Episode 116: Who You Are When You Begin Is So Far From What You Will Be One With Heather Satterley
Who you are in the beginning of your life is not who you’ll be in the future. You will change as you grow. Your interests will be different. What you thought was boring as a kid might not be boring anymore. In fact, it might actually be your career. In this episode, Amy Vetter talks to Heather Satterley about her journey from beginning as an actress to becoming a successful CPA and entrepreneur. Heather is a CPA and the Founder of Satterley Training & Consulting, LLC. Discover more about her career path and what she learned from each career. Also learn some of the lessons her parents have taught her and how you can put those into practice today! Start finding what you love doing today!
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Who You Are When You Begin Is So Far From What You Will Be One With Heather Satterley
I'm here with Heather Satterley. I love having you on the show. If you don't mind giving our readers a brief introduction to who you are, and then we all get started.
First of all, thank you so much for having me on the show. I'm thrilled to be here. I'm Heather Satterley. I am a CPA and a technology lover. I have been in accounting for a long time, and I'm most known to folks as a QuickBooks expert and part of the Intuit training team, and also known for being Zapier no-code evangelist within our industry.
I have done a lot of different things. I worked with a lot of different sizes of firms but I'm an entrepreneur at heart and I love working with other accountants, small businesses, mid-sized businesses, and anybody that's looking to streamline processes and free up their time from mundane data entry repetitive tasks and find balance in their life.
I'm so happy for you to be here and to dive into your story. Where I would like to start is the beginning. Where did you grow up? What was your family like and so forth? Start from that.
I consider myself a native of Rhode Islander, although I'm not truly a native of Rhode Islander. I moved to Rhode Island with my family when I was eight years old from Kentucky. I have lived here ever since. I have traveled around a little bit but this has always been home for me. I love New England. I love the ocean. It's beautiful here.
I grew up in the home of a CPA. My mom, when I was a little kid, she was an entrepreneur herself, and she owned a health food store in Louisville, Kentucky. When we moved to Rhode Island, her store ended up closing, so it failed. She sold it. What she said was, “I always wish I had that advisor that could have helped my business succeed.” She decided that was what she wanted to become.
When we moved to Rhode Island, she enrolled at the University of Rhode Island in their College of Business and got her Master's degree in Accounting and ended up getting her CPA and worked as a CPA in my teenage years. I always said that I was never going to be an accountant. I was going to be an actress, movie star, rock star, artist or anything but an accountant. It was ironic and amazing that's where I ended up.
What about your father?
I remember him as a kid as him being a cowboy. He was a restaurateur, and my parents were divorced. I had my father and my stepfather. My father was a restaurateur and so what he would do is he would work with restaurant owners to design their menus, with the general contractors to build and design the restaurants, and then he would get them up and running. He trains the staff, gets everything going, and then moves on to his next project.
We spent summers with him. Some of my favorite memories were spending summers with him in Colorado, and he did some cool things. It was fun to be at the restaurants. One of the things that he did one summer is he ran an outfitting company up in Granby and Great Lake Colorado on the mountain, and he ran horseback trips into the mountains for families, corporations, and things. We spent that summer on a dude ranch, working with horses, and honestly, it was one of the best summers of my life. That's how I think of my dad. He's an ex-Marine and cowboy. That's my dad.
Did he get remarried?
He got married several times. He got remarried again for the fourth time.
You said you referenced your stepdad.
My mom remarried when I was young, and he was an artist. He was a steamboat captain. We moved here to Rhode Island. It was always a dream to live here. He left his job as a steamboat captain and became a sign painter. He always doodled and did cartoons. He was into calligraphy and art. They both reinvented themselves when we moved to Rhode Island. It was interesting to see as a kid how you could do that later in life.
They divorced, and then my mom fell in love with the marine biologist. Her last phase was going out and studying sharks with the love of her life, and they have been doing that for many years now. They live up in Maine, and they are still studying sharks and kayaking. It's amazing and beautiful. My mom still kayaks regularly and hikes. She does all that. She’s cool.
Do you have siblings?
I do. I have my sister Teri. She is an attorney and lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico. She got a little bit of fame to her. She is a criminal defense attorney who specializes in death penalty cases. When she started her career, she wanted to be a prosecutor. She had a conversation with an attorney, a friend of my aunt, and changed her mind. She ended up becoming a defender.
