Episode 7: You Can Be Anything: When Your Intentions Are Good, You Create Stronger Relationships With Jennifer Wilson
Transforming individuals to become better versions of themselves is key to generating better professionals. Today’s guest is Jennifer Wilson of Convergence Coaching. In this discussion, she talks about her journey from cold calling selling PCs to leading a top consulting firm. She shares the lessons she has learned from her parents, peers, team members, and children that has helped her design the career and life she has today. Jennifer also touches on transforming individual and team performance, and offers an advice to the younger working generation.
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You Can Be Anything: When Your Intentions Are Good, You Create Stronger Relationships With Jennifer Wilson
I interviewed Jennifer Wilson of Convergence Coaching. She is the Cofounder and partner of this national consulting firm that helps leaders achieve success. She’s been named one of Accounting Today’s 100 Most Influential People in Accounting, INSIDE Public Accounting’s Top Ten Most Recommended Consultants and Practicing CPA’s Top 25 Thought Leaders and Top 25 Most Powerful Women in Accounting. She’s an experience-changed agent who has worked in both public accounting and industry and a frequent speaker and thought leader on topics related to leadership, the rise of the next generation and managing change within the CPA profession. As you will see from our discussion, she’s also a wife, mother, writer and runner. What we talked about during this discussion is her journey coming from cold calling and selling PCs to leading a top consulting firm. She shares the lessons she has learned from her parents, her peers, her team members and her children that have helped her design the career and life she has now.
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I'm very excited to have Jennifer Wilson from Convergence Coaching on our show. Jennifer, I'd love to start out with you giving us a little bit of background of how you got to where you are with Convergence Coaching. What's your story?
I started off in technology and I fell into it. I took a part-time job in college, telemarketing for an accounting software distributor as the IBM PC was released. I got this cool job that didn't exist before I took it calling into accounting firms. Back then computer retailers, which were the bars of the later of ours. I'd call in and find out if they were using PCs and if they were going to automate accounting. I tried to convince them to do that and to use us for distribution.
You like telemarketing. I imagine my first job was telemarketing. I couldn't pick up the phone one more time. How did that become interesting to you? Was it like cold calling people? Were they people you knew?
I bought the Yellow Pages from seven states, physical hard copy books and called everybody in the accounting section, Yellow Pages and everybody in the computer retailer section. It’s definite cold calling. You know Randy Johnston. He was with Entre Computer. I met him off a cold call when I was nineteen. I bought Kansas Yellow Pages so I called Andy randomly and our friendship started then a long time ago. I met tons of people and I didn't look at it like cold calling in the fact that I was trying to sell people stuff. I was calling to find out, “What are you doing with automation? Are you going to go to the PC when people were fighting it and resisting it?” When I met somebody who was, we were like friends. We were part of a tribe. It was more like I was trolling for friends than I was trying to sell somebody something. I made a lot of friends.
How did you start a conversation?
I don't know, “Hi, this is Jennifer Wilson and I am working with accounting software on a PC. I know you're in accounting. I wonder, are you doing anything with PC-based accounting software?”
I was trained completely different. I was trained to pretend that we had already had a conversation. They told me to call back. I started like, “We talked that we can go and you told me to give you a callback.” It was painful.
That’s outside my authenticity. That’s not who I am, not even a little bit. I was taught to telemarket by my mother. I helped her sell zoo memberships for the Omaha Zoo. She paid me $0.10 a call. I was eleven. I'm pretty unafraid to call people.
That started you on that path of sales. You felt comfortable entering into anyone's life and suggesting something.
