My Journey To and From and Back to Public Accounting
Accountant Kansas City
To truly appreciate any good journey, it’s important to understand a little of the context.
Accountants are often thought of as a cost center; they don’t sell product or build anything salable, so most companies are eager to spend as little on accountants as possible, which creates an opportunity for public accounting firms who can sell accounting help and expertise for less than it would cost to hire accounting experts on a full-time basis. In this arrangement, everyone can win because now companies have access to expertise they could not otherwise afford, and now experts can be valued by lots of companies rather than despised by just one.
CPA Kansas City
My small Tennessee university was not on the radar of any B4 firms, so I had already missed the bus by the time I graduated. Instead, I moved home and quickly accepted a job in the accounting office of an OEM auto parts factory, where I became a veritable Microsoft Excel ninja and quickly learned the monthly and annual cycle and rhythms of an accounting office. After about a year, I landed a tax job at Howe & Company, a midsize public accounting firm in Kansas City..
H&C was a fantastic job in lots of respects. In the four years I worked there, I learned a ton, but to be honest, I always felt like the dumbest person in the room.
I was effectively a cog in the middle of a tax services machine. I was efficient and learned more as I gained experience, but I did not have any visibility to the rest of the process, or to the people that I was actually helping. The 2009 financial crisis put an end to my employment at Howe & Company, but it also paved the way for me to advance in a new role as a tax senior at KPMG.
Accounting Firms in Kansas City
KPMG was an excellent public accounting gig in many ways. Working there, I found out how much I had learned at H&C (which was more than I thought), and I was able to work on many important engagements for impressive companies.
All of that came at a cost, though. Where I had been a small part of a machine before, I was now a marginally larger part of a much more massive machine. This machine was built to run 19 hours a day, and it changed parts (read: people) often due to burnout, which is what led me to leave public accounting entirely for an industry tax department job at Sprint.
Sprint’s accounting machine did not run as fast or chew through “parts” as aggressively as KPMG’s, but it was amazingly large and dumbfoundingly complex. Nonetheless, I was determined to plug in and understand my place in the overall machinery. I joined a cross-functional group designed so that any of the over twenty thousand employees (!!!) at Sprint HQ could meet regularly to understand each other’s roles and generate ideas to improve products, services and processes. I stepped into leadership of one such team, but even availing myself of all the considerable resources to connect and contextualize parts of that machine, it was just too big.
Some folks seemed to thrive in the grind of that hulking machine, but I did not. After three years at Sprint, I raised my hand for one of the several voluntary layoffs and spent the next nine months as a stay-at-home dad.
Being a stay-at-home dad was a unique challenge. For starters, my accumulated accounting skill and knowledge did not help at all. Also, the job did not actually pay any money. However, it was uniquely rewarding in a way I did not anticipate. For the first time in my career, my connection to the people I was helping was extremely clear; my success was tied directly to their success. To my surprise, the piece of the puzzle that had been missing in my other roles began to take shape.
Small Business Bookkeeping Kansas City
After nine months at home full-time, Chad Dodge reached out to me.
Chad was a former manager from Howe & Company who was now running his own small CPA firm in Kansas, and he asked me to come work with him. I recognized that this setting would afford me the chance to take the more hands on approach with people, and accepted his offer.
By being a CPA in a smaller firm, I was able to work directly with clients. Engagements were not mere sets of instructions filtered through my manager; engagements were real people who needed real help. They could reach out to me directly with questions or problems, and I could simply help them.
If someone needed help with a tax notice, I could help.
If someone needed help with QuickBooks, I could help.
If someone needed help reading or understanding a partnership agreement or a lease agreement or some tax law, I could help.
This was finally the right mix, the right balance of complexity and opportunity to connect to the people I was helping. No longer was I the tax form preparation part of the accounting machine—now I was the whole machine. The result was two-fold: clients who were able to connect with a real person who could help them, and I was able to connect with and help real people.
If you had asked me at any point before working with Chad if I would ever consider opening a practice, I would have said “absolutely not.” However, my experience there was priceless, and showed me a different side of accounting that is invaluable. Now, I can not imagine a better opportunity to help and genuinely connect with people.
After four years of working in that “sweet spot,” I realized it was time to make a more permanent change, and I founded Horowitz Tax & Accounting LLC, a small business accounting firm.
Kansas City has many great tax firms, and I joined their ranks, settling on a great location just north of downtown, in Liberty, Missouri. We provide tax and accounting services to small businesses, small business owners, and individuals in Kansas and Missouri, but it goes deeper than that.
There is no shortage of great tax advisors and public accountants and firms who can provide forms, instructions and data (and believe me, there is plenty of data.) A quick search online will pull up a bunch of businesses that will provide you with enough data and information to make your head spin.
We can do those things, too, but our purpose is more specific: We tell the story of your money, clearly and concisely…so you don’t have to.
We aren’t here to send you endless articles about how to DIY Your Bookkeeping, or How To Do This or That on your taxes. That’s not what we’re about.
Instead, you hire us to do those things for you. Sure, there will be documents you’ll need to sign (we offer electronic signatures), and information you’ll need to provide (we use state of the art security to protect your information), but we make it our business to keep things simple and clear.
That’s why you work with us - so you don’t have to wade through all that information. Information overload is real, and there’s no need for it when you work with us. We’ll make sure the “i’s” are dotted and “t’s” are crossed, but we are here free you up to do what you do best…by doing what we do best.
My journey to and from and back to public accounting has been filled with the things that fill every journey, but I wouldn’t change any of it. Every career role, learning experience and challenge, no matter how difficult, has served an important purpose: to bring me here, to this point. I’m glad to be here, and I’m glad you’re here with me.
Tell me something you’ve learned on your own journey in the comments below - I’d love to hear from you!
Warm Regards,
Jacob
