Peter: Hey, welcome back to Improv Is No Joke. Many of you know that I spent 10 years in higher education, with eight of those years at THE Ohio Dominican University here in Columbus, Ohio. One of the great benefits of being a professor is you get to see your students graduate and go off and start developing wonderful careers. I’m excited today to have one of my former students, Ashley Matthews, joining me today on the podcast. Thank you, Ashley, for taking time out of your busy schedule to be interviewed. I greatly appreciate it.

Ashley: Of course, I’m happy to be here.

Peter: And I have to say I am so proud to see how your career has evolved from the days that you left Ohio Dominican to where you are today. You, Rachel, Bryce – just to name a few – I love it when I get together and talk with you guys because it’s so different than talking to you back in 2004.

Ashley: Well, I hope so. I hope we’ve grown a little bit since then, but those are very kind words. Thank you.

Peter: Well Rachel, you have grown. Bryce? The jury’s still out.

Ashley: Yeah, still a work in progress.

Peter: So before we begin what I’d like you do is, so the audience can get to know you just a little bit better, give us your background starting with when you graduated from THE Ohio Dominican University.

Ashley: Sure. I graduated in 2007 with my bachelor’s. I went on to take a couple courses after graduation, to be eligible for the CPA exam. A lot of my peers went on to get their master’s degree. I did not. I just took those extra courses and did an internship with Deloitte in 2006, prior to graduation. I joined them full-time in January 2008. I was with Deloitte for almost eight years and left this past fall to join Rea & Associates. Most of my background and work is in taxation – so, fun stuff.

Peter: Fun stuff.

Ashley: [laughs]

Peter: So what kind of stuff do you work on?

Ashley: My area of expertise – I use that term loosely – is partner shifts. So I worked with a lot in real estate partnerships and the owners of real estate development companies, commercial real estate companies, and joining Rey I’ve kind of spearheaded their partnership practice, so to speak, for streamlining some of our processes in consulting and the such. I really enjoy that area of the tax code, and the ever-changing parts of it and how you can pretty much do anything with a partnership as long as it’s in the partnership agreement, so it’s always fun/

Peter: You said fun and tax – okay hold.

Ashley: [laughs]

Peter: Just so the audience knows, we’re on a skype video call and she’s got this wonderful smile while she’s sitting there describing her background and tax, so I know she really loves what she does.

Ashley: I do. I do love what I do, and you know leaving the industry was never an option for me. I knew I want to stay in public accounting, and I love the work that I did, and I’m glad that I found a firm that fit well with with what I wanted to do and supported that.

Peter: Why did you leave Deloitte for Rea?

Ashley: You know, I was looking for more transparency in my upward mobility and kind of a guarantee that if I work hard it’s gonna pay off, and Deloitte is such a large firm and you never really know what’s going to happen no matter how hard you work. I was looking for a little bit more transparency there and I’m always looking for the work-life balance. It wasn’t quite where I wanted it to be a Deloitte, and so joining Rea provided the balance I was looking for.

Peter: Work-life balance. Now remind me, how many children do you have?

Ashley: I have three children.

Peter: There’s the work-life out of balance. [laughs]

Ashley: Exactly, exactly. So flexibility was huge for me, which I did find at Deloitte but I just needed a little bit more.

Peter: And you have been able to get that at Rea & Associates, and you’ve been with Rey for less than a year, is that correct?

Ashley: Correct, yes, and I have been able to find that and the professionals that I’m working with here are wonderful, so it’s been a great change for me.

Peter: And what is your current title at Rey?

Ashley: I’m a manager. I focus on tax services but do a little bit of everything now, with the client base that I have.

Peter: So how often are you out at your clients?

Ashley: I try to get out there often. You know, as often as I can – I don’t like to be behind my desk. It depends on the time of year, the season, and now we’re kind of in consulting mode, so we’re out of that compliance piece, chained to our desks, and trying to to figure out the other ways that we can can provide value and help our clients. So trying to get out there as much as I can.

Peter: So what’s your biggest challenge in dealing with your clients? From being, as you said, chained to your desk to then actually having to be face-to-face in front of them.

Ashley: So the biggest challenge is communication. Everybody communicates differently, and and you have clients who have expectations of return phone calls and emails, and how do we exchange that dialogue in person? Really figuring out their preferred method of communication and figuring out how to deliver those messages in the way that they appreciate receiving them. It’s a challenge, and especially for me with a whole new client base – some of them are legacy Rey clients, a few of them we picked up since I joined the firm, and so navigating those relationships that already exist with Rey and the ones that are new to the firm is a challenge.

Peter: When you say it’s a challenge, is this a challenge because the legacy clients have been around and you’re the fresh new face, and they’re probably going, “another one?”

Ashley: Yeah, exactly. The transition is hard. Sometimes it’s a retiring partner and they don’t understand or don’t want to see them go, but yeah I think, just like any public accounting firm, Rey experiences turnover and these clients are great, they hung in there – and Rey’s obviously doing something right for client service team to turn over multiple times – but for the most part they get disillusioned with the whole process of meeting a new person then getting them onboard, and really they may be happy with the status quo so when somebody new comes in and tries to switch it up there’s a little bit of pushback.

Peter: So how do you put your client at ease? I can imagine it’s a huge challenge, especially if you pick up a client from a retiring partner who’s been with them for a number of years and then you’re the new contact person. Over time, how do you put that client at ease?

Ashley: You know, for me it’s the do. Lots of people can say lots of great things and wow them with technical knowledge or experience or their personality, but for me the money – and I say money in terms of where they really find that they’ll follow you – is really in the do. So are you of your word? Do you get stuff done timely? Do you exceed expectations? Setting yourself up to exceed expectations vs. meet them is huge. If I know I’m going to get your project done in a week I’m going to tell you maybe a week and a half, maybe two weeks, because I want to exceed your expectations and I want to set a client up for exceeding their expectations. If I’m always just meeting expectations then I’m mediocre. So we want to make sure you know that we’re managing their personalities, which is great because partners can pass down that knowledge, but at the same time I want to re-evaluate how we’re doing things. Are we doing them the most efficient way possible? Are we bringing all the value to the client that we could be bringing? Are there things that we haven’t thought of in the past that we should be thinking of now? Bringing those up in conversation and proposing those types of changes are great, but implementing them is another story and I feel like my credibility comes from my ability to execute.

Peter: When you were talking about exceeding expectations vs. meeting expectations, because, for a lot of people, if they can get it done in a week they will say, I’ll have it to you in a week – but as you well know, in public accounting, every day’s a fire drill.

Ashley: Exactly. I have a to-do list a mile long and there are days I come in and nothing on that to-do list gets done. It’s always something different and more important and yeah – I mean fire drills come up all the time, and so realistically, yes, if I could sit down and focus on that project I would get it done in a week. It’s not a perfect world, and so two weeks is probably more realistic, but I will love to get it to you in a week.

Peter: Yeah, but I like the fact that you – because if I could sit down and completely focus, which is very difficult during a fire drill that’s going on and something is always more important, and then you’re at that a week later and it’s harder to call the client say, “look I need a few more days,” versus I’m gonna build a buffer in this project so that, when things do come up, it’s not gonna set me behind and I’m still going to meet the expectations and still make that client feel good about me having met those expectations.

Ashley: Yeah, and a lot of times we’re dealing with time-sensitive information. A lot of times clients are looking for us to give them information so that they can make business decisions, and so you know if they need a quick turnaround we can do it. I pride myself in getting clients timely information and really working closely with them in that regard, and so I don’t wanna make it sound like I’m gonna say, “Oh, sorry, can’t do it. I need more time.” We’ll get it done, but when you’re looking at those things that may not be quite as time sensitive, or if it’s a large project you want to build in time so that you make sure that you can meet and/or exceed their expectations.

Peter: So in this conversation of communication I’m hearing a couple things: one, the communication with the client and also coming back into the office and the communication with the partner that you report to. They’re going, you know what we’ve got a time sensitive thing that we’ve got to get done. What can you take off of my plate so I can get this thing done?

Ashley: Yeah, that’s the constant struggle in public accounting. [laughs]

Peter: [laughs]

Ashley: Adding to and never subtracting. So I think it’s a big issue in public accounting right now. After the downturn in 2008, we worked with leaner practices than we would prefer: we hired less and we still had attrition when the economy turned around a little bit, and so at that 5-8 year mark, you know, experienced manager – senior manager – there’s a lot of gaps. There’s a lot of work and not many people for it to go around to, and so we’re doing more with less people and those conversations happen frequently and they’re difficult. I found that you have to be stern and you have to mean what you say in order to be taken seriously. People have a tendency to pile on and see how much you’ll take, and so pushing back is always appropriate but that open line of communication with who you work for, and prioritizing your work and maybe calling another client who has a project that’s maybe not quite as time-sensitive and saying, “hey, it looks like we may need some more time,” or just explaining. A lot of clients are going to understand, and so it’s very helpful to have somebody to talk to about that and and really to support you.

Peter: Yeah, having spent some time in public I thoroughly agree and I think those who are not in public accounting, and clients, don’t really think of the word adaptability and CPA in the same sentence, but as you very well described CPAs must be adaptable to everyday occurrences in order to be successful, because if you’re not adapting its way too rigid and we’ll start losing clients and losing business.

Ashley: Yeah, this definitely is not a profession for someone who wants to come in and sit at their desk and have their day planned out and be predictable and get their to-do list done every day and punch the clock and go home. For sure, it’s not.

Peter: But that’s the stereotype that’s out there, so how are you breaking the stereotype? Because we have we have to start breaking it.

Ashley: Oh my gosh, yes. I tell people I’m a CPA and you get the weird kind of look like, huh? Really? So I think, like you said, the CPA stereotype is just of a person that’s chained to a desk every day cranking out financial statements or tax returns or counting beans in the back office, right? That’s the famous stereotype there. We’re working, especially here at Rey, for our clients to view us as their business advisor – their trusted business advisor. We want to understand all aspects of their business, not just their tax compliance issues or their issues with GAAP and their financial statements. We want to understand how they operate. We want to help them improve their processes, and, to us, in order to be successful in the space, that’s something that we we have to do. Not only are we trying to break the mold, as far as perception of accounting goes for people in the outside world, but for our clients as well.

Peter: Yeah, and you’re doing the right things by getting out from behind your desk, getting to know the client, getting to know how the operations work. Not just not focusing solely on the tax piece or the auditing piece. I’ve got a number of stories where CPAs haven’t visited a client in years, and we’re not talking individual clients we’re talking business clients. Information comes in, we take care of something, we send it back, and there’s really no relationship-building there. To become that trusted business advisor, you have to get out. You have to build a relationship with your client. They need to get to know you and you need to get to know them and their business, and it sounds like Rey is doing a great job with that, in order to help the firm continue to grow.

Ashley: Yeah, I mean that the future of the CPA and public accounting is not more complex regulatory issues, it’s not more gap pronouncements, it’s not more complicated code sections and regulations. It’s really in how do we increase profitability for our clients, how do we help them navigate the business issues that they’re having, how do we become that partner?

Peter: To be viewed as a part of doing business or an investment in our business, versus a the cost of doing business.

Ashley: We don’t want to be a sunk cost, that’s for sure.

Peter: That’s right, and it sounds like you’re going down a great path. So, you graduated in 2007 and you’ve been out in the workforce – you are that 5 to 8 to 9 year person that has this void, and you’re classified as a millennial, which works differently than my group, the baby boomers. How has that been in your career, in navigating those waters?

Ashley: You know, as Millennials, I feel like we have a chip on our shoulder. Everybody has their opinion of who Millennials are and what they are and how they operate, and just like I don’t want to stereotype baby boomers I would hope that people would not stereotype us as Millennials – but we do have unique challenges in the workforce. The generation gap is huge. Boomers are working longer than they have, historically, and and we have to learn how to navigate those age gaps and those experience gaps. We have that reputation of being lazy and not wanting to work or put the time in, and we’re often faced with the partner who sits in his office and says, “In my day, I just got the work done. We cranked it out and you put your head down and you worked and, when you looked up, you were promoted to manager.” [laughs]

Peter: [laughs]

Ashley: So that’s a hard thing to manage with the new generation coming in, because we are not afraid to put our head down and work and to do that that hard work and put our time in, but we want to see the impact we’re making and we want to understand how what we’re doing benefits and contributes and really how we’re appreciated. It’s just generational norms. Its differences there, and most companies who are successful in managing the generation and bringing on Millennials understand that there’s a difference in the thinking of where we work and what we do in careers and how that impacts our life, and they’re willing to accept that and really help us flourish.

Peter: I think the term Millennials has probably been overused in the fact that, when you graduated, you’re a millennial coming into the workforce. What I tell people these days, when I start talking about the generations, I go, “Have you ever heard of this guy, he’s a millennial. You may have heard of him. His name is Mark Zuckerberg.”

Ashley: [laughs] Yeah, exactly.

Peter: Or I saw last year on CNBC that Millennials contribute over 2 trillion dollars in US consumer spending.

Ashley: Mhm.

Peter: Yeah, so what’s in that stereotype of that millennial is they’re not coming out of college, they’re in the workforce. You guys may work differently than the way we did growing up, but you’re much more technologically savvy. When I left Ohio Dominican and was out I said, and I would say this even when I was at ODU, I would love to be a senior graduating at that point in time, because I always said you guys always had the world by the tail because of your drive, your determination, and your technological savvy. You guys will go out there and break that stereotype and say, you know, I don’t have to be chained to a desk. Give me the work, let’s use the technology, lets get it done. Public accounting is a profession, however we do punch a clock just like somebody walking into a distribution center, so I think that’s a little bit of the “have you punched that clock today, have you looked at that, I haven’t seen you sitting here,” but you know what? You’re providing excellent value to the firm and to the client when you’re able to work in a different way.

Ashley: Right, and, especially in public accounting, it’s trending up upward in terms of firms adopting this perspective, but a lot of it now is I don’t care where you work as long as your clients are happy and the work is getting done, and that’s huge – especially for my generation. People in the early part of the generation are having families and have children, and those in the later part of the generation have other responsibilities and things that they want to do too, and commuting to an office everyday may not be something that they want or are willing to do, and if it helps with their job satisfaction to be able to utilize technology in a manner that they can do their job and do it well from somewhere other than a desk, in an office, then I think that companies are wise to embrace that.

Peter: Yeah, this even goes into succession planning, because that’s one of the big issues out there. Who’s going to take over the firm when I retire? A lot of the Millennial group says, I don’t want to work like yo, I don’t wanna do this – and actually I have a person who came up to me in Minnesota and shared a story with me in which the partner came and dropped a file on his desk and said I want you to handle this transaction this way, and as he’s walking away the manager said, “No, I think I’ve got a better way to do it.”

Ashley: Mhm.

Peter: The partner turned around and said, “Okay, show me,” which he did, and the manager was right – and then the manager said, “If this was my firm, I would run it differently,” and he goes, I knew I was maybe doing a career-limiting move at the time–

Ashley: Yeah.

Peter: But the partner said, “Okay, how would you do this?” And he goes, you’ve got ten partners in this office. Why don’t we have 20 partners in this office? Spread out the work so we’re not working long hours, spread out that wealth and you’ve happier people. He said that that really resonated with that partner – this was about two years ago – and they’re going through a process of changing that culture, changing that firm structure. So my question to you would be, if Rey was your firm, or you want to have your own firm, what would you do different today that maybe other firms aren’t doing differently, or even as in Deloitte?

Ashley: Well, for me, technology and process development are huge. If you’re doing the same thing today as you were doing three years ago then you’re missing the boat, and you know I am working for a generation of partners who hand-wrote tax returns–

Peter: [laughs]

Ashley: –and were behind their desk. I’m sure you, maybe, are familiar with that a little bit.

