As the world evolves, the concept of leadership is evolving as well. And the leaders of today are finding they need new skills to succeed. Jennifer Elder is a thought leader, trainer, and business coach dedicated to the concept of business transformation. She offers programs through the Business Learning Institute about strategic leadership, and she’s going to share about it from a corporate finance perspective. She tells us how finance is taking on a more strategic role in most organizations, w...
Mar 15, 2021•50 min•Ep. 136
If you’re feeling a serious lack of energy in your life right now, know that you’re not alone. People around the world are starting to face this as we move past year one of the pandemic. But there are strategies for moving past this energy drain, and Greg Conderacci is here to share some of them with us. Greg is a senior fellow with the Business Learning Institute, a consultant, and a faculty member at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. He has researched and written extensively...
Mar 08, 2021•44 min•Ep. 135
If there’s one word that describes the past year with a fair amount of accuracy, it would have to be “change.” It’s been a year of unprecedented change, in a lot of ways, and that change impacts each of us — often in ways that are very personal. Karl Ahlrichs is going to help us explore how change impacts us and what we can do to adapt. Karl is a bestselling author and an acclaimed national speaker who works across all industries and has a wealth of experience in human resources, operations, and...
Mar 01, 2021•45 min•Ep. 134
Personal finance isn’t always a fun topic to talk about. But the sooner you start to think about it, the less stress it’s going to cause down the line. Rachel Richards took this principle to heart when she paid her way through college by selling Cutco Knives, graduating with no debt. She took her love of helping people with their finances and her talent for sales and became a financial advisor, but her heart wasn’t really in it. She found the world of investment properties and worked that until ...
Feb 22, 2021•35 min•Ep. 133
We have spent the past several years talking about the exponential advancement of technology and what it all means for our profession. Most of those conversations tend to gravitate toward the public practice side of the profession, but today we’re taking a closer look at how those advances in technology are impacting things like financial reporting, cybersecurity, auditing, assessments, and other compliance-related issues. Because tech trends are impacting those things just as heavily as any oth...
Feb 17, 2021•38 min•Ep. 132
There are some big changes taking place at the Business Learning Institute. Tom Hood, now the former president and CEO of the Maryland Association of CPAs and the Business Learning Institute, is the new executive vice president of business growth and engagement for the Association of International Certified Professional Accountants — the global arm of the American Institute of CPAs. Before Tom closes out his time with the MACPA, we capture some of his wisdom so that we can learn from it going fo...
Feb 08, 2021•36 min•Ep. 131
George Willie is a managing partner with Bert Smith & Company, a CPA and management consulting firm with offices in D.C., Baltimore, and the Virgin Islands. He has served as chair of the AICPA’s Private Companies Practice Section and the Montgomery County Employee Retirement System Board of Investment Trustees, and is also an immigrant originally from Jamaica. He has some great stories to tell, and some great insights into the CPA profession’s efforts around diversity and inclusion, the impo...
Feb 01, 2021•41 min•Ep. 130
We’re approaching the third wave of Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) relief, and while we’ve seen these before, there’s good reason to be prepared for what’s new this time around. Erik Asgeirsson is the president and CEO of CPA.com . Joining him is Lisa Simpson, who leads the American Institute of CPAs’ Private Companies Practice Section in the development of practice management tools that address topics that are most important to firm owners. They talk about where we stand with this latest rou...
Jan 25, 2021•26 min•Ep. 129
There are so many changes being made in the world of finance. Many of them could be seen coming, but due to the pandemic, those changes are being made much faster than anyone could have guessed. Wayne Slater is the director of product marketing for Prophix, which helps mid-market companies achieve their goals with innovative, cloud-based Corporate Performance Management software. He talks about the accelerations that are disrupting corporate finance, how businesses have had to shift in order to ...
Jan 18, 2021•40 min•Ep. 128
Allen DeLeon is a founding partner of DeLeon & Stang in Gaithersberg, MD, and is one of the most active volunteers in the Maryland Association of CPAs. He’s a member of the boards of directors for numerous community organizations and he has a solid pulse on what’s going on in the profession. Allen retired at the beginning of 2021, and as he steps away from his day-to-day duties, he talks about how things have changed during his career, and how he sees the future playing out for the professio...
