She Counts

What happens when something you love no longer fits the life you need to live? Season 4 opens with Nancy McClelland interviewing her friend and founding co-host, Questian Telka, about her decision to step away from She Counts . Questian shares how burnout, family responsibilities, and financial priorities pushed her to follow the advice they’ve so often discussed on the show. Together, they revisi...

Nancy is joined by Madeline Reeves, founder of Fearless Foundry and creative director of Advisory Amplified, for an uncomfortable but necessary conversation: the ways women sometimes undercut each other in business. Maddy shares the moment a client asked if her proposal was her "PITA fee," and the pattern that followed of being stiffed on invoices exclusively by women. Nancy argues that the real i...

What changes when you discover who you are, trust what you have to say, and recognize the impact your voice can make? In the final episode of our Curtain Call series, Nancy and Theatre of Public Speaking CEO Misty Megia bring listeners two conversations about finding, trusting, and using your own voice. Certified Fraud Examiner Candy Bellau spent her career uncovering deception, but her latest inv...

What happens when the way you’ve always moved through the world stops working for you? Nancy brings Mellisa Miller Furgeson (filling in for Questian) two more conversations from the Theatre of Public Speaking Advanced Retreat. Jean Zick shares how understanding her introversion helped her stop fighting the way she’s wired and start building around it. Terri Warren faced a dramatic reckoning after...

Big changes rarely happen all at once. And when fear has been making our decisions for a long time, even the first small step can feel enormous. Nancy and Questian bring listeners two conversations from the Theater of Public Speaking “Curtain Call” retreat, recorded by Nancy with women whose stories start in different places and arrive at the same realization. Katie Helle spent seven years staring...

Nancy and Questian compare notes on their two very different sessions from Scaling New Heights that turned out to have more in common than expected, leading to insightful lessons about leadership. Nancy's panel on Vulnerability as a Strength started with a deliberately invasive survey she gives accomplished leaders, designed to surface what they never say out-loud; Questian's session on Change Man...

Live from Wave Seattle, Nancy and Questian are joined by conference founder Erin Pohan to put the audience's own definitions of success on trial. Nancy explains why she'd rather work in her business than scale it, even after a vendor once told her she was leaving money on the table; Questian describes firing almost every client to become a firm of one built entirely around nonprofit CFO work. It's...

We all have moments that ask more of us than we think we're capable of giving: the difficult client conversation, the boundary that needs to be set, the meeting where it's time to speak up. It happened to Cassie Divine, too. In two decades leading at Intuit, she discovered that authority isn't something you earn once you feel ready. It's something you access when the moment demands it. Most career...

The need for “executive presence” is the vague phrase that shows up in performance reviews as the reason women don't get the promotion – even though almost no one can define it. Lindsay Patterson, co-founder and CEO of CPA QualityPro, joins Nancy and Questian to strip it down to something simpler and more meaningful: instilling confidence in others that you're the right person for the job. They di...

Nancy and special guest Melissa Miller Furgeson, stepping in for Questian, get honest about the awards nomination cycle in accounting: the longing for recognition tangled up with the dread of asking to be nominated, the fear of losing in public, and the jealousy and imposter feelings most of us have but few admit. They reframe awards as visibility events rather than verdicts, and talk through why...

Nancy and Questian make the case for why conferences can have such impact for women in accounting, and how to get the most out of them when you show up. They share their industry favorites; what they look for when prioritizing certain events over others; how to define and reach your attendance goals; and the mistakes that sometimes keep people from getting full value out of the experience. Whether...

In a special crossover episode with the Unofficial QuickBooks Accountants Podcast, Nancy and Questian are joined by Alicia Katz Pollock to dig into why so many technically skilled bookkeepers struggle to charge what they're worth — and what it takes to bridge the gap between expertise and authority. Alicia gets candid about her own discomfort with pricing, using a real business pivot as a window i...

When Questian read through 31 pages of divorce paperwork and added it to her Ta-Da List (see Ep. 25), it cracked open a conversation she and Nancy had been circling for a while. This episode gets honest about navigating divorce while running a business and raising kids — what it means to grieve something you chose, and why relief and devastation aren't mutually exclusive. They dig into radical acc...