Peter: Well wait a minute! She just threw me under the bus, everybody. Hear that thump thump? [laughs]

Ashley: [laughs] But their perspective on how you climb the ladder is different and I think about succession planning a lot, because I want to be a partner in our firm but I want to be a partner in a firm that I’m proud of and a firm that is willing to grow and change and meet the needs of the professionals that will be running it eventually, and so for me technology is huge and changing the way that we do the work that we do. Evaluating efficiencies and processes and morale and the work that we’re doing constantly – the profitability of our clients, do they make sense to us, and not keeping certain clients that may be better and happier served by another firm just because that relationship is there and it’s been there for years. Really evaluating where do we make money, what makes our people happy, where do we want to be, and not just taking on all clients that we can take on because we can, and being thoughtful about where we where we put our resources and spend our time. And being more transparent about where we see people in the firm, where we see their career going, where they are in the pipeline, so to speak. That’s huge, as far as partner track goes. Do we see you becoming a partner? How have we slotted you in our partner pipeline and our succession planning? Just being transparent of that. You know, if somebody’s already counted me out before I’ve even been able to to make a difference I want to know that, because that’s something I have to work against. For me, its technology, its transparency, it’s being smart about the work that we’re doing and when we’re doing it, and it’s realizing that the best decisions and some of the best relationships are made when you’re out from behind your desk and really talking to people.

Peter: I thoroughly agree, and you mentioned something about resources and investing. How does that relate to your continuing education, because obviously we know we have a compliance that we have to meet X amount of hours, but how does that fit in?

Ashley: So I think there there’s obviously a difference in size of firm and internally developed versus externally developed and whether we’re making a commitment to educating our people or a commitment to making sure they’re in compliance with their licensing requirements, and so you know I was happy that – coming from Deloitte, which has internally developed continuing professional education that was top-notch and it was great and they built a university for it – but coming to Rey the first thing that I was told was, “Hey, probably the Ohio Society and AICPA courses are not going to cut it for you in terms of technical skills, and there’s going to be some but not all. So really focusing on and looking for where am I going to get the most value, where is the most relevant information for me, and how how am I going to learn what I need and stay on top of changing regulations and learning even those soft skills and improving those – not just taking the one-hour free course just because I need the CPE credit.

Peter: Right. We need you to be well rounded. First and foremost, technically sound, when you sit in front of the client, but the ability to communicate with that client in a manner that connects with them and that they understand – because we speak a different language in accounting.

Ashley: Mhm.

Peter: It’s just like speaking Japanese to somebody, or Greek.

Ashley: [laughs] It is.

Peter: Because, when you say depreciation to someone who’s not an accountant, they go, oh that’s the value I lose my car when I drive it off the car lot.

Ashley: Exactly.

Peter: And you’re going no, no no. That’s a systematic allocation of an asset over time, and they’re going what is that?

Ashley: Yeah.

Peter: So it’s bridging that bridging that gap and being able to connect with that client in a way that you are that trusted business advisor.

Ashley: Yeah, and you know I would connect that back to working with the boomer generation. I don’t want people to think that, as Millennials, we’re just biding our time to get your job.

Peter: [laughs]

Ashley: There’s so much that I can learn from those partners, and there’s so many things that they do great, and I don’t want to change everything – but I think there may be a way that we can do it better. But their ability to build relationships, their ability to communicate technical things to their clients and to really have those difficult conversations, and how they operate and navigate that world. There’s a wealth of information for us to learn and bring me along – I want to see it. I want to see how you interact and and, for me, I learn the best there.

Peter: Yeah, that’s a great training ground – being out there with the partner and the client and watching how they’re interacting, as well as being prepared for when the partner looks at you and says, so you want to explain this, or if the client doesn’t look at the partner and says, I’m gonna ask you this question, that you’re able to sit there and think about it for about a split second and provide them with a coherent, intelligent answer.

Ashley: Exactly.

Peter: Versus uhhhhhhhh.

Ashley: Yep, and the expectation is, when you’re in front of a client, that you have some type of an answer – and I’ll get back to you works a lot, but, when you’re face-to-face with somebody, “I’ll get back to you” doesn’t always work. But some of the skills that I’ve learned, in terms of having conversations with clients that may be difficult, like billing conversations where we can’t quite get to the answer they want or we’re communicating an adverse tax effect. I’ve learned how to have those conversations from being in a partner’s office when he calls the client or tagging along with a partner when he has those conversations, and how he or she handles them have really shaped how I’m able to to have those conversations as well.

Peter: We have to have difficult conversations with our clients, but you’re now in a manager role and you have to be able to have that same type of conversation with that client and with the people that report to you, and I have found that sometimes having that conversation with people that report you is a lot harder than having it with the client.

Ashley: As I try to pass those skills down the to the people that report to me, my staff and seniors, I find that their tendency is that, if we’re communicating adverse results, they internalize it as being something they did wrong and that’s not the case. Delivering bad news is hard enough as it is without having the attitude that you somehow did something wrong, and so trying to counsel that out of people is very hard.

Peter: It is really hard, but it’s also a learning process. I think, because the person’s thinking oh my god I just made a mistake, I did something wrong, versus the viewpoint of maybe I did make the mistake, but what should have been? How can I learn from this so I don’t make that same mistake again? Mistakes are just learning opportunities.

Ashley: They are. They definitely are, and I think those learning opportunities are further reinforced by how I respond to that mistake. They have already beat themself up enough that they made a mistake, especially the millennial generation because we want to be right and we want to do it right and we want to learn how to do it right, and so, for me, saying anything negative or in a negative tone or anything is not going to help the situation at all, and so my job as a leader is to figure out and bring them back up and. How do we come up with a solution and how do you learn from this so it doesn’t happen again?

Peter: It sounds like a lot of empathy from what I’m hearing. I had a boss at Victoria’s Secret who once told me don’t come into my office with your problems, come into my office with a problem and your solution, whether it’s right wrong or indifferent, but don’t ever walk into my office without a solution – and I learned that the hard way, but that’s something that I pass down all the time. We’re going to make mistakes, and I love how you empathize and you’re not using a negative tone. I’m hopeful that you’ve come in here with how you can solve it, and if not then, as my former boss did – she sent me away with an hour to come up with a solution or two. Were they right? No, but it led us down a path to finding a solution.

Ashley: Right, and that helps them grow. I mean, in this profession especially, you learn by doing and if your boss always gave you an answer then you’re going to come for an answer and you’re not going to think about it, and I find that train of thinking has to be learned because the first thought is “this is wrong” and it’s never “okay, well what’s the impact and how does how does it impact X and if we fix it this way what does that mean for fix it that way what does that mean?” People hate the term materiality, but is it material? Just think it through, take it through that one more step, because wrong answers sometimes have different levels of wrongness.

Peter: [laughs] Different levels of wrongness. Some are okay wrong, and some are oh crap wrong.

Ashley: [laughs] Well, I guess if we’re talking about a $600 mistaking versus a number much larger than that – now that’s relative to the size of the client, but I think having some perspective in that regard helps a little bit.

Peter: Yeah, very well put. Anything else you’d like to add before we begin to wrap this up that we maybe haven’t discussed?

Ashley: I think, as far as you know looking at Millennials and as they’re growing to become leaders, we’re not okay with sitting on our hands and waiting. We’re knocking on that door and we want to be the next partner, the next leadership team, in our firm and and in our workplace, and we want to be difference-makers and make a change. If you’re expecting somebody that’s gonna sit behind the desk and and do everything you asked – you’re not going to find that in my generation.

Peter: Very well put, and I love the fact youlike to get out there, you like to get your hands dirty, you want to in front of the client, you want to be involved within the firm from the get-go. The likelihood that you would leave drops dramatically the more that you are emotionally invested into the firm, and to get emotionally invested into that firm requires a lot of conversation and a lot of trust, and a lot of those things that on both sides in order to feel that emotional equity, per se.

Ashley: I agree.

Peter: Before we wrap this up, just so the audience can maybe get to know you a little bit better, I’m gonna put you through my 10 quick questions. It’s a rapid-fire kind of thing, so are you ready for this?

Ashley: Oh no. No, but go ahead. [laughs]

Peter: [laughs] Alright, the first question Microsoft Word or an old-fashioned typewriter?

Ashley: Microsoft Word.

Peter: That was easy. I thought I’d throw you a softball.

Ashley: Yeah.

Peter: What’s your favorite tax code section? [laughs]

Ashley: 704.

Peter: Okay, and what is section 704?

Ashley: Its partnership and uh… basically partnerships.

Peter: Thank you. You know what, I should really know that but I’ve been away from it so long that I’m just going to move into the third question.

Ashley: There you go.

Peter: Disney channel or the Cartoon Network?

Ashley: Oh, Disney channel.

Peter: What is your favorite show that your kids like to watch?

Ashley: That’s a good question. We like Bubble Guppies. It’s mermaid kids that are put in different situations, but it’s a school under the sea. It’s pretty cool.

Peter: Cool. One day my son was watching Blue’s Clues and he became addicted to Blue’s Clues – it’s all about Blue’s Clues. This fourth question is really easy for you. I should maybe have had this as a second. Partnerships or C corps?

Ashley: Oh, partnerships.

Peter: Yeah. What’s your favorite movie?

Ashley: Oh goodness. Probably a kid’s movie, because that’s what we watch.

Peter: [laughs]

Ashley: Probably of the Disney variety – but we have been stuck right now on Into The Woods, which is a musical with some old fairy tales so it’s pretty cool.

Peter: I’ll have to look that one up. I have not seen that one yet. What’s your favorite song on your playlist?

Ashley: Oh gosh. It’s a country song by Randy Houser, called “Like a Cowboy,” and it’s probably because I just saw him in concert about a month ago. I went to the Buckeye Country Superfest, and so that’s on my playlist on repeat right now.

Peter: Oh, cool. I didn’t know you were a country girl.

Ashley: I am. You know, if given a chance to see Luke Bryan live, I couldn’t pass that up.

Peter: Not in a heartbeat. What’s your favorite city to visit on vacation?

Ashley: Oh goodness. You know, I do like the metropolitan cities – I think they’re super cool – so I like to go to Chicago. I went there a lot for work, but it’s really nice to go there for weekend trips and what not just to kind of sightsee and explore.

Peter: Yeah, Chicago’s one of my favorite cities. I’ve been there twice this year, but I go up to spend time at the Second City workshops and in the training department, but I do love Chicago a whole lot. A lot of great food. Do you prefer PC or mac?

Ashley: PC, but I’ve never really used a

Peter: They do but also it kind of depends on the profession, because obviously a lot of Corporate America uses PCs because of windows, and those that are more on the creative side tend to use the PC. Even though now you can have Windows on your Mac, which to me is wrong but that’s just a personal thing.

Ashley: Yeah [laughs]

Peter: Gilligan’s Island or the Big Bang Theory?

Ashley: Big Bang Theory.

Peter: Okay, number 10. Last one. How did you find yourself becoming a CPA?

Ashley: I took Pete Margaritis course at Ohio Dominican University.

Peter: [laughs] No, no, no, no.

Ashley: His improv and humor made CPAs look wonderful.

Peter: Okay, now you can tell us all the truth. Thank you for that.

Ashley: [laughs] I honestly didn’t decide until I took my intro accounting courses and really just kind of liked the problem solving aspect of it. I think accounting and CPAs get a bad rap in terms of, oh I don’t want to do math the rest of my life. Well, it’s not math. It’s a lot of problem solving and finding solutions and I really like that aspect of it.

Peter: And so, when you started at ODU, did you have an idea that accounting might be a major or was it those early classes that convinced you to try it as a major?

Ashley: I thought it may be a good major but I didn’t really pile up my schedule with accounting courses with the intent that it would be my major, I guess is the way to put it. So I was on the fence until I took those courses.

Peter: So it was either going to be accounting or theology?

Ashley: [laughs] No

Peter: [laughs]

Ashley: Actually accounting or I was going to be an English teacher.

Peter: Oh really?

Ashley: Yeah, very different.

Peter: That is very different, but that works really well in what you do because you do a lot of writing in your job.

Ashley: Yep.

Peter: To be an effective writer in what you do goes a long, long way.

Ashley: I agree with that. Technical memos are a piece of cake to me.

Peter: Where they they stress a lot of others completely out.

Ashley: Right, exactly.

Peter: Well Ashley, I can’t thank you enough. I so enjoyed this conversation, and like I said I’m so proud of you and your career and where you are. I want to be there the day when you have the party when you become partner, because I know that’s not too far down the line. You’ll make a great partner with Rey, or wherever you go. I know Rey & Associates fairly well, and let’s just say they’re very lucky to have you.

Ashley: Thank you, Peter, I appreciate those words very much.

Peter: Thank you!

Peter: Hey welcome to the podcast. Pete margaritas here, and today I’m honored to have as my guest Bill Sheridan, the Chief Information Officer at the Maryland Association of CPAs. Maybe not a longtime friend, but a friend over the years that we’ve met each other. So Bill, first and foremost thank you for taking time out of your crazy busy schedule to sit down and talk to me.

Bill: My pleasure. Thanks for having me. It’s an honor.

Peter: I’m looking forward to this because you are the Chief Information Officer. I tell you what, instead of me doing it why don’t you give the audience a little bit of your background because you can probably do it a lot better than I can.

Bill: You know, sure. Well the key word in that phrase information, so what I’ve been doing my whole life, basically, is just informing people. I started out as a journalist in 1990, I think. I graduated from college. I went right into print journals and newspapers. I was a reporter for a while and then I worked my way up to editors for some smaller papers and kind of advanced up the line, as a lot of journalists do, going from smaller papers to bigger papers, and I eventually ended up at a daily newspaper in Gastonia, North Carolina, just outside of Charlotte. I ended up taking the Sports Editor position there, and that was right around ‘95, ‘96, I think. The internet was just starting to really heat up as a thing that a lot of people paying attention to, and newspapers were really trying to figure out where they fit in with this new online space. So we were playing around with that at the newspaper and then, in the meantime, the guy who used to have a Sports Editor job before me moved on to this outfit in Fort Lauderdale called CBS Sportsline. This was one of the first sports-only websites that was out there. He took an editor’s position there and they were just wrapping up. He was one of the first waves hires down there and when they decided to expand he gave me a call and said, do you want to give this internet thing a try?

Peter: [laughs]

Bill: I said, sure, let’s roll with it. So I move down there and work for what is now cbssports.com – CBS bought them out, but at the time it was sportsline.com – and I worked there for a couple years. Great job, and I became immersed in the internet publishing culture and I liked it a lot, and one thing we didn’t like, my wife and I were engaged at the time, we move down there and it didn’t take us long to realize that we beat we’re not big fans of South Florida. We’re not hot weather people. My wife likes to say we spent two years down there and about 18 months trying to get out.

Peter: [laughs]

Bill: So that brought me up to Baltimore. I took a job in downtown Baltimore, again kind of an Internet-based jobs, as an electronic marketing manager for a company that is no longer there, and I stayed with them for about a year before the position at the MACPA came up. So I liked the folks that I talked to at the MACPA. It seems like a small group, but it really seems like a family and I had no idea at all about anything that had to do with the CPA profession. I came in cold and just learned from one of the best, Tom Hood. He kinda took me under his wings and showed me the ropes, and so I started out at the MACPA as their electronic marketing manager. They wanted somebody in there to help develop a series of electronic newsletters and help organize web content and things like that. So that’s what I started out in, and since then it’s just kind of morphed into this on this Chief Communications Officer position, but it’s it’s the same thing that I’ve always done. Even back when I was reporting for newspapers it was just finding relevant information and presenting it to the people that we do business with, so instead of doing that in newspapers I’m now doing that at the MACPA for our members, and for anyone else who happens to be reading or listening or anything like that. I like to say I’m I doing the same thing that I was trained to do in college, it’s just how I do it is has transformed itself over the years.

Peter: and you’re getting paid.

Bill: Yeah.

Peter: [laughs]

Bill: It’s funny. I’ve been with the MACPA now for 16 years. It turned into a career, which is cool.

Peter: So you’re working for CPA.

Bill: Yep.

Peter: And we’re having this conversation, and you are located where right now?

Bill: I am in St. Louis, Missouri – we also call it the Midwestern branch the MACPA

Peter: [laughs]

Bill: I’ve been telecommuting from my home in St. Louis for a little over 10 years now. My wife is from St. Louis originally, and at the time that we were thinking about moving back we had a daughter, she was my wife’s parents only grandchild at the time, and so we moved back to be closer to family. And when we decided we were gonna be back I really looked hard for a new job out here and couldn’t find anything that I love nearly as much as what I was doing, so I just walked into Tom and Jackie’s office one day and said, I’m moving to St. Louis, can I keep my job?

