FEATURED VIDEO

Which is Better: A Year of Education or a Year of Experience?

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The 150-hour rule is facing harsh criticism in the accounting staffing crisis.

With Steven Sacks
The NEW Fundamentals: Thriving in Disruption

There is a movement afoot by the state CPA societies to reconsider whether the fifth year of an accounting program that offers the student a Master’s in Accounting is worth the cost, not to mention the increased complexity of business requiring as much exposure and experience as necessary to groom the younger professionals.

MORE STEVE SACKS: Sell Service, Not Hours | Fine-Tuning the Subscription Fee Model | When Cyber-Crime Hits Close to Home | How to Build a Winning Proposal | Six Ways to Fix Your Firm Agreement | The Great Resignation or a Reshuffling? | Listen to Learn | Build the Framework to a Solution with Five Answers | Try for Success, Not a Win
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However, there is a shortage of 300,000 CPA candidates entering the profession’s pipeline. That’s why several states are seeking to eliminate, modify or enhance the educational/experiential model.

Steve Sacks, CPA, CGMA, ABC, discussed the dilemma of education versus experience with accounting expert David Bergstein, CPA, the chief innovation officer for Bergstein CPA and teaching adjunct for Valencia College.

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The Disruptors: Al Anderson on The New Manifesto for Accountants

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Change your firm or go extinct.

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The Disruptors
With Liz Farr

Al Anderson has been trying to change audit for nearly his entire career and has always been “willing to try things differently.” While he’s always loved auditing – and thinks to this day that auditing can be fun – what he didn’t love was “auditing by doing it the same way every year.” However, he sees far too many firms performing audits the same way they have for decades. Anderson believes that “the firms that are unwilling to change eventually are going to be history.”

INSTANT DOWNLOAD: Al Anderson’s “The New Manifesto for Accountants.“

MORE PODCASTS and VIDEOS:  Peter Margaritis: The Power Skills Every Accountant Needs | Joe Montgomery: Find the Sweet Spot of the Right Clients, Right Services and Right Prices | Marie Green: Your Bad Apples Are Ruining You | Megan Genest Tarnow: Hire for Curiosity Rather Than Compliance | Clayton Oates: One Way to Keep Clients for Life | Randy Crabtree: Follow These Three Rules to Keep Employees Happy | Erik Solbakken: Yes, You Can Work Less and Make More | Donny Shimamoto: Future Firm Growth Requires a Mindshift | Jennifer Wilson: Empower Young Workers to Build the Firm Everyone Loves | Mike Whitmire: Re-Think Your Hiring and Training Practices | 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

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In an effort to combat the rising tide of commoditization of audit and assurance services, Anderson has been teaching a revolutionary framework for audit leadership to auditors around the world and has now written a book (to be released later this year by CPA Trendlines) that describes the five attributes of this framework.

These five attributes include:

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Scott Scarano: First, Grow People. Then Firm Growth Can Follow

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We need the machines to do as much of this as we can.

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The Disruptors
With Liz Farr

When Scott Scarano lost a few good people at his firm, he had an epiphany that he needed to change things. Instead of continuing to grow for the sake of growth, he overhauled his management approach.

MORE PODCASTS and VIDEOS:  Peter Margaritis: The Power Skills Every Accountant Needs | Joe Montgomery: Find the Sweet Spot of the Right Clients, Right Services and Right Prices | Marie Green: Your Bad Apples Are Ruining You | Megan Genest Tarnow: Hire for Curiosity Rather Than Compliance | Clayton Oates: One Way to Keep Clients for Life | Randy Crabtree: Follow These Three Rules to Keep Employees Happy | Erik Solbakken: Yes, You Can Work Less and Make More | Donny Shimamoto: Future Firm Growth Requires a Mindshift | Jennifer Wilson: Empower Young Workers to Build the Firm Everyone Loves | Mike Whitmire: Re-Think Your Hiring and Training Practices | 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

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“And things are better now at the firm, because we’re not focused on growth,” but instead on “growing everybody,” including himself, Scarano said. By building better habits and finding better ways to do things, his team is growing its bottom line, and a few of the people who left earlier have now returned. “That’s the growth I like to see.” READ MORE →

Jody Padar: Build a Practice that Works for You, Not Vice-Versa. 

