“we have to tell a better story, but we also have to have a better story to tell.”
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gear up for growth
with jean caragher
for 卡塔尔世界杯常规比赛时间
a powerhouse in the accounting profession, kimberly ellison-taylor, cpa, cgma, citp, cisa, the ceo of ket solutions, shares her deep insights on talent recruitment and retention, inclusive leadership, and the evolving role of cpas in a rapidly changing world.
gear up for growth spotlights the best strategies for smart and efficient growth in today’s competitive landscape. more gear up for growth every friday here | more capstone conversations with jean caragher every monday | more jean caragher here | get her best-selling handbook, the 90-day marketing plan for cpa firms, here | more 卡塔尔世界杯常规比赛时间 videos and podcasts here
ellison-taylor’s journey into the accounting profession began earlier than most. she recalls a pivotal career day in third grade when she learned that “accountants manage the money.” this revelation not only sparked her initial interest but also set her on a path to becoming one of the most recognized leaders in the profession, including serving as chairman of both the maryland association of cpas and the aicpa. her story is a testament to the power of early inspiration and leadership support.
ellison-taylor emphasizes the critical need for the accounting profession to craft and share better narratives. “we have to tell a better story, but we also have to have a better story to tell,” she says, quoting jen wilson of the national pipeline advisory group. she highlights that leadership—and the support it provides—is at the heart of these stories. her own career was shaped by leaders who encouraged her to seize opportunities, provided constructive feedback, and championed her growth.
ellison-taylor draws a direct line between leadership and retention. “people don’t leave organizations; they leave their leaders,” she explains. she underscores the importance of leaders being transparent about career opportunities and firm financials, as well as offering flexibility and emotional intelligence to meet the evolving needs of a diverse workforce.
one pressing challenge for accounting firms is navigating the differing expectations of baby boomers, gen x, millennials, and gen z. ellison-taylor offers a candid perspective: “the old stories of working 70-hour weeks and never seeing your kids—that’s not working anymore.” she urges firms to embrace flexibility and better communicate the “why” behind their work to attract and retain younger talent.
ellison-taylor’s dual background in accounting and technology gives her a unique vantage point on the profession’s future. she advocates for the integration of ai and other technologies to modernize workflows, increase efficiency, and appeal to younger generations of digital natives. “we have to be current,” she stresses. “if we’re not leveraging relevant technologies, we’ll lose people.”
while larger firms may have more resources, ellison-taylor highlights the unique advantages of small cpa firms in recruiting and retention. agility, personalized leadership, and opportunities for diverse experiences are key strengths. “small firms can pivot quickly,” she notes, pointing out their ability to create flexible schedules and foster close-knit cultures.
as the conversation wraps up, ellison-taylor shares her passion for helping the next generation develop confidence, communication skills, and a vision for long-term success. her advice for aspiring cpas: “focus on the end game. it’s not about the ups and downs in the middle; it’s about where you want to be on the other side.”
about kimberly ellison-taylor, cpa, cgma, citp, cisa
kimberly ellison-taylor is a global technology and finance leader with over 30 years of career achievements. she is the chief executive officer of ket solutions, llc, a consulting firm focused on business growth, innovation, strategy, transformation and inclusive leadership. ellison-taylor is a sought after keynote speaker and has received many awards and recognitions for her expertise and leadership including accounting today’s top 100 most influential people in accounting and cpa practice advisor’s 25 most powerful women in accounting. she is a past chairman of the american institute of cpas and past chairman of the association of international certified professional accountants.
for almost 17 years, ellison-taylor served in global leadership roles for oracle corporation. kimberly advised c-suite executives on cloud solutions that innovate and transform business. ellison-taylor is also an adjunct professor for carnegie mellon university’s chief information officer certificate program teaching emerging technologies & innovation. kimberly is an independent board director for us bancorp, mutual of omaha, evercommerce and marathon petroleum.
transcript
(transcripts are made available as soon as possible. they are not fully edited for grammar or spelling.)