Peter: [laughs]

Bill: And they said yeah, we’ll figure out how to make it work. I’m fortunate that I have a job that I can pretty much do from anywhere, that helps, but telecommuting has been great. It’s worked out wonderfully for me and I really enjoy what I do and where I am.

Peter: The reason why I brought that up is because, one, that’s cool. It’s somewhat a long commute anytime you have to get on an airplane, it doesn’t matter if it’s Southwest or whatever there’s always some hiccups that can occur, but if you think back to when you were in college nobody was telecommuting.

Bill: No.

Peter: And actually, last week I was in Tennessee, and there’s a gentleman there who is the CFO of an engineering company and part owner, and he lives in Nashville and the company is located in New Orleans,

Bill: Mhm.

Peter: So let’s go down a technology path, because there’s two topics I want to talk about – technology and social media – but let’s talk about technology and how technology has evolved from, one, just the ability to do this, as well as the rate of information. I mean there’s so much information out there, and we as CPAs and business leaders have access to more information than we ever have as this thing has evolved. What do you see on the horizon out there? I mean we’ve come a long way in the profession. We’re not using 10 keys as much anymore. We use Excel and I ask the audience, if you think about technology, how many of you right now have more than one monitor on your desk? A lot of hands go up, and I had one gentleman say he has four monitors, and then I asked, but do you remember when you just had one monitor that had a back on it, and when you picked it up you had to go get a hernia surgery because it weighed so much? So you’re you’re working from St. Louis, Maryland Association CPA, you’ve been doing this for 10 years and you’ve been working with them for 16 years. So you get the profession. What do you see on the horizon in information and technology?

Bill: A lot of change, Pete, I tell you, It’s gonna get crazy, and it’s going to get crazy really, really fast. I mean you mentioned it before, when we were talking about telecommuting and how it wasn’t long ago that nobody was doing it, and the reason that more and more people are doing it now is it that the technology has finally evolved to the point where it makes it really, really easy to have conversations like this, and the reason that that technology is advancing – I boil it down to two words: Moore’s Law, and I’m not sure if you’re familiar with Moore’s Law, but for those who are listening who aren’t, it’s developed by Gordon Moore. He was the co-founder of Intel. Actually, he developed this law in 1965, which I think was like two or three years before he even founded Intel. At the time it was more of a theory. He said, and I’m simplifying it here, but it was it’s basically that the the processing speeds of computers will double roughly every two years or so, and that’s held true from ‘65 to today, and most people see it holding true for years to come, as a matter of fact – and that’s not linear change. That’s exponential change. It’s doubling every year: two becomes four becomes eight become 16, and it’s hard to visualize what that exponential change looks like, but I read a book recently called The Future of Professions by Daniel and Richard Susskind, and it’s not for the the faint of heart, if you’re a CPA, because he lays out a kind of scary future for what the professions might look like. But anyway at one point this book he he kind of visualizes what that exponential change really looks like and I want to read some to you because it blew me away. He says, “To appreciate the power of exponential growth consider the following thought experiment. Start by imagining just an ordinary sheet of paper – a regular, nondescript, ordinary sheet of paper – now imagine repeatedly folding the sheet in half.” So you fold it over once and that doubles its width. Fold it over a second time and now it’s four times as thick as it used to be. “After four folds, it will be as thick as a credit card,” he says, “now this is not particularly spectacular. If it could be folded 11 times,” which it can’t by the way, I think we have done experiments saying that the most that you can fold anything, I think, is seven times, but but if you could fold it 11 times it would be as tall as a can of Diet Coke, and if you you could fold it 10 more times it would be taller than Big Ben, the tower in london.

Peter: Not the Steelers quarterback.

Bill: Right, exactly. No, the tower. And after a further 10 folds it would reach into outer space. 12 more folds it would reach the moon, and if you could fold this single piece of paper 100 times it would create a wad over 8 billion light-years in thickness. Now that’s what exponential growth does for you, and that’s what Moore’s Law has done for us technology-wise. I mean, we had slow growth in technology early on, but but we’re at that point now where we’re reaching outer space and the moon and lightyears in thickness, as far as technology goes, and it’s doing more than giving us really cool gadgets to play with. It’s fundamentally changing everything. My daughter’s 14 so she’s going to get her driver’s permit next year. Probably 4, 5 years after that she may go out and buy her first car, and it will probably a driverless car, you know? So things are are changing radically, and they’re changing for CPA’s as well. There’s a study that came out from Oxford University, I think last year or the year before, and the purpose of the study was to determine what the odds were that certain professions were going to be completely automated within the next 20 years. Tax preparation is right there at the top of the list.

Peter: Right.

Bill: There’s about a 99% chance that, within the next 20 years, tax prep will be a completely automated function. Accounting and auditing was around 93.5% chance. So Moore’s Law is having a huge impact on how our profession operates, and we’re to the point now where we can’t rely on continuing to do the same things that we’ve always done, the things that we were trained to do years and years and years ago, because that stuff’s going to be going away. So the question then becomes, how do we continue to be relevant and add value to our clients’ lives when we get to the point that what we’ve always done is kind of commoditized and automated, and I think it comes down to figuring out how we can do the things that machines aren’t quite are ready to do themselves yet. It’s a scary time for a lot of folks, but I think there’s a lot of opportunity out there for CPA’s who kind of have that future focus and are positioning themselves now to do the things that machines won’t be able to do.

Peter: I want to challenge you on something. I agree wholeheartedly with what you’re saying, and I’ll even say there’s two other books that address the same thing: The Second Machine Age, which came out maybe five or six years ago, starts talking about Moore’s Law and exponential growth, and then last year Geoff Colvin, manager of Fortune, published a book called Humans are Underrated, Same thing. Talked a lot about IBM and Watson, and we can talk about the the KPMG-IBM agreement on cognitive computing as it relates to our auditing practice, but I hear 20 years and I truly believe that it’s not going to take 20 years. I keep saying in some of my sessions, and one person came up to me afterwards and said, okay I’m gonna take you up on your bet. I said, I think Excel will be extinct in five years.

Bill: [laughs] Yeah, I mean that’s a point they make in this book The Future of Professions. A lot of folks try to, you know, predict what’s going to happen in the future based on the technology that we have today, and they can’t really wrap their brains around things transferring so completely, but the point that they’re missing is that the technology is going to transform itself first. So we’re going to have technology that we can’t even possibly fathom, in five years or so.

Peter: Mhm.

Bill: That is going to change our future even that much more. When we get to the point that we have tools that will allow us to do the unimaginable, then suddenly that becomes easier to to imagine.

Peter: So take cognitive computing, the IBM Watson example, where it beat the guy in chess, beat the guy in Jeopardy. They dumped tens of thousands of cookbooks and it came up with a recipe that’s never been done before, and edible. The legal profession and health care profession are using it, and now the accounting profession are using it with the deal that KPMG and IBM made earlier. In March 2017 they will bring cognitive computing to the KPMG auditing practice, and the CEO of KPMG said we’ll be able to audit and review many more transactions than we’ve ever been able to do before.

Bill: Right, yeah.

Peter: So why do I need a lot of my auditing staff?

Bill: And suddenly this stuff starts to hit a little close to home. We’ve been playing around the edges of this technology stuff here for the last few years and thinking we’ve got all kinds of time to kind of ramp up, but time’s up. IBM Watson was kind of a fun little thing to watch when it was beating Ken Jennings at Jeopardy and Garry Kasparov at chess, but then all of a sudden it has real world implications for what we do right now. So it’s there’s no time off to hope this stuff is going to go away because it’s here.

Peter: You and I both know the Pin CPA stands for procrastination

Bill: [laughs]

Peter: And we have to quit procrastinating or saying, this is the way we used to do it, and that to me says we can’t do it that way anymore.

Bill: Yeah, and I understand that the fear factor with a lot of folks, and you’re right the CPA profession has been notoriously kind of slow on the adoption curve. What I see happening there is that you’re not going to change a lot of people’s minds on this stuff. They’re going to coast until they can retire and not have to worry about it anymore, and that’s fine, but what’s going to happen is you’re going to see a tie-in here between technology and demographics, where the old guard, the Boomers, they’re getting ready to retire and move out, and coming in to replace them are not necessarily the Gen Xers, because there’s not nearly enough Gen Xers to take replace the retiring boomers, but you’re going to start ramping up the leadership skills of of Millennials, and then right on their heels we’re already seeing generation Z start moving into the later years of college now. They’ll be in the workforce before too long, and they work in a completely different way than the folks who are leading this profession right now. At one point everything is just gonna flip and this profession will be working in a completely different way than what leaders of the profession are working in right now. So I truly believe that, when that leadership shift happens, there’s gonna be a whole lot of changes that happen from within the profession just around things like how we physically work – our work spaces are gonna look completely different – and and how we choose to use new technologies. These younger folks who are going to be leading the profession in a very short period of time are completely comfortable with moving from new stuff to new stuff to new stuff, because that’s just the way life is for them. The pushback is fine and it’s not unexpected, and very soon it’s going to shift to a profession that’s much more capable of embracing new stuff just because of the shift in leadership. I think that’s what’s going to happen, anyway.

Peter: So what key skills will this require those in our profession to have? What’s that key skill that they’re going to need to develop in order to be in that leadership role in order to be able to embrace the technology change and the profession change.

Bill: Tom and I banter back and forth a lot about the key skills we need going forward, and one that I have kind of latched onto is actually written by a Robert Safety, I think his name is. The editor of Fast Company magazine. He wrote an article not too long ago in which he said that the most important skill going forward is going to be the ability to learn new skills because things are changing so rapidly and the people who come out on top are going to be the ones who embrace change and have this mindset that I’m going to continually update my skill set so that I remain relevant going forward no matter how by my work, my job, my office changes. I’m going to have the skills that I need in order to to stay relevant. That to me, more than anything, is just to be to have that mindset of – there’s another guy named Warren Berger who wrote a book called A More Beautiful Question. He calls it serial mastery but it’s the same thing. It’s just this concept that I’m gonna be completely flexible and understand that my job, what I do right now, is not necessarily what I’m gonna be doing five years or two years or 18 months from now, and I have to be ready to change in order to stay relevant.

Peter: So allow me just have a just a little bit of fun, because I agree with everything you’re saying, but my ears heard it in a different way. My ears heard that we have to be much more adaptable.

Bill: Mhm.

Peter: You said flexibility. Adaptable – I think you know where I’m going with this – we have to be better improvisers.

Bill: [laughs]

Peter: Yeah, but I mean that’s true. What I hear is we have to be more adaptable, we have to embrace change, we have to be flexible, we have to be able to think on our feet, react quickly – oh, by the way, that’s called improvisation.

Bill: Mhm. The stuff you do applies perfectly to this. I mean just to be able to to riff off of somebody else, I mean we’re all gonna need that skill going forward. I think that’s very true.

Peter: I think it is and I know I keep saying this but it does apply in about everything that we do – especially when we relate it to changing technology, because if we can’t adapt to the changing landscape then we’re not relevant at all.

Bill: Well, yeah. Change is going to happen. Whether we like it or not, this stuff is coming. It’s just a question of are we going to do anything about it. We work real closely, at the MACPA, with a futurist named Daniel Burrus who talks about this stuff a lot. He breaks it down to hard trends and soft trends. Hard trends are the things that we know are going to happen, and they’re things that you can identify. You can actually predict future based on things that you know are going to happen. The the iphone 7 is going to come out next month. I know that’s gonna happen.

Peter: Okay.

Bill: You know, what’s the iPhone 7 going to look like? Is it gonna be more powerful or less powerful than what I have right now, and what am I going to be able to do with that power? So we can adjust how we work based on some things that we know we’re going to happen. Obviously the iPhone is kind of a simplified example of that, but the point is we can identify certain things we know are going to happen. Soft friends on the other hand are things that might happen. Dan Burrus likes to say that change is a hard trend. Stuff is gonna happen whether we like it or not. The soft trend is whether or not we do anything about it. So that’s it. We all have that choice. I’m not here to tell anybody that you have to do this stuff, because you don’t, but you also don’t have to stay in business, either.

Peter: [laughs]

Bill: And again, I know what I’m sounding like, this doomsday the sky is falling thing, and I don’t want to make it sound like the world is coming to an end. There’s a lot of opportunity here for folks who adapt to take that mindset and kind of learn to to roll with the changes. Another friend of the MACPAs, his name is Reggie Henry, he is like the chief technology guy at the American Society of Association Executives, which is basically like the association for associations. There is an association for everything out there. But he likes to say that our job is to make the future more comfortable for our members. He was talking to associations at that time, but I think that applies the CPAs too. I think our job is to make the future more comfortable for our clients and customers, because they’re dealing with the same stuff that we are.

Peter: Right.

Bill: And if we can get there first, if we can figure out how to become a little bit more future ready, and then show our clients and customers how to do that as well, then our role as trusted business advisors just gets stronger.

Peter: And the bottom line of all of that is that we have to become better communicators with our clients. We have to understand the complete business of what they do, not just from the financial side of it. I think that’s where a lot of this technology is going to take us because we don’t have to crank it, we have to interpret it, apply it, and become that trusted business advisor, and I think it’s a wonderful opportunity sitting out there and I think the challenge is for Gen Z, or as Karl Ahlrichs likes to call this next generation, Gen Wi-Fi, because they’ve been Googled since birth. The ability to embrace it and the ability to look forward. You said we can’t tell people what to do, but I think that with some cases we need to strongly suggest that we start preparing those Gen Zs, who are still in college, providing them with part of that curriculum: the skills that we see are going to be needed by the time they graduate, and think about accounting curriculum.

Bill: Mhm.

Peter: Are we providing those skill sets?

Bill: Right.

Peter: And I think a challenge for the profession as it relates to academia is building their communication skills within the curriculum, so when they do graduate they’re a little bit better prepared.

Bill: Yeah, we’ve seen research after research after research point to the same thing. The skills that we’re going to need going forward are are much more geared to the so-called soft skills. But you know communication, collaboration, strategic learning, leadership and those types of things are are really what we’re going to have to know going forward. I forget who said it, there was a futurist I saw speak recently who predicted that the incoming college freshman class, just going back to school today, half of what they learned in their first year is going to be obsolete by the time they graduate.

Peter: Yeah.

Bill: So the skills that we need are way different than the skills that previous generations have had to bring to the workforce. We could go on and on about education, I think that will transform itself too. So yeah, I mean Moore’s Law is doing that to everybody.

Peter: Let’s change the conversation into a different direction, because you are in my eyes, for a long time, the social media king of the profession. I mean, how many blogs do you write? And there’s all the stuff that you do on social media between Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, yada yada yada. I would say Gen X and late baby boomers are going I still don’t get the concept of social media. I don’t see the ROI driving business. So let’s have a conversation about social media. What are your thoughts? What are you using now? What is your new social media tool that you might be exploring?

Bill: I know I social has only been around for 10, 12 years, or something like that, so I’m already sounding old by saying that I gotta figure out this Instagram thing, because that’s one thing that I don’t use a whole lot of. I think there’s a lot of fun, a lot of potential there. I mean we started out in 2006, I think. We we wrote our first blog post. We’ve now got two blogs up and running and contribute to both of those quite frequently. That’s where a lot of our content creation starts, with our blogs, and then we’ll start moving them out through the other social channels – Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn are the three main ones that we’ve been using, but we’re open to exploring pretty much anything. Our philosophy really has been that we need to be wherever our members are and reach them in whatever way that they like to be reached, so we’re we’re trying to do that across all of the different platforms, and I really think that it’s key from a communication point of view nowadays just to stay connected in every possible way that you possibly can. That’s really been our philosophy. We’re very much a throw it against the wall and see what sticks kind of operation, which is great. It gives us a lot of leeway to try new things. Podcasting, we have had a podcast for a couple of years. Early on we kind of let it die – at the time I think we were a little bit ahead of the curve but we didn’t have the resources available to us that are there now, from a podcasting point of view, there are all these producers out there that make it really, really easy, so we’re thinking, you know, you kind of kicked our butt in that.

Peter: [laughs]

Bill: We’re thinking, you know, maybe we need to revisit our podcasting and see if there’s some value there to stay in touch with our members and communicate information to them that way as well. So we will try anything once, and we have tried a lot of things that we just don’t have the time to do or that didn’t didn’t really gain any traction, but we love blogging. We’ve had a lot of success with that. We get a lot of engagement with our members on Facebook, on LinkedIn. We use Twitter extensively to communicate breaking news the day and things like that, so yeah it’s been a great communication tool for us.

