the disruptors: billable hours – demeaning and demoralizing or useful measurement?
subscribe to 卡塔尔世界杯常规比赛时间 podcasts anywhere: apple, google, spotify, iheart, deezer, amazon music and audible, player fm, audacy, gaana (india), and boomplay (africa).
the disruptors
with liz farr for 卡塔尔世界杯常规比赛时间
anyone who has been in the accounting profession–or legal profession–for any length of time knows how revered the billable hour is. however, plenty of firms are ditching the billable hour–a move that many professionals say is long overdue. 
more: hector garcia: success strategies of a quickbooks youtube superstar | blake oliver: why tax work yearns to be free| private equity explodes in u.k. | brannon poe: the status quo must go | accounting nerds, unlock your super powers | disruptor: jason statts shakes up the status quo | think small to think big with matt wilkinson | when financial statements go extinct with corey schmidt | can geraldine carter save accountants from themselves? | re-inventing accounting with tyler anderson
exclusively for pro members. log in here or 2022世界杯足球排名 today.
seth fineberg, a business journalist specializing in the accounting profession, says the billable hour can’t be a significant part of the business model of the future.
fineberg asked, “what are you doing for your clients that they can’t get elsewhere? that’s the value of you.”
he continued, “the billable hour was sacred. appreciate the time you put into things, but it shouldn’t be the end-all, be-all.”
for firms that cling to billable hours, fineberg said, “all of a sudden, there’s this big number over your head and you’re like, ‘i’m a lot more than that, pal.'”
fineberg’s observation could point to the larger problem firms everywhere report: lack of talent.
while he said the billable hour could be construed as demeaning and demoralizing for employees, he believes some talent problems could be readily solved by changing the firm outlook.
mentioning other valuable professions like it, marketing and project management, fineberg said, “there’s a lot of other things that can really help build the firm of the future and where the profession is going and needs to go.”
he continued, “you’re not necessarily looking in the right places or doing your level best to educate in the way that the future of accounting needs to go. there’s no one magic solution.”
fineberg recommended broadening where firms are searching for talent, using different methods and access points for accounting education to make the profession more accessible and inclusive.
more takeaways from seth fineberg:
- cpas only comprise about a third of the accounting profession. one does not necessarily need to be a cpa to be a valuable piece to the firm of the future.
- the talents and skills required to enter the profession today are vastly different and changing even faster. firm leaders must be open to recognizing the new skills necessary and not cling to skills previously required if technology could help fill the gap.
- if you’re basing someone’s worth on billable hours, that person “may as well work at a car dealership” because you’re showing your firm’s primary value is based on revenue.
- it may be more valuable to employees to see how much revenue they bring in without comparing that or translating that to billable hours.
- your business model should revolve around what you do for your clients that they can’t get elsewhere.
- there’s a clear difference between being growth-minded and future-minded.
- don’t limit your learning to accounting – learn the platforms being used in your firm and understand their abilities and limitations.
- remain flexible. if the pandemic has taught us anything, it’s that we need to continue to learn and think outside the box to keep from getting stuck and boxing ourselves in corners.
- stop beating yourself up for things you don’t think you can do. stop saying yes to everything, professionally and personally. stop thinking you need to do it all and understand that it is okay to say no.
about seth fineberg
seth fineberg is an accounting and business-focused editorial manager & content strategist. he has been an editor and journalist for over 30 years, the vast majority of which has been spend overseeing the accounting profession at large. his passion has been helping to curate information on what makes businesses tick. a huge part of that process is the role of the professional accountant. he is particularly keyed in to business technology, changes and trends in this field, as well as how businesses, accounting firms and the technology companies that serve them think about their growth and what they bring to clients and customers.
transcript
(transcripts are made available as soon as possible. they are not fully edited for grammar or spelling.)
liz farr: welcome to accounting disruptor conversations. i’m your host liz farr from 卡塔尔世界杯常规比赛时间. my guest today is seth feinberg, former editorial manager and us team lead for accountingweb.com, professional editor, and content strategist for the accounting profession. welcome, seth. how are you doing today?
seth feinberg: doing great liz. thank you for reaching out to me. i’m glad to be on the show.
liz: well, fantastic. well, i can’t wait to hear what you have to say about all these questions i have because i know you’ve been in the profession a long time and you’ve got a lot of ideas.
