Future-Proof

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, bu...

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...

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 clo...

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...

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 addres...

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 th...

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...

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 o...

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 Ma...

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 changi...

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? Un...

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 Fles...

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 Associatio...

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 diff...

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 alo...

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 discipli...

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 c...

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 shou...

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...

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 incl...

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 a...

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...

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—somethin...

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...

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 organi...