Peter: So let’s talk about blogging. Tell the audience the name of the two blogs that the MACPA puts out.

Bill: The first one that we launched was called CPA Success, and you can find that just at CPAsuccess.com. Lately we’ve been using that as much more of a kind of news filtration type of thing. Breaking news of the day, what kind of new standards are coming out, what do our members need to know today. That type of thing. And then we have a learning affiliate called the Business Learning Institute, which I know you’re very familiar with.

Peter: Yeah, I’ve heard of them before. [laughs]

Bill: Peter is one of our instructors and thought leaders, and so we have a BLI website, which is blionline.org, and we have a blog there that focuses more on those those hard skills that we talked about earlier and the future of leadership, and a lot of the stuff that we have been talking about for the last half hour. What kind of things are impacting the direction of this profession is going in, and what we’re members need to know, and what should they be paying attention to? That type of thing. So those two blogs are what we’ve been focusing on, and I’ve been doing more writing lately for the BLI blog, actually, than I have for CPA success. So yeah, those are the two types of things that we have really been focusing on: what’s happening right now that our members need to know about and and what might be happening down the road that they should be paying attention to as well.

Peter: So the analytics on your blogs: are you reaching an audience outside of the state of Maryland?

Bill: Yeah, I don’t know this is true or not, but I would I’m guessing that it might be true, that more people are aware of our blog outside of Maryland they are inside the state, for whatever reason I’m not sure. But we do we have a lot of subscribers from outside of Maryland, and I think that is a testament to the work that Tom Hood does. He’s nationally recognized as one of the the top influencers in the profession and he does a lot of writing for our blog, so he’s out there talking about the blog’s to folks all across the country, so I’m not surprised that we kind of built a national audience.

Peter: So take that concept of a national audience and the ability to reach that national audience through a blog and let’s add a little bit to it, and when you do the podcast now you’ve got a greater opportunity to get a larger audience globally. I’ll just use myself as an example. I think to date, over just about two months, I’ve had about 700 downloads of the episodes and I’m in six or seven countries. Now that audience may be small in those countries, which they are, but I’m in that country. I’m getting that additional exposure and I think one of the reasons why I went down the podcast is because I thought everybody knew what a podcast was. I thought I was on the tail end of it, and I agree that when you guys started you guys were early adopters, but from what I’ve read and from those I’ve talked to who do it, it still hasn’t even gotten to anywhere near that point. It’s still pretty fresh and new and this micro media. This is really just a radio show but it’s tailored to a specific audience that you have access to at any time that you want.

Bill: For sure. That’s a great thing about all forms of social media in my mind. Well, it does a couple of things really, really well, and to continue this conversation one of the things it does is it’s a great self-branding too. It really levels the playing field in a lot of ways. I mean, folks like yourself can build your own brand on a global scale and reach a global audience, which we didn’t have the tools to do before. Small firms can use social media to search for the best and brightest new talent to come work for their firm and compete with the big four when it comes to hiring and recruitment and retention and things like that, so we’ve got some really powerful tools at our disposal now that we didn’t have before that have really leveled the playing field from a branding and recruitment standpoint. That’s one thing that it does. The other thing, on a much more personal level, I mean this goes back to what we talked about earlier about the most important skill being the ability to learn new skills. Social media is a fantastic way to ramp up what you learn. I mean a lot of people complain about the the information overload factor. There is too much information flying around, how can I possibly pay attention to it all and absorb anything? But think about how we use social networks. We follow people that we think are going to be adding value to our lives. We don’t intentionally go out and follow a bunch of Yahoos who are throwing up nonsense.

Peter: Right.

Bill: I follow you because I know what I’m going to get. I’m going to get some really thought-provoking stuff, and when we do that we’ve got a network of folks that are giving us really valuable information and that lets us ignore all the other stuff that’s going on around there. I think it’s Clay Shirky, he’s a professor of new media at New York University, he kind of answered that information overload questions. He said our problem really isn’t information overload, it’s filter failure.

Peter: [laughs]

Bill: We don’t have the right filters in place, and then social media, really in my mind, is one of those really great filters that lets us zero in on the stuff that matters to us and ignore everything else. That’s that’s what I love about it more than anything. It really lets me learn from some really smart people, and I think that’s really, really important today.

Peter: Because it’s content driven. There’s a firm and in Columbus called Rea & Associates. It’s a regional firm, and earlier this year they started a podcast and it’s called Unsuitable, and actually they were just featured recently in Columbus Business First, and I think the headline read, “Podcast: I think this is the craziest idea we’ve ever thought about,” but what they’ve done is they’ve created this media where they will talk about, specifically, implementing rev rec, tax issues, things along those lines, as well as other things that they think their clients and/or prospects would be interested in hearing about, which to another degree is, you know, a newsletter. So if you don’t podcast, how are you getting content out to your audience to help them make their lives a little bit easier or get them up to speed a lot quicker? And I think when we think of social media we go Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, but podcasting, writing newsletters – because it is media – and getting it out to that client or prospect base goes a long way, and in actually trying to get published in almost any type of magazine.

Bill: You’re absolutely right. You know, we talk to a lot of folks throughout the profession about this stuff and I’m always a little bit amazed every time we talk about social media at how many of them still either haven’t been paying attention or just don’t really grasp the concept, but it’s still a fairly new concept for a lot of folks in the profession. It’s time to pay closer attention and to learn how to use these tools in a way that’s going to help you build relationships and connect to your clients and customers, because there’s like 1.5 billion on Facebook now, 400-500 million, I think, on LinkedIn. I mean the numbers are staggering and all says to me is that that’s where your clients and customers are, right?

Peter: That’s where a lot of the conversation is happening. Don’t you want to be part of it?

Bill: You be a part of that conversation, so I think the answer is obviously, in my mind anyways, yes, because there are a lot of benefits for for those folks who can figure out how to do it right.

Peter: So let’s go back to the generations. Huge millennial generation and they’re not coming out of college anymore. Do you know this guy, he’s a millennial, Mark Zuckerberg? Okay. Last year on CNBC they said that Millennials contributed over 2 trillion dollars to consumer spending. So if Millennials are on social media, and they have that type of consumer spending and they are future clients, shouldn’t we be out there as part of that conversation? I think the hard part is is finding that auditorium that we have our target audience in.

Bill: Yeah, right. It’s just finding the one that that creates the most traction for you, and that means trying a little bit of all of them. You know, dipping your toes into all of them and seeing what works. I mean, you know your clients and customers better than I ever will, so where are they? How are they spending their time? What’s the best way to reach them? And maybe it’s more on a case-by-case basis. I’m friends with a person on Twitter and LinkedIn and Facebook, and I know that if I send her a message on Twitter I’m never going to hear from her, but I know that if I send a direct message on Facebook I’ll hear from her like 30 seconds later. So it’s just finding the the one that works best for you and going with that.

Peter: Sometimes it’s even asking your staff what are you on, who do you follow, and should I be following who you’re following? It’s almost like let’s flip the classroom a little bit.

Bill: Yeah, absolutely.

Peter: So here’s what I want to do. I want to revisit this conversation in about a year, and I want to see how far we have come in just that year, but I before I cut you loose – I didn’t tell you this before we started because I wanted to kind of spring this on you, if you haven’t been listening to my podcast already – at the end of most of them I like to do 10 quick questions. Just something so that the audience will get to know you just a little bit better. Some of these are softballs, and some of these might require a little bit more thought, and hopefully there’s a few in here that really make you laugh.

Bill: Okay.

Peter: First one. You live in St. Louis. St. Louis Cardinals or the Cincinnati Reds?

Bill: Cincinnati Reds.

Peter: You are in St. Louis, you were in Baltimore, how did you become a Reds fan?

Bill: I’m a mutt when it comes to my sports teams. So I was born and raised just south of Buffalo, New York, where there were we kind of follow the Buffalo sports teams – but long story short, the Cincinnati Reds, I have an aunt and uncle who lived in Dayton, Ohio, just outside of Cincinnati, and they they got married in October ‘76. I was the ringbearer in their wedding, and of course that was the year that the Reds swept the Yankees in the World Series and everyone was just going nuts in Dayton over that, so I just kind of got swept up in the whole thing and I’ve been a Reds fan ever since.

Peter: And just for the audience, I can’t believe it was two years ago, once I found out that you were a Reds fan I flew out to St. Louis and we went to a Reds-Cardinals game and St. Louis, and then a few weeks later you came to Cincinnati. PC or Mac?

Bill: Mac, and I haven’t always been that way. I was a PC guy for years and years and years and I slowly kind of – I think I bought an iPad first, and then got my iPhone, and then I was like, alright, I’ll get a MacBook.

Peter: [laughs] Mac and cheese or just plain spaghetti?

Bill: Gosh. Nothing like spaghetti and marinara for me.

Peter: What is your go-to song that you listen to when you need to get motivated?

Bill: Wow, that’s a hard one. I’m a big music guy.

Peter: I know.

Bill: What’s funny is my daughter is huge into music too, so she’s turned me onto a lot of new stuff and there’s a lot of really great new music out there. I always say that if I had to spend the rest of my life on a desert island and could only listen to one song, it’d probably be Born to Run by Bruce Springsteen.

Peter: Yes. Because if I answered the same question it wouldn’t be Born to Run, it’d be Badlands.

Bill: Oh okay.

Peter: And actually, before this started, I was listening to Badlands getting pumped up. Now I will say that I went to your Facebook site and you posted a music video for my new second go-to song, Up&Up by Coldplay.

Bill: Yeah, it’s off their new album. I know there are some people who would hold this against me, but I’m a big Coldplay fan, and it’s on their latest album and I don’t think I’d listened to the entire album start to finish, so this is the last song on the album and I heard it on my Google Music on a playlist that my wife was listening to. They played that song and I was like, wow, that sounds like Coldplay, but it’s fantastic and I love that song.

Peter: It is fantastic. What’s your all-time favorite movie?

Bill: Wow.

Peter: It’s a rainy day in St. Louis, you’re flipping through the channels and it pops up and you can’t move to the next channel.

Bill: I love, like, old-timey movies. I love Citizen Kane.

Peter: Okay.

Bill: I love The Sting. There are certain movies that, if I’m channel flipping at night and I see it, I know I’m going to stop and spend the next two hours watching. A Few Good Men is another one of them.

Peter: Cool. Mine is Bird Cage, I love Bird Cage. Big Bird Cage fan, big Robin Williams fan, but if I see Shawshank Redemption, I don’t care if it’s halfway through the movie, I can’t get past it.

Bill: That’s my night right there. So, yeah.

Peter: So when you travel to Baltimore, and you’re in Baltimore lot, what’s your favorite restaurant to go to?

Bill: Oh wow.

Peter: Because there’s a lot of good ones in Baltimore.

Bill: Yeah, there are. The one we end up going back to the most often is a place called Michael’s, a little north of Baltimore, where they make some fantastic crab cakes. Really, what I like to do more than anything this is grab Tom Hood or Skip Falatko, our CFO, and just have them take me out to dinner. So there’s a million really great just dives down near the water, in the little out-of-the-way places that you wouldn’t ever think would have great food, and you walk in and it’s just the most amazing thing you’ve ever had in your life. So Michaels is the go-to place, but what I love more than anything is just trying something new because there’s so much good food in Baltimore. Oh my gosh.

Peter: There really is, and actually I’ve been Michaels before and you’re right. Wonderful crab cakes, but if you’re a fan of the Food Network, Guy Fieri Triple D, and I think a whole episode is on Baltimore, and a lot of it’s down the inner harbor. There’s this Greek restaurant, not in the inner harbor but just off, called Sip and Dine or something like that. I’ve been dying to go to it and just everybody I talked to says it’s absolutely wonderful.

Bill: When I was in Florida getting ready to move up here and I told them I was moving to Baltimore, my boss was like, oh my god you’re gonna weigh 400 pounds.

Peter: [laugh]

Bill: There’s so much good stuff to eat up there, and it’s true.

Peter: Here’s the next one. Who do you look more like: Mark or Scott Kelly? [laughs]

Bill: [laugh] I’m the long-lost third of the Kelly triplets, yeah. For those who don’t know what we’re talking about, I was just at a conference a couple weeks ago and Mark and Scott Kelly the astronauts wear keynoting that particular conference. Bald as a cue ball and and just very similar features, and they had an opportunity for folks to come and get their photos taken with them and I’m sitting there between these these two guys and we look like we could be triplets. I guess I have to go with with Scott on that one.

Peter: I got the idea when I went out to your Facebook page you had that as your cover. I thought that was great. I know you’re a big baseball fan. What’s your favorite park to go visit?

Bill: Camden Yards, and I haven’t been to all of them so there might be one out there that might be better. I mean I’ve been to Wrigley, which is a great place. Busch Stadium is a great place to see a game. But there’s something about Camden Yards, with the warehouse there beyond right field and just the whole atmosphere, and the whole park opening up onto downtown, it’s just a great place to see a game.

Peter: It is.

Bill: And Baltimore loves their Orioles, so I love going back.

Peter: I know you travel a lot and you speak at a lot of different conferences in different cities. What’s your favorite City to visit on business?

Bill: Wow. It’s nothing personal against the city, I could never live there in a million years, but I love going to visit New Orleans. I just have so much fun when I’m down there, and we did the Bourbon Street thing for a while. There’s this one bar way down at the end of Bourbon Street that had a great live house band that we could always go to, but lately we’ve been asking where the locals go to hear good music and we found some really great places. Tom Hood and I found this place up there one time. It was Wynton Marsalis’ dad had his own band, and it was just this little place on the second floor of this bar. A small room that seated maybe 50 people and it was just a lot of fun. I’ve never have not had a good time when I go to New Orleans, so it’s just a great place to go visit.

Peter: That’s my favorite place, and for all same reasons that you have. I could never live there, I probably get a liver poisoning.

Bill: [laughs]

Peter: But I love to go visit, I love the food, I love the music, I love the atmosphere.

Bill: Yeah.

Peter: So we’ll wrap it up with the last one. This one might be tough, because the original question is what book are you currently reading, and is it Future of the Profession?

Bill: No, I just finished that one a few days ago. I’m a little embarrassed to say, actually. So I get on the skipper and I read two or three or four business books in a row, and I just have to stop and read some fast food for my mind. I asked my daughter, what should I be reading, and she’s like, you haven’t read the Harry Potter series yet, have you?

Peter: [laughs]

Bill: So I’m actually on the second Harry Potter book, I think it’s called the Chamber of Secrets.

Peter: Oh, that’s cool

Bill: It’s kinda fun.

Peter: I was really expecting a business book, but that’s kind of good idea. I read a lot of business books as well, and leadership books and stuff, and I need to pick up a fast food for the brain type of book.

Peter: There’s another one of those types of books that I listened to on a long drive, but the name of the book is The Answer to the Riddle is Me, and it’s a memoir about a guy – it’s a fascinating story – but the backstory is that he was traveling overseas and he woke up after passing out on this train platform with complete amnesia. He didn’t know who he was, didn’t know why he was there, didn’t have his passport, and it was just about his journey back to figuring out who he was and what his life was. It is just a fascinating story. That was a fun book to read. That was a recommendation from a friend of mine, and that was another one of those books that I just needed to kind of veg out with and read something that didn’t have to do with work.

Peter: That’s cool. Well Bill, as always I enjoy our conversations. I can’t thank you enough for spending time with me today. A lot of great information. I think a lot of great information for CPA’s, but even bigger than that a lot of great information for business leaders to think about. As technology continues to change and there’s a lot of opportunity out there, if we look at as opportunity. So thank you for imparting your knowledge, I always enjoy our conversations.

Bill: It’s been my pleasure, Peter, and I think that’s a great idea. I would love to talk again in a year and see exactly where this stuff goes in that short period of time, because chances are there’s going to be something new rocking our world and in just four months from now. I had fun, thank you for having me.

Peter: Thank you very much.

