Episode 23: When In Doubt Turn Left: Get Out And Learn The Business With Alison Reiff-Martin
Sometimes, turning left for success is necessary for anyone to reach their dreams. While living life is risky enough, taking more risks for achieving success brings you more lessons than disappointments. Today, Amy Vetter talks to Alison Reiff-Martin, CEO and Founder of Reiff-Martin CPA and Business Advisory Services, PLLC. In this discussion, learn about Alison's journey from wanting to be a French teacher to changing gears to business and accounting. Alison shares advice she has been given along the way and her belief in the power of positivity to create long lasting relationships. Be influenced with Alison’s wise words as she guides you through an intelligent manner to turn left and take risks.
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When In Doubt Turn Left: Get Out And Learn The Business With Alison Reiff-Martin
In this episode, I interview Alison Reiff-Martin. She’s a CPA and the CEO and Founder of Reiff Martin CPA & Business Advisory Services. She has many years of accounting experience ranging from a staff accountant to the director of accounting to now being an entrepreneur. Alison enjoys collaborating with clients to find simple solutions to complex problems. It's through her accounting experience in broadcast television, radio and agency industries that she learned the importance of being a trusted advisor and partner. She has a passion for translating accounting best practices into simple and practical strategies to help her clients grow and achieve goals. During this discussion, we talked about Alison's journey from starting out wanting to become a French teacher to getting into accounting because she liked to listen to her accounting professor. She learned about how being open to opportunity and going for it has created success in her career.
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I'm with Alison Reiff-Martin. Alison, do you want to start us off by telling us a little bit about yourself?
Thank you for having me on. I appreciate it and it was quite a thrill to have you as the keynote speaker at my conference. I am the CEO and Founder of Reiff Martin CPA & Business Advisory Services. I have had my own firm for a few years. We provide tax and accounting services to small businesses and individuals. It's a lot of fun. I like working with my small business clients who I do accounting and tax work. It's fun to evolve with them as their firm grows and I'm growing too. I've learned a lot from that. I also bring to the table many years of accounting and tax experience from staff accountant all the way up to a CFO role. I bring a lot to the table and it's a lot of fun. That's what I do.
We've talked a lot about your journey, but I wanted to start from your beginnings of when you were younger, what you imagined doing when you grew up versus how you got to where you are now.
When I went off to college, I thought I was going to be a French teacher.
What was it about French?
It is the language of love and it was cool. I thought it was fun to be able to speak another language. I liked listening to it. I like listening to people speak it. It was fun and I loved getting up in front of an audience and talk about it. I got to college and got to advanced French grammar and realized that I do not want to be a French teacher. I was stuck with thinking, “What do I do?” In the 1980s there was a lot of pressure for everybody to be a business major because that was going to be a guarantee to a job. I didn't want to do it because I wanted to do something creative, but advanced French grammar messed it up for me. I went back to the business classes. I took an intermediate accounting class and the professor was a wonderful teacher. He had this great voice that you wanted to listen to. I spent a lot of time going to his office hours because I wanted to listen to him speak.
It’s not like you had a crush on him.
I'm going to confess that I do, but I thought you couldn't go to his office hours and just stare and listen to him. You have to have real questions. I would make up every question I could think of to talk to him. We got there and because he would explain it well, he made accounting come alive for me. In the classes is where we learned the statement of cashflows. I thought it was fun to discover that I liked puzzles where you knew what the answer is, but how do you get to it? If the number was 2, was it 2 plus 2 equals 4 or was it 5 minus 1 equals 4? I thought it was fun to sit there and figure that out. It was from there that I realized I want to be an accountant because it's fun trying to figure stuff out. I went to school at Indiana University and I was offered a job with Prudential Insurance Company in New Jersey. Coming from a small town in Ohio, I thought, “This is my chance to make it to New Jersey.”
