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This episode gets into the work of keeping great people—and helping them thrive. Rachel Anevski has led HR and Business Development inside firms, advised dozens more and co-authored Accounting for Times: Evolve or Dissolve. She and Rob dig into the parts of firm life we talk about a lot but don’t always fix.

We’ll cover:

• Why “transformation” is real—but the people side lags     
• Internships that market your firm (and what breaks them)
• Micro-learning as a blueprint for faster, better onboarding
• Writing the pitch for CPAs to choose your firm, not just clients
• Transformational and ethical leadership that builds followership
• Remote/hybrid realities and keeping people connected
• Wellness beyond fruit bowls—redesigning work to cut burnout
• The tech shift: are we accounting firms, tech firms, or both?
• Billable hours, project management, and using fractional talent smarter

Why it matters:

Retention isn’t one initiative. It’s how you hire, teach, lead, and structure the work. Rachel offers clear, doable changes firms can start this quarter.

Welcome to the Inside Public Accounting podcast. I'm Rob Brown, your host, and on behalf of InsidePublicAccounting.com, this show is the stories and the personalities behind the numbers. You'll appreciate the surveys and the amazing research that we do here, and occasionally we bring on very special guests that have a lot to say about what's happening in the accounting world. We're thrilled to have with us today Rachel Anevski from New Jersey. Rachel, it's brilliant to have you with us. Hello.

Hi, I'm so excited to be here. This has been a long time coming. I love this podcast and I love that you are here with me this morning.

Well, it's this afternoon in the UK, but we're truly an international show, hence your American accent and my English accent. Rachel, for people that haven't come across you, you've been in this game a long time, but just give us a little bio of your life so far.

sure thing.

A little bio, that's a loaded question. So I had this great job in public accounting ⁓ many, many years ago. I was a scheduling coordinator, right? So I got to see the heartbeat of how public accounting firms worked. I got to understand skill sets and time and billing really, really intricately. And that kind of set off my career in public accounting, I have to tell you. And so I have an academic background in criminal psychology.

and when I worked my first job in public accounting, I went and obtained a master's in organizational behavior. From there, I became a director of human resources and then a director of business relationships and marketing. So that was an early kind of career onset. I oversaw all of HR and all business development for many years for two public accounting firms, one about 20 million in revenue.

and one is Citroen-Couperman. So Citroen-Couperman then was a ⁓ small 300 person firm and now we all know Citroen-Couperman today. And so fast forward just a little bit, both of those firms became my first two clients when I went out on my own and opened up Matters of Management, which was a consulting firm that helped.

an international alliance firm. She's pretty fabulous. That book has done rather well. She went off and got her doctorate and so did I. And so I am almost done and my doctorate is all about transformational leadership and its intent to retain future leaders, future CPA leaders. So that's a bio for you.

That is quite a heritage and well done for fitting all of that into just a couple of minutes. Fascinated to dig into a lot of things here, but let's start generally. Dr. Rachel Anevski, what kind of shape do you feel the accounting profession is in right now?

it's so much fun. That's the shape it's in. It's in a fun shape. So obviously transformation is the, is the buzzword of the industry. Now I feel like it's, it's almost overused. It's, it's chat, GPT overused, but it is transformational times. And, I think you have, you've got all of these little subsets of what's happening in the industry. and really it's business transformation, be it the tech, you know,

and early adopters of what's happening in tech or early adopters of what's happening in PE. And then all on the other side, you have the firm owners that are saying, hey, I don't want any part of all of this crazy fun that's happening. I just want to go out on my own. So we're seeing all of these fractions coming off of what has been a hundred year of tradition in CPA firms.

of these independent solo practitioners happening and then you have some true accounting firms that are bidding the question, what will my firm look like? Right? So what is this evolution doing to the true nature of the business of accounting and why I really went into this industry to begin with?