Questian and Nancy close out Season Two with Valerie Heckman, Accountant Community Manager at OnPay, and a deceptively simple idea: the “Ta-Da!” list. Instead of measuring your day by what’s left undone, what if you kept track of what you actually did? Valerie shares how this practice helped her interrupt burnout, why women in accounting are especially prone to dismissing their own wins, and how s...

It's Questian's birthday, and your hosts are celebrating with the most creative gift they could think of: a crowdsourced collection of "You know you're a woman in accounting when..." moments from their community. From conference survival strategies to scheduling babies around busy season, the hosts laugh, vent, and commiserate over the absurdities of life in this profession. Plus, a bonus visit fr...

After one of Nancy's slide decks recently turned up in someone else's presentation without her name or her invitation, she and Questian decided to dig into the many forms plagiarism takes in professional life. From blatant reuse of materials to the murkier territory of borrowed ideas, they explore why credit tends to drift toward higher-status voices; what the research says about how this affects...

When an Ernst & Young seminar told female executives that women's brains absorb information like pancakes soak up syrup, as opposed to retaining information like men, whose brains are more like waffles, it made headlines — and it still stings. Nancy and Questian dig into why sexist trainings on topics like women's clothing and appearance remain a workplace issue in accounting, from vague dress...

J udie McCarthy's team was spending a third of their time chasing down information—then one of her biggest clients called in tears, completely overwhelmed by the constant requests. Judie joins Questian and Nancy to share why that moment launched her from bookkeeper to tech founder. She talks through juggling two full-time jobs for years, selling her 25-year practice to the lowest bidder (and why t...

Questian and Nancy sit down with Misty Megia of the Theatre of Public Speaking to explore why women so often stay muted—in meetings, on stages, and in their own heads. They unpack the roots of negative self-talk, why we're so much harsher on ourselves than we'd ever be with a friend, and how to bridge the gap between knowing something logically and feeling it emotionally. Misty shares specific tec...

Recorded live at AFWA’s Women Who Count Conference, Questian and Nancy are joined by employment attorney Kami Hoskins and HR leader Julie Thiel for an unflinching conversation about sexual harassment in accounting. From boundary-crossing “jokes” and unwanted physical contact to explicit quid pro quo threats, this panel breaks down how harassment actually shows up at work… and why it’s so often min...

Recorded live at AFWA’s Women Who Count Conference, Questian and Nancy are joined by employment attorney Kami Hoskins and HR leader Julie Thiel for an unflinching conversation about sexual harassment in accounting. From boundary-crossing “jokes” and unwanted physical contact to explicit quid pro quo threats, this panel breaks down how harassment actually shows up at work… and why it’s so often min...

Two accountants with ADHD (and one who’s got lots of questions) get real about what it's like when your brain won't filter information, when 30 minutes turns into either 3 hours or 3 minutes, and when opening your email derails your entire day. Jina Etienne joins Questian and Nancy to discuss early- vs later-in-life diagnosis; the exhaustion of masking symptoms for decades; the superpowers inheren...

When nearly everyone in the room raises their hand to admit they experience imposter syndrome… it's time to stop calling it a “syndrome”. Questian and Nancy explore why this near-universal feeling shows up differently for high-achieving women in accounting—who, for various reasons, often push through it more slowly than men—examining the systemic and social roots that reinforce it. They share pers...

Candy Bellau joins Nancy and Questian to discuss a problem that costs women accountants thousands of dollars every year: underpricing. The conversation covers why women tend to charge 25-50% less than men for the same work, how compassionate pricing and relationship loyalty keep us trapped in unsustainable business models, and what changed when Candy discovered male colleagues were quoting double...

Most professionals treat "yes" as their default setting, then spend their lives playing catch-up. Brandy Jordan joins us to help reframe "no" as a necessary operating system for strategic decision-making rather than a personal failure. The discussion covers the planning fallacy, why self-abandonment is unsustainable leadership, and how starting with no actually leads to better, more intentional “y...