Accountants in Media and the Branding Problem of the Industry

You'd be surprised. We run these businesses that are huge and handle people's money. And then the imposter syndrome that lives in accountants is very real.

You're listening to the Marketing for Accounting Firms podcast. Each episode we have conversations with firm owners and marketing experts about how to attract your ideal clients, foster trust, and build a marketing engine that works for an accounting firm. I'm your host, Matt Banker Account. I'm the founder of Benchmark Growth Marketing. You can find more episodes and subscribe to our newsletter at marketingforaccountingfirms.com now here's the show. We are here today with Lori Hauk and Lori and I, we're going to talk about something a little different. Normally we talk about marketing for accounting firms like you're trying to get more clients for your firm. But today we're going to talk a little bit more big picture marketing of accounting as a profession as a whole. And so Laurie, why, why are we talking to you about this topic?

So we're talking about this topic and why we should listen to me about it is I am doing research through Pepperdine University to write an entire research paper on how the profession of accounting is portrayed in the media and how the negative portrayal has actually impacted the pipeline and how we get new accountants and also how we're portrayed to clients and potential clients in the world.

So, so your theory isn't, it's not just the 150 hour rule that's killing the pipeline that there's actually a deeper, almost branding issue with accounting as, as a profession?

Absolutely. My hope is that I have a great impact on rebranding accounting through different, more through different media portrayal. Really?

Yeah. I think it's super fascinating. I know from my work mostly with accounting firm owners, hiring is a big challenge right now. It's pretty well established that there is a pipeline problem as a whole for accountants in the accounting space. Anything from tax professionals, CPAs, like across the board, it's a challenge. And the best firms, they're competing for a limited pool of talent. And upstream from that though is that there's just not that many young people who are going into accounting as, as a profession. Why don't you can you just unpack for us a little bit from, from your perspective and in your research? What, where's the root of this? Where does this come from? How, I mean, I guess the assumption is that accountants aren't portrayed very well in media. But what's the, what's the history of this?

So the history is deep. We can Go to comic books all the way back to 1938.

Okay.

There's actually a write up on comic books from 1938 to 2018. And the portrayal of accountants in a non hero sense, like we cannot be the hero or even the anti hero because we can't leave our desks. We're bean counters that are micromanaged. So all we can possibly do is be a supporting character to the main hero. So that's a large, that's a long term study. But also in media, if you can think about all of the professions you've seen portrayed as cool, and that's actually a term, the cool factor is you're not going to see accounting. If you think back to them, this is my favorite example, the movie Hitch and Albert Brenneman, he is one of the two main characters essentially. And Will Smith's character, Hitch is trying his best to make him cool so he can get a girlfriend. And he's portrayed as spilling stuff on himself, bumbling, doing the dance. I like to do it for, you know, presentation, which is like Will Smith's like, don't ever do that again. Like do not behave like this in public. And so that's Albert as an accountant. Then you think about the office, the TV show, their accountants. The accountants in that show busted the stereotypes of white male, but yet they were still socially inept and kind of weird. Essentially a popular one people want to be excited about is Ben Wyatt from Parks and Rec. But he still, he also had that like little bit of socially ineptness to him. And so we through history have been portrayed as either just a secondary character that can't possibly carry, you know, an interesting storyline and that we're very much micromanaged bean counters who can't leave their desk to go network or have fun or do anything exciting. And so that's become what the portrayal of the profession is.

Yeah, I come out of the, out of the marketing space and I would say I do think, I think that marketers tend to be thought probably as, as cool, right? Like creative folks, artists in a lot of cases. But I've myself in the accounting space and with a lot of accountants at conferences and things like that. And one of the things that was really surprising to me was, and this is my own bias showing through here, but my expectation was, oh, you know, boring math people go to accounting conferences. The reality is accountants are like regular people, as in every other industry. There are some personality types I think, that are drawn to different spaces. But I mean, I'll just be honest, like A lot of accountants are very like, fun, funny, they get pretty wild at some of these conferences and things like that. But my, my peers in the marketing space when they hear, oh, you work with accountants, like, isn't that pretty boring? And I'm like, well, no, it's not, it's not boring. It's not boring people. So you and I know the reality of, of who our accountants and that space doesn't match with the portrayal of it. Why, and I don't know, in your research or in your opinion, why is it that accountants have landed as the, as the nerdy, uncool of the professional services?

