Episode 107: Doing Business Can Be A Retreat: Don't Take Yourself Too Seriously With Sheri Muntean
When we take ourselves too seriously, we lose the joy of doing business. Amy Vetter welcomes Sheri Muntean, a Certified Public Accountant and Managing Partner of Shamballa Centre. Sheri talks about how doing business can be a retreat because it's a conscious choice. You don't have to be doing what you do, but you choose to do it. And you had your reasons. Here's the key: it's when you own your choice that you feel empowered. Another secret? Enrich yourself by having a genuine connection to the community you built. Tune in!
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Doing Business Can Be A Retreat: Don't Take Yourself Too Seriously With Sheri Muntean
Welcome to this episode where I interviewed Sheri Muntean, the Founder of the Shamballa Centre. During this interview, we discussed the influence of the multi-generations of CPAs in her family and her father's business on the career she has now in delivering client advisory services. The Shamballa Centre has the mission to provide individuals and businesses with services that diminish workload, reduce financial stress and increase their peace of mind.
Sheri has a Master's in Psychology and a PhD in Metaphysics. She is uniquely suited to providing customized personal solutions to businesses or organizations. She has surrounded herself with professionals who all pride themselves in making a constructive difference in the lives of their clients. I met Sheri in my Client Advisory Services practice workshop, where we put together business plans.
She impressed me with the way that she runs her business and the passion that she has around it. There are lots of great stories of how she created the career that she has in this interview. I hope that you will share it with your friends or colleagues that it could be helpful and also take away action items that might help you in your career or your business.
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I'm excited to interview Sheri Muntean. If you want to go ahead and give a little brief intro on your firm and yourself, and then we will get right into your story.
I'm a Certified Public Accountant, and I am the Managing Partner at Shamballa Centre, which is a client advisory services firm. Our mission at Shamballa is to support success and provide peace of mind. That guides all of the services that we provide to our bookkeeping clients and tax clients. We specialize in small businesses here in our community.
What I would like to do when we start off these interviews is talk about your story because we do not necessarily always know what our career is going to be when we are young and what our interests are. I would love to know where you grew up, what your parents did, and what hobbies you had growing up.
My mom and dad both graduated from Stanford, so the bar was high. My dad was an MBA, and I always idolized him in many ways. I wanted to grow up and be like my dad, but I often joke that my tax training started prenatally because my mom was working at the IRS when she was pregnant with me. She was a third-generation accountant. She was an English major but ended up at the IRS. I guess you could argue that it is in my blood.
I grew up being meticulous and organized. I loved to read. I do think that played into eventually loving accounting. I love this sense of order. I like the meticulous nature of it. I do love working with people. My Master's is in Psychology. That comes into play a lot in what we do when we are working with people.
It is a powerful thing to help people come closer to their numbers.
I want to get into these three generations of accountants. Were they immigrants?
My grandfather was a pharmacist, but he ran his own business. His brothers were all accountants. They didn't start out that way. They pushed hand carts across the United States when they were children. My grandfather tells stories about being carried on the backs of his brothers into the beet fields to pick beets when he was two. They worked hard to get to the point where they all went to college. That is my mom's side of the family. My dad's side of the family was in show business. That has nothing to do with where we ended up, but it was colorful.
When you were young or maybe with your mother, were they talking about accounting?
All the time. Not accounting much, but we did have a tradition of eating dinner together. We would eat dinner together every night, and we would talk for at least a good hour or two every night about what my dad had been doing, what my mom had been doing, and what we had been doing. My dad's life as a business person was part of my life. That is why I admired it so much.
Did you work in his business?
I did have jobs when I was younger, but my first real job was in one of his businesses. It did lead to me being a better accountant because I started out as a receptionist, but I guess they noticed I was a hard worker. I started typing because back then, we didn't have computers. I was typing all the forms, invoices, estimates, and purchase orders.