I’m influencing others and trying to drive a very dramatic change because everybody was paper-based. I was trying to get them to see that they could automate accounting and they could use this super cool tool called VisiCalc, which was the predecessor to Excel. Up to then, they were adding on a green sheet of paper, whole columns of numbers and they prided themselves if they can look at them and visually at them and stuff. I had to teach them how this PC was going to add them for them and they thought that was going to make the whole world stupid. I was going to be dumb. It was super cool because I got inside TPA for board rooms as a kid. I was nineteen years old. I got in there. My major was accounting with minor in marketing. I was going to school at the time. I wasn't professionally doing anything other than a side hustle making phone calls. It led to a career in accounting software distribution and went to work at Sage. After that, I retired and took a year off. I did seven days a week for seven years at Sage. I grew that thing and learned a ton. I left and took a year off. When my volunteer work and all that stuff started to consume me, my husband said, “You're never home. You're always on the phone. You're on the computer. Why don't you go get a real job?” I started a consulting firm and ultimately went to work at BDO. When I left BDO, I started Convergence many years ago.
That's quite a thing to have your own business that you create for many years.
It's flown by. To say many years is a concept. It's the truth but it's not fathomable.
You mentioned your mom worked for the zoo?
She didn't work for the zoo. She was a volunteer. She was selling zoo memberships as a volunteer, community service.
What did your dad do?
That's not what my mom did though. My mom had her Master’s in Guidance Counseling. She was a registered nurse. She was a psychiatric nurse. She sold insurance. During the time that I was automating accounting software for people, she worked for me for minimum wage for two years. She helped me telemarket. She helped me build a channel in the Midwest because she wanted to help launch me in this completely new field called computer. My dad was a retired Air Force Lieutenant Colonel. He did twenty-plus years as a fund administrator of a large law firm in Omaha. He retired at 72. They're both living. My mom will turn 90 in November and my dad will be 90 next May. They're half-a-mile from me and my best friend.
How did they influence the decisions you were making as a little girl growing up? You said you had four other siblings?
I'm one of six. I’m number four, three girls, three boys. My parents' biggest influence was that they had a conversation called You Can Be Anything. My mom was a feminist. Originally, she was a very conservative Baptist, but when dad went to Vietnam, she sold the station wagon and got a Volkswagen bus. I went back to school and all that stuff. From that angle, my super liberal mom was like, “You can do anything. You could be anything.” As a little kid, I thought that was true until I found out that because I was born on an Air Force base in Germany that I couldn't be president. I’m super bitter, but they convinced me I could do anything. That and my faith in God, which is a faith in a higher power that if I am unselfish and try to do good for others, that the world will treat me right. That faith system that my parents gave me, those two things would probably be the biggest beliefs that I got from them as a kid that made a difference in who I am now.
What led you to want to major in Accounting and Marketing when your parents were not in those fields?
My brother, Jack, he passed his CPA exam on the first try and went on to pass the bar. He became a partner at Touche Ross and AA. I first started in college thinking I would be a doctor, but I did not appreciate chemistry. I liked it in high school, but in college, partying and chemistry, they didn’t go in hand-and-hand. I wanted to have more fun than that. I’ve switched to a business major. I picked accounting because Jack did accounting. I didn't know what else to major in. Marketing mostly because of my mom's influence about selling. We could sell anything to anybody as long as your intentions are good.
That's what I teach people all the time about selling when I'm trying to have them understand or influencing, getting your ideas across to others that they can't be for your reasons. They have to be for their reasons. If they have a need that you can fulfill and it's right for them, selling that idea to them is not a bad thing. It's not manipulation. It's not evil. It's a service. It's almost unconscionable not to tell them you can help them with their problem. Selling things for your reasons selfishly because you need a deal or you need the engagement or the commission or your hours are slow or whatever, that is not the right approach and it won't succeed. It'll come back to you.
You went into Accounting. You started having this part-time job. Did you work in a firm during college?
I had several jobs and I've always been a worker. I had a paper route at age eight and a credit card at eleven.
I had checkbooks.
I did too. I wrote bad checks for gum and that kind of stuff at a grocery store and didn't even realize that. I thought I wrote a check and it was money, “Wait a minute. You have to have money in that account.” I was industrious. I worked as this telemarketer at an accounting software distributor. I worked as a clerk typist in the medical records department. I also bartended. The accounting software thing was this unknown territory and nobody knew anything. There were no manuals, no training. The tech support was free. You would call the 1-800 number and be on hold for six hours. Nobody could help you with anything.