So there is, to your point, there are personality types that are attracted to specific things. There's a study out of Portugal of the public's opinion of what personality traits an accountant has. And most people don't necessarily find those as bad things. The, the portrayal was through the big five model of personality test. So you can all run out and after you listen to this and do the big five personality test. But conscientiousness was a top one. Not introverted, but not necessarily extroverted. They're kind of somewhere in the middle, but they're just very somewhat risk averse, which you kind of want your accountant to be. And so there's a basis and I go through this in information, I write about that and I know this personally. So as soon as I read the research, I ran out and took the Big 5 personality test because I'm an accountant with over 20 years experience myself. But I'm switching, I'm moving into this marketing space more so now. And it's part of my doctorate is actually, it's focused more on marketing, the accounting profession than being an accountant. And so the first thing I did was take that personality test. And I am the exact opposite of what an accountant would be. And so I've had people say to me, well, you are kind of a different accountant. Like, you don't strike me as accountant. You strike me as a kindergarten teacher or a speaker. You're a dynamic speaker, like these things. And so that's, I think where we started to get the bad rap in all of this is the public sees us one way and the media portrayal has been kind of the same way. So, and I think traditionally you did have. It was a white male who went to the office every day. He had usually a spouse or someone at home to take care of all the household duties so he could just work, work, work and take care of the family and become a partner. And that track was Always there. So it kind of fed the stereotype along the way. And let's be honest, you always need a butt of a joke. So if you've got the cool people, you need the opposite.

Right.

So we landed in that space, and now we have to really work on repositioning the brand to get out of that space.

Well, I mean, you mentioned some media portrayals of accountants. I was thinking in my head, all right, well, what. Who are we comparing to? Because we're not. We're not comparing accountants just to, like, superheroes. But when I think of even professional services, I can think of my favorite lawyer shows. I can think of my favorite doctor shows. But I. But all of the accountants shows, I can't think of any of those. I don't know, maybe there's just. We're missing that creative screenwriter who can find the really interesting stories in this. But I think you're right. Like, the Ben Wyatt is sort of the only, we'll say, even like, semi interesting, fun accountant character that you can or, you know, positively compared one that I. That I can really think of how much of this is a chicken and egg situation. Right. There's the negative media portrayal, which obviously is going to influence how the public thinks of. And that's going to affect. I think this is a big part of your research, the types of people who think they should go into accounting. Like, if they don't see themselves in those stereotypes, they're going to be less likely to think of it as a. As an option for a career. Right?

Absolutely. There's actually been surveys done that show that some people don't mind because everybody wants to talk about the 150 hours. Everybody wants to talk about if you paid accountants more than the people would come. It's not true entirely. There have been surveys done that show that people were okay with the salary, fine with it, accepted it. And then they said, but I don't want to be an accountant because I have heard and been told and seen that it's boring.

Let's face it, marketing is expensive. It's either going to cost you time or money or both. And a lot of firms want to do a lot of their marketing in house, which makes complete sense. The problem is they don't always, always know what they're doing. And depending on who's in charge of it, they may not actually even understand that much about accounting. That's why we started a marketing mastermind for whoever wears the marketing hat at an accounting firm. Sometimes that's the owner. Sometimes it's a front desk admin. And sometimes it's a bookkeeper who happens to be really creative. Either way, this marketing mastermind is designed to support that person as they try to get more leads and grow your firm. You get access to expert marketers like myself on a weekly basis to learn what is working, how to do it better, and you also connect with other peers who are in the same role at their firm so that you can both level up your skill set and your understanding. Marketing. We're about to launch the next cohort of our Mastermind. We'll kick it off on June 5th and we'll be accepting new members throughout the month of June. After that, we're going to cut it off at least until the fall so that there can be some cohesion amongst the people who are a part of the Mastermind. To learn more and apply to be a part of the Mastermind, go to our website marketingforaccountingfirms.com mastermind. You'll find all the details and there's also a link there where you can schedule a call with me so that we can talk about whether or not the Mastermind is a good fit for you and your firm.

