Hello and welcome to The Unique CPA with your host,
Randy Crabtree.
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Today our guest is Alan Whitman.
Alan is currently an advisor and coach to CEOs
in his past life.
He was CEO and chairman of Baker Tilly
and held that role for many years.
Very much experienced obviously in the profession
that we all love, or hopefully most of us love,
but there's some things Alan wants to do
to help us all love this better.
Before we jump in, welcome Alan,
welcome to The Unique CPA.
Thanks Randy, I'm really happy to be here
and we will talk about some good stuff
about how I would think we need to change the profession
if it's gonna be sustainable long in the future,
be more attractive, modernize our great profession.
And I do love the profession.
I've been in it since I got out of university.
It's done great things for me and I wanna help it
do great things for many others long into the future.
You know, that's the exact same thing I say too.
It's an awesome profession and took me a long time
to realize how to do the profession right,
at least in my mind.
But there's so many things we can do different.
So before we jump into that,
cause I'm gonna set the stage here a second.
You and I talked a few weeks ago
and I knew more about you than going into the conversation.
But if I was originally gonna talk to a CEO
of a large accounting firm,
I would have had a complete bias probably
in a different direction than the conversation we had.
Because when you and I started talking
and I knew this was the things you talked about,
it was like, yeah, we need to change this.
There's things we can do better.
There's archaic things that we're doing in our profession
that is hurting the profession.
And those are my words.
You didn't say that, but I'm just thinking
you probably agree.
And so you actually have come out and you've trademarked
and you can tell me if I got it right or not,
but you know, breaking the mold.
Is it breaking the mold in the profession
or break the mold?
What is the term that you've done?
Well, certainly it's break the mold.
That's what I've trademarked.
And it's breaking the mold in the CPA profession,
but actually more generally in just professional services.
You know, people driven businesses, you know,
it leaves the building every night in the elevator
or when you turn your wifi off.
It's where I grew up, certainly the CPA profession
that's near and dear to my heart.
I know about that the best.
All of what I'm talking about
applies to professional services in general.
Okay, and I'm gonna wanna get into that,
but I wanna give you an opportunity to expand
on my little teeny intro I did there.
Why don't you give us a little background on you
and maybe your journey to a CEO and chairman of Baker Tilly
and then what you're doing today.
Yeah, well, like everybody,
I was a bright-eyed young associate
at one of the big eight back in 1987.
And so I'm a public accounting brat.
I grew up on the tax side, joined a couple of firms
and then left the big four
and joined what is now Baker Tilly
and was immediately asked
to build an international platform.
And neither my predecessor nor I knew what that meant.
And we both looked at each other and said,
well, we'll figure it out along the way.
I enjoy existing in the abstract
and I enjoy existing in things
that are less figured out, frankly.
We need to build it as we're going down the road.
So I did that for a number of years,
had the great fortune of traveling around the world,
meeting people throughout the network,
the Baker Tilly network.
And it made me who I am today.
I understand different cultures.
I've learned from thousands of people,
tens of thousands of people around the world.
And that's made me who I am today.
And it's made me a person that's really, really curious
about what's next.
It's made me a person who's really curious about,
well, why do we do it this way?
Isn't there a better way?
And then I was elected by the board of Baker Tilly
in I think the fall of 2014.
I began leading the firm.
When my predecessor became the chairman of the AICPA,
Tim Christian, great mentor of mine,
became the chair of the AICPA in June of 15.
And that's when my run began.
And it was a glorious experience.
It was a wonderful run that many people had a hand in.
We took the firm from 475 million in revenue
to a billion five when I recently retired
from Baker Tilly last winter
and did a number of acquisitions, entered new markets,
became a global organization,
elevated the people aspect of the business
from the high level it was when I became the CEO.
And we had a great time doing it.
And along the way, as I like to say,
executing strategy is running the business
and transforming it.
Not, we stopped transformation
when we got to run the business.
It's a both and.
We started breaking the mold.
We started breaking down the preconceived biases.
