The longtime leader of Top 10 Firm Marcum, Jeff Weiner, shares the secrets behind his remarkable career, and the equally remarkable firm he ran.

Transcription:

Transcripts are generated using a combination of speech recognition software and human transcribers, and may contain errors. Please check the corresponding audio for the authoritative record.

Dan Hood (00:02):

Welcome to On the Air with Accounting Today; I’m editor-in-chief Dan Hood. Jeff Weiner, his personal career and the tremendous growth trajectory of the Top 10 Firm Marcum that he led have both been extraordinary. So we’re happy to have him on this episode to talk about some of the lessons he’s learned along the way and get his insights on how to build a career well, hopefully something like his, but also how to hopefully learn some lessons from Marcum’s tremendous growth. Jeff, I want to thank you for joining us.

Jeff Weiner (00:29):

Thanks, Dan. It’s my pleasure to be here.

Dan Hood (00:31):

Great. I want to just give the audience a little bit more detail on your career because it’ll help them get a sense of where you’re coming from and why it’s worth paying attention to you. Jeff graduated from Hofstra in 1979, joined to then a big eight firm, Deloitte very briefly before moving to what was then a very, very small firm. I think six people out on Long Island called Marcum & Kliegman in 1981. Became a partner very shortly afterwards and became managing partner by 1990, and then from there, grew it to a billion dollar firm or more, and famously an innovative and pioneering firm in a host of areas. I’m going to name a couple of ’em just because I, it’s fascinating the range of them from technology to audit to international audit to a host of other areas before combining it just last year from CBIZ in one of the biggest deals the profession has seen in a long while. So I think that gives a perspective on why Jeff might be worth paying attention to and listening to. So maybe just to start off, I think particularly the early years of your career are fascinating for a lot of people. When you moved from Deloitte to Marcum, like I said, it only had about six people. What was it about working in a small firm that attracted you?

Jeff Weiner (01:50):

Well, Dan, I spent, as you pointed out, my first two years at Deloitte, which was a big eight firm at the time, and it was very corporate, and my first year salary, I tell this all the time, was $14,500 and this is 1970 $9, and I think I worked my rear end off and after the first full year, whoever was supervising me calls me in to tell me about my raise, and at the end of the first year, they raised me from 14,500 to $15,300, and I sort of looked at it and I thought I was in the top percentile of performers and things like that. I had worked my butt off for a year and I got an $800 raise, which if you do the math after taxes, it’s like $50 a week. And I said, this kind of environment is not for me.

(02:49):

If I’m going to work hard, I want to see the fruits of my labor. I also want to see a path where the moving up the ladder I could see, instead of it being hard to imagine in an organization as big as Deloitte was at the time. So I said, all right, big firm’s not for me. Let me go try and find a small firm, which I did. As you pointed out, Marcum & Kliegman had six people at the time, but the attractive part of it was that both Marcum and Kliegman were approaching their early sixties. So I saw the opportunity that if things worked out that maybe one day, and as they say the rest is history

Dan Hood (03:35):

And a fairly short history. I mean, that’s the thing is to go from joining the firm to managing partner of it in 10 years. I don’t think most accountants, even the most ambitious would see that as happening. Do you see that kind of opportunity? Is that, I mean, was that a one and you got very lucky to find Mark and Cleveland, or do you think that opportunity is out there for other people?

Jeff Weiner (03:56):

Oh, I think that opportunity is out there for anybody who wants it. You have to get lucky. I mean, with everything in business, you have to work hard, you have to be talented, and you have to have a little bit of luck. Some people will tell you you make your own luck, but there was an opportunity there, and I was very lucky. Mark and Cleman were both named Dad, and they were great people who really understood that if they wanted to see their business survive and them able to monetize whatever they could, even back 40 years ago that they had to have a succession plan, but there were no guarantees. It was just a dollar and a dream, so to speak.

Dan Hood (04:37):

Right. You talk about luck and there’s a great quote, and I can’t remember exactly, but how amazingly hard people who are lucky work, it turns out that the people who get lucky are the ones who’ve been working really hard to prepare themselves and to be ready for it.

