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What does it take to move from diagnosing accounting’s talent challenges to actually fixing them? In the finale of IPA’s Rewriting the Story of Accounting series, Chelsea Summers and Rob Brown turn the conversation into a practical action plan for firm leaders.

They discuss why firms should improve the employee experience before rewriting their recruiting materials, how AI and offshore capacity can create more meaningful early-career work and why unanswered candidate questions should be treated as strategic feedback.

They also explore promotion transparency, internships, earlier student outreach, local pipeline development and the role firms, associations and individuals can play in changing the profession’s story.

Learn more about INSIDE Public Accounting: https://insidepublicaccounting.com

Because the profession doesn't need one national campaign. It needs hundreds of local ones. And I think this is actually where smaller firms have an advantage. You could adopt one high school, one community college, one student organization, show up consistently year after year in your own zip code. A firm that owns its local pipeline never has to compete nationally for talent because the students in that community grew up knowing them.

Welcome back to INSIDE Public Accounting, the podcast where we give you the data and we interpret it for you too. I'm Rob Brown here with Chelsea Summers. Today we're wrapping up our series on rewriting the story of accounting.

It's hard to believe we're at the finale of this already. The series started, I think, with a bold claim that the profession's biggest problem doesn't have to do with the pipeline, but it's the story that we tell about who we are and what we do.

Yeah, and we're so excited. We're in the middle of the accounting profession and we speak highly of it, but not everyone does. And it's a great career to be in. So we're trying to shine a light on that. And as we move into this season two here, instead of just one-off episodes, we're Netflix style. We're collecting key topics and wrapping series around them so we can go a little bit deeper. And let's just take 30 seconds to remind everybody where we've been with this mini-series, Chelsea. Episode one was the perception gap. We talked about the difference.

Between what this profession actually offers and the outdated picture that's in most people's heads. So we tried to write that wrong. Then I did a bonus episode on getting personal about personal branding and how we can all tell a better story if we've got a better platform, we're more visible, we're more vocal, we're more bold in what we talk about. So a personal brand helps. Because the story isn't just going to get rewritten at institutional level, it's almost conversation by conversation.

person by person, one professional at a time. So we got to there, didn't we?

Yeah. And then we also heard from the AICPA about what students are actually thinking and hearing on campuses right now. And we went inside the firms themselves and talked about the cultural shift that is already happening. those changes to busy season, flexibility becoming more of a baseline, and transparency becoming the thing that makes everything else credible. I keep coming back to something that Alex Romero told us in that interview. The pipeline is improving.

but we're not done with that work yet. And today's episode is about what that work actually looks like.

Yeah, and if you've not checked out the interview with Alex Romero, you can see the light shining out of her eyes. When she talks about the young people coming into accounting, she's in completely the right job for her. So we've spent this whole series diagnosing. As always on this show, we move beyond diagnosing into practical implications and interpretations. So today's gonna be a little bit different, Chelsea, isn't

Yeah, today is nothing but prescription. If you're a firm leader listening to this, my goal is that you walk away with things that you can actually start this quarter, a to-do list.

And when we say firm leader, Chelsea and I think that everybody leads in a firm, even if you're an introverted and you feel at the bottom of the line, you're influencing clients, you're influencing policy, you're you you're talking to people all the time. So we can all consider ourselves to be a leader and an ambassador of the brand of the profession. So we're going to walk through this in four parts, step by step. First of all, talk about what firms can do to change the experience of accounting as a career inside their walls. That's great for retention and attraction of talent.

We'll talk about what firms can do to reach students and young people earlier. We'll talk about what the profession as a whole needs to do at any level, above any singular firm or person, and then we'll close with the fun part, which is what this profession actually looks like if we all pull in the same direction and we actually get this right.

Yeah. Get out your pencil and paper to get ready to write your to-do list and let let's get into it.