And we've always done it that way.
To try to build a new model,
because in my mind, the profession,
as wonderful as it is, has gotten a little stale.
Yes.
And why is it stale, Randy?
I believe it's stale
because the firms haven't modernized themselves.
And so, I'm sure you've done quite a bit of research
and interviewing on the CPA storage
coming out of university.
Yes.
I have the honor of sitting on the AICPA board.
So I'm in my second of three years, the three year term.
And we talk about that a lot.
And I am consistent in my comments to the board
and the leadership of the AICPA that,
yeah, there's all sorts of issues with education.
I know the 150 hour issue is out there.
I believe that the onus is on the firms
to become sexy again, if you will.
Yeah.
In order to attract more CPAs into the profession.
Because as I see it,
there's a lot of professions that work hard.
Think of investment banking, think of private equity,
think of becoming a doctor, becoming a lawyer.
There's a lot of professions that are tough
and where you work a lot of hours.
So it's not about hours in my mind.
And those professions are getting plenty of people
coming into their profession.
So why are they and we're not?
And I believe it's frankly,
it has to do with many of the archaic ways
in which we run our business.
The CPA profession runs its business
and that needs to change.
And so that's the premise of break the mold.
Break the mold.
That's the premise of really my,
who I am as a person, as an advisor,
as a coach, as a CEO.
And I'm still bullish that we're gonna get it done.
Yeah, that's great to hear because I am too.
I'm very excited about,
and I think you and I may have talked about this
a few weeks ago, what I've seen
and I'm seeing these younger startup firms
just doing things so much different.
They're breaking the mold.
Where the older legacy firms,
I don't think there's much, hopefully are.
I assume with you at the helm,
Baker Tilly was looking at things differently
while you were there.
Were there certain things that you implemented there
that you think fell into that break the mold?
You know, I wanna,
I'll answer your question in a second.
I wanna step into what you just said about smaller firms.
I was at a meeting with a number of council members,
AICPA council members.
And I made a comment to a young guy
who bought a small CPA firm.
And I said, you know,
I think the larger firms have a better chance
of doing this than the smaller ones.
And he actually very appropriately corrected me.
He said, you're not right, Alan.
The smaller firms are the ones that don't have the biases.
We can shift very easily.
And I sat back and I'm like, well, duh.
Yeah, of course.
And so it actually flies right into one of the ways
that I look at how to solve complex
or complicated situations.
And that is whiteboard.
Get rid of all of the influences, the negative influences.
And just, if you were to build it from scratch,
whatever it is, whether it's a promotion,
whether it's a new business line, what have you,
if you were to build from scratch, how would you build it?
And then layer on all the intricacies
and all the yeah, buts and all the,
well, this is gonna upset this person or that person,
that's how you break the mold.
As opposed to try to start from where you are,
you'll never get there.
Right, right.
I think we are, and you've mentioned it,
we are very, very much a Sally profession.
But it's also kind of ingrained in us.
Consistency, this is accounting and that.
And so I think that kind of somewhat holds us back.
It's also, and you know, this profession,
we can do very well in it.
I mean, the money is tremendous.
And so I think people get the mindset,
well, hey, I'm making, you know, whatever,
700,000, a million dollars, whatever the numbers are.
Why do I wanna change anything?
This is, I mean, I'm doing well.
The next generation can change.
Right now, I just need to get through the next 10 years.
I don't wanna change.
So boy, I'm kind of probably jumping ahead of myself.
But do you believe that mindset
or just the fact that we can do so well
and why make a change is holding us back
from breaking that mold?
Oh, without question.
I'm ready, but you go first.
I'll change, but you go first.
So yeah, and I appreciate that.
And that's why the profession
or anything needs bold leaders to say, yeah, I get that.
We're still going to kind of push the envelope.
And look, it's not either or.
I'm either gonna change or I'm gonna keep my compensation.
Maybe it's a both and.
I'm gonna keep running the business in an optimal way
and transform it.
We have to have a both and mindset.
