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Cool Careers in Accounting Ep. 8 - The Tech CPA Who Needed Just One Yes with Mike Manalac
250 Plays26 days ago
Explore Mike Manalac's journey to uproot his family, move across the country, and break into the tech world. He shares how, despite many rejections, perseverance and a renewed perspective finally got him the opportunity to join Google. He shares how he used his CPA license and accounting background to grow his dream career in spite of the pitfalls, how he successfully navigated a sabbatical to travel the world with family, and advice for anyone who strives to take their career in a new direction.
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Transcript
Introduction & Guest Introduction
00:00:09
Speaker
Hey, Spencer Payne here with Becker and another episode of Cool Careers in Accounting. Our guest today is Mike Manilac, CPA. And Mike, can you introduce yourself a little bit to this CPA audience who kind of knows the profession a little bit? How do you describe what it is that you do for work to to folks in the accounting profession?
00:00:28
Speaker
Absolutely. First of all, great to be here. Again, I'm Mike Manilak. I'm ah a CPA. I'm a manager, accounting manager at Google. I mainly focus on Google search and YouTube products.
Mike's Online Presence & Playbook
00:00:39
Speaker
Outside of that, I run a website, mikefromaccounting.com. i I really try to highlight the the fun and exciting side of the accounting profession and A lot of good resources on there. I like to draw. So I have have a blog with some ah illustrations that I put up that are pretty helpful, but also ah fun at the same time. And I have a playbook that I put out called No Flux Given, how to land the accounting job of your dreams, which might be ah something that resonates with some of your audience, which kind of goes through the strategy that that I went through.
00:01:09
Speaker
ah leading up to landing my dream job at Google and of course and a bunch of other good stuff on there too. But ah yeah, otherwise I'm i'm just a a regular accountant that that's really kind of shot for the moon and excited to be here on your podcast.
Goal Setting & Work-Life Balance
00:01:25
Speaker
Yep. Awesome, Mike. Well, we're going to dive into some of those things, especially the concept of landing your dream job and accounting, maybe working your way into the the technology world. So we're definitely going to get into that. Um, but, but first maybe with that wide range of things that you do, can you share a little bit of like, Hey, how how do you know if you're doing your job? Well, sometimes, sometimes we get hung up on, you know, am I doing okay? Am I doing great? like how How do you know, especially with that broad range of things that you're focused on of how do you get a sense at the end of the month?
00:01:52
Speaker
Yeah, um umm I'm doing all these things well. um how do you How do you keep score of that yourself? It's a good question because I think I try to look at everything that I try to tackle with ah what's the success metric for whatever that goal is. At work, it's a little easier because Google is very regimented in the quarterly OKR setting your expectations. How are you progressing to that? And you have check ins every quarter and a big annual review at the end of the year.
00:02:19
Speaker
and you have to get feedback from your peers and you know from your manager. so ah But I think that holds you accountable at the very beginning of the year you set out. like What do I want to accomplish? What do I expect of myself? Are they lofty enough? Is it too soft? Should I ah focus on areas of of strengths while also touching all my weaknesses or vice versa? So I think actually setting the goals is is you know utmost importance. I think a lot of times people just kind of go with the flow of My main goal is to handle the routine work that's assigned to me, but that's only going to get you so far. So I think at work, always trying to push the envelope a little bit as far as what you can accomplish within your your work tasks. And then separately, I mean, the the other stuff that I do outside of work is is really just for fun. I try to motivate a lot of the younger accounting professionals out there. And I have different success metrics there just as far as
00:03:14
Speaker
putting something out, you know, being leading by example, if I'm going to say be visible and as a way to stand out, I want to make sure that I'm being visible and standing out to and, you know, I'm putting different content out there, you know, whether it's a video or a drawing or, you know, reposting some other content that's resonated and trying to do that on a regular cadence um and holding myself accountable to that. um So that's one thing.
Transformation & SQL Skills
00:03:40
Speaker
And then kind of just tracking, like, is it resonating with with ah the audience that i'm I'm trying to connect with, which is probably like a lot of lot of the audience of this podcast and other accounting professionals that maybe feel stuck or maybe want a little more out of the accounting profession or are a little unsatisfied with where their career is or
00:04:00
Speaker
Maybe they're unsure if they even want to do accounting. So those are the types of people I connect with. And I can usually get a good sense with my audience would what's resonating and what's not. So I try to lean into the stuff that's resonating and the stuff that's not trying to figure out why. But um yeah, I think having a specific success metric in whatever capacity that means is very important for all of your goals at work and then outside of work.
00:04:26
Speaker
Yeah, it's it's hard to have success if you're drifting and don't really know where you're headed. um On that note, is there any anything over the next, say, 12 months, any projects at work or personally or anything that's just got you particularly energized, anything you want to do new or anything you're doubling down on? Is there anything over the next 12 months that you're just you're just energized or excited by?