It was like a black box and I was interested. I took out, with my parents co-signing a loan and bought a compact portable 86-pound laptop. I loaded up the accounting software and started learning it. When I would telemarket to sell, people would say, “I'm trying to do it but I've got an Error 41 or whatever.” I would call the tech support line and be on hold for six hours while I made my phone calls, somebody would answer. I made friends with all the guys up at Open Systems accounting software, some of whom I'm still friends with on Facebook, Doug and Bill and a whole bunch of others. They would say, “It's Jennifer.” They’d help me and they give me a solution to these errors. I'd write it all down and put it in this three-ring binder.
Later, Open Systems heard that I had the binder and they said, “Come up here to Minneapolis, we want to see this binder.” They ended up incorporating it and we made it into a training manual. I traveled around the country training people. All of a sudden, I was in accounting software. That was not a career choice. I had to tell my kids now when they're worried about what am I going to be when I grow up, I say, “All the jobs I've had weren't invented until I did them.” I didn't invent them but they were being invented as I was doing it.
It takes awareness like being open to what's happening around you and saying, “I want to take advantage of that opportunity and what gets your blood boiling.”
What's interesting to you or what you feel passionate about or whatever. It was scary to tell my parents I left college because I got an opportunity to move with my employer, an accounting software distribution to Southern California. I'd always wanted to get out in Nebraska so I went. I was like, “Mom and Dad, I'll go back. I'll go right to Cal State, Long Beach. I’ll do a year of residency.” My parents were like, “Finish school, no moving,” but then hey helped me move. I was there a year. Sage Accounting Software called. I took the call and went down and met with those guys. I did seven years of rocket ride. I was their VP of Sales and Marketing and Customer Services.
Convergence Coaching: Selling things mainly for commission or hours will not lead to success.
Where did you start at Sage? What was your job?
I was the director of sales. I was that for maybe 90 days and they made me VP of Sales. We added all this stuff to my job. I was 24 when I did that and I kept leaning to go back to school, but I didn't. It's busy. It’s seven days a week for seven straight years. I learned so much. I was constantly interviewing and training, A lot of people have high school friends that are their best friends or college friends. Mine are all from state-of-the-art accounting software. Those were my positive people. A whole bunch of human beings that I met as a kid, hired and brought them in. We all built this thing together. I never went back until I finished that state of the art and moved home to Nebraska with my husband to get in the baby business. After I had my daughter, Dallas, she was a few months old. I suddenly felt compelled to get my degree, but I've made money. I didn't need my degree for that. I needed it because I committed to my grandfather and my parents wanted me to have it. It felt like unfinished business. It’s one of those things on your list. It's way up there. You voted a long time ago, but you never scratched it off. I went back and got my degree. I went to night school, big and pregnant. By then, I'd started this company. In fact, I interned for Convergence Coaching. I wrote my first accounting articles as part of my internship. I got a grade for it. I got my degree in 2002.
My son was born in 2001 and I did my MBA on bed rest. Two weeks before he was born, I finished it.
I was huge, pregnant and old attending these classes. The teacher would be in a special chair for the day. I'd sit in there with those kids and take a management class or something at night. They wouldn't make me sit in this little desk with that big belly. That was baby number two. I was holding her at my graduation party.
In order to make these pivots that you had to have and you come from this belief system, “I can do anything,” were there any points that you felt like, “No, I can't?”
Sometimes it was, “I can't work for an organization that is on the wrong path or I can't work for an employer where the individual that I worked for was not treating people well or something.” Sometimes the pivots were caused by my belief system not aligning with my employers or with my direct supervisors. It was a huge wake-up call to find out that as a female that I was going to be treated differently. My parents didn't set me up for that. The first time I noticed that like I was making less than the other guys, but I had the job that if we didn't make our numbers, I get fired. There were some moments there when I realized, “Youth has its disadvantages and being female is pretty sketchy sometimes too as it relates to being treated equally or heard.” There were some moments of reckoning or whatever. You could be a victim to it or you could say, “What could I do differently? How could I change what I'm doing?” To be heard more effectively or maybe I can't work in an organization that values these things and maybe I should be out on my own.