You asked me a few minutes ago.
So what were the things that we were trying to begin
when I was at Baker-Tilley?
Yes.
Look, and some firms have already done this, right?
Disconnect days was something that Baker-Tilley put in place.
And that came out of COVID
and basically shut the office down
where nobody feels like they needed to answer an email.
And many people are like, oh, I can't do that.
My client won't allow me.
Well, then tell your client we're doing it
for the benefit of the people and for their culture
and for their psyche.
They're people too, they'll get it.
We started talking about four day work weeks.
We started the process of rather than production,
meaning hours, let's shift from production
to outcomes, to value.
Oh yeah.
Look, that was a hard one.
But as some of the people started thinking about it,
well, wait a minute.
In busy season, I have,
let's say I've got 15 audits to do
or a hundred tax returns.
I know the fees for that.
So putting in hours, all that is,
it's an accounting entry
so that we can do percentage of completion basically, right?
And my quip back to that is
with the realization of the write-ups that occur,
how do you know it's right?
Right?
I know how many hours I put in as a young associate.
I didn't know anything.
I just, you know, I just charged.
Doesn't mean those hours were good.
So how do you know the input is even good, right?
And so then we get to the point of,
well, maybe we need to be better project managers.
So I'm like, ah, there you go.
And unfortunately, I'm a tax guy.
Tax guys or gals are not that great at project managing.
It's just fill the funnel, get it done.
And thank gosh we have a deadline,
otherwise it would take us forever.
So we started down the path of
envisioning going from a production business model,
inputs, hours, to an outcomes value.
Interestingly, I had dinner with the number two,
second in command at one of the big four last night.
We meet every couple of, every couple of months.
And we talked about going from production to outcomes value.
And he said, Alan, the firm that solves for that
will win by a landslide.
And he says, I don't know who's gonna do it,
but somebody will figure that out.
That will be the biggest shift in the profession
in the last three decades.
Because people don't wanna,
they don't wanna get that email, Randy.
Well, you've gotta have 55 chargeable hours
because it's January 15th.
So they're not developing.
The only thing that they've got going for them
is they've gotta get hours.
If we're a people-centric business,
I hear this all the time, we're people-centric.
Well, what does that mean?
No, you're not.
You're not people-centric because you have dog insurance
or pet insurance or you have a company store
that you give credits for, coupons.
That's not people-centric.
Being people-centric, Randy,
is building bespoke development plans
and not having, like I did,
not having somebody work 610 40s.
You stop learning after the 100s maybe,
but the reason you do 600 is because, well,
you've gotta book the revenue.
I've gotta have the hours.
Those are career non-value-added hours.
And if I'm people-centric as an organization,
I should be focusing on you, Randy,
to make sure you're developing the right way,
not just punching hours.
Well, it's too late for me, but somebody else.
Right, yeah.
Fair enough, fair enough, okay.
So I like that, the whole, I mean,
I had a conversation yesterday,
we recorded a podcast with someone, Geraldine Carter.
Don't know if you know Geraldine at all or not.
I think I do.
Geraldine deals with small firms.
She just wrote a book about down to 40 hours.
And it's a value-based billing and it's a niche practice
and she deals with smaller.
But the concepts in the book, I think,
translate to any size firm.
And really, because we were talking about this yesterday,
and I said, so you need to get out there
and you need to go out and start talking about this,
get involved with state societies, the ACPA, whatever.
And she goes, yeah, but my audience.
I go, no, it doesn't matter your audience.
Your audience is small firms right now.
That's who you talk to.
But your concepts don't have to stay there.
They can go elsewhere.
So I'd like her to get out and talk about that more.
But let me ask you this then.
Your buddy just told you the firm that solves this,
that figures it out, is gonna take over.
Do you have ideas?
I mean, how can we do this?
How can we change?
And we see it.
I see it at the smaller firm level,
but they operate differently.
They do, they do.
So I'll answer the question.
I've got a point on the down to 40.