A movie came out in 2020, The Mauritanian. Have you heard of that movie? It's about Mohamedou Ould Slahi, who was a detainee at Guantanamo Bay. He was arrested after 9/11 and put in Guantanamo. He proclaimed his innocence during the whole ordeal. He was in prison there for thirteen years, and my sister joined an organization called the John Adams Project, which is a group of attorneys that's funded by the ACLU and run by them. It's named after John Adams because John Adams was the defender of the redcoats that were responsible for the Boston Massacre.
His ideology was, “As horrible as they are, everybody deserves a fair trial.” He was very hated for the fact that he was representing the enemy. The John Adams Project are attorneys that believe in the same ideology. They were the ones that went in, and pro bono defended some of the detainees at Guantanamo Bay.
Mohamedou was eventually released thirteen years after he was imprisoned. He was found not guilty and sent home, and they made a movie called The Mauritanian, which was released in 2020. My sister, Teri, was portrayed by Shailene Woodley, the actress that was in the Divergent series. That was cool. I remember talking to my sister. I was like, “That's going to be wild to be portrayed by Shailene Woodley.” It had an amazing cast. It had Benedict Cumberbatch played the prosecutor, and Jodie Foster played my sister's mentor, Nancy Hollander, who worked with her on that case. She's still friends with Mohamedou. I know it's supposed to be about me but that's my sister.
That's very cool and also to picture watching your life with somebody else portraying you. That's interesting. Are there any other siblings?
I had a brother who passed when he was twenty. I have a stepsister who lives here in Rhode Island with me and is one of my dearest friends. I have a half-sister on my dad's side, and she was born when I was 21. There's a 21-year difference. That's my family. I have a stepbrother. We have a village. We are a majorly blended family, and it's amazing. What's cool about it is everybody gets along, which is so cool.
I'm sorry to hear about your brother. That’s a hard thing, I can imagine. Going back to you saying when you were younger, you didn’t want to be an accountant. What did you imagine yourself when you grew up?
I was a dreamer and artist. I walked to the beat of my own drum. I wanted to be a movie star. I wanted to be an actress and figured that I would be out doing that thing, and I did that for a little while. I did get paid to act. I got $50 for the whole summer of my stint with the Rhode Island Shakespeare Theater. I was very proud of it.
I did a little bit of that, and it was hard because of the rejection. You have to be a certain type of person to get rejected over and over again. When I was about 22 to 23, I was like, “Maybe this isn't the right thing for me.” I started looking for some other things to do. I ended up getting a job as an inventory control clerk. I counted inventory and then put the inventory into Real-World Software, if you remember Real-World Software.
Who You Are: It's hard to understand how somebody could be fulfilled at working with numbers all day. Accounting can seem really boring but once you do it, it's actually really interesting and fun.
That's why I laughed because it was the first entry into the cloud. That was as close as you could get to transfer files through the cloud, and no one ever remembers them.
That was where I got started. I did the inventory thing and was good at the computer piece of it and ended up being a resource for other people in the company when things would go wrong. That's when I discovered my affinity for technology and also understanding of relational databases, which nicely coincides with the county. Double entry accounting. It's all relational. My brain worked that way. It was a surprise.
You never knew that about yourself prior.
I never explored it because I was so adamant that I wasn't going to be an accountant. I wasn't going to sit in an office. As a kid of a CPA, you stuff a lot of envelopes, and your best friend is carbon paper back in that day. Now, it's not, but your worst enemy was carbon paper. I didn't understand how somebody could be fulfilled at working all these hours and working with numbers. It seemed boring to me as a kid. Once I started doing it, I was like, “This is interesting and fun,” plus you are working with these businesses.
You are working with jewelry designers, contractors, college professors, and everyone. You are hearing tons of stories, learning about different industries, and discovering other people's passions and things that you never knew about. It was fascinating. It's super interesting, and I was good at it. That was good. I was like, “All of a sudden, I'm not being rejected.” It's nice.
What did you do from there?
I had a baby.
We skipped over that.
We did. That coincided with the ending of the acting career. The baby was part of that.
Were you married?
No. I wasn't married. I was pretty sure it wasn't going to work out. I was like, “We will do this on our own.” We are great friends and have done a great job of co-parenting. I also have three other children because I got married later in life, and I'm jumping ahead. I will stay on my path here. I raised my oldest daughter Chloe by myself until she was five, and then I met my husband. We got married when she was seven and then had a couple of kids together. I have a beautiful and amazing stepdaughter, Mhegan, who works with me. She's dipping her toe into accounting, which is awesome.
