Episode 38: Follow Your Heart: Do What Makes You Happy With Scott Zarret, CPA
Our jobs rarely become the source of our happiness. Just because we are good at it does not mean that it is necessarily our life's calling. Scott Zarret, CPA, has found himself in positions where he doubted his career choices. What got him out of that rut was his passion for mountain biking. In this episode, Amy Vetter sits down with Scott to talk about how his passion led him to the answers he needed in his career and personal life. At the center of it is his pursuit of what makes him happy, following his heart that allowed him to use his expertise and knowledge to help other people. Now, as the founder and president of CPAacademy.org, Scott has positioned the company as the accounting profession's most innovative independent source of online education. Follow along this great conversation to find inspiration for your own career journey.
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Follow Your Heart: Do What Makes You Happy With Scott Zarret, CPA
I'm interviewing Scott Zarret, Founder and President of CPA Academy. With more than 25 years of experience in the accounting profession, Scott Zarret is widely recognized for developing innovative and highly successful marketing and sales strategies. His platform, CPAAcademy.org, has processed more than 4.5 million registrations. An alumnus of the University of Maryland's Robert H. Smith School of Business, Scott began his career in audit and tax department of what is now CohnReznick. Scott was named as one of the 2019 Top 100 Most Influential People in Accounting. During our interview, we talked about his passion of mountain biking, and through the thread of his passion, led him to make decisions not only in his career but his personal life.
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I'm here with Scott Zarret. Scott, do you want to give a little background on who you are?
I am from New Jersey. I live in Denver, Colorado. I'm married with two boys. I'm also a CPA and the President of the CPAAcademy.org. For those of you who aren't familiar with us, we're the largest provider of free CPE in the accounting space.
Thanks so much for being here. Many people take courses through CPA Academy, so they know you one way, but this is all about your journey to getting there and the pivots that you've taken in your life. Let's start at the beginning. Did you want to become a CPA when you were little? How did that even start?
I would say definitely not when I was little. I wanted to be a kid. I come from a family of accountants and educators. It was in the back of my head, subconsciously perhaps. Even when I went to college and I applied for accounting and got in, I still didn't even know at that point what I wanted to be. My father was a CPA and my grandfather was in the accounting space. We had cousins in the accounting space. All the women were in education. I don't exactly know why, but I think it was perhaps in my blood. I took the assumption that the apple didn't fall far from the tree. I didn't put a whole lot of stock in what I wanted to be. I was a normal kid growing up and playing with his friends and taking on normal jobs, which everyone in my neighborhood did, mowing lawns and stuff like that. I never had thought about what I was going to turn into.
Did you like accounting? How did that all get started for you?
I went to University of Maryland. I got my four-year degree. Like a lot of the other people that I went to school with, a lot of the big four companies and other public accounting firms recruited heavily from the university. I ended up taking a job with one of the largest regional firms in the area, Reznick, Fedder & Silverman, and it was a public accounting job. From every bit of advice I got, that was the best place to start, a way to find out what all is out there and move on from there. I did that. I started in public accounting and I got my CPA exam shortly thereafter. I wouldn't say I was in love with the work. I don't even know that I was great at it. I just did it. Like a lot of other people, it worked for the time. I wasn't passionate about it. I did have some second doubts about whether I'd made the right choice, to be frank.
How did you start pivoting?
Public accounting wasn't a great passion, but I was able to find a job. My second job after was with a company called CSC, Computer Sciences Corporation. It was much better for me. It was internal audit. I had a chance to travel the country extensively, even get out of the country on their dime and see some great things. I enjoyed that more, but it still wasn't certainly my life calling. The pivot for me, what got me out was totally random. I've been a cyclist my whole life. I’m a mountain biker. I have a strong identity with mountain biking. While I was working for Computer Sciences Corporation and doing my thing, at the same time I was reading about this journey that was going on, the Great Divide Mountain Bike Route, which at the time was routed and people were just starting to do it. It was touted as the longest mountain bike trail in the world, going from Canada down to Mexico. I read about it and that's where my heart was. I remember going to my boss at CFC and after some serious consideration, I thought maybe I'll ask for a sabbatical and see what they say.
