Welcome to the latest installment of The Partner Track, a story of a Big 4 Senior Manager navigating a career in public accounting and thinking about the next step -- the partnership.
I liked being a manager1. I was doing more reviewing than doing, which I found to be easier and a nice change. I had positioned myself on an important client doing some of the most important areas. This led to learning new things and decent ratings. More critically, I had more control over my schedule and my audits. Busy season still sucked but I was able to control the hours for me and most of my team to something reasonable. There were no 70-hour weeks on my jobs. The back office stuff (training, HR, compliance, etc) was bearable. I even managed to get out of audit for a little bit and teach some trainings. I had some exposure to the office politics around things like staff ratings and scheduling but I was still too low on the pole to have much sway. I was as much on easy street as I could be in audit and I thought I had a pretty good chance of riding it out to partner.
The sky is falling
Then the financial crisis hit in 2008 and being an auditor in financial services went to shit. When the world turned on investment valuations, so did my job and two years of living the moderate good life went to hell. For all those people who think auditors bow to clients on everything, I cry bullshit.
We worked our asses off on valuations, had hard client discussions and I found myself driven to drink like never before. One night my girlfriend (now wife) put the bottle of Scotch on the table when I got home at midnight and told me there better be some left when she woke up. It went from an easy ride to every day being the worst day of my life at the firm. It sparked the first time in my seven years with the firm when I interviewed with another company.
Weighing options
I found myself in a classic situation of being in the middle of busy season and sneaking around to interviews. The job came to me from a headhunter and it was the first one that looked interesting. It was a Head of Internal Audit/Head of Risk Management position for a middle market financial services company that was a subsidiary of a larger British firm. It was a fairly high position in the company with a lot of responsibility and plenty of opportunity to grow out a department the way I liked it. After the first interview, I got invited back for round two, finding myself on a shortlist of candidates.
It was at that point I went to my mentor (a partner) and told him I was interviewing. To his credit he didn’t give me the company line and I found out he’d been in a similar situation. We had an honest dialogue about my future and choices2. I left his office not having a plan but at least knowing my options.
The offer
The pay would have been a decent bump (around $10-15K, along with 20% potential bonus), the perks were good (company paid for lunch every day) and there would have been some good travel (to London 2-4 times a year).
The drawbacks to the job I saw were 1) the company had an open office floor plan so I wouldn’t even have a cube with full walls (which was a big change from the cube and office world I was used to) and 2) the job responsibilities were a little vague, being as it was a somewhat new position for the company. I wasn’t sure the metrics by which I was going to be evaluated, which gave me some pause.
The decision
After the second interview I had the job but ended up turning it down. Why? What possible reason could keep me in a job I hated and that used up people on a routine basis? The decision came down to the people. The job I would be moving to had a small, older staff available to me with only the possibility of being able to hire some folks in the near future. It was nothing like the younger, vibrant dynamic I had built with my engagement team. It wasn’t so much the people above me I cared about, rather the ones my level and below that I had spent 4 years toiling with in our audit dungeon. Some people would call this complacent and having a fear of change but I decided stay with the devil I knew.
So I stayed. The people I worked with were happy and we got through that busy season and a couple others before the core team split up. There have been days I wish I hadn’t stayed (especially the way auditing under the PCAOB has been going) but I’m ok with how it turned out. During my time as a manager I made good internal and external contacts and was paid fairly for the work I’ve performed. I stuck it out and got promoted again.
Up next...where am I now?
1More on being a Senior Manager next time.
2 If you are a partner or manager reading this, you should do the same for anyone looking to leave.