Unlike some of my peers, when I finally got to take accounting classes, I knew what the forms were in a real way. It was real to me because I was the one that walked them where they were supposed to go. I understood the whole flow of how documents went through the business, why they went through the business, and where they were going. For me, accounting became a real metaphor for something real. That is something I try to encourage my clients to understand because it helps them understand their businesses better. Those numbers as a metaphor for what is happening.
Did your father encourage you to go into accounting? What was he encouraging you to do?
I wouldn't say that my parents told me what they thought. I took an Accounting class, and I loved it so much. I started as an Economics major because my goal was I wanted an MBA, like my dad. I took one Accounting class, and I was in love. Interestingly though, the one thing my dad told me was, “If there is one class you take when you are in college, make it be Accounting because if you understand accounting, you can understand anything in business.
Doing Business: Our mission at Shamballa is to support success and provide peace of mind.
I worked in my mom's business. We would go to chamber events and networking. I started asking, but they were telling me, “Major in it because you would understand the business better.” To me, the whole reason for client advisory services and what that is. The fact that people feel like they need to go to school for Accounting because it is not being explained good enough to run their business and that thing. That is the whole awesome part of having a client advisory service practice because you are able to affect their business.
It is a powerful thing to help people come closer to their numbers. It has been moving to me because I'm at the point of my career now where I have some clients I have had for several years and to see their progress over those years. They could have started out as someone who were afraid to touch a computer, let alone look at a number. Now they are doing their own books, understanding things and asking real questions and that is exciting to see that evolution.
You ended up sticking with accounting through school. Where did you end up working first?
I started out in Los Angeles because I got my undergraduate degree at Claremont McKenna College. That ended me up at Pricewaterhouse. That is where I started my career, and that is where I did my internship. Eventually, I ended up at Ernst & Young, and I ended up at National at Ernst & Young. I was probably in the big 6 or big 8 for the first good several years of my career.
What were you doing there?
I started in accounting and auditing because back in the day, when you got your CPA license in California, you could either get a Master's Degree or you could have specific accounting and auditing experience. My choice was to go the experience route. I'm glad I did that because they had detailed requirements where you had to touch every part of the audit and manage the audit. I loved that. I got intimately acquainted with every piece of the process, and that is how I got my CPA certification. It was through those several years of specific hours in auditing. That is how I started my career in audit, but the hours and the travel didn't lend itself to having a family.
Eventually, I transferred into tax, and I started out in what they call the small business department, but their definition of small is different than mine now. It was great. I loved it. I ended up going from the West Coast to the East Coast, and I ended up in the re-engineering team for Ernst & Young at the turn of the century, where they were identifying best practices, going paperless, and all that stuff. I got to be part of the group that spearheaded that across the nation. That was exciting. It affected how I manage my practice now, having been a part of picking out those things that were important, hitting the ground running with them, and training people nationwide on how to do that.
A few of the things you said are important to note. There are many issues now in the profession and many careers in the last couple of years and how it has been stressful and work demands. What you are saying is it has never been different. You are the same thing in your career and then pivoted. That is important. A lot of times, when things feel off, stressful, or you feel like you can't manage everything with your work and your family, we go elsewhere or give up things because we are stressed versus stepping back, looking at what you have got and how can you pivot it in your career. You have the expertise, and you enjoy what you do. How can you do it differently?
I had a powerful moment when I was at Ernst & Young and I was working at National. I had a traumatic event occur, and I immediately was taking two weeks off. The partner asked to meet with me, and she took me out to lunch. We sat down at lunch, and she said, “I would understand if you completely disappeared. You would have every right to do that.” What she encouraged me to consider and what I ended up doing, and she said, “I would encourage you to at least work part-time because you could choose to view work as your opportunity to leave your troubles behind for twenty hours a week.” I had never thought of that.
Learn to leverage the strength of others and step into a management position.
It reverses it. It is time off, but more of like, “Life is hard too, whether it is work, family, or whatever. Let it be your release.”
It flipped the script for me. She was right. It was the best decision that I ever made. It was to stay in the group and continue working twenty hours a week. It was interesting because I had to write a proposition to the partners to get approved for this part-time schedule because most people don't work part-time. This was before 2000. My proposition is I would get all of the same work done, but in half the time, that was the other thing. It is learning to streamline, to be efficient, and to be virtual, and it worked. That was exciting.
