Hello and welcome to the Unique CPA with your host, Randy Crabtree. We're committed to creating a thriving community of accounting professionals who are physically and mentally healthy, fulfilled, and energized by their work. Our ultimate goal is to elevate the reputation of the accounting profession and vastly improve the lives of those in it. The Unique CPA is brought to you by Tri-Merit, the specialty tax professionals. Today, our guest is Greg Adams.
As a side note, I'm very excited about this discussion today, but Greg is a senior vice president and chief financial officer of the American Management Association, but the reason I'm excited about this discussion today, and more importantly, Greg is a huge advocate for the profession and recently released a book called Green Shade$: Accountants Aren't Supposed to Die this Way. I have my copy of it. Uh, Greg, welcome to the Unique CPA. Thanks, Randy.
It's great to be with you and I look forward to our discussion. Yeah, I do too. I've actually been telling some people about the book and they're like, Oh, I got to get that. And then I pull up the website and they said, that sounds cool. I got to get that. But all right, before we get into that, why don't you give us a little background of who you are and what you're doing? And then we'll start discussing the profession and the book. Yeah, sure.
Yeah, I'm currently, as you said, I'm Chief Financial Officer of the American Management Association. It's a not for profit educational institution, particularly soft skills, which many of those skills accountants may or may not lack or definitely need. But prior to being CFO of the AMA, and I've been here a little over five years, I did the traditional accounting route. I spent 11 years at KPMG.
I was an accounting major, a CPA, passed the CPA exam, and then after KPMG, I've been a CFO of three public companies and a private company. It's been quite a journey. And, uh, now moving into a not for profit with a very good mission, an educational mission to actually try to change behavior and help individuals at work, and often the skills you learn are at home, in particular, uh, listening skills, which so many, many folks need to work on.
But I only say that because I, even myself, I'm still taking courses. I took a critical thinking course a couple of weeks ago, and you know, one, one major skill is, yeah, listen before you react to something. So it's been a fun journey as a CFO and.
What got me to write this book is I've had all these, you know, almost 30 years plus of experience of Being a CFO and more importantly being the accountant and I was getting frustrated to a degree Of someone would ask you what's your you know, what do you do? They always ask that. What do you do? What do you do? I said, I'm an accountant And I always found myself having to pause and use the but, but I really do a lot of cool things like when I was at KPMG, I was, I was three years in Australia.
How many people get to work in Australia for three years? Nice. I saw so many different industries from, you know, Banking at Citibank, to Pepsico, to a gold mine in the middle of the bush. So, that really drove me to write this novel, Green Shade$. To have a protagonist, a hero, that's an accountant. You know, that solves problems and saves the world.
And so I tried to make the book also not only a fun, you know, crime thriller worldwide, which takes place in Australia and New York City and Barbados and India. I also try to work in what's going on in the accounting profession and what are some useful tools. And I put a lot of those, that information in the exhibits to the book. Yeah, I did notice that the exhibits were there. I want to go back to one thing you said, because I find this interesting when people ask, what do you do?
Because every time someone asks that, I like, uh, well, I'm an accountant. But, and exactly what you just said, I'm an accountant, but I really just go out and talk. And so that still doesn't, I have to have a mindset of what it is that I do. And without a but, I'm an accountant and I do really exciting things that are just so, you know, they're passionate about and it lights me up and that kind of stuff. That's what I need to figure out how to say that. So yeah, exactly.
Then again, that's why I really drove me to write Green Shade$ and have an exciting journey that you can follow this Jack Reacher type character who's in nice around the world as he figures out, you know. What had happened to is one of his closest friends who happened to show up dead on the northern beaches of Australia And he had to figure out how the heck did that happen because he's a good surfer and I don't think he drowned Something happened with that.
Yeah an adventure, you know, there's so many Directions you can go as an accountant so many industries you can go to and we're in a unique situation in that we can We usually have our fingers in everything, and we know what's going around, particularly a CFO or a controller or even an accounting manager. You know what's going on in your corporation, your company, all different departments.