Also, you've got to start in one practice, a pilot,
one part, right?
You've got to have a commitment
that you really want to break the mold.
You want to be the firm that leads the league.
And so every firm wants to climb the league tables, right?
They want to be bigger.
They want to be in the top 10, right?
They want to have a great net promoter score.
They want to have great turnover,
the right amount level of turnover.
Why can't a firm,
there'll be a firm that says there's a fifth
and this is getting rid of the chargeable hours.
At the end of the day,
they're just nervous that they're gonna miss something.
I know.
That's the thing.
And listen, your comment about going to 40 hours,
and I'm sure the book is great
and I appreciate what Geraldine is talking about.
I'll go back to my comment earlier
that there are plenty of professions
where they're not working 40 hours.
They're working 60 or 70
and they're working in a context that's much more fun,
much more inspiring.
So to me, it's not quantity as much as it is quality, right?
However, you got to clip the peaks
and fill in the valleys of busy season.
And there are plenty of ways you can do that
with offshoring, with automation, et cetera.
It's not extreme.
Again, I think we just need to change the way we work.
And then if we may get to the point
where people are willing to commit even more effort
along the way.
Okay.
And I think, like you said,
it's why are these other industries sexier than accounting?
I think a lot of it's just a perception problem.
I just don't think we've done.
I mean, I think it's reality.
I've never been big four,
but my mind big four just burns and churns through you.
Now I can be completely wrong there,
but that's my perception.
So if I have that perception,
I'm guessing others have that perception as well.
And so somehow it's almost a marketing as well.
Hey, we have to market ourselves different.
We have to show that we're having fun,
that we're really living the fact
that we are helping people have that work-life balance,
that they are people that an auditor,
a tax preparer, a tax advisor,
their title is not who they are.
They are something else.
They have a life.
And I think the perception is we've got,
and I'm old, so this is back in the day,
when someone's sitting at their desk 80 hours
with the glasses with the tape around it
and the pocket protector and all that,
but that's still, I think, permeate some of it.
So I think perception, I mean, reality has to happen,
but I think perception is something we need to work on
and maybe AICPA has to start helping with that.
I don't know.
Well, I know that the AICPA and one of their divisions
is working hard on the branding aspect of that.
I think you're spot on already.
We need to show them that it is a fun career, profession.
Look, the relationships that I have built over the years,
I wouldn't trade for anything.
Oh yeah.
And the acumen that I've been able to develop
over the years has been, the people I've learned from,
it's been fantastic.
And what's really interesting is remember,
I was having dinner with effectively
a competitor last night.
And lo and behold, we're actually helping one another,
so it's a really interesting profession.
It's a collaborative profession in general.
I believe it is strong from that standpoint.
Right, well, the AICPCPA.com put together
the DAS project, which is Dynamic Audit Solution,
and 40 major firms, under the big four,
the major firms group, came together and crowdfunded,
I don't know, $40 million as a co-chair with Chris Schmidt,
the former recently retired CEO of Moss Adams.
We crowdfunded $45 million to team with CPA.com
to build a platform for audit the next generation.
So we are looking to push things forward,
and we are looking to work together.
You're right, messaging is critical.
We need to do a better job of showing the what and the how
of it is a good place to be.
Yep, and that's, so I'm not on the committee,
but I've been helping out a little bit with this.
It's the National Pipeline Advisory Group,
Jennifer Wilson is in that, so I've been promoting that.
I got in front of my university to have the students
take the survey there.
Things like that to find out what is going on too,
why is there a pipeline issue?
I'm actually doing my own, I guess benchmark survey right now
just to find out what's going on in the profession,
what's happening, are people leaving?
We know they are.
Are they not coming in?
We know why.
So trying to set a baseline and then over the next few years
trying to expand on that to get deeper.
We're hoping to have results in July,
so I'm very excited about that coming out as well.
You know, that's great, Randy.
You know, it's interesting as I sit here and listen to you,
I'm familiar with the pipeline, Sue Coffey,
Lexi Kessler and others are leading that.