Peter: Hey, welcome back to Improv Is No Joke. Pete Margaritis here, and today’s guest is Brette Rowley. I met Brette almost two years ago, when she was the marketing consultant extraordinaire at Advantage Media Group, which is the publisher of my book, and since then she’s gone off on her own. I will let her tell you of this wonderful adventure that she’s on. So first and foremost, Brette, thank you for taking time out of your busy entrepreneurial scheduled to sit and have a conversation with me.

Brette: Absolutely, Peter. I’m excited. I’ve been looking forward to it.

Peter: Yeah, so have I. I am sorry to have put this off for so many weeks, bronchitis kept getting in the way, but I’m glad we’re finally able to have the conversation today and have a voice to have this. So to get us kicked off, I mean I said I met you at Advantage Media. Was that your first employer out of college?

Brette: It was not. So I actually graduated from college with a degree in marketing and I bounced around, so I am your typical millennial job hopper. I had four different jobs over the course of about five years, which led me to Advantage. So all of them built on each other, most of them were in the marketing consulting world, but that gave me a lot of experience, certainly, in the job search process, which ultimately led to my my new career that you hinted at.

Peter: So what was the craziest jobs that you had during that five year period when you were be-bopping around?

Brette: The craziest job that I had was the marketing director for a summer camp in Texas, and I use the term summer camp very loosely.

Peter: Hahaha

Brette: It was like a resort for kids. There were granite countertops, there was a go-kart track, there was sailing, you know, all these different things. It was about five grand to send your kid there for a month, so I use the term summer camp loosely, but it was a fun time and certainly a lot of experience working with and and dealing with all types of people, and certainly marketing strategies that came along with that.

Peter: Wow, I think that’s a summer camp that I would like to have gone to when I was a kid.

Brette: It was perfect. I got to be a quote-unquote adult and still go to camp for the summer, it worked out perfectly.

Peter: [laughs] So you found yourself at Advantage Media Group in Charleston, South Carolina. Now remind me, are you from the Charleston, South Carolina area?

Brette: I’m not. I’m from Atlanta originally, but if anyone’s ever been to Charleston, I know you’ve been here Pete, I think we have 30 people day moving here. So it’s definitely a growing city and I joined the ranks. My boyfriend was living here at the time so I wanted to try to find a job down here, and like you said it’s been about two years ago now that I joined Advantage.

Peter: Oh so you joined Advantage about the time that I came on as a as a client, so I was one of your first clients. Now I understand why you left.

Brette: It was all your fault Peter.

Peter: “I can’t take that guy anymore! Everything else is pretty cool but this guy is driving me crazy!” Yes I have been to Charleston, South Carolina. It quickly moved up to my number one, number two favorite City to visit, and I’m lucky enough that I will be back in Charleston at the end of October speaking at a conference, and my tastebuds are already hopping about all the wonderful food that’s in Charleston.

Brette: You know what, moving from Atlanta I thought, well there’s gonna be no traffic, I’m going to save so much money on gas and so much money on travel expense (my work’s only three miles away), and all of that savings went directly into food and drink here in Charleston. So, no shortage of it at all.

Peter: I’ve had some great food and drink. So what did you do at Advantage? Can you explain the job of a marketing consultant, and I add that part extraordinaire?

Brette: [laughs] I appreciate that addition. So essentially I worked with our clients and our members to help them grow their businesses, and as you said Advantage is a publisher, first and foremost, but when I came on there was a renewed emphasis in how we use these books to help our authors really take the next step in their business and really grow their businesses. I like to joke that I was a little bit of an accountability partner, a little bit therapist, a little bit strategist when I was on the phone with my client. So I helped them really take the book, which is a tool that they have to use, and look at their goals say, okay, how can we get there using the book? What are other authors doing? What have you done in your experience that’s worked? So I had the pleasure of spending most my day on the phone and helping people grow their businesses using their book.

Peter: I’m glad our conversations were usually earlier in the day than later in the day, because I imagined with as many conversations as you have that by the end of the day you’re probably starting to sound a little bit like Barry White. [laughs]

Brette: [laughs] A little bit, a little bit.

Peter: I will say that my time Advantage with you, and still now that you that and Alison’s there, everytime I’m on the phone or some type of contact I’m learning something new about marketing. I was never a marketing major. I was a business administration major coming out of college then I went back and got my accounting degree, and I’ve been able to use some of those tools that you guys had taught me and also taking that information and sharing it with CPAs, because it’s very applicable to CPAs and primary lead generation. How do you get out in front of it, with or without the book, and in it’s been a wonderful education process for myself.

Brette: I think that’s one of the things that initially drew me to marketing, in general, was the fact that those principles apply to everything across the board, whether you’re marketing a product, a service or yourself. I mean even in the job search process you’re ultimately marketing yourself, and so from the CPA’s perspective it can be something as simple as how to differentiate yourself from all the other CPAs out there. You know, if your clients have choices, how do you make sure that you’re the one that they’re choosing?

Peter: Okay let’s play let’s play with this for a moment. So let’s take a CPA firm. and we can say any stereotypical firm, that they provide the same services across the board. Except maybe if there’s a niche or something, there’s really no difference. How do they differentiate themselves? How do they let that that potential prospect, or even a current client, know that they are different from their competition?

Brette: The biggest thing that I would tell people to think about is to put yourself in the shoes of the client first. So, before I worked with Advantage, I worked specifically with financial advisors, which I recognize is not entirely the same thing but I think they probably struggle with similar struggles in that the financial advisors that I worked with honed in so much on the tactical services they could provide, and that’s what they marketed. So they’ve got all these different solutions. They’ve got annuity, they’ve got life insurance, they’ve got stocks, bonds, etc. But really what the client cares about is the fact that they’re not going to have to worry about all that stuff. They want to know their money is going to be there when they need, and I think that CPAs can take the same approach and understand that they don’t necessarily need to know exactly, tactically every single thing that you’re doing. What your clients need to know is that they’re taken care of, that you’re the expert in your field. You know, what are they really buying when they’re coming to you? And so that’s the first place to start, understanding what you’re selling, and understanding that it’s probably not what you think you’re selling, right off the bat.

Peter: Right, and I think you worded that very well by saying you don’t have to give that client every tactical piece that you’re doing. First and foremost I think you have to make a connection with the client, you can build that trust with that client because you only do business with people that you trust. I also say that some of your best marketing comes from your people, and tie it back to the hiring process: are you hiring the best and the brightest, and how articulate are they at taking very complex information and boiling it down to something that anybody on the street would be able to understand.

Brette: Lots of things, and stop me if I’m wrong, but I think that most CPAs and most of their clients, if they needed to know all the tactical things, all the details, they could probably do a majority of it at home. They don’t want to know the majority of what you’re doing. That’s the reason that they’re coming to you, and so you’re exactly right that it’s about relationships and how can you position yourself personally and really know how to attract that right client.

Peter: Exactly. So we’re taking that marketing perspective, we’re making those connections, and then one day you’re on the phone with me, and we’re wrapping up our monthly phone call, and I get, “Oh, do you have a couple extra minutes?”

Brette: [laughs]

Peter: And immediately my stomach went right out my heart socket, and I knew that I was leaving.

Brette” [laughs] Yeah I remember saying, you know, you don’t have to tell me. I remember you knowing that that’s what I was gonna say.

Peter: Yeah, and after I got over the shock and awe of it you went out and and started your own business, and tell us what this business is.

Brette: So I am, and it’s it seems like a big shift but it’s really not. It’s a little bit of a pivot. So I’m now a career coach and basically what I’ve done is taken, like we talked about, those marketing principles that apply to everything and applied them to specifically to Millennials who are feeling stuck in their first couple jobs out of school, feeling like their career’s not going in the right direction or not going as quickly as they like it to, and helping them realize – really the same thing that we did for your business – how to create that strategic plan. What’s the end goal? Where do you want your career to go? And then how do we get there? How do you position yourself and make sure that you’re going in the right direction? So for those Millennials who are like me and job-hopping aimlessly, let’s let’s put together a plan and know that there’s an end in sight, and I think that with the clients that I’m working with the biggest challenge is that they’re feeling stuck. So I like to say that I help people get unstuck.

Peter: You help people get unstuck. On your website, I love this, “go from drained to driven, and you’ll show them how.” So let me ask you this question. Hypothetically you’ve got a millennial who is in a job that they actually like and they want they want to stay, do you offer career coaching for that person who wants to stay within the organization but might not know how to move up that ladder?

Brette: Absolutely. That’s a big part of what I do. So if there are people that are looking for a promotion, there’s a new position within the organization that they’re wanting to shoot for, a lot of what I teach in the job search process applies. So negotiation skills, interview skills – you are still going to probably have to go through an interview process if you’re looking for that that promotion. How do you position yourself within your organization to be the perfect fit for that role? So a lot of that applies even if it’s an internal transition. That’s probably a better way to think about it, as career transitions rather than just solely the job search, because it could be internal.

Peter: And I think I remember when, early on in my career, I wanted that next role but I probably didn’t know how to execute it. I maybe ran into a few brick walls in doing that and to have somebody to say, you need you need to go down this path, and by the way thank god there was no cell phones and cameras back in my day.

Brette: [laughs]

Peter: But at the University, I still keep in contact with a lot of my former students. I just interviewed one yesterday who is in a public accounting firm. She just went from a large firm to regional firm, and we’ve had these conversations on how, if I want to make partner, what things do I need to put in place and along those lines, and I think that information is vital whether you’re looking to go from one employer to the next or go up that ladder.

Brette: Absolutely, and I think that it’s something that is going to be at an increasing trend in the marketplace. I mean I think Millennials have the the reputation, good or bad, of being a little bit more entitled, wanting more from our careers, and so I think there’s a bigger disconnect from people who are in that first entry-level job or first or second job out of school. They want those bigger positions but they don’t have a clue how to get there. I was talking with a girl this week. She knows where she wants to go, but to your point she doesn’t have the skills yet to be able to functionally do that job well, and so rather than saying, okay, well I’m just gonna pass the time until I somehow magically get those skills, we put together a plan and said, okay, we’re going to focus on these projects and you’re going to build those specific skills so that when it gets time to go after that job, you’ve really prepared for it and you’re going to be the clear choice within your organization.

Peter: Exactly, and I just thought about this. Here’s something that you can share with your clients. I was teaching in Minnesota and during one the breaks this woman walks by and she just shakes her head and says, “I don’t get people,” and I went okay, that’s a question, so tell me about it. And she says at our organization, at my company, someone left and we had this opening and normally we would post a job and have everybody who wants to apply for it, but in this case we didn’t post the job. We had the perfect person, let’s say it’s Brette, who we just offered the job instead of posting and everybody in the office with bat-crap crazy and thought it was unfair and this and that, and her response to those who thought it was unfair was, “every time you walk into this office, every time you walk in this building, you are interviewing, and quite frankly your interviewing skills over the last six to eight months have not been up to par and Brette’s has been far exceeding,” and she said the look on everybody’s face was that they had never thought about it that way. They’re in there everyday and they’re been judged, they’re being interviewed, in how they handle themselves.

Brette: You’re right, I am going to steal that.

Peter: [laughs]

Brette: I’m going to tell my clients that because that’s exactly right. When I talk with my clients, and I use the term personal brand, but ultimately it’s when people talk about, you what are they saying? And to your point, that’s exactly what happened. That person had built up their personal brand so strong through their work ethic, through different things they had done, that they eliminated all the other competition right off the bat.

Peter: Yeah and I actually I thought it was really unique in the way she did that, because I’ll always remember, the thing that I always kept is, no matter where I’m at outside the organization, I’m still the brand of whether it’s Victoria’s Secret, Pete Margaritis, and the only time that I’m not quote unquote on stage or carrying that brand is when I’m with my family or home alone, and I never thought the fact that every time you go into the office you’re interviewing, and I thought that was golden.

Brette: I love that. You might hear me later on down the road I mentioning that. I’ll give you credit though.

Peter: Okay.

Brette: I’ll say I learned this from my friend Pete Margaritis.

Peter: Who learned it from some woman who he can’t remember their name, and who knows maybe she’ll sue me one day. Heh, stand in line with everybody else.

Brette: [laughs]

Peter: So I have to ask, in my eyes you were doing outstanding job at Advantage. You were great to work with and from my perception from being there a couple times everybody loved working with you. What what was inside you that said I want to go be a career coach to the Millennials?

Brette: A couple things. One, I have been entrepreneurial my whole life so I’ve always worked for entrepreneurial companies. I have always kind of had that in the back of my mind. I’ll tell you a secret. I wrote my first business plan when I was like ten, like I was that nerdy.

Peter: What?!

Brette: [laughs]

Peter: What was the business?

Brette: I’m an equestrian, so that was a horse barn and I was going to teach lessons and training and all that.

Peter: Wow.

Brette: I still have it somewhere. I pulled it out and embarrassed myself with my boyfriend showing it to him during the Kentucky Derby this year, actually. But anyways I’ve always been entrepreneurial and I started working with, on the side, the College of Charleston here. I spoke to their MBA program and I realized that the things that I had gone through in my career when I was feeling stuck, when I was feeling like I kept changing jobs and wasn’t finding what I was looking for, that there are so many people out there that feel like that. As I started working with the kids at College of Charleston I loved it. Like something just clicked with me and I felt so inspired by them. I think it’s the idea that there’s so much opportunity and you just have to take it. So with the job search, with any kind of career transition, I want to re-encourage people to dream a little bit, and to not kind of accept the status quo. I know that sounds so macro and so big picture, but really that’s what what prompted me to step out and do this. Then it’s so funny because I’ve come completely full circle. When I went to school, when I went to college, and people asked me why I was getting a marketing degree I always said it applies to everything, even when I’m looking for a job later on. even the job search, not knowing at that point that I would ever have anything to do with career coaching or the job search in general and now I’ve come totally full circle. So it just started with a chance opportunity at the college and then I loved it and it grew from there.

Peter: So let’s back up a second. When you’re talking to this MBA program, is there a commonality, a common thread, that you’re hearing from them?

Brette: For the kids coming out of school, for the college students whether it’s undergrad or MBA, they really struggle with having to differentiate themselves and having to stand out in the job search because they’ve been given, especially in the MBA program, they’re given a templated resume, they all essentially have the same experience, so they really struggle with their personal story and how to even get into interviews. Same thing with undergrads as well. They struggle with how do you even get started? If there are 10,000 people that are graduating with me that have fairly similar experience, how can I even begin to stand out? And a lot of them struggle because they are at that point 21, 22. They have grown up in this tech age, and I’m in that group too, but they don’t understand the value of networking or the value of building relationships, and so all they’re doing is spending time filling out applications online and they’re literally hearing nothing back. I mean not even a no, and so it’s funny the number of people that tell I’d be happy even if I heard a no, even if someone told me sorry we’ve already filled the position, and so that’s their biggest struggle. They don’t even know where to start and they’re feeling stuck. I mean that’s the biggest thing that I hear.

Peter: What do you hear from those who are in the workforce? Who have been there 2, 3 years? What is that common thread that you’re hearing from that group?

Brette: A lot of it is I thought I would move up quicker, I thought it would be different, people told me I just needed to get my foot in the door and and then I’d work my way up. I also get people who, once they graduate they take kind of whatever job they can get, and then they turn around and it’s three years later and they never meant to stay there that long. They don’t love it, they’re not fulfilled, it’s not something that they’re passionate about. But they get comfortable. I worked with a girl named Lauren and she worked for a boutique in college and they offered her a full-time job at managing the boutique after school, and she said, okay, well that’s an easy transition. I’ll make some money, save up, and then go do something else. Well literally three years passed and she has a finance degree and she’s like, I’m not doing anything with my finance degree. so she came to me to try to figure out how do I position this experience that wasn’t really what I wanted to be doing, and how do I use that to go get a job that I really am excited about?

Peter: Interesting. I hadn’t really thought about that. You know, from the accounting perspective, the accounting students are getting job offers in their junior year. Most of them know most where they’re going, but I also think about back in my day when I got out of college. Where do you go? How do you do all that stuff? And it was just, I guess, persistence and drive, but it can be very confusing out there, with the the landscape moving as quickly as it is, and I think having a resource, a coach, who can help you navigate those waters is only a great benefit for the individual. We talk about cost. What does it cost? What does it cost? And when I would talk to students about the CPA exam and say you need to take a review course they would ask, how much does it cost? That’s not a cost. It’s an investment into your future. You’ll get the return on that investment, but don’t look at it that way. Same thing with with your role. Don’t look at it as a cost. It’s investment in their career and in the future.

