The Talent Equation: Finding That Missing Potential

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:

Thanks for tuning in to CPA Life, where we now rejoin John Randolph in his conversation with Rob Brown of Accounting Influencers and the Accounting Influencers Podcasts. They return their focus to talent in the profession, how to stand out both as a potential candidate and a potential firm, the leadership chasm that has developed since the onset of Covid, and much more. Welcome to CPA Life.

A criticism of accountants is they’re not entrepreneurial enough. But they serve a community that are often entrepreneurs who are pioneering and risk-takers. What you’ve described there, with that guy starting that channel, that platform, is someone that’s been entrepreneurial because he is 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 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.

You know, as we’re sitting here talking about this, one of the things, there’s that fear of, you know, what are other people going to think? Will it even make a dent with other people? Will it resound with people? My wife and I cannot be two any more opposite personalities. I’m an extrovert, she’s an introvert; there are some things that I’ve done in life she was a little reticent about some things at one point, and I finally asked her, what are you afraid of? And she said, “I’m afraid you’re going to make a fool of yourself.” It had to do with ministry. It wasn’t so much she was afraid that I was going to make a fool of myself because she knows me—I don’t really care what anyone thinks. Her, on the other hand, she’s very concerned about that.

One of the things that I would always tell her, because I’ve spent a lot of time studying personalities, is I would tell her “Look, there are four personality styles in this world. It’s safe to say that at any given time, 75% of the population is not going to resonate with anything that I say. They’re just not. There’s 25% of the population that’s going to go, ‘I like that. That’s pretty cool,’ because those 25% have my personality.” In the accounting world, you may be fearful that this just isn’t going to resound with anybody, it’s going to fall flat, no one’s going to listen to it, no one’s going to take my advice. There’s probably 25% of the population that has your personality that’s either going to admire you for what you’re doing, or what you’re talking about is going to resonate with them, and you may just give courage to somebody else that’s just like you to say, “You know what, if John can do this, why can’t I do it? Why can’t I do it?”

Yeah. I’d extend that a little bit, John. 25%, great. But when it comes to stuff you’re putting out there, 5% of people are going to hate you, 5% are going to love you. In the middle 90%, they might be sitting on the fence. They might think it’s okay. But you can’t control who loves you and who hates you a lot of the time. Some people will hate you for not wearing a tie. Some people will love you for not wearing a tie. But if you try and play it safe and get everyone to be okay with what you’re doing, you’re being too bland, too vanilla, too beige, too safe. You’re not being declarative enough. You’re not being authoritative enough. You’re not being controversial enough. You’re not being true to yourself enough. You’re too on the fence. And that will create very bland content and a message that nobody resonates with, just because you’re fearful of upsetting anyone. So, we do have to be a little bit bold, and we do have to run the risk of not everyone liking it, but that’s not in our hands. If you are not wearing a tie, that’s someone else’s issue.

Yeah. You’re exactly right. In thinking about that, one of the things in the marketplace that we’re hearing a lot about today is the return to office, everybody back in the office. And as we look at that, one of the things that drives me crazy about that, forget the just being in the office full-time necessity that some people have. But what drives me crazy about that is the broad strokes that a lot of CEOs and firm leaders or corporate leaders are painting people with of, “I need everybody back in the office because people aren’t as productive because people aren’t as committed to their job, because people aren’t this, because people aren’t that.” I think that one of the biggest mistakes we make in the world that we live in today is that we paint in very broad strokes. Whether it’s personally, professionally, politically, whatever it is, we paint in very broad strokes.

I would have a lot more respect for a leader that put a stake in the ground and said, “Let me tell you why I want you back in my office: Because it’s my company and it’s my office and I want. And if you don’t like it, you can resign. This is what I want.” I worked for a CEO years ago and was arguing with him one day about some stuff, and I kept pushing and pushing and pushing. “Why, why, why, why, why?” And finally he said to me, “Because I’m the CEO, John. I’m the CEO, and I get to tell people what they’re going to do.” And he said, “You know, John, there’s a difference between entrepreneur and entrepreneurial. You know that, right?” I said, “Well, in theory, I guess I do. Tell me what you mean by that.” And he said, “Well, an entrepreneur is a person that writes a check to run a company, and therefore, gets to outline the parameters of the box that you as my employee get to be entrepreneurial within. I put the box together, because I wrote the check. Now, I have a number in mind that if you want to write a check, you can tell me where you want some of those lines of those boxes to be. Until then, you’ll be entrepreneurial within my entrepreneur box.”

