LEADERSHIP

Megan Genest Tarnow: Hire for Curiosity Rather Than Compliance

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Flip the org chart and put staff at the top.

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The Disruptors
With Liz Farr
for CPA Trendlines

Megan Genest Tarnow is well-known in accounting circles as the go-to expert in using QuickBooks for the fund accounting required by nonprofit entities.  

MORE: 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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Many of the best accountants she knows have come from non-traditional backgrounds like dance or philosophy. Megan herself worked in theater for several years before she was thrust into a finance role. Like her, these non-traditional accountants apply their native curiosity to understand how the pieces fit together. By leaning into the work and asking questions, they uncover an unknown aptitude for accounting, suggesting that perhaps we should hire for curiosity rather than compliance knowledge.  

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How Do Firm Leaders Learn?

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The four essential pillars for continuous learning

By W. Michael Hsu, CPA

As a firm leader, you know that you need new software, services, processes, and tactics…something that is going to take your firm to the next level. But how do You get there?

MORE W. MICHAEL HSU: Seven Principles to Work Less and Achieve More | How Do Firm Leaders Learn? | Why Your Approach to CAS and CFO Services Is Wrong | When it Comes to Pricing, it’s About ‘Can’t Afford Not To’ | Your Client Base Is Global |

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The tools and processes you use to get you to the next level have to come from or are signed off by You. So, who is teaching you? If you took the leap into a new service area and don’t know where you will land, you can’t turn to staff. They are looking to You for the answers.

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Five Ways to Keep Your Edge as a Leader

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man writing in notebookSpecific steps, including three ways to make life easier.

By August J. Aquila
What Makes a Great Partnership

Have you ever wondered why in good times or in bad it seems that managing partners of professional services firms fail? What happens to them? Do they get stuck in a routine? Do they fail to see the next issue coming down the road? Do they stop thinking about what is critical for success? Or, do they spend too much time with clients, with dysfunctional partners or with all the other noisy, but unimportant things that can pull them from their purpose?

MORE: Five Reasons That Leaders Fail | What Managing Partners Must Be Doing | Do Your Partners Pay Their Own Way? | How to Create Firm Accountability | Five Questions to Ask Your Partners about Accountability
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Sometimes leaders get overwhelmed. They forget that non-stop action is a lot different from delivering results. In short, they lose the alignment between what’s important to them and what’s important to the firm.
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Five Reasons That Leaders Fail

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Do you have these habits of highly ineffective CEOs?

By August J. Aquila
What Makes a Great Partnership

Several years ago there was an interesting article in Fortune magazine. It dealt with the topic of why CEOs fail. For example, “Chainsaw Al” Dunlap was let go by Sunbeam after two years of dismal performance and questionable conduct.

MORE: What Managing Partners Must Be Doing | Managing Partner: The Toughest Job in the World | Eleven Things Partners Must Do | Do Your Partners Pay Their Own Way? | Why Partners Need Written Goals | Seven Keys to Becoming an Equity Partner | How to Create Firm Accountability | Eight Criteria for Partnership | How to Achieve Partner Unity | Five Questions to Ask Your Partners about Accountability | How You Can Get Partners to Change | The Seven Building Blocks of a Great Partnership
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What do CPA firm managing partners have to learn from corporate America?
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Forged in Fire: The Pains of Leadership

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Businessman bursting through flames and fireworksThink of it as an upward spiral.

By Martin Bissett
Passport to Partnership

Unhappy and difficult clients help our firms to improve our client management skills and present opportunities to refine our leadership skills.

MORE: Perception Is Reality, Client Version | Your Website Promises. Do You Deliver? | Five Reasons Firms Don’t Thrive | Four Biz Dev Tasks to Start the New Year | What the Next Generation of Practice Leaders Faces | Nine Points to Check Before Hello | Why Clients Struggle with Growth | Nine Biz-Dev Metrics for Making Partner
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It is tough for us to build a successful firm without difficult clients or internal personnel issues in order to provide learning experiences for us to build a robust and commercially successful infrastructure.
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Dustin Verity: Keep an Open Mind and Constantly Learn

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Tech allows small to mid-size firms to provide better CAS.

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Transformation Talks
With Bill Penczak
Center for Accounting Transformation

Center for Accounting Transformation
Center for Accounting Transformation

Dustin Verity admits to being cautious. He also admits to being a technophile.

In the latest episode of Transformation Talks, the CPA explained being conflicted between his obsession with playing with the latest technology and finding the right fit for his firm.

MORE: 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
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“I’ve always been interested in technology and, and you know, efficiencies,” Verity said, always wanting to know how his firm could produce more and work more efficiently. “That means less hours that we have to spend in the office ourselves.”  READ MORE →

16 Steps to Creating a Partnership Path

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BONUSES: 12 questions to ask staff about the future. Advancing from staff to senior to manager.

By Marc Rosenberg
How to Bring in New Partners

“I think nothing is more important than what a firm does to create partners. I mean from Day 1 of someone’s career. Or maybe when a person is identified as a star. It’s critical what the firm does to nurture that person so that they become a partner someday.” – Harry Steindler, partner, MichaelSilver (Chicago)

MORE: Nine Ways to Measure Staff Performance on the Path to Partner | Three Types of Skills You Need to Become a Partner | Seventeen Basic Expectations of Partners | Nine Ways to Woo a Prospective Partner
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Here is what the best firms do to create a path to partnership. These practices are not ranked strictly, but items at the top of the list are more common and effective than those toward the bottom. However, all the items are important.
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How Do You Value Your Most Important Asset?

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Yes, your employees.

By Steven E. Sacks
The NEW Fundamentals

Skills, abilities and experience are the elements recruiters use to assess candidates who come before them. But what is interesting is despite a skill set playing  a dominant role in the value that an employee brings to the organization, it may not be recognized as such. This is not a new concept. I came across research conducted in 1918 by Harvard University, the Carnegie Foundation and Stanford Research Center.

MORE STEVE SACKS: 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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The study discovered that almost 95% of job success comes from having well-developed soft skills (better referred to as life skills ) and people skills, while  only 5% of job success comes from technical skills and knowledge — hard skills.

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