Accountant v Social Media Accountant

For much of my forty plus years in the accounting profession, our perception of what other accountants were achieving was relatively limited, based upon local chat, articles in the trade press and the noise made by those who were louder on the networking circuit.

Whilst my own confidence levels lead me to believe that there were many accountants better than me out there (they weren’t wrong!) it didn’t particularly impact on me in a negative way because my world was quite small. My colleagues and clients were happy with me and I heard nothing negative from outside so I was content within my bubble.

Social media has well and truly burst that bubble. I spend a lot of time on it, LinkedIn in particular, as a consequence of the needs of our business. Now you cannot hide away from the apparent successes of others.

Of course, social media gives a distorted version of the truth, if indeed the concept of truth even exists these days. Social media gives us a version of our world that others want us to see and not necessarily the world that actually exists. As a consequence, we may benchmark ourselves against someone else’s rosy picture or see ourselves in the minority against an artificially created majority.

So, for those accountants struggling with the view of themselves and their own firms against the apparent highflyers out there, here’s some observations from my life as an accountant amongst accountants to balance things up.

It’s okay to:-

·     still wear a suit and tie

·     be over 45 and still consider you have a future

·     be under 35 and not have a life plan

·     see compliance as your bread and butter

·     class tech as useful tools rather than the promised land

·     have an office

·     not be a follower of gurus, thought leaders and visionaries

·     not bombard your clients with your holiday snaps

·     not yet have AI running your communications

·     still work a five day week

·     not have a workforce thousands of miles away from you

·     think that ‘sick’ is bad

·     believe that experience matters

·     believe that being professional matters

·     be a ‘general practitioner’

Care about your people and yourself, have a vision and plan for your firm, be aware of what’s happening around you and live by your own values and rules. Don’t let LinkedIn tell you otherwise. That way, you will succeed or fail by your own hand, rather than the hands of others. That’s how it should be.

Maybe I’m being hypocritical in posting this on social media, and I’m certainly not advocating that some of the topics caught in the net above don’t matter, simply that you and your firm are almost certainly better than you give yourself credit for.

You’ve read this for a start!