Much to my surprise, they said yes. That took about 24 hours and then I realized, “I guess I'm doing it because I have no more excuses.” My heart went into planning for this trip for a full year and then doing this trip. I think when you're on a trip like that where it was a self-supported trip, you're with about a dozen people and out in the wide open, the best possible scenarios give you a lot of time to think about things. On that trip, I realized every other person on the trip seemed to be passionate but was passionate about their career whether they were a retired police officer or a student or anything. I realized I had no identity with what I was doing and it bothered me. I had the time to think about it and it hit me like a ton of bricks. At the end of the trip, I was like, “I don't have to do what I've been doing. I can move to Colorado. I can move out to the Rocky Mountains and stay out in Colorado where I love it.” My next move was to move out to Colorado.
Maybe you can tell me what it is about mountain biking that interests you. How did you get started in mountain biking and what made you so interested in it in the first place?
It started out with my father who encouraged me to go on trips around New Jersey when we were younger. He would pull out these books like the thirteen most beautiful rides in New Jersey and we'd go through Princeton. I loved it. When I was given the option to go to camp, I chose to do cycling trips instead through lots of different organizations. I started doing touring. It wasn't mountain biking that first got me going, it was touring. I'd probably done 12 or 13 long-distance trips to four weeks at least. I'd ridden across the country, from Jersey to Oregon at one point. Mountain biking was a part of my cycling experience. The thing that I enjoyed most is being in the woods, the sheer thrill of riding fast over obstacles and having a good time with your friends. I loved everything about it.
It just started growing and then you're like, “I want to see what this would be like to do it for three months.”
It was like the trip of a lifetime. It was written about in all the outdoor magazines and the first guys who did it were from DC where I was living at the time. I did know them through the bike shop that I was racing with. It was this pipe dream, like the ultimate test and a trip of a lifetime. I did it and at the end, that was like, “That’s fun.” I didn't see a career path out of it, but at least I figured I could move where I want. I’ve been through Colorado. The trip goes through Montana, Idaho, Wyoming, Colorado and New Mexico. Denver was the place that seemed to have the most promise in terms of a potential future with a career. I’ve never even been to Denver when I decided to move there. It was the idea of being in close proximity to the mountains.
You quit your job after this trip? What was your plan?
Plan is a strong word. I had a car that I thought would make it to Colorado. My plan was to see if that was true. It was mostly true and I made it to Colorado. The first thing I did was help my buddy whose house I was staying in. I prepared his tax returns. I settled in the next day, found a new home and a new life. It was fantastic. The job I got eventually was very similar to things that I'd done in the past. It was a way to pay the bills. I was going to take the first job that paid well enough for me to do my thing, but not much of a career path. The company I went to went under after about a year and I was laid off from that. That ended that, serendipitously I would say. It was a means to an end.
Follow Your Heart: If you want to establish credibility, then be in a room with a lot of people who could hear what you have to say.
What did you start doing? Did you start a new career once you got going?
After I lost that job, which I was not that into, I had a great personal life. I met some super fun people. After that, I was like, “I can't look for another job like this.” I was ready to do anything, to hang up that CPA license. I started messing around with a few different things. I was doing everything, from helping a buddy who had an audio business, doing whole house systems, home theaters for the wealthy people. I thought it was unbelievable. I messed around and followed in his footsteps and watched what he was doing and how he sold. He didn't think I went to college.
He was a high school and that was it. He was super successful and I was inspired by him, the way he stayed authentic. At the same time, I was thinking maybe I can go into business with him and help him sell stereos, which I love. I absolutely love loud music and I want to be surrounded by it all the time. A cousin of mine who knew that I wasn't active with a career path said, “I have an idea for you.” He had an accounting practice in New Jersey and said, “There's this thing called cost segregation,” which I had never heard of, which was accelerated depreciation for commercial building owners. He said, “Maybe you want to give it a shot and sell it. I think there's a lot of money to be made.”