Were there times where you backed up from it and said, “I need to change?”
Yes, and that's how I found Convergence. Occasionally people will say, “You should sell this thing and come to work for us.” I tell people, “I'm utterly unemployable.” I will never work for the man again. If I do something bad has happened in my life. I would if I had to feed my family or something, but I don't think I could ever get into that corporate infrastructure where things don't make sense and where decisions get made based on politics. I know that's naive. I'm watching our country's politics and I'm super-duper grossed out. I believe that we can do better.
That's what makes you unique as a person as well. You’re very, “It is what it is.” You’re not trying to sugarcoat information. I know a lot of times when the approach is like that. People don't take that well. How do you reconcile with like, “I've got to do what's right for me at the end of the day to feel like I did well by others,” versus, “I'm going to make people very unhappy by what I'm about to do?”
I'm in that boat because there's so much change in our profession happening and so much needs to transition to next gen practices, strategies. The generous thing from leaders to do is to shift who they're being and be more open to the change that needs to happen and these tough conversations. I'm unwilling to say that I'm working with a firm and not have those conversations. How do I reconcile it? I have to first of all say “I'm not going to win homecoming queen.” I'm not trying to win it. I want to be liked. I don't want people to think, “I don't want to hear what she has to say.” I'd love to be invited because everybody wants to hear stuff. I'm more worried about our profession. I'm worried about our country and its transition to wealth. Whether we're going to do a good job and whether we're going to set these young people up for the right circumstances so they can succeed or whether we're going to essentially deplete these firms like we're depleting our Earth's resources. Are we going to suck them all dry or milk the cash cow all the way until there's no milk left and hand it to these people and say, “Figure out how to fix this mess I made?” I’m willing to participate.
My dad told me this when I was a kid. He said, “Jennifer, the worst lie you'll ever tell is the lie you tell yourself. At the end of the day, you’ve got to look in the mirror and stare at your own face and say, “I did the right thing, whatever that is.” I have to do that before I worry about staring in someone else's face and having them not approved of me. I may be occasionally out there radical or even sometimes super challenging of traditional norms. So far, that strategy has continued to keep my company and business and continue to make a difference for the clients that we serve. I have audience members say, “Thank you.” Occasionally, I have people avoid me. We're doing this podcast and we gave a speech. There are certain people skirting the sides as opposed to coming up to me and saying, “Thanks so much.” I might have said that they shouldn't continue some of the behaviors that they're doing that aren't good for their firm or its people or its client. They want to make me wrong or their circumstances and not take responsibility. They want to make the young people wrong, which is an absolute crash and burn strategy if you want to do that.
One of the things I talk about a lot is knowing what your personal purpose is because it's your guiding light in your career and personal life. A lot of people don't take the time to identify and define it. You've got a very clear personal purpose for what you do. You're not leading with your career. You're leading with, “This is my purpose of what I do. If it makes some people unhappy, so be it. I wouldn't be living my purpose otherwise.”
My purpose is to transform individual performance, transform teams and transform firms inside the market we're living in and the one we're going to. It’s not inside the market we wished we had or that we used to have. I say to people all the time, “I wish that I could do business with you and help you in the market we wish we had, not the market that was yesterday's market.” We have to do business in the market we have and the one that's coming. As long as I'm working with people to figure that out for them, both individually for their career and their life's purpose, I am doing what I think I was called to do. When I'm working with a team and having that conversation, I'm doing what I'm supposed to do. If we're not and what I'm doing is entertainment, they're hiring me because they want me to be the entertainer for a half-day retreat. That's not my life's purpose. That's not transformative. I'm usually somehow outside of what I'm supposed to be doing.
What do you take from your learnings and your belief systems to help younger generations or your staff or your coworkers? Are there some key things that you've seen that help others from the things you've learned over time?