And you hinted

a little bit at the glacial pace of change in accounting. It's been ever this double entry bookkeeping. I'm a former high school math teacher. I'm a part qualified accountant. So I get the numbers, but yeah, change seems to happen to accountants rather than them driving change. But I want to ask you, you in the management business, you in the leadership business, what do you feel you're banging your head against the wall with? What really frustrates you with what's happening in accounting firms? Let's get that out of the way.

Sure, it's really simple for me. We say we are a people industry and I have seen for some time now lots of things that are not in the benefit of the people. So it is what's driving me in the industry. It's what's kind of reigniting this passion again to say, look, we have had this thread of retention as a problem.

always been a problem and we do a lot of talking about problems and we do very little about solving for them. In an industry that I love and I'm not a CPA and I don't ever aspire to be, but I honor that credential. I think it's really one of the ones that provides stability and safety in the course of our lifetimes. So I appreciate it. But I think that we've kind of lost touch with our reason why.

And it's a lot of competitive environment and a lot of not knowing how to navigate. And if we come back to kind of the true center, which is the reason why we do the work that we do, and the people that we serve both externally and internally, I think we'll really be serving the population in a better way.

I've interviewed Calvin Harris, we talked about him ahead of the New York State Society and a Corey Ramsey when he was chair of AICPA and Mark Koziel who's the current chair and of course Lexi Kessler and Sue Coffey and we've talked a lot about the brand of accounting and how good a story we tell about how great it is being an accountant. Would you agree with me that that's not a narrative we weave well?

So about 20 years ago, I used to walk around saying to partners, 20 of them in fact, why don't you celebrate all of the things you do outside of these walls? Isn't it good to be the king? Right? we know it is about narratives.

So it's about looking at yourself in the mirror and deciding who you want to be. Every day we have a choice, right? So you could be the CPA that shows up and is miserable to do the work or you could be the CPA that chose a profession, a wonderful profession and love what you do and talk and share about all of the relationships that you've built throughout the years and all of the people that trust your decisions and talk about all of the things that you need to learn in this passion for learning and the ability

to kind of take people along with you in this lifetime. Instead, we talk about all of the regulations, we talk about all of the heartache, we talk about how many times we have to retrain people, we talk about all of the problems, and we never talk enough about why it's good to be the king, right? Or the queen, you know.

Well, let's

see if we can right a few wrongs today and you're going back to student life. You're doing your doctorate right now and you're very in touch with the student community. We've had such a lot on the news about how AI and automation and offshore and is killing graduate prospects and internships and it's shutting those down. The inside public accounting data shows that 87 % of firms offer structured internships and more than half of those are hired full time. So take us back to that internship rule. What makes it work?

in your eyes, not just for the firm, but for the students.

Yeah, so I have worked with CPAs all my life. I prepared internship programs. I consult on internship programs and onboarding and all that fun stuff. But this year was a little bit interesting for me because I have a 20 year old son that took an internship at a public accounting firm. So I spent a little time listening and learning from him and then also interviewing some students in internship programs. So for me internship programs do

couple of things. One primarily is market your firm to future CPAs, right? So your internship is only as good as when that person walks away and goes back to the school and to those professors and talks about how good it is, right? So it's a marketing venture and always for me recruiting is people and marketing. It's both of those things we walk together on. It's a sales, know, proficiency if you will.

And they're walking talking billboards, just as you say, Rachel. They are ambassadors for your brand, for your firm, aren't they?

Oh my God. If you get it right. If you get it right. So what we can't do is continue to take a market share of young professionals and sit them in a room, give them 48 hours, two days of training.

training, right? So we sit you in front of a computer and for two days you are going to learn our stuff and maybe you'll meet some of our people that don't do a great job talking about the profession anyway and the people we're going to introduce you to are the people that are heavily being recruited from our firm currently and then we're going to set you and forget you and send out emails to partners saying, there's some interns over there in the corner, if you have any work give it to them.

Yeah.

