Change Your Mindset

Only 8 percent of CPAs believe that the profession is future ready, according to CPA.com’s study Welcome to the Fast Future. This is a rather concerning statistic because the future is coming, and it might be closer than you think.   Bill Sheridan, Chief Communication Officer at the MACPA, is on the front lines trying to prepare CPAs for the future, and he recently published a new white paper that every CPA should read: Human Work in the Ages of Machines: Five Steps for Building a Future-Ready Finance Team.   Basically, the paper asks what happens when more and more of the things that accounting and finance professionals are trained to do are being done by machines, and what does that mean for our profession?   Because these technological changes are going to happen whether we like it or not, there's nothing we can do except learn how to do the things that machines can't do and work with them (or go out of business).   We have to go beyond being just number crunchers and become number interpreters; we have t

We’re doing something a little different today: Peter shares his favorite places to eat all over the country. He was inspired by former guest Clarke Price, who keeps a record of every restaurant he visits and often suggests new places for Peter to try.   New Orleans: Gump Shop - GumboShop.com Mr. B's Bistro -  MrBsBistro.com The Pelican Club - PelicanClub.com K-Paul's Louisiana Kitchen - KPauls.com Drago's Seafood Restaurant - DragosRestaurant.com   The Greater Baltimore Area: Cunningham’s - CunninghamsTowson.com Gachi House of Sushi - GachiSushi.com   Bloomington, Minnesota: Ciao Bella - CiaoBellaMN.com - Best Customer Service Award Read Peter’s article about Ciao Bella’s customer service   Seattle, Washington: Purple Cafe and Wine Bar - PurpleCafe.com   Bellevue, Washington: Seastar - SeastarRestaurant.com   Atlanta, Georgia: Canoe - CanoeATL.com One Flew South - OneFlewSouthATL.com   Charleston, South Carolina: S.N.O.B. (Slightly North of Broad) - SNOBCharleston.com   Nashville, Tennesse

Annie Conderacci is a change management consultant and a passionate student of improv. She studied and performed improv at The Second City, Annoyance Theater, and IO Chicago, and she performs improv and sketch all around the city. As a change and management consultant, Annie frequently uses her improv skills to facilitate growth and positive change in organizations. Throughout the interview, she does an outstanding job of describing how improv can be applied to business, and discusses how you can use improv to defuse difficult situations. Annie fell in love with Improv the first time she saw Second City – she went to business school in Chicago so that she could also take classes. She was first drawn to the culture of imperfection. When she saw that you can make mistakes sometimes, and you don’t have to be perfect or even scripted, something clicked. As she moved up through the levels at Second City, it got more challenging… but it never stopped being fun or supportive. One of the most important lessons that s

Byron Patrick, Managing Director of CPA practice at Network Alliance, is a nationally-known industry thought leader and a multi-recipient of the CPA Practice Advisor's 40 Under 40 award. Byron has been an active member of the Maryland Association of CPAs since the beginning of his career, and he credits much of his professional success to the support and membership of the MACPA. Personally, I know I wouldn’t be where where I am today without my local association, and I wholeheartedly agree with Byron – The benefits from volunteering at your state CPA Association (or any professional association) are endless, and the financial and personal investment you make will pay for itself many times over. Too often, CPAs don’t want to participate with their association because they look at membership as a cost, when really it's an investment in your network and career. When Byron was chair of the MACPA’s young professional network, his message was to be selfish – get involved with the association. These relationships an

We’re talking to returning guest Greg Conderacci, the energy management expert who wrote Getting Up!: Supercharging Your Energy and, at the age of 66, rode his bicycle across the United States in just 18 days. In Getting Up!, Greg writes about the important difference between time management and energy management. Doing more, and living a happier life, isn’t about having more time – It's all about having more energy. We don't get any more time, but we can all get way more energy. Throughout this three-part series, Greg discussed four types of interrelated energy, which you can remember by thinking of P.I.E.S. Physical energy is the ability to just get up and get going, and it’s the type of energy that a lot of people focus on... but it’s the least important of them all. Intellectual energy is what people usually get paid for. Do you have the energy to solve puzzles, solve the problem, meet these needs, etc. Emotional energy is the one that often causes the most problems. In episode 46, we discussed the “ene