That virtual piece is important because we hear so much now like this is a new thing. It is not. I have been virtual for most of my career. I have been able to still engage, have client relationships, and have great staff relationships. What did you do during that time? Look at what we can do now compared to the 2000s. They were pushing like they were phantom drives that I would share work with my clients. It was pushing technology at that.
I was the National Knowledge Manager for the Ernst & Young practice at the time for the tax compliance practice. I was building Lotus Notes databases, and it was interesting to manage most of the stuff. I doubt they used that anymore. We did develop some stuff that was internet-based. The majority of the communication that I did nationally and it is provocative to note that when we re-engineered the Ernst & Young practice, the tax compliance practice back in 1999, it was to take the practice virtually.
It was to take it paperless because what Ernst & Young had recognized was the up or out paradigm that they had been using for over 100 years, it was antiquated. They were losing their most important assets, their people, and that knowledge. Part of that was allowing people to go virtual and acknowledging, “We don't have to have these big buildings in order to have a powerful practice and what do we need to do to make that happen?”
Being on the ground on helping make that happen by having virtual schedules and having people coordinating people nationwide, I was an area scheduler there for a minute, which was provocative too. I was mostly using the phone and email. We did have an email back then. It was pretty new, but we had email. It was phone, email, and that was pretty much it.
That is important to pause there because of the art of picking up the phone. It is meaning like this, where we can see each other face to face now rather than on the phone. It is easy in this world to send a quick message, instant message, or text and not talk to anyone and still have that personal interaction. That touch of still picking up the phone or whatever that means in this world is something important to remember to make sure you still have a connection.
One thing that they did require of us was as if we were working from our living rooms or whatever. I was working on my son’s porch at the time. That was my office. We did meet with our team, and it was monthly. We did have one once a month. I would drive down to Greenville, South Carolina, which is a good 100-mile drive.
The whole team from the Southeast area would sit in a room together. We could collaborate and come up with our plans for the next month. It was a powerful thing to make sure that we did have some face time. It was worth the commitment to do this like we are doing, this Zoom call to have that real personal connection.
Doing Business: You could choose to view work as your opportunity to leave your troubles behind for 20 hours a week.
What led you to go on your own and have the guts to do that?
I wanted to move, to be closer to family. I was 3,000 miles away from my family on the East Coast. It was the decision to make that big move and to put family first. There is no better way to do that as an accountant other than going out on your own. It makes you flexible. I have been licensed now in six states. I have been flexible, but we have been here now for several years, which is why I now have a small firm because it has been built over the years, and it has been wonderful. The evolution from a sole practitioner to someone who works has a powerful team has been provocative because it is a big shift to go from doing everything personally to leveraging the strengths of others and stepping into more of a management position.
What have you learned from that shift? What did you have to change from an individual contributor to becoming a leader? This is something hard for many, and in the profession that we get promoted based on our technical expertise, but not necessarily our people skills. Once we have got people reporting to us, that is a whole other skill. What did you do to shift that mindset and be able to lead?
I had to learn to let it go. That is the big thing. I had to lighten up because, as a sole proprietor, it was intense. I was 100% responsible, and I still am at a certain level, but I was 100% responsible for everything, and everything to me had to be perfect all the time. When I'm mentoring people, I have to trust others and believe in them but also provide them with the tools where that trust is valid.
I make sure that they always have what they need, not technically. I’m making sure they have that knowledge manager skillset was great because we had to go in and identify everything that everyone in practice might need, know and understand at any time and assure that there was a place for that to live, and it was accessible.
That is something that is translated into my practice because there is going to be attrition. I'm not talking about the people quitting. People get older. There are many reasons, and we want this to be something that people can rely on ad infinitum after I'm gone. What does that look like? How do we preserve all those things?