And that is one profession that is probably one of the only professions that you have your hand in almost anything, and you can quickly go to different industries if you want to move jobs. Not pigeonholed necessarily. Let's go a a little deeper into the book without giving things away, just as a, I mean, you, I think you did a good job already, but is there any, because then I wanna go into, we got an idea of how you wrote it, why you wrote it, but just the, give us the synopsis.
And I assume you can do this because you talked about the book and you wrote the book without, without giving us any spoilers. Yeah, I'll give you a little bit of synopsis. So the protagonist, the hero is Derek "Dex" McCord. Oh, cool name. And Dex McCord is a big four, a big accounting firm. Can't say big four, but I use a fictional name. Although I referenced the big four and other large accounting firms in the book. Okay. I'll talk about their personalities of each firm. Dex McCord sends his.
Close buddy, he used to live in Australia, Dex Macquarie, sends his buddy from Australia to India to do a simple audit of an SEC XBRL processing company that creates documents XBRL tags them, and if you don't know about XBRL, the book will explain it, and a lot more about the exhibit, so don't worry. I was going to say, this isn't simple to me, but I'm not an auditor, so So they're barcoding financial statements in India.
Tony comes back to Australia, and like I said, he's all of a sudden He's asked to do something that he's found on the northern beaches of Australia, and the authorities conclude it's a surfing accident. Dex McCord goes to Australia to the funeral, and he starts to uncover facts that, hey, this may not have been a surfing accident. And all of a sudden, he's the one being hunted by the bad guys. Oh. All right. The journey takes him back to New York City.
He has to go down to Barbados to see what's going on there. And it really, it covers so many different topics in the novel because at times I will go back and talk about how did Dex McCord become a good accountant? What skills did he have to learn? Right. His mentor is in the book is a CFO of Edgar, a. SCC Document Filing Company, who kind of helps them and mentors them. And every accountant needs a good mentor. But, you know, the novel is, like I said, it's a financial crime thriller.
But it has all the, I got to put a warning in there, it has violence, has some sexual tension. Oh! That's what you might come across in this journey. Yeah. But it's just a fun, fun novel. But it also has things in there like, what's the pay scale at large accounting firms? Okay. What are some of the key financial ratios when algorithm trades are made, made and, you know, nanosecond trades are made from SEC information? What happens if someone has some SEC information a little bit early?
Oh, look at you. All right. So I know one of the, the, you know, you actually recently wrote a, an article for Accounting Today. And I think, actually I should have put the title here, but I think some, one of the themes of it or the theme of it was soft skills for accountants, right? Or am I Confusing that. I've written two articles recently for Trendlines. One is the importance and the power of soft skills for accountants. And the other is how finance leaders use storytelling.
In particular, storytelling here, in Green Shade$, is obviously the epitome and the big example of it. But, you know, first starting with storytelling, I use the term, actually it's an AMA term, it's a degree that we teach this, we need to learn how to spar with our audience. And as accountants, We're constantly doing that. We don't realize it, but we're constantly doing that.
SPAR stands for There's a situation that we identify, there's an action that has to happen, there's a result that we're looking for. And by the way, oh, oh, I forgot the first one. There's a P in there somewhere. Situation problems. Problem. Got it. Action and result. And so storytelling, you need to sort of start with that and then build on it and how we, we solve those problems.
And as accountants, we're constantly asked to solve problems, so we're constantly asked to make our clients money or save them money or usually impact their lives quite often. So that's a big part of it. So the soft skills storytelling is this one aspect of it. We also need good communication skills, good critical thinking skills, business acumen 100%. And, you know, getting back to the original reason I wrote the book, accounts in general.
You know, there's a perception, there's an image, and break through that image. And I think that image has hurt us in the profession with respect to the pipeline of the number of people taking the CPA exam. It's a bad image. So that needs to change image. And it needs to be, you know, disclosed to the world how cool it is to be accountants. Like, like Dex. Yes, exactly. Dex McCord is a cool accountant. There's a lot of them. So we need to, uh, make accountants cool again.
So maybe I should have a hat like that, right? A Macca, Macca hat. Make accountants cool again. I think we've always been cool though. It's just the perception has not been there of the coolness. Maybe not. I'm very lucky. I get to hang out with a lot of cool accountants like you writing, uh, mystery novels that are pretty cool. So the book though, with Dex, a lot of things that you're highlighting with him is his soft skills, right? And how he's using that to, you know, come up with these.
