Sandra Wiley: Staffing Problem? Check Your Culture

Whether it’s clients or talent, if you build a better business culture, you’ll get better results.

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As shareholder and president of Boomer Consulting, Sandra Wiley has been speaking with firm owners and leaders for nearly three decades and clearly sees the need for change in the profession.

“The business model that was built before cannot be the business model that you have going forward. It simply doesn’t work,” Wiley said. “Now, we’re still living in the old business model,” and we have to get out of it.

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When she does exit interviews to find out why people are leaving a firm, she said they all say it’s because of the hours. They need to find more balance in their lives, and they need to work less. While accountants do have government-imposed deadlines for tax returns, there are ways to reduce hours, Wiley explained. We can do extensions to spread the work out over time and people, and we can outsource. Most importantly, we can be more selective in the clients we work with. “We don’t have to work with every client we’ve ever worked with,” Wiley said.

Posted on August 21, 2023

Liz Farr

About the Author

Liz Farr, CPA, is a special contributor to CPA Trendlines, bringing an insider's clear-eyed view of the tax and accounting business and a passion for advancing the profession.

She's the host of the hit CPA Trendlines podcast series "The Disruptors," available everywhere: Apple, Google, Spotify, iHeart, Deezer, Amazon Music and Audible, Player FM, Audacy, Gaana (India), and Boomplay (Africa).

As founder and proprietor of Farr Communications, she is the secret weapon that her clients use to get their messages out. She has written blog posts, web content, articles, white papers, case studies and books for accountants and accounting tech companies. Her specialty is ghostwriting for coaches and consultants who want to move accountants into the future. She can bridge the gap between the dream these visionaries have for the future and the mindset and reality that today’s accountants are living in.

Five of her past and current clients have been named to Accounting Today’s annual list of 100 most influential in accounting. She has written under her name for the Journal of Accountancy, Intuit’s Firm of the Future blog and AccountingWEB. She has also appeared in Forbes, CFO.com, and Accounting Today.

Farr has a broad educational background, studying biochemistry at the University of Munster, Germany, and obtained her bachelor's degree as a double major in biochemistry and German at the University of New Mexico. She also studied German, Spanish, computer science and linguistics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and continued her studies in linguistics at the University of Washington. She earned her master's degree in accounting in 2004 from the Robert O. Anderson School of Management at the University of New Mexico, qualifying as a licensed CPA in 2005.

Professionally, Liz began as a tax preparer at H&R Block before working at several local CPA firms in the Albuquerque, N.M. area. At her last assignment as a tax manager, she helped a team develop streamlined processes for getting tax returns out faster and more accurately.

After spending 15 years working as an accountant in the Albuquerque, N.M., area, she traded in her ten-key for a pen and has been writing full time since 2018.

She can be contacted at Farr Communications.

When she’s not writing or studying the accounting business, she’s hiking or skiing in the mountains of New Mexico.

Click here for more by Liz Farr

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