jean caragher: hello. thank you for joining gear up for growth powered by 卡塔尔世界杯常规比赛时间. i’m jean caragher, president of capstone marketing and your host. this episode is focused on talent recruitment and retention. our guest is kimberly ellison-taylor, founder and ceo of ket solutions, a consulting firm focused on business growth, innovation, strategy, transformation, and inclusive leadership. kimberly has volunteered in the accounting profession for decades, including as chairman of the maryland association of cpas and chairman of the aicpa. she has also received many awards, including accounting today’s top 100 most influential people in accounting and cpa practice advisors’ 25 most powerful women in accounting. kimberly, welcome to gear up for growth.
kimberly: thank you, jean. i’m so excited to be here. thank you for having me.
jean: oh, you’re very welcome. i am equally excited to have this discussion with you. let me start off by reading a bit of the description that was included for you in this year’s top 100 most influential people in accounting. it includes her intense love for the profession and dedication to making sure it’s ready to attract and retain its next generation of leaders and that they learn the great opportunities it offers them. is it true that you decided to become a cpa when you were in the third grade?
kimberly: absolutely. someone came to my elementary school, jean, and i think it was just probably a regular career day where they were going to come and talk about the usual suspects, be a doctor, be a lawyer, be an engineer, and they finally said be an accountant because accountants manage the money. yes.
jean: you thought you’d be good at that, right?
kimberly: yes, because i wanted to boss it over my sisters. i couldn’t wait. i’m the middle child, so there’s a sister four years older, there’s a sister four years younger, and i said, “hmm, i manage the money. i’m going to boss it over them. good.” [chuckles]
jean: it seems like that’s worked out pretty good so far.
kimberly: i think so. it’s better than what i thought it was in the third grade.
[laughter]
jean: great. oh, goodness. one of the six themes that came out of that national pipeline advisory group is the need to tell a better story to create a more engaging employee experience. what is one of your stories about becoming a cpa or being a cpa?
kimberly: it’s a very interesting question because when you think about, and as jen wilson says, and she was one of the facilitators for the npag, she says we have to tell a better story, but we have to have a better story to tell. i love that because ultimately, jean, i think it’s about leadership, and it’s about the people you work with. when people leave organizations, i don’t care where they are in the profession, they’re not necessarily leaving the organization, they’re leaving their leader, the person that they report into. i’ve had some amazing leaders in my career, and i have been so fortunate. i’ll just give a more recent example, although it is still getting longer and longer between.
when i was potentially going to be nominated for the aicpa’s vice chair role, i needed to go to my leader and say, “i have this amazing opportunity, what do you think i should do?” he is an inactive cpa, and he said, “what do you mean, what do you should do? you should totally go for it.” that’s the type of leadership where we are talking about having a better story to tell and telling the great stories. it’s about the leader. no matter where we are, i think it comes down to someone believing in you, someone encouraging you, someone giving you the skills and the training for skills that you need.
when i think about my stories on the path to becoming a cpa, that was after i was a cpa, but i would never have become a cpa had i not had leaders who actually said, “kimberly, what do you need?” “kimberly, this is where you can do better, here’s where we can improve.” feedback was critical to my success as well, and also having people who were willing to go above and beyond to help me whenever and however they could. i think that’s part of the story to tell.
jean: right. it’s not real exciting when cpas in public accounting are in the midst of tax season and all you hear is about the number of hours they’re working and how stressed out they are and how much time they’re spending away from their families. these young kids starting off their careers or in high school, thinking about becoming accountants. if those are the stories that you’re hearing, that doesn’t sound really appealing.
kimberly: no. jean, we have to talk about outcomes. we have to talk about the businesses we support, the families we support, the why for the community. because we support businesses, we are enabling them to be more powerful in their communities to support those they love and their stakeholders.
jean: this is interesting because now i’m going to go out of order of how i planned because you’re bringing up some great points and i want to make sure we follow up. part of, i think, the current situation is that there are partners leading firms who are not transparent about the money behind the firm. i know you’re chuckling.
kimberly: i am chuckling.
jean: you know where i’m headed with this. they’re not sharing, “hey, this is the revenue that we’ve generated this year. you know what? as a partner or whatever, this is how much money we make.” i’m sure that a lot of these ones starting out or maybe a couple of years experience have no idea about that income potential and how a long-term career in public accounting could compare with a career in finance or technology, those other industries where accountants are going.