There's actually U.S. bureau of Labor Statistics, the top 20 jobs to grow in the next 10 years. There are jobs on there with similar education requirements such as an occupational therapist and software engineering that don't pay any greater than accounting, but they're set to grow. Why? I don't know anything bad about occupational therapists. I've never seen one in the media, so why would I not want to be an occupational therapist? Meanwhile, I've seen accountants in the media. There's an actually a Netflix show that was based on a book and it only lasted one season, but it's called Partner Trap to your point about attorneys. So it's a show about lawyers and they get to about episode six or so and they introduce the tax attorneys. And I say it with that voice because these people are like, they're like the nerdiest people you could have possibly found. Meanwhile, if you actually take that book and or show partner track and watch it from the standpoint of I've worked in a top 25 firm, I don't even care big four or top 25, they all operate generally the same in my experience and everything I know about them and I've worked in, I've worked in them, I've worked in two of them. So I have experiences. But that partner track show, you could replace those attorneys for accountants and essentially make the show out of accountants. Because it's the same like Big Law and Big four kind of have the same path of you do the grunt work, you run around and work endless hours to eventually hopefully make the partner track. And that's what the show is about. So I find it interesting that it can parallel and my hope is to possibly do exactly what you're saying, maybe a TV show someday about that makes accountants look like the hero. Like if you've watched suits. So there is a bunch of. I hate to be talky talky, but that's kind of the point of this. There is a bunch of research that shows LA law after that debuted in 1986. The run on law school applications was ridiculous. They had something like 6,000 applications for like 300 spots in law schools in LA. And LA has a lot of universities and law schools. And so that showed a positive impact. Suits showed a positive impact, especially with Meghan Markle being on the show. Then there have been, we call it the MasterChef effect has actually been written about. I ran a poll on Twitter not that long ago indicating which of these careers would you find the least desirable. And yes, my. I have a little bit of bias because my Twitter probably skews my 4,000 plus followers. You know, I have thousands of followers, but they probably skew accounting. But I asked which one would you least want to do during busy season? As a matter of fact. And being in the culinary and like a chef was the one. And that's the worst one I can think of because I put up law. I put up crime scene investigator because there's also a CSI effect that's been proven and that people want to go into crime scene investigations and law enforcement forensics because of CSI. And so I put MasterChef essentially suits accounting and just all these different positions. And I can't imagine a worse job. I love cooking, but I don't want to do it eight hours a day in a hot kitchen as a grunt being told what to do to work my way up to executive chef or something. But yet having MasterChef portray this job as like, look what you can create has actually improved the numbers of culinary enrollment in the schools that teach for they teach culinary degrees. Meanwhile accounting. I talked to one university that had a thousand people in their accounting major. Typically they've dropped to 600 recently. And this was a conversation this year in February. So that's a big drop that we're seeing.

Do you feel like is there. I don't know if this. This gets off of the conversation about Media portrayal primarily. But I wonder if there's a little bit of a lack of imagination as well in that. One of the things I hear in a lot of universities and accounting programs as well is that, and you're, you're a professor, so tell me if this is different than your experience or you think I'm wrong, but I've heard that a lot of accounting departments have a pretty narrow imagination for what career options are there? You know, the big four tracks seems to be the really the strongest one. Most of my work is with mid sized small size accounting firms who are working with business owners. And the folks that I talk to in those firms, they love their work because they feel like they're making a real difference. It's not boring because they're working with, you know, community based businesses. They're helping them, you know, be more profitable. But maybe is this, is this, is there an issue of messaging at the education in academia as well that's, that's keeping people from, you know, having that imagination of how great this career could be or how exciting as, as a job it could be?

I think there is, I do think, and I have seen that we primarily push and, and the Big four comes to recruit and so students don't necessarily get an idea that there are other jobs out there. I did work at a university temporarily when I lived in Phoenix. I worked at Grand Canyon, which everybody got a little bit more exposure to through the NCAA tournament. But Grand Canyon actually is innovative in the way that they have built two accounting, well, kind of accounting majors. They've built the, if you want to go the, you know, the public accounting route and they've built a separate major if you aren't interested in a CPA in the public accounting route. And that has actually provided students with a better idea that there are other jobs out there. Some of the seniors I had in my capstone classes were already interning and working in government cost accounting, various, just different places they weren't all headed for. One was interviewing and got the job in a real estate accounting job. So they weren't just all headed for the big Four. There were still plenty of students that were in the track to go public accounting that were getting recruited and hired for the Big four. But there was a lot more exposure and discussion that there are other options. And that's also part of my getting out there and talking to students and talking to adults that what I call second career accountants is because they don't always know that there are more options than just going public accounting. It's a great route. It can be. It's a good learning, but you can also do other things with your career.