You see that you like the database work and working with the software. You had a baby, and now you are going to be a single mom. Were you looking for stability?
Totally looking for stability. I'm like, “How can I do this? I know Real-World Software. I know Inventory. What can I do? I reached out to a temp agency to get some work, and they were like, “This is a skill that people want.” They found a position for me as a manufacturer that was using Real-World and wanted to implement their inventory module.
That was my first implementation before I even had an Accounting degree. It was based on the knowledge that I had gotten from this other position, and it was great. I loved it. After that, I went to work for mom. I was a bookkeeper for a company for a little bit, and then mom said, “Intuit rolled out this cool program called the ProAdvisor Program. I think you should learn it because you are good at software and working with people. Why don't you come work for me and I will pay you? You can become a ProAdvisor. We will work together.” That happened. I worked for her for a little bit and enrolled at URI in their Accounting program and ended up getting my Accounting degree.
You went to college, then again later.
I did. I graduated when I was 31. The school wasn't my thing early on but I rocked college.
I have got what you are experiencing too but college-age kids and so many people in our generation are like that. The kids are all trying to figure out what they want to do. One of the things that we have been talking about with my kids and my friend's kids is, “What is it that you want to do when you grow up?” Everyone feels that they need to make this decision at 17 or 18 years old, which is hard because you've had no life experience.
I was listening to this podcast with Brené Brown, and she told her daughter, “Do not pick a major your first year in college. Your job is to take every class that is of interest to you without any intention of that. After the first year, look at what were the things that most interested you.” That's the thing for so many, we get boxed into what we think we are going to be and not even try to see if we are good at other things and so forth.
It's such an important part of the journey. I talked to a lot of college students as well. There’s so much that you do in accounting besides what you think an accountant does, and you have no idea when you are starting out. You can think it's the most boring work in the world, and then you get in, and all of a sudden, your eyes open, and there's a whole software side to it. There's blockchain and all sorts of different areas like supply chain. You name it. What makes it exciting is that you can pivot without losing your experience.
It's funny that you said that about college because I remember my mother telling me when I went off to college the first time. That was way at the beginning. She's like, “College is a buffet.” You told me the same thing. She was like, “Don't pick a major. It's like a buffet. You go and try a little bit of Philosophy, Business or Math, and you figure out what interests you.”
Even when you do that, your life changes. You are not the same person that you are when you turn eighteen and embark on your life journey. You evolve over time, and that's something that we as people, as humans, need to understand that we are constantly growing and changing. You are right. The accounting industry is so awesome for that because there are many different facets to it, and it's constantly changing 100%.
Like in your life, you could go and be paid $50 for the summer to be an actress, versus once you have a baby, you are like, “I need a salary. I need something a little more secure here. I got to try new things.” It forces you to evaluate things in your life when you have those pivots. That's what I like to call them. It's a pivot. It's not necessarily giving up on anything because I'm sure some of those skills as an actress, especially when you talk about learning how to deal with rejection. That's sales.
I hear this all the time and used to say all the time that I was horrible at sales. I said, “I'm horrible at sales. This is not my thing,” and that wasn't true. It wasn't that I was horrible at sales. It was that sales made me uncomfortable. It wasn't that I didn't perform well because I usually did. If I wanted the client, I could usually sign them. I did a good job at that but it made me uncomfortable.
It's learning how to work through that uncomfortable piece without blaming the outside world for the fact that you are uncomfortable because that's usually what we do when we are in those moments. When you can go back and see even through your journey so far what we have talked about of how many times you had to recreate a life by moving, having family changes, new siblings, or whatever it is. You start gaining confidence in yourself like, “I can figure out how to navigate stuff.” I don't know what that is but you have to pull on that to make a change and pivot things in your life.
Who You Are: Even if you choose to do something else or pursue something else, never give up your CPA license. You never know when you want to go back.
This was on Facebook, and somebody posted a meme, and it was beautiful. The story was given from the point of view of a grown child that was watching her mother's actions. The Mother, all of a sudden, when somebody would come to her and ask, something would go wrong. The mother would be like, “I understand. I hear you, and you need to go figure this out.”
The child was saying, “That's not my mother. My mother was always the one that was micromanaging in my business and doing all this stuff.” The family had an intervention because she had been doing this for several weeks. They were like, “What's wrong with you? Are you depressed? Is something wrong?” She was like, “No. I have this epiphany that this is your journey, and it's not my problem to solve. If I don't support you and stop putting myself in the middle of your stuff, you can't grow. I realized that, and I had to make a change in myself.”