Yeah, okay, so part one. changing the experience inside the firm. This is the engine room of the accounting profession. Obviously, there are accountants in industry and in and in business, but we're talking about private or public practice. Chelsea, I want to start with a challenge you gave us before we hit record and and you said that firms have an order of operations, but they've got it backwards. What did you mean by that?

Yeah, so most when most firms hear we have a story problem, their instinct is to go and fix the marketing, to create new recruiting brochures, better social media posts, a nice careers page. And I do understand that instinct, but I think it's backwards. You cannot market a story that your own staff don't corroborate.

Yeah, staff are the great ambassadors because they're living it out every day. They're the great storytellers, they're on the front lines. we've talked about in our episodes on culture, this generation compares notes out loud. They're very vocal, they're visible, they're having conversations, they're sharing things all the time and and they gossip and there's a grapevine.

Yeah. And candidates don't just listen to your recruiters. They talk to your second year associates. They read reviews online. They text their friend who interned with you last summer. So if the experience inside the firm doesn't match the story on the website or the story the recruiter is telling, then the story loses every time.

And I've done some work with accounting firms, Chelsea, on employer brand and specifically answering the question, why is your firm a great place to work? And some firms stop at putting on their website, we are a great place to work, but there's no evidence for that. And you can make all the claims you like, but the the best evidence is your own staff saying, not only is this a great place to work, this is a great profession to be in. So what's the step to solving that one? Some kind of honest audit?

Yeah, you need to sit down and audit the first two years of your staff experience. Not the recruiting materials and what they say that that experience is, but what it actually is. What does a new hire actually do in the first 12 months? If the answer is repetitive, low judgment work with nearly no client exposure, then that could really be a problem. That's the thing that generating the bad story in your brochures and your recruiters are not going to fix that.

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These people are reading all the time how AI is taking the grunt work and the drudgery out of accounting. And if you're still thinking you can lock them in a dark room and hope that they'll stay there in the in the hope of making partner in a few years, they're not gonna stand for that anymore. And here's where I think firms actually have more tools at their disposal than they used to, because the the technology conversation, the offshore conversation, all of these give firms a real way to change.

that first year experience and expose them to more interesting things.

Yeah, and I think this is one of the major points of this whole episode. Firms are already adopting AI and building that offshore capacity. We've covered both of those topics extensively on the podcast, and we're gonna come back to both of them in the future. But most firms frame those discussions as a cost and capacity move. Very, very few firms have connected that to the talent story.

That's so insightful. now that you mentioned that, I I don't hear anybody talking about that. Tell us more about that disconnect.

Yeah. So if AI and offshore teams are absorbing the high volume repetitive work, then by definition, your domestic junior staff have room to do other things. The question is whether you are intentional about what that something else is. I think the firms that are getting this right are deliberately pulling staff into client meetings, into advisory conversations, into judgment-based work.

Years earlier than that traditional model allowed.

Yeah, so the action item here isn't go ahead and adopt AI. A lot of firms are doing that too with varying degrees of success, but the action item for you here is decide intentionally what your junior staff will do with the hours that AI is given them back.

That's it. Because if you don't decide on purpose, those hours just get absorbed into more of the same. And you spend all that money on technology without changing the career experience at all.

Yeah, so we're saying here the technology has the capacity to change your productivity and your profitability, but also the way your talent thinks about what it's like to work there. So now let's hit the questions that the candidates are asking. They're looking from the outside. Chelsea, in the culture episode, you said vague answers used to be good enough, but now they're a red flag in the recruitment world.

Yeah, and I think I'll take that a step further. Every question a candidate asks that your firm can't answer with specifics is an action item. Write them down. What does a realistic week look like during busy season? How is performance actually measured? What does it take to make a manager? And how long does it typically take at this firm?

Yeah, and if the answer's fuzzy, that's information too.

Yeah, if the answer is fuzzy, I think one of two things are true. Either you have an answer and you haven't bothered to articulate it, which is fixable in a month or even within a meeting. Or the honest answer is bad, in which, congratulations, the candidates just handed you a strategic plan.