My parenting has come into this where paying attention, being with people, noticing when they are having a hard day, and noticing when something is starting to go awry. Everything has been going on in a nice clip, and then something shifts. Being present enough to notice the shift, stop everything, and say, “What is up?” Give them the tools to resolve it. Some of my staff need daycare. Some of them don't have children. One of them, their dog died, and that is decimating. How do we engage that? Those things matter too. It is not the deadline.
That is the mindfulness piece of the leadership of being aware around you, stopping and slowing down. It is important because we do get done, and there is so much stress. The client workload, we are 100% responsible for that. My violin teacher would say to me, “If you are no good, I'm no good. That is the way it is.” If my people aren't good, I'm not good. You can't do what we do.
They say, “The chain is only as strong as it is the weakest link.” It is trying to make that chain stronger on a daily basis, and what does that look like? That was something else that the reengineering practice at Ernst & Young was good for was that they were starting to acknowledge. That upper route is antiquated. What that means is asking people like, “What do you want your career to look like?” Not everyone wants to be a partner.
Pay attention, be with people, and notice when they’re having a hard day.
We have a unique paradigm here where we have a Southwest approach. I have four partners and one person that doesn't want to be a partner, and that is our team right now. One of our partners doesn't want to be responsible for deadlines, and we are okay with that. It is weird. Two of us are CPAs. We were raised in that upper-out background, and we have a hard time, like, “What do you mean you do not want to worry about deadlines? That is your job. We are partners.” No, it is not her job. We identify roles, who is going to be responsible for what, and it may be a “lower-level staff” that is paying attention to the deadline. It is someone with more experience who doesn't want to do deadlines
It is having the best place. Instead of looking at everyone as everyone is equal and having the same strengths is important. I love that you bring up, even at the partner level, that not everyone is responsible for the same things that if you are in a corporation, all the C levels are doing different things. We met several years ago. You are coming into my Client Advisory Services course, and you have been doing this for this great career. You are demonstrating continuous improvement. There is no time that you can sit back and think about it like, “I'm good.” What led you to think about, “I want to take this to the next level, and so forth?”
I'm always thinking that and I do think some of that is that 100 years old was never a good enough paradigm, but a lot of it is acknowledging that the world is always changing. Now that we are in the information age, it is changing even faster. One thing that my staff will tell you that they appreciate about me is that I’m always looking at all the new technology, new software, and new information, assessing it to see if it would be a good fit and help bring us to the next level or fill a gap. The minute we find something that is going to be better, we try it.
As my grandfather used to say, “The only people that never make mistakes are people who never do anything.” Sometimes we fail our way to success. There is no question. As a result, we do have a complete tech stack. We don't feel like we are missing something major at the moment, and we can be present for our clients too.
That is an important thing because when they ask us, there is so much out there now and many options. To be the ones that can facilitate our client's ability to run their bookstore, their restaurant, or whatever they are doing and not have to worry about, “Am I using the best tool? Have things passed me by?” They can ask us, “What is your take on this? What is your take on that? If I want to go start using eCommerce, what is the best thing that is going to integrate with my POS system?”
Those types of questions that we have done, some of the research already, and being able to provide that information to them with some confidence is important. That is something that I think you pointed out when we were working with you how important it is to have somebody. I'm not somebody in our firm that has the luxury of paying attention because sometimes we are busy doing the work, we are not paying attention. I will admit. Some of it is a hobby for me. I have always been a tech nerd. I was the only person in my entire high school that had my own computer.
It is the difference of working on the business instead of in it. As the leader, you have to step back and constantly think about the business and what is next in whatever business you are doing. If you are not doing it for your own business, it is hard to advise other businesses.
We have done it and been using it. We know if it is broken.
You put together a business plan for 2021. What have been some big changes or things that have been a-ha moment through 2021 from doing that process when you are several years into your practice?
Doing Business: We don’t need big buildings to have a powerful accounting practice; what we need is to have people coordinate nationwide.