And

this is what I see, copy, paste, copy, paste, copy, over and And we think we're doing it right. And then at the end of the internship process, maybe we're giving five minutes of feedback and we're giving offer letters, but we haven't spent any time in the middle. We haven't reconnected in eight weeks, in 10 weeks. We have really just said, here we go. And we could do so much better here.

And even at the smaller firms, we could do so much better here. There are a lot of people that, a lot of firms that say, we don't have the work for interns. That's an honest answer. Quite, that's an honest answer because there are a lot of firms that really haven't prepared the work for interns, prepared an internship program and are still taking on interns. And those are the ones that are really going wrong. And those are the kids that are going back to school saying, I don't know if I want to be a CPA.

problem.

Maybe I should change my major. I don't know if this is for me, if all day long I have to sit there and beg for work, if all day long no one's telling me what it is that I'm doing or why I'm connecting to this industry.

And there is a reputation, there, for internships. My daughter's just about to go on one. She's studying in North Carolina at East Carolina University and she's majoring in criminal justice. She's just about to take an internship with the North Carolina State Bureau of Investigation. And she's asking me about internships and I don't want to give her the story that they'll make you do some photocopying and run for the tees and coffers and do the sandwich runs and everything else because it's got to be more than that. But I am mindful of, as an educator,

Yeah, I mean, I think the majority of internship programs have not been looked at in decades. We haven't re-jugged them, if that's a word. Yeah, so I think that it really requires some advanced thinking, especially if the goal is retention, especially if the goal is to create...

Yeah, great.

little people to do the work to get the good work, the knowledge of that quicker, and to get the most proficient so that a firm can make the most money and be the most effective. Right? So those are the goals, but we don't, we're not addressing the goals at the early stages.

Well let's talk about what good looks like. I know you're a big fan of methodology and training and education and getting it right, particularly micro learning and the bite-sized focus training. So what makes that particularly effective? Because in accounting time's limited, people are busy, the technical learning curve might be pretty steep. So what does good look like?

So here's the thing, the people that we're getting in our firms now have spent a lot of time, and we don't think about it this way, but they've spent a lot of time researching their interests. So if they like anime, they have spent lots of time doing this, out anime. If they like cars, they've done a lot of this.

checking out cars and researching it. And we do not recognize that a skill set that these young professionals have is researching and figuring it out. They know how to get the A. Maybe it's not from the way that we got the A, which was studying and learning and reading and reading again and again. They figured out how to get the A by

Googling it by chat, GPTing it by finding an app that for it. So why aren't we using the skills that they've been really working and apply that in our business model? Because if we use that, here you go, here's something really hard to do. Go figure it out. Now we are going to leverage the skill set that they they've built innately, give them a 15 minute.

10 minute, two minute, know, brief on it. There's your micro learning moment. Tell them what you expect them to do. Let them go ahead and learn it. That's your innovation teaching moment about innovation, teaching them how to get creative and build in time to then review it and give them feedback. And right there in that 15 minutes, you have solved all of the things.

But we're not doing that. We're putting them in front of a CCH toolkit online and saying, press play here. And at 2 PM, you have a, you know, meet us in this Zoom meeting or this Teams meeting, and we're gonna talk around you about things you've never heard about and not give you any insight to what you need to be learning. And then we're still gonna go tell you to go knock on everybody's door and say, do you have work for me? Do you have work for me?

And your emphasis on micro learning is really pertinent. My other daughter is a kindergarten teacher. She's just coming into her second year and she said these kids don't have any attention span. So she has to plan her lessons Rachel in small five, seven minute blocks. Because if you tell a kid something in two or three minutes, They're looking out of the window. They can't focus, concentrate for that long and then maybe the generations coming through have a little bit of that.