00:04:46
Speaker
I love the question. ah At work, I'm in a pretty cool place where ah a lot of the accountants listening will probably fully understand the pains of manual work and and spreadsheets with 50 gazillion tabs in it. I'm basically at a point in ah and though the workflow project that I've been working on with some of the ah Google search programs that I manage of basically taking those from separate Excel spreadsheets at Google. We use Google sheets, but for all intents and purposes, it's the same taking them out of the spreadsheet and incorporating sequel based workflow. ah That's been really fun for me to kind of pick up ah some sequel skill sets there and actually instead of it being multiple different type of programs that kind of operate separately, consolidating them into one workflow.
00:05:36
Speaker
and whenever you can do that at ah at a company like google you can kind of get the attention of the engineering teams that are then looking at at that is like i can take that and supercharge it and if you just have a bunch of spreadsheets they don't even want to touch it so i'm i'm getting to a pretty cool point there At work and then, but you know, on the outside of work I just last week had a an article published in Business Insider, which I thought was pretty cool. It was a feature about, you know, some of the journey that I kind of went through and going some of the sacrifices I made in my career, including like a super commute, which I feel like nobody loves sitting in in a car for multiple hours to get to work so
00:06:18
Speaker
ah That really resonated, and I actually had a couple follow-up ah writers paint me to see if I wanted to do some follow-up articles after that. So, very excited. I like writing, so i'm I'm curious to see what comes from that, and I can't see it being a bad thing. So, you know, looking forward to see where that goes.
00:06:35
Speaker
Yep. And a couple of quick follow-ups on some of those things. One, one SQL. So maybe how did you identify SQL as something you you wanted to go learn or was going to help propel you? And where did, where did you go? Where did you go to say like, I want to learn SQL it's that's a little too generic. You might say, I want to learn XYZ or how this interacts with that. So how did you, where where did you go to learn it? And maybe how did you set up the question better rather than I want to learn SQL, which could be this yeah to get maybe hyper targeted of what it was that you were trying to learn. And where did you go to learn?
Career Transition to Tech
00:07:06
Speaker
Yeah, that's a good question because, oddly enough, I've been at some small some top 20s, some big four firms, SQL is not a part of your day to day, you know, and yet when I went into industry and I was at a fortune 500 company like Walmart, I was on their e commerce team handling the ah Walmart dot.com operations, the P and&L, the balance sheet. And tons, you can imagine anything with Walmart, it's big data. You can't do, even in a spreadsheet, you would have to convert it to a CSV because one spreadsheet wasn't enough. You'd have to convert it to a CSV to squeeze out some more rows. ah And we were working with engineer teams at the time that were using SQL to try to run the accounting reports. And some of the other members of my team were,
00:07:53
Speaker
Very high caliber people I was working with they came over from like a Nike and a Pepsi and and Amazon companies like that They were familiar with sequel where to me it it was brand new um But we were working with these engineers who knew very well how to script and run these reports But when they got the data, they didn't know what the hell they were looking at you know And then they had to push it back to the accounting team who, for the most part, like myself at the time, I knew what I was looking at, but I didn't know how to change the scripts and fine tune it the way I needed. it So there's this constant ping pong, volleying back and forth between our teams.
00:08:29
Speaker
And I really realized the importance of, well, what if I was able to have some of those skills so that I could both interpret what I'm looking at and also suggest some improvements or how to tweak it. And that opportunity didn't really present itself until I joined Google, which completely shocked me because I would walk across the you know the ah the office floor and there would be tons of people all writing workflows and sequel like typing out scripts and stuff and I kind of felt like is this the accounting team because I really was expecting
00:09:00
Speaker
and not as many people to be as savvy with any sort of coding language. um But a database language is perfect for you know accountants. And ah we have our own thing that we call Finance Academy within Google. So there was there was all these trainings. And I really pushed myself to pick that stuff up. And I had kind of mentioned that one consolidated project that I was working on that um I'm really excited for in the next 12 months. A lot of that is using some of those SQL skill sets that I built because I think one thing that you did say that really resonated was how do you narrow it down and say go beyond just saying I want to learn SQL because that's what I initially did.
00:09:42
Speaker
And you can learn a ton online for free. But the problem is if there's not a real use case for it with your day to day, it doesn't resonate like I'm matching people's names with their dogs and join this table. And that's cool, but it didn't mean anything to me. So it wasn't until I was able to use it in a real-life work scenario to say, oh okay, I have this data and I want to pull data from it. ah How would I go about doing that? Sure, I could export it in Excel and run some VLOOKUPs and you know things like that, which I was more used to, or I could see how to take it to the next level with SQL. I tried a couple of times without the real use case and it I kind of fell flat.
00:10:25
Speaker
It wasn't until I was able to incorporate it within my day-to-day where it really started to pay off and and click for me. Yeah, yeah. So that's almost advice on learning any new skill, right? As you might say, I want to learn X skill. And it's like, that sometimes is too generic and it's too broad. It might be, I need to learn how to specifically do this task as part of that broader skill. And then all of a sudden that brings it to life a little bit more.
