Episode 7: A Conversation With Mark Koziel

Yeah, thanks Scott and thanks for having me. I always enjoy talking to the student community and to educators. It's such an important part of who we are and what we do. You know, I look back on it and I go all the way back to finishing up high school and all my friends were getting ready to go to school to become cops in the Buffalo, New York marketplace. And I said, 'Well, I don't want to be a cop.' I said, 'But I'd kind of like to get in the FBI and I'm kind of good at this accounting thing, so maybe I'll do that.' One of my friend's fathers who was like a father to me, he said, 'Yep, you do that and when you know my son and all your other friends show up, you can say out of the way, I'm in charge.' And so, FBI was every reason why I went into accounting, and then never pursued it. Because I didn't know anything about this whole public accounting thing and CPA, I didn't have a mentor myself of anyone in my family or anyone else that did that. So I chose it and I started to learn a lot more about the profession and I ended up going to work for a local firm in Buffalo. I spent three years at my first firm, left that, went to another firm three years later and I spent nine years at my second firm. And I always tell students especially, you know, give it a chance. And if it's not the right cultural fit, maybe there's another right culture for you out there in public accounting. But after 12 years of it, I left. I went to work for a client. The client was after me for like a year. They do political and public affairs media, TV, radio for political campaigns, public affairs. Did that for three years. Just figured out politicians are crazy and got back into the normal. Joined the AICPA in 2006. Moved my family from Buffalo, New York to the Raleigh Durham area and never looked back. Spent 14 great years at AICPA. Left to go run an international association of firms for five years and as you know, recruited back January 1. So all of those stages in life, none of it was planned. None of it was how I thought my career would go. But all of them prepared me to sit in this role today.

For a variety of reasons? Yes. I mean, it's amazing the impact that the profession has on the business community, on the political community in DC now, this global community around advocacy and what we've done with merging AICPA here in the US with CIMA, the Chartered Institute of Management Accountants, to create this new association and so now it's this global reach. And I learned this really from my international association firm how much management accounting and public accounting are really kind of coming together. Especially, there will continue to be this challenge of finding talent. And companies are suffering the same fate in their finance function. And so there's been a lot of outsourcing globally happening in a variety of markets. We had a billion-dollar basically spin-off that was like a startup client come to one of our firms. Had to be up in 56 countries. Of those 56 countries, 14 of those countries did the outsourced accounting for that billion-dollar spin-off. And so, management accounting, public accounting, they're all very closely tied. But to summarize what it is that I do, I consider my job to be the steward of the profession. That's what the board's job is. That's what my job is. Every day I wake up thinking about the profession. Every night when I go to sleep I'm thinking about the profession. And it's advocacy, it is meeting with regulators, it is meeting with members, it is press releases and presentations and traveling the globe for a variety of reasons, always representing the profession. And then you have the strategy component and the governance piece over the profession that become a large part of that. I sit on the board of the Center for Audit Quality by nature of my role. I sit on CBA.com's board by nature of my role. I am involved with the International Federation of Accounting Coalition based on this role, the Global Accounting Alliance based on this role. There's just a lot of influence. And AICPA was the largest member body and then the merger with CIMA makes us absolutely the largest member body in the world with a lot of influence. And it's important for us to recognize that and do the right thing for the profession for the future of the profession as we go forward.

Yeah. And Scott, how do you tell a student what it is that they're going to do as accounting? I go out and I do presentations and I ask everybody, show of hands, how many CPAs out there were the director of media planning for a political firm? I haven't gotten a hand yet. And yet, that's what I did. And it was the trust factor of the CPA that was one of the reasons why they hired me. They used it as a marketing advantage to say, you know, our director of media planning is a CPA and you can trust them with your money and your campaign contributions because he's going to do the right thing. And that trust element, we can't, that's the number one thing that we will never, we can never lose that, because that trust gives us permission to do all these other things as a profession.

Yeah, I think well quality always, right? And so a lot of the discussion is around quality. And you know, conversations we have with CAQ, quality is paramount. And we are only as good as our last corporate failure that we may have been involved in, you know. And they always want to blame the audit, but there's a lot of other elements that go into any type of corporate failure with the corporate boards that are out there and management and all kinds of things. But we have to make sure that we as a profession are focused on top level of quality and how we self-regulate, who we are, having the right level of standards, trying to get the right balance of standards. You know, some will talk about standards overload and the like. Uhm, you know, seeing the M&A activity, what's happening in the marketplace. You know, there's a lot of discussion around private equity coming into the marketplace. What is that going to do? I say we have no opinion on private equity one way or the other. And that's why I say to students, pick the right culture. Maybe that is a culture that you want to be involved in. Maybe it's not. There are a lot of other choices out there. Whether the firm's publicly traded, private, equity-backed, or an independent firm, there are a lot of choices. Small, medium, large firms, business and industry. Just making sure that that ecosystem remains. And now in the midst of me joining, right on top of it, there's changes to the options as far as how you can sit for the exam. Making sure that we have mobility from state to state is top of mind. I said that train's already left the station. But you know, I think whenever you're talking about the change in education like that, what does it mean? There have been arguments for or against, and I again neither for or against. I will say personally, I thought it was important for my son, not in accounting, but for him to go for a master's degree in what he did. And so the master's programs are still an incredible option and will always remain so. And it's all dependent on what people want to do. I think a faster track to an MBA and all these other pieces that happen down the road. So just all of it, trying to keep the profession together, making sure we're responding to what needs to happen and reduce the friction as much as we possibly can for people to enter the profession, to stay in the profession and the like. Those are the big items that we're working on today.