That so resonated with me because that is, as a parent, one of the hardest lessons to learn but when you learn it, it's one of the most beautiful ones because then you start to see your children transform. Sometimes there are times when you are crying with them, and sometimes there are times where you are celebrating because they worked through the problem and made a breakthrough, and it's beautiful. That is something that at this time in our life, we are learning to let go of.
Even like your mom and your story, she had to let you go down the path of being an actress so that you never looked back and said, “Shoulda or coulda,” where you could play that out and then was there to help support you when you came back toward her. You also saw your mom do that when she changed careers around the same age and became an accountant as well. It's interesting. The parallel.
When my mom ended up selling her practice early-2000s, she went off to be a marine biologist. I was talking to her, and she was saying, “Even if you choose at this time in life to do and pursue something else, never give up your CPA license. That was the biggest mistake I ever made. I left, went, and started this new path, and then, all of a sudden, I missed it. I realized that I could do this at any time. I could pick it up and start helping clients. I let my license lapse, and then I had to go and try and get it again.”
She’s 80 and still does all her CPE. She still maintains her license. She still stays abreast of everything in the industry because she has such a love for it. She understands the incredible value of being a CPA and what that means, and the fact that that's something that she's worked hard for and that needs something.
I'm assuming you stayed with your mom through the sale of her business.
I did. In the final year of college, when she was going through the sale, I ended up doing an internship at another firm because I wanted to see what audit was like. I thought I loved audit and actually hated audit but I thought I would love it. It was miserable to me. I didn't enjoy it at all. I did stick with her, and then we have worked together on and off throughout the years, where I pull her into a project where she has expertise. She does a lot of not-for-profit work, so sometimes, we will get on a call and talk QuickBooks. It's nice to have that in common with her, for sure.
Did you start your own practice after the audit job?
That's exactly what happened. I was working for a firm. I did the audit and went to tax, and then realized I didn’t want to work in a firm. I don't want to be in a big firm. I went back into private for a little bit. In private, I went in, and they were like, “We need you to set up our entire system and HR and do everything.” I did it in six months, and then I was blown out of my mind. I set up everything. Everything is working like, “What do I do?”
At that point is when I decided to go out and start my own firm. I didn't get my CPA back. I graduated from URI in 2003 and didn't get my CPA. I took the exam right after college because my professors will like, “Do it now because you are going to remember all this stuff. If you try to take it later, you must redo it. You will have to relearn everything.” I took the exam and passed but the education hour requirements changed the year before. It was two years before I graduated, so I missed it. It went from 120 to 150.
I got married while I was in school and had my second child. I was like, “I'm not going to go back. I don't need it. I can have a career without the CPA,” but I did pass the exam. I ended up getting my EA so that I could practice with the IRS. I started my firm and ended up doing that for a long time. In 2017 or ‘18, somewhere around there, I got an email or somebody reached out to me from Northeastern University, and they had started this brand new Master's program. It was a Master's in Innovation.
I read the description of the program. I'm like, “This sounds so cool.” I signed up for it and graduated in 2019 with my Master's in Innovation. I'm like, “I can be a CPA now.” I worked at CPA firms. I'm like, “I have the education now. I passed the exam.” I reached out to the Rhode Island board and was like, “I did this several years ago.” I got my CPA.
They still grandfathered it in. That's awesome.
Once you pass, you don't lose it. At least in the state of Rhode Island, you don't lose that exam. I had to go back to the CPA firms that I had worked for and have them put in my attestation of hours which wasn't an issue. I ended up getting my CPA. It was 50. I'm a fledgling CPA.
I get that because as I have pivoted in my career, I have never let my license go, either. It's one of those things that you worked so hard for, and for me, I did not pass on the first time. I do tell college students that all the time because it is not an easy thing, and no one ever asks how many times they took it. It's just that you are a CPA.
I honestly think I would have done better with work experience under my belt before I took the test because I'm one of those people that's an application, and all the theory of school was like, “I don't get what they are trying to say. I don't get what they are trying to do.” Until I audited, I was like, “Now I understand what those books were saying,” but it's too much theory for me. I'm not a theory person.