seth: i would say i’ve been a professional fly on the wall for the last 20-plus years. as a business journalist, you never know where your path is going to take you. i’ve been in business journalism for over 30 years, but 20 of those have been covering, overseeing accounting, the accounting profession at large. it’s been a great ride and hoping to stay actively involved.
liz: fantastic. well, we have a lot to cover, so. let’s get started.
seth: let’s get into it.
liz: accounting talent in the us and the world has been scarce for years, and covid made it much worse. what are some ideas you have on how to make things better?
seth: one of the trends that i’ve seen, now, obviously, there’s a couple of schools of thought, one is to make at least on the cpa side of things, so you got to figure in the us by the numbers, cpas are about a third approximately of what you would consider the accounting profession, meaning you go to work every day as a practitioner, you work at a firm, whether it’s yours or your staff or something.
when i was at accountingweb, we had to look at who our audience was and want, and what we wanted to be. we had to look at accountants at large because we were solely focused on professional accountants and not necessarily cfos and accounting departments or internal auditors and things like this. controllers, what have you, people in business and industry, we didn’t really focus on that. as a professional accountant, i think that getting back to the talent pool, there’s two schools of thought.
one is education making it easier because it’s been falling off for years. aicpa has numbers on this and they’re doing their level best, and state societies are as well to and other groups to try to encourage younger talent. get them educated on the latest and greatest technologies and the skills that they’re going to need. obviously, the skills from when you came into the profession or even someone coming into the profession 20 years ago are different than now.
making education, having things maybe a little more on demand, and really just making things a little easier. it’s not saying, “oh, what we had to go through is much harder to be a cpa.” i’m not saying that. i’m saying just the process it should also be a lot more inclusive than it’s ever been. i think it could be from a dni perspective and just from also an overall talent pool perspective, that’s the second school of thought is looking beyond just core accounting.
the skills that a growing accounting firm or the future of accounting, it’s not in just accounting. i know that we’re going to get to the cas discussion at some point, but you cannot, in my view, even start a cas practice. this is, oh, the future of accounting, client accounting services, client accounting services, and all that. you can’t really build that as a practice area without having things like management accounting skills and project management skills, other things outside of actual accounting, core accounting, education that you need.
you might need to find some of these skills. also the technical skills too. you need someone who maybe has an understanding of things like risk management and processes and security, data security. you should really have some of that, and possibly even a little dash of marketing. there’s a lot of other things that can really help build the firm of the future and where the profession is going and needs to go.
the scarcity of talent, i think it’s in a lot of ways it’s just you’re not necessarily looking in the right place places or doing your level best to educate in the way that the future of accounting needs to go. hopefully, that answers your question there. i know it’s somewhat longwinded, but it’s a multi-faceted type of answer. it’s not really one thing. there’s no one magic solution.
liz: basically, broadening where accounting firms are looking for talent.
seth: where you’re looking, how they’re educating and just really broadening the net to really just to be more inclusive and allow for education, accounting, education to happen in a more sort of on-demand way or in a more realistic way than just the classroom or the whatever, i got to take this course so to speak, pretty much, i guess for lack of a better term, traditional ways.
liz: well, that’s a good segue to my next question, which is about the changes in the business model. for decades, accounting firms ran on a very traditional business model. they build by the hour. it was very hierarchical. you started as staff and then went to senior and so on to maybe eventually you became a partner.
seth: you had a pretty clear path, you came up that way. a lot of folks came up that way. you go into a firm at this level, and here’s how you level up, and here’s your tier. it was a tiered system, right.
liz: we’re beginning to see firms get away from that model. what are some of the things that you saw in the work that you do?
seth: well, as i said i’ve been the professional fly on the wall for the profession. well, i’ve never worked actually worked in a firm. i’ve visited some to see physically how they’re structured and how other workdays go. i’ve also spoken to many of you, meaning accountants, accounting professionals over time because this is how i learn from you and your stories, and thank you all, for sharing them with me, and i hope you continue to.
what i’ve seen definitely in the business model now, it’s funny. you get to things like the billable hour. now, i can remember my very first conference i was ever at, this was something that impacted me. you had a gentleman by the name of ron baker, this is back in 2002, can’t talk about the billable hour and not bring up the names of ron baker, ed kless from sage.
the discussion really was, “oh, you got to move away from this. you got to value more of your time.” i remember distinctly some gentleman from cpas in the audience really getting up in arms, red in the face, screaming about, “how dare you,” how it was unethical to say that because the hour, the billable hour was so, and then the legal profession is going through this too, it was just so like your time is your time, and it can’t be changed.