Jeff Weiner (04:53):

And it’s been a career of working hard and taking advantage of opportunities and recognizing opportunities and capitalizing on them and planning and strategy, and you put it all together and a little bit of hard work and 43 years later you’ve been lucky.

Dan Hood (05:15):

And I think a lot of people are going to go, I don’t think that’s luck. I think there’s something else going on there, right? The hard work, but also a certain vision and a certain ability to see beyond what maybe a lot of other people see. But for those 10 years from joining Markum Tip to becoming mp, maybe talk a little bit about that. What advice would you give a young accountant who wanted to pursue something similar? Obviously they’ve got to find a firm like Markum Mc Clemans that was open to that or was ready to give an opportunity to a young CBA, but what do you do to make sure you can take advantage of that?

Jeff Weiner (05:46):

Well, first of all, you have to have a vision. You have to know where you want to go. And accounting is one of those businesses where there’s been professions where there’s been a lot of successful people. You don’t have to make it up on your own, but you do have to decide what you want to be when you grow up. You have to decide what kind of clients you have. You have to people you want to have to decide what kind of work you want to do. Certainly, I would recommend being a famous person at something, have a specialty, be better than most. Don’t just be a generalist. Have people want to hire you for what, not what you charge. Don’t be the low cost provider, but you’ve got to have a vision and you have to have a passion for what you do. So it’s not work to you.

(06:40):

But I was at Barham for 43 years and watched it grow from 300,000 in revenue to 1,000,000,002 when we sold it to CB, and we evolved. You really have to evolve. We had a couple of guiding principles we always reinvested in talent and technology in the last 40 years. Those were two good bets and two good things to invest in. But it’s a process, and I would say vision as I started out, you have to have a vision. You have to know where you want to go, and you have to figure out how to get there, and you have to surround yourself. Public accounting is a team sport. Public accounting is clearly a baseball team. You have your starting pitchers, you have your relief pitchers, you have your shortstop batting third, and then you have your right fielder who’s batting eighth, but nobody ever won a ball game without a right fielder. So there’s always someone out there, but you really have to have a vision and you have to have a passion to get there.

Dan Hood (07:59):

I think it’s interesting because I think there’s visions on both sides, right? There’s vision for you as an individual and then there’s vision for your firm. But let’s talk a little bit about the vision for yourself. You or at what point did you know you wanted to be managing partner of a CPA firm? Was that always the goal or is that something that developed over time or

Jeff Weiner (08:17):

No? Well, first of all, I think the visions are one and the same. I don’t think you could separate them. I’ve always believed if you take care of the firm, the firm would take care of you. But no, Dan, I went to college. I knew at the end of four years I had to have a job. When I graduated, it cost me $12,000 in 1980 $9 to go to school four years, and I had $10,000 of loans. So college to college to me was about graduating, so I’d have a job. So wasn’t one of these people who grew up and wanted to be an accountant. It just seemed like a very good background to get into business. And I’ve told this story before when I was a senior, I went to Hofstra University on Long Island, and when I was a senior, I got involved with the Hofstra Placement Service, and we had on-campus interviews and all the big eight came on campus and I was watching all the kids I went to school with, get these big eight interviews and big eight job offers. Being as competitive as I am, I said, well, if they can do it, I can do it.

(09:28):

So I went into accounting not knowing what I wanted to do or what it really meant to be an accounting. I understood it from the theory I did well in it at school. It sort of clicked in my mind, but there was no deep seated desire to be an accountant. Oh, I want to be an accountant when I grow up. And even when I became managing partner in 1990, by that time, mark and Kleeman had five partners and we probably had 20 people working for us. And what happened is what happens in most business businesses where there’s no clear cut leader, the people who work for us would go to one of the five partners who thought whoever they thought they could get what they wanted from. So with that kind of environment, you have to decide somebody’s in charge. So I think they did a vote on a Thursday, and I was out that day. I drew the short straw and I came back and I was managing partner.