I could not just be involved with a great company, but also be close to something exciting compared to what I'm always doing growing up in a small town in Ohio. From there, what I came to realize with my very first supervisor was asked lots of questions and volunteer for everything because accounting can be boring, but it's only as boring as you make it. If you make yourself available to get involved, then your world opens up. I got opportunities to work on 10-Ks, 10-Q filing, various SEC filing and consolidations. That was helpful as I progressed in my career. I ultimately spent the majority of my time on broadcast television and radio companies. Working with the director of engineering and my first TV station, what I realized was you are only good as an accountant as you understand the business.
It was helpful to me to be a better partner with him and the rest of the company by making sure I understand how TV worked. What I realized was it's a lot of fun. That has been my thing throughout my career was to understand the business and be a better partner and make your job more fun. That's what I've tried to do with my clients. I make sure I understand what they do so that I can anticipate things that are coming up for them or figure out how I can help them as a better partner and advisor. That's how I got to where I am now. I know that was long-winded but I loved telling those stories about how I came to realized that your job could be fun if you make it fun.
A lot of people go about their daily tasks of whatever their jobs are, but not thinking about how do you make a bigger impact with it and find that creative side of any job. From a creativity standpoint, we get lumped into left-brained or right-brained, but there's no such thing because you need your entire brain in order to do critical thinking skills, executive functions and so forth. They are not just taking the numbers on the paper, but dive deeper into them and try to understand solutions.
That's what I've come to learn. You can't look at a number and say it's two. What do those two mean? What does it mean based on your perception versus my perception? How can we both make it mean the same thing or not? That's what makes the job fun.
It’s finding the truth in the number. What for you were some big learnings along the way about yourself? You had a belief system about the business that it was going to be boring and you broke through that. Were there other things going into your career that you thought was going to work for you based on watching your parents or things like that where you've had to go, “That's not working for me?”
My mom and dad were big influences in my career. I think everybody's parents are big influences. My mom, in particular, was the first to go to college in her family. She has two Master's degrees. She has a Master's in social work. She got her MBA in finance and then became a salesperson for Ameritech, which is now AT&T. Her biggest client was the Air Force. She was fortunate enough to play a big role in the Dayton Bosnia Peace Accord in 1992. All she did was set up the communication system for the two parties that were involved. You may think this is silly, but had either party not had a telephone, there wouldn't be a Dayton Bosnia Peace Accord. It was cool to think that my mom played a huge role in that. She was courageous and always took chances. That made a huge impact on me that if you want something, you have to go and figure out how to get it.
That's always been a driving factor in my life as to how I have approached my career. If you want it, you have to go out and figure out how to get it. Because of her and my dad, I wouldn't be where I am without them. They were encouraging and pushing me along. At the same time, they were workaholics. Work wasn't a big deal to them. I learned a lot about that too. Over the course of my life, I realized there is more to life than work and how to do the balance. It’s like what you're talking in the B3 Institute, Business, Balance, and Bliss. How do you incorporate all three? That's definitely something I've been trying in the past couple of years to be more cognizant of. Work is fun but it can't be the only thing that can be fun. You have to find something else in your life to make it meaningful.
How do you do that?
I go to a lot of yoga classes to make myself be mindful and think about it. I get together with friends and spend a lot of time with my husband and kids.
It's easy to become a workaholic and in this profession or any profession. How do you limit yourself in order to make sure that you create time for that and not feel stressed out about leaving work?
Turning Left For Success: While work can be fun, you have to find something else in your life to make it meaningful.
I haven't always been great at this, but I've been trying to work harder setting boundaries. It’s like you cannot call me at 8:00 at night to ask me an accounting question because there is no accounting emergency at 8:00 at night. I'm trying harder to be conscious of the boundaries because in the end, work is fun but it can't be the only thing in your life that's fun.
What did your dad do?