clearly, accountants in the profession now can scoff at that a bit more, that they can really see beyond. you still have to understand the time you put into things, but it shouldn’t be the end all be all. is that a business model? i’m not so sure. i think the business models meeting, it’s more about what you do. what is your product? what are you producing at the end of the day? is it a return? is it business advice? is it cash flow management? what are the things that you are doing for your clients that they cannot get elsewhere? it is the value of you, the individual. sure, in part, the systems and things that you use to get the work done, but ultimately, it’s what you’re producing for them. in some cases, it’s just peace of mind. i don’t have to worry about getting audited. i don’t have to worry about critically high tax bill.
i am set up and in some cases, things like wealth management for individuals, estate planning, really setting people up for their future, their individual futures, their families’ futures.
also, as a business for the businesses that you work with, you’re almost becoming more of this partner in the process of how do i get to the next phase? what if i want to merge in with another business? all of it does start with what you know as a professional accountant, which is the financials.
the business models of the future really, sure, how you bill, how you charge me, at this point, i think it can still be a hybrid of those things. it has to be at the comfortability of your client and also your business. if you run a firm, like a lot of the folks that i spoke to, particularly at accountingweb were firm owners or the key decision makers within a practice, these are the folks who are setting the rules and setting the tone for how a practice runs.
they’re the ones who are saying, “okay, we’re going to take on this client work. we have to put some value in what we do. plus, it’s also going to make it a little easier for our customers, our clients, if they just know, like, okay, i’m going to charge you this for this work. it’s very upfront, it’s not like, oh, we’ll see how much time it takes, and you’ll get a bill after the fact.” it should be more upfront because you want to establish that trust.
i don’t want to get too far off the rails, but i just think in the discussion of the business model of the accounting firm, it definitely has to start with the work itself. then i think everything else starts falling into place. you can’t just realistically start thinking, oh, well, i’m going to start the clock on this particular project, whereas it needs a set scope of work, and you set what it is you pay for this. i paid for this service, and this is what you got. you want something over and above that, okay, now you’re at another tier.
that’s where the tiered approach comes in and for the more advanced thinkers, the business model can be more of like the subscription model, which is another thing that i know that eddie and ron have been discussing and some firms have taken on. it’s that you pay for the year, you are subscribing to me. with that, you are going to get this menu of things that i’m going to do for you, and you’re comfortable with that everything is upfront versus after the fact.
i think that’s really the part of the future of accounting is that very philosophy. whereas, how you came up and how a lot of cpas, a lot of accountants came up. it’s more of this, we’ll tell you at the end what this is. it’s this big mysterious thing, it’s almost like with the irs itself, it’s like, well, they know, you’ve got to do the work in order to get it right. if you don’t get it right, we’re going to tell you after the fact, like, yes, you did it wrong, and because you did it wrong, we’re going to find you for it, or you’re going to be in trouble and some way.
that’s a whole other discussion with the irs. things have to change because you have to work in the way that people want to work. the expectations i think are also a lot higher these days from businesses, from individuals. if they’re going to hire you out of necessity, because they truly feel like i need an accountant in my corner for this, and a lot of folks really don’t have this, still this full understanding of what accountants can do. there’s still this old-school thinking and vision of an accountant that needs to be changed.
anyway, sorry. i told you i could talk on one of these questions for an hour.
speaker 2: oh, i know. in practice, you talked about the billable hour. in practice, accountants have been value-pricing for years without really saying that that’s what they were doing.
seth: i guess it falls under that if you want to label it, it’s like, well, it’s the fixed feet. all right, well i’m doing this for this. sure, you factor in and even the eds and rons of the world will still agree, yes, you have to have an understanding of the time that you put in, but it has to go beyond that. it can’t just be that’s what it is. punch the card, here’s what it is, this is what it says on the clock. let’s round up to the nearest hour. i don’t even know that– you also have to look at how accountants just generally want to work.
i don’t know that the folks who are in the profession today, even want to work that way, let alone charge that way.
speaker 2: no.
seth: that’s just changing organically, i think.
speaker 2: yes. i didn’t enjoy tracking my time.
seth: oh, also, that’s your value to your managing partner. oh, what were billable hours? oh, all of a sudden, you’re this big number over your head and you’re like, “i’m a lot more than that, pal.”