Brette: Absolutely, and for me if you get if you get a job three weeks quicker because you worked with me it’s paid for. And, you know, if you can negotiate. I work with a lot of my clients on negotiation. There’s this crazy statistic I always like to share. People leave half-a-million dollars on the table over the course of their life just by not asking for it. Literally just by accepting offers that they’re given, and so there is a negotiation factor for what I do as well. Obviously it’s case-by-case and it depends on what kind of leverage that you have, but that’s something that I work with my my clients really closely on. How do we make sure that you’re getting yourself set up to where you’re going to be successful and you’re going to be able to to get to where you want to go, and right now Millennials – and again I’m in that group so I use it as a term of endearment – but there’s so much more focus on their lifestyle as well. So it’s not just something where they’re coming out of school and they’re looking for okay I need a nine-to-five job that is gonna get me X amount of dollars per year so that I can grow. You know, they’re wanting to be able to travel. They’re wanting a particular lifestyle, and so that’s a lot of what I get too. Yes I want the great job, but I also want six weeks of vacation and a flexible who work-life balance.

Peter: Right, right.

Brette: There’s a lot more at play there yeah.

Peter: Yeah, and I can imagine coming out of college and negotiating… God, I must have left a half-million dollars on the table, and I’m going to take that one from you and use that and I will give you reference, but I think it’s a great stat.

Brette: It’s crazy, right? When I read that it hit me right in the face, because that’s just crazy that people just don’t even ask for it.

Peter: Yeah.

Brette: And I think that certainly there’s a fine line of knowing where you stand and how much to negotiate for, but that was a big one for me.

Peter: So now listening to this conversation and the career coach for Millennials I think I’m hearing a niche that you have within this. Can you share that with us?

Brette: I can. So I typically am working with women Millennials, and there’s a couple reasons for that. I jokingly say that women tend to be a little bit more open to to coaching, in my experience, but also I think, when it comes down to negotiation, that men find that comes much more naturally, in general, and I’m making broad generalizations but, overall, typically men find those things to come more naturally than women do. So I think that that’s really where I can actually make the biggest impact. With women who kind of got stuck and they had things that they wanted to do, they had industries that they wanted to get into or those types of things, and got kind of lost along the way. I think that we typically are more prone to getting comfortable and saying, oh you know what, maybe next year. Like Lauren, who I was telling you about, she said for three years, maybe next year, maybe once I get this paid off, maybe when this happens and so I think that’s really where I can make the most impact, which is what I’m looking for.

Peter: So from the millennial perspective, and I interviewed a gentleman in episode five named Karl Ahlrichs and he was talking about hiring patterns in the future where the high performers are more likely to leave your organization a lot quicker and go someplace else. They may come back later, by the way when they come back later it will cost you a lot more –

Brette: [laughs] Yeah

Peter: And we were talking about how do you slow that revolving door, and I guess long story short basically says just the way we invest in the individual’s career, and the development of that career, and two the ability to actually have that manager listen to the concerns and the ideas of that person and not just blow them off. It’s more likely that they will stick around longer if they get that in return from the organization and, especially from a listening perspective, they’re not getting that.

Brette: Yeah, I had an interesting conversation along these lines recently and it kind of boiled down to high-performing, whether they’re Millennials or not but specifically high-performing millennials, they want to be treated like they’re human beings, right?

Peter: Yeah.

Brette: It sounds very rudimentary, but they have an expectation of, I want to be heard, if I have ideas I want to be able to share them, I want to be invested in, and if I’m spending my time here I also want to be invested in from a career perspective. But also it’s the idea, what I found a lot of my clients running into, is they want to work smarter rather than harder, and I think that scares a lot of their managers to some extent.

Peter: Okay.

Brette: If they have ideas where I can get this done quicker, better, etc., but it’s going to be a different process. To your point sometimes that can just be, oh well, you know we’ve done it this way for years and years, and that’s very deflating for Millennials who are always looking to do things a little bit smarter, to figure out “a hack” so to speak.

Peter: A hack?

Brette: Have you heard life hacks or organization hacks or productivity hacks? These are the kind of the terms that Millennials think in. How can I do something that’s going to result in either a better or equal result but do it a little bit quicker and do it a little bit better? And I think that encouraging those ideas is one of the best ways to keep them engaged.

Peter: Alright I just learned something, the term hack. I’m going to need to look it up and see how it’s applied from a millennial perspective, because when I think of a hack I think of a website, security, data. I think all of that, but…

Brette: It’s okay, I’m not I’m not hacking your podcast.

Peter: Well that would just be another attendee, or an audience member, and that’s always greatly appreciated.

Brette: [laughs]

Peter: So I’m on your website, and one of the first things that we talked about is going from drained to driven, and it says get started today. I give you my first name, last name, and email address. If I hit Get Started Today, what happens?

Brette: So when you hit submit there you’ll an email from me with some resources. I think there’s a guide on interview skills, that type of thing, but I’ll tell people that really the best way, if you’re really ready to get started, is an opportunity there on my site today to schedule a 30-minute call with me and to get that conversation started, and so what I like to do with those 30 minutes – I called them clarity conversations – and so that’s where we’ll start by understanding, what do you want out of your career, what do you want your lifestyle to look like, and then how can you fit your career to build to that? So that’s really the best first place. Schedule a time to talk with me, and I’m very nice. Peter you can vouch for me that I’m good at talking on the phone, but I think that the best way to start is just to get some clarity. If you’re dipping your toe in the water and some of this is resonating – you’re saying I am feeling drained, this isn’t how I thought it would be – let’s have a conversation about it.

Peter: And your website is?

Brette: It is BretteRowley.com.

Peter: And yes, she is great on the phone. I compared her once to the Energizer Bunny. She’s got so much energy – heck you guys are hearing that in this interview.

Brette: [laughs]

Peter: When I saw this initially on your website I sent you a note. You have been out there on your own now how long? When did you leave me, I mean when did you leave?

Brette: [laughs] So I’ve been out here full time since May. I’m coming up on a year of doing consulting on the side, but since May I have been a full-time entrepreneur. I’ve joined your ranks.

Peter: Yeah, so there’s seven days in the work week now.

Brette: That’s right.

Peter: As soon as you went on your own you launched the website. It wasn’t out there prior, correct?

Brette: I did have a version of my website. This new one that you’re looking at was after I left Advantage, but I did have a version of my site up for about six or eight months prior.

Peter: So on the menu bar it says online course, which really blew me away, and she’s got a curriculum. I mean, I think after I saw this I sent you an email going, hey, how did you do this, this is something I’ve been needing to do.

Brette: Okay, I’m going to take credit for that. I think it’s something that I had told you that you needed to do at some point.

Peter: We’ve got a bad connection, I’m sorry, I can’t hear you very well right now…

Brette: [laughs]

Peter: Yeah, we did talk about this, how you get an online course up and running, and you know the first one out that you’re giving a preview of is the value of networking, and you said that’s really the basis for everything and then getting started then into the course I see expanding your network, mastering online networking, conversation skills, the power of partners in closing the deal, and I’m, one, extremely impressed that you were able to do this and get this out there. I’m going to model mine somewhat after how you did it, but what type of activity are you getting? Are you getting inquiries, are you getting students, are you getting any of this?

Brette: Yeah, so I put this together and kind of crossed my fingers and was like, you know, let’s see how it does. The course is called Painless Networking For Job Seekers, and I named it that because I think it’s so relevant because I say networking to my clients and immediately they stop listening. They’re like, oh god, I’m picturing horrible, awkward cocktail conversation and networking events and passing out business cards, and so I wanted to help people understand there’s a better way to do it. You don’t have to be out there pounding the pavement. It’s about relationships, not necessarily the number of connections and so that’s why I went this direction. I’ve gotten some really great feedback. There’s a statistic on that page that 80 percent of jobs are not posted online.

Peter: Oh yeah, that’s right.

Brette: And it’s terrifying to people because literally all the they’re doing is submitting online applications, and so this is a good way to say, if you want to get some traction really quickly, this is a good way to get started.

Peter: It is. Networking is a skill that was taught to me when I was in the banking industry and I love to network, and you’re right that when people think networking they think two things: I don’t want to talk to strangers because my mother said never talk to strangers – these aren’t strangers, these are these are opportunities. A stranger is somebody that sits down in downtown Columbus with the bottle Mogen David 20/20 and is talking to the lamppost. That’s a stranger.

Brette: [laughs]

Peter: And the other thing is that all they’re doing is brown-nosing. No it’s not. Most jobs are not found in the paper or on monster.com or or anything like that, and I’ve got an episode with Greg Lainas, who is a recruiter for Robert Half, and he talks a lot about how he used networking early on to get where he wanted to go and he had some really great ideas on how to position yourself and how to get in front of people that actually I had never thought of and I thought they were wonderful ideas, but it all goes to the power of networking.

Brette: And, to your point, it’s not something that’s only applicable during the job search. Networking serves you throughout your entire career, whether you’re looking to hire down the road, you’re looking for mentors, you’re looking for business partners. Whatever the case may be, these are skills that you’ll take with you and so I think it’s crucial.

Peter: Well you can share this one with your clients. I was asked to take a couple of instructors out some years ago from the Ohio Society of CPAs when I was Chair, because the CEO was unavailable at the time. They give me a call and I’m like, aw man, I don’t want to do this, I don’t want to go. I was hemming and hawing so much and then I said, you know what, I’m just gonna go. So as I left the house my wife goes, when will you be back? I said, well, dinner’s at 6:30 so I should be back by 8:30. We closed the place, and we only had one cocktail each. The four of us together hit it off. We were having great conversations, and actually that dinner that I didn’t want to go to turned into a two-year revenue stream that I would have never had. So any time I’m hemming and hawing I just remember that time, and the person who I connected with’s first name with Cecil, so I say remember Cecil, and you know you just never know but you know that nothing’s gonna happen if you don’t go.

Brette: That’s exactly right, and I think that, specifically for Millennials and I’m guilty of it to some extent as well, but we tend to hide behind our devices, right? We hide behind our computers, our phones, social media. We hear about all those things and there’s so much value in creating those one-on-one personal relationships, to your point, that maybe you’re not getting a job through it right now but five, ten years down the road you’re still going to have that that relationship and you’ve got a strong network, so I think that it’s key.

Peter: When I was talking to my Millennials, whether I was in the workforce or at university, I go, you know social media is great as a networking tool – as A networking tool, not THE networking tool. There’s still a lot to say about gripping and grinning and smiling and being face-to-face, because in my mind I don’t get that ick feeling.

Brette: Yeah.

Peter: And when I can see somebody I get a good feeling or get a bad feeling, that gut emotion that I can act on, and I don’t get that from social media. Social media is great, it’s a part of it, but you know face-to-face networking is a part of that as well even though a lot of us don’t like to do it because we’re shy, don’t talk to strangers, what do I say, and someone asked me, what do I start out with? I said, well, you ask them what their name is.

Brette: [laughs]

Peter: And then you ask them what they do.

Brette: What a revolutionary concept.

Peter: Yeah and then ask them what they do. The more questions you ask them really the less you have to talk and the more that they talk, and then you’ll get to a comfort level. When it’s time for you to converse you have now built up a little bit of rapport and that will go a long way.

Brette: Absolutely. When it comes to networking, I tell my clients to give first. Help them solve a problem first and then, whether they’re looking to make a connection and you know somebody or whatever their challenged with in their lives, solve that problem first, and then they are going to be more than happy to help you further your career as well. So I think that’s a big piece of it. These are people too. It’s not as intimidating as it can seem. It doesn’t need to be awkward. It can be something as simple as let’s go to coffee, let’s take 30 minutes and I want to pick your brain about something. There are ways that we can ease into it at that aren’t as intimidating.

Peter: I call it The Godfather approach, because I’m gonna come and ask you, what can I do for you, I could do something for you and someday I’m gonna come and ask for a favor from you. The Godfather approach.

Brette: I love it. I’m not gonna be able to say it in just the way that you did, but I’ll record that little piece of podcast and use it.

Peter: Well the bronchitis is still probably there because it’s not my best Marlon Brando Godfather, but you got the gist. If I help you first then you’re more inclined to help me when I need something.

Brette: Absolutely.

Peter: What else you want to add that maybe we haven’t touched on or that I haven’t asked about this wonderful business that you’re in?

Brette: [laughs] I think we’ve covered some good ground. I think the biggest thing for me, the reason why I started started the business, is to re-encourage people and re-engage people. People get bogged down by their day-to-day, and so taking careers out of it, taking the job search out of it, my conversations that I have with people are typically getting them to dream a little bigger than they had before, getting them to think a little bit harder about what they can do in their careers and in their lives, and so that’s really my kind of mission. How can I take these work zombies–

Peter: [laughs]

Brette: [laughs] I don’t know any other way to say it – and make them excited about what they’re doing. I’ve been there, I’ve been a zombie, so I say it lovingly but that’s what I’m really passionate about. It affects your whole life. If you’re drained at work, you’re not gonna have time to spend on your hobbies, your passions. You’re going to sit on the couch when you get home because you just don’t have the mental energy, and so I’d like to reverse that a little bit in my way.

Peter: Adam, if you’re listening to this, she was talking about the job she had prior to coming to Advantage.

Brette: I was!

Peter: I just wanted to clarify that. [laughs]

Brette: You’re exactly right, thank you Peter.

Peter: You’re welcome. Well before I leave I’m gonna I’m gonna hit you with 10 quick questions here that will give the audience a little bit more about you. This will be painless, for the most part.

Brette: You started to say painful and it came out painless, so I’m appropriately terrified.

Peter: [laughs] Okay, so are you more a SEC fan or an ACC fan?

Brette: Oh Pete you know the answer to this one. I’m a Clemson girl so I am absolutely more an ACC fan.

Peter: and so now you just lost the Ohio audience. Right there they all just left. I’m gonna get these reviews on my podcast saying, you traitor, how can you interview someone from Clemson?

Brette: [laughs]

Peter: What is your favorite movie?

Brette: That’s tough. My favorite movie is Top Gun.

Peter: Okay. Nothing about the volleyball scene at all, right?

Brette: Not at all. My mom wanted to be a fighter pilot, but that didn’t work out. She actually got accepted – a little shout-out to my mom – she got accepted into the Air Force Academy but they weren’t going to let her fly so she didn’t go. I blame that answer on her because she loved that movie and I’ve watched it a billion times growing up.

Peter: My wife has too but she keeps going volleyball, volleyball, volleyball.

Brette: [laughs]

Peter: What’s your favorite song on your playlist?

Brette: Oh, Pete. This is really a tough one. Favorite song… I don’t even have an answer.

Peter: What’s your go to song when you need to get some energy. You’re feeling drained, you need to get pumped up.

Brette: I’m listening to a girl named Maren Morris right now. I don’t have a song, but her new album – she’s a new country singer – anything country I listen to, but I’ll tell you a secret. When I need to focus in the afternoon, Jamie my boyfriend thinks I’m really weird, there’s this deep focus Spotify playlist that has songs you’ve never heard that have no words, so that’s really what I listen, which is boring.

Peter: Okay.

Brette: You’re like, who is this weirdo?

Peter: I get the country music, but you know…

Brette: It’s got a mesmerizing effect and it makes me focus. You should try it.

Peter: Siberian monks singing throat songs.

Brette: It’s not quite that bad, but close.

Peter: Alright next question. Gumbo or lobster bisque?

Brette: Mm. Lobster Bisque.

Peter: Oh that one surprised me. Are you a University of South Carolina fan or more of a Clemson fan?

Brette: Oh, come on. I’m an absolute Clemson fan.

Peter: that’s when I was expected to hear. Are you really gonna ask me that stupid question, Peter?

Brette: No this is a perfect example of never ask a question that you don’t know the answer to. My parents raised me better than that.

Peter: [laughs] George, did you hear that? George? Do you prefer PC or Mac?

Brette: Mac, and I was adamantly PC before I got my first Mac.

Peter: When did you first Mac?

Brette: My job before Advantage. They were an all-Mac office and I was very grumpy about it but it took me about two hours to be completely converted.