00:10:49
Speaker
um exactly You mentioned dream jobs and going to get your dream job so is like maybe I'll ask a blunt question right is working at Google your dream job and how how what you mentioned working at Walmart and big four so it sounds like your your path has been quite varied so can you just talk a little bit to maybe how you identify what your dream job even is in the first place, and then how do you go get it? And then once you get it, is it what you thought it was going to be? So I realize three-part question there maybe first is how do you start, how how do how have you throughout your career identified what type of aspects your dream job incorporates?
00:11:25
Speaker
Yeah. Uh, you know, it's funny because it sounds like a a simple enough question. Like, well, what's your dream job? It's almost like when your parent will ask you and you're a little kid, like, what do you want to be? It can be anything. And it's actually a pretty hard question. And somebody had asked me years ago, I was at a ah happy hour in DC and somebody asked, well, I was complaining, I think about busy season, right? Go figure.
00:11:48
Speaker
And they said, well, what's your dream job? And I didn't think much into it. I just said, I don't know, working working ah on the finance team at Google or something like that. And once I said it and put it out there, it kind of like stuck in my head. And, you know, I had never verbalized anything like that or really ever given it some thought. And after I said it once, I did start to really dig in like.
00:12:11
Speaker
you know, maybe that dream changes once I really start to think about it. But I started to think not just about the job, but what do I want? I want flexibility. I was the busy seasons were getting old, right? I want flexibility. I want the compensation. I want the exciting work. And ah once you start having a couple of those factors, it's almost like buying a house. Like you got to pick two. You can't get all three.
00:12:34
Speaker
Once you get all three, then you're pretty much approaching a dream job territory. So ah one for me, it was it was really looking internal, like what do I really want? and then A lot of people look at it in a vacuum of what do they want out of their career. But to be honest, I think most people, especially nowadays, you know, they're not they're not um living to work like we're working to live. So your job is a piece of it. But what do you want to do in your life? And will that career that you just outlined
00:13:04
Speaker
afford that like well will that fund whatever you want in your life because i could say i want to you know go be a professional painter but i also don't want to be a starving artist i'm realistic like i have other things i need to pay the bills so uh you know there's a little bit of asking yourself getting real clear with yourself like what do i want in my career and what do i want to accomplish in my life and then the second piece is well when do i want to do those things yeah which and then you can kind of work backwards so uh to to get back to your original question that's kind of how I pressured myself to come up with what is it that I really want and at the time I was I was living in Baltimore I was
00:13:45
Speaker
really attracted by the tech scene in Silicon Valley, there's movies and articles and Uber and Airbnb were just coming out. And this whole concept of the sharing economy was really cool. And next thing I know, I'm like, Airbnb being my house. And I think, you know, I'm some like entrepreneur kind of guy, but that actually just made me really interested in this like app economy, shared economy. like And I just thought, like wouldn't it be cool to be working for these companies that are really disrupting the taxi industry or the hotel industry? And every time I would look up any of the companies I was interested, they were always in in San Francisco Bay Area. And ah being in Baltimore, my hometown, I love it. Go Ravens. But there's na there's actually zero Fortune 500 companies headquartered there. There's a couple of big companies. Great job opportunities.
00:14:36
Speaker
you know but not to the extent of what I was looking for. And I think I was at a kind of a pivotal time because I was working at, i again, I had mentioned I had started out at a small firm as an internship, maybe 50 people. ah That's where really where you realize, do you like a small firm or do you want a bigger firm? And that's when I realized, okay, I want a bigger firm. So that's kind of when after school,
00:15:00
Speaker
joined a top twenty firm named cohen reznick they might be pushing top top ten nowadays but they had a big presence in baltimore um And from there I started, ah you know, working my way through the ranks. I got my CPA, I was getting promotions. I was ah was working on repeat clients, which was good because I was able to have efficiencies year over year and things like that. But it also kind of started to get old because I was doing the same clients year over year. And I started to think, I don't know, maybe I need to change. And that was right when somebody had asked me what the dream job was.
00:15:38
Speaker
yeah pen and right when i started getting obsessed with this tech scene so you know my my head was going all over the place at that point Yep. And, uh, approximately, you know, some people today think I want X I better get X in the next two weeks or I'm a failure. Right. And like, that's just so not how most of these stories happen. So I'm curious from that time you blurted it out, you know, Hey, I want to work in at Google or maybe more macro. I want to work in this technology sector. Do you recall like how how long before you.
00:16:08
Speaker
actually, like, how long before you actually updated your resume and started applying for those jobs and actually got one and actually, I'm assuming this story leads to you moving to San Francisco, it sure feels like that. So like, yeah but can you help us understand the timing of from identifying that and blurring that out at that cocktail party in DC that you want to work in tech to actually doing it? Like, what well, how long did that take? What was that process like?