You know, one of the things I think for me it's always important to listen. And for even any student out there that wants to reply to me personally, we created an email address: [email protected]. And that was to get member feedback. I did it with our team internally. I did it with members. And we are now in the process of what we're calling RISE 2040 to actually vision out the profession 15 years from where we are today. That's the amazing thing about this profession is that that happened in the late 90s. When I was still fairly young in my career, there was the Vision Project and that was looking out 15 years. And in 2011, that was updated to be CPA Horizons 2025, which gets us to the current year that we're in. And I think this is a great time for us to look at the hard trends and soft trends that are coming at the profession and how we respond to that. And from that, for me, greater connectivity and taking advantage of the tools that are available out there to be able to respond to each other and be better connected as a profession. That's what I love about this profession is how collaborative it is and how important that connection can be. We did that in my international association the last five years. It was amazing how that just helped develop even deeper relationships. And that's incredibly important to me and I want each and every one of our students as they come into the profession to make sure that this is what we asked or promised them on the way in. Constantly getting that feedback and making sure the profession is responding to the needs of our members but also the needs of the marketplace too.

You know, I think about as a student, right, all the noise that's out there and people saying, 'Well, AI is going to replace the accountant. AI is going to replace this. AI is going to replace that.' I hear it time and again. I say, you know, when I think about what I did as an entry-level auditor in my firm in Buffalo, New York back, now 30 years ago, the job was very different than it is today. And technology is what's driven that difference. And AI is no different than that. And if we go back since the dawn of time, I said, I don't know what we did as a profession to upset the global marketplace, but every time there's some type of technology innovation, they want to displace the accountant. The accountant's going to be eliminated, right? It goes all the way back to the advent of the 10-key, the electronic calculator in the 1930s was going to be the elimination. And I'm talking to a consultant to the profession who's probably well in the 40 plus years in the profession. He said in his day when he started in the Big Eight at the time, they had a room full of 30-footers. It was their sole job to sit there all day every day and just foot schedules, like adding up all these schedules that came in. And you were judged by how fast and how accurate you did that. That was the ultimate judgment of your proficiency and ability as you come into the profession. Those days are long gone. Even when I started, everyone's on Excel now. You may remember VisiCalc replaced by Lotus 1-2-3 replaced by Excel. So I was in the Lotus days. VisiCalc in college, Lotus when I came out. And the audit partners were literally telling me I have to print the Lotus spreadsheet to make sure that Lotus calculated it correctly, because how am I going to know? And today we take that for granted, right? Okay, check the formula, we're done. We're in a far different place than where we used to be. And time and energy and effort that we put in, what's happening now today is far different. And I would say AI is going to only enhance what we do, but it's going to be really important for your students especially to be better prepared than I was prepared coming into the marketplace and being able to hit the ground running.

Adding up my travel miles would be first probably. I am on the road almost, it's been almost every week. So it's rare that I'm home. And I don't know if you and I have talked about this, but we now live in the foothills I guess technically of North Carolina between Hickory and Asheville, and we're on a lake, beautiful lake. So I get some time to spend out. This week actually I spent two days out on the lake for the first time all year. But you know, I did an interview with John Garrett who has done a lot of speeches and he talks about what's your 'and'. It's amazing how you can relate and learn about people based on what their 'and' is. You have your work person and then you have your other things. And I said my response to him was, I said well I'm a smoker. He says well that doesn't sound like something to be proud of. I said it's actually twofold. I am a big-time griller. I love to smoke meats, barbecue. I learned all kinds. Moving to North Carolina made me a big fan of doing a pig picking. And I've just I love cooking for large groups, the larger the better. But then I also have an affinity for a cigar every now and again. So it's kind of two phases together. And it's just really about spending time with people, spending time with family, with friends. Food tends to gather people in a relaxed environment. So that does relax me and I do enjoy that quite a bit.

Well, you know what? It was interesting at our ENGAGE conference in June. I did a podcast interview and it was the first time I've ever really heard this question or that it's been asked of me or heard it asked of other people. But they asked me what would I tell my 21-year-old self. I think back to those days. I got choked up actually because it was the first time I actually reflected on it. And I said, bottom line, I would tell my 21-year-old self, it's going to be okay. It's going to be an incredible career. You're going to take dips and dives and turns and all these different things, but at the end of the day, if you work hard, you show up, you do what's asked of you to do, and you have open communication with your employer, the world is your oyster. And you know, I came out of that. I had nine W-2s my senior year. And literally I worked nine jobs in that year. I had three that were a base that I constantly worked. And then I would just, you know, digging fence posts with this friend over here, painting fences over on this side, painting houses and hanging wallpaper wherever I could make a dollar to help pay for my exorbitant education at the time, that was what I had to do to get through it. And I don't know that I would have thought that I would have ended up or being able to contribute to the profession the way that I have. The greatest profession in the world. And being a part of it makes me proud. And I want to make sure that it's better for everyone after you and I leave and someone else takes it over.