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If you can’t change your pricing or your customers, it doesn’t matter how efficient you are

Subscribe to CPA Trendlines 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 CPA Trendlines

Jody Padar, the author of The Radical CPA, has been shaking things up in the accounting world for years. But today, firms are at a boiling point, limited by supply and demand. “You only have so many people doing the work. And what are you going to do? You can’t make the work up. It’s got to get done,” Padar said.

MORE: Jody Padar here

PODCASTS and VIDEOS:  Peter Margaritis: The Power Skills Every Accountant Needs | Joe Montgomery: Find the Sweet Spot of the Right Clients, Right Services and Right Prices | Marie Green: Your Bad Apples Are Ruining You | Megan Genest Tarnow: Hire for Curiosity Rather Than Compliance | Clayton Oates: One Way to Keep Clients for Life | Randy Crabtree: Follow These Three Rules to Keep Employees Happy | Erik Solbakken: Yes, You Can Work Less and Make More | Donny Shimamoto: Future Firm Growth Requires a Mindshift | Jennifer Wilson: Empower Young Workers to Build the Firm Everyone Loves | Mike Whitmire: Re-Think Your Hiring and Training Practices | 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

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The old business model was taking whoever walked in and billing by the hour. But today, we don’t have the capacity. “There’s so much work out there,” she explained.  “I have not heard any accountants say that they are looking for work. They’re all saying, ‘Stop, go away. I don’t have the resources to serve you.’”
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Peter Margaritis: The Power Skills Every Accountant Needs

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Your EQ is just as important as your IQ. And seven more take-aways.

^ Unmute for sound and adjust the volume
Subscribe to CPA Trendlines 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 CPA Trendlines

Peter Margaritis, who also calls himself The Accidental Accountant, grew up in the gregarious environment of restaurants, “where everybody communicated, not well, sometimes, but they communicated.” So it was a shock when he went to work at Price Waterhouse, and he “felt that all the air got sucked out of the office, and nobody was communicating at all, and they looked at me like I was crazy.”

MORE: Joe Montgomery: Find the Sweet Spot of the Right Clients, Right Services and Right Prices | Marie Green: Your Bad Apples Are Ruining You | Megan Genest Tarnow: Hire for Curiosity Rather Than Compliance | Clayton Oates: One Way to Keep Clients for Life | Randy Crabtree: Follow These Three Rules to Keep Employees Happy | Erik Solbakken: Yes, You Can Work Less and Make More | Donny Shimamoto: Future Firm Growth Requires a Mindshift | Jennifer Wilson: Empower Young Workers to Build the Firm Everyone Loves | Mike Whitmire: Re-Think Your Hiring and Training Practices | 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

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His crusade for the last decade or so has been to help accountants improve what we often call soft skills, but which he calls power skills: the ability to communicate clearly and effectively with others. “There’s nothing that will slow you down more in your career than a poorly written memo or email or a presentation that you were poorly prepared for,” Margaritis said.
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Robert Fligel: Private Equity Shakes up M&A

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Opportunity or threat? It depends.

^ Unmute for sound and adjust the volume

Subscribe to CPA Trendlines podcasts anywhere: Apple, Google, Spotify, iHeart, Deezer, Amazon Music and Audible, Player FM, Audacy, Gaana (India), and Boomplay (Africa).

With Rick Telberg
For CPA Trendlines

Private equity takeovers of accounting firms are changing the rules for the CPA business, impacting succession plans, shifting talent strategies, and reshaping the competition, according to Robert Fligel, CEO and founder of RF Resources, one of the nation’s leading advisors.

MORE: Dustin Verity: Keep an Open Mind and Constantly Learn | Secret to Success? A Growth and Abundance Mindset | O.D. Lanier: Stepping Into Advisory | From Tax to Transformation | Early Adopters Gain an Edge in Audit | Why the Future is in Risk Advisory | Four Strategies for a Future Ready Firm Clayton Oates: One Way to Keep Clients for Life | Randy Crabtree: Follow These Three Rules to Keep Employees Happy | Erik Solbakken: Yes, You Can Work Less and Make More

SEE ALL: Podcasts and Videos here

In this exclusive interview with CPA Trendlines, Fligel, a veteran dealmaker in the vast and active New York market, explains what PE firms may not want you to know, why CPA firms are suddenly so much in demand, and the often-uncertain outlook for owners, staffers, and the profession.

For some, PE is an opportunity. For others, a threat. Fligel helps sort it all out.

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