speaker 2: yes. at one firm i was at, they used to put out a monthly report that showed the actual dollars that my efforts brought to the top line.
seth: it’s demeaning. demoralize, i think.
speaker 2: that was more useful than seeing the reports of utilization percent and that nonsense, but seeing that for this month, i brought x dollars into the firm, that was more useful because then i could say, “okay, that’s about three times my compensation. that’s about right.”
seth: yes. it’s a very sales approach. you might as well work at a car dealership. what were your numbers? or real estate firm.
speaker 2: yes. that was more useful than seeing how many hours i put in and how many were billable and how many writeups and that was just nonsense.
seth: yes, totally.
speaker 2: seeing the real impact was more useful and that i think, gave me a little more skin in the game.
seth: right.
speaker 2: yes. what about growth? do firms even really need to grow? do they? do all of them need to grow?
seth: i believe i had a post on that, and i’m thinking about my next blog that i want to do. i want to keep some of my thoughts out there. again, thank you for having me with this, because this is something that i’ve been ruminating about for some time. you have certain scrolls of thought. it’s like, oh, the growth-minded firms, growth-oriented firms, everyone’s growth-minded. i’ve even heard this say, “oh, of course, every firms grow.” i’m like, “not so much.”
i think that the priority, particularly for a lot of smaller firms, isn’t necessarily to being a bigger firm, to take on more clients to do more work. i think it’s really to maybe do– i think a lot of the trend, at least of the more future mind, that’s what i like to call them, bot growth-minded, but future-minded firms of the folks who are thinking about their future, again, maybe not in like these large tenure terms, but in these three to five-year chunks, where do you want to be?
you want to be able to do more with the time that you spend in order to do more, you can charge more, you can earn more by actually working with fewer clients. what’s growth? is it staff? is it your new client base? is it, oh, i see us merging in or buying other firms? i don’t know that most firms today, and when i talk about most firms, i’m think of the majority of the profession always, which are the solo practitioners, and these sub-10 or 12 staff practices. i’m not saying all of them. i’ve talked to plenty who are like, “yes, i’ve got this vision of being this [unintelligible 00:20:19] size firm,” and all that. that’s great, but there’s still plenty out there that are not thinking of growth in that way. they’re maybe thinking of adding some services and going deeper. also just, gosh, just retaining the staff that they have. they’ve worked with them, they’ve trained them.
they don’t want to see them go out the door. they want to feel like they’re more invested in this thing that they’re building. they’re going to create opportunities. they’re going to be at a place that, that is maybe a little more flexible that, that has a higher earning potential for each staffer, each partner, each stakeholder in the practice. you hit it on the head. i really truly feel that not all firms are growth-minded per se. a lot of them, their minds are such that they want to be sustainable.
to be sustainable isn’t necessarily to think about growth. it’s just like, “i want to be around for another, 5 or 10 years. how do i do that? how do i stay relevant?” that’s a little scary but that’s reality. to go back to your earlier question. if you haven’t evolved your business model, or to be more future-minded, you’re probably not going to make it. i still know firms and have spoken to firms out there too. they’re like, “oh, yes, i’m looking to maybe i’ll retire in another 5, 10 years or i’m just really looking to get out.” okay.
i get that you want to do other things. maybe you want to be an educator. you want to be wherever you want to go. what’s the value of what you built? is it because you have x amount of clients or is it something else? the kinds of businesses that you work with, the kinds of clients you have, and that you’ve built something that’s actually profitable. otherwise, who’s going to even want to buy you down the road? that’s a scary thought. if you have this general plan of, “oh, well, yes, i’ll probably just sell out at some point.”
liz: do you have something somebody would want to buy?
seth: right. again, you don’t have to necessarily grow to x or y or whatever letter. you just have to be back to the value of what you’ve built. you could be like, “hey, man, this is me and my 80 clients, but those 80 clients, i’m billing–” i’m sorry. get back there. “at the end of the day, i’ve been able to do so much for them and help them with their growth, and they’ve helped them with my revenue sustainability to where i’m a valuable firm.”
liz: if a company wanted to grow, a firm, wanted to grow are there different strategies for solo firms versus multi-partner practices?
seth: well, sure. for the folks who just kind of want to stay whatever small, i think it still gets back to my original point. it’s the services that you offer. maybe you’ve been doing prep, that’s been your bread and butter for years. maybe you get more into tax planning work. that’s a way to grow. you can deepen that relationship so you can grow out, you can grow deep and then with some other folks too, okay, now that you’re in their financials, talking to businesses, keeping them compliant, maybe you start getting into things like helping to diversify or maybe get into cash flow forecasting, really just going, “okay. i have that as a part of my business.”