Micro learning seems very app

Well, here's your five-year-old doing ABC mouse all day, right? You them in front of an iPad and they're doing ABC mouse. so everything is gamified. All of the learning is gamified. And it's this reward system that's going on in their brain. So can you imagine taking 30 interns and gamifying that internship program and saying, here's everybody and this is what you've learned and you have a leaderboard in your internship program.

And then at the end of it, you're celebrating who has accomplished all of the modules, five minute interval modules, and who's been able to build this acumen so that they're better served. And now, what a brilliant model. Then they go back to their firm and they go back to their school and they're all talking about their internship models in their accounting, sorority, fraternity, whatever, club, and saying.

my God, I had the best time. was so much fun. I won this accolade. I learned this much. It was ABC mouse. That did it. Really? I mean, these are simple fixes and it's what they know. Why aren't we leveraging what they know instead of force feeding what has not worked, has not retained.

And it's so slow to change that I'm fearful that if we don't change it soon then we're going to be taking them through a process whereby they're totally in equipped to deal with the world in five years time. So okay let's acknowledge a poor onboarding experience, poor internship experience is a fast way to lose a promising new hire. It damages the brand. You've talked about micro learning as one hack, one way.

Is there another that you'd give the audience here to improve the onboarding, that initial experience, to expose them to the right things and get them really fired up for the journey they're going on?

Yeah, so I think you have to connect with them really quick. And I know that there's a small percentage of firms that do this really well, but the business of accounting has to be used as a tool. It has to be used as an opportunity to learn the why we do what we do. And I think some firms have acknowledged this and built this into curriculum.

but I think that we could do a real better job as part of our culture, as part of our fabric. I you could talk to any accounting firm and ask them why they should be chosen from a client, but can they really discuss why they should be chosen from a CPA?

Right? It's a different talk. It is a sales pitch. It is also about culture. It's also about who we are and what we stand for and what we really live and breathe and do. And so that language hasn't been developed enough yet, but that's certainly something, those two things, like develop the content and your reason why someone would want to work for you, that pro forma, that pitch, if you will, and live it and breathe it. That's your cultural talk.

and culture should be different everywhere. While I know for most firms, it's the reason why you should choose us is because we really pay attention to our clients and we really care about the people. you find that as like a ⁓ running fabric. You can see it in every website. You can see it in everybody's pitch to their rotary, like whatever. But what is it that we say and do for our CPAs? Why should a CPA want our firm?

You have a local firm that a CPA would want, and then you have big four. These are the young professionals, what they're taught at school. And we also really need to kind of wrangle in all of the professors, sit them all down in a room and say, please stop telling people, go to public accounting firms for three years and leave. Please, please stop that one. Find them for that conversation. Do something to stop that. There is a real value. And I think the real...

The real magic at an accounting firm happens in year four to seven anyway. That's the where you become the CPA. That's where you really kind of live the moments of what it feels like. We have to get more people into that space and to do that, we have to talk about business of accounting. We have to talk about our culture in a way that connects with people and we have to really draw people into the why of what we do.

Yeah, it's great that you mentioned the professors, they have a responsibility. I was at the University of Charlotte, North Carolina, talking to some of them and about their internships and the way they prepare their graduates for the world of work. there's so much going on. I want to pivot to leadership, Rachel, because I know this is very much your topic of choice. You're doing your doctorate around leadership. And when we talk about good leaders, it's so difficult to put them in a box and define what makes them good. But we do know.

that people will follow the vision of a good leader. They set an example, they set culture, you've talked a little bit about culture. Can you draw a straight line between leadership style and an employee's decision to stay or leave?

I've been researching this for two and a half years like every day and talking ship every day

Yeah, leadership.

Mm-hmm. So, huh. Okay. So the first thing is I want to I want to pay attention to one of the leaders that I interviewed through my doctorate. Okay. She said to me, no one asked me if I wanted to be a leader. They assumed that I was a leader because I've reached a level of business acumen or business experience in my firm. So it was assumed that I have now I'm a leader because seven years of experience

I've made partner, I've brought in some business, voila, leader. So I think it's important to acknowledge to your point that leadership style is a development. It requires...