00:16:31
Speaker
Yeah, I would say it definitely not a two week process, but still, I think pretty short. I think within six to eight months, I was out the door all in. And it was one of those things that I i guess deep down, I always knew I was ready for a change. I had already been a manager for a couple of years and anybody in public you know you realize you'll go from associate to senior to manager. The next step is senior manager and then you're pushing close to partner track and i started asking myself. Well do if i'm about to be senior manager then i'm basically gonna then be like on deck for partner or director is that am i a lifer in public you know because a lot of people don't necessarily start out saying i'm a lifer in anything.
00:17:15
Speaker
But it kind of creeps up on you, you know, so I had already been toying around with I need to make a decision, am I a lifer or not?
Risk-Taking & Work-Life Balance
00:17:23
Speaker
And then after that conversation in DC, when I realized what I really wanted as as a dream job was not to spend my days in public accounting. Not that that's a bad choice, but it for me it it wasn't exactly where my head was at at the time. I think the next six months I started, the next month I tried to convince myself, you know, am I crazy? You know, I'm going to put all my stuff in a storage locker, sell my car, say goodbye to my friends.
00:17:50
Speaker
quit my job that's been treated me very well and i i'm going to move to san francisco a place i've never visited and now i gotta convince my girlfriend at the time my now wife that she should do the same thing and leave her job uh for this same dream and uh that's what that took the six months of basically me convincing myself talking about it with my wife, about how it's good opportunities for her too, and would she be able to do a transfer, how how that would work. ah So about six to eight months, but I still think that that's pretty quick. you know Not the two week quick, but but it ended up feeling pretty quick. Yeah, yeah. So for those listening out there, if you didn't get your, land your dream job in three weeks, like take some time, calm down. It takes a little bit of time.
00:18:32
Speaker
Um, and, uh, I gotta ask as, as, as this circuitous route of your, of your role and your work and where you've lived has trended. Uh, can you share a little bit about how your enjoyment of work has trended over time, work life balance, and maybe specifically, you know, where there's some times of.
00:18:50
Speaker
Jeez, looking around, I'm working a lot right now. This isn't what I want to do. But maybe that helps set you up for getting some of these roles in the future. So can you just give a little ah little ah little synopsis maybe of kind of how enjoyment and work-life balance have maybe trended over time as you've navigated the the the career that you've had so far.
00:19:09
Speaker
Yeah, it's definitely been a little bit of ah a roller coaster not not as linear as you may think it just goes better and better and better, you know, that doesn't happen. It's just like, yeah, it's just like the don't land your dream job in two weeks. The linear stuff is is not necessarily how it works either. But I love the question because I definitely feel like the youngest accountants today like Gen Z, they prioritize this work life balance and That was always something me as like an older millennial was big for me. But I do know the the old guard was more of put your time and do the work. This is how it used to be. So I love that it's a focus and it has always been a focus for me, too. um I'd say it has over time, from beginning to end, it has gotten much better, especially it's it's hard to deal with.
00:19:53
Speaker
a significant amount of busy seasons. And I think I had done eight or nine busy seasons, which is quite a lot of time. I i never want to add up the amount of overtime I did and and and and kind of put that out there in my head. But ah but either way, like it has gotten better, I think.
00:20:10
Speaker
not that jumping to industry or private account and corporate accounting, not that that grass is always greener, but you do miss the busy seasons. And instead of busy season, I think people forget this though, you have a month and close. And then if you're at a public company, you have a quarter and close. so I think some people think the grass is so green, but that doesn't necessarily happen that way. It just might take a busy season of four months where you're slammed and instead you get mini slammed every month and 10 days every month. Yeah, exactly.
00:20:41
Speaker
Exactly. So but at least for me, you know, especially as I was getting older and wanted to start a family, that balance really did um become even more important. So fast forwarding a little bit, but I had left Baltimore, I joined PwC to kind of get that big forward notch under my belt, work on some bigger custom clients. But you know, the the work was the same as far as the long busy season hours and things and And that's when I had kind of said, OK, I'm going to switch over to to industry private accounting as a way to get out of that that busy season type workload. And then things did really get better on the work life balance front. And that's when I was with Walmart e-commerce. I really enjoyed the work.
00:21:27
Speaker
They were going toe-to-toe with Amazon at the time trying to see ah trying to launch their two-day shipping, which I thought was really exciting work. And I was basically doing 40, 45-hour weeks, which sometimes when you're in public accounting, you hear 40-hour weeks, it sounds like part-time, which is kind of sad, actually. But ah you know it was getting it was getting much better. And then ah even when I had joined Google to fast-forward a little bit more,
00:21:52
Speaker
the The perks were great. The work-life balance was good. Expectations were very high. So the stress levels continued to rise, I'd say. um But the hours and everything like that seemed to normalize. But when with one good thing comes a bad thing. like When I was with Google at the time, I was continuing. That great general ledger doesn't lie. It goes beyond debits enough. It goes with lifetime stuff, too.