Yeah. And we can't allow candidates to make up their own choices. We we've got to make that decision easy for them in giving them the right information. So I love the way you frame that. If if the candidates are giving you a strategic plan, you've got opportunities there.

Yeah, they're doing free consultation in every interview. The firms, I think, just have to be humble enough to listen to those questions and the non-answers.

Yeah, it's valuable feedback. So the last piece of this segment is the promotion path. This is the internal conversation. This came up again in our culture episode, Chelsea, and it came up again in our in the conversation with the AICPA and the pipeline. Advancement in this profession has traditionally been, well, opaque is a word for it. Dark arts, mysterious.

Yes, and

and that opaqueness reads as bad news. So this generation assumes that if you won't say something out loud, it's because the answer is unflattering. So action item is to say it's it's simple, but it's really hard to do is that publish your promotion criteria internally. Alex gave firms a really practical version of this when she was on the show.

Build role-specific competency frameworks, the technical skills and the leadership skills required at each level, and put them somewhere every single person in the firm can open them. Her suggestion was literally on the shared drive. So an intern on day one can see exactly what it takes to become a staff, to become a senior, a manager, all the way up to partner.

Young people want some autonomy and flexibility in their career. They want to feel like they've got their hands on the steering wheel of their own career and it's not just happening to them by sticking around. And Alex also shared something in that conversation, Chelsea, that should stop firm leaders' cold. She said, watch the senior managers, watch them walk away from firms, not because they don't want partnership, but because nobody explained to them what partnership actually involved, what the path was.

What boxes they need to check to get there. And some of them didn't even know there was any kind of buy in or any any kind of options.

Yes. And this is echoes what I've been screaming from the rooftops for a year about the need of transparency inside firms. Yeah. So you've invested a decade developing somebody and then they leave over question that you could have answered in a one hour conversation with them. And Alex went a step further, which I loved. Be open about earning potential at each level. That really used to be taboo in this profession. But people stay when they can see what success looks like, including financial success.

Transparency. Yeah.

You've spoken a lot about transparency, Chelsea. I know it's one of the drums that you bang and and money does come into it. The finances, what the firm's making, how it's making it. You're a an advocate, aren't you, of the people at the top cascading that down and being open about it within the firm.

Yeah. And it doesn't need to be here's the exact dollar amounts that every partner makes, but bans and an understanding of what the upside of partnership looks like, I think is something critical that is needed inside the firms.

Yeah. And the path doesn't have to be a traditional equity track anymore. Non-equity partner, director, principal. There are lots of ways of doing it. Alex made the point. There are plenty of young professionals. They don't want to buy in. They don't even want to go down the partner route. But there are many alternative paths that will only keep your people engaged and in the firm if they know what they are.

Mm, a visible path. That is what keeps your best people because they can literally see themselves succeeding there. But an invisible one is going to lose them.

Okay, so we've done segment one, just to summarize. The real first year experience needs some kind of audit. And use that capacity that AI and offshore teams and any other cost savings are giving you to pull those junior staff into meaningful, purposeful work. They want to buy into the story, they want to be part of something and do that intentionally, do that on purpose, and turn every unanswerable candidate question or bit of feedback into an action item because that's

Wonderful strategic planning for you and make your promotion path visible. That wraps that up, Chelsea.

Yeah, and notice that none of those require a marketing budget. That's all operational. The story improves because the reality improves inside the firm.

And the visibility improves, which speaks to transparency. Okay, part two, reaching the young people, the students earlier. And and Chelsea, I think this is where a lot of firms think they're already doing the work and doing good work. They go up to the the college campuses, they do the career fairs, they sponsor the local accounting society, they run an internship program, but that isn't enough, is it?

No, by the time a firm shows up at a college career fair, that story is already set. The students that are walking past your booth, they've already decided what accounting is years ago. The perception gap that we talked about in episode one doesn't form in college. It forms in high school and probably even earlier.