Tom Hood, CEO of the Maryland Association of CPAs and the Business Learning Institute, is on a mission to help CPAs make sense of this changing and complex world. Tom and I spoke on the third episode of this podcast, in June of 2016, and a lot has changed in that short period of time. We discuss how technologies like blockchain, artificial intelligence, and cloud computing are impacting the accounting profession (and the world), and how CPAs can begin transforming themselves into Anticipatory CPAs. What is blockchain? Tom says that blockchain is best described as the Internet of Value. Using secure peer-to-peer data, blockchain basically conveys transactions of value with multiple parties to, effectively, create a public ledger. This is a real example of a supply chain using blockchain technology, which may help you understand how it works in practice: There’s fishermen in a boat off the coast of Malaysia, and they have smartphones. When they catch a tuna, they use their smartphone to take a picture. The pho

Karen Eddington is a comedian, speaker, researcher, and the author of Understanding Self-Worth. She uses her experience in stand-up comedy and improv to teach laughter as a form of self-care.   For 15 years, Karen has researched identity to look for patterns and create original solutions that help people “Under Pressure.” Although The Under Pressure Project started as an effort to understand the biggest pressures faced by teens, it has grown into a mission to heal the most universal and dangerous experience we all share.   The one thing that we all have in common, which Karen describes as “the most universal and dangerous experience we can have,” is mental isolation: The times we feel alone in our mind because we feel diminished, flawed, or excluded   The best solution for getting through this terrible but universal experience is to develop a support network, and anyone can learn how to create supportive communities by practicing comedy.   Comedy vs Pressure   While Karen was researching The Unde

Debbie Peterson is a certified trainer of neuro-linguistic programming (NLP) and mindset expert who works with companies to increase bottom line results through greater clarity in communication and in leadership. We discuss how you can change the story that you’re telling yourself to transform negative self-talk into a positive thought process. We all suffer from this, at times, but Debbie provides proven strategies that will help change the dialogue in your head. Neuro-linguistic Programming One of the most important skills that Debbie learned was neuro-linguistic programming. After she went to NLP training, she figured out how to think differently in a way that changed her career, and her belief system about herself and what she was capable of. After discovering that positive mindset shift, she wanted to help others do the same. Then, one fateful night, Debbie woke up with an idea formed in her mind: Getting to Clarity. She rushed downstairs, secured the URL, and the rest is history. The Stories We Tell Our

Chris Shirer describes herself as a devoted champion of all things food, beverage, and guest experience… and she got my attention at “food!” Chris is the Founder of two companies: Madison + Fifth, a marketing agency, and the recently-launched JoinMyTable, a new platform for prepaid group dining created to encourage community and increase our time spent in real world conversation. JoinMyTable is a fascinating and unique concept: people who want to go out for dinner can pre-purchase off-the-menu dining experiences online with everything included (tip, tax, and any fees). Then they can invite people to join, and all of this is from a web-based platform. The idea is to bring communities together over dinner for some good conversation, without technology or the usual hassle of going out. This could be a group of your friends or your team from work, but the real gem is bringing a like-minded community together to make new friends and have good conversation. It took five years to get to this point because they neede

Bob Dean, Founder of Dean Learning and Talent Advisors, returns to the show to talk more about virtual learning. Our conversation is framed around ThinkTank, collaboration, and an article that we wrote titled “The New CPE: Collaborative Learning Experiences.” Bob works as a practitioner consultant using ThinkTank, a collaboration-as-a-service software company. By providing a collaborative structure to the way people work together, ThinkTank enables leaders to transform business processes and create a culture of collaboration, innovation, and engagement. Bob recently facilitated something remarkable: a (successful) virtual collaboration experience with over 100 people from around the world that lasted 90 minutes – and he did that four times in one day! Not only was his experience a feat, it benefitted both the client and the participants: It was all people ages 27 to 30, so all millennials, and they really embraced the virtual collaboration experience. In a live group, you may not get everybody's thoughts or