I like that.

Very well put. I didn’t necessarily like it at the time, but it was pointed. And I think that in the world we live in today, whether it’s RTO or whatever the issues are that firms are dealing with, I think that more leaders need to be willing to put a stake in the ground and say, “This is who we are. This is what we do. This is why we do it. This is an issue that I’m dealing with as a leader, and therefore we’re moving forward.” Do you see that as sometimes a challenge in leadership in the space that we’re in today in accounting?

Most people I speak to on the Accounting Influencers Podcasts would agree that there is a problem with leadership in accounting that now has so many dimensions to it. There are external forces at play, like private equity. What do you do with that? It’s a juggernaut that’s taken over the profession, and it’s taken over the ecosystem of tech providers and software vendors that serve the profession. So it’s pervasive, it’s everywhere, and money talks. So what do you do as a leader when there are so many disruptive forces going on? Leadership training is at a premium; very few accountants have had it. You generally secure a leadership role in accounting by virtue of the fact that you’ve been around the longest. There are not many people stepping up into leadership roles that could do, because they see the burnout, the overwhelm, and the stress that leaders have to handle.

So yes, we need great leaders. We need strong leaders in disruptive, dark times, for sure. Where are they? There are some brilliant ones out there, some very innovative and entrepreneurial ones out there. But we could do a whole better job of developing leaders, and you talk a lot about succession and bringing those new people through and exposing them to responsibility and leadership roles and training them. We’ve probably lost the art of that. Do you remember back in the day, pre-Covid, where you would just knock on someone’s door, you would walk the corridors and learn things, you’d meet someone at the coffee machine and you’d get a leadership lesson? Or you’d go to client meetings with a partner and you’d learn stuff? We didn’t have that in Covid, did we? Because everyone was at home. And we weren’t meeting face-to-face with clients, and we weren’t rubbing shoulders with our peers and our superiors in the office. So we’ve lost the art of mentoring and coaching and bringing other people through and developing leaders in the, I don’t know, in the social side of our job, in the non-work stuff. So yeah, that’s my thoughts on leadership. We’re all leaders.

I think one of the challenges that leaders have to be willing to embrace in the marketplace that we’re in today is that leadership as a game was a lot easier, and is a lot easier, when everybody is sitting geographically within close proximity to one another.

I’d agree with that.

Yeah, they just are.

And culture’s easier then too, isn’t it?

Absolutely. The word that I’ve leaned into the last couple of years with this is intentionality. You as a leader, absolutely have to be intentional in your actions, in your processes, in everything that you do. You know, you talk about what I refer to as learning through osmosis. I either sit with somebody, I hear them, you know, I grew up in an office where everybody was on the phone and I didn’t necessarily need to be sitting there listening to that conversation. But there’s times that I would hear a conversation and I’d pick up a nugget of it and I’d go, “Ooh, that sounded good. Let me write that down.” Or somebody would say something and it fell flat, and you’re like, okay, make a note, don’t do that. We don’t live in that world today.

So for instance, one of the things that I have to do in my business, I’ve got a remote-deployed team. I have to schedule time in my week, every week with every one of my recruiters and sourcers that I’m on the phone with them doing at least two interviews, where I’m doing the interview or I’m listening to them do the interview, on Teams so that we can coach, we can train, we can learn, we can record that. And if I can’t be on the call, we use an AI note taker now, so again, there’s no excuse of not being able to go back and do some coaching, but I can listen to the recording of that phone call. It calls for intentionality. It’s harder. It calls for more planning and forethought. But I think it’s something that’s necessary as a leader. I don’t think it’s a muscle that we’ve exercised very well over the course of our careers when you’ve got people that have been doing this for 10 plus years.