Yeah. So at the point of decision, recruitment means that firms need to show up earlier. Maybe we could call it the point of perception, when they're starting to form concrete ideas about what a career in accounting is and whether it's worth taking any qualifications or or credits in accounting.

Yeah, I think that's a great way to put it. A 17-year-old picturing cubicles and spreadsheets isn't going to declare an accounting major, which means they're never at that career fair for you to even meet. The firms that win the pipeline long term are willing to show up before there's anything to recruit.

Yeah.

No.

I heard a phrase recently that said, People don't buy what you do, they buy what you solve. They buy the outcomes. If we could talk a lot more to students about the outcomes and the problems that accountants solve and the myriad of ways that they do that and the skills, the opportunities, the conversations, that's a much better narrative. So what is showing up earlier in the conversation actually look like? Chelsea, do you have a a practical example or version of that?

Mm.

Yes.

Yeah, so think we need to get real practitioners into high school classrooms, career days, and community colleges. And I want to be specific here, not necessarily recruiters and not a slide deck about the firm, but an actual accountant telling the actual story that we laid out in episode one, the front row seat to how businesses work, the trust that clients put in you, the range of what this career can really become.

Yeah. They're doing it. And they're living it. They're honest. They're not going to spin it. They're on the front lines. They are the best ambassadors to do that. So let's get them in. And that story would pull a seventeen year old into the accounting profession, not the requirements or the qualifications or anything else.

Right. Nobody is in a high school classroom and needing to hear about exam pass rates. They need to hear someone say, A business owner called me before they called anybody else because I'm the person with the trust with the biggest decisions that they make. I think that lands. And Alex modeled this perfectly in her episode.

No.

She didn't describe what accountants do. She told the story of breaking ground in a new fire station because when she was a director of finance for a city, she put the funding package together to make that happen.

I heard a story recently about an accountant that he had a client that was from Spain. He'd come from Spain and he was setting up a clothing company in his American city, I forget which city it was. but he said this Spaniard called me up one day and he said, Do you know a good fishmonger? And the accountant did. And he said he wasn't calling me for financial advice, but he was calling me because of my network and the people that I know. And we happened to have a client that was that ran a fish.

business and we put them together because he's used to the Mediterranean and the fresh fish and nothing to do with accounting really, but testimony to how accountants are that first call sometimes or the first response to many businesses for all kinds of questions. So that is really insightful. look, I here's why I want to bring in the messenger question because this connects back to the personal branding conversation from our bonus episode.

It does. And

Yeah, good. Because the profession doesn't need one national campaign. It needs hundreds of local ones. And I think this is actually where smaller firms have an advantage. You could adopt one high school, one community college, one student organization, show up consistently year after year in your own zip code. A firm that owns its local pipeline never has to compete nationally for talent because the students in that community grew up knowing them.

an 18-year-old might not believe a managing partner. No offense to those managing partners out there, but they will believe that 26-year-old. Someone close enough in age that the story feels like a preview of their own life instead of a lecture from an entirely different different generation. So action item is to put your younger staff forward as the messengers. Send your third year associate to the career day.

Let your young professionals talk about their actual work on LinkedIn and in their communities.

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Which does a double duty, double purpose, by the way, because we talked about this in the branding episode. The young professionals building visibility also is building their own career. They're building their own profile, their own reach, their own influence. They're building the firm's story, but they're also building their own story and they they go in tandem, they rise together.

Yeah. And as staff who get asked to represent the firm, they feel ownership towards the firm. It signals trust with them. It's a development opportunity disguised as a recruiting activity.

Hmm. And while we're talking internally, let's talk about internships. This is one of the most underrated fixes available to firms, Chelsea, isn't it?

Yeah, the internship I think is the best storytelling asset that a firm has. And most firms are wasting it. If a student spends a summer doing nothing but ticking and tying, you've just confirmed every stereotype they walked in with. And they will go back to campus and tell everybody.

Yeah, the internship isn't just to evaluate and interview the candidate. The candidate's gonna broadcast that to their entire network.