And again, I haven't read the book, but solve this mystery that he's dealing with. Exactly. So it's a lot of it is critical thinking skills and diving deeper into issues and circumstances and what is happening and trends and then learning about things like, you know, what is the Edgar system and the SEC and if the Edgar system is being played with, what can happen and SEC violates.
And so Dex McCord has to constantly kind of build these skills and deep dive into how are, you know, how are financial traders? How are black box trading happening with financial data? You know, how is quant analytics going on to make investment decisions? Impacted by SEC filings, for example. Right? He has to be able to, uh, explain this to his audience and, and in the novel, I need to explain it to my audience, a lot of the things by, by keeping it in a fun way, not necessarily technical way.
And so it gets, again, it gets back to that storytelling. It gets back to everyday life that accountants have this storytelling usually leveraging. Data, the data will show you the trends and, and now with artificial intelligence, that's a whole nother direction of how we start having the leverage and the trends that go with it.
Yep. And then, so with, you know, Dex and soft skills and general soft skills for the accounting soft skills, I think I had read that this is something that you think that we need to concentrate on more. In the education part of becoming an accountant that this is something that's ignored. We're very good at teaching the technical on that, but the soft skills and I think I read somewhere was maybe in your article where people are valuing the soft skills more than they are the technical skills.
And so you think we're falling short on that? And how do we handle this? Yeah, exactly. I think we are falling short on that. Seems like most of the training accountants focus on and even most of their bosses or the HR departments is technical in nature. And we have the same issue here at AMA where most of our audience is engineers, for example, and accountants. At AMA we have over 30 courses that you can get CPE credits for your CPA that are just soft skills. Nice. Soft skill credits.
So, you know, one solution is to push away the technical skills. That's kind of a given. And even now with Google searches, you can find the answer or other resources or auditors. That's a given. But what CEOs and higher senior managers and the relationships you have at work, what matters most is your soft skills, is your presentation skills, is your communication skills. Like I said, your business acumen, your critical thinking. So I believe accountants need to focus on that.
And Randy, also for your listeners. They can always reach out to me at AMA. I will take 500 off any of our courses for anyone that reaches out to me. Oh, nice. And as a matter of fact, I'll even go a step further and the first three people that contact me, I will give them a free course at AMA and you can get, you know, you get 24 CPEs if you need and our retail value is 2, 500. So it's a good offer for us.
Well, I'm very lucky that this episode won't be coming out for a while because I just signed up now, so I get 24 hours of, no, I'm kidding. I am not going to do that. I will not be one of the first three. I'll wait for the episode to come out before we let anybody know about that. But we'll put a link in the show notes, and I really appreciate that. But those soft skills, I agree completely.
I don't remember who told me this, but I don't know if it was in a session somewhere, or I was just talking to somebody. But I think that's how they put it. You know what? No matter what you do, you're not going to be the greatest technical accountant in the world. Everybody has these skills.
What's going to differentiate you is these soft skills, these leadership skills, communication skills, and these relationship building skills, and that is what's going to differentiate you in this profession, because that's what really puts your personality out there, which is what attracts people to what you're doing. Absolutely. My whole career has been really kind of presented.
Whether it's to the staff, whether it's to the board of directors, whether it's to the community, I mean, all your stakeholders are looking at you sort of to, to be the leader in the room and communicate out what's going on and what's important, what's not important. So the soft skills, we can't emphasize enough. And sometimes I like calling them power skills.
Nice. The power skills are so important to every Accountant out there and it'll change perception because most of the time it internally at your company. Oh, oh, I have to go talk to the Internal accountant and it's almost like a burden. Well, if you can approach them in a very friendly and Exciting way and get them really behind you But what you're trying to do on the situation on the problem and create an action in the result That will help you in your profession, I think, in the long run.
And so, let's just talk, since you're just talking about profession, let's talk about the profession in general. Because we are, you know, I don't know if we call it crisis mode. We are in a situation where we don't have the people coming in that we used to. And we have probably more people leaving once they come in that they have in the past. And so, I guess first, uh, there are other issues that you're identifying, but not just issues then. How do we change this?