My dad was a risk manager for insurance. It's no longer in existence. They made those cool Trapper Keepers that everybody had. What I learned from him, he could only be a good risk manager if he understood the business. He got the coolest job to get to go out to the plants and see how the paper was made. He couldn't insure properly if he didn't understand how the paper was made. From him, I learned to ask questions, be involved, get involved in any way that you can to make sure you understand the business so that you can do a better job of making sure that the company is properly insured. Through them and their willingness to volunteer for stuff, they gave me many opportunities to get to see stuff that I wouldn't have known about beforehand like going to their various conferences or getting to hang out with my dad in New York City on a business trip at thirteen and realizing this is where I want to live. They’ve played a big role in how my career has been shaped.
That was a big reality check for me because I've always traveled a lot with my kids my whole life because of the work I do. We were at dinner one summer. I've got a son in college and one in high school. We were starting to talk about the future, like where mom will be when they're in college or out of college. I'm like, “If you're here, I'll travel back here.” They're like, “We're not staying here.” One said he wanted to go to California and the other one in New York. I'm like, “Great,” but then I had to sit back and go, “I gave them exposure and now they started picturing their life and you don't even realize it's happening.” That's why it's important to expose your kids to the things you do.
They can see, “Here's why I work hard so that I can take you on those trips,” or to get them ready to go off and leave you crying and thinking, “My baby left me.”
I'm like, “I created these monsters, so there you go.” You had moved to Dallas to be part of this media company as a comptroller. You then made a decision to go out on your own. Why don't you talk about your story of taking that leap of faith and how you even got there?
I've always wanted to own my firm, but it took a lot of confidence to get there. I remember I started a job with this digital media advertising agency. I was reading my CPA magazine and looking at all the CPA firms that were for sale. I said to my husband, “I’d like to go out on my own.” He said, “That’s great, answer these questions and if you can answer them to satisfaction, go ahead and start your own business.” I talked to a friend of mine who was a social worker. She invited me to her office to see the possibilities of owning my firm. She took me around the office and said, “I have to meet with some patients. You sit here and have lunch and I'll talk to you later.” I'm having lunch and this man walks up to me. I invite him to sit at the table with me. We start talking and I asked him what he does. He tells me he's an attorney and then he says, “Why are you here?” I said, “My friends invited me here to have lunch. I'm a CPA and I'm looking to branch out on my own. She wants me to see the possibilities.” No joke, he leans forward and says, “I could be your first client.” I said, “Yes, absolutely.”
It's when you put it out into the universe.
That's another thing that came to mind was speaking to the universe and it will happen. After he and I agreed to meet later to discuss the specifics of him becoming my first client, I ran to the car and I called my husband. I said, “I think I have my first client.” He says, “That’s great, start your own business.” What I realized was after you get one, it's easier to get number two. Here I am a few years later and I'm glad that I had the confidence and the personality to be open enough to invite you to come and sit with me and talk to you. My kids always make fun of me for this, but I don't care. I don't think I've ever met a stranger and I can walk away knowing a lot about your story. A lot of times, it works and results in great positive relationships.
Is he still your client?
No. After a few years, he became too big for the services that I could provide. We went in a different direction, but it was completely fine because he's still great. He gave me the confidence to go out on my own.
That's the other important thing knowing where your sweet spot is and not trying to take on things unless you want to, if you've got a certain process for the persona of a client. A lot of people don't define that for themselves. They take whatever comes in the door. It can throw you off-kilter because then it takes you away from tending to other clients that are your more regulars and stuff like that.
That's something I've learned over the past couple of years. For me, it's not about volume. It's about the relationships with clients that I have and picking and choosing so that it's fun for both parties. They get what they want and I get what I want, which is fun to somebody I’m trying to work with.
How do you think the learnings that you've had along the way have helped you in your business or working with your clients? What is the impact that you want people to walk away with?