Every intern is a media channel back to campus. So design the internship as a preview of the real career. Put interns in client meetings, even if they're just observing. Let them shadow an advisory conversation. Show them the judgment work, the interesting problems, the parts of this career that made you stay in it. If they see the destination and not just the toll, then the story they tell on campus is going to completely change.

Well, that's good.

So what about the smaller firm? Someone's listening and they said, We're a thirty person firm. We don't have a pipeline team. We don't run a national campaign. We can't get to university campuses. We can't do all of that.

Yeah, good. Because the profession doesn't need one national campaign. It needs hundreds of local ones. And I think this is actually where smaller firms have an advantage. You could adopt one high school, one community college, one student organization, show up consistently year after year in your own zip code. A firm that owns its local pipeline never has to compete nationally for talent because the students in that community grew up knowing them.

Yeah, good. Because the profession doesn't need one national campaign. It needs hundreds of local ones. And I think this is actually where smaller firms have an advantage. You could adopt one high school, one community college, one student organization, show up consistently year after year in your own zip code. A firm that owns its local pipeline never has to compete nationally for talent because the students in that community grew up knowing them.

That's such a great sound by own your own zip code. I love that as a headline for this whole segment. Build a better story, own your own zip code. It's like being environmentally conscious by starting thinking locally and then it will grow globally. You're serving the whole story at the bottom.

Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Yeah. And I think it's achievable. And that's the point of today. This this nothing requires tons of scale. It just requires intention.

Yeah. So that's what the individual firm can do. But some of this Chelsea is bigger than one firm. There are pieces of this jigsaw puzzle that no one CEO, founder, owner, managing partner consultant, no matter how intentional they are. So let's move up a level. What about the profession itself? What what does the profession need to do?

Yes, I think this is important because firm leaders can start to feel like the entire pipeline problem sits on their shoulders. Fixing climate change sits on our straw usage. but I don't think it does. Some of this genuinely belongs to the profession as a whole. And I point to several things that I think can be done.

Let's hear them. Give us four. If you got four.

Okay.

First, the profession needs to tell one coordinated story. Right now, every firm, every state society, every association out there is marketing and accounting a little bit differently. Some lead with stability, some lead with salary, some lead with the credentials. it's fragmented and fragmented stories have a hard time sticking.

That's a really good way of putting it. We're all thinking that we're doing good and doing our own little bit, but it doesn't we're not completing the picture on the front of the puzzle box. We're all just creating our own individual pieces. So the story we led out in episode one was around variety and influence and literacy and stability, all of those great things that an accounting career offers. We need one shared frame or narrative for that.

Yeah, and I imagine if every touch point a student had with this profession, whether a firm at a career day, at a state society scholarship program, or a national campaign, reinforce the same core narrative. I think that is how we move perception, repetition of a consistent story from many different voices. And the profession has those voices, it just hasn't coordinated that story.

And it's a good point you make about repetition because repetition builds momentum and consistency. People need to hear a consistent message coming out time after time. Alex Romero made the same argument when she was on the show. She said if firms are spreading the work and building real balance, then all of us need to be communicating that together. because this work-life balance, this mental health, these career opportunities, we can't be telling counter stories. We can't be muddying the waters.

She brought up the tax season memes and the skeleton at the desk and the jokes about eighty hour weeks. We want to be getting away from them and telling a different story.

Yeah, and a lot of those memes get shared by people inside the profession. We laugh along with them. Alex's point was that every time we do, we're co-signing that old story. a firm can genuinely fix its busy season and still lose the student who saw that meme because that fix happened quietly and the joke happened publicly.

Ha ha.

Yeah, and the work and the story, they travel together, don't they?

I think that's the whole series in a miniature right there.

Yeah, so okay. So what's the second one? We got four here.

Yeah, so reduce the friction at the front door. The cost of education, the cost the extra credit hours, the licensure pathway questions, these are all structural barriers and they're professional level decisions. No in one individual firm controls them, but the action item for firm leaders, there is one. You don't get to sit this out just because you don't control it. Support the organizations that are working on those pathways. Lend your voice when your state society asks. Speak up.