00:22:17
Speaker
Yeah, you you had asked a good question of when you finally got the dream job, like, was it exactly what you wanted? And ah in my mind, I pictured like, oh, I'd be riding around on these colorful bikes and eating free food at lunch. And, you know, yes, part that is all very true, but the expectations are high. yeah You know, and it's it's a it's a, you know, you got to have to perform and the expectation is you're self serving, you know, you're able to do a lot of this stuff autonomously. And so one, it was a little bit of a shock, you know, working with the caliber of people that are coding and SQL and stuff like, I felt obviously the imposter syndrome that we all face, I continue to face with that. But ah so that was a little bit of a shocker, but then my commute from San Francisco down to Silicon Valley and Sunnyvale.
00:23:04
Speaker
was two hours each way. And I was doing that five days a week, so four hours a day, 20 hours a week. um When I got back to what you were saying, like, that wasn't part of the dream when I was in Baltimore thinking about how good it's going to be if I can actually land this dream job. Totally didn't think about that part, you know, and didn't think about the imposter syndrome. I did think about how hard it was going to get to get in.
00:23:29
Speaker
but then once i got it i kind of thought it would be like the pearly gates open you know and and that wasn't necessarily how it works so with that commute it also took a ding on the the work-life balance that that you had brought up so There's the ebbs and flows there. And you know i don't I don't want to ramble on too much, but I've ended up relocating to Chicago and Google Chicago office. ah We have a finance hub here. And my commute now is much better. So I'm able to kind of eventually, after all that meandering, I eventually did get all the things that I wanted and and still actually maintained a good work life value.
00:24:04
Speaker
Yeah. and And the theme there I just want to call out is right sometimes you want more of X and you might go get more of X and not realize that it comes with less of Y. And you're like, oh, I didn't realize how important Y was to me. I need i need to make sure Y goes up. like I need to make sure I get more Y in my life for the next one. And it's just a never ending kind of quest as you make one hop and you get more of something, but less of something where it comes with more of a commute and you're like, ah, I didn't realize I was signing up for this. So just Again, it's never ending quest, right? And the more the more changes you make, the more you slowly define what it is that you want more of and less of, and you just keep iterating and getting closer and closer, which it sounds like exactly what you've done to that that dream job.
00:24:43
Speaker
Oh, you nailed it. Yeah. I'd love to ask a couple questions as you look back on on some of the things that you've done in your career of of maybe one, what what is, does anything stand out as just a really cool, most enjoyable, proud accomplishment in your working career? Maybe something that when you think about it still kind of makes you light up or makes you smile because you're so proud or excited of what you and your team did. Does anything stand out for you?
00:25:09
Speaker
Uh, yeah, I may take it in a different direction than maybe you had intended, but actually just earlier this year, uh, I took a sabbatical. So I took three months off of work. Uh, my, my wife, my son, I'm a two year old son and, uh, we're paying all this money to send them to daycare and, you know,
00:25:27
Speaker
the i'm working my wife is working and it just felt like these are really cool years and he's so fun at this age i want to just spend more time with him and i think society has set it up where you don't do something like that you don't take a three-month euro trip until you're retired you know and who knows maybe you don't have the money maybe you're not physically fit maybe you have some other ailments my son will definitely be grown at that point you know i'm going to miss out on some of that and i'm really proud that i I made that work. and And I essentially, we spent a month in Italy, a couple of weeks in Portugal and Ireland and ah to really just put a pause on both of our careers. My wife has ah has an excellent career too. and When you both put a pause on that, pulled my kid out of daycare and basically said, I don't care if if the the societal norm is to wait until you retire to do something like this. I want to try some of that now.
00:26:24
Speaker
And, you know, not everybody does that. And it was a little risky because people say, well, well, what if you come back and you're not needed because somebody, you know, and those things are are valid, but you have to, you know, sometimes you just have to go with, go for it with what you want. And I don't see too many people really investing in that. Everybody says they want to travel and they want to do that stuff, but I don't see that many people actually do it. So I'm pretty proud that I, I was able to do that. And, and I do light up every time I see these pictures and remind myself of how that was such a great idea to do that. Yeah. That's, that's a great, cause that's also a testament to like, you obviously to, to, to, to be able to ask for that and have that answer be yes and come back. You've got to be doing great work, right? So there's a little bit of like, to do that, there's a testament of like, you're obviously doing good work and you're trusted and people want to extend some grace to you, right? Which is a proud accomplishment also in your career. One run really quick question on that. I'm curious, do you recall
00:27:21
Speaker
what it felt like to go ask for that. like Were you nervous? like where you Were you practicing that ask for like three months? Do you recall how you phrased it? I'd love to just get a little tactical of that one, just because it is so and like not a normal thing that most people hear. So I'd love to hear a little bit more of, ah yeah, I guess, how how did you ask? How long did it take to muster up the courage to ask? Could you get a ah little more specific into into how that that conversation went? Oh, man. I was so nervous and know it in the end.