kimberly: that’s a great point, jean, because, in other industries and professions, they’re wearing their money. it’s visible. you can see it. it’s so funny because we used to have a past chair that spoke about television shows and movies. he had a great point because doctors have shows that highlight how much money they have. you’ll see technology leaders. they’re in the news every day. you get to see how they live. for us, we show up. sometimes we’re showing up in that 25-year-old car. now, i will tell you, i have no car notes, so i get it. i’ve been driving the same car for 10 years.
students want to know that there is a path to success. we’ve got to be able to tell that story because everyone else is telling their story. lawyers get huge benefit of the doubt about their livelihood and financial success. we are just as successful, if not more, but who knows because we’re not telling the story. now, i believe, jean, it’s because we want to keep our money and we don’t need everyone knowing how much money we have. that’s a part of our financial acumen. i think if we’re going to attract people, i think we have to be very transparent about the opportunity for success.
here’s also the thing, jean, it can’t be 10 to 15 years in because when the technology leaders are pitching why you should come and work there. i know we are through this little rough patch in technology where people were right-sizing and laying off people, but it’s still going to be one of the most viable career options for students who want to be in stem. even if we can tell the story on how we have longevity in times of crisis, people need us, we’re essential to the economy, we’re essential to the world and to people, that’s not going to work if we can’t also say you can get the car, you can get the house, you can go on trips, that it’s a very financially lucrative career path.
jean: absolutely. there’s also this gap that we need to bridge between the baby boomers talking about like, “this is how we always did things.” then we have the gen x and the millennials thinking about, “this is what i would like to do.” there’s different goals and motivations there. can you speak to that?
kimberly: absolutely, because i am heavily influenced by boomers. i grew up on motown. the nick at night things that are syndication, i actually watched on television with heavy influence from boomers, my parents. i will say that the whole do as i say is not working with our millennial little brothers and sisters and our gen z little brothers and sisters. they’re not having it. i think we have to be able to have emotional intelligence. we have to read the room. it’s not working.
\in reading the room, we have some of the smartest people i have ever met in our profession. when it comes to people skills, sometimes we miss it a little bit. because saying what you did and how you worked, nine miles, you carry books under each arm, you had holes in your shoes. that’s what my parents told me. up and down a hill.
jean: uphill both ways [unintelligible 00:11:21]
[laughter]
kimberly: everybody knows a story like that. that, jean, that’s not working. that is not working. we have to figure out a better way because we’re going to lose them. we are going to lose them. the old stories of how we used to do it, 60, 70 hours a week. your kids don’t know you, the dog is barking. they don’t want that life. many of them grew up with us as parents and they’ve seen how we work.
we have to not just change it externally. we got to go change it inside our households because one of the things i’ve said, jean, is that we have incumbent advantage. our kids are not becoming accountants or cpas. if we have home-field advantage and our kids aren’t doing it, we certainly can’t then go and hold our state societies or our aicpa leadership to a standard that we can’t even accomplish because we can’t accomplish it in our own families.
jean: that is interesting. i hadn’t thought about it that way. what i’m hearing is that it gets back to the leadership again and the leadership being willing to do things differently. of course that requires change and a lot of people really don’t want any more change in our world. the leadership of the firms have the future of their firm in their hands if they decide, “okay, we recognize that we need to change things up and this is what we’re going to do.”
kimberly: it’s easier, jean, to change when you’re coming from a position of strength. it’s harder to change when we are struggling and we don’t have people. this is the time we should be changing. the future was yesterday. we have to think about how we do the work. we have to think about what the work is. we also have to think about sharing that message in terms of why.
i think back to when my son was younger and i remember he was like four years old and the daycare, the school people said to me, “kimberly, your son asks why all the time.” they’re like, “he’s always like, why? why? why? why?” here’s the thing, he’s still that same guy. he’s 22 today, but he’s still asking why. if we can’t share the why, it’s not going to happen.
i think before you go into busy season, you get your great motivational speech, you talk about the outcomes, you talk about why this matters, you talk about why this is going to benefit their careers, the new skills we’re going to learn. it’s going to be challenging, but we can do it. who’s giving that coach speech? who’s motivating the team? “hey, i know it’s a rough patch. the client’s just got us the data, but we can do this because they need us.” i don’t think we think we need to give a speech because we didn’t need a speech. no one gave us a speech and we just need to work. we need a speech.