Today our guest is Patrick Donadio, MBA, CSP, and MCC. For the past three decades, he has guided leaders and their organizations with powerful presentations and one-on-one business communications coaching. In his desire to help leaders grow their people, Patrick has taken his decades of experience and crafted a results-based process for his new leader’s guide, Communicating with IMPACT, focused on improving communication, increasing profits, and boosting performance in less time. Patrick’s process, The IMPACT Model, outlines The Six Keys to Communication. As you go through these six keys, think about which one is a weakness for you and try to pick up a couple of tips you can put in practice tomorrow. The IMPACT Model I is the intention. What's my intention for this conversation? What do I want the person(s) I’m communicating with to think, do, or feel after we've met? M is the message & the method. How do I craft a message that's going to help me achieve the intention I have for this communication, and what

Chris Jenkins, CEO of the South Carolina Associations of CPAs, joins us today to discuss how you can better engage an audience of any size when you are speaking, and to discuss how we can improve association management. Although Chris is a technology guy – we originally met when he served as the Chief Information Officer at the Ohio Society – he believes that Associations, and business professionals in general, are relying on technology far too much, and using it improperly. Professional organizations need to re-emphasize, and re-facilitate, face-to-face human relationships. Chris has always had a knack for engaging large crowds of people, but he used to struggle with small group interactions. Partly due to technology, we have lost the skill to connect with people one-on-one – because of this, Associations and businesses need to offer more professional development opportunities for soft skills. Elevator Training Chris learned to engage people one-on-one through an unconventional training exercise: he was lock

Today’s returning guest, Karl Ahlrichs, is a human capitalist consultant and a far-thinking and future-planning individual. Back in episode five, we discussed some of the storms he sees coming on the horizon, particularly where HR and the next generations of employees meet. In this episode, we once again look to the future of human resources. Although our current economy is far greater now than it's been in a while, Karl sees quite a few potential problems on the horizon that we need to be better prepared to tackle, in addition to some opportunities. What’s are the big things on the horizon for employees and HR? Workers in the U.S. are very productive, and that’s what keeps our stock market alive. The volume of people working isn’t changing very much, but the volume of what we’re producing continues to climb because we’re leveraging technology and new processes. The scary thing is that it’s not going to be applied to every industry (e.g. coal industry is in trouble, but natural gas is booming). We’re going

Today’s interview is love at first improv. Allison Estep is a former Creative Services Associate for the Indiana Society of CPAs and a graduate of the conservatory program at Second City in Chicago. Our conversation focuses on the everyday application of improvisation skills to help us combat fear, take risks, work as a team, and become a more well-rounded person. Allison strongly believes that every person should take an improv course at some point in their life – it’s simply a great way to learn valuable life skills, like listening, managing your ego, following fear, and working as a team. As a matter of fact, improv games were originally created by Viola Spolin as a teaching tool. Getting up in front of people (in any situation) can seem like such a scary thing for people that have never been through an improv class, or don't know everything about the practice, but it's a little less scary once you realize everyone is part of the same team and everything doesn’t have to be a joke… and sometimes the most mu

Today’s guest, Jason Michaels, is a professional entertainer, speaker, and author with astounding experience in the arts of deception. A storyteller by heart, Jason loves to blend impossible mysteries with unforgettable tales. Diagnosed with Tourette's Syndrome at the age of six, Jason overcame the impossible and became an award-winning sleight of hand artist and professional speaker. He motivates audiences to see beyond their challenges and self-imposed limitations and inspires them to take action by living bigger bolder lives with his keynote program and book, You Can Do The Impossible, Too! Jason's also performs The Card Shark, a true story of scams, cons, and hustles. It is a one-man, autobiographical sleight of hand show that dives deep into the world of confidence men, fortune tellers, and charismatic magicians. If you’re not familiar, Tourette's syndrome is a neurological brain chemical disorder that manifests itself by what doctors refer to as tics, which are basically uncontrollable movements or vo