00:27:49
Speaker
in the end, I'm asking for the time off, it was unpaid, you know, most sabbaticals are unpaid too. So before I would ask, I made sure the finances were in order and ensure that that's what I wanted to do. And I kind of had to line up, well, my wife had to say the same thing to her job, if they say no, and mine says yes, or if, you know, like, how are we going to deal with that, you know, and, and is there a blowback to because I was really nervous of, well, Mike's distracted, or he's got one foot in one foot out, he's not out in and,
00:28:19
Speaker
To your point, like all those things I was very nervous about, but you know I'd spent years building up a lot of goodwill.
Career Challenges & Resilience
00:28:26
Speaker
I'm not one to ask for exception type things like that. So I felt like I'm not one to ask for these things. And when I do, hopefully they say yes, but.
00:28:37
Speaker
I was incredibly nervous and I made sure that I had it, I at least had it down as to why I wanted to do it. And everybody can kind of understand that family time. yeah ah And it was it was kind of gut wrenching for me. i know you're I think you're about to have have another child here soon too. And like, it's tough to have a kid and then send them off, pay a bunch of money to send them off for somebody else to spend all day with them.
00:29:00
Speaker
And that really nagged at me. And I felt like I only have a few years where I could even do this. Because once he's in, ah my son's in school, I'm not going to pull him out of you know first grade to go on this trip. So I felt like ah not quite an hour or never, but very close to an hour never. And ah my manager was very supportive. He obviously had to move things around. I had to lean on my team a lot to Shoulder a lot of that workload and uh, but if anything, I think it made them stronger and everyone was very Excited that I was able to do that, but it it was it was nerve-racking for sure Well, congratulations on getting through those nerves because I bet when you're 80 years old looking back You're gonna remember that time. You're gonna remember that. Yeah, like no doubt. Um
00:29:47
Speaker
how about How about anything, you know, ah tougher times, um any any tougher times in your career that you look back on, and maybe it was that super commute, you know, four hours in the car every day, five days a week. I don't know, if i some people, um now listen to podcasts, I'm jamming, it's fine. For me, that would be like, I wouldn't be able to handle that.
00:30:05
Speaker
um because Any tougher times looking back on your career that, you know, you just weren't a funk. It didn't feel good. You're questioning maybe what you're doing and and how did you self-correct? How did you get back on track? Does anything anything strike you?
00:30:19
Speaker
Yeah. I mean, I kind of skipped, which I'm glad you asked because I feel like you usually hear of people that maybe are in this really good situation, but you don't really hear of the struggles, you know, especially online. You're only seeing the highlight reel. Um, but essentially after I was at PwC in San Francisco, the idea was I was going to go get that big tech job that I moved across the country for. And it did not happen that way. Uh, a lot of the companies that I wanted and you know, these, these big tech companies,
00:30:47
Speaker
They wanted somebody who had had the big four public accounting experience and big tech experience. Like if I'm going to be closing the books for you know their you know fortune 50 company and here I am saying I want to manage a team doing that. I've never even done it myself once.
00:31:04
Speaker
And ah it was a big reality check where I even had recruiters say, oh, you've got a great East Coast resume, but you're never going to make it on the West Coast. And I was like, ouch. you know And like I started to think, like did I make a mistake coming over? Or maybe I'm not going to get that that big tech job. so And that really that's kind of how it panned out. i mean I ended up interviewing for a lot of the big companies. um Twitter and Tesla and and Amazon and Google and Salesforce and Uber and and Nike. And I learned a lot along those ways, but most of those that I just rattled off were failures.
00:31:39
Speaker
And the one that hurt the worst was Facebook. Cause I made it to their final round twice and their interview processes. It was like a two month interview process. I was at like fifth or six rounds, um, made it all the way to the final round just to fail. And I think when I failed that second time around after I basically invested four months, you know, not at the same time, but, uh, I just started to think like,
00:32:05
Speaker
I feel like I gave it my all. I took it as far as I could and it still wasn't enough. And it was a little bit of a reality check where I thought I may have to go home with with my tail between my legs. Still with no regrets that I didn't try, but I started to kind of have to accept the fact that maybe I just won't get that that pinnacle goal that I set out to do. And ah you know that was gut wrenching because I remember being on the phone with family back in Baltimore, like, I don't know, maybe I should come home and I had a good life there. Why am I putting myself through this? Because
00:32:41
Speaker
you know Round after round of people telling you you're not good enough and that was just one company to have that happen a lot of times. ah It's tough and I remember ah feeling like to your question about how did I snap out of it? I basically said, well, I tried to look at it in a different way. Most people don't ever land that interview, the first interview. Very few people make it all the way up to the final round, let alone the final round twice.
00:33:08
Speaker
And I said that I was so close I could taste it. And if that's true, it may not even be anything about me. It may just be a timing thing or luck. In a different scenario, a different world, I could have had that job. And I started to think, and if I could do that with Facebook and and do it it repeatedly, do it twice, I had something there that eventually was going to click with some other employer. And ah I think a week later I went out, Amazon had flown me out for their final round in Seattle.