Dan Hood (10:30):

That is a great story. The person who’s out of the room gets voted to that job, but that also speaks a little bit to the role of managing partner back in the day is not quite as well. I mean one way to put it is corporate now the managing partnership become more CEOs. I think you changed your title at some point to chairman and CEO as well. I think that the concept of what a managing partner is at accounting firms has changed a little bit over the years to be more really leadership oriented. It’s not the kind of thing you give to the guy who’s out of the room because he can’t vote to say no. You give it to people who really want it and want to lead the firm in a direction. Is that your sense of it, that the rule has changed that?

Jeff Weiner (11:07):

Yeah, it’s definitely changed and it’s changed based on size of firm. As Marcum grew, I used to tell people I’ve had the same job for 30 years. However, the job description has changed, and that I would say is the same in any business. Running a 20 person business is certainly different than running a hundred person business or a 500 person business or a thousand, or when we sold, we were close to 4,000 people. So you have to evolve as a leader and not do the same things you were doing when you were a hundred, 500 or a thousand people.

Dan Hood (11:46):

Did you ever find, as the firm got bigger and bigger, were there ever points where you’re like, wow, this is bigger than I could, bigger than I could run, or you just add, I just got to adapt to it. I mean, as you say, they’re very different beasts at different sizes.

Jeff Weiner (11:58):

No, not that I couldn’t do it because I’ve been pretty adaptable and grew with the job, but there’s times where I looked in the mirror and said, be careful of what you wish for. You may actually get it. It starts out a lot more fun than it ends up because as the firm gets bigger, everything becomes process oriented, whether it’s hr, whether it’s finance, it just becomes bigger and different to manage. Also, the regulatory and risk management environment has changed, and all of a sudden you have this big business and you’re responsible to make sure 4,000 people get a paycheck every two weeks, and so you’ve got 4,000 mortgages you’ve got or rent payments, you’ve probably got 6,000 car payments, and those 4,000 people, when you extrapolate it out to families is probably close to 20,000 people you’re feeding. And all of a sudden you realize, wow, it used to be fun. Now I got to make sure all these people get paid and all these clients get served, and you don’t take on more risk than you should, and you play nice with the regulators and the licensing people and the insurance people and the bankers and your fun job of just bringing in clients and growing the business. All of a sudden now you’re managing this monster.

Dan Hood (13:20):

Right, right. Well, I mean that’s absolutely, the way you described that is perfect there. There seems to be, and this happens at all levels, I think in kind of every business, but particularly in accounting, is that the reason you got into the work in the first place, the more successful you are at, the less of that work you get to do, the more time you spend focusing on all the things you just described.

Jeff Weiner (13:41):

Exactly.

Dan Hood (13:43):

So let me ask you, as the firm changed and you changed with it as it grew and you adapted to that, did your vision for the firm change significantly or when you started where you’re like, yep, I want to be a billion dollar firm and that’s where we’re headed. Or at what point did you just say, Hey, wait a minute, we could be a billion dollar firm?

Jeff Weiner (14:01):

Well, it’s funny, you’re going to find this surprising, but there was never a number associated with our strategic plan. It was always about what kind of clients we wanted, what kind of industries we wanted to play in, what kind of locations we wanted to practice in. And it was always about the other stuff, but the revenue, we assume the revenue would follow, but I find that when you take a strategic plan and tie it to a revenue target, you make decisions to hit the revenue, not the other decisions like what industries do you want to specialize in? What cities do you want to practice in? What type of clients do you want? And if you focus on those three things, the dollars will take care of themselves and sense. One day you wake up and Wow, we’re doing a billion dollars.

Dan Hood (14:56):

Well, certainly you say you imagine if you put in a number, people hit the number and they go, okay, we’re done. As opposed, or you make

Jeff Weiner (15:03):

Decisions to hit the number that you wouldn’t make if you didn’t have that number. If you decide you want to be in Boston and LA and San Francisco and Miami and Philadelphia and Chicago, well that’s your roadmap and you do what you can to fill in the roadmap. Or if you decide you want to specialize in construction or real estate or life sciences or things like that, that becomes your roadmap. And then as you grow, the numbers just keep going up. But I tried never to get caught up in the numbers.

