The CPA Profession’s Next Era Requires Intention

Brian Blaha, CPA
Strategic Insights for Today’s Firm Leaders

After more than 28 wonderful years, I made the difficult decision to step away from my position at Wipfli in September to embark on a new career journey. While I’ll undoubtedly miss my time with the firm, stepping away has afforded me valuable time and space to evaluate accounting firms and the CPA profession in a much different way. It’s allowed me to get super curious again—a true testament to the old adage that you need to give yourself space to think, ideate, doodle, and meet new people.

As I begin this new era in my life, I can’t help but relate it to the new era the profession is entering (e.g., technological advancements, evolving standards, talent and pipeline challenges, increased CPA responsibilities, etc.). During this transitional period, I’ve been fortunate to have additional time to focus on areas I believe will help firms—and the profession—successfully grow and prosper. In my opinion, it starts with setting intention on four key areas: culture and leadership, relationship building, ownership structure, and technology and artificial intelligence (AI).

CULTURE AND LEADERSHIP

Culture has always been important to me. Throughout my time at Wipfli, for example, I was a champion for what we internally called the “Wipfli Way,” which was built and refined over the years using principals from educator and author Stephen Covey, American animator and producer Walt Disney, and the Arbinger Institute. Getting to know people in an outward mindset manner where we truly care about others’ goals, challenges, needs, and desires was a critical pillar in our culture.

While maintaining, sustaining, and evolving culture can be a challenging and daunting task in this fast-paced and change-oriented world, it can’t be left up to chance. To survive, culture needs:

• A North Star: Employees need a rallying cry that roots their work in a sense of purpose.
• A passion for people: People need to matter to each other. This helps everyone fit their skills and passions to the work that needs to be done.
• A well-defined system: Culture is a living, breathing organism, and it needs to have a definition. Importantly, leaders need to constantly be committed to defining it.
• Purpose, communication, and modeled behaviors: Culture doesn’t survive on its own—it needs to be purposeful, communicated over and over again, and modeled by leaders on a daily basis.
• Continuous learning: The needs of our customers and employees are changing fast, so it requires us to ensure our cultures encourage curiosity, a desire to learn, and a space for experiential learning.
• Accountability: People perform to what’s measured. Culture markers should be defined, discussed, measured, and documented in performance reviews to ensure accountability toward the guidelines.

RELATIONSHIP BUILDING

There needs to be time on the calendar for true relationship building. Most of our interactions tend to be superficial and masked by what we need from people, typically in the moment. However, true relationships grow from below the surface level, where meaningful conversations and interactions reside. I’ve been amazed by all of the people (both past colleagues and clients) that have reached out to me to reconnect after I left Wipfli—they seem to truly care about my well-being. They’re excited to share the work they’re doing and introduce me to others they’ve met along the way.

These interactions have caused me to reflect on my own past relationship building efforts. Well, it turns out that I haven’t always done a great job at this, as my focus has usually been on the task at hand. Yet, I know that continued personal and organizational growth comes from the relationships that are made and talents that are shared. Therefore, if we can find more time for genuine and deep relationship building, even greater things can occur.

OWNERSHIP STRUCTURE

You can’t go anywhere in the accounting profession today without hearing about private equity (PE). There’s no doubt that PE investment in our industry has accelerated the discussion about the future of the profession. It’s opened corporate governance and ownership structure options and opportunities, fueled investments in transformation, created new incentive structures for partners and employees alike, and, of course, it’s brought a new wave of consolidation.

Options in ownership structures are providing for a new age in our profession that includes:

• Traditional partnerships.
• Majority-owned PE models.
• Minority-owned PE models.
• Employee stock ownership plans.
• Hybrid options.

Of course, not all alternative firm structures and strategies are the same. Firms (both large and small) must ensure the strategy aligns with the firm’s long-term vision of transformation in key areas, such as culture, strategy, growth, go-to-market plans, and operational processes and systems, to name a few. Ultimately, the focus needs to be on building value for the business and its people.

TECHNOLOGY AND AI

Technology transformation will continue to revolutionize the accounting industry. The accelerating adoption of generative AI is fostering innovation across our client service delivery processes and platforms. Innovation is occurring through start-up entities as well through our traditional technology partners. In fact, through my own AI research, I met with a firm that automated their preparation of financial statements by leveraging public company filings and firm specific data. This decreased the time spent on financial statements from weeks to hours!

The impact of this technology is truly amazing and will help shift CPAs’ value proposition from preparation to analysis and insights. It’ll be incumbent upon us all to learn, be open to change, and leverage new business models to take advantage of these new technologies to propel the profession to new heights.

While I can’t be more bullish about the future of our profession, it’s important to recognize that we all must grab the bull by its horns in our own way. To truly take advantage of this new era in the profession, we’ll need to be intentional about our cultures and leadership, how we build deep relationships, how we create governance and ownership structures, and how we embrace technological changes.

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• What the Future of Accounting Really Needs: If the accounting profession is to remain relevant to future generations of workers, changes in work-life balance, diversity, and pay are needed now.