My, My wife is a, is a teacher. Well, she was. She's not teaching this year, but she was a teacher. And I, as you were talking about the portrayal and, and salary and things like that, I think about teachers, obviously. Obviously teacher teaching is a, is another really difficult career. But I think of all of the teachers I know, they go into it because they care about the work and someone told them they would be good at this job and, and in their minds, I think they associated that with being a worthwhile way to spend their time. But it seems like with, with accounting there are plenty of young people and students who would be really great in this career, but no one is telling them this is. And they're not seeing the portrayals of this as, as an option. That that would be a really good thing. I do think it's, it's an interesting perspective and maybe we underestimate how much the cool factor is really contributing. Maybe cool isn't the only factor, but the cool, the like necessary factor. Like people don't necessarily see accountants as an important role in, in the world. They see it as a. Important might be the right way as, as like a necessary evil. But even that word obviously is not one that's going to, is not going to attract people attract to the industry. And you're a market. Yeah. Well, okay. This is a big problem though, right? And we're saying accounting as a profession, as a whole has a branding issue. Whose job is it to fix that?

It's everyone's job. Like that's not a singular question. I can't say, well, firm owners need to do a better job because it's also multifaceted. Like I said, some people want to blame the 150 hours, some people want to pay. Blame the pay. Some people want to blame. They think that I'm silly blaming the media portrayal or there's just. There's so many things. The boringness of it, the grinding people's hours out. I've made the comment quite a few times on X Twitter that perhaps it's not the hours and there are other. Or the pay and that there are other positions that get paid about the same. And people will chime in with, yeah, but not for the amount of hours we work. And I'm thinking, well, you also have control over them. I didn't. I worked in public accounting. Yes, but I didn't always work in public accounting. I worked as a controller for 10 plus years. And I worked max, probably about 45 hours a week, typically more like 40. But I would definitely give up my lunches if it meant, you know, getting out of there on time kind of thing. And so it wasn't. It was a great job and I enjoyed it. I enjoy teaching more. That's why I no longer do that job. But I, I knew that my path was going to go the route of a doctorate and teaching and research, so. But there are jobs like that and I was getting paid well. It's not like I, you know, got paid half as much as someone working more hours than me. I was getting paid well. As a matter of fact, I saw this is still making me laugh a little. There was a job post because I keep up on them for my students kind of thing. I just like, I let the, the recruiter emails roll in and stuff because I keep up on the industry that way too. There was a job yesterday posted for a standard AI company who are hiring in a senior accountant to do essentially typical bank recs and balance sheet reconciliations and typical senior accounting work. Paid over a hundred thousand remote, if I recall, because they are an AI company, but so that's there. Do I know how many hours they'll work you? No. But at the same time, it's not to say necessarily that you're going to work 60 or 65. There's also the firm owners that are like, oh, we work so much. You own your firm, you choose. You're choosing to take on more clients when you're already at hours capacity that you'd like to work. So let's change that narrative because it's also making it sound like there's no other option to potential people who might become accountants. But they look at firm owners and say, well, why are they still working so much? So we all have a responsibility in changing the narrative here. The AICPA. A lot of people are laughing at their TikTok posts lately that they're trying to change the narrative. But there's also a saying that everything is cringe until it's not, until you succeed at it. And so, you know, podcasting was cringe until everybody succeeded at it. And then it's like, wait, everybody wants a podcast now? And so it's all of our responsibility to change the narrative around it. And we can't attract more people or even change the narrative with clients until we start with ourselves and helping. You know, I didn't take on more clients than I could handle because I couldn't hire someone like there's those options there. I upped my text stack so I could handle more clients without more hours. There's a lot to this and the media portrayal is one big chunk of it though, I believe.