Dan Hood (15:39):

Makes sense. Mentioned just because you mentioned looking at different geographies and deciding you want to be in them, one of the areas of innovation that I didn’t mention that I meant to was that you were, I think one of the first firms, not necessarily the first, but one of the early firms, to really pioneer a really strong and strategic m and a and geographic expansion plan that put all those pieces together and very carefully picked where you wanted to go as opposed to falling into areas. So that was, sorry, I just wanted to throw that in because I forgot that was an area I wanted to mention that Marcum was particularly adept at that and early in the, now everybody’s buying everybody, but you all were a little earlier to that game, I think the most.

Jeff Weiner (16:18):

Yeah. Well, that was born out of necessity brought on by the 2008 financial crisis up until 2008. We had never had a down year. We just kept growing and we were primarily a New York City and Long Island based firm. When the recession of 2008 hit, I sat down with my partner group and said, listen, businesses grow in two ways. They grow organically, which had always been our game plan, but also they grow through strategic mergers and acquisition. I said, so while we are a profession, we’re also a business. So if based on what’s going on in the economy, organic growth is going to be tough. We should do it the way other companies do and start looking to expand through mergers and acquisition. So we also wanted to get out of our, just being a New York based firm, so we sat down and came up with a business plan that was totally based on geography at that point.

(17:17):

If we’re going to expand out of New York, we Googled the top 15 business markets in the country, and we came up with the roadmap. If you ask Alan Colton, he calls it the NFL cities, but we came up with a roadmap of the places we wanted to practice, and that’s the way the initial M and a roadmap strategic plan was created. It was solely based on geography. Once we executed that plan, realized that we could be successful on a geographic expansion, we started adding an industry component to it. What industries did we want to grow? So as we were out in the market looking at potential merger or acquisition candidates, we had two things to look for at that point. One was people in places we wanted to be. The other was people in industries we wanted to grow. And so Dan, the plan probably evolved every two or three years that as we realized we could accomplish our objectives, we kept raising the bar on ourselves.

Dan Hood (18:24):

Very cool. Very cool. I think all throughout that there’s a ton of great advice for people looking to grow a firm, but if you had to give some specific piece of advice to people who’ve got, let’s say, a $10 million firm that they’re looking to grow with no particular number in their head, as you said to start, they just want to get bigger. Any advice you would hand them first principles for them to bear in mind?

Jeff Weiner (18:47):

Yeah. Well, first of all, don’t get bigger to get bigger. Get bigger for a plan. It was always about Dan, when I started out at Marcum in 1981, we measured clients by how much they paid us a month. And if we had, this is again 1980 $1, but if we had a client that paid us a thousand dollars a month or 2000 or $3,000 a month, that’s how we measured the client. We weren’t a sophisticated firm. We had a small business firm. Then in 19 89, 1 of our partners brought in a $50,000 audit client. Yeah, that was a lot of money. We didn’t realize that there were $50,000 audit clients out there, but it opened our eyes and we realized there were people that pay 50,000 a year to their accountant, a hundred thousand dollars a year, 200,000, 500,000. It was like, okay, what do we have to do to put ourselves in a position to get those kind of clients? And it goes back to what I mentioned earlier, talent and technology. So we always did well financially. We never took out more money than the company was making. We always left capital in the way we advise our clients. So we reinvested our capital in clients, I’m sorry, in talent and technology, which enabled us to get the clients we wanted.

Dan Hood (20:10):

Now, there’s some risk there. I mean, I think for a lot of accounting firms, they say, well, I couldn’t take on a $50,000 client if all I’m doing is a thousand dollars clients because what if I can’t serve them? What if I can’t give them the service they need? What if I don’t have the capabilities? There’s some confidence there, but there’s also a little bit of building the resources to make sure you can, how do you handle that risk?

