Episode 127: More Is Not Necessarily Better: Accept Life As It Is With Allen Lloyd
True strength lies in embracing the realities of life, for it is through accepting life as it is that we find the power to overcome and grow. In this episode, we sit down with Allen Lloyd, Exec Dir of the Montana Society of CPAs, for a heartfelt conversation. Discover how his humble upbringing in a small town instilled in him the power of accepting life as it is. Allen shares the important leadership lessons he had while working as an Exec Assistant to top CEOs and partners. These experiences helped him become a remarkable individual today. Tune in for an inspiring episode that celebrates curiosity, resilience, and personal growth.
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More Is Not Necessarily Better: Accept Life As It Is With Allen Lloyd
Welcome to this episode where I interview Allen Lloyd. Allen is the Executive Director of the Montana Society of CPAs where he is responsible to work with his members and board to move forward the mission of the organization. He manages the staff and makes sure the efforts are focused on his mission to inspire, empower, and impact their members to achieve professional excellence.
During this interview, we discuss his background growing up in a small town and how that has helped him accept life as it is. He also shares the leadership lessons that he learned along the way as an executive assistant that he learned from CEOs and partners that helped shape him. I'm so excited for you to read this interview on how Allen created belief systems from the people around him, his family, and leaders throughout his career.
That is what my new book Disconnect to Connect: Tap Into the Power Within You to Create the Life You Desire is all about. I hope you join the journey and sign up for the exciting events we have coming up around my book as well as purchase my book on Amazon available on April 25th, 2023. Welcome to this episode. I am very excited to be interviewing Allen Lloyd. Allen, did you want to start and give us a little background on yourself?
Disconnect to Connect: Tap Into the Power Within You to Create the Life You Desire
My name is Allen Lloyd. I'm the Executive Director of the Montana Society of CPAs. Prior to joining the society, I worked for seven years at The Ohio Society. Prior to that, I spent seven years at a regional accounting firm after graduating with a Business Administration degree. I took two accounting classes in college. I hated both of them and spent the majority of my working life in the accounting profession.
I'm a board member of The Ohio Society. I would love to hear how you grew through those channels. Ohio Society has been awesome. They're engaged in the profession. It has been fun to be a part of that. Let's get started. You're part of the Montana Society. Where did you grow up? Where are you from?
I was born in Massachusetts. My dad was in the Navy, and then he was a long-haul truck driver after that. We moved when I was a year old. My only recollection is my dad and I would go back to golfing in the summers growing up. I said that because his best friend was this guy named Fonzie. I always thought Fonzie was the guy from Happy Days but that's a guy out there. We moved to West Virginia where all my family is from. When I was 4 or 5, we moved to Ohio barely. I grew up right on the Ohio River in a tiny little town called Clarington. There are 300 people that live there now. My parents still live in the house where I grew up. You can see the Ohio River and West Virginia from their front porch.
Why did they decide to move to Ohio?
My dad got a job. My dad has an interesting story. He was in the Navy, and then he took the GI Bill to get an Engineering degree. He was one of the first people that did CAD. He worked at a chemical plant that had a million miles of pipe. These chemicals are going back and forth everywhere. All they had was the original engineers' drawings. If something started to leak, they wouldn't know what it was.
They didn't know what was in every tube. They had to go back to the drawing, find the page, and be like, "That's bad stuff. Stay away. That's fine. Go ahead and fix it." My dad spent a number of years converting all those hand-drawn things into CAD files. He became a consultant after that because he had this knowledge of something highly valuable but quite scarce.
You said he was a truck driver as well. What was the transition there?
That was the in-between. He drove trucks. He was doing it while he was going back to school, which is even more difficult.
Especially if it's a long haul. There was no virtual at the time. What did your mom do?
My mom is a schoolteacher.
What grade?
She taught Home Ec in a rural middle and high school in Ohio. It's funny because she has two brothers who are also both teachers.