even for some small firms too, and i know that the folks in the gustos and the adps of the world, they would very much love for accountants to embrace this role of being more of an actuary. really seeing where hr and benefits, and having an understanding of that space. it’s not this big scary thing so that they can grow their practices in that way. i use “grow” in these big-finger quotes, but it’s just you’re adding services and that’s value. even for a small firm, you can do.
obviously, you’re outsourcing a lot of it too. you’re not physically having people there doing payrolls. no, they take care of that for you. you can offer it as a service, then you can look to other things. retirement planning, like i mentioned, estate planning, but eventually, sure, you might need to add some more individuals to handle some of that work of course. there’s only so much you’re going to want to do on your own.
liz: that’s very true. now, years ago when i was starting out we had to practically keep the irs code in our heads, fasb regulations, and we had to be really good with a 10-key,
seth: right. yes, you do.
liz: today, there are a lot of different skills that accountants need. what are some of the skills that accountants need to be successful today and in the future?
seth: good question. i touched on a little bit before on the hiring side of things. clearly, knowing, and i don’t know how you’d teach this, but know your own personal time management. you have to have an understanding of when to turn it on and when to shut it off, when to really step back, because you see it, and i saw it most explicitly in these last couple of years during the pandemic times, during times where you were used to just going out, physically seeing clients, having them come into the office to do this work, going into the office yourself.
all of a sudden not being able to do that and still having to– the compliance work didn’t stop. if anything, it got more complicated and all of a sudden, all these irs agents sent home. they’re not there. irs becomes a lot more impossible to deal with if that’s imaginable but it did. that’s where you had this march trinity happening. it’s like from march 2020, the never-ending tax season, they didn’t stop. folks just literally got fried.
by 2022, when some live events started coming back, it was a welcome thing because folks just needed to see each other again to just vent and really just i saw so many who were just like, “i’m just ready to pack it in. a lot of that was because they still didn’t really know how to balance their time. you need that skill. the other skill too is like i said, it wouldn’t hurt you to learn a bit about marketing and/or even social media. get comfortable with writing, keep yourself out there. this helps your clients too.
this isn’t about just making you famous as we have for you. no, it’s about just sharing what even with your own clients. publishing a newsletter, learning a basic newsletter platform. little technical types of skills really would not hurt. having an understanding even if cms and seo, things that maybe you wouldn’t think of accountants needing to know. i think it’s pretty important. get an understanding of how certain systems that you work with and need to work with work.
liz: absolutely.
seth: that’s just an appetizer view, but i think it’s pretty essential and these are things even several years ago, you probably wouldn’t be necessarily talking about. i knew that on the technical side, there were a lot of efforts, i would say 10 years ago or so, when we really saw cloud accounting happening, the idea of what cloud accounting is and working with internet-based systems, non-desktop-based systems could bring. it opened up this whole other world of really having to have some understanding of how all this works from a safety and security point of view, from a punctual point of view.
i know the folks on the education side, the designation side, the aicpa, and state societies, and that really pushing for the citp accreditation to take hold because then you just say, “okay, i now have the skills, i have the understanding of all these technical things that i’m probably going to need, that my clients can look to me and go, oh, wow, okay. that’s a nice thing to have for the present and for the future.”
i don’t know where those efforts went, but i think it’s evolved into just– you have to be, i wouldn’t say tech savvy, but just tech comfortable. you have to be able to know some of these basic things. go on your linkedin. i think it’s a pretty good nice little menu of if you look through the skills of things that you might want to know. it definitely helps to have an understanding outside of the things that maybe you learned in school or that are in a cpa course.
liz: a lot of what you mention is skills that are needed today, are things that the older accountants frequently don’t really understand and don’t really embrace. now, i saw, in the firms that i worked in, that they really weren’t too interested in me doing any marketing or writing. they didn’t really care about that. they didn’t know what to do with that.
seth: i get that. it’s hard to just be comfortable with that too.
liz: i think that as some of the younger generation, some of these younger firm owners are coming in, they know that accounting isn’t just getting the tax returns done. that’s not all there is to running a successful business. i think that that’s pretty amazing. i find that really encouraging. that gives me hope for the profession that we won’t just fade into the dust as ai comes and figures out how to do tax returns and audits and financials and bookkeeping.