Not having a whole lot of better options, I was intrigued. the idea that maybe I could do something related to a small business and maybe I could salvage my CPA background and get into something different, which was entrepreneurship and sales. I took that challenge on and decided to commit to it. We started from scratch. The company didn't have a name, a logo or a website. I tried to figure out how to make that happen and did my homework on his dime. He was the investor. I was creating all this collateral and all this material. That was my first segue into something totally different in the accounting space, trying to sell to accountants and not do the public accounting or a general accounting role.
I did enjoy the different entrepreneurial aspects of it. The problem though was that I spent a year doing all that and had nothing to show for it and then sell anything we had. People were open to having me come in and pitch, but not a dime made from it. That's quite a bruise to the ego because that's a rough first impression. It’s one thing if you're at least paying the bills, but that's a lot of blood, sweat and tears, mostly tears, put into something. That was a good learning experience. I don't regret doing it, but that was a stepping stone.
I think what's important for people when they listen to different people's history as well is that your expertise is important. Something that you come back to you, there might be whole other ways. Your knowledge of accounting is important in order to do other things with accountants. It doesn't mean you have to do accounting, but with that history and experience and relationships, your new track, even if it was something different, that helped you along the way.
My father and grandfather always said that accounting is the backbone of all business. In order to be able to see the whole picture, that would probably be one of the most important things to understand. I'm grateful for that. In retrospect, you'll see that I was grateful for all these different learning experiences. It was until much later that I realized how true it was, that these experiences and the things that I studied in college were going to play out and be very helpful for me later on. I'm glad I didn't turn my back on those things, but I was ready to at one point.
I think everybody has those moments in their life, but that's where you have to pause and think about, “What are my passions? How could I use my expertise in a different way?” rather than giving up all your knowledge that you have because there are many different ways you can go about it. What happened after that?
Around that same time, I was trying to figure out ways to sell more effectively. There's got to be a better way than making cold calls. Anyone who has done cold calls, it’s horrible. Talk about a long day. I was trying to figure out how to make that more scalable and I started to mess around in different areas. I went from cold calls and meeting one-on-one with CPAs to realizing that if you want to establish credibility, then it helps to be in a room with a lot of people who could hear what you have to say. That meant small seminars. We started doing small seminars and then I realized if small seminars are good, then big seminars must be better. I put together a big seminar here in Denver and put my neck out on the line to organize this conference, and it was very successful. We had 150, 160 people and I had invited all the folks to participate, including the head of the real estate tax program. He was a big deal around here.
I even invited the IRS to participate in speaking. To my surprise, they accepted the invite. It kept snowballing with different sponsors. We had this big event and we talked about cost segregation. I thought, “What a genius I am. I surrounded myself with all these experts and I bet the phone's going to ring off the hook.” The problem was I didn't speak at that event. I organized it and I gave other people the opportunity to speak. While I did a lot of the behind the scenes stuff, when it was over, I had very little data about the audience other than who registered and their contact information. I think when that event was over, I was proud of the fact that I had pulled off an event that was very successful.
Everyone was happy. The stakeholders of it were very happy, but I realized it wasn't scalable. As successful as the event was, I was like, “When can I do that again? Another year from now?” It wasn't going to be regular. It started to dawn on me that there had to be a more scalable way. That's when webinars were starting to come into favor. They were pretty rough in the beginning if you remember. The fact that we have a webcam now is nothing to take for granted. That's not how it started. I was intrigued by webinars and thought, “This makes sense.” That's something you can do every day if you want to. I started to study what was happening there and trying to understand why they weren't more popular.
They were rising in popularity, but I was all-in. I was fascinated by the concept. My mind started to shift into, “How can I get more progressive with the teaching and how could I do some teaching on my own?” I found a different company. It wasn't working out with my cousin. I found a progressive company that I pitched this idea to doing webinars for the purpose of selling cost segregation. It was an accounting firm and they loved it. I said, “I've got a list of emails we've got. Let's put on these classes, get ideally hundreds of people to listen and try to convert.” Fortunately, they bought into the idea and brought me in as an employee. For the first time, I was making a salary. That was nice.