jean: yes, absolutely. cpas who have smaller practices are not seeing the next generation take over their accounting practices. this means they either have to close their firms or sell their firm. how much is this due to the lack of leadership on the part of owners, or maybe the lack of interest on the part of those managers or level below to want to take over that practice?
kimberly: it’s a great question, but when you think about a sole practitioner or a very small firm, the reputation or myths of our profession are ones that we have all contributed to. by and large, when people are not thinking that they want to stay, they’re looking at the macro. what we have to do is determine how we’re going to be different from the macro, advertise it, talk about it, and share it.
these firms cannot be the best-kept secret. if it were me, i would have a blog, i’d have podcasts. i’d be out talking about how we have flexible hours and how we talk about the outcomes. as long as you get your work done, get it done. we don’t care how many hours you work. we don’t care when you’re in or when you’re out, get it done. if that’s an approach that you’re using to help recruit, retain, and also set yourself up for leadership succession, and hopefully one day the success and selling your firm, then we need to hear your story.
i think that when you look across the firms who want to retire, they want to leave, they can’t give it to their kids because their kids decided to do something else. the people in the firm, no doubt, sometimes think that it is stressful. whenever i hear about stories like that, jean, i’m like, “oh, wow, surely there’s a senior manager. surely there’s a director. someone would take over the firm.”
i think firms from day one have to be thinking about what they’re going to do when they want to leave and retire. i think many of them don’t start thinking about it until they’re ready to retire. i think you have to build the technology, the skills, the reputation, the branding day one so that when you get toward the end of your career, or when you decide you don’t want to do it, you’ve already put the building blocks in place so that it’s a place where people would want to be.
jean: as a marketing consultant, what you’ve just said is music to my ears because those are all marketing concepts that firms do need to embrace. we’ve come a long way in that area, but there are still, gosh, just a ton of firms, particularly those smaller firms that i believe they don’t think it’s relevant to them because they are a smaller firm. i think that’s a miss on their part.
kimberly: absolutely.
jean: i read that you are passionate about helping millennials develop the skills they need to continue to be successful in the accounting profession. what are some of those skills?
kimberly: i think the first skill is confidence. when someone is confident, they’re willing to, i think, more easily accept feedback because they know it’s not personal. they know that it’s the person actually trying to help them on their career path. the second thing that i have found that some of my colleagues probably need a little more help in is public speaking. many of them are very shy and they just don’t want to speak up. i think if you’re in the meeting and they’re asking for ideas and they’re asking for suggestions, that’s how we get noticed. you have to be confident and you have to be willing to speak up to share your idea.
i also think that we need some notion in our heads of the life we want to live because that’s what helps most people get through from one hard, busy season to the next. they start thinking about, my wife or my partner or my spouse, my husband, is able to be at home. that’s a privilege. that’s a blessing. whenever i meet colleagues who said, “my husband is at home and he’s managing the house and he’s managing the life.”
i’m like, yes, because that is what the opportunity that’s been afforded to them because of this profession. if you focus on the vision, you’re not thinking about, “oh my gosh, i’m a senior and this is really hard.” think about being a partner. think about the end game. think about where you’re going. not these moments that are up and down and up and down in the middle. think about where you want to be on the other side.
that’s the same advice i give when people are thinking about taking a cpa exam. yes, it could be 18 months or 30 months of agony, but it could be 30 years of success and consistency and being able to provide for you and or your families. i share my story. i share my humble beginnings. i want them to know that if you fall, get up. don’t take it personal. rub some dirt on it that [unintelligible 00:20:02] some dirt on it and keep going. i think those are the things that i most hear from my colleagues. i also think they’re trying to figure out some cases, what do they want to do?
i think we reinvent ourselves in the profession. when you think about all of the options and opportunities, and let’s just take a public accounting firm. you’ve got audit, tax, advisory, consulting. you also have industry-based solutions. there are so many different ways that you could reinvent yourself without even leaving the firm. now, as a profession, when i say that, it has to be true. is it true that someone could really move from one area to the next? “i worked in hr, but i have a passion for marketing. will you let me move?” “i’m in audit, but i think i have a passion for tax. would you rather me leave than move?”