seth: it’s just in all ai and all of that is just the next level of automation. it’s like cloud didn’t necessarily kill the it professional. it may be just evolved their role. i’m sure you’ve heard this, and folks who are listening to this, you’ve heard this many times over, is you’re always going to need a human being, a skilled, knowledgeable, educated human being alongside these tools that are out there. all ai is, is just the next level of automation. there’s probably, five, 10 years from now, there’ll be some other level of automation.
automating things doesn’t necessarily– it’s not like in the manufacturing world where automation did kill a lot of jobs. partly maybe even because the folks who were incorporating it maybe didn’t see how you can upskill your labor. in a way, it’s like you failed them because you incorporated all this automation without thinking of where these people would go or do. you didn’t train them to do anything else. look at the city of detroit, a city that once relied on a single industry and almost literally died is now coming back.
a lot of these big facilities that were used for automotive parts are being used for other things like watchmaking, those really precision timepieces. all of a sudden, you’re able to use this space in some of the machinery in ways that you hadn’t imagined before. i think it’s the same thing with accountants. it’s something that– and i know my good friend, dan, who had a really great piece a couple weeks back on, at some point, are we going to need accounting firms?
i still would say yes, but they still need, and just like what this whole discussion is about, is they still need to evolve how they’re structured, how the kinds of things that they do, they need to change. they need to continue to embrace the change that’s happening. the firm leaders need to understand this and not be afraid of where things are moving, but truly embrace it and just really use it as an opportunity, just like in the last couple of years, man.
look at what happened. so much of the profession really could have just sounded the alarm and they rose to the occasion. so many firms just rose to the occasion and were just like, okay. look at all the firms’ leaders that were like, “nope, we tried remote work in the past. doesn’t work for us. won’t work. can’t go remote.” all of a sudden now you have to, you have to. you cannot bring people into the office. what do you do? you’re in the middle of the busiest time of your year, what do you do? you figured it out.
you figured out how to get these systems in place. now, sure, you’re struggling with that. oh, okay. get people back to the office. well, i don’t know. now look at work in general, the whole office-centric public, and granted, i’m in one of those cities, man, that has tons of physical office space. what do you do when all these people are just not– you don’t need it as much. even in the hybrid model, sure, you need it for some things, but man, that’s rent. that’s tens even hundreds of thousands in rent that you need to do.
i think a really great imagining of how business can and needs to work, the accounting profession included, is occurring and needs to continue to not think in these, oh, this is replacing this. you have to just say what can i do, back to my earlier point of staying relevant, not growing, necessarily, but staying relevant. what do i need to do? how do i need to train my staff? what do i need to learn in order to do this?
i think it starts with knowing how to manage time, knowing the value of that time, and really going from there, looking at the systems that are going to get you there, the things that are going to help you. whether ai is involved or not, you have to see it as something that’s going to help you and not hurt you.
liz: absolutely.
seth: simple thinking, but that’s at the core of it.
liz: it’s going to be a lot of big changes. we’ve talked about what accountants should do, so what should accountants stop doing immediately?
seth: [laughs] that’s a good one and i like that question. i think they need to, first and foremost, stop beating themselves up over the things that they feel that they can’t do. i think they need to stop thinking in terms of my time, again, back to our original point, my time, my time, my time. i get it. from when we get up in the morning until we eventually doze off sleep, you have x amount of hours in the day. it’s more about what are you going to do with what you’re given. i think they need to stop also saying yes to everything in their work, in their professional lives thinking that they need to do it all. it’s okay to say no.
liz: yes. i worked on a bunch of projects that would’ve been better if the partner had just said, “no, this isn’t something that we have the knowledge or the skill sets to do.”
seth: yes. okay to say no. stop saying yes when deep down it’s a no.” it’s okay.
liz: yes.
seth: if anything that client might respect you more and if they go elsewhere, okay. probably a problem that you avoided.
liz: yes.
seth: hard to see that in the moment. i get it. especially when you’re really just looking for work and you need that work. do you need it that badly that you need to take on another problem or a future problem?
liz: do you really need to bring this train wreck into your practice?