I'm not just easy to work with, but I'm also here to help you. I am a positive person. I have positive energy. My goal is to help you find a solution. Sometimes I feel like a mom to the clients, “Let me help you so that you can be successful here. Did you realize this is coming on? Let me help you with that. By the way, don't forget about it.” That's what I learned along the way. Positive energy helps get you far but also producing and performing.
A lot of times, when we step back and look at our strengths, we don't realize that it can be the littlest things that end up being the thing that makes us unique. When we're intentional about bringing those out, I don't know if it's something you realize about yourself or it’s something that people have told you about yourself. You're like, “I hear these 3 or 4 times about me, now I’ve got to go harder on that area of me because it's something people remember when they walk away.”
I've been told a lot of times that I'm the most positive person. I always put a smile on my face and I'm always happy to help you. I want to help you solve your problem. I'm not here to do the “boring” accounting because accounting as a process is boring, but it's what you do with it that makes it interesting.
I want to talk about you starting your own conference. That's another big hurdle of getting an understanding of yourself and being able to do something like that. Tell me the story.
I have been listening to lots of podcasts and read lots of articles that said we're all supposed to transition our CPA firm from the more traditional tax prepare bookkeeping mode. Technology is changing how we're supposed to handle our practice. What the articles didn't say was how you do it. What was the “roadmap” that you're supposed to follow to do this? Everything I had read seems to be geared toward the bigger firms. I was listening to Jim Burke who is a managing partner with them, talking about everyone who needs to move to advisory services. He concluded that interview with, “Here's my email address, ask me any questions you want.” I was thinking, “That's a complete invitation. I'm going to ask all the questions I have.”
Turning Left For Success: Positive energy helps get you far but also producing and performing.
He and I were talking and I said, “I have this great idea that I've been thinking about and I can't stop thinking about it. What if we did a conference that was geared towards the solo practitioner and the small CPA firm? We could make it the roadmap to business advisory services.” He said, “That is an awesome idea. I completely encourage you to go for it.” I sat on the idea for a couple of months thinking, “Can I pull it off?” One of my friends said, “Why aren't you pulling this off?” I said, “You're right.” I listened to one of your interviews and I thought you would make an awesome keynote speaker because you come along my vibe.
Yoga has had a great impact on you. Like me, you understand that accounting is one thing, it's all about understanding the business. I emailed you and you said yes. I’m like, “Now I have to do this.” I asked you to be a speaker and you said yes. I was like, “The universe is telling me that I have to do this.” What I came to realize from this whole event was I'm worth it. This helps me firm up my idea of how I want to take my firm. I can have a lot of influence on the community. I like planning events and it was fun to put it together and I was pleased with the outcome of it. The feedback I got from everyone else said they love it too.
It is inspiring that you went after something and you did in a short period. It’s usually planned out over a year period and we did it in four months.
I did it in four months. My big takeaway was sometimes being impulsive can pay off. Now that I've got it under my belt, I know what things I can do differently better the same for next year. It's a great event. It was fun. I remember thinking when I was trying to prepare my opening remarks, “What would I say?” I thought of my grandfather who is a farmer. His big advice to me was, “When in doubt, turn left.” He meant that if you get lost while you're driving, don't do what everyone else does which is turn right. Turn left and you'll still end up where you're supposed to be. I thought that was silly, but that advice has always worked. When in doubt, do something different. Be courageous and be bold and it will pay off. It may not, but if you had gone with the right attitude, it'd pay off. That to me was what the conference is about. Turn left to do something different. It has given me the most amazing boost of confidence to move forward with my firm and how I'm going to handle it going forward.
It's important to understand what you want to get out of. I love what he said about turning left and taking the risk of doing something different. When you do that, you also have to have in your head your business. What is it that I want to know? How would I know I achieved something? A lot of times, the first time you do a conference or the first time you do a business venture, it takes a while to see the payoff or whatever. What are the things that would give you the idea that you created success for yourself or the people around you?