00:33:39
Speaker
And I hugged myself. I was listening to the music. I was all hyped up. And they their final round is an all day interview. I'm talking about eight hour, eight hour interview, ah multiple rounds, of course. But I went in there and i I was so tuned up and I feel like I knocked everything out of the park so that I could tell myself, hey, I gave it my best shot. And if that's not good enough, I should be able to hold my head ah held high.
00:34:04
Speaker
And I crushed it. I ended up getting an offer for Amazon, one that obviously I didn't take. I went with with Google. But that was that was the turning point where I said, sure, maybe I could look at it like I came so close twice and failed both times. That's it for me. But I kind of had to tweak my mindset to say, I was so close I could taste it. And yeah maybe it's nothing I need to change. I just need a little bit of luck.
00:34:29
Speaker
you know or maybe a little change in circumstance. So it was a tough time, but man, with failure, like that's how you grow. you know And I definitely feel like I've taken all those failures, I've grown a lot, and ah that's carried through you know years later. I feel like I've become a stronger ah professional because of that.
00:34:49
Speaker
Yeah, that's huge. Thank you for sharing that. And and i I couldn't quite tally up how many no's that was, but it sounds like it was maybe 10, right? Maybe it was more. And the one thing I do want to highlight in this kind of job search, especially, you know, looking for the dream job concept is you only need to, you only he need to hear yes once.
00:35:09
Speaker
Right. You don't need to have 10 companies all say yes. Like that's, and that's different than how all, that's different from how all of grades work. That's different from how all of school works. Like you got to get 93 out of a hundred, right? To get your A minus. Right. Um, you gotta, you gotta have every little detail of this audit. Perfect. Including the data that everything has to be right.
00:35:31
Speaker
But that's a completely different way that this whole job process works. You don't need to get everything right. You don't need to get it right once you need to give me the one yes, that's all you need. And it looks like it's not like at the end, you've got your two yeses and that propelled you yeah different directions. So congratulations just with it and changing your mindset from I'm 0 for 6 or 5 or 0 for 10 to
Job Search & Career Advice
00:35:52
Speaker
like, it doesn't matter. I just need one and I'm this close and I just need one. Yes. That's all you need. Yeah. I bet you there's a ton of, of your audience sitting for the exam. Maybe who's looking at that 75 Mark saying the same thing. I don't need to hit a 99. In fact, if you get a, if you get a 99 or a hundred, you probably, I don't know, get some award or something.
00:36:11
Speaker
But most people would probably say you overstudied cause you only needed to hit a 75. So it's very similar to, right? Like you get that, you could get four 75s. You got the same CPA as the next guy. All right. And a couple quick hitter questions here as we kind of wrap this thing up. So, uh, you mentioned CPA a second ago. So I'm curious, how did you approach your CPA? Did you do it while you were working full time? Did you knock it out before you started? And how would you recommend folks approach their CPA today?
00:36:41
Speaker
Yeah, so I started, I didn't get my full 150 in college. I got my maybe 130 or something like that. Started working, went to community college to get the rest of the 150, and then took, ah so it was essentially a year after I started working before I actually sat for the exam.
00:37:02
Speaker
I would probably say if I could have done it over again, I know some some universities offer you to to get that 150 through like an MSA program. And then they even have review courses ah to to get for your to sit for your CPA and you don't take it as a team, but it basically is almost like a prep. So a lot some of the people I joined with in my starting class already had passed the CPA exam.
00:37:29
Speaker
And I always was very envious of that because it's hard to get up before work and study and study at lunchtime and study after work. So ah the one year gap that I took, I probably wouldn't do any longer than that. I probably would say don't even take a gap, to be completely honest. And maybe if you can get the CPA before you even start working.
00:37:50
Speaker
Yeah, yeah. And if you could go back and and place yourself back in that maybe final year of college or first year in the working world, kind of in that timeframe, knowing what you know now, what what maybe is the number one piece of advice that you go back and give yourself at that time?
00:38:08
Speaker
You know, it's not that everybody doesn't already know this, but you know, big four is ah obviously seen as a pinnacle for an exit opportunity coming out of college. I didn't start in big four as I kind of went through. um I did have an internship. So one, I would make sure everybody has an internship. These days, I feel like it's almost a prerequisite before you graduate to come out with some experience.
00:38:30
Speaker
um But also if you're able to really push to get that big four internship before you graduate, that'll go a long way. Even if you say don't ever end up working with big four after that, what I didn't realize until later was Job applications everywhere, big four preferred, big four preferred, big four preferred. It kind of haunts you. you know It was part of the reason why I felt like I had great experience prior to joining big four, but I still felt like I needed that that validation of big four, which is why I joined PWC, partially why I joined PWC. If you're able to get, knock that big four out in the early in as an internship, then you might save yourself some anguish later on from having to do that.