I had resources, people with similar mindsets, except that they wanted to charge for the content instead of give it away for free, which can make sense on one level. You want to set up some barrier to only have people who have some skin in the game or shown that they are willing to pull out their wallet to participate in that subject. After a little while, I realized I was copying everybody. Everybody I ever met, I was like, “Come to this class for free,” because I didn't want that to be the barrier. They agreed with that and that's what we did. We started getting in big numbers. I helped him create the site, which was separate from their main website that was focusing on the education. Long story short, I did that for eight years and had educated about 25,000 people, which I thought was a massive number at the time. I didn't realize what the potential was, how far it could be taken. That was how I got into the webinars.
I know that your wife holds a pivotal piece in your transformation. How did you meet her?
I met her when I was in year seven with KBKG. I was living a good life out here, doing my thing. The job that I had, it was working for somebody else. I was doing better than I've ever done. I felt good about what I created for the company. That's where I was in life when I met my wife. I met her at a party. It was Halloween. The following weekend, I had thrown a singles party, believe it or not, here in Denver. She was there and we met. For me, it was love at first sight. I met her on Friday, and by Sunday I was in love, so maybe not first sight but pretty quick. She had just moved to Denver. When I met her at the Halloween party, she'd been there all of a week. She was only two weeks in Denver and I was head over heels. The problem was that she's a PhD from Harvard and a little out of my league. She moved to Denver because she was so passionate about her work and giving back to the community, serving and helping others.
I was having a good time and happy about that, buying myself a lot of free time. The question was always, “What are you passionate about? What do you want to do?” I was proud of what I did, but I didn't own anything. I think it was always a matter of what piece can I carve out for myself? What is it that I could do to prove myself and certainly make the most of my career, which wasn't something I focused on? I focused on my personal ambitions. We were on the fast track. We met and got engaged. She moved in six months later. We got engaged on our one-year anniversary and we had a child on the way shortly thereafter. It was right around the time when I found out we were pregnant that something hit me like a ton of bricks.
Follow Your Heart: There's just not enough hours in the day. Hire people who can help shape the company and make it scalable.
I had an epiphany and I realized, “This thing that I've been doing for eight years for this other company is a universal concept of using education to help a person position themselves as a thought leader to sell.” It could be applied to anything in the accounting space. I couldn't figure out why others weren't doing the same thing. I remember sitting there and going, “Why wouldn't I do this? Why wouldn't I create a business like this?” I spent a lot of time trying to figure out that answer and didn't come up with an answer. I figured I should do it. It seemed like a great idea and there wasn't a single shared platform out there where people were able to plug into a system like that. That was the first time I was like, “I feel like I could make a go at this.”
I think with the child on the way, you face this decision of, “Is this the time to play it safe?” because I don't want to gamble on savings and fail right now. I had time for that before. However, now there's a lot more at stake. This is the perfect time to do it and not use my son as an excuse for saying, “It's too risky.” Fortunately, I chose the latter and said, “I would never want to second guess this decision and take the easy path only to regret it for the rest of my life.” I felt very strongly about it. I think some people could say that's a foolish decision to take on something that risky when you don't even know what it's like to have a child. Everyone is telling me how bad it is. It’s not bad. It's wonderful, but it's very time-consuming and there are lots of surprises.
Where did you start seeing the success when you moved into creating CPA Academy? How did that take off? How do people get to know you?
It took a good year of moonlighting, of trying to figure out the whole thing, doing your SWOT Analysis and every other bit of research as possible before I opened the doors. When I first opened my doors, I was charging for some content too because I wasn't finding speakers that were all that willing to plug into the model. It was very traditional. I remember getting a call from someone else who is already very established in the CPA space going, “How would you get into paid webinars at this point?” I was like, “That's not my plan. That's how I'm starting.” I didn't see a path, but I very quickly found companies who were giving away free webinars who wanted more attendance. No surprise there.