Yeah, I do think, I mean I'm in, I'm in the marketing space. A lot of my work with accounting firms is around messaging and positioning because I do think that a lot of firms, they let themselves just slide into, I'm going to say like a commoditization zone and they look like, they look like, I'll be honest, a lot of firms, if you go to their websites, they just look really boring and they look like they don't, they don't. They haven't elevated their own perception through their branding in a way that I think does impact some of their. How people perceive them as professionals. You've all seen I think a real estate agents and lawyers, they're on billboards and all over town. A lot of that like personal branding I think affects the perception that people then have of the industry. Not always good, you know, lawyers I think have their own branding issues. But there is an element of like we, we are a high value service or that that we're supposed to be well respected, we're good at our jobs is even a part of that with real estate agents and things that there's an element where I do think individual firm owners could focus on their own branding of their businesses and their personal brand. That would be helpful in a general sense. On the other hand, I think when it comes to that branding firms should also be thinking about how they're being perceived by potential job candidates. So that's where a lot of our work is at the kind of micro level. Not, not accounting as a whole necessarily. But every individual firm is fighting against the generalized branding of accounting. And so they have to do even more to show that they stand out, that they're different, they have a good work life balance, that you can build a career here, that it's not bean counting boring work, that we have real culture that you're going to enjoy your coworkers. You have to work against all these generalized things in order to attract good candidates to your firm. Do you have any advice for that individual firm owner? What should they be doing to affect what people perceive accounting to be as a whole?

I think that you and I kind of have a similar job in this, in that traditional. And traditionally, even if you're not a traditional accountant type, traditionally you haven't had to market, especially if you're in tax. So you can throw up the website that's very boring and or at least some of us perceive it as very boring. And you're still going to get clients. You can put up the Google Ad and you're going to get clients. And so you haven't had to be interesting or attractive necessarily. I mean attractive in the sense of I look fun and I look like someone should want to work with me.

Right?

People are just gonna, we're gonna pick you because you are local or they were gonna pick you because you seem to have the niche that they're in. So my advice really is if you're looking to attract student and employees and maybe not even students but you know, new grads or even a year or so out, contact your local schools, the universities or even the community colleges. If you're okay with a two year degree, contact them and ask if you can come be have a little gathering. My hope is that I'm going to start doing small gatherings of students and local firm like medium small firm owner meetings because the big four tend to recruit at universities and then the smaller firms don't get known as much by students. And so I'm hoping to start hosting some mixers and you know, get some of the local business owners, accounting firm owners together too because to your point, we are fun people. We can interest people in our profession and coming to work for us. If they speak to us, you know, if they actually have a conversation with us, we are just like anyone else and we're fun and we do, we have interesting hobbies and like I run long distances for fun and I've done triathlons. And so there's students that athletes that are like oh you do? That's interesting. You mean I don't have to. I'm not going to give up my entire, you know, athletic pursuits to sit at a desk every day. And so I think that individual firm owners can do like work with marketing professionals to up their website game to get some social media that's a little more interesting just in general like reach out to potential candidates at universities and schools of trade schools. Community college, I think we're no longer using the term community college. So two year colleges because you do have things to offer. It's a solid career path. Even though we see a lot of layoffs lately in accounting firms, it's typically not the accountants being laid off. So it's giving off the wrong vibe to non accountants and to students because they do see that in the media too and that's throwing them off and they're like, well, maybe it's not a stable career then, but it's typically not the accountants being laid off. It's consulting in other areas of firms. So I guess my biggest advice is get out there, believe in yourself and what your career has done for you positively and make that positive portrayal of your firm and the profession to potential candidates. Yeah.

And even it sounds like if you can find opportunity to partner with your local university or college, finding ways to connect and interact with students earlier in their college experience when they're choosing what direction to go. Hiring is such a huge issue for so many firms right now. I think it's really smart, especially firms that are a little bigger or on a growth path, to be investing in the pipeline locally for your firm, not just hoping to attract, you know, once, once the few candidates have graduated. Now you're competing with all these other firms. They can be remote. They could be, you know, in your same town. If you're investing early in that pipeline, you can, that can be a really good way to, you know, build the, build the, the future accountants within, within your firm.