00:39:15
Speaker
not that you need big four, not that you even need to go public accounting, but something to think about and ah just another quick one for anybody who's just starting out in in their career or coming out of college and you know in your first year or two. ah Don't underestimate the the value of just having an opinion, raising your hand to have a thought and idea because what you'll find early in your career is When you're sitting in a conference room with a bunch of your peers and and your manager or boss says, who has any thoughts on this or any ideas? It's almost always the same people who have that their hands go up. And those peoples who who they're the people with their hands up are usually the ones that are going to be the future leaders.
00:39:59
Speaker
Uh, so, you know, just think about that too. And, and that doesn't require an advanced degree just to show up and have a thought, have an idea and just be an active participant because a lot of your peers will probably, you know, sit on their hands and they'll kind of look around to see who else chimes in. That's one easy way to stand out in your first couple of years. Yeah. There's nothing like being genuinely curious and there's a whole lot of things to be curious about when you're looking at a company's financial statements, um, as simple as,
00:40:27
Speaker
What is their number one revenue driver? How does this company make money? I mean, there's just basic things that you can do to stand out early in your career, most of which is is kind of having a genuine curiosity on things. yeah there's AI is everywhere, out of curiosity.
AI in Accounting & Sharing Insights
00:40:41
Speaker
There we go, back to curiosity. are you How, if at all, are you using AI in any way, kind of in work or personal life? Personal life, probably use it like most people. um as a you know replacement for searches and things like that. But at work, fortunately, Google's Gemini AI is incorporated in almost all of our Google suite of products. So um ah some of it I use the the basic stuff, which is like, oh, condense this email down into you know one paragraph instead of a page, you know make it more concise. so Or how do I rephrase this to be a little less
00:41:20
Speaker
um I don't know, like a ah a little more persuasive and things like that. I found that to be really useful. But really, I think what what I found to be the the most impactful, there's different types of ways of using AI that you can join with your data sets that you have on the accounting side. So we may have a ah list of customers that we have on the accounting side, right? And I may want to know you know A lot of these customers, or at least the the top customers I'm working with, they're usually publicly traded companies themselves that are advertising on Google. And I may want to know, hey, I wonder how they're performing and maybe that impacts maybe credit collection or maybe it impacts how much advertising spend they're going to have if they're having a boom year or is it a bust year and I'm expecting them to trail off when they're their advertising spend.
00:42:11
Speaker
You can actually do something where ah you can use AI to take the list of the companies that you're looking at and go find the stock ticker for each of those companies and maybe their 90 day performance in the market. And then you pair that with the financial data that you see. And that's something that I would never have that access to that data otherwise, and I'm not going to go manually do it. So I've really been playing around with that idea of how can I take the financial data that I have and actually make it more meaningful by taking public data that's outside of you know the database that I have and enjoying that together to really tell a bigger story.
00:42:50
Speaker
Because I think a big part of what AI can help with, but really in an area that ah accountants, I think, should look to as a way to kind of take themselves into the future or stand out is being able to tell that story and look beyond the numbers. You know, a number is just a number, but to tell the story and have the various data points, I think is huge. And, you know, that's something I never would have been able to do. So that's not, I haven't like fully scaled that out, but things like that, where I can actually use the the internet to kind of add to my data sets, which was something I never would have thought about before. Yeah, it's it's interesting you say that because that's not that's not doing something you were already doing faster. That's literally doing something that you never would have done otherwise that now you can do um that you weren't you weren't already doing and you weren't going to do. It's and is's a truly great thing. Last one, Mike, where where can people find out more about you? I know you've got a published author
00:43:45
Speaker
I've written a book, website. Again, i know I think you said this at the beginning, but let's just wrap up. of where Where can people go learn more about you, your journey, and maybe um maybe even go deeper with more questions of how you've navigated this path from from public accounting into a whole lot of ways and a whole lot of no's in getting yourself into your dream job, defining it, and getting your way into the tech sector. So where can people learn more about you?
00:44:08
Speaker
Yeah, I'm pretty active on LinkedIn. I post there almost every business day, again, trying to highlight some of the fun, fulfilling, exciting side of accounting. So you can look me up, Mike Manolax, CPA, um and then also my website, mikefromaccounting.com. I have a bunch of different stuff out there ah that I think maybe some of your audience might like resonate with. And ah yeah, I encourage you guys to check it out. I try and and do the ah the opposite side of the coin, which is showing the positive side of the exciting work that's in accounting because I don't want anybody to really think that the ah you know what you might see in the headlines, a lot of it skews negative. And I think it's a little bit of a unfair reputation. So I'm doing my part to try and and show the other side of that coin there. And I hope that your audience, and I think this podcast is going to go a long way there too. So ah yeah, just make sure you're seeing both sides of the situation to to your audience and connect with me. I'd love to to keep the conversation going with each of you.
00:45:06
Speaker
All right, thanks so much, Mike. Mikefromaccounting.com. And Mike, definitely you've got a cool career in accounting. So thanks for sitting down with us and Mikefromaccounting.com for those who want to learn more. Thanks so much, Mike. You got it. Thank you, Spencer. Thanks, everyone.