Yeah.

some education and experience. While I do believe in the core of who I am, that leaders are born, when you talk about leadership style, that is something that you have to obtain because there's so many. And the reason why I chose transformational leadership as opposed to all of the variations of leadership is because in public accounting, there's succession plan. There should be.

succession plans, right? We should do better job at succession plans. But if we invest in developing future leaders in our firms, we're doing two things. And that's the premise of transformational leadership. We build skills that can be emulated for future people to follow, right? So if we teach current leaders how to lead future leaders,

And then if you give them the type of training that helps other people learn how to lead, then now you've built this ecosystem of people who want to stay with you and want to follow you. And for sure we understand at a very basic level that leadership only happens if you have at least one follower, right? But lots of people will say, I'm a leader, I'm a leader, and they look back and there's no one there.

So we need to build a model where people want to follow. They want to be impressed by that person. They want to listen and learn and then become what they're seeing. So it does take practice and it's mindful practice of how we do this. And we're coming off a period of time where I feel like

training and leadership, leadership training specifically, has been put on a back burner because we've been talking about succession for so long. And what's happening is when we're failing to kind of relook at this model of bringing the people along with us in this environment, we're missing huge opportunities.

There was a preach in my church recently about followership. I it's okay having good leaders, but you've got to be good followers too. Jesus had good followers. He created a worldwide movement. We interviewed Jeffrey Weiner. He's a former CEO of Markham, led them into the merger with CBIZ and obviously 1.3 billion and growing. So he had some great stories to tell about the traits of leaders in driving firm culture.

They set the tone, they adhere to the vision, the values, they set the examples. That's a key part of it, isn't it?

it certainly is. one of the emerging characteristics in my doctorate was ethical leadership. now so ethical leadership is an actual term. It's different than the ethics we teach in our CPA societies. It's different than what is required. It's modeling a certain type of behavior. And while I'm on that topic, I just want to go back. There is a Ted talk about the first follower. And I talk about this all the time. And leadership is really glorified.

we always are talking about the leader. And I think it's really so much more important that we talk about the first follower, that person that takes that leap of faith to say, I hear you leader and I agree with you because it needs more than one person. really does.

What

about the dancing on the hill at the festival?

Yes, it is my favorite TED talk of all

Yeah.

Yeah, it's fantastic. So how to start a movement is the name of it. Any of you listeners, how to start a movement, TED Talk, fabulous leadership skills. But in terms of ethical leadership, the way that we teach ethical leadership is we hold people accountable for when they show up in a positive ethical way, and then we celebrate that and we emulate that. That is ethical leadership. It's morality and it's integrity.

It's all of those things and oftentimes you'll see in the value statements of CPA firms and we value integrity we value this but how do we really see that showing up in our firms? So some of the ways that we could do that and and celebrate it in a way that we want more people to follow is when you have a great experience with a client or a client sends an accolade and talks about a CPA or when a CPA talks about how they were able to help

do specific things or how a team helps a client do specific things. So more kind of internal work. This is like panel talks. This is doing conferences and conventions for your firm internally so that we can continue to progress and say this is how we want our people to look like and the way that we make sure of it is our leaders look like this. So be this.

Is that challenging though Rachel when we're in remote environments? It's much harder to drive culture if you're not walking the corridors and bumping into people by the water cooler and having those more intimate moments.

Yeah, so I have personally chose in my own profession to not be a remote solution. I like people. I like to have those water cooler conversations. I like to have awkward moments of silence so that things that can bubble to the surface can get there. It's just me. There are other people who have...

certainly shown that either via their circadian rhythm or who they are or their personal experiences or personal environment require remote experiences. And so we're living in this hybrid universe and I think you have opportunity all over the place with this. In the setting of kind of like conference style or how people show up, I think there's great ways to bring in large groups of people remotely.