I went to school after I had a Doctorate experience. I went in with a different lens. It was almost like every course was unlocking the why. That’s why I do that. I remember having an argument with my audit professor because I was pregnant with my second daughter and his course, which I'm sorry, professor. It’s a pain in the behind. One of the things that we had to do every week is we had to memorize the audit standards word for word, punctuation included, and it was pass or fail. If you didn't get it exactly right, then you fail.
I did because, first of all, I'm ADHD. Although I did memorize lines when I was an actress somehow. I did have those skills but I remember one day I was trying to remember it and was like, “I can't remember if there's a comma or not, or whatever it was.” Instead of the standard, I ended up writing him a note. I was like, “Professor, with all due respect, this is the biggest waste of my time and your time. This is ridiculous. This is an exercise in futility, and I'm offended by it.” I got an F, of course. He wrote back and was like, “When you pass the CPA exam, you can tell me how to teach my class.” After I passed the CPA exam, I was like, “What now?”
In the moment of glory of the CPA exam, what are you thinking about that professor?
That was what I was thinking about, “Now I can talk about how he can teach a class.”
You are like, “Now I can.”
Stop doing that because it's not nice. We had to memorize the letters too. It was brutal, and that's probably why I decided audit wasn't for me because that class was so brutal.
I did an external audit coming out of school but that's the thing. When you are in school, everyone is talking to you about what you should or shouldn't do, and everyone is like, “Don't be an internal audit. You should be an external audit.” My next job was an internal audit, and I loved that because it was much more operational.
Who You Are: Do you really understand how much your client cares about you? As an accountant, clients don't understand that sometimes when they're going through something tough, it's hard to sleep at night.
I worked for Ryder Logistics in Miami. As nerdy as it is, I went into all these different warehouses and was like, “This is so cool because I started learning best practices and how they could set it up better.” That was when I started in bigger software applications as well, learning those and being like, “This is cool of what you can get out of it.”
All those things that you weren't close enough with external audit and run in what they call client advisory services now. At the time, it wasn't a thing when I opened that practice but it was based on my audit skills of the things that I did. It's that people now wanted to hear my recommendation because I wasn't the auditor.
When you are the auditor, they are like, “Please don't give us a point. I don't want to hear it,” or whatever. They are afraid of anything you come up with but you are trying to help them. I drew upon those skills a lot as a consultant because you understand business processes, internal controls, and all of those things that help the infrastructure of a business, which is cool when you can pull from that.
It's also understanding as you pivot through your career what things that might seem boring help you in the long run. You have to do the math before the calculator. You have to understand when you are looking at a software application, how it ticks or how information flow to be able to help somebody. That's what I like is the puzzle and what you start learning about yourself if you are not a maintenance person but you can go in and fix puzzles.
You can find the anomalies. You can find the data outliers. When you were talking about figuring out the math before you use a calculator, I have a tax professor, and he's still at URI, from what I understand. We did have tax software back in when I was there but we weren't allowed to use it. We had to do a return for our final exam by hand, and it was a complicated return. He still does that, and I love that. I don't know if that's common practice but in his tax class, I was talking to a grad, and they were like, “We had to do it by hand.”
That's more important than learning punctuation and memorizing a standard versus something where you are going to have to understand why you are doing what you are doing, which is cool. With your practice, when you look at yourself as an entrepreneur and going over time, what lessons do you think you drew from watching your mom and her practice?
The thing that I learned from my mom was I learned how to take a tie. I learned never to take everything at face value and to always dig deeper. She was big on understanding the why and understanding the situation. Empathy with the client was a huge one. My mom cared about her clients. I don't want to say to a fault because I don't think it is a fault at all but she put her clients first. I remember her meeting with clients and having conversations with her, and listening. She felt their pain and wanted to help them.
That was something that was magical to me and what’s something that gets lost on the general population is, “Do you understand how much your accountant cares about you?” Sometimes that clients don't quite understand that sometimes when they are going through something tough that we stay up at night that we can't sleep because we are worried about them and we are trying to help.
I see accountants as unsung heroes for sure. A lot of the stuff that we do for our clients. They are not even aware of it. One of the things I wish for my mom is that she always valued her intelligence and integrity. I wish she understood the impact that she had on our clients and how special that was. That has always been part of my DNA and is the only way to explain it, and I get that from my mom.
From your creative and artistic side, your father is on a dude ranch and a cowboy. How do you pull that side of yourself into your business and career?