Home Ec was my worst class. We had to sew a dress, and I did not know how to sew. You had to wear the dress one day to school once you made it. The whole day, I felt something pricking at me. I was ignoring it. I got home from school and plopped down on the couch. I never took the needle out.
My mom was a Home Ec teacher. Growing up, my mom taught in the public school system. As a result of that, my parents sent me to a private school. I never took Home Ec. To this day, I still don't like to cook, and I have no idea how to sew.
She was like, "At home, I don't want to deal with this."
She still did all those things. She was an expert in all those things. If something happened, I didn't have to do any of it.
Did you have siblings?
I'm an only child.
How did your parents meet?
My grandparents lived across the street from each other. They were on the same street in this rural town in West Virginia. The fun part about it is when they were in high school, they were good friends but they dated other people. They go out on a date, come home at the end of the night, and talk to each other about the dates they went on. Eventually, they figured out, "We should stop dating these other people. We're built for each other."
What a great story.
It always made holidays interesting though. From either grandparents' house, you could see the other one. You couldn't go to one. You had to go to two or else they would be like, "What are you doing over there?"
Why did your dad decide to go into the Navy? Were they already married at that point?
This is fun because I'm trying to remember. When they got married, my dad was in uniform. He must have been in the Navy when they got married.
Having someone that has been in the military as your father and also engineering as a very analytical mind and probably orderly, what was that like growing up with your dad? What did you learn from it and have kept from that as well?
I shared that very hyper-organized mentality. Engineering is also problem-solving. Probably more often than not, I'm that classic person. If you want to tell me a story, I'm going to tell you how to fix things at the end because that's how my mind works. The other one is in running an organization, a lot of times, you have to think a few steps ahead. My dad taught me the game of golf.
It's hilarious. We always joke that when they send us on a golf course, they need to make sure it's got a full battery because he hits the ball left. I hit the ball right. Growing up, my dad would get frustrated. He would be like, "You know the ball is going to do this, and you know that you have to get there in three shots. Why don't you try to go over there knowing it will land there?" There's a strategy there in thinking, "Here are my limitations. I need to recognize them," which has been very helpful. It's one of those things that naturally I do these days.
You don't even realize when those things sink in. You start referring back to it. What were your hobbies when you were younger?
I grew up in a little town. It had a main drag. By the time I was growing up, the highway had bypassed it. You didn't have to worry about getting run over. Growing up in the summer, I would ride my bike back and forth. The town is three miles from end to end. There's a lot of the same area. There's a whole bunch. I still bike to this day. The other things are basketball and golf. Growing up, my best friend Sean and I would play hours of basketball at his house.
What did you learn from growing up in a small town that you think you still keep with you?
The biggest thing is appreciating things moving slower. I like to say I spent the first twenty years of my life on the Ohio River. I spent my second twenty years in Columbus, Ohio. In those twenty years, I was in Columbus. I remember when I went to college at Otterbein. When you drove around the north side of the city, there was a lot of farmland. Now, that's developments and malls. At a certain point in life, you're either built for that or not. We discovered that pace.
Accept Life: Appreciate things moving slower.
For quite a reference from somebody from Ohio, Helena is the side of Zanesville. It's the state capital but the pace of things here is rush hour lasts twenty minutes. Realizing the appreciation for that is huge. Community is one of those things where I still struggle, not just inherently. I have two boys. They're pretty much free-range. They go about, do what they want, and have their adventures. Had we stayed in Columbus, there would have been times when that would have been more difficult to do and not be overly nervous.
You got into college. What did you want to be when you grew up so that we can figure out the transition to where you are now?
Quite frankly, I had no idea what I wanted to be when I grew up. When I was a kid, I wanted to be a fighter pilot. There was a guy in our town who had been a fighter pilot. One afternoon, I was talking to him. He was showing me all these things. I'm like, "This is what I want to do." He goes, "I'm sorry, kid. It's not going to happen." I'm like, "What are you talking about?" He's like, "You have glasses. Fighter pilots with glasses don't exist." I was like, "I've made these plans. Top Gun was going to be me."