⁓ I certainly have participated in lots of conventions that are both at home and in person. It's harder to engage or stay engaged when I'm home and all of what's happening is there. But it doesn't mean it doesn't.

it doesn't exist. There are ways to incorporate your at home people or your remote people. It again takes a little more planning, a little more proactive thought, mindfulness. How do we make sure that we address everybody? And sometimes I think what's happening is lazy or priority takeover, you know? And so, and the way that we see this on the people side is at least that the people at home are

really kind of suffering or being left out of moments or being not promoted as frequently as those people that are showing up on staff and maybe the learning is a little bit different. But you know there's something also to say about your freedom and your ability to work whenever you want, however you want. So we're you know we're we're in it, we're in the thick of this environment, I don't see it changing much, we just do still need to get better at it.

but I'm hearing you that connectedness creates culture and it's difficult to get that when you're remote. I'm mindful of the people that think that technical skills is just enough to get you where you are but we're moving into an age where we talk a lot about advisory and the downward pressure on compliance fees and what was valued by clients years ago is that historical look but the clients are now wanting a more future forward thinking approach. Let's talk about commercial

Acumen business awareness. You're very big on this, aren't you? And you help firms to develop this.

I do. you know, they're, again, so I don't write curriculum. I talk about curriculum, but I don't write curriculum. not an LND person. I'm a leadership, you know, I talk about leadership. So...

I think when I look at leadership programs and I look at business acumen programs and we have this emphasis of technical, you you have to have 40 CPE every year and you have, you know, there's all of this, these requirements.

I think that early on in my career I saw a curriculum model that took people through this life span of early career models. So from internship to partner. And there's different subsets of learning, left side, right side, brain learning. So when we bring people into public accounting firms, we say all you need to do is learn.

That's the skill set we want you to have. We don't test this, by the way. We don't test people coming into the industry on their ability to learn, how they learn. We don't. just, we say, this is how we teach, so you have to learn it.

We know they can

learn. These people have done degrees and past qualifications so they know how to learn presumably.

But how do they learn, right? So there's a whole, there's three different ways, typically adults, because now we're talking adult learning, right? So adult learning theory says we learn three different ways, right? Visual, audio, kinesthetic. But most of the time we're not developing our curriculum based on that. We're not addressing the individual people. And individualized training is really connectivity. And firms have the ability to do this. ⁓

it does take some bandwidth, does take some developing. So we have this model of the first three years, you just have to learn, but then we take people from learning and say, you have to teach. We don't teach them how to be teachers, we expect them to be teachers. So we go through this model and then after they've been around for a little while, we say, now we're gonna flip the switch on you just one more time and we're gonna say, okay, enough learning, you've got it.

on the technical side, just some updates we'll do for you for the rest of your life. And then you've done enough teaching, although you have to teach for the rest of, you know, for the next 40 years in this place. And by the way, you have to sell and you have to lead. And we also don't teach that switch.

and present and persuade and influence and all these things.

And negotiation and communication and I mean there is a list that came out of this doctorate of all of the types of trainings that existing leaders wished they had so that they could give back so that future leaders had that.

Rachel, we're asking too much of the modern day accountant. You're talking about all the things they need to equip themselves as leaders, but we haven't even talked about technological skills and not necessarily writing code, but knowing more than how to turn a computer on and off and prompt engineering and all of these things and mastering the myriad of software that they've got at their disposal. There's a lot we're asking of the modern day accountant.