we always talk about the flexibility, but i don’t know if it’s as easy, jean, as i am saying, but i think if we share that information from day one, it’ll be a lot easier because when people are tired, potentially, of doing the work they’re doing, we could rotate them on a career assignment into another part of the firm. that way we won’t lose them because if they said they wanted to work in hospitality and we just happen to have a hospitality practice or a nonprofit practice, that way we can combine their love of whatever industry with the work that the firm needs to do. i think we need to do a better job doing that.
jean: there was a study, i want to say it was through the illinois cpa society, and they asked firm leadership in public accounting firms why people left their firms and the majority thought it was because they were leaving public accounting. that wasn’t the reason at all. most of the time it was because they went to another firm. those leaders are misguided and they need to recognize what’s happening with their own people and the thought process of their own people.
kimberly: i think that’s true, but i have also said, because i try to be even-handed, to our colleagues who are working in the firms, when we have the opportunity to respond to the internal surveys, engagement surveys, we have to be honest because i am also a consultant. i will look at engagement survey results and they’re 79, 85, 95. you’re like, “wow, there doesn’t seem to be a huge problem here. there’s opportunity always, but there doesn’t seem to be a problem.”
we have to also be really more transparent about what we want, what we need, and what can a firm do. if a leader came to someone tomorrow and said, “hey, we think you’re a power player here. you have great potential. we see you on the partner path.” i think you need to tell people early. let’s not let them mystery every day, wondering when is the day they’re going to become on the partner track. i think you got to go let it be known so that they feel motivated.
if that’s the case, then we need to also make sure that the people in the firm can also come to those leaders and say, “i’m not too sure about this because i want to go home and coach little league on fridays.” the partner could say, there’s nothing stopping you from coaching little league on fridays. why not do that? all you have to do is rearrange work and tell your career coach, and here it’s done.” people will leave because they had no idea that they could coach little league on fridays because they didn’t ask and no one told them. we have to be able to communicate more effectively about what we want.
jean: more often, because i think just communication in general, it’s impossible to over-communicate in areas like this because people don’t always hear it the first time. they might have to hear it a few times in order to process it.
kimberly: [laughs] that’s true. that is very true.
jean: there’s an article on your website about ai, and i believe the title is, why today’s younger generation of employees are eager for robots to play a bigger role in finance. how does the use of ai factor into recruiting and retention for public accounting firms?
kimberly: we have to be current. there is no way to avoid the currency and the media craze over gen ai, for instance. if we are not leveraging current relevant technologies, we’re going to lose people. it’s not just what the work is, it’s how we do the work. because how we do the work can also impact the efficiency and the effectiveness of how i feel about the work, and actually the work itself even being completed.
when we talk about technology acumen, we’re combining that with also knowledge of the profession. because knowledge of the profession can in some cases be automated, can be put into a digital assistant, we can complement the two, actually have a more efficient engagement, and be able to get to the things we really care about. if we’re going to recruit in a highly competitive environment, we have to be talking about the technologies that everyone else is talking about. we have to be talking about those as well. we certainly don’t want to go to a client site that is way more advanced than what we have internally into the firm, because guess what? that client will be coming to get our employees to work for them.
jean: isn’t it part of the cool factor, i hope that’s not dating me, of how they’re doing the work? you’ve got the younger generations who have been on playstation and all that other stuff, and they’re used to the gaming and all of that. to have that be part of how they work, i think would be very appealing.
kimberly: 100%. they are totally not going to go back to a green screen environment, which many of us grew up with it being very manual. you’ve got 10 people to do the job, 10 screens every day, five different systems. i know some firms are already dealing with how do they get from this environment to the next. i don’t want to say firms have completely passed this whole technology obsolescence phase, but i think we have no choice. we really have to respond accordingly to digital natives. we did not grow up with technology, they did. many of them had technology right out of the cradle.
as a matter of fact, jean, i remember seeing this little article where a little girl was trying to swipe a magazine. she was like probably 12 months old, a year, and she was swiping the magazine because she couldn’t understand why it was not moving. they have grown up with technology in a way that far surpasses what we could even be aware of. i just think we should leverage that. we should ask our team members, what technologies have you heard? even if it’s in another industry, but you love the way it works, let’s investigate that.
let’s have an incubator innovation team that actually goes out and looks at some of these options and they don’t have to have been in the accounting profession for 500 years. if they’re working for another profession or a different industry, let’s try those and get the team really involved in the process. especially if you’re not where you need to be with technology, it’s a good strategy to ask the team for help and to get involved in that process.