I went to a private school. In my last three years, I was a boarding student. I lived in the dorm. The guy that ran our dorm, Mr. Plumby, was also my business class teacher. A lot of it was basic economics and supply and demand stuff but I latched onto that. When I was looking at colleges, I wanted to go somewhere and study business in general. I ended up with a Business Administration major. The nice thing about a Business Administration major is you don't take any of the 400-level classes, just 200 to 300 levels across all the disciplines. It's like an undergrad MBA of sorts.
What were you thinking to do with that? What was the goal?
I always remind myself of this when I go on college campuses. A lot of students, even when they're in college, still have no idea what the real world is about. I was like, "I'm going to do business things, whatever that means." Luckily, when I graduated college, my good friend Trisha, her mom worked at Huntington Bank. She was like, "I'm hiring. Do you have anything?" I'm like, "I don't have a job." She gave me an application. I filled out the application and submitted it.
With that, think of how different the world was. We have had Boyd talking about this and others if you screwed up anything on sending that application in. He didn't put the right phone number. He had screwed up a digit. He wasn't getting any responses, and he didn't know why. It's so different than these days going on job boards. It was hard. You had to walk into places and give your application.
Mine was handwritten. I handwrote it. The funny story is Tina hires me who's the compliance for car loans and bases. It was glorified data entry at best. About six months in, she pulls me aside. She's like, "You're doing a good job. I was this close to not even hiring you because you couldn't even fill out the application correctly." I was like, "What are you talking about?"
I'm a junior. My dad has the same name. Growing up, all my high school and college friends know me as Lloyd because if you call her house and ask for Allen, you got my dad. I defaulted to Lloyd. When she got my application, she knew me because I was college friends with her daughter. She always knew me as Lloyd. She's like, "You couldn't even get your names in the right boxes." I'm like, "I got that right. You just never knew."
That's hilarious. How long did you work there?
I worked there for three years. I left when Tina left. One of the things about Tina was she was the manager. It's one of those early business lessons I learned. She was salaried, and then all of us that reported to her were hourly. We worked together for three years. In two of those years, I made more money than she made. I was getting paid for all these hours we were putting in, and she wasn't. She left. It was bank compliance work. A lot of that has been automated away. Thank God. It's looking and going, "Did they put the right number in the right place? Does the math work out?"
It's funny. My son has a school bank at his high school. He's the president of the bank. They still are doing all that manually because they don't have automation. They could invest in that for school lunch money that they're putting in there. They're doing all banking functions. It's funny to see everything manual again and him complaining about different things that they're doing.
You learn so much from that too.
You know the math before the calculator.
If the computer does it, you don't even have to think about it but we still had to think about it a lot. Tina left. She went to this place called Sky Financial, and I followed. We did bank compliance there. It was commercial lending only to dentists. Dentists are number two behind funeral homes. Those are the least likely businesses to go under. You've got a big capital investment. Everybody has to have their teeth cleaned. I spent three years there. It was a very sales-driven organization.
Being in compliance at a sales organization is not the best but commissions were good. I remember the last year I was there. I switched over to a sales assistant role. My salary got cut in half but my take-home was almost triple. I knew I was tired of it. I said, "I'm saving every dollar I can." In July or August, I told my boss, "On January 1st, I'm out. I'm leaving." They're like, "Where are you going?" I'm like, "I have no idea."
I'm making enough money. I had built up enough money to not work for a little while, which was fantastic. There was a point where I needed to get a job again. I was applying to anything I could find. The accounting firm, Norman, Jones, Enlow, was looking for an executive assistant or somebody to be the partners' gofer. I remember the day I started. Everybody looked at me, and they were like, "You don't look like any of the assistants they have had before." I'm like, "I haven't met any of them."
The executive assistant was a man at that point. I remember my first tax season there. We had this client. He owned a novelty goods store. He came in. Our managing partner didn't have time for him. He's like, "Can you give him this stuff?" I go out to meet with this guy and go, "I'm Andy's assistant." He's like, "What? Does he kiss you?" I was like, "Take your stuff." I remember going back and being like, "That was weird but he's a great client."