The profession level bodies move faster when the firms behind them are allowed.

Yeah. This is about being vocal so that the people who can solve that problem, they have some momentum, some weight, some support behind.

Yeah, silence from the firms reads as indifference, and indifference slows everything down. So the third thing I think is fund the pipeline collectively. Scholarships, high school outreach programs, educational partnerships, these scale so much better as shared efforts than as 500 separate firm initiatives. A firm might fund one scholarship alone, but a state society pooling firm contributions can fund an entire program.

So I think this is a place where collaboration beats competition because the talent shortage is one problem that every firm shares.

Yes, your competitor's pipeline problem is your pipeline problem.

Yeah. And when a student chooses marketing or data analytics over accounting, every firm lost that person. Nobody won. So it makes sense to treat the pipeline investment as it and not as a competitive activity. Let's grow the pool together and let's compete for the talent afterwards.

Yeah. And the fourth thing?

so the profession needs to modernize what it celebrates. Look at the awards, the rankings, the conference stages. What gets held up is still overwhelmingly technical mastery and growth. Revenue milestones, deal activity, and those matter. I mean, we track them ourselves. But if the profession says culture and talent development are the future, then only ever puts growth on the stage. I think there's a gap there and people are noticing it.

Yeah, and the incentives have got to match the message.

Yeah. And we need to start publicly celebrating the firm that redesigned busy season, the firm that built a genuine high school pipeline program, or the leader who developed people instead of just producing more revenue. What gets celebrated is what gets copied. And that's true inside a firm and true across the profession.

So what I've been dying to ask, and I have asked a few heads of state societies this, and even firm leaders, who is responsible for the brand of accounting? Who owns this? Because in my experience, if everyone owns the story, nobody does anything about it because they all think it's somebody else's responsibility and somebody else will do something about

Yeah, I and I I think it's a challenge. And here is, you know, my opinion. I think the associations and the state societies, they own that frame. They have to reach, they have the reach and they have the coordination and ability to get that shared narrative and work on the structural barriers. But frames don't talk to students. People do. So firms carry that story into their communities and individuals carry it into their classroom visits, their LinkedIn posts, their conversations.

So this seems to close the circle. the whole series really, because the institutions are gonna set the frame, the firms will live out the story and the individuals will communicate the story.

Yeah, I think every level has a job

the failure mode is each level waiting for a different one to go first. The profession waits for the firms to change the experience, firms wait for the profession to fix the pipeline and nothing is moving. So the whole message of today is stop waiting. Every listener has something on that list that's theirs that they can affect.

Hmm, okay. So we've covered what firms can do inside their walls. We've covered how they reach students earlier, get to the perception point rather than the recruitment point. We talked about what a profession can do above the firm level. The fun part, I guess, is let's say all that works. So we paint a picture, five, maybe ten years old, the profession gets this right. What does the future look like?

So let's start with a student. A high school senior hears the word accountant and pictures someone in the room where the decision gets made. Someone, a business owner calls first and they choose this profession because of that story, not despite of it. That alone changes everything downstream because the pipeline stops being a leaky funnel of people talked into accounting and becomes a stream of people who want to be there.

And inside the firms?

I think the culture and the story finally match. The first year experience is genuinely interesting because the repetitive work went to the technology and the humans got the judgment work. Staff see their career path. Turnover stops being a leaky bucket firms pour recruiting money into. And the retention problem becomes a development opportunity because people who can see a future stay to build that future.

Hmm. It's worth mentioning AI here, Chelsea, because we know it's changing the game. It there's a generation out there thinking and reading and watching videos and and deciding maybe whether this profession has a future. And Alex told us that students are genuinely nervous. They're uncertain about it. They see their headlines, they wonder if they're training for a job that won't exist and AI is stripping out those entry level, those starting positions.

