Change Your Mindset

I spent 10 years in higher education, with eight of those years at The Ohio Dominican University in Columbus, Ohio. One of the great benefits of being a professor is seeing your students graduate and start developing wonderful careers. Today, I’m excited to be joined by one of my former students, Ashley Matthews, Senior Tax Manager at Rea & Associates. A constant struggle in public accounting is that work is always being added, but never subtracted – and this issue was exacerbated by the economic downturn in 2008. Public accounting practices became leaner and hiring slowed down to a crawl. The result is a gap in experienced senior managers, because there were so few new hires 5-8 years ago. CPAs rising in the industry need to be adaptable and maintain an open line of communication with the people they work for, in addition to their clients. “I found that you have to be stern and you have to mean what you say in order to be taken seriously. People have a tendency to pile on and see how much you'll take, and so