All these things would not be accepted now. Why would you make an assumption that he would kiss a woman?
I can't believe somebody would say that.
It's unbelievable. It's amazing though. This is years ago but you think it was even longer ago. Being Jewish in a Midwestern town, there weren't as many Jews. Clients would make antisemitic remarks all the time. The managers would be like, "Don't say anything. We can't lose this client." You're biting your tongue and smiling. Now, there's no way. It's unbelievable. You can never have a manager that told you not to protect yourself. That wouldn't be acceptable in the workplace. Look how far we’ve come. Even though there's so much to go, sometimes we forget how people weren't accepting or protected to be accepted.
Whenever diversity comes up, the first Black person I ever talked to was when I'm at this private school. At the time, my day was due. I get dropped off before school. I'm sitting in the hallway. I was working on my Math homework. I'm not good at Math to begin with but something was challenging me. I'm sitting there next to my locker. This guy Dwight walks by. He looks down and goes, "Kid, do you need help?" I was like, "Maybe."
I looked back at the yearbook. He was 6'4. He was a super intimidating guy. I remember the feeling of having a little bit of fear. He sat down next to me. I had been going to class all week to learn whatever this Math was, and it wasn't sinking in. Within two minutes, he explained it to me, and I understood it. At that point, I didn't instinctively go for a Black person as a Math teacher. This is a person like me.
I had a very similar experience when I went to Otterbein. I was a Business Major. In my freshman year, the school in its infinite wisdom paired me up with a Theater major. Otterbein has a very good theater program. A month in college, I met somebody that was gay. I had met him before, and I had no idea. One day, he was talking about going out with somebody. I was like, "Are you gay?" He's like, "Yeah." It was one of those moments where it was a normal person like me in that one little way.
You don't grow up in areas where it's diverse. Those are the things over time. Make sure to break free from anything you heard. Preconceived notions are so important because a lot of times, I don't think people even realize they're repeating something that someone else said to them but do they believe it? Make sure they test it.
How many of those people repeat those things having never had an experience with somebody?
You're with the accounting firm. How did you get to The Ohio Society from there?
We were a firm with seven partners. Our managing partner and the next managing partner didn't get along. I was always stuck in the middle. It was one of those, "Will you go tell him I said this?" I remember one point being like, "I can't do this anymore." I left and spent two years at the Mid-Ohio Regional Planning Commission. Government work is not for me. I can't do it. I learned that lesson pretty quickly.
I was the CEO's assistant. I was looking for a job. Clarke Price from The Ohio Society was looking for an assistant. I applied for the job. I used the two partners that didn't along. They're both still friends of mine. I love the two of them dearly. They just don't like each other. There were two things I remember from my interview. The first was he showed me his phone and said, "I'm retiring in two and a half years." The seconds of the rest of his career were ticking away. He knew was retiring.
At the time, as an executive assistant, you would look pretty good to have a CEO transition on your resume. The other thing he told me was, "If you can have both of these guys as references, you will have no problem dealing with me." He knew both of them as well. He was like, "They're both big personalities and quite different." That's why I landed The Ohio Society.
What was your career like there?
When I started, I was Clarke's assistant. It's funny. We were talking. Somebody printed off a map. Erin on my team printed off a map because she was going over the billings to visit people. She wanted to know where to go next. When I started there, here's one of the things I would do. When Clarke traveled, he had an envelope that he put all his receipts in and tracked his mileage on the outside of it. Now, that seems like the craziest thing you've ever heard in your life. It worked well because he had it. When he came back, he handed it to me and his expenses.
I sat right outside Clarke's office. I always heard his conversations with folks. I picked up on how he managed things and how he liked things to be. I leveraged that to try and help the senior leadership team there get out of their way. You talked about Boyd. Boyd was there when I started. Boyd is from Georgia. Chris is from South Carolina. All three worked together for a while. There were many afternoons when the three of us would sit down. We would be talking about whatever the big initiative that we were working on was. We would talk about how certain other folks were either pulling us away from it or not getting it.