Yeah. And in the version where we get this right, AI turns out to be the best thing that's ever happened to the accounting career. Not the thing that shrank it or made it obsolete. The thing that made it bigger. It cleared out the least interesting work and moved everybody up the value chain faster. Ten years from now, the profession tells the story as an obvious truth. The fear that people carried in this decade looks like the fear that people once had about spreadsheets. And that's exactly the message.

that Alex said they're already giving students. AI takes the routine tasks so you can get to the analysis, the insight, and the strategic work faster. The profession just needs to now prove that that message is true.

And there's one more piece of the picture I like to add in. In that future you're talking about, the profession isn't running recruiting campaigns to convince people that it's interesting and it's worthy of their attention. The people inside it are visible enough that the proof is just out there. It it's evidence and I'm often quoting Mohammed Ali, but he said, It ain't bragging if you've done it. And those stories are real. So thousands of professionals telling their own true stories, that's emphatic.

Ha.

Yeah, and I think that's the deepest version of rewriting the story. It stops being a campaign and just becomes a chorus. And here's the line I wanna leave firm leaders with. The firms that win will be the ones that became the best story.

Well, that just tees up this whole series on rewriting the story of accounting beautifully in one sentence. Okay. So let's land this, Chelsea. Give me the start on Monday list. If a managing partner, leader, somebody in an executive position in an accounting firm has heard this, wants to do something, wants to move, what would be first on their list?

Yeah, so one, audit your real first year experience and fix the gap between it and your recruiting story. Two, decide on purpose what your junior staff do with the capacity AI and offshore teams create. Three, write down every candidate question you can't answer with specifics and then treat that as your to-do list or your strategic plan. Four, publish your promotion criteria internally so that the path is a roadmap instead of a mystery black box.

And five, adopt one school, one high school, one community college, one program, own your zip code.

In your zip code. And if you're not going to do this, delegate it because there'll be people in your firm that will want to do some of this. So that's the firm level at the profession level.

Yeah, I think three things. Support the organizations working on those structural barriers loudly.

two, pool your pipeline investment with your state society instead of going at it alone. And three, celebrate the firms and leaders modernizing the experience because what gets celebrated gets copied.

What about the people that don't have a voice or feel they don't have a voice? The the individual listening, they're not a managing partner, they're not in the C suite or the boardroom, they don't set firm strategy, what can they do?

Tell your story. you are the proof. Go back to the bonus episode if you need to know how. But the assignment is simple. The next time someone asks what you do, don't lead with the credential. Lead with the part of the career you'd actually fight to keep. And that's how the story gets rewritten. One firm, one person at a time.

Yeah, and that what do you do question your elevator pitch, or whatever you want to call it. If you give people your job title or your role, that's boring because you're allowing them to put you in a box with every other accountant or CPA they've ever met. And that's not what you want to be. So it you might say I'm an accountant, but let me tell you what my days look like these days and and things like that, but we tell a story. Chelsea, this has been a a great series to build with you. And I love the fact that we're not just bitching and moaning and whining about a problem.

We're interpreting the problem and giving really concrete solutions for our audience and that's where we're going with these series.

Yeah. And to everyone who's listened to the whole thing, sent us questions and shared these episodes, thank you. This conversation matters and I think it's resonating.

Yeah,

we're trying to make a difference. And this series is wrapping up. But the conversation isn't, as Chelsea said, we want to hear from you, your firm. We want to know about what you're doing. If you're reaching or teaching students, redesigning that experience, telling a different, a better story in a new way, leave us a comment, tell us about it. We would love to know that this is landing. And we read everyone in your ideas share future episodes.

And if this series was valuable to you, do us a favor, like the episode, subscribe, follow the podcast wherever you listen, and share this with a colleague who needs to hear it. That's how the story travels.

Yes, we call that the Great Vine, we call it the Rumour Mill, and we can all tell a better story. Thanks for listening to the INSIDE Public Accounting Podcast. We'll see you next time where we'll be digging into the IPA five hundred firms, so stay tuned.

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