Absolutely. I mean, start some of them at sophomore level internships. That is what some firms have started doing. And they make it known like we bring in this many interns, but we're not hiring you necessarily. We might hire one of you or none of you, but it gives the student. A lot of students, especially at sophomore level, they don't want a full time job, they want experience doing it. And so you can give them that, they can then get interested and they know about your firm then. So when they're ready to graduate or even in the interim, you keep them and bring them on as your junior year intern. And their senior year they keep coming back. So to your point, you've invested in the pipeline in your local community all along the way to build this connection. And that is some things I know some smaller firms do. There is, I've heard this trend of not telling people that they're just intern seasonal work and then getting rid of them unexpectedly at the end of tax season or busy season. Yeah, I don't, I would not promote that. Like, that is a terrible idea because I think you're doing the opposite for your firm. You're making people think, wow, they lied to me. Yeah, wow, I thought I had a job. And that's, that's not great. No one likes someone misinforming them about something.

Well, if I'm going to. Yeah, if I'm going to make a. You kind of mentioned it already. Slight pitch for Some of the work that we do on this topic is more and more we find that firms, when they think about marketing, half of it is to attract the right clients, but half of it is to attract the right talent. And that's becoming a bigger and bigger issue. I talked to so many firms that say we would love to get, we'd love to grow, we would love to get more better clients, but we can't until we can fill positions A, B and C. And so what I would, what I would say though is perception is reality to the candidates that are seeing you. And so if your website and your social media and your brand look stale, old, boring and kind of play into those stereotypes, you might not be having any trouble getting clients because you're kind of the only option. There's a CPA shortage. People need what you offer, so you don't have a problem getting work, but it is affecting your ability to attract good talent. And so I think marketing has a role to play in that. And like you said, I think that networking and investment in your local pipeline really has a big part to play in that as well. For people who are interested in being a part of this, do you have any learning more, contributing in, in a good way to the perception of accounting as a whole? Are there resources or places that you're going to point people to?

So my LinkedIn, I post some about it. I need to do more. I take on private clients who want to learn more about how can I do this, how can I? I'm not a marketing firm like you. I'm not going to work on their website. I'm not going to. I'm talking more like coaching of business owners and how they can do this and also how they can connect with their local. Because I am a professor, I can probably get in contact. If you are not comfortable just reaching out to a school, I can get in contact with them for you on how to do that. I can give you ideas on things that's kind of like how to, how to believe in yourself. You'd be surprised. We run these businesses that are huge and handle people's money. And then the imposter syndrome that lives in accountants is very real. As a matter of fact, there is actual information that certain accounting firms, the HR departments, would focus on hiring like students that were graduating. So graduates that had a personality trait of eager to be like accepted and eager to please and very competent. So it's a specific personality trait where we don't really believe in ourselves to stand up for ourselves, but we'll work hard to please other people. So we're people pleasers but we have huge imposter syndrome so I worry. So come to my LinkedIn reach out to me. I do answer my LinkedIn messages. Even the ones where I'm saying no thank you, I answer those too. I'm just a polite person.

Please.

Yes, exactly. I personally have fought imposter syndrome and fought that and eager to please kind of thing. I definitely have bought the people pleaser. So I am more than happy to work with professionals on how to go about this and how and also you can find me my headphone finally did fall out. You can also find me on X. I go by purely numbers. I'm working on to your to your credit, I'm working on all of the marketing pieces to this on the side kind of. I'm still building social media because I transitioned from having a firm, a small firm that was just me, a solopreneurship to while I was teaching to now I'm not taking actual accounting clients. I'm only taking firm, you know, owners and business people who need help in this arena. So I am on LinkedIn. Lori Hauk, MBA, CPA and you can find me there and reach out and I'm happy to talk.

Is is there anything that you're looking for from accounting firm owners or accountants out there? Are you, is there anything around your research that you're that you need from them? Or is this mostly just in the media space?