Jan 11, 2021•41 min•Ep. 127
John O’Leary is a thought leader, a world-renowned speaker, and best-selling author of “On Fire” and “In Awe.” When he was a kid, he burned himself really badly—he suffered burns on 100 percent of his body. Doctors gave him a 1 percent chance of survival. And yet he survived. Not without some issues. He spent months in the hospital, he had numerous surgeries, his fingers were amputated—all of this around his 10th birthday. But he survived, and he persevered. This has been a wildly difficul...
Dec 28, 2020•27 min•Ep. 126
What’s happening at the state level that might have an impact on the accounting and finance world? There’s a lot that’s going on in state capitals across the country that bears watching. Here to talk about all of this is Tom Hood, the president and CEO of the Maryland Association of CPAs and the Business Learning Institute. The issues we’re talking about today are things that Tom is watching in Maryland, but these could be issues in any state in the nation. Nearly all states are either dealing w...
Dec 14, 2020•25 min•Ep. 125
Cheryl Duvall is the Consulting Practice Area leader for Gensler’s Southeast Region, the renowned global integrated architecture, design, planning and consulting firm with more than 5,000 professionals in 50 offices worldwide. Cheryl talks about the nature of work, what our workspaces will actually look like going forward, whether or not we will need offices in the future, how leadership is changing as a result, and the skills future-ready leaders will need to develop. To learn more, and for the...
Dec 07, 2020•50 min•Ep. 124
What we do isn’t who we are; we are all something more than our job. So, what’s that thing that really defines us? Our guest John Garrett, for example, is a CPA, yes. AND he’s an author, a standup comedian, an Emmy Award nominee, and a thought-provoker — he’s a lot besides just a CPA, and he’s encouraging all of us to find our “and” too. He recently wrote a book on the topic — “What’s Your And? Unlock the Person With the Professional” — to teach others how sharing your personal passions im...
Nov 30, 2020•30 min•Ep. 123
As with pretty much every other trend out there, this pandemic has acted as an accelerator for cyber threats. This was a big problem before COVID-19, but it’s an even bigger problem now. And that makes this week’s conversation particularly relevant, and it’ll likely only become more relevant over the coming months. To help us get ahead of this unsetting trend, we had a conversation with Scott Fleszar, chief operating and strategy officer for SafeSend . SafeSend’s mission is to accelerate the tax...
Nov 23, 2020•34 min•Ep. 122
Joe Biden is the president-elect of the United States of America, but the future of America’s tax policy is going to largely depend on the way a few remaining Senate races turn out. There are a lot of questions about how things will turn out, but Ed Karl is going to try to clarify a few things. Ed is vice president of taxation for the American Institute of CPAs, a member of the Maryland Association of CPAs, and he’s got a good sense of the tax situation in our country. Ed joined us not long afte...
Nov 16, 2020•34 min•Ep. 121
Twyla Verhelst is one of the top 50 women in accounting. She is head of the Accountant Channel and leader of the New Accounting Professionals Program at Freshbooks. She’s also a CPA and has deep personal experience in advisory accounting, so she knows how to leverage technology and create high-value client experiences. We’ve discussed the need to create the “Future-Ready CPA,” and Twyla has a different term for these CPAs of the future. Twyla believes CPAs and accountants have to stop thinking o...
Nov 09, 2020•29 min•Ep. 120
The world of financing touches everything—including sports. Jeff Goering is the CFO of the Baltimore Ravens NFL team. He talks about how life as a CFO for an NFL team differs from your typical job in finance—and the ways in which it doesn’t. He also discusses the impact COVID-19 is having on teams, how corporate finance has changed in recent years, and how the role of the CFO has changed right along with it. To learn more, and for the complete show notes, visit blionline.org/blog . Resources: ba...
Nov 02, 2020•54 min•Ep. 119
Diversity and inclusion is important. If we want to future-proof our careers, our organizations, our profession, it has to include diversity, equality, and inclusion. Anoop Mehta is president of Science Systems and Applications in Lanham, Maryland. It’s a leading provider of scientific research and development, engineering, and information analytics services in the Earth and space science disciplines. He is also a former chair of the Maryland Association of CPAs’ Board of Directors, and a curren...
Oct 26, 2020•50 min•Ep. 118
Byron Patrick is a chameleon of sorts, changing his specialty with the times and staying ahead of the curve. He’s a good friend of our host, Bill Sheridan, who met him in 2006 as the Director of IT for KatzAbosch in Maryland. He had just created a virtual office for the firm in an online virtual world called Second Life. Virtual space is a great place to teach and learn, and other platforms have come along since then and proved it right. Byron was thinking about this concept long before anyone e...