I’d agree with that. I’m just thinking of the way the world has gone with hybrid working and remote working, and we’ve gained something and we’ve lost something. We’ve certainly raised our game with mental wellbeing and mental health and quality of life and work-life balance on autonomy and flexibility at work, and even productivity you might argue has gone up with not having that one, two hour commute. But we’ve lost something too, haven’t we? We’ve lost the camaraderie. We’ve lost culture to an extent. We’ve lost that leadership by osmosis. We’ve lost that coaching and mentoring element. So I don’t know what the answer is there. I don’t know what the future will hold and the RTO mandates, I don’t know what’s going to happen there as it bleeds into accounting from corporate world, we’re already seeing some of the big firms call people back into the office. They’ve got big commercial premises. You know all about that. So how will that play out? I don’t know. There are merits and minuses on both sides. Interesting times to be in accounting, right?

Very interesting, and I think that you’ve made a point, I know that I’ve listened to on your podcast because I’m an avid listener of the work that you put out. One of the things that you’ve talked a lot about in your podcast, which I think is a very valid point, is stereotypically, most firms are located either downtown or in a business hub somewhere in the center of the city where real estate is at a premium. I mean, I’m talking about, you know, home ownership or rent. So stereotypically, that two year staff person, that five year senior that’s married with two kids, they’re not the ones with a 10 minute commute to the office—it’s the partner, it’s senior leadership. So that’s something that’s be played out.

Yep. And the partner will have the best car to commute with, and the beautiful corner office to sit in, and not some cubicle or hot desk, you know, everything else. So, yeah, you’re right. Thanks for picking up on that. It is a point that I’ve made that it seems unfair that it’s okay for people with the shortest commutes in the best offices and the biggest salaries to call everybody back into the office. Who knows how it’s going to play out, but, it’s a fight out there, it’s something of a fight, isn’t it, between the employees and the employers, John?

Well, I think it was Jeff Phillips on one of your podcasts, the Accounting Talent Podcast, that said the talent war is over and the talent has won.

Yes. It’s a great phrase.

I think there’s a lot of truth to that! I think there’s a whole lot of truth to that. And ownership is going to have to, leadership is going to have to wrap their head around the fact that, hey, we’ve got to do some things different if we’re going to attract, if we’re going to retain, if we’re going to hold on to people. When you think about the leaders that you’ve talked to in the space, what would you say that you consistently hear from them as the one or two biggest hurdles or challenges that they are faced with, in today’s marketplace, when it comes to growing your firm, hiring talent, retaining talent, return to work, don’t return to work, what are the things that you constantly hear when you talk to people?

Ooh. Talent is a complex problem. There are so many ways to come at it. We know that 75% of accountants are at, or close to, retirement age, we know that less and less people are coming into accounting as a major or as a career choice. So that’s what’s happening at either end and in the middle, we know that people are leaching out of accounting to go into industry, to go into tech. So there is a problem. Tech is taking up some of the slack—technology—outsourcing, and offshoring is taking up some of the slack, some of the capacity. But still, tech and talent are the two biggest headaches for leaders. How do we stay ahead of the technology as it’s changing so fast? And accountants are not known to buy technology well. They don’t buy it strategically. They don’t fit it into everything else that they’re doing. They just say, I’ve got a need. What tech stack or what app can support that?

But equally with talent, it’s a conundrum that they’ve yet to really get right. When times were good and people wanted a career in accounting and there were more candidates out there than clients, then great. It wasn’t a problem. But these days, most leaders will tell you, I’m struggling to get enough of the right people, enough good people. Yep. Which is where you come in, because they are out there, John, and you are very good at finding them and getting a fit between the firm and the employee.

