Change Your Mindset

My guest this week is Bret Johnson, Director of Channel Management and Development at the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants (AICPA). For the past 20 years, he has worked to build partnerships and grow businesses, especially in the learning space. Bret was hired by the AICPA to focus on partnerships and business development. His team looks for different routes to market, handles licensing, works with publishers and grows state society relationships. “Anything that we create in number learning and competency, my team helps to take up.” The Director of Channel Management and Development did not exist at the AICPA until Bret was hired in February 2014. “Even though Channels is a practice that has been around a long time, in a lot of cases, it’s sort of a little incubator inside of a different organization. You could say I’m in constant startup mode.” Bret’s biggest challenge at the AICPA is internal education. “There’s a certain amount of fear when it comes to working with partners. You have to t