seth: oh, yes. i loved it and it’s almost that time of year, isn’t it? i’m going to miss your accounting horror stories. i loved that series. everyone listening, i had liz i don’t know if you read these at all, but for a couple of years around every october or so, leading up to halloween, liz would share her real tales of accounting horror stories. some of them were very chilling. definitely, avoid a future horror story by saying no, not saying yes to everything. not feeling like you have to do everything. be everything.
liz: yes. what is it that keeps accountants from changing? what are the blocks to change?
seth: well, look, i think it’s in every accountant’s nature. from what i’ve seen, their pure nature is to be measured. that’s what you get paid for, to be critical, to really just be balanced in most things that you do. measure again, the old adage of as measure twice, cut once. that very nature keeps them from moving. i still think that accountants do deal with change. look at our [unintelligible 00:43:08] tax code alone.
every year they have to deal with those changes, but when it comes to things in their personal lives, the professional professionalize, how they work, how they do things, it’s harder because routine is what you know. it’s part of the nature. i think of human nature but definitely with accountants more so. if you are a tried and true accountant by nature, you’re going to be a lot more measured in what you do. i don’t think it’s a fault. i won’t ever knock them for it. i think that’s why but they’ll get there. i think it’s just getting back to one of your earlier questions about adjusting your thinking.
liz: yes. it’s just a big change. now, as you mentioned before, client accounting services, cas, client advisory services, whatever we want to call it, client accounting and advisory services.
seth: this is one of the big problems which we can open that pandora’s box if you want. i’ve done it.
liz: that’s a big thing. now, what do you think is going to be the next big thing after cas?
seth: well, again, first of all, it’s going to take a little time for the profession as a whole to really accept what those letters are, and ps much like growth, cas is not for every firm. it’s also not the end all, be all. do you need to look beyond the kinds of compliance work that you’re doing? i will say a hard yes on that. however, cas might not be your future. maybe it is, however, in doing some of these other things, as i mentioned earlier, like doing a little more planning, a little more setting your clients up for their future, whether it’s on the personal financial growth level when it comes to retirement planning, estate planning, wealth management, things like that, being more of an actuary, yes.
on the business side, doing more business planning, more casual forecast. look, the tools are there too. let’s not forget that we didn’t talk too much about tech, which is something that i came up with. business tech is something that i know intimately. the tools are there for you. you have somewhere where you want to go. you’re going to find a tool or set of tools that’s going to help you and your practice to do it.
it’s just a matter of talking to the right people and really you’ll continue to be measured, continue to evaluate but really thinking like, “yes, this is something i would like to get into more.” really more of the growth-minded types of things. does client accounting, advisory, whatever you want to call it help you get there? sure. that’s not the end all be off.
liz: no. well, i think we’ve covered all the questions that i have. that’s probably a good way to stop. i want to thank you so much, seth, for taking the time to talk to me and letting me serve as your megaphone. now if listers want to connect with you, what is the best way to find you?
seth: best way to find me right now, there’s a couple of ways. social media in general, but linkedin i’m out there. it’s seth feinberg, f-e-i-n-b-e-r-g. you’ll see me, on linkedin social media, i’m @b2bseth, so you can at me on things. right now, my personal email too, it’s just sethf1869@gmail.com. by and large, i’ve been staying connected with a lot of you via linkedin, via social media, and thank you for reaching out to me.
when i put out my final notice of moving on from accountingweb, it was extremely humbling to see the outpouring of just not just lamenting the loss, but just support of people just saying, “yes, we want to see you stay involved. we know the next thing you’re going to do is going to be big and all this.” i want to keep myself very involved and very active because i am still passionate. that doesn’t go away.
what i wanted accountingweb to do, my vision for was something that i still think is very missing on a regular basis out there in the market, which is giving that practical, useful advice keeping content and thought leadership out there and providing ways that are going to help the profession as a whole really reach the next level. i’m not dissing on the mid to larger firms. i just feel like they tend to have more systems in place for growth and change and support to happen.
the solo practitioners, the bookkeepers of the world, the solo enrolled agents, the small cpa firms, not so much. i feel they need to stay connected to one another. i feel that they need to have these conversations to be out there regularly. i want to be a part of continuing to make that happen in some way. i’ll continue to advocate for the profession as much as i’m not a cpa or an accountant. i really feel that you all are so much at the center of what makes this country good and grow.
it’s got a lot of problems. i’m not going to lie. i’m not going to get political about it. it is what it is. we’re at a place where i still feel accountants are very much a part of the overall change that is happening and the growth and the good things that can happen in people’s personal lives and professional lives as well.