You know, we're worried about the people
that aren't coming into the profession
and we're worrying about the people that are leaving.
Maybe we should start focusing on people that are staying.
Right, right?
Because look, all the firms are growing leaps and bounds.
Right? Oh yeah, oh yeah.
Even with the limitations because of automation
or because of what have you,
and there are thousands of people around
that we need to do this for.
And you know, it's like if you build it, they will come.
Right, so let's build it now
and then hopefully the students will come.
Yep, and that actually is part of what we're finalizing
all the questions right now, but that is part of it.
Why are you in the profession
is one of the benchmarks we're looking at.
And what is it, and then we're,
sorry, I'm giving away all of our data right now.
But we'll release this in July then after that.
Right, okay, good, right, that's fair.
But back to the break the mold then.
Hours are a big part of it,
the thing that you want to see
and figure out if there's a way to change it.
What are other areas that need to,
and we talked about the perception of the industry
and you're showing we're fun,
but what are other mold areas that we want to see changed?
Well, what about development, right?
CPE development, most of the development is elective.
I mean, there are certain things you need to take auditing
ethics, et cetera, but then the rest are,
we pull the data or the systems to us.
What about if the firms push it?
And what if, again, looking at you,
what if we put a bespoke plan together for you?
Now, a lot of firms say, well,
we can only do that for the hypos, the high potentials.
Well, why?
Well, it's expensive.
Well, yeah, okay, it's expensive,
but think about the benefit you get
if you really develop people in an,
be intentional about the way you develop, right?
Rather than, I use a buffet example,
you go to the buffet in Las Vegas
and you get to pick whatever you want, right?
And you could sit in the fried food section,
you could sit in the pasta section.
Well, maybe you need to sit in some other section
and maybe the firm needs to develop you intentionally.
Think about all the administrative stuff.
Think about all the billing and collection stuff
that people do, the layers and layers of administrative
and as I like to say, the career non-value added tasks.
They didn't come into this profession
to learn how to bill and collect.
They came in to be tax professionals
and advisors and consultants.
Well, let's let them do that.
Why do they need to do all this other stuff?
It's probably because the people before them did it.
Exactly.
Let's reinvent the experience
when you're in public accounting in a CPA firm, totally.
It's about them developing as a practitioner,
not as a biller or a collector or an administrative person.
And so let's move those tasks to the right person.
They're important.
Maybe it's not important
for a tax consulting senior associate.
And so we need to become much more intentional
about how we're developing people rather than have it be,
well, go to the library,
pick your courses because you need 80 hours
and never shall you really think about building your career.
Yeah, I love what you said there
because allowing people to find their passion,
to find the thing they like and be able to concentrate on that
and the things that they don't need to be doing
or they can delegate.
So the conference we're having in July,
everything goes back to July.
That's why we want to announce the results then.
But it's automate, delegate, collaborate.
So there's so many things that somebody loves doing
that I hate doing.
Why would I do it then?
Why would I spend time?
I think that's kind of what you're trying to say, right?
I mean, not trying.
You did say, I'm just trying to make sure I understood it.
It's exactly.
And again, I didn't come into this profession
to do all that stuff.
I came in this profession to be the best early on,
the best tax professional I can be.
And in turn, all this admin took away hours
of my development time.
And so again, I think we need to take
a much more intentional view on this.
Another thing about intentionality,
a former colleague of mine,
her name is Francesca Ranieri.
She's a wonderful L and D specialist.
During COVID, we were talking about
how do we get in front of our people?
How do we deal with virtual work,
which is here to stay.
Oh yeah.
It's just a new way.
And she coined this phrase,
we need to go from proximity to intentionality.
So rather than proximity being,
I've got to see you,
I've got to be in the same room with you, et cetera.
I've got to go to be intentional
about how I connect with you.
That's the goal.
Proximity to intentionality.
It's not about whether we're in the same room.
She needs to trademark that.
Yeah, yeah.