jean: i think the other exciting part of that is by spending less time doing the more rote type of activities, it opens up more time for cpas to be more advisory in nature with their clients. let’s face it, the word advisory has been tossed around for decades.
kimberly: it has.
jean: this is truly an opportunity where they’re spending less time on the rote activities and more time taking the data they have and translating that for their clients for ways that they can improve their profitability or open a new location or save on some tax legislation or whatever it might be. it allows them, to me, to use more of their brains, like their thought power for their clients instead of putting numbers in a tax return.
kimberly: 100%. i also have a technology background. it’s so interesting because although i wanted to be a cpa, i graduated valedictorian and went to school on a full scholarship, i ended up majoring in information systems. i went back years later after my mba to a community college to take all the accounting classes. i have this technology path and i have this accounting path. i can tell you that in today’s environment, that is so essential.
i think no matter what area someone’s studies, they need technology acumen. to the extent that it can help you improve decision-making, it can help you manage your assets, mitigate risk, achieve operational excellence, and improve profitability, i think we can sell the why these two things need to be together, but we also need to work, jean, on the change management. moving from where you were to where you need to be is a change journey, and we need to make sure that we bring people along on the journey.
jean: absolutely. that needs to be part of that story we were talking about earlier. right?
kimberly: absolutely.
jean: i’ve got two more questions for you. what advantages do small cpa firms have over the larger firms when it comes to recruiting and retention?
kimberly: oh, my gosh. many, and they’re not taking advantage of it. i would totally be the cool one. i would show up in those nice sneakers. i wear sneakers a lot with dresses these days. i would show up. i would have a laptop screen, depending on where you’re going. i would talk about the people in the firm and how they are doing so well. your biggest asset will be the work that you’ve already done with people. talk about various people’s stories. tell them your humble beginning stories if you’re the leader. many of the people i know have come from humble beginnings. they just are not telling that story, and i think we have to tell that story.
i think we also have to share why us? why you? why should someone come and work for you when they could work for any firm that they want? i would think a selling point would be that you would give them the opportunity to work across a lot of different areas. a lot of the young people i speak with do not want to just work in one area. they really do want the ability to work across a lot of different areas. you’re going to support them in volunteerism. you believe in maybe some of the same social causes they believe in. you should be out telling the story.
also sharing that as the leader of the firm, you’re invested in everyone’s success and that you have town halls, your door is open, people can call you. if there’s a mistake made, you own it. you say you don’t know. you’re willing to be vulnerable. you listen and you don’t judge. i just think there are so many things that a small firm is able to do because when the leader says, “we’re going to do this,” he doesn’t have to talk to 50,000 other partners. [unintelligible 00:32:41] [crosstalk]
he can say, “we’re going to take the day off after new year’s day.” let’s say after the holiday, the federal holiday, which is on a wednesday this year, he could say, “we’re going to be off thursday and friday.” he didn’t have to call legal. he didn’t have to call 10 partners, make the decision. she can make the decision. that’s the flexibility and agility i love about small businesses and small firms in general.
jean: that’s fantastic. my last question is your bonus question. what is your favorite movie?
kimberly: the matrix. i love the matrix. i love the matrix. now, my favorite kids’ movies, the incredibles. i don’t know if anyone’s ever seen the incredibles or meet the robinsons. i watched a lot of kids’ movies because i have two sons. one is now 20 and the other is 22. my favorite movie would be the matrix series because there was so much technology in there.
jean: oh, there is.
kimberly: oh, my goodness. iot, internet of things. there was the whole ai. oh, so many things, cybersecurity. they were hacking in the matrix. it was awesome. it was a lot of violence, i will say, but you’ll pass that violence and think about how much technology was in the matrix.
jean: oh, my gosh. that’s a great answer. [laughs] it’s a movie that i haven’t seen. you’re giving me some motivation here to check that out. i’ve been speaking today with kimberly ellison-taylor, founder and ceo of ket solutions. kimberly, thank you for your time today. you are a joy.
kimberly: thank you, jean.
jean: thank you for tuning in to gear up for growth. be sure to check us out next time when we focus on another topic crucial for accounting firms aiming for smart growth in today’s competitive landscape. i’ll see you then.