With the conference, hearing from people that they thought it was fantastic. It was not boring, but the ones where you go to listen to information about an accounting pronouncement. This gave real concrete information for people on how to conceivably steer their business. Knowing that I've spent a lot of my life wanting to be helpful and wanting to share, that to me was a pinnacle of success. Hearing from my clients I've helped them save money on their tax bill, helped them figure out maybe they need to take a different course correction, or there's an opportunity to grow their business in a different way, that to me is the pinnacle of success. They're asking me for help and asking me questions.
That was the whole reason I was asking that question because it's not always money. A lot of times when people go after things, they'll be disappointed. I remember when I opened my yoga studio, I had hoped one day I'd be able to run a yoga studio, then I realized there's no money in a yoga studio, but then I had to sit back and go, “Why do I have it?” At the end of the day, it had nothing to do with the money. It had to do with the healing that people were having there and the impact it was having in people's lives. It's important that we define what things are important to us besides the financial impact. You want to make money, but as you're trying to get there, there's got to be other wins along the way that you're like, “That was good enough for year one or that was good enough for year two.”
The conference to me was great, but there are many things that could be done better and different and the same. In my business, when I think of how I started out, it's not the same business I started out from what I have now. My goals are a little different. Having gone through the few years, I've gotten more clarified as to what I want.
I like to end with some rapid-fire questions. You pick a category. It’s family and friends, money, spiritual or health.
I would say health.
I don't get a lot of people that pick that one.
I’m picking health because I'm not twenty.
It's important. What are the things or actions I don't have that I want?
In this particular case with health, when it comes to food, I am a stress eater. I need to work on improving my ability to say, “No. I'm not going to use food as my answer.” They say, “If hunger is not the problem, then what's the question?”
I'll give you a little plug there. I'm doing a whole mindfulness series for the AICPA. There's a whole mindfulness article I wrote on eating so that people are intentional about their food. They can monitor their energy and don't pick whatever is there. Things or actions I do have that I want.
This is what I'm improving at. It’s being intentional about making exercise an important part of my day. My dog and I go for a walk every single morning. It's a 30-minute walk. I can't run a marathon, but I can walk around the neighborhood for 20 to 30 minutes. She and I have a great time looking at squirrels and enjoying the walk together. Trying to be more intentional with that and going to yoga classes where I spend time wondering if I can touch my toes as opposed to what's stressing me out in life.
At the end of the day, it doesn't matter. Things or actions I don't have that I don't want.
Turning Left For Success: Life has a lot of opportunities and you have to figure out what your opportunity is and go for it.
This seems like a hard one to answer. I don't know how to answer that one.
It could be sickness or things that you're trying to prevent from happening.
How to keep myself in good shape so that I'm not up until 2:00 in the morning wondering if I can get everything done, that's something I don't want and it's all about setting boundaries.
Things or actions that I do have that I don't want.
It goes back to stress eating. I'm sure it's not buying Ben & Jerry's ice cream. Whenever I'm anxious about something, not mindlessly reaching for a piece of food. It’s getting up and going for a walk or getting a glass of water or calling my husband and saying, “I'm stressed out.” He'll say, “That’s great. Talk to me about whatever it is you’re talking about.” I’m diverting myself so that I don't reach for the ice cream, the cake or the cookies.
My best friend and I were talking about this because she hangs out with the kids and there’s a whole pint of ice cream. We'll eat the whole thing because it's a group activity. That's one of the things she was talking about too is not to make it mindless. If you're going to eat it, at least be aware of every bite you're taking.
Realize that it's a choice to make and if you want to have it, have it but plan for it.
I run teacher training for yoga teachers that want to become teachers. We have a homework assignment and it's a mindfulness exercise. You have to take an hour to eat an orange. It is a hard exercise but it makes you intentional about eating it, smelling it, that you're not hungry, all this stuff. It's a good exercise to try. We shove down food so fast that we do not necessarily have the sensory around it.