Every day is an a-ha moment to me, to be honest. If we were to look, the biggest a-ha moment for me was when I was diagnosed with cancer. You probably would have anticipated that knowingly. That, for me, was a big shock. I thought I was taking care of myself. I have these different boxes I'm supposed to check like, “Am I eating well?” What floored me was when the oncologist looked at everything in my life and went, “It must be stress. That is probably why you have cancer.” I went, “What?” I immediately shifted everything and not because I had to go to the doctor or whatever.
It shifted perspective on business.
It shifted everything. It was the moment that we were talking about before, like work as a vacation. It benefits everyone to sit with the knowledge that we all go, “I have to work.” The fact of the matter is if the proverbial stuff hit the fan, you would stop working. We are all working by choice, and we are where we want to be. Truly owning what living my life in a healthy way looked like, and I was not doing it. Redefining what it looks like to be healthy because there is a biopsychosocial model. It is not in biology that counts. My psychology, my social life, all these things matter.
The business can run even if you are not able to be there.
I’m making sure that if any one of us is gone, it will still be okay, and that has played into the success of our business because we had someone on our staff who had another disastrous medical thing happen, and she was in her twenties. She needed to be gone for months.
You got to have the business process in place to support that.
We were okay. When I had to go to deal with my stuff, I did have to be gone for several weeks, and we found a way to make that work. There is a number of times, I was sitting next to my husband's hospital bedside working. That is how I used to do things.
I would like to end our conversation where you pick a category, and I will ask you some rapid-fire questions about the category. Pick either family, friends, money, spirituality, or health.
We have addressed health. I'm going to go with a harder one for me, which is friends and family.
The only people that never make mistakes are people who never do anything.
Things are actions I don't have that I want with my family and friends.
I am constantly aware because I have eight children. Not that I gave birth to, but in my life. I would like to spend more of that individual time you talked about with my individual friends, family, and clients. That one-on-one time, more of that.
Things are actions that I do have that I want.
I love that connection. I am friends with all of my clients. I have that connection with all the people in my life. My partners are truly my partners. It is good. It is such a rich life when I have that closeness and that connection with all of them.
Things are actions that I don't have that I don't want.
I don't have a connection with people that drain me. We are quick to identify. Usually, in six months or less, if we have connected with somebody that is not a good match for them, which is important for us. We cut the connection with people that don't feed us and vice versa.
That is important because a lot of people fear doing those things.
It is more unselfish to let that go. It is good for them too.
The last question, things are actions that I do have that I don't want.
Doing Business: It's a rich life when you have closeness and connection with all the people in your life.
It is stress around those difficult relationships. I have made peace with that. That is part of the process. It goes back to my grandfather saying, “We don't make mistakes only if we aren't doing anything.” You have to take risks. We do take risks, and we develop wonderful new relationships with wonderful new people because we took those risks, but it does not always work.
Is there anything that you want to make sure that people take away from this conversation that we haven't talked about or emphasized either?
The biggest thing would be that doing business can be a retreat. We get so serious. We take ourselves and what we do way too seriously. I don't think we recognize that whole, “I have to.” That is my pet peeve. We don't have to do anything. There are a lot of people that don't do what we do and that within itself demonstrates. We do not have to be doing it.
We have made choices. We have made them for a reason, and owning that can be empowering and0 enriching. It can be amazing to recognize that this community that you have built for yourself can be a powerful thing if we view it that way. We can nourish and care for each other. That includes our clients, coworkers, and family. It may not always be easy, but it is worth it.
Thank you so much for taking your time doing this with me. You have shared so many things that I think our readers are going to learn from. Thank you.
I enjoyed it. Thank you.
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For our Mindful Moments with this interview with Sheri Muntean, in which there were many great takeaways in the path of our belief systems and what creates us as a leader along the way in our careers. We began talking about her upbringing of having CPAs and her family, her mother being a CPA and her grandfather's brothers being CPAs.
We also talked about her father's business and how working in her father's business affected her and her career when she was helping clients in her own business. The great thing about her upgrade brings is that she was able to experience what everybody was talking about in their day at their family dinners and understand their different careers. She chose her own accounting. It wasn't something because her family was CPAs that she fell into. It is that she took a class because her father recommended that she do that so that anything she does in business would be helpful.