But accounting firms don’t traditionally differentiate themselves well, and leaders are responsible for this. They don’t say, when you work for us, here’s why it’s going to be better or different than anywhere else. Because all websites and employer brands say the same thing and promise the same thing and have the same values and the same looking website in the same font with the same color promising the same fruit bowl and the same career development opportunities. Younger people, particularly these days—you’ll know this, you talk to them a lot—they want something they can buy into. A story they can be a part of, a vision they can feel involved with. When you ask me what are the challenges that leaders have with the talent these days? Yeah, it’s being able to articulate what it is about them and their firm that’s just that little bit different than saying “Hey, come and work for us,” or give a good enough answer to the question, “Why do people work for you?” Or a good enough answer to the question, “Why do people stay at your firm?” Now you are great at soliciting this from your clients, but it’s not done well enough, is it?

Well, I don’t think it’s, and it’s something that the firms from my experience, Rob, what I’ve seen is the firms that do it well, the leadership, and I don’t say this negatively: Leadership takes it for granted because in their mind, that’s just the way that you do things. So to them, it’s an everyday occurrence. I’ll give you an example. There’s a client that we’re working with, started working with them last year that is in the Chicago area, and we were talking to them about why do people stay here? Why is the average tenure in your leadership team 14 years? Why is the average tenure with your firm as a whole, almost nine years? What keeps people here? And they said, “You know, we just take care of our people. We just do what we think is right.” So we asked them, you know, who can we talk to in your firm that can talk to us about why they’re here? So they told us a handful of people to talk to, and every person we talked to told us outstanding stories about how these wonderful values that you see on the wall, they’re not just phrases and words. They have flesh and bone to them, and “this is how they’ve played out in my life.”

You know, we talked to an employee that at 23 weeks went into the doctor’s office to have just a normal checkup with, she was pregnant, and the doctor told her, “Hey, you’re not leaving here. You’re going to the hospital across the street. Sorry, but you’re not leaving, because if you leave, there’s a chance you could lose the baby.” So ohe called the company and said, “Hey, here’s what’s going on. I don’t know what I’m going to do.” And they’re like, “Look, let the dust settle. Talk to your doctor tomorrow. Check into the hospital. Let us know what’s going on. Don’t worry about your job. We’ve got you.” And this is in the middle of tax season. And to them, this is just normal course of business. They’re doing what they feel is the right thing to do.

This employee calls them next day and says. “Hey. I can’t leave until the baby’s born. I’m going to be here for six weeks.” And their first fallback is, “Don’t worry about your job,” and she said, “No, no. You don’t understand. I’m going to go crazy if I sit here for six weeks and don’t work. I need to do something.” Their response was, “Let us figure it out. We’ll get back to you.” “At three o’clock that afternoon, John, our IT director shows up in my hospital room with a brand new laptop and two monitors and an iPad. They set an office up in my hospital room and said, ‘We don’t care how much you work. Work two hours, work 15 hours. We don’t care. Whatever you can do, you do, but we’re here for you.’” And she said, “At the time, this was before Covid, we didn’t have the greatest, you know, technology in regards to where we house stuff. So literally every day somebody brought files to the hospital, and at the end of the day, somebody came and picked them up and brought them back to the office for six weeks. That’s why I’m here.”

That’s a stellar story, isn’t it? That brings to life the values on a website, and the claims that a firm would make about why they’re a great place to work.

And I know that you are passionate when you’ve talked to firm leaders and some of the firms that you’ve worked with on the consulting side of your business and employee branding side of the business and employer branding, I know that you’re passionate about taking those stories and showing firms, how can we put flesh and bone on this and give you more of a face than just a partner or a leader saying, we’re a great firm to work for.

And when you can capture videos like that, stick them on your website of real people telling real stories about why that is their forever firm or how they’ve been treated, people look at that talent looks at that, and says, “There’s somebody like me, there’s somebody I can relate to. That’s something I want. That’s something I want to be a part of.” And that makes your job as a recruiter, John, so much more easy, doesn’t it? Because you’ve got an easy sell there.