I took on the role of trying to coach people into, at the most basic level, pissing Clarke off and getting them to get the organization to move together. I was there for the transition. Clarke retires, and Scott gets hired. Onboarding Scott was quite an adventure. Scott didn't have a history in the accounting profession. He understood how to run a membership organization and the importance of all of the pieces of that but he didn't know much about the profession.
Scott's first year and a half or two years was a lot of, "You said you used this word. That word doesn't mean what you think it means," and trying to get him on board. I always tell this story. One day, Scott was like, "Do you want to go to lunch?" If you ask us to eat, we're going to say yes. We're going to eat well, especially when we go together. We're sitting down and having lunch. Scott is sitting across from me. He goes, "You can do more. You're high maintenance. I'm busting my ass over here to keep up. You can have an elevated role in the organization." I was like, "That sounds a whole lot better."
At that point, we started talking about long-term what I wanted to do. I remember at the time off the cuff saying, "I would love to run one of these things someday." He was like, "If you want to run one of these things, you have to get the experience. Luckily, you work at one of these things. It's fairly easy to do that." I ran a membership for a couple of years. It was interesting to get all the logistics of that figured out. We had a piece of software that ran the association. Over time, we customized and built all these cool things that it could do that everybody else's version couldn't do.
Right about the time we were due for an update, the folks came to us and said, "All your custom stuff either goes in the garbage, or you can't update. The security features and all this crap are not going to work with your customization." We started this project to reimplement the software that runs the place. Shortly after that, Chris takes the job in South Carolina. Our chief technology officer at the beginning of this massive project leaves. I inherited not the technical work of it but a lot of the project management. We had to take these custom things out. Most of them were replaced with some stock functionality.
There was a year and a half or two years of going to people and being like, "You used to check this box to do that. You now have to check this box to do that. Everything works the same. It just looks different." At about that same time, my oldest son started to watch these YouTube videos of people watching other people play video games. The first time I saw this, I was like, "This is the stupidest thing that could ever exist. We have discovered the dumbest thing possible."
One of the things I learned from hearing this was these people took things that were amazingly mundane. It wasn't even action. They were Minecraft games but they were super excited about it. It was almost impossible not to get excited. The problem was you had an organization of 40 people. Everybody needed to learn something. You would get everybody in a room and show them. Sometimes it works. Sometimes it doesn't.
Accept Life: People take things that are amazingly mundane.
What I started doing was self-recording videos but I would get super excited about it. The worst part was we had this open-concept office. I would send a message out. About three minutes later, I would hear myself off by a second in each one. It would drive me nuts but everybody loved it. The nice thing was since it was recorded, they could watch it again. If they get it, I didn't have to go and explain it a second time. They pressed play again and did it all over again. That's one of those things. Looking back, I took something that I saw as the dumbest thing but I tried to learn from it.
You saw how engaging it was. That's important too when we talk about the difference between generations. A lot of times, we think there's only one way to do something. It's the way we know. We can learn from the younger generation the things that engage them. You're like, "How do I take this concept and make it work for me?"
I had a yoga studio. We did a lot of our communications and everything through Facebook. My son worked at the studio. He was like, "Why are you using Facebook?" I was like, "That's how we communicate." He's like, "That's for old people." I was like, "Those are my people," but he is like, "You're never going to get people my age here." I was like, "That's a good point. What should we do?"
At the time, Snapchat was a big deal. It was geo-mapping or something. He's like, "I have to do that here so that they see it." I was like, "You're in charge." Instead of rejecting, "That would never work," his point from his standpoint was valid. What you can learn as a leader from anyone in the organization is it doesn't have to be a title. It's a great example.
When I managed membership in Ohio, Laura Owen who's still there taught me a fantastic lesson one day. I was sitting in my office. She and the rest of the team sat right outside me. She was talking to somebody, and she swore. I was like, "I can't believe this. She's swearing at a member." I was very nervous the next day. I'm like, "Laura, can you come here? What's the deal? I heard you swearing at this member yesterday." She's like, "He swore at me first."
