, do you know anything about this guy from a social media standpoint? I couldn’t find anything about him on LinkedIn. He hasn’t posted anything in four and a half years, five years. In fact, his LinkedIn profile isn’t even up to date with his career.” What an impact that would have, to be able to have some consistent data that speaks to the value you bring to a potential organization, right?

And you mentioned LinkedIn there. There are two shop windows for accountants—two places where they can be checked out, where people can go and do due diligence. If I come across a good accountant, I’ll get a reference to a firm. My first stop might be the website. Specifically, the About Us page. “Who am I dealing with here? What do I know about this person?” And so many bios on websites say, “This is Jim. He works in our tax department. He has been with us four years and he does CrossFit on the weekend, and he graduated from this university, and his expertise areas are this.” Which is fine, but I don’t know that guy as a person. It’s nothing different from a billion other profiles of accountants on websites. There’s nothing individual and differentiated about it. What I’d love to see on there is a video of Jim saying, “Hi everybody, I’m Jim,” or somebody interviewing Jim and saying, “Jim, tell me what you were doing when you were 16 years old. Did you always want to be an accountant? How did you become an accountant? What was your first job? What was your first paycheck? Did you have a paper route? Did you sell lemonade on a street corner?” Let’s get into the personality of Jim. So that’s one shop window, the website and the About Us page for an individual.

But the other is LinkedIn. That’s the world that we live in. That’s where accountants, recruitment professionals, that’s where they live. They might go on social, but that’s where their professional profile is. And if you are not leveraging that and putting good stuff about you, people will go on that and you’re absolutely right, they’ll see tumbleweed. It’s an echo chamber; there’s nothing going on. But that is where you will be relevant, or you will be forgotten about and people will pass on to someone else.

So we are all—I won’t say we all have a responsibility to manage our personal brand. You’ll know there’s some accountants that don’t want a personal brand, they don’t want to be a leader. They just love accounting. They love the number-crunching. They want to be in a dark room with an Excel spreadsheet and a bit of AI, and really look after the clients and get great results and crunch the audit and everything else. Great. Good luck to them. But for the rest of us, if we have any aspirations to leadership or we want to be influential— even [introverts] will influence 10,000 people in their lifetimes—if we want to be a force for good, if we want to make a difference, if we want to serve our clients, then it is incumbent upon us, isn’t it, to put out some good thoughts, some good ideas, some good content. Showcase your expertise. Have a crusade. Have a niche that you want to be a force for good in, and we can all do that. My proposition here is just to help elicit that from them and make it easy for them to get it out there.

Well, and it’s amazing when you start to give somebody an audience, and in this case to start with an audience of one, they’re talking to you. Barriers start to come down, and let’s be honest, if you start working with somebody this month, the videos they put out this month, even though the work that you do to edit is going to be top-notch to make it sound competent and intelligent, but the video they put out today is not going to be anything compared to the video they put out 12 months from now.

That’s such a great point.

It’s only going to get better. It’s only going to get better. And not only is it going to get better with what they’re doing with you, but we live in a world today that is technology-driven. The work you’re doing with your clients over video, as well as face-to-face, it’s only going to get better—the more you do it, and the higher the level of comfort you get.

I wrote a book a few years ago. I’ll show you it now. Exhibit A for the video—here’s the book, Build Your Reputation. You guys don’t need to buy it, it’s on Amazon. It’s about standing out in your career. A mentor of mine once said to me, “It’s not what the book makes for you, it’s what it makes of you.”

Nice.

And what he meant by that is when you write a book like that, unless we’re JK Rowling writing Harry Potter or something like that, we’re not going to make millions from our book, or thousands, or any money at all. But it’s what it makes of you as a person. Now, your first episode of CPA Life, and you’ve done 60-odd episodes now, so you’ve shown real longevity in the game, but you probably could look back at that first episode and roll your eyes and think, how lousy was I back then? Because you’ve really honed your craft.

Absolutely!

And you’re right. These accountants—everything’s difficult before it becomes easy—but if they put out more thought leadership, it’s what it makes of them. It’s how they develop as people and the skills they upgrade, and the confidence they get for putting their thoughts out there, even if one or two people see it. It’s not for the followers and the fans and the likes and everything else. It’s the person you become by articulating your thoughts and being courageous enough to put them out there. It’s what it makes of you, not what it makes for you.

I like how you put that because we placed a gentleman with a firm on the recruiting side of our business this past December in a senior tax manager role. What it really came down to, between him and another candidate, was he had invested over the last five years since Covid hit, he started doing it on TikTok just for fun, but creating videos, making fun of stupid tax issues—things that he was seeing on returns, things that he was seeing that clients were asking if they could do, just debunking a lot of the crazy tax myths that are out there on TikTok or Instagram. But he had created this following over the last five years while also helping drive some business for the firm that he was a part of.

Love that.

The way that my client looked at that is, look at how much he has owned who he is—and the perception of the marketplace and who he is—and how that’s going to translate into who we are and what we’re trying to build. They saw it as nothing but a huge positive that he had taken control of that and not let somebody else write that narrative, or lack thereof, for him.

A criticism of accountants is they’re not entrepreneurial enough. Because accounting is black and white, it’s risk mitigation, it’s playing it safe. But they serve a community that are often entrepreneurs who are pioneering and risk-takers. So the argument is, “Accountants can’t really understand my business because they’ve never run a business and they’re not entrepreneurs. But if they are going to be advisors and consultants and be future thinking, they need to be more entrepreneurial.”

So what you’ve described there with that guy starting that channel, that platform—he’s someone that’s been entrepreneurial because he’s turning nothing into something. He’s birthed something. He’s had a burden or an idea, and he’s done something with it, and he’s run with it. So, that is a great example of an entrepreneurially-minded accounting professional. If we challenge a lot of accountants, there would be that spark in them that they want to talk a little bit more about that, or that kind of thing really excites them, or that burdens them, or that annoys them. They’ve got a breakthrough idea there. They’ve got the makings of a little series or a post or an interview or something that they could run with. Otherwise it just dies inside them. The idea never comes to fruition—it never gets birthed.

Thanks for joining us for part one of John Randolph’s conversation, focusing on talent within the accounting space with the founder of Accounting Influencers and host of the Accounting Influencers Podcast, Rob Brown. Part two will air April 23rd. Be sure to subscribe and go to CPALifePodcast.com for transcripts, links, and bios, and to learn more about the show. We’ll see you next time on CPA Life.

Retelling Accounting’s Story: An Eye on the Profession with Rob Brown

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