Peter: It took me about a day and then I get on a pc now and I lose a finger, I sprain something. I just can’t operate in the PC environment anymore. I love my Mac.

Brette: I’m very savvy when it comes to Macs.

Peter: So when you went to that University called Clemson, what was your favorite course?

Brette: Ooh. I took a sports marketing class that I loved. I thought I wanted to go into sports marketing and then realized that, you know, baseball has a 180 games a year. They worked a little harder than I really wanted to, but I took a sports marketing that was really interesting right around the time of the Olympics, so we did a lot of cool projects around the Olympics.

Peter: Cool. What’s your favorite restaurant in Charleston?

Brette: Oh, there’s an italian restaurant called Pane E Vino off of King Street that’s a little bit of a hole in the wall, but anything italian and I’m sold. That’s a good one.

Peter: I’m gonna remember that when I get down there. Pane E Vino. My favorite one down there so far has been was Snob, slightly north of Broad.

Brette: Yeah, our biggest struggle on the weekends is figuring out where to go for dinner, which I can’t complain about.

Peter: No kidding. Outside of Charleston, what’s your favorite city to visit?

Brette: New York is probably my favorite city to visit. I lived there for a few months so I love going there, but really I like going places that I have never been before. So I don’t know if I have a favorite city to visit repeatedly.

Peter: Okay so what city do you want to visit that you’ve never been to before?

Brette: All of them.

Peter: And number one?

Brette: I would love to go to Barcelona. I’ve never been to Barcelona and I’ve heard good things.

Peter: Mine is I would love to go to either Melbourne or Sydney. The problem is I probably won’t come back.

Brette: Well that’s the thing for two reasons. One, you’ll love it, but also when I think of Australia the percentage of deadly thing that live in Australia vs here in South Carolina and that tempers my desire to go to Australia just a little bit.

Peter: I just think of the cute koala bear.

Brette: That is true. The koalas might make up for some of it, but really outside of cities where I actually want to go visit is Norway. I want to see the fjords.That’s number one on my travel bucket list.

Peter: Oh that’d be cool. Last question, real easy: what’s the best vacation you’ve ever taken?

Brette: I travelled around Italy for 10 days.

Peter: Okay, I guess it’s been nine years since I’ve been to Italy. What cities did you go?

Brette: We did Rome, Venice, a town in Tuscany called Montecatini, and Florence. I don’t think I’m missing any.

Peter: Yeah, we were in Tuscany too and went to Montecatini and we were based more out of Cortona and one thing I find about those wine villages is you gotta walk up, and then seems like when you’re walking down you’re still walking up.

Brette: [laughs]

Peter: Everywhere you look there is wine galore.

Brette: Yeah. Unfortunately when I went I was not yet of age, so I need to go back and enjoy the wine.

Peter: That’s the only vacation my wife and I have ever been on, we were there for two weeks, that we ate and drank heartily throughout Italy and came home and lost five pounds.

Brette: Wow, because you walked so much.

Peter: Because we walked everywhere.

Brette: See, that’s reason enough to move there. If I can eat and drink whatever I want and lose weight, I’m in.

Peter: That’s the Italian diet plan.

Brette: Yeah I’m happy with that 100%, and I could eat pasta every single day if I wouldn’t be 400 pounds.

Peter: Well you don’t have a car right now, you can just walk.

Brette: That’s true, that’s true. I’ll just didn’t do laps around my neighborhood to counteract the pasta.

Peter: Well Brette, one, I’ve been looking forward to this conversation as we haven’t talked since she left Advantage. I’m really excited about your business. I love having this conversation. I will have you back on a future podcast and I know we’ll stay in touch, but once again thank you so very much for taking time out to talk with me today. I know my audience will gain a lot of insight and hopefully will drive some additional business your way.

Brette: I appreciate it. I had a great time and you better bring me back.

Peter: I most certainly will.

Brette: [laughs]

Peter: Thanks!

Peter: Hey welcome back everybody. Today I’ve got a very special guest, Greg Lainas, out of Connecticut. Greg is an employee in the higher echelons of Robert Half and I want to first thank him for taking time out of his busy schedule, and once again I greatly appreciate you for being a guest on my podcast Greg.

Greg: Peter thank you very much for asking me. It’s a pleasure.

Peter: Great. I met Greg about a year and a half ago. I was in Connecticut teaching at the Connecticut Society of CPAs, of course, and Greg was a student in my class for the whole day. He stayed awake for the whole time. I think he was the only one, because as you’ll find out in this interview Greg is a, I guess we could say an accidental accountant. He’s not your stereotypical accountant and he’s got a wealth of knowledge as relates to the accounting profession, but first and foremost Greg can you give the audience a little bit about your background.

Greg: Surely, thank you Peter. Well I was originally raised in Waterbury, Connecticut, which is a blue-collar town of a hundred thousand population, plus or minus. I am a graduate of Northeastern University in Boston where I majored in accounting, and coincidentally that’s where I met my wife. When I first graduated I worked for a bank in Rhode Island as an internal auditor and my goal was to become a CIA and I did not really want to go to the CPA route. I work for the bank for a year and realized that for me to accelerate I was going to have to get my CPA, so we came back to Connecticut and worked in a medium-sized CPA firm by the name of Whittlesey and Hadley. I was there for over four years. My wife and I had our first, we wanted to expand the family etc, so I wanted out of public and I worked at ESPN during their infancy, and while at ESPN I was responsible for the budgeting and forecasting primarily for expenses in the sales and marketing area, and that was really the inspiration to get to where I am today. So in 1987 I came to Robert Half international, and we are the world’s largest financial staffing specialist firm publicly traded on the New York Stock Exchange. The company’s been in existence since 1948. Well my first 10 years were with the account temps division, which people are quite familiar with, and then since 1998 I’ve been running the manager resources division here in Hartford, and what I do is place senior-level accounting, finance, and systems professionals on projects and interim engagements. So we’re not the temp side, we’re not the firm side, we’re the financial consulting side. I became the first person in the history of the company to get 20 million in gross margin, and then also I’ve been very involved with the Connecticut Society of CPAs. I’m one of the past presidents and over my career here I’ve also been a president of one of the local student management accounts chapters, so I try to really be involved with the accounting community as well. I often speak to students. I often speak to people who are, no matter where they are in in the spectrum of their career, primarily around accounting and finance, but most of the things that I talk to people are universal. So that’s me in the nutshell.

Peter: There’s one thing that you left out of your background and I’ll just bring it up: I could say that you’re a character, but I can say that your character in a way that most people can’t relate to being a character. You are actually a character in the book Flashback by Gary Braver, am I correct?

Greg: Yes, I am.

Peter: Yes you are, and if I remember, I have the book and I’m opening the book right now and I believe it started in chapter 19 on page 115.

Greg: That’s correct.

Peter: “And Greg Lainas and his wife Mary Anne sat in the backseat. It was later on a Sunday morning on a beautiful early September day with a big, blue sky filled with fluffy white puffs of clouds.” You know I’ve written a book, but I’ve never been a character in a book and I think that one ups me because not everybody can say that they’ve been a character in a novel.

Greg: Well thank you Peter, and being an accountant you know when you go to the party we’re usually not the life of the party, so I look at this as one of my claims to fame. I didn’t mention it, but thank you, but it’s a long story and I don’t know whether your audience wants to hear it, but we can table that may come back to it later, but the one thing I do is I bring the book whenever I speak to an audience, because for the most part it revolves around careers, getting a job, networking, etc. and at the end of my session, as long as it needs, I usually pick on somebody in the audience to see if they’re paying attention and I’ll ask them to read the back jacket, because the back jacket, as in most books, is a description of the author, and they read it out loud and the author is actually a professor at Northeastern. So I’ll say, okay, stop right there. What school did I go to? And they said you went to Northeastern. I said okay very good, now open to page 115 and then I make them read it out loud, just the first paragraph, and I usually gets oohs and aahs, and I’ll stop the person right then and there and then I ask the audience, does anybody know why I brought the book in and why I had someone read it out loud? And the response typically is, well you wanted us to know you’re in a book, and I say, no that’s not the reason why but thank you. Anybody else? Nobody gets it, and then I’ll close by saying if I can network my way into a book you should be able to network your way into a job. Class dismissed.

Peter: [claps] Wow. I’m clapping. That’s wonderful. If you can Network your way into a book you can Network your way into a job, and networking is one of my strong suits as well. I love networking, the power of networking I’m always talking about. So let’s talk about this, since you’ve network your way into a book and even though you’re on the the consulting side of Robert Half, what advice do you give those students who are coming out of college or even those who are currently working, whether they’re an industry forum, what type of advice do you give them?

Greg: Well Peter it’s real simple. The first thing I’ll tell somebody is if I can do it you can do it, in that I try to make the party relaxed and and let them know that it’s not biology or chemistry 101 or something. It’s simple and anybody can do it. What may come to somebody as a natural item could be incredibly difficult for someone else, unless you’re exposed to it, but I look back at my jobs and they all came via networking. My job at Robert Half came from networking. My job at ESPN, although I had to go through the applying process, my neighbor and friend was a Cameraman and I begged him to give me a tour of the company. I went in on a Saturday night, I met a bunch of the personalities or the talent, and I had a bird’s-eye view of that company. I actually went into a live Sportscenter update, which I never did when I worked there, but when I applied for the job I made reference to that. I was the only person who had a tour of ESPN, so that helps my cause. The job I got is as an internal auditor in Rhode Island was a result of one of my college professors, not through the career services. My job in public, well I only had a few months to get a job because my wife and I were getting married and she was living in Boston. I’m living in Princeton. We wanted to settle in Connecticut, which is where we’re both from. So the famous saying, if you have all day to do it it will take you all day to do it, if you only have a little while to do it you get it done. So I made the decision, because I always say when everything else fails, let common sense prevail, and there’s no textbook to tell me what to do. And back in those days, which was the late seventies, we have no internet. Didn’t have fax. Nothing. All we had was a newspaper and a library. So we’ve all heard the 30 second elevator pitch.

Peter: Right.

Greg: All that stuff. But in my day we didn’t call it that, we just had to learn to sell yourself. So what I did was I would come home to Connecticut, get the wants ads from the Hartford Courant, circle the entry level, and of course I get back to my apartment Sunday night and I had three choices with going after these ads, because back in those days they put the name, the phone number, whatever. I could either take a roll of dimes and go into a go phone booth at lunchtime. I could go into a private office and charge all the phone calls to my home phone number, my apartment, or I could rush home after five o’clock, get on the phone from my apartment and start calling these people. I’ll often ask people in my presentation, what do you think I did? None of them get it right, but yet I’m only 24, 25 and I figured out how to do this, because like I said when all else fails let common sense prevail. I actually used to stand in front of the mirror and practice my my presentation, my 30-second commercial, before I even pick up the phone, and I always say is that for every rejection, well okay it happens, but all you need is one acceptance and that will overcome all the rejection. So I called this one CPA up and went into my dissertation. He says I can’t help you but I know someone who can. He told me to call Bob Hadley of Whittlesey and Hadley. Now if you realize why I called after five o’clock at night, well no one’s going to be there except the owners, the ones who locked the doors, the ones who count the money, and the ones who make the money. Bob Hadley answered the phone and I go into my dissertation about being the Northeastern grad. Right away he asked me what do you think about Northeastern. I’m thinking this is cool, so it turned into an interview, turned into a job. A job that didn’t exist, all from making a phone call to a total stranger.

Peter: You said something there that I think is one of the big challenges that those who don’t network well, that they’re the mothers in their head, because you said the word total stranger, and you remember what your mother told ya? Don’t talk to strangers, and when I talk to audiences about networking I said a stranger is somebody who’s sitting downtown Columbus, Ohio with a brown bag and they’re talking to the lamppost. That’s a stranger. But outside of that, in the business community and in professional environment, there’s no such thing as a stranger. Their potential opportunities, their colleagues, their peers. Just go say hello.

Greg: Just go say hello. What’s the worst that happens? They’re not gonna rip your head off.

Peter: No they’re not. As long as you’re doing what you’re doing right now, as long as you’re smiling and you just introduce yourself, nobody’s gonna go run away from you. Nobody’s ever run away from me. Maybe after they’ve got to know me they have, but not at that initial, hey how are you doing.

Greg: You bet. Now Peter, specifically about the students, I try to get to a level that they can identify with. So I’ll talk to students and our first asked how many of you have ever gotten a job through your parents, your parents friends, your friends, or just your friend’s parents, whereby they know who you are and they trust you so they hire you and you don’t have to necessarily fill out an application, send the resume, they just know who you are. And then I’ll say how many people have actually hired somebody as a result of that? Because most of the time these students are in retail or fast food and it’s who you know, and I’ll then start to extrapolate and make it now professional rather than just a summer job. And then I’ll expand to how many have friends whose parents are in accounting or finance? Did you ever think to ask, can I talk to Mr or Mrs Jones for a little while? Or how about this, how many friend’s parents have their own company but also have a CPA firm? Maybe mr. or mrs. Jones could give you the intro to the firm. Another avenue is how many students have ever been to the Career Services Department. Companies come on campus. Companies come on campus today. Companies have been on campus for a few years. Companies continue to come on. One of my greatest success stories, even though you get the job at Northeastern, was that IBM and Texas Instruments both came on campus looking for sales and marketing people. These companies are big today, well they were really big back then, and I could use the yellow ticket to make sure I get an interview and I could bump somebody. Well I got interviews with both people and both HR reps. Mind you know I’m 23, 24, whatever it is. Both HR reps said to me, Well Greg why are you here, because I see you want to be an account and you know I’m looking for sales and marketing people. My answer was, “This is my only chance to have a one-on-one meeting with a representative of your company. Now I know you’re looking for sales and marketing people, but if you like me you may refer me to you accounting HR representative and he or she may want to talk to me, and guess what? I got second interviews with both companies.

Peter: Wow. That’s a wonderful strategy I would have never ever thought of, but that is classic.

Greg: See it’s common sense. It’s not organic chemistry. Now getting back to the students. Alright so you find out the companies that come on campus. Did they hire anybody from their campus visit? Hopefully career services has those records. Well if they do you pick up the phone and you call that grad of your school and you reiterate your approach is that I’m a junior or senior looking for an internship or a full-time job, can you help me? What I’ve observed over the years is that you may not enjoy your college lifestyle. Your allegiance to that College is not as strong when you’re in school, but when you’re out of school your allegiance to that school is even stronger, and the grads from the same school like to help out their own fellow constituents. So a school of well, since we’re in the Midwest, Ohio State. Ohio State grads are probably gonna hire an Ohio State grad. Who knows? What’s the worst thing happens nothing? What’s the best? You get a job. And then it continues. Then you may even call the representative of that company that came on campus, and then you go back three or four years. Next thing you know you have an abundant list, and then you may find out that the company continually comes to your particular campus. Do you think they’re going to want to talk to you if they’ve had a good success rate? Think about when you’re back in high school when you want to make it into a college. if the college has a good track record with that particular high school what are the chances of you making that college? Pretty good. Same thing. The next category you can go into are the alums of your college. There may be their own little LinkedIn page. That’s one avenue. Even your high school may have their own LinkedIn page, or you go into contacts at the particular company and you find out where they went to school. Next thing you know you have your own list of people to call. You’re going to have so many people you don’t know where to begin, and that’s how it starts. Did I ever mention anything about networking? Not once that I use that word in this, but I just try to equate it to things that people can identify with.

Peter: You put it in a context – I think a lot of people hear the word networking and it has a negative connotation, but you found a way to put it in a sense to drive the importance of meeting people. Now look since we’re talking about the students, when you talk to them today how do you address the issue of social media and networking?