My number one would take 100% responsibility for your circumstances, which is my favorite leadership distinction and probably the least favorite of all others. They don't like it. That's this idea that I don't like my circumstances or I don't like my outcomes or I don't like my relationship or whatever. What I want to do is make other people wrong for it or the marketplace wrong or make a whole generation wrong. That's easy to do, blame, as opposed to say, “I'm 100% responsible for my circumstances and I can change something. I can try something new. I can quit doing something. I can alter my circumstances. I can continue this relationship. I can do a whole bunch of things to change my circumstances.” I try to teach people to be 100% responsible.
When they're complaining, I say, “I hear you, I feel you. How could you be responsible and what could you change?” When I get people there and they realize, “There's a lot of power in that. I'm not a victim. I do have the ability to change my circumstances.” That's a huge breakthrough. I try to give that one to everybody. They don't like it because sometimes most of us want to complain. I try to listen to that a little bit, but mostly I had people on my team. My team will be like, “Jennifer, I hear you complaining as much as 100% responsible.” This idea that you could be anything and that you can generate it. You can pray about it and you can tell others and enroll others in your ideal and they'll help you.
That would be another one is this idea that you do not have to be limited by your current circumstances or your upbringing or your past based story if you choose not to be. The other thing is that, I said this in a speech, generosity is to me the number one hallmark of a functional person and of a functional team or company. The degree of generosity or how much selfish interest is allowed to persist without discussing it because we all have selfish interests. What do you want out of this? What do I want out of it?
If we talk about it and if we're open, we try to help each other get each other's selfish interests. Tell me what you need and I'll tell you what I need and how could we work together to get it. That's a high functioning environment. That's authentic too. That's another thing I would tell young people and that's another thing we try to strive for is get your selfish interests out on the table and try to help other people with theirs. That selling thing I said earlier, if you're selling for their reasons, you've got to be successful. It's going to make a difference for them and help them. Otherwise, you're doing it selfishly and it's not going to work. Those would be some of the beliefs that I have and hold that I try to pass on.
Is there anything that you've seen you've had to shift as a leader yourself where over time you've noticed this isn't working?
I'm a dominator. I’m an over owner over doer. If we have a hard problem, I'll do it, I'll fix it. If something can't get done, give it to me, I'll do it. That is an enabling strategy and allows others not to own, but it also rocks them of the privilege of owning. It's a hoarding thing. I've had to learn to be like, “Who wants to own it? I don't need to own it. I won't own it.” Control is a little bit of when you own it, you can control it. When you give up ownership, you have to give up control and trust the difference or an advocate. My experience in doing that, and I've done it with my kids, I have three kids that are almost grown. With all of my team members, anybody I've ever managed, when I've let go to them and trusted them, I've been astounded by how awesome what they produce and maybe so much better than I could have done.
It’s so much smarter and a different angle. I can't even say all the ways that it's better. There's so much gratification in seeing what they produce versus what I produce. If I do it all, I can keep it small but if I give it all away, look at what could happen, which is the whole creation that we've done with Convergence. It's this big thing that's small. It's because of the brilliance of the people that are working inside that brute because of me might look like me sometimes, but it's not me. It's a team for sure.
The rapid-fire questions that I end with, you get to pick a category: family and friends, money, spiritual or health.
It’s family and friends.
Things or actions that I don't have that I want with my family and friends?
More time with them. I travel so more physical time. Playing around in my bed with my girls watching movies. We do some of it but I'd love more.
Things or actions I do have that I want with my family and friends.
It’s laughter and real intentional fun. We try to schedule fun when I am home. We've been ax-throwing and escape rooming, zip-lining and grooming. More of the fun that we have and also figuring out ways to help each other.
Things or actions I don't have that I don't want with my family.
It’s inauthenticity. My kids coach me and always have. I've told them like I'd say to my oldest daughter, “You're my starter child and I don't know what I'm doing.” I'm going to screw it up. You have my 100% permission to coach me. She would say like, “What are we going to learn from