Yeah, right. Are you an accountant or are you a technologist or are you both? And so that, you know, that of course is the evolution of where accounting is going. And that's, that's the conversation that our seasoned leaders in, in, ⁓ midsize firms or small firms that want to stay independent are asking, am I still an accounting firm or I'm, am I a technology firm that sells an accounting service every so often? Right. So,

So I do think that, you I mean, and you see these firms, even Saks just popped up a technology firm. You see firms talking and moving towards this area that we need to kind of be dual experts in. There used to be a certification. I don't see it that much anymore. The CITP certification, so CPAs then getting the technology certification on top of it. I actually thought that in this environment, we would see that CITP being like blown out of the water, like everyone wanting to be CITP.

but I don't see it that much anymore. But I'll tell you, I think that we are a little bit of both. I think that we are asking a good amount of people. But the call to action then is what are we doing? What are we doing to support that then? Cause that's the retention piece. If we don't do something to support all that we're asking of them, then they're going to leave. They're going to leave now quicker than they've ever left before. Cause then they'll find

something that makes more sense to them. They'll go to a technology firm or they'll go and start their own firm, but they won't stay at the firm that's not willing to develop, train, support and love them.

Yeah, we had that a lot during the pandemic and quiet quitting and people leeching out of the accounting profession to go into tech and go into industry. I want to talk about, you mentioned the word support there. We've got a hit burnout here. Public accounting feels it. We hear a lot about busy seasons and stress. Inside Public Accounting data shows 51 % of firms now have some form of a wellness program, but it's sometimes service level. saw a firm's website recently that talked about a

free complimentary fruit bowl as if that was really going to move the dial on retention. So what does real wellness support look like particularly when the performance pressures as accountants is still very acute?

Yeah, so I love this chat and I think that firms are getting into this. Although you'll see some senior leaders be like, come on, know, what is it? How do they say? The inmates are running the show.

the lunatics are running the asylum or something like that.

Yeah, so you'll have people who still say that and no one will understand why we bring ice cream trucks to the firm on the hottest day in the summer or all of these things or why we have an IO professional, an industrial psychologist on staff or why we're giving divorce attorney support, all of these things. ⁓ And there are firms that are doing kind of all the things and some firms that are doing a little bit of the things. I think it's really simple.

individualized attention. We have to know our people. We have to know what drives them. We have to kind of address this model of burnout. Why do we really need people to work 13 weeks a year at 65 hours a week? Why do we need that? What is it? What is the solve, right? So if we, so the firms that are getting project managers are brilliant firms that are getting people who understand the engineering or the technology or the psychology are saying, Hey, like

We don't need a CPA to have all of these skill sets. They don't need to be everything to everybody. If we identify the skills that we require and then portion out who does what, this is organizational development, right? So this is kind of where my background is. Then we're solving these problems. We're taking away the pieces that are a stretch to the CPA. We're taking away the pieces that they don't want to do.

the problems. We're looking at talking about the problems. That's what the industry does best right now. We got to move from that. Yeah, it's old. It's a hundred year old conversation.

Talk is

Well, I'm just thinking how long we've been talking about billable hours and time sheets and the futility of those and nothing's changed has it?

So just the other day, so two conversations I had the other day, had it, and I think that this is the pitfall of remote that employers don't necessarily realize. When you're putting out remote jobs, you have people on the other end that are taking remote jobs, but also having other jobs too. And that is still happening. Those are real things. I had a gentleman have a $125,000 remote opportunity and a $150,000 in...

in-house opportunity, chose the $125,000 remote opportunity so that he can continue to have his own firm on the side. So you do have those issues. And then I had a managing partner say to me, why can't I hire anyone? All I've told him is that we require 1,700 billable hours a year. I said, do you want me to answer that question? Why are we leading with that conversation? Why is that still the conversation? You might have accountability measures and all of these things, but

How are we remarking on quality of work? there's so many other things to value. But these are real conversations. are two days ago. These are real conversations that are happening still in the majority of our firms. What we've done as an industry lately is we're talking about 100 % of the time about 10 % of what's happening in the industry. It's crazy for me.

Listen, mean, you this is what we do. It's news. First thing I Yeah, I mean, but that's what we do. we're glorifying things in the industry and we're not talking about some of the things that have been talked about that we haven't solved for yet.