During that class, she saw she had a passion for it and started her career there. With that, she talked about so much in her career that rings true now that a lot of times, we think these issues of remote work, having a heavy client workload, and all these things of work-life balance and boundaries are new issues, but they have been issues throughout our career.
Every day is an “Aha!” moment.
What is important about her story is every time she hit a pivotal moment where things got hard, she was being pulled in too many directions or had hard news that came her way. It was about stepping back and assessing her environment, her situation, the things that she loved to do, the things that she didn't love to do, and how she could pivot using the experience that she had without having to start over or give up everything.
Her manager at E&Y had said to her to look at work as her escape when you have got hard things going on in your personal life. It flips the script because a lot of times we feel that is our have to do, but if it is something we are passionate about, and we enjoy the work, is it something that can give us a reprieve from hard things that go on in our lives and think about it differently?
The other thing we talked about was remote work and how she was already developing that in 1999. I can tell you about my first accounting business. I opened in 2001, and it was always remote. This isn't different, but for many people, it has been a different experience being remote and figuring that out. One of the things is we have to look at what we do well in person. We bring that into our personal lives and work lives. We make sure to not lose that.
One of the things she was talking about was picking up the phone, where in this world, having the webcam on and still touching base where we are having a conversation. It is not all written because things get interpreted the way that we write or how someone's feeling instead of still seeing someone's body language or hearing any fluctuations in their voice to give you more information on how someone's feeling.
The other thing was when she made this pivot to have her own career, her own practice, leaving public accounting, she had to think about that shift from being 100% responsible when you start a business and any practice, even if you are within a business and you are the only one doing it and moving into managing people. She had some great tips about it. Number one is to be able to trust the people that worked for you. Number two is to believe in them and that they can do it and let them realize that you believe in them. Number three is that you have given them all the tools so that they can do their job.
It is important to understand what people need, whether it is education, support, automation, or technology that they need. There is always going to be attrition. We have to make sure that we have built a business that we can be successful no matter what. We can preserve the business no matter what, and people can live the life that they want.
When we think about how we instead can look at our lives and make sure that we are living to our purpose, what do we want our career to look like, as well as the people that work for us, what do they want in their lives? We are living true to that and not thinking that everybody is going to be the same in every job role and that everybody has different desires. It is important that we are living up to that.
One of the things that she also said that has been important is technology and automation and how much she loves doing that. To do that, you make a lot of mistakes along the way, and things don't work more times than they do. She quoted her grandfather talking about how the only people that don't make mistakes are the ones that don't try. It is important that we remember that. This is part of the learning process, but it always makes us better in the end because if we keep iterating, we can figure out the path to create success.
Lastly, we talked about how important it has been as a leader to be present for the people that you are working with and that you have set up a business and a practice that can sustain itself. You have the luxury of paying attention and can be present for your customers, your clients, and the people that you work with.
Hopefully, you were able to take many notes during the session because she had many great tips for people. I know that I have enjoyed Sheri’s passion during our sessions and as part of our client advisory services workshop. It helps when we have people like Sheri in these groups and people like you that want to get involved and be able to put a business plan in place, no matter what stage of your business is at.
Maybe it is in the beginning or midway. Maybe you are iterating on your process, but that peer sharing of being able to see what other people are doing in their business helps you to formulate those ideas. You are working on the business and not in the business. Thank you so much for reading. I hope that you will like, share, and subscribe so that you will be able to hear updated interviews as well.
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About Sheri Muntean
Sheri Muntean CPA Ph.D. is a Certified Public Accountant who has worked over 30 years with some of the most well-recognized companies in the world. Sheri founded Shamballa Centre LLC with the mission to provide individuals and businesses with services that diminish workload, reduce financial stress, and increase their peace of mind. With a Master’s in Psychology and a Ph.D. in Metaphysics, Sheri is uniquely suited to providing customized, personal solutions to businesses or organizations. Sheri has surrounded herself with professionals who all pride themselves in making a constructive difference in the lives of their clients.