I like that a lot because that's,
when I go out and talk about culture in firms
and why it's important and all that,
and often obviously the remote aspect of the business now
and just the world in general comes up a lot.
And somebody that's my age or older always brings up,
well, how am I going to train somebody
if they're not sitting next to me in the office?
And well, yeah, you have to be intentional about it.
You can still do it.
And how are they going to learn
how to have face-to-face meetings with their clients?
Well, honestly, the new clients
are not going to be the face-to-face anyways.
This is not going away.
The new generation of business owners
are not going to want you coming in their office,
meeting with them all the time.
And we just need to get past that.
Let me give you two things on that.
So going back to our comment about small firms
being able to really break the mold.
I've heard about a firm somewhere,
I think in the Southeastern part of the country,
that is a virtual firm,
and they charge extra
if the client wants them to come to the office.
Okay, yeah.
Think about that.
Because their fees are based on being a virtual firm.
And if you want us to come in, we'll come,
but that's not our model,
so you got to pay an extra 25 bucks or whatever it is.
And so that's a huge shift of being intentional.
So another example,
so you know that I,
if you look at my LinkedIn profile,
I've got a newsletter, I release posts every day,
and I got a weekly newsletter.
I hired a young man to help me with that.
I have never met him in person.
He and his wife traveled the country
in a mobile home type vehicle.
Well, that's right, I met him online.
You met Chad.
He knew nothing about public accounting and the profession.
So not only did I teach him,
he's my author, we write together,
and I've never met him.
So it's, but he's intentional.
We meet every Tuesday, every Thursday.
He's intentional about it, and it works fabulously.
So it can be done, and he's much younger than me.
So it's not like he's been doing this forever,
and you know, well, you know, he's better prepared.
He wasn't prepared at all.
And so he's like a senior associate to me being a partner.
So it can be done.
Yeah, oh, it's the same story.
My assistant lives in Guadalajara, Mexico.
You know, we get together twice a week.
In fact, right when you and I finish,
she and I are getting on a call.
We're going over my emails, going over my schedule,
making sure I'm not missing anything,
if there's follow-up I need to do.
And yeah, we actually have met.
She's come into town twice for,
we as a company do more remote business,
but twice a year, we get together in a central location
and bring all the employees into one spot and get together.
So she came in for that last year
and will again this year.
But yeah, same thing.
You can do it, it's possible.
And you and I are not, you know, 25 years old or anything.
No, we're not, no we're not.
I wanna keep going on in this forever,
but we're gonna have to wrap up soon.
So let me give you an opportunity to just kind of,
one, I want you to explain just a wrap up on, you know,
why we need to change how, you know,
and just, you know, give your ideals on this.
And then before we wrap, I wanna get more information
on what you're doing
and how people can get ahold of you as well.
Great, well, thank you.
Look, every organization's goal should be amongst others
to be relevant and sustainable.
And you need to be relevant to clients,
for your people, et cetera.
And old archaic ways of doing things need to be tweaked.
We can do it incrementally,
but we'll never really do it if we do it from now forward.
Meaning, you read a book from page one to the last page.
You run a company or you transform a company,
the future and back.
And so you need to set that future in order to get there.
Otherwise, we'll make incremental small little tweaks.
And frankly, that's less effective
than just leaving it alone.
Because you're gonna mess things up
if you don't go far enough.
And so I'm a big believer that just because
it got us here won't get us there.
I think we're at a crucial time in this profession's
storied history.
And if we wanna be sustainable long to the future,
we wanna continue having the franchise, if you will,
of the CPA franchise and the trust and the interest,
we need to come together and reinvent
how we run our business.
Because we're being told our customers,
meaning our people, they're telling us
if our customers that pay us
were telling us something so bold
by not coming to us, we would change.
So why aren't we changing if our people
are telling us by using their feet?
That's just, it's a conundrum that I can't figure out.
But you're going to, I have faith in you.
I am advising everybody that I'm talking with.
And Randy, so I'll move to that.