I was like, "Who was it? Who were you talking to?" She told me the person's name. I give him a call, and he was like, "We always swear at each other." At the time, this whole concept of personalization and making things individualized wasn't as predominant. I was like, "This is an example where she's got a relationship that she's built over time. She's doing what they do in that relationship." You can't judge a conversation from only hearing one side of it.
Accept Life: You can't judge a conversation from only hearing one side of it.
Now that you are the Executive Director at Montana, what lessons do you think you take into your leadership, whether it be from your dad, Clarke, Scott, and these other managing partners? I always think we're a quilt. We take little things over time and then make them our own. What were some lessons that you've learned and that you've kept?
I try to do it because it's worked well for me. Others have done this to me, and I always appreciated it. It's not micromanaging. I've seen folks who micromanage and the impact of that. I've always appreciated it when somebody has given me a project and said, "Get us to this point. Don't do A, B, and C but get us here. However that works, do it."
The first example that pops into my mind is when I worked at an accounting firm. We created a mentoring program. We wanted folks to have a more senior person they could go to but somebody that didn't report to. I was told to do it. I did some research and figured out what the mechanics of a good mentorship program are. We implemented the program but I was given the freedom to make it happen. I do my best work. If you tell me to do A, B, and C, I'm going to B and try and figure out C to get it done instead.
Are there any other lessons?
I don't know if curiosity is a lesson but over time, I've learned that you can make more progress by asking questions than you can by sharing answers. That's something that I distinctly remember. Clarke was fantastic at that. He would ask you to do something, and you would bring him a prototype of it. His questions were always fantastic. Laura at The Ohio Society did the same thing. They knew where they wanted to get you. They wouldn't tell you but they would ask you a leading question, and then you would naturally go where they wanted you to go. A year later, you're like, "I never would have gone there. I didn't want to go in that direction, not by demand but purely asking a question."
Accept Life: You can make more progress by asking questions than you can by sharing answers.
It's also an influence. It's a gentle influence so that you feel like you are a part of getting to that answer.
They recognize that I didn't like being micromanaged but they still wanted to control my energies. They found a way to do it.
Is there anything that you've thought hasn't served you, and you've decided as a leader to be intentionally different?
It's funny because when I interviewed for the job, they asked the classic question, "What are you not good at?" I said, "I have very little experience in advocacy, government relations, and that whole ball of wax." My default is to be fairly blunt and to the point and less BS. I've learned in advocacy that it is not the best policy. That's not how you get things done with legislators or folks like that. That is an area where I have recognized the skill I was lacking and a natural proclivity to do it the wrong way and over time continue to fight myself there.
I was also thinking. You being an executive assistant probably did fall in line with your dad being so organized and methodical and being taught that way as well. It probably gave you comfort in that.
The flip side of that or the thing that I've probably taken away the most from my mom is a lot of home economics as it was termed back then. You're doing these things to run a household to take care of people. One of the nice things is that they changed that curriculum over time to make it more inwardly focused. If you take home ec now, it's less family planning and more of those soft life skills that you don't learn anywhere else. From my mom, I still inherently want to take care of people, especially in working in an association. A big part of what we do is take care of people.
There are so many great stories and lessons there. I would like to end with some rapid-fire questions. You pick a category. The category is either family and friends, money, spirituality, or health.
Having watched my peers, I don't think any of them was with spirit. As I looked at them all, the questions were easier to answer in every other category. It took a little more thought but I'm ready for this one. The other thing I would say is people who know me are probably on the edge of their seats at this point to find out what my thoughts are in this area.
As far as spiritual, things or actions I don't have that I want.
I take spiritual to be a little bit religious. It's understanding. I'm always envious of people who have an understanding of the world through either religion or a philosophy of some sort. I don't have that understanding. I'm still looking for that.
Things or actions that I do have that I want to keep.
Curiosity. This one is easy. I never read the Bible. I read the Bible because I was curious. You hear all the stories. I'm reading the Book of Mormon.