In this episode we are talking to Clarke Price, a retired CEO of the Ohio Society of CPAs and the very first guest on this podcast one year ago. We discuss how the prevalence of social media (and the decline of respectful debate) creates new challenges for leaders and we provide suggestions on how you can overcome these challenges to provide strong leadership in your organization. The Ohio Society’s record of innovative leadership during Clarke’s tenure was recognized by the American Society of Association Executives when the society was selected as one of nine remarkable associations that were part of an extensive nationwide study of successful associations The American Society of Association Executives’ publication, Seven Measures of Success: What remarkable associations do that others don't, featured the Ohio Society of CPAs as the only state-based membership organization profiled in the seven measures study. Social media fervor is making many organizations far too risk-averse. Organizations are fearful t

Today we’re pulling back the curtain to reveal the Wizard of Pod(casts), Cody Boyce, Founder of Podcast Masters. Cody and his team produce podcasts for entrepreneurs, small businesses, and other organizations that want to create brand authority, connect with an audience, and sound great doing it… including this one! We discuss why podcasts are a powerful medium, for both hosts and listeners, and how the industry is likely to change over the next few months. One of the most important pieces of podcasting, which a lot of people don’t think about, is its potential for lifelong learners. People who listen to podcasts are consuming so much information that can help them be more productive, do their job more effectively, be funnier, and countless other things. The list is constantly growing – there are 1,000 new podcasts (shows, not episodes) on iTunes every week! Part of the reason that podcasts are so effective for lifelong learning, and what makes the medium so unique, is the freedom. For the audience, podcasts

Today's guest is Allen Lloyd, the new CEO of the Montana Society of CPA's and the former Senior Manager of the Board of Executive Operations at the Ohio Society of CPA's. In this interview, you will learn how Allen employed principles of improvisation to build trust, create new opportunities, learn new skills, and grow as a leader. We also have some fun (and learn a little bit more about two-way communication) by playing an improv game! You can find instructions to play that game with your team at the bottom of this post. Allen started his career in accounting as an Executive Assistant. It’s been a long, strange road from the offices of Norman, Jones, Enlow, & Co to the mountains of Montana, but a lot of his success came from being willing to improvise, try new things, and listen. It’s important to remember that Improv isn’t making stuff up. It's going into a room with nothing but walking out with something because you collaborated on an idea. Allen really understands how to be an active listener and collabor

Today’s episode is about something very close to me: diagnosing, managing, and informing others about Diabetes. I was diagnosed with Type 1 Diabetes later in life, and my son was diagnosed at the age of 16. We were lucky that I was paying attention, knew the symptoms, and took action quickly… but everyone isn’t that lucky. Cathy Paessun, Executive Director for the Central Ohio Diabetes Association and former Executive Director of the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation, is on the show to discuss how we, as a community, can learn the information necessary to recognize potential symptoms and adapt appropriately. First we will highlight the similarities and differences between Type 1 and Type 2 Diabetes. Type 1 and Type 2 Diabetes are similar in that both suppress the effectiveness of insulin in the body. Individuals experiencing either type of diabetes may also present similar symptoms: Excessive thirst Excessive urination Excessive eating Lethargy Weight loss However, Type 1 and Type 2 diabetes are very di

Today’s returning guest is Gregory Lainas, Senior Vice President and Division Director of Robert Half Management Services, a division of Robert Half International. Greg is an incredible networker – so good, in fact, that he networked his way into the novel Flashback and was the first person in the history of Robert Half to obtain $20 million in gross margin – and this interview is packed with helpful tips and stories about networking for business development. When we say networking, many of you (particularly accountants) might recoil. The concept is simple - it can be as simple as asking someone a question, and with social networking that ask is even easier -  but networking itself can still feel difficult. Why do so many of us still find networking difficult? As we grow up, we find our comfort zones and it only gets harder to leave those zones. If social situations aren’t where you feel comfortable, that can be seem like a big obstacle. There’s a fear of failure. Your inner critic says you can’t do it, ther