It makes it easier. Since we eat so fast we’re not even choosing good food. If you're going to spend an hour on ice cream or orange, make it the best one. If you're going to eat ice cream, do it but make sure it's good ice cream. Don't buy stuff that comes at the convenience store. Go to the grocery store and buy the best one you can because it's ice cream. I've been thinking about that.
Is there anything that we didn't cover that you want to emphasize that you want people to leave with?
Life has a lot of opportunities and you have to figure out what your opportunity is and go for it. The only thing that can happen is you’ll hear no. Be courageous and go for it.
Thank you, Alison, for being here. It was great talking to you.
I enjoyed it. Thank you for the opportunity. I appreciate it.
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It's time to take some mindful moments about this interview with Alison and diving into the energy that Alison creates in order to create success in her life. One thing I've noticed about Alison getting to know her is her energy is infectious. Her way of looking at things positively has allowed her to take chances that a lot of people may not take. When we talked about her starting out as wanting to be a French teacher and moving into business because it's a safer career, I know a lot of people choose their careers based on that. I was one of them. It's important to understand who our influences are when we do get involved. It was funny her story about her first professor but that is what started making accounting interesting to her, where she understood it was more than the work.
It was all the mechanics that got you to the answer and the things that you needed to learn along the way. No matter what your profession is, there can be an outward look at the result and thinking that's the job versus all the mechanics of doing it. I remember when I was younger playing a violin and viola. I realized that when people watch a concert of a symphony and it sounds so beautiful, harmonized, and perfect, they don't realize the hours and hours of playing one measure of music to get it right. To get it coordinated and all the different ways you have to get there to get that to harmonize. Her analogy to understanding the puzzle of accounting, not necessarily just the number, but what created that number makes the job more interesting.
When she talked about her journey and the jobs that she had that taught her things along the way and have helped her in its success, one of her big takeaways was asking a lot of questions. That can be the difference between loving a job and being average with a job, rather than taking the job at face value and pushing out reports. A lot of times in the financial world, this is where people go wrong. They don't know when they give those reports, the people don't know what it means or what the answers are. If the people behind the report don't ask the questions and understand the business, those numbers don't come to life. You can't have a discussion about the business without understanding the mechanics underneath the puzzle. To do that and to make the job “not boring,” it's important that we get out of our chair, we get into the operations and understand how things operate.
She talked about that in a few different areas and especially with her father that worked at Mead. He was in risk management, but he went and learned how the paper was made and what the actual process is in order to understand the business better so he could do his job better. Rather than looking at what we do as a cog in the wheel, how do we get out and understand from a broader level what our piece of the total operation is so that we can make a bigger impact? People understand what we do, how we impact them, and how we can help them. When we serve, then we become more valuable to the people around us.
Another big takeaway is her positive energy. It's given her confidence to keep going after things because people relate and want to be around someone that's positive and open to meeting new people. When we close ourselves off or we're not intentional about the energy we put out in the world, it is a deterrent to other people. We may blame other people that they must not like us or whatever it might be. A lot of times, we have to step back and think about how we want to show up each day and to make an impact. Her examples of making sure that she accentuated something that people already felt about her, but then how does she make sure that everyone has that experience with her, that’s her clients or strategic partners or whatever that is.
One of my favorite lines out of this interview is, “When in doubt, turn left,” from her grandfather. That took me back for a moment trying to figure out what that meant. It is important that we are not always looking at what other people are doing. A lot of times, we know in our gut what the right way to go is. When we get too many voices in our head, we start changing course and doing what everybody else does. There are things to listen to as far as advice that is important in anything that we do. Our intuition, in yoga it's called the intuitive mind, a lot of times we push it down because our rational mind or what everybody else is feeling rational is getting in the way of what our intuition is telling us to do. An important line to remember is don't always turn to the direction that everybody's doing it for no reason. If you feel there is an opportunity, go for it and be courageous.
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