I am setting up survey questions, interview items for actual research. And so what I'm going to be looking for from accounting firm connections of mine, accountants is we want to draw a portrayal of a new account. Like I need to not necessarily draw, like literally draw, but I need to build together with other accountants what we think the future accountant that should be portrayed will look like. So it's not just my personal opinion, but I want the opinion of other firm owners and other CPAs and EAs and everyone in this space so that we can get what do we think the portrayal should be? That we're like, it's gotta include that fun. Like there are people in accounting who love fashion, who love, you know, who have additional, like I said, hobbies. I mean there's probably every hobby you can think of. You've got rappers to podcasters to people writing books. There's like bird watchers. So like I want to talk to additional accountants about like, let's work together to figure out what the portrayal of this cool factor is. Because when I talk to students that are freshman Sophomore. We want to show them this is the traditional view, this is the new view. Which one it like, what do they speak to you? What do they say to you? Each of these different views. So that's my hope to connect with accounting firm owners so we can get a portrayal of what we all kind of agree on or what a bunch of us agree on, what that looks like.

Well, I'm not an accountant myself but from, from the outside and thinking about accounting, one of the things that I really appreciate and respect about it and what I've heard. So if I'm going to add my contribution. Accounting is a great platform to build and do whatever you want. I don't think, I think it's, it's one of the majors. I was a, I started as a communication major. Communication major is like the, the worst version of being an accountant. It's kind of like a general business thing. I think accounting, one of the things that's great is there, there actually are so many opportunities and different types of businesses, different types of jobs. And so for that, that student who is maybe a little bit risk averse, right. They want it, they want to pursue something that feels kind of safe but they don't want to be locked down into a singular career path or direction. I think that's one of the things that I see accounting as having like a big strength in as, as a career option. So that's just my perspective here as a cool marketer from the outside.

But the very cool. I want to be like you someday, the cool marketer.

I think, I think that accountants aspirationally can definitely reach cool marketer. Because here's a secret. Us marketers are not actually that cool. We're quite nerdy ourselves. I don't know how we lucked out as being portrayed as the, as the like, you know, hip, fun people in the world. Because I hang out a lot at a lot of marketing conferences and no offense, luckily no marketers listen to this show. But I. Accountants are no less cool than the marketers that I hang out with. That's what I'll say.

I would agree. I have quite a few marketers in my life and they are no cooler than me. They're probably like one of them does math in his head like Rayman and yeah, like that's just an example. No offense to the portrayal of Ray Man.

The new tagline for accounting profession is accounting just as cool as marketers? Okay, I don't think that's going to really, I don't think it's really going to Sell it completely. But, hey, it's.

It's someplace maybe not. There's no TV shows about cool marketers either, if you think about it. I can't. I can't know any anyway.

I don't. There's no, There's. There's no cool. I think there's a few TV shows about, I would say, like, pretty sleazy. Well, Mad Men is probably the closest. You know, that's probably the closest to a cool marketer. But they're. They're not always portrayed as. There's a little bit of anti hero in there, for sure.

Yeah. You know, Breaking Bad had a bookkeeper, and I'm like, do we really want to go with that as the portrait?

Yeah, but there's Breaking Bad was. There's an element, too. I, you know, I'm not an expert on media theory, but you go through phases where, you know, a type of character can be. Is, like, seen as the villain first, and I think maybe that's where accounting has been. Then they can move into being the hero. But, you know, you really have arrived when the accountant can be the anti hero as well. It doesn't just have to be the, like, aspirational, perfect character, but we got to go through those stages, and I.

Think if you look at social media, you'll find that we can be both the hero and antihero.

Yeah, a little bit. We didn't even get into the social media. You know, I'm an accountant meme and all of that. But I think we'll leave that maybe for another time.

Yeah, absolutely. We can definitely have a chat about the social media portrayal and a whole other conversation.

Yeah, that's the. That's the Marketing for Accounting Firms After Dark episode. I think so.

Absolutely.

Well, Lori, it's been great to have you on. I'm really, I'm excited about your research and the work that you're doing. You said people should find Lori Hauk on LinkedIn and on Twitter X whatever we're calling it these days. Follow her, follow her research and yeah, thank you for being on the show.

Thank you so much, Matt.

All right, we will leave it there. See you next time. Bye.

Thanks, everybody.

Thanks for listening to this episode of the Marketing for Accounting Firms podcast. If you liked this conversation and found it valuable, please rate and review us on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. It's really good for the algorithm and it helps other firm owners find this show. You can subscribe to our weekly Marketing for Accounting Firms newsletter@marketingforaccountingfirms.com and you can connect with me, Matt Banker on LinkedIn or Twitter. We hope you tune in next time for another episod of marketing for accounting firms.