Do you have the magic, uh, pill of how we, uh, and perception? I know you already mentioned this part of it, but let's talk about, you know, what is going on that is causing this and then what can we do in your opinion? Right. So yeah, it is very alarming that basically since the turn of the century and kind of when they changed the 120 hour rule, it's been roughly a 40 percent decline, over 40 percent people taking the exam. That is really alarming. And I look at three major factors.
First and probably foremost, and improving a bit, but not there yet, is work life balance. Yep. Now, accountants don't mind working hard. They'll work hard, they have deadlines, they have to, you know, meet their deadlines, and most accountants usually will. But there does need to be a little bit better work life balance, and I think, Randy, you might have even written about that recently, and done some studies about it.
The second in my mind is, um, pay, and the pay scale, I think, needs to increase for accountants, it's so, so important. I'm a little bit more draconian in thought of particularly auditing and accounting firms. That there should be some kind of profit share and revenue share. You know, the private equity guys are coming into our profession for a reason. There's a lot of profits there. So I think, potentially be a little more creative in the pay scale for accounts.
And then the third gets back to that, the image and the branding. Dex McCord, we will count, but you want friends with because, um, you know, the image, the perception of accountants needs to improve. It's not, you know, you and I, we, we know we've been around. It's really got to start the high school and college level. You've got to be programs. I don't want to bam out the AICPA, but you know, they're sitting on 120 million plus of cash. If you look at that in 990.
And I think there needs to be a big campaign, a big branding and imaging campaign at the high school level. You know, maybe it's giving a novel out like Green Shade$ at the college level. I have had some professors that have bought it and reached out to me, and they're working it into their curriculum as extra credit. If you read this book and answer a few questions, they're going to give you extra credit. So they reached out to me. Hey, what kind of questions should we ask our students?
So image is so important. It starts. Really at, you know, lower level and even throughout, throughout everyone's work history It'll encounter people that say, you know I should have been an accountant because they're kind of stuck in a dead end job Whereas as accountants like, you know, I really don't like this industry. I'm gonna move over to the tech industry I want to get into tech industry, even though you might have been in the manufacturing industry as an accountant.
So there's a lot you can do. So we need to brand it and brand an image out, get those salaries up. And it's good to see some firms are starting to put at least some 10 percent increases. I know some of the big four firms are starting to do that. And then lastly, again, that work life balance needs to be there. We can't constantly be in the office, we need to get out and go surfing, for example. Yep, and I honestly think that's a personality issue, not issue, yeah, I'll say issue with us.
It's just the way we think of things and the way we want to help rather than, you know, look at, you know, how we help ourselves as well. In fact, today, I mean, obviously when this gets released, this will have run already, but it'd be on YouTube today. I'm recording a webinar with Hector Garcia, uh, which is prioritizing mental health while preparing for tax season because you and I are recording right now in November, you know, which I think that's still staying evergreen.
I can tell him when we're recording, this'll probably be released in January or February, but it'll be in tax season. But yeah, You know, we want to get people ready. We're in tax planning season. Let's not only just tax plan for our clients, let's tax plan mentally for ourselves for this next tax season. So that we don't come out April 16th, just completely exhausted and burned out, so what are the things we can do?
And I know there's a lot of people doing positive things in that way, but that's that image that we now have to show that, Hey, we are. Integrating technology to help us be more efficient. We are prioritizing work life balance. We are finding ways to shut down at the end of the day, this kind of stuff. And so if we can show that that's happening, I really am. Bullish means positive, right? I am really bullish on this profession. All right, there we go.
Exactly, and actually I think recent statistics are starting to show that the pipeline is starting to build, people are getting more excited. Yep. Yeah, that's a good thing. I think. Yep. For sure.
And I know that AICPA, the pipeline, the survey study that they did, Jennifer Wilson helped out with that, you know, had a lot of good data in there and actually it looks like we're going to try to incorporate the data that you referenced that we did recently on satisfaction levels in the profession in with that survey and see if there's any way we can collaborate on. Getting even stronger data out of there. So I see positive things happening, cool things happening.