Not the musical.
I was talking to my board chair at our retreat. I said, "I read the Bible." He's like, "Have you read the Book of Mormon?" I'm like, "No." He's like, "Would you like to?" I was like, "Yes." He had one. He gave it to me, and I'm working my way through it.
That's important because then, you see the throughlines and all the different spiritualities of what makes everyone in common too. Things or actions I don't have that I don't want.
Blind faith. I know too many people that are brought up in a religion, and they don't question it at all. That scares me.
It's not taking time to learn about others. Things or actions that I do have that I don't want.
Skepticism. I'm highly skeptical of all of these things, and I wish I wasn't. I wish I could latch onto something and embrace it but I'm always skeptical.
That probably goes along with curiosity. With research, you have to uncover the reason why or why not. That makes sense. Thanks for going for a different category.
There was someone asking me, "Describe your view of life and the afterlife." It's funny because I saw something, and I was like, "That's it." I don't know if you've seen Everything Everywhere All at Once, the movie. It's this multidimensional thing where every decision you make branches into two different universes. Intrinsically, when I look at the night sky, I think, "There's no end to that." That means everything is happening somewhere. It's a fantastic movie. There are a couple of highly raunchy scenes in it but overall, it's a good movie. It's a good story.
Is there anything that you want to make sure that you emphasize or that we didn't cover that you want to leave people with?
One of the things we didn't touch on that I would like to have people think about is that more isn't necessarily better. You can find your place in this world and accept life as it is. I've found myself to be a lot happier when I am accepting of my circumstances than when I have to try and grow or be something that I'm not. When people ask me when they interview for a job, I'm always like, "Be yourself because if they hire you and you or somebody else in the interview, you have to be the other person when they hire you."
They're like, "Who did we hire?"
If you can be yourself, which is something we should all want, then you have to be yourself. A lot of people aren't going to like that but the people that matter will like that.
I love that. Thank you so much for taking the time to share your story and so many great leadership lessons here as well. I also look forward to being part of your conference in June 2023. It's going to be awesome. We're doing yoga there as well. People can get present before they go into their session that day.
We're excited to have you. We can't wait to show Montana to you.
Thank you. I'm excited as well. I will see you soon. Thank you very much for being on.
You're welcome. Thank you.
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For my Mindful Moments in this interview that I had with Allen, he talked about the small town he lived in growing up where his dad originally had been in the Navy and a truck driver when they moved to Ohio so that he could be a CAD designer as an engineer. He did this very early on in his career. He was organized and methodical, which were traits that stuck with Allen throughout his growing up as well as into his career. Where his mom was a schoolteacher, his uncles were schoolteachers too.
He went to a private school outside of the public school where his mom taught. He came from a close-knit family. His parents met when they lived across the street from each other their entire life. The grandparents were close. The family was close-knit. He learned how to keep himself busy growing up in a small town that was about 3 miles in radius. That gave him traits as he's grown into an adult to keep himself present and not want to be rushed that things take time and have patience with the people around you.
He talked about the important things that he learned from being in a small town and appreciating when things move slower. When he lived in Columbus, whether it was through college or some of his career as well, the pace was very different. He didn't realize how much moving now to Montana and being responsible for the Montana Society brought back his small-town ideals and how he enjoys life.
Sometimes we don't often notice when we appreciate certain things from our childhood that we have gotten away from. When we have those observations of making sure that we bring those things back into our life even in small ways if we need to learn to meditate, slow down, or things like that, we can create that feeling or that bliss of what he felt of being from a small town.
The other thing that was important to him about being from a small town was the community and being able to inherently trust people. Being from a small town, you know most of the people around you and their families. It does make it easier to trust versus in a big town where you're not sure who to trust. Understanding how you build that trust as a community is important, whether that's through friendships, family, or even business.
We talked about his career and also his graduating in Business Administration but moving into being an executive assistant. He even talks about being one of the few men that were an executive assistant at the time. We forget how far we have come with this diversity, stereotyping, or profiling of certain roles as he described in this interview, and how he had to gain acceptance as a man and an executive assistant and gain trust and respect as well. That is important.