The real question was how do you come up with the price point for it? That was a real challenge. What’s the business model? How much do you charge? I came up with what I believe to be a very fair price point. Long story short, in that first year, I had a lot of stress. When you're sinking, when you're dipping into your savings and you're cutting checks to software companies for $10,000 here or $20,000 there and you're not sure how viable it is, it's pretty stressful in a whole new way. It's your money and it's a different ball game. In the first year, we had generated so many new clients, including big ones. Dale Carnegie was one of my first big clients. I was doing better in that first year than I'd ever done working for somebody.
I was lucky. The stats that you read out there show that the odds are against that. There's certainly no resting or no taking it easy on cruise control. There's nothing like that. You're constantly watching your back and constantly worried about the next time your site crashes and everything else. It was as stressful as it could be, but it was exciting. Couple that with having a newborn in your life and all the joy that goes with that. It was like a new life. It felt like Scott 2.0. For people who only knew me from single, mountain biking and party Scott, this was like, “You're a dad now and you started a business. You're not going out anymore.” I wasn't even racing anymore. I put that aside. You can't have it all. It was like a whole rebirth.
How is CPA Academy developed over time? Is it something you thought it would be or did it turn into something different or something in the middle?
When I first started, my benchmark was I want to have the creative flexibility. I'd like to be able to work for myself, not have someone else control my destiny. I wanted to be able to prove that I was able to do something on my own that was meaningful. I wanted to be able to make a living that was going to be able to afford me the things that I felt were important for our family. By those measures, it was successful in the offset. I was fortunate because the business model that I had come up with from the beginning, my idea truly was to use free education as the model. The fact that we charged for the first class was a bit of an anomaly.
The reason I bring that up is that even now, years into the business, the model barely changed at all. That was one of the most reassuring things is that I was fortunate that I did the homework upfront to get the business model right. I didn't have to keep pivoting in that sense at all. While there were a lot of drama that goes on, a lot of things that have happened, it wasn't like we had to start from scratch at any point. It's all been building on the initial concepts and a lot of the speakers that I had in year one, including my old employer, still present on our platform. There have been probably more similarities than differences but years into it, it’s certainly a very different ballgame.
When I started out in the beginning, it was just me and I felt strongly in the beginning that I wanted it to be me. I didn't want to have employees. I wanted full control. I didn't know anything about managing. It didn't seem like a good idea for me to do it. I felt like I was a Jack of all trades and could do it. I pushed back on the idea of having a team. I think probably the biggest change was when I couldn't handle it anymore. There are not enough hours in the day and I was forced into hiring. Those are the biggest milestones for me. The hiring decisions that I've made, the people that I brought on, how that's helped shape the company and make it scalable and allowed me not to lose my mind in this entire process.
I’d like to ask you some quick-fire closing questions. You pick a category, either family and friends, money, spiritual or health?
I'll take spiritual.
The things or actions I don't have that I want?
I don't have a meditation practice. That goes along with spiritual, right? It seems like that would do me a world of good. I wish I knew how to slow down my brain and let go a little bit. I'm not there yet.
Things or actions I do have that I want?
I do have a yoga practice. That's changed with the stay-at-home orders because I need to get away to make the most of it. I still have mountain biking. The mountains to me are among the most spiritual things for my soul.
Follow Your Heart: Do what makes you happy without worrying about what others think.
Things or actions I don't have that I don't want.
I don't have Coronavirus. I don't want Coronavirus. It seems like horrible juju. I'm going to try to stay away from that one.
Things or actions I do have that I don't want?
I am competitive by nature. At least that's what I'm told. Often, I'm competing with myself. That's probably better, but I am competitive with myself. I'd have to imagine that's probably not super helpful for finding my inner peace. It helps when it comes to business, but I could probably work on that a bit.
Is there anything you want to make sure that people take away from your journey that you haven't talked about already or a message that you want people to walk away with?
My journey started from my parents’ influences. My business success only came together over the past few years or so. I didn't think it was going to happen for me at all. Even worse, I thought I had made this bad decision about even becoming a CPA. I didn't think that the skills that I was acquiring along the way will come full circle. It helped me in the business world and I didn't realize how the skills that I was building would help me in life. In hindsight, I'm very grateful that I followed my heart, my passions and took chances and moving around the country, putting my neck on the line for starting a new business without selling myself out.