Greg: Well first with social media, I make sure that they use proper grammar, proper english. I tell them to have two different emails. One for business and one for fun. I’ve even said it’s okay to have two different cell phones because the message on a college student cell phone might not be the one that a prospective employer wants to hear, and don’t mix them up. So dealing with the technical attributes of that, but the ability to apply instead of phone to the email or a LinkedIn or texting, whatever it is, are the same principles. Ask for help, don’t demand it. Ask politely, and always send a thank-you note. What I really tell people to do, Peter, is you keep a log of who you called, when you called, outcome, next step, and always send a thank you note, handwritten. If your handwriting is miserable then definitely email, but email it as if it was coming from the heart, not from you’re talking to your friend Mary or Joe. If I can just add one thing, how I became president of the Connecticut Society of CPAs. When I started the division manager resources we were we are not a household name. Robert Half and account temps are the household names, and this of course goes back to 1998. My boss at the time said, Greg, there’s the Connecticut Society of CPAs golf tournament. You play golf right? I said yes but not good. He said well you should play. Well I don’t want to spend the money. Greg, you got to get out and network, you know about networking, what’s the matter with you? Go play. Alright I’ll play. I was more fearful of my golf quality than my networking ability, so one of the other people that participated in the golf tourney is a very good friend of mine who I had known previously in the profession. I played three years in a row, and he calls me up one day and he’s on the golf committee. He’s actually a past president of the Connecticut Society of CPAs. He called me and said, Greg, how would you like to get on the golf committee? I’m thinking what are you kidding me, all of a sudden the antennae go up saying, “Warning, warning,” from the from the TV show, and he said Greg we have fun and we raise money and it’s not a lot of work. So his name is Charlie. I said, Charlie, you’ve done so much for me so if you ask me to to get on I’ll get on, but I don’t want to promise something I can’t deliver on because the worst thing that people do is over promise and then don’t deliver. I tell people all the time it’s not what you do it’s how well you do it. So I go to my first golf committee meeting and it’s, Greg nice to have you here. I know names but I don’t know any of these people, and then they know I worked at ESPN.

Peter: Oh.

Greg: So they asked me, “Greg you know it’s becoming real popular are to have celebrities go to these golf tournaments. Can you help us?” Great, okay. Well I’ve been out of ESPN for a very long time but I still have friends, so I said I will give it the best effort I can, but again I don’t want to promise something I can’t deliver. Well to make a long story short it’s not what you do it’s how well you do it. I got ESPN talent to be emcees. I also obtained corporate sponsors. I also got offers. I also got raffle prizes, and that was all part of my job anyway. I just asked. Whether I’m networking to get a job, networking to get business, networking to help people, call it whatever you want, I ask. The worse thing they can do is say no. Because I’ve doing it long enough, when I call they’re going to say alright what does Greg want now?

Peter: [laughs]

Greg: So I did that, and it wasn’t exorbitantly hard it just took time and effort, but anything worth striving for takes an effort. It isn’t easy. If it were easy everyone would be doing it.

Peter: Right.

Greg: Next think you know I got a call to be on the Board of Governors of the Connecticut Society of CPAs, and basically several years later I became president, and Peter if you looked at the profiles of all the previous presidents and you compare mine to them you’d say, what is this guy doing here? And I did not set up the quest to become president it just evolved and I seized the moment, and I was very proud to have been president.

Peter: We share a very similar background because, as you all know, I was president – we call it chairman – of the house executive board, and same thing. If you look the profiles of the hundred past before me, same thing. I did at one point aspired to that role, but you don’t get to that level without a network of people to help you get there.

Greg: Correct.

Peter: And I just built a very strong network and networked my way into that role, and I say the same thing. If I can be President (Chairman) of the Ohio Society of CPAs Executive Board, you can too. You can do anything that you want to, you just gotta set your mind to it.

Greg: You’re right. When I finished my term on the Board of Governors, at that time we we revamped the entire program, which I won’t bore your listeners with. When I was done I took the initiative and I called some respective parties and I basically inquired, I really enjoyed my time and I don’t know what the plans of the powers to be are, but I don’t know whether you tap them on the shoulder or you ask them or you see who raises their hand, so I’m gonna raise my hand and if I’m worthy of it from your perspective I would love to continue in the process, and I was it. So all out of playing in a golf tournament that I became president. Of course there were more steps and I had to work hard, etc., and make commitments and sacrifices, but if you ever talk to people that are in the higher echelon of their profession, which I don’t consider myself, and you say so and so has a great job or so and so is really wonderful. They always make it look easy but you never know how hard they worked to get to where they are, and I tell people all the time that anything worth striving for takes an effort. You have to put it in and if it was that easy everybody would be doing it, and I tell people all the time people want things in life, but they don’t do what it takes to get to what they want, and regarding the networking, if you ask for someone’s help, if they know that you’re genuine, they will give you the time, but it better be genuine. And at work if you ask someone to do the job for you, they may help you once or twice, but over time they’re not going to help you, but if you have worked hard and you ask for their help they will help you, and you’ll be shocked at how quickly you can prosper and grow, and next thing you know you are a mentor to somebody else.

Peter: You know as I’ve as I listened through this conversation, and I think you would agree with this–

Greg: Whatever you say Peter I agree.

Peter: [laughs] Maybe indirectly over the years in doing your networking and this persistence and looking down different paths and going after opportunities, you’ve been using those two words I use a lot – Yes, And – in your building of the network vs Yes, But, which stops networking. Would you agree with that?

Greg: Absolutely. Peter, did you understand what gravitated me to come up to talk to you that day? I mean as soon as I heard you talking I said I gotta talk to this gentleman at the break. We all tend to want to develop friendships with people who we think of have similar personalities and certain traits and interests, and I was gravitated towards you right away. In fact I went home and told my wife, “you’re not gonna believe I met this wonderful gentlemen today,” and look how it has spurred our friendship. Just by me coming up and talking to him at the break.

Peter: Right. exactly. You could have not said a word even though our backgrounds are similar in lot of ways, as well as you are Greek. I’m Greek. I know I probably made a comment about that, but you could maybe just set them and did nothing and then, you know, nothing would have happened. We wouldn’t have met. I wouldn’t have known about this book. You wouldn’t be on the podcast, and this has been going on for about a year and a half, almost almost two years now, right?

Greg: Yes sir.

Peter: And I keep trying to get back up to Connecticut, because when I do get back up there I know I’m gonna look you up. That’s the fun of networking!

Greg: You bet.

Peter: The stories that you can tell the people that you meet, and when I think about it I think about this one time I was doing a networking program and for a conference, for a group of CPAs, and I made the comment, did anyone bring their business cards today? And out of 40 people maybe 10. I asked the 10, what do you use your business card for? This one woman goes, I use my business card to put in the fishbowls at the vendors to get, you know, the gifts, and I just politely and respectfully said, is that the best return on investment of that business card?

Greg: Well if they get free lunches then it might. Who knows, right?

Peter: [laughs] That’s true. As we’re having this conversation, someone said I don’t bring my business card to these things because it’s just a bunch of CPAs, why do I need to know more CPAs? And I went if you look at one CPA how many people don’t you see? Probably 3-400 people within the network. Everybody knows somebody. This is one of the best places in our profession to network.

Greg: You bet.

Peter: And I think people are starting to realize that.

Greg: And it may be one of way to get a job, too.

Peter: Exactly, and I do want to ask you this question. I’ve had a number of people over the years come up to me and they’ve been in their jobs for 15, 20, 25 years. The company has been bought their role has been diminished and they’re looking for a job, and I hear this all the time. I haven’t networked in 25 years, where do I start?

Greg: Great question.

Peter: What advice would you give this person, or these people?

Greg: Well I would use the same approach I use with the students, only I would elevate it at the professional level and I would start with are you involved with your college alum, and of course most people aren’t. They may not even have a LinkedIn page. I would really try to assess, just like a doctor assesses a patient, I try to assess where their pain is. What they know, what they don’t know, and then I would give them a step-by-step process to help them build on it, but I would focus on, tell me, are you still in touch with any or former employees that may have left the company? People that worked for you or people you worked for? Are you involved in professional organizations? How involved are you with your own place of worship? I would just keep looking for commonality. How about your own family members? I often think about the person who all of a sudden becomes an insurance salesperson, and what’s the first thing that they do? Who do you get a phone call from?

Peter: Yeah, exactly.

Greg: I just I got home late last night and there’s one of our neighbors kids calling me. I just walked in and the phone is ringing so I answered it, better to not answer the phone, and he says Mr. Lainas? I said yes – I won’t say this person’s name – can I talk to you? Sure. What is it? He goes I’m now selling etc. etc. etc., and if I talk to four people I’m going to get some bonus. I said do me a favor, I just got in the door, call Mrs. Lainas tomorrow. I didn’t say like get lost.

Peter: [laughs] Yeah

Greg: I know that’s a that’s kind of a remote example, but getting back to the person who has been the workforce. They have the skills, it’s just they haven’t had to nurture them and they may have waned, so you have to help them with step-by-step to build up their confidence, and you know if somebody’s been downsized, most likely part of the downsize package will give them an outplacement service. That’s a start, but the person who has been so immersed in their career and family, and they have neglected their networking, what I tell them is that when you do learn your next job remember the pain you went through with developing your own network group and help somebody else, and likewise spend time on keeping your network group sharp, and that person will also have contacts just as the college student did. It just takes time, but there’s no magic formula. It’s ask for help and you’ll get help. Now if they are a CPA, I obviously ask them to get involved there with their state society and there may be the ability to post resumes, or maybe to network. In Connecticut we have 6,000 members. When I go to students and other CPAs who are not members I say, why are you not a member? It’s 6,000 members you can talk to. Now all we’re going to be germane to help you–

Peter: Right.

Greg: But those are 6,000 people who know another 6,000 people. It’s not hard, it just takes time.

Peter: I always say, Networking: Take the net- and the -ing out of it and it requires work.

Greg: Very good, very good sir.

Peter: It requires work, and as you have eloquently articulated here it takes a lot of work to develop a network but that work does pay off in the long run.

Greg: You bet, and if you don’t do it will anything become different? No. Here’s an analogy I came up with: Alright, we’re accounts. We tend not to be creative. Of course a creative accountant might end up in jail, but I’m not going there. The thing is, go back to high school days. You need a date for the prom. Now the accountant will say, see if I don’t ask her she can’t say no.

Peter: Right.

Greg: But the person who needs a job is going to say, well I’m going ask her because she might say yes, and once the worse that happens? She says no and I go to the next one.

Peter: Right.

Greg: But imagine if she does say yes how you feel for all those other people who don’t want to ask her. You do ask her she may be thrilled, so the what’s the worst thing happened?

Peter: What’s the worse thing that can happen. And whether you are networking, and you said something earlier on about we have to sell ourselves, and anything we do, no matter whether an accountant, we sell ourselves every single day, and realize that we are salespeople. We might not be selling Clorox or something like that, or some product, but that product that we sell is ourselves.

Greg: An idea, a theory, a position, a recommendation. Numerous things.

Peter: Exactly, and someone recently told me that, as relates to selling yourself and in a sense of indirectly networking, there’s a position, a person left a position and the company would normally post for the for the open position, but they had the ideal person and they put that person in that role and this person said everybody the office went bat crap crazy because we didn’t post, and she said to this group every day you walk into this building you are interviewing and you know what your interviewing skills over the last six months have not been up to par, or even close to par, as this person’s interviewing skills, and that’s why we didn’t feel like we needed to interview. Same thing with networking. It’s, you know, you’re networking, you’re interviewing, every time you’re in front of anybody.

Greg: You know, Peter, along that same line. Talk about the networking, it’s a great way for companies to hire people and it’s great when somebody get a job. It’s a two-way street. I actually got a job offer once from a CPA firm via a CP seminar. Just happenstance the partner came over and started talking to me, and I’ll never forget it was the tax aspects of closely held. What was I doing in the seminar, I wasn’t even CP. One night I get a phone call, and this was early in my career, and he said, Greg, you impressed me. I wanted to talk to you. I didn’t take the job, because in my day you didn’t leave onc CPA firm to go to another, but the fact is that happened. But where I was going to go is you see an ad and it says contact HR, mail your resume. What do most people do?

Peter: They just send a resume in.

Greg: And where does it go? It goes into the abyss.

Peter: Exactly.

Greg: What’s the smart person do? The one that has a little initiative or creativity, I didn’t say creative accounting.

Peter: First I make a phone call.

Greg: To whom?

Peter: To whoever the HR person is that’s in the ad.

Greg: All right I’m gonna give it something else. That’s one step.

Peter: Okay, what’s the other step?

Greg: You know the company, as opposed to a blind ad.

Peter: Oh, right, yeah.

Greg: You know the company and you have a LinkedIn page. Take a couple hours, take a day, I don’t care. Try to find out who the job reports to, because who gets hired by a company, and and this is no disrespect towards HR people please, but if you want to get it done faster you go to the source. So let’s say you find out it reports to Mary Jones in accounting or finance. Now the next thing is you might want to network to see if somebody knows Mary Jones that know someone that you know, etc. Now that may be a stretch to get the buy-in from a party to hand deliver your resume to Mary Jones, but if you have a connection to someone who likes you and trusts you, he or she will take that resume to Mary Jones. Or, to your point, what’s the worst thing that happens if you pick up the phone and you call Mary Jones? Now you can figure out her domain, you can send an email, but email and phone are both the vehicles to go to. Now if she doesn’t access your email, she’s not going to know you emailed her. If she doesn’t access her phone, she’s not gonna know that you called her. And you may get the admin, so you plead your case, and the admin say get me the resume I’ll get it to her. That’s fine, and then of course you can do a trick that I did, of course, is call maybe after five or six o’clock at night or call seven o’clock in the morning when Mary’s at her desk.

Peter: Right.

Greg: I wouldn’t do it the same day. I might wait a few days, and meanwhile you can also send your resume in through the process that the company requires. Now let’s say there are 50 people applying for that job, a hundred, only one person reaches out to Mary Jones. What do you think? Who is more likely to get the interview?

Peter: Right.

Greg: It’s not because you’re technically better, it’s because you took more initiative, and the purpose of a resume is to get an interview not get the job. You get the job.

Peter: Just a thread that’s in everything that you’ve said is doing your homework in essence of learning who Mary is.

Greg: Correct.

Peter: Learning maybe she went–

Greg: She could have been an alumni of your college, you bet.

Peter: And also research the organization and understand how the organization operates as much as you can get off of paper. Do your homework. I love that route that you just took us down and you’re more than likely going to be in front of the decision-maker a lot quicker–

Greg: You bet.

Peter: –than going the traditional route.

Greg: Mary may reject you, say to go through HR, I can’t talk to you right now. Okay, so what? At least you tried.

Peter: But she’s gonna remember you when that resume comes across her desk. Oh this is that Greg guy. Oh yeah, I wonder how he found me.

Greg: Now we all come across people who have incredibly strong intellect, very smart, technically sound, and then we all meet people who have incredible personality that we all gravitate towards. The worst thing is someone smart who can’t talk and the worst thing is all talk and then all form and no substance. You follow me?

Peter: Yeah.

Greg: Those are my work papers by the way. I had no substance or form.

Peter: [laughs]

Greg: But the thing is we all go after and and gravitate towards the hungrier person. Now you can’t teach hunger, you can’t teach desire. Either you have it or you don’t. The thing is it can be maxed out. I mean you could maximize whatever you have, but I can tell you that you talk to all leaders and they’re always going to say I wish my people showed more initiative. I wish they showed more desire, because most likely the person that you’re reporting to had those traits. So if you can exhibit those traits with sound technical experience, not just form, then the chances are you’re going to emerge. It’s real simple.

Peter: You know what I say a lot: it’s so simple, but it’s hard.

Greg: Yes.

Peter: it’s because of that, because the effort and persistence, the amount of work to put into it, but to your point it is so simple. Greg, I can’t, one, begin to thank you enough for your wisdom. I mean everybody, I don’t care if you’re looking for a job, after they’ve listened to this interview on networking they’re gonna be so much smarter, wiser and more creative in their current job search, or beginning to build that wonderful network around them so when that time does come that they need that network they can call it. And you know quite frankly you’ve given me a couple of great ideas. That even my businesses I’m trying to get in front of more people that I’m going to use that strategy, and just know this my friend, there’s another interview with me and you and in the future because we could take this home networking path angle and go even deeper, and I know there’s other paths that we can take.

Greg: I can even tell you how I got into the book. That’s a story into itself. I won’t bore you now.

Peter: We will save that for the next one, and maybe more detail on how you networked yourself into a character into a book. Greg I can’t thank you enough for taking time out of your schedule. I greatly appreciate it. This has been so much fun. I hope you enjoyed it and thank you again.

Greg: Peter it was my pleasure and I’m thrilled that you even asked me to participate.

Peter: Thank you Greg, and we will talk soon.

Greg: Yes, sir.