Jeff Weiner (20:32):

Well, first of all, you never believe you can’t do it. If you want to grow, if you want to elevate your practice, you have to decide you are going to do it, and you’re going to invest in whatever resources you need to do that, and you not make money on the first client. You might not make money on the second client. People invest in their own businesses. Accountants don’t realize you have to reinvest in your business, but if you set your mind to doing it, you decide what client clients you want to serve, what industries, what size, what fee level, and then you go make the investments to do it the right way, and you’re going to stumble a little. You’re not going to make money on everything you touch, but as the first one is the first one, the second one gets easier. The third one is easier than that, and all of a sudden you know what you’re doing.

Dan Hood (21:26):

And also, but you got to have that patience, right? The patience to spend money really on the resources and then deliver and deliver and deliver until you get the bicycle rolling,

Jeff Weiner (21:37):

Just like you tell your clients. Accounting is a business. The owners need to continually reinvest in the business to improve the business.

Dan Hood (21:48):

Alright, that is a lot of tremendous advice. I want to take a little bit back and just look at the accounting profession as a whole and your viewpoint on it and where it’s been and where it’s going. But before we do that, we’re going to take a quick break and we’re back. We’re talking with Jeff Wier, who grew markum to a billion dollar firm last year, combine it with cvis, sharing his insights, one on how he managed to do that, how he built his own career, and also how the firm managed to achieve its tremendous success. I want to, as I said, take a little bit of a step back and talk more about just the accounting profession as a whole. Been in it for four decades or more. What are some of the big changes you’ve seen in accounting over the course of your career?

Jeff Weiner (22:34):

Oh, it’s a completely different profession than when I started. When I started, we used seven column or 14 column paper pencils and didn’t have a computer. We did tax returns by hand. We didn’t have iPhones, we didn’t have the internet, we didn’t have email. The whole world has changed, but I will tell you what’s going on in the accounting profession today, particularly as it relates to ownership and private equity is a long overdue change in the structure of how accounting firms are owned and capitalized. It’s sort of what happened to Wall Street 25 years or so. If you remember correctly, Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs, Merrill Lynch, they were all partnerships owned and capitalized by the people who worked there. I don’t think any of those companies has suffered, and the people who work there haven’t suffered by bringing in outside capital. So I’ve been saying for a very long time that the partnership model for public accounting is an antiquated business model, and fortunately my friend Charlie Weinstein from Eisner ER figured it out in 2021 of really how to successfully attract outside capital to the profession

Dan Hood (23:57):

Right now so far, I mean so far the overwhelming majority of that, not all of it, but the overwhelming majority of that outside capital has come from private equity. Do you see private equity being continually to be the main provider of outside capital, or is that just opening the flood gates to a bunch of other people who may come in and be interested?

Jeff Weiner (24:17):

I think it’s the beginning, and I read somewhere, I don’t know if it was an accounting today or one of the accounting publications very recently about this round of private equity being sort of like the first inning, the first go round, right? Marcum was acquired last year by CBIZ, and we decided to, rather than do private equity, because most private equity firms’ ultimate acquisition is going to be some type of public offering. CBIZ has been public for the last 25 years. So we had an opportunity to do a transaction with CBIZ that sort of got us to the end of the story without, we skipped the middle step of private equity. So I think we’re in the very early stages of outside capital coming into the accounting industry. You’ll see in the next two years, we will not be the only public accounting firm, whether it’s Grant Thornton, whether it’s Citrin Cooperman, whether it’s Eisner, er, one of those 2021 or 2022 vintage private equity deals will go public within the next two years. I don’t know that as a fact, that’s my prediction, but because private equity firms, Citrin Cooperman, which is the first one to actually do a second private equity deal, new Mountain Capital sold Citrin to Blackstone

(25:47):

If anyone could,

Dan Hood (25:48):

And then turned around and bought Grant, right? So that’s

Jeff Weiner (25:51):

Right. They bought Grant. I mean, grant Thornton or Citrin Cooperman or EisnerAmper, one of those is going to be the next public one. And again, I don’t have any insight information, it’s just if I had to predict the future. But I certainly see a future in the next five years where some of these backed firms choose to tap the capital markets. I mean, right now the capital markets are not as such where IPOs are a big thing, but IPOs and capital markets are cyclical, and in the next go round where IPOs are in favor, you’re going to see another accounting firm or two choose to do an IPO.