My dad was the guy that threw us into the deep end of the pool to teach us to swim. That was my dad, and I hated it. As a kid, I remember him taking us on a whitewater rafting trip, and it started by like, “If you fall out of the boat, make sure that you go feet first so that you don’t die.” That was like our life with dad.
As a child, that was absolutely terrifying. Why is he putting us through this? Woe is me. Why are we backpacking through the mountains? Why can't I stop and sit down? He pushed us, and I hated it. It was like, “We are going to dad.” I loved being there. I love the mountains. I loved where we were but I remember being terrified a lot of the time. What that taught me, as I got older, was that as hard as something looks, you got to keep pushing through it.
I went to the AICPA Engage in Las Vegas, and one of my biggest fears is heights. I'm terrified of heights. The opportunity arose for me to jump off a 160-story building and rappel. You don't jump freestyle but you rappel down. The opportunity came up and I was like, “When am I ever going to have the chance to do that again? It's absolutely terrifying but if I do this, that's going to be something that will be meaningful to me as a human because it would be like, ‘I don't dive a 160-story building if I can get myself to step off the platform and not die. This will be a big thing for me.’”
As I was standing there and they were doing the triple check and this and that, and I'm like, “What am I doing?” I thought about my dad. I thought about the fact that I probably wouldn't have been able to step off that platform and do it had he not put me through those experiences as a child because I survived all those experiences where I was pretty certain I was going to die. He instilled in me the ability to face my fears and push through them. I thank him for that. I didn't appreciate it growing up at all. It took me many years to forgive him for something like that. Where I am in life and looking at it now, it's amazing how you don't quite understand why your parents are teaching you certain things until later in life when you realize that.
To wrap up, I like to ask some rapid-fire questions. Pick a category. Family and friends, money, spiritual, or health.
I'm going to pick health.
Things or actions that I don't have that I want.
I would like to be more consistent in my exercise regime. I'm one of those that start things, and then after either, I go on a trip or we go on vacation, I don't feel like it. You back into keeping up with that routine is difficult for me. I would love to overcome that.
As far as your health, things or actions that you do have that you want to keep.
The fact that I keep trying, picking it back up, and not giving up.
Things or actions that I don't have as far as my health, and I don't want it.
Diabetes.
Last question. Things or actions that I do have that I don't want as far as my health.
I would say I love wine and probably like it too much. I'm going to leave that there.
Who You Are: When you're young, you don't quite understand why your parents are teaching you certain things until later in life when you find out. They are teaching you how to face your fears and step off the platform.
You've shared so many great stories and life lessons with everyone. Is there anything that we didn't say or that you want to make sure people leave with as far as takeaways from you?
The one thing I want to say and something I have been thinking about a lot is who you are when you start out, so far from where you are going to be at every step of your life. I'm not done. We are always evolving. The one thing that I would say to people, and I'm going to quote Winnie the Pooh here. I'm not going to say it right because I can't remember things, which is why I got so mad at that audit professor.
I don't remember things well. It’s, “You are stronger than you are. You are kinder than you are. You are amazing.” Every person has gifts that they bring to this world that they don't acknowledge within themselves and need to be kinder to themselves. My sister once told me, “When you reach a certain point in your life where you are older, and you are looking back and reflecting on your childhood, whatever your path, it's okay to stop and give that person that you were a hug.”
It's important to visualize that to give yourself a hug and say, “That was a tough time or an exciting time. I was proud of you.” To acknowledge that all the little things that have happened throughout your life happened. To me, that is the key to understanding self-love. That's what I want for everybody is that everyone is worthy of love, and you owe it to yourself to give every piece of you that hug.
What a great ending. I hug you back. Thank you so much for sharing your story. I'm sure, so many people are going to walk away very inspired.
This has been super fun, so thanks for having me.
You are welcome.
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For my mindful moments with my interview with Heather and hopefully, you all enjoyed her story. I thought it was so inspiring and loved hearing about her family background, with her mom pivoting so many times in her career from having a food store, becoming an accountant later in life, and then moving on to Marine biology. It shows that we can never stop learning. It's our zest for learning and not staying stagnant. That helps us to constantly keep our brains working and be innovative.
Talking about her father, who would design and construct restaurants and how they design the menu and thought through all of that those would be successful. As well as what she learned from her father, with her trips over the summer to be with her dad and learn from him how to live in the outdoors and take risks. There are so many great stories that you can tell. It had such an influence on Heather throughout her life.