I think that for me, the biggest beliefs to break is not doing what makes other people happy. It’s making what makes you happy. Doing what makes you happy and not worrying about what others think, I mean that both in the work and the personal sense. Trying to not allow fear or doubt to get in the way is important. For me, that's what I find as my calling. I'd also say the most important is to surround yourself with great people always, whether that's employees, clients, parents, wife and kids. It's all critical and it all helps make you, you. Most of this doesn't mean a whole lot unless you've got the support of loved ones. I would say follow your heart would be my biggest recommendation.
Thank you so much for sharing your story. I know there will be a lot of great nuggets for people to take away.
Thank you so much, Amy. I appreciate it.
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Now for our Mindful Moments from my interview with Scott Zarret. This was a unique interview because of the fact that his career bloomed later in his life. I think it's important for anyone that is starting out in their career, realizing that wherever you begin doesn't mean that's where you end up. If you ever have moments where you feel doubt and so forth, you keep walking forward until you see other opportunities or take the risks that you need to take in order to find those passions. For the majority of his story, he was mostly following what his family did, what seemed the normal path, until he got to a point in his career where he had that pivotal moment of seeing this bike ride that was going to be so important to him to do. For whatever reason that was, we all have those pivotal moments in our life.
For him, this Great Divide Mountain Bike Route changed his life and took him in a new direction figuratively. He planned to go on the sabbatical for three months to take this bike ride. In the process, he decided that he wanted to make a shift in his career and his personal life and take the risk and go out to Colorado after it was over and start a whole new life. These are huge risks. For some of us, that might be too big of a risk to quit your job and start over in a new city. For others, that may mean that you still are secure in a job, but you keep looking for opportunities where you can continue to pivot your career along the way when things start being exciting to you to think about or other ideas.
In any profession, there are many ways you can use your expertise if you open your eyes. What we saw with Scott's story is that even though he quit being in public accounting or in corporate accounting, he couldn't have done sales and accounting or be doing education and accounting like he's doing now without that experience that he had when he began. That to me is a very inspirational thing for anyone starting out in college. I know when I started out, I was looking at the work, not sure if I had made the right decision. As you keep walking forward and getting deeper, learning more and keeping your eyes open to different clients, businesses and things that you can do in your profession of expertise, then other opportunities open up. You have to be open without putting walls up of why you can't.
That's usually what I see with people. There are a million excuses of why you can't, instead of taking the leap and saying, “Let me give it a shot.” With meeting his wife and her challenging him on what is his true passion, what are the things that he wants to dedicate his life and career and to know that there's purpose behind what he was doing, it made him step back and pause and make sure what he was doing in his life aligned with purpose. To take a risk when your wife is pregnant and to start a business is a huge leap of faith. If we don't believe in ourselves, it won't ever happen. We can always find a million reasons why life is not perfect for any major decision we make in our life. If we plan, if we have people around us that can give us the right advice, as well as the knowledge that we need to go forward and make an educated risk, these are the things that help us with the pivots that we need to make.
It was important that when he was talking about even starting his business and not wanting employees. I remember having that feeling when we decide to take on staff. We have to start letting go and realizing people may do things differently. It’s truly the only way to scale a business, a department, wherever you're working is to allow people to grow and learn and enable them and empower them to grow their skills so that you can have the life that you want and you're not working around the clock. Surrounding yourself by great people can help not only them, but empower you to live the life that you want. Also, looking for things that feed your soul and what your purpose is in life can help you to make sure that you've got happiness and not worry about what other people think along the way.
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About Scott Zarret
With more than 25 years of experience in the accounting profession, Scott Zarret, CPA is widely recognized for developing innovative and highly successful marketing and sales strategies. Scott's platform (CPAacademy.org) has processed more than 4,500,000 registrations. An alumnus of University of Maryland’s Robert H. Smith School of Business, Scott began his career in the audit and tax department of what is now CohnReznick. Scott was named as one of the 2019 Top 100 Most Influential People in Accounting.
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