Dan Hood (26:31):

Right? It’s going to be fascinating. I mean, as you say, CBIZ has been one for a long time, but for a long time they were sort of unusual. The people were like, I think a lot of people even forgot for long periods time that CBIZ was an IPO or was a company. They’re like, oh, yeah. Right. You always had to sort of remind yourself, but as more, come on, they’re going to follow that model.

Jeff Weiner (26:49):

Yeah, CBIZ was the best kept secret in accounting for a very long time. Then they went out and bought us.

Dan Hood (26:55):

Right. Well, and this is the thing, so now, I mean, you’ve had some insight. You, you’ve, you’ve worked with them to do the deal. You’ve had some insight into what’s going on there, and it doesn’t seem to this move away from the partnership structure or partnership ownership or all that hasn’t seemed to harm them at all, right? There’s still a very successful firm, obviously. Do you, but all these changes, all these outside capital, all these outside players, do you have any concerns about how it might, leaving aside the access to capital, which is necessary, any concerns about how it might impact the profession? You hear people concerned about integrity, concerned about the public service function of the profession? Any concerns there?

Jeff Weiner (27:35):

No, I don’t think so. I think the people investing in the profession are doing it with their eyes wide open. They’re not actually running the firms. They’re usually passive investors. As long as you produce the returns they’re expecting and run the business the right way, they don’t want to run your business for you. But there’s enough business to go around that. I’m not concerned about the independence issues. Accountants have integrity. There are rule makers, there are laws, there are regulators that you have to comply with, so they’re not going away. And if the people who are investing in the profession don’t want to lose their money, they’re going to let the professionals run the business. They may install some controls and make people a bit more financially savvy, but our profession has rules. Just like Goldman Sachs has rules and Merrill Lynch has rules, and Morgan Stanley has rules, and if you break the rules, you’re going to get pay the price, whatever that might be.

(28:39):

But that’s the same in the partnership model. I think it’s good for people to realize accounting firms are businesses and they’ve got to be structured the same way. Accounting become very capital intensive with the investments we have to make in technology with the benefits. We have to pay people the way people want to get paid, not just in cash, but they want some type of equity ownership because their friends are going to companies in order to compete in the workforce. We can’t just be a partnership that lets people retire when they hit age 65 and gives them a pension. We have to be able to help people monetize along the way, give them stock or give them options and alternative forms of ownership. So we can compete successfully against Wall Street. We can compete successfully against private equity backed firms. We can compete successfully against startups. If you want the best and the brightest, you have to give the best and the brightest what they can get elsewhere.

Dan Hood (29:41):

I mean, that alone is right, is a huge change from, well, those two things actually combined the need for capital. I mean, I don’t think the profession had this need for capital for a long time. And two, the competition for the type of talent that would in the past, you would’ve expect to go to accounting firms seems to have changed enormously, right? Suddenly there’s a lot more people competing for those college graduates, the sort of people with,

Jeff Weiner (30:05):

There are careers that didn’t exist 20 years ago. There’s careers didn’t exist 30 years ago. I mean, you are competing against industries and careers that did not exist when I graduated college. So if you want to be able to attract the people you want to attract, you’ve got to be able to compensate them the way they could get compensated elsewhere.

Dan Hood (30:28):

And I think that’s a tough lesson for a lot of accounting firms to learn. A lot of the current generation of leadership is used to the model that was in place when they came out of college where there were plenty of people coming into accounting. There was no worries about it. And as you say, the tech space wasn’t competing for talent. Finance wasn’t competing in the same way. It’s competing now. Still a lesson that a lot of firms need to pick up on. I want to talk about for the individual accountant, we talked a little bit about what profession is whole and firm structure. How is it changing for the individual accountant, the young person entering accounting now? Could they do what you did in terms of growing a career your way? Are there different choices they need to be thinking about or different things they need to be bearing in mind as they move forward?