She talked about how she grew up being a dreamer and had this artistic family of adults that were going after their dreams, which created that herself of wanting to be an actress and working toward that as she was younger. She found that it was hard to go through the rejection of being an actress. Looking at her mother and how she had pivoted when things weren't working out with her business, Heather did the same thing. She started to go back and try to find jobs that would give her a more stable life, and that's what unlocked interest in her that she didn't even know she had.
We had that discussion on we can have this perceived notion of what we think we want in life or what our goal is. We must constantly be aware of the things that excite us, the things that inspire us or that we take an interest in that I find all of the time of my life, that there are things that I thought I would never do or never like. I try it and am like, “Maybe it is something that I would be interested in doing, never thought of or never pictured that would be something I would do in my life.”
That lesson of never closing yourself off from trying new things and exploring, we are never too old. It's always a time to look at that within ourselves. We talked about the fact that she started uncovering that she had the same interests that our mom did. She understood databases and how all the numbers work together. She started working for her mom when she became a ProAdvisor and then went back to college so that she could become an accountant and eventually a CPA.
One of the things that were important there was to see that she could constantly evolve and have faith in herself to pivot, change, and go after a new dream. Even if it wasn't the original dream, that is all the journey that we go through. Once her mom sold her practice, she started her own practice and passed the CPA exam but was missing the education requirement, which I loved. She went back still fifteen years later after she did her Master's program and was able to still get her license through, even though she didn't do the education requirements at the time.
That, to me, a big lesson is that sometimes our dreams or something that we plan for get put on hold. It doesn't mean that it has to be the end. It means that it's on hold for a moment because other life situations come up that might get in the way of it happening as we planned it. To always come back to those things that we wanted badly so that we can accomplish those things and not forget about them.
Maybe ask yourself that question from this interview, what is it that maybe you put on hold that you want to go back to and find a way that you can make that realistic in your life? Maybe it doesn't look exactly the way that it looked when you originally thought about it but it is something to consider like how do you bring that back into your life.
I asked her what some lessons she learned from her mom, and one of them was learning to never take anything at face value and always understand the why. For consultants out there, this is a big thing. Many times people will come to you as a consultant to tell you what their issues are but as you question, learn, and get into it, you realize that there are so many layers underneath what that person is saying to understand how to help them.
The other thing that she learned was how to have empathy for your clients and care about their situation and put yourself in their shoes. This is something that in anything, whether you work in a corporation and have other staff people, coworkers or serve other departments. How can you put yourself in their shoes so that you understand what they are going through on a daily basis and can help them?
I loved her answer about accountants being unsung heroes. For many of us that are accountants, we understand this but the clients don't see it that they are getting whatever final reports, returns or whatever it is that you are finishing up for them. They don't understand how much time goes into thinking through issues or problems that arise and so forth because all they see is when they hear, talk to you or get an official report from you. Sharing that with them is important so that they know that you care and that it matters to them, and their wellbeing. I thought that was a good thing to note.
She talked about our father of the lesson that you learned from our father of how many risks he made her take, which she remembers as a kid being terrified. As she's gone through her adulthood, it's given her the vision, the notion that she can do it. She has been put in so many situations that were risky but she can overcome them. She will get through it and survive because of the many times that she was put in those situations with her father.
I want to thank Heather so much for being on. When she ended, she talked about how we are all stronger and kinder than we think we might be or what’s underneath. What is important is to be kind to ourselves over this journey, sometimes, we get hard on ourselves when things don't necessarily work out exactly the way that we had planned. It is exactly the lessons that we need to learn to become better for ourselves and for the people around us.
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About Heather Satterley
Heather is a CPA and founder of Satterley Training & Consulting, LLC - a consulting firm focused on helping businesses define, design and automate their processes by employing innovative strategy and cloud-based technology. Heather is an Advanced Certified ProAdvisor, member of the exclusive Intuit Trainer/Writer Network, and a Zapier Certified Expert. She holds an undergraduate degree in Accounting and a Masters Degree in Innovation from Northeastern University in Boston, MA.
Heather is the co-host of the The ‘Appy Hour with Liz and Heather, a webinar series devoted to building awareness in the accounting community about the latest technology trends and best practices in a fun, relaxed environment.
Heather was named a categorical Top 10 ProAdvisor in 2017 and 2019 and has been listed as a Top 100 ProAdvisor for the past 7 years by Insightful Accountant. She was also named to the Top 100 Influential People in Accounting in 2019 by Accounting Today.