Like your book will be a lot of fun for the profession. And I'm looking forward to January when I have my downtime and I can spend it reading the book. I'm seeing so many good reviews online. Then I'm very excited to get this going. So before I ask a couple last questions, anything you want to, uh, um, summarize on what we've discussed so far? Yeah. Just. Just the biggest takeaway, obviously, besides buying my book and give it to your friends and family, particularly future accountants.
The advice I have for most people, whether account or not, is when you're at work, one, go into the office as much as you can be present, because let people see you. And two, when you're in your office, don't sit at your desk, get up, walk around, talk to people. That's how you're going to find out how things are going on. And then.
You'd be able, from there, elevate your career, network properly with individuals, and networking, we haven't talked about networking, but obviously that's a really important thing. Oh, yeah. Even tonight, I'm going, still networking at my age, still going to the New York Society of CPAs is opening a new office. Oh, nice. They're having a reception tonight for their new office, and that's exciting, but things like that, I'm sure I'm going to meet a handful.
Accountants just like me and have a great time and make new friends. So, get out there as much as you can. Yep. For me, relationships are one of the most important things that we, I think, ignore too much because we just concentrate on work, work, work rather than relationships. But relationships is really the key to, you know, I think, mental and financial success. So, yeah, that's important. All right. Two last questions.
And the final one will be, you know, information on where they can get ahold of you in the book and all that. But before that. I'm a big proponent of people are more than their job title. And so, you know, you are CFO, you're an author, but what are your outside of work passions? What do you do for fun when you're not doing all of these work related things? Yeah, probably the biggest thing is softball. Nice. I played baseball in college.
I'm in my young sixties now and I'm still playing softball and you know, it's. Nothing I say more about the game and who wins or loses. It's about the camaraderie. Oh, yeah, I agree completely. Yep. Yeah having a beer with the guys afterwards. So yep. That's one thing I still do besides read I like reading historical fiction and I also like fishing. Nice. I'm a good surfer. I'm a good body surfer But I'm not good surfer. I tried that when I was living in Australia. I tried surfing.
It was a disaster They had to come rescue me half the time Plus, there's all those sharks there. So, and in the book, Dex McCord, he will encounter some sharks. Nice. All right. Well, those, those sound like awesome hobbies. Uh, then lastly, then if people want to, you know, get the book, reach out to you, find out more about what you're doing, where I think we're places they can look. Yeah, take a look. The first one, obviously, is, yeah, Amazon. The book's on there.
Green Shade$ with an S. A lot of people get the S. It's a dollar sign. Yep. But it's not available on Amazon, but also go to my website, which is CPA-Author.com, and you'll be able to see videos. There'll be some examples of the exhibits, like salaries of Big Four accountants. And on there you'll see an email. GAdams@CPA-Author.Com, or you can always reach out to me at the AMA at gadaGAdams@AMANet.org. You know, I would love your feedback, but like I said, so far, the reviews have been great.
It's been, the book also, one surprise has been a lot of companies have bought it in bulk to give for prospecting. Some small accounting firms have sent it to their customers and prospects. Insurance companies, accounting software companies, so. It's getting out there, and I think the reader will enjoy the journey of Dex McCord and realize that accountants are cool. Nice, I agree, accountants are cool. Well, I'm excited, like I said, to read it. I'm also excited, you're motivating me.
I've been working on the book for two plus years now. But it's going to be released in 2025. So now I have to do it because I said it on here. It will be released, but it's nothing like your story. It's more about the firm culture and the importance of it and putting people first. So, all right. Well, Greg, thank you so much for being here today. I'm glad we were able to do this. And again, looking forward to seeing the impact that your book's going to be making on this profession.
Thank you, Randy. I really appreciate it. And hopefully after the book, you'll see us on Netflix and there'll be an accounting hero instead of a cop or a doctor and those stuff. Nice. I want a cameo appearance on that show. All right. Great. All right. Well, thanks. Thanks everybody for listening today. Thank you. Thank you for joining us today on the Unique CPA. You can find the show notes for today's episode. And learn more about Tri-Merit at theuniquecpa. com.
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