When I left Baker-Tilley, I had a lot to say.
I wanna use what I've learned,
the experiences I've had, the things I've gotten wrong
to help others get there faster,
jump higher, run faster, et cetera.
And so I'm not just focusing on large organizations
like Baker-Tilley was.
I've got a couple of startups I'm helping.
I've got a $15 million professional services organization
that I'm helping with strategy and doing things differently.
And I pushed them on,
let's think about things in a different way.
I'm helping a $5 million firm
because the owners are friends of mine.
The goal is for me to impart my experiences
and my passion for doing things differently
and reframing the conversation, changing the narrative,
whatever you wanna call it, so they can achieve more
like we were able to at Baker-Tilley.
You know, when I became the CEO of Baker-Tilley, Randy,
it was pretty much a first-generation firm.
You know, Tim had taken it from 30 million to 475 million,
but in the modern era,
that was really a first-generation firm.
And we reinvented it to be much more
than a second-generation firm, modernized it.
So it can be done.
And now I'm suggesting that more people do that
and get more bold or bolder.
And the word mark, break the mold, embodies all of that.
Let's break the mold because it is a mold.
And you know, molds are solid there.
You can't move, you gotta break it.
You can't just shave a little bit off.
You gotta break the mold and build a new mold.
Yep, I think that's awesome.
And believe me, this conversation,
I don't think it could get me more excited that,
again, as I said at the beginning,
somebody coming from a large with Baker-Tilley,
top 10, top 20, whatever it is, firm,
is thinking that because in my mind,
the big firms are not thinking break the mold.
They're thinking, let's keep going the way we're going
because we're making lots of money
and we'll do it that way.
So that's awesome.
Before I ask for contact information, anything,
and believe me, I got a thousand more questions
I wanna go over.
So you and I are gonna have to do this again.
I mean, even just,
I wanted to start talking about firm structure.
I mean, is the partnership still something?
And I'm sure you have ideas on that.
Maybe we'll schedule another one
down the road for that as well.
But before we wrap up then,
and I alluded to it before,
we are not our job title.
We are our outside of work passion.
So I'm curious, what do you love doing
when you're not out to advising CEOs?
Yeah, well, I love being on the water.
My wife and I and family are big boaters.
So we're on the water quite a bit.
I love giving back to the community.
So I do a lot of volunteering.
I'm a treasurer on a couple of different places.
I am an accountant.
I like that.
I like helping these not-for-profits
really become a business
because they still are a business.
And it's amazing how many not-for-profits
don't realize that they are.
Not-for-profit doesn't mean
you don't wanna make a profit.
You're just not taxable.
And so love traveling the world.
I was very fortunate in my early years with Baker Tilly
to get to a lot of places around the globe.
Love traveling with my bride, Kim.
And I love this weekend specifically
because it's master's weekend, so I love watching golf.
I assume you play as well.
Well, yes, I play golf.
I don't know if I'm a golfer, but I play it.
And I remember the last time I was at the master's,
I was able to take my father
who it was a year or two before he passed
and it was the first time he had ever been there.
So it was a, this weekend's a really special weekend
for me remembering him.
So on the water and on really nice green grass.
How's that?
That sounds like a good place to be.
So, all right.
And then if people wanna find out,
we know LinkedIn, you're on there.
You're posting every day.
But if you wanna find out more or get ahold of you at all,
what's the best place for them to look?
Yeah, my email is alan, A-L-A-N
at alan D as in davidwittman.com.
That's my website is alan D as in davidwittman.com.
All right, and we'll put that in the show notes as well.
Yeah, so Alan, this was awesome.
I really appreciate you sharing your knowledge
and your passion surrounding this profession.
And honestly, I'd really love to do it again sometime.
So hope we can get this together.
I would too.
I appreciate what you do for us in the profession.
And this was a lot of fun, which makes it even better.
It was a joy to be with you.
So good luck with your survey and the event in July.
And I hope we'll talk again.
Thank you for joining us today on the Unique CPA.
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