Well, I'm wondering what it would take. It would take a lot in the education sector, my heartland, to change the curriculum and the exam, the emphasis on exams. So what would it take to shake up the accounting profession so there's no busy seasons and there's no 150 hours and we take away these barriers to entry that people get so upset about. Is that even possible?

It's so possible. ⁓ my God, it's so possible. And it's, it would be so fabulous to do. And I think that there are some firms that are doing it. Those are the firms we need to celebrate, highlight, talk about. That's where, you know, we need to be spending our time. Of course it's possible. Look, you have one year ago, two years ago, you had, you know, 10,000 fractional executives in the world. Now there are 90,000 fractional executives. Most of them being,

CFOs. Go ahead, ask the question.

Well, how come they're all CFOs?

Oh, well, because they've taken the CAS model and they've kind of produced it for themselves and they've realized why do I want to give 65 % to a firm when I can make 100 % for myself? But here's the thing. The thing is, here's a great opportunity for public accounting firms to plug and play those extra hours. You don't need the same person to do the same type of work.

you could shut your, you could actually have two shifts. You could actually have, you know, people who are working remote from four to 10. You could, you could incorporate instead of utilizing outsourcing as just because everybody else is doing it, you could really leverage an outsourced team, an overseas team for strategy for your firm to make sure that the meaningful work that happens at the top level happens.

You no longer have to teach kind of basic skills training. You could teach advisory in a way that's never been taught before. There's so many different ways to do this that would be cost contained and help people feel really valued because meaningful work is the missing piece on value, right? There's your connectivity back to a leadership development and a retention model. These are all simple fixes.

Rachel, it's wonderful talking to you. You have a beautiful blend of the practical and the inspirational because it seems so out there, but yet you make it very pragmatic and doable. I want to ask you one last thing before we go with everything you see going on, the talent gaps, the leadership trends, the crying out for wellness and good examples, good leadership, the culture challenges. I asked you at the beginning how bullish you were about the accounting profession, but

Where truly is your hope coming from for where we're heading on the accounting ship?

Oh, well, first of all, I have to say that I love this industry. I love the people in this industry. I love the problems that they solve for other people. My hope is that.

We pivot just a little bit and we really solve for our people, our community, reignite the passion so that young people have a desire and a passion to want this safe environment, this exciting environment. CPAs kind of rule the world in terms of how influential they can be for businesses. And we really should be celebrating that in a way that's not so insulated.

My hope is that the next generation reignites this passion for what a CPA is supposed to do. That is my hope. I see that happening a lot in people like ⁓ Yuri, the fun CPA, and there's so much.

change happening and people talking and you just have to kind dial in. So my hope is that we all kind of get on this, know, Randy Crabtree's mindset of empathy and moving forward and kind of celebrating who, you know, the nature of the industry. And I could drop a million names of all of the people that I just am addicted to watching and learning from.

But my hope is that more just happens more. It's infectious, this kind of the love and passion for what CPAs do.

Well, you're

a wonderful ambassador for the brand of accounting. We're all trying to do our little bit to move the dial. Rachel Anevski it's been a joy to have you on the show today. Thank you so much for sharing your passion and your insights.

Thank you so much for having me. It's great to talk to you Rob.

This is the Inside Public Accounting podcast. Sometimes we focus on the numbers, sometimes we focus on the stories behind the numbers, sometimes we have personalities that are shaping the profession and doing their very best. It's just been a delight to shine a light on your world and have you shine a light on what's good, what's challenging about the profession and just a couple of words to finish. Good time to be in accounting.

yeah, fun time to be in accounting, awesome time to be in accounting, exciting, all of the words, all of them.

We'll see you on the next episode of show. If you've got questions for us, then reach out to us on whatever platform you see us on. Thanks for sharing the show and looking at it and tuning in and going on the journey with us. We'll see you next time on the Inside Public Accounting podcast.