Oct 19, 2020•32 min•Ep. 117
Alexander Hagerup is the founder of Vic.AI, a strategic partner of the MACPA and the Business Learning Institute. Alex is a serial tech entrepreneur based in New York with a strong passion for artificial intelligence. Alex joins us to talk about A.I., and how far we’ve come, and where we are now in terms of the automation possibilities that A.I. gives us. And maybe most importantly, why CPAs should be paying attention to this, and what this technology will do for us that will improve our lives, ...
Oct 12, 2020•26 min•Ep. 116
Ed Kless is senior director of partner development and strategy at Sage, a senior fellow at the VeraSage Institute, and the co-host of the Soul of Enterprise podcast. Ed believes that so much of the leadership advice available out there, in hundreds of books on every topic imaginable, completely misses the boat on what great leadership is about. And that, to Ed, is “Healing Leadership.” Ed shares with us what that term means, how most people are getting it wrong, and how you can learn it and pra...
Oct 05, 2020•28 min•Ep. 115
Financial performance isn’t the only metric of value we should care about, so why is it all that we report on? We’re living in a different time. We’re working for different organizations that are impacted by different issues, and we need financial reports and tell different stories and communicate different values than those of the past. Integrative reports intend to fix this problem by including factors in addition to financial performance: reliance on the environment, social reputation, ...
Sep 28, 2020•38 min•Ep. 114
There are some important changes coming to the internet in the form of top-level domains. These are the parts of a website that come after the dot in a domain name. There are seven original top-level domains, which were created in the early days of the Internet — .com, .org, .net, .int, .edu, .gov, and .mil. Today, the number of top-level domains available has exploded, and now, .cpa has finally arrived, and it is one you will want to pay attention to. Like everything else with the profession, t...
Sep 21, 2020•37 min•Ep. 113
With the upcoming elections fast approaching, we are going to make a level-headed comparison of the two candidates through the lens of their tax policies. How does each candidate differ when it comes to their ideas about individual and corporate taxes? Joining us to discuss the topic is Tony Nitti. Tony is a tax partner with RubinBrown in Aspen, Colorado. He also teaches the graduate tax programs at both the University of Denver and Golden Gate University. He writes about tax issues frequently f...
Sep 14, 2020•49 min•Ep. 112
Ron Baker has been a vocal evangelist in favor of the concept of value pricing—the idea of charging based on the value you provide, rather than on the amount of time you spend providing it. He has spent more than 20 years trying to convince people in the accounting profession to throw away the timesheet, but now he’s come to the conclusion that there’s something else that may work instead—something he calls the subscription model, “Value Pricing 2.0.” It’s a completely different business model, ...
Sep 07, 2020•37 min•Ep. 111
The skills involved in mastering improv are the same critical skills for becoming a great leader. Peter Margaritis is a CPA, a thought leader with the Business Learning Institute, and a comedian doing stand up in his free time. He knows all about improv, and more importantly, how it connects to CPAs and finance professionals. Good leadership requires connecting with and listening to others, being in the moment, being flexible, and following our intuition, and Peter is going to tell us how all of...
Aug 31, 2020•38 min•Ep. 110
With so many people working from home, companies are being forced to re-examine how they measure productivity and input. Is time spent in front of the computer really the greatest factor for measuring employee contribution? Jody Thompson co-created the Results-Only Work Environment system, or ROWE, in 2003. Since then, it’s gained global traction and has influenced the cultures of countless organizations around the world, and we’re seeing a resurgence of it now as more and more companies adopt r...
Aug 24, 2020•41 min•Ep. 109
11 years ago, when Sebastian Terry was 24 years old, he lost a friend. The sudden death shook Sebastian to his core, to the point where he re-evaluated his own life and asked himself, “Am I happy?” His answer was, “No.” Sebastian started looking for more happiness in his life. He wrote down a list of 100 things that he thought might make him happy — 100 things that he wanted to accomplish and that he thought might bring him a sense of joy — and as he started crossing things off his list, o...
Aug 17, 2020•28 min•Ep. 108
With everything that’s going on in the world today, it could do us all some good to spend more time on positivity. Gretchen Pisano is co-founder and CEO of pLink Leadership, a group that combines strategy, leadership development, and coaching with a focus on the “link” between the practice of positive psychology and better business results. She’s a professional certified coach, she has a master’s in applied positive psychology, and she’s a student of the teachings of Barbara Fredrickson and Bren...
Aug 10, 2020•55 min•Ep. 107