One of the things he talked about, and I do think this has come up as well when I talk to accounting firms about learning, is how you take the stuff that you learn inside an office that's ancillary and that you learn from and how you do that in this remote world because he used an example about how he learned a lot from Clarke Price when he was working for The Ohio Society.
He was sitting outside of his office, and he heard different conversations or how Clarke handled certain things. It also gave him knowledge on how to help others in the organization be able to achieve the outcomes that they wanted. He knew from watching Clarke and listening to Clarke what things were going to help influence him to get to where everyone wanted to go.
That's an important thing that we all need to think about. How do we take some of those interactions or learning that aren't formalized education that we got in an office atmosphere or real life? How do we take that into remote life and make sure that people are still learning these things and creating ways where everything doesn't have to be so scheduled, and people can listen to things or shadow things so that they do learn different people's styles?
One of the things that I thought was so great when he was talking about engaging people in the process is when he learned from his son that was watching different YouTube videos about something that they thought was boring but in the way that those YouTube videos were created with excitement and enthusiasm, you couldn't help but watch it. He used that lesson in the way that he created learning for other people in the organization by making recordings where it got people to watch or wait for the next one. That's important that we don't always do what's expected and that we try to find ways that will engage people. In this time of being in this remote world, how important is that?
To sum up the lessons that he learned along the way that are important to call out here from other leaders that became his belief systems, number one was not to micromanage. Let people know where you want to go and then give them the freedom to get there and the way that they can get there. You need to put guardrails on that, deadlines, and benchmarks but giving people that freedom to explore brings the second thing of curiosity.
Staying curious is an important skillset that a lot of people lose as they go up the ranks because everyone becomes so sure of themselves or sure of their answers that they lose that curiosity, "Maybe there's another way. It is possible. We tried it a couple of years ago but now, let's look at it again. It's a different time." Too many times, people get crushed when they have new ideas, and they're told, "It's always been this way. That won't work because we tried that before," instead of allowing a new approach and being curious.
He also talked about what he learned from his mom about taking care of others and how important that is in team building but also relationship building with your customers, clients, members, or whoever that is. That is an important part that we shouldn't get away from as we move through the leadership ranks. This was a great interview with so many great takeaways that Allen described and stories he described about his life.
Getting back to that mentality of being present and being able to be still is something that I talk about in my new book, Disconnect to Connect: Tap Into the Power Within You to Create the Life You Desire. Sometimes we're racing through life. We have these career aspirations, family aspirations, or whatever it is in our minds that we're running toward but we're not present in the life that we're in, and we're not taking the time to enjoy life as it is now.
These are the lessons that Allen is talking about, that my book is talking about, and that so many leaders have talked about here. There is no rush. Life is a journey. The lessons that we learn about ourselves when we take those moments to step back, research, continually learn, and expand ourselves not only make us better but also create better energy for those around us.
I hope you enjoyed this interview. I also hope you will go out and buy my book. It is launching on April 25th, 2023. That is Disconnect to Connect: Tap Into the Power Within You to Create the Life You Desire. We're going to have a new series coming up in summer 2023 where I'm going to break down the book chapter by chapter. Get your copy. Let us know what your questions are so that I can address them as we go through that series. Thank you so much for reading. Share and rate this show so others will know about it as well.
Important Links
Disconnect to Connect: Tap Into the Power Within You to Create the Life You Desire
Boyd Search - Previous episode
mtcpaexecdir - LinkedIn
AllenSLloyd - Twitter
About Allen Lloyd
At the intersection of trust and getting things done is a group of people. I am one of them and have evolved from an admin. assistant to an Executive Director working to take ideas and turn them into results.
As Ex. Dir. of the Montana Society of CPAs it is my responsibility to work with our members and board to move forward the mission of the organization. I manage our staff and make sure our efforts are focused on our mission to inspire, empower, and impact our members to achieve professional excellence.