Jeff Weiner (31:13):

Well, first of all, I think anybody can do anything they want to do. I mean, remember, we accomplished a lot, but it took 43 years. So when you look at it that way, it may not be as impressive as it sounds, but it was sheer desire to do it. And we were builders. We built this business. We didn’t know where we were going to wind up. And three and a half years ago, if you told me that a private equity firm or a public company would come in and buy my business, I would’ve looked to you like you were crazy. Nobody bought accounting firms up until three and a half years ago. So that wasn’t the reason to do it. We were always just building the business to attract the clients we wanted to practice in the places we wanted to practice and in the industries we wanted to be in and constantly reinvested in talent and technology. And 43 years later, you’re 1,000,000,002 firm with a 2.3 billion market cap.

Dan Hood (32:17):

You make it sound like anybody can do it. That’s the thing.

Jeff Weiner (32:20):

Anybody could do it. You just have to do it. And can someone do it today? Sure. I would tell you that somebody today, knowing I could only see what was in front of me, and firms like Marcum were not in front of me 43 years ago. Someone today has the benefit of the world being different, and I certainly think that someone who’s talented, somebody who’s motivated, somebody who wants to build an accounting business, you see some of these other private equity backed, I’ll call them, where they’re going out and picking up 10 or 15 or 20 accounting firms and they’re building them from scratch, and the people doing them are not accountants. They’re finance graduates, and they’re raising capital, and they’re building accounting firms. Some of these people will put together a billion dollar firm in less than five years because they’re different people and they’re looking at accounting differently than us. I hope they don’t make some mistakes, and I hope they put it together the right way. But I think what we did over 43 years took a long time in today’s world, and there’ll be some talented financial people who can do the same thing in a much shorter period of time.

Dan Hood (33:43):

But I mean, particularly given the number of people in it, it’s inevitable that there will be some mistakes and there will be any firm grow, and deer size would make mistakes, and as you say, you adapt. The difference may be the speed at which they’re moving may make their mistakes more impactful or harder to recover from.

Jeff Weiner (34:02):

Well, hey, listen. As I was growing up in this profession, there used to be a firm called McGladry. They made a mistake. There was a firm called Arthur Anderson. Mistakes are going to happen. It will have nothing to do with the way the cap stack and accounting is changing today. It happened before. It’ll happen again. Hopefully it won’t be catastrophic, but mistakes do happen.

Dan Hood (34:28):

Sure. And then that comes down to that adaptability. You were talking about the ability to change as things go on and to pivot to move around. Fascinating stuff. Jeff Wiener, we could talk for hours and hours and hours, has a lot to talk about, but I just want to just wrap up. Any final thoughts for the accountants out there? Any final words you would give them of advice or wisdom or warning?

Jeff Weiner (34:52):

No, I think that this change in how accounting firms are capitalized, they’re going to create opportunities that the profession never saw before. There seems to be an sensational demand from clients for professional services, things that accounting firms provide and can provide. So I don’t think the demand is going to go away that quickly. And I think the opportunities to make the accounting profession look like other professions so we can attract the best and the brightest and pay them the way we need to pay them in 20, 25 and beyond has created an opportunity that is really going to propel this industry and attract the people we want. I think it’s a great time to be an accountant. I wish I was going into the profession now.

Dan Hood (35:44):

Excellent. Alright. A bright vision of the future. If you could do it all over again, you would. That’s the message there. Jeff, thank you so much for joining us,

Jeff Weiner (35:53):

Dan. It was great. Good seeing you.

Dan Hood (35:55):

The pleasure, and thank you all for listening. This episode of On the Air was produced by Accounting Today with audio production by Adnan Khan. Ready to review us on your favorite podcast platform and see the rest of our content on accounting today.com. Thanks again to our guest, and thank you for listening.