Yeah. And even if there’s not a recruiter in the process, as a firm owner, as a firm leader in a small to midsize firm, when you begin to engage with candidates that send you their resume, you know, just think of the power of being able to get back to that person and say, “Hey, thanks for your resume. I’m going to send you a little bit more information on our firm and including in the information I’m going to send you, I’m going to send you a couple of links to videos of people that work for our firm—they’re not leaders, they’re part of our staff just like you would be, but I want you to hear from them about why they’re here, why they’ve stayed here and what being a part of this organization has meant to their life. And if you see that and you like it, get back to me and let me know what your thoughts are and let’s set up a time to talk.” Imagine the power of that versus “I sent my resume to this Big Four firm or Top 100 firm and I got a response back from a recruiter that knows nothing about the firm other than this is a job description and I fit it, and they want to see if I have an interest.” So there’s some power in that when you can tell that story.

Yeah, it truly is. It’s a great differentiator. We’ve chewed the fat over a lot of things on your show today, John.

We absolutely have. Absolutely have.

Well, if we were to wrap up today’s show: Be proud of what you’re doing you CPAs. Tell a better story. Don’t fall to proximity bias, you know that idea that you’re so close to what you do, you don’t see it as remarkable, you see it as quite mundane, but actually what you do is pretty special. You just need to articulate it in those terms. I’d say to people as a closing remark, have a better answer to the question, “What do you do?” or “How are you?” Those two questions are the two most commonly asked questions when we meet people, when we chat to people, we say, “How’s it going? What’s up? How are you doing?” We ask that, and most people will say, “Yeah, I’m okay.” “I’m pretty busy.” If you’re in England, you’ll say, “Not too bad,” or “I mustn’t grumble,” or “I can’t complain.” But we don’t give a good story there. So that’s one. And another is, “What are you on with? What are you working on? What do you do?” And we apologize and say, I’m an accountant or whatever, and we give a job title. Those are two opportunities where we can tell a better story.

So when someone says, “How you doing? How’s it going?” “Yeah, it’s going good. Tough job, but I did something great today. I had a wonderful conversation today with a client. Oh, we did this today. Oh, this happened,” and you’re giving a much better answer to a very mundane question. “What do you do?” “Well, I’m an accountant, but that sounds quite boring. I’ll tell you what is exciting though, being able to change people’s lives and helping them to retire five years earlier.” It’s just a better way of answering a question that we get asked every day. So let’s all be a little bit more imaginative. So let’s be a little bit more courageous with those simple questions, instead of giving a trite, off the cuff answer, we can add a little bit of color to the world.

I like that. Being able to package that and tell that in a real quick, succinct way, you’re telling a better story, you’re painting a better picture, and it’s in some pretty vibrant colors and not a monochromatic black-and-white that people want to hear, People want to see. Rob, your position in this space is truly one that has a pulse on a lot of the different moving parts that leaders are facing as a challenge. So if there are folks that are listening that want to get in touch, find out how you can bring value to their organization with some of the product offerings or consulting that you’re doing, or if there’s leaders that just want to have a one-on-one talk with with you about the issues that they’re facing and see what you are hearing from other leaders that they may be able to implement in their firms, what’s the best way for people to reach out to you and get ahold of you?

They should go to LinkedIn. That’s where I’m the most active, and search and search for Rob Brown on there, and check out the Accounting Influencers Podcasts. Like you, fellow podcaster, and on that show, we take new stories and what’s happening out there, and trends, and disruptors, and tell people what it means for their role in an accounting firm so that they can be more influential and more relevant, more competitive, and more authoritative, have more of a voice in their firm and in their career. So the podcast and the LinkedIn, that’s where the conversations start. So thank you for allowing me to do that, John.

Perfect. I’ll make sure that we have in the show notes below that we’ll have a link to the uh, podcast as well as a link to your LinkedIn profile for people to reach out to you. So we’ll get those in there. I can’t thank you enough for taking some time to hang out today and talk about all the hurdles and some of the possible answers for leaders to embrace. Thank you.

It’s been a blast, John. You’re one of the good guys, so keep up your excellent work.

I appreciate it. And if those of you that are listening, like what you’ve heard, please give us a like on the platform of your choosing, and don’t forget to subscribe to the podcast so you won’t miss any of the upcoming conversations that we have queued up with other leaders, industry insiders as we learn just a little bit more about this thing that we call CPA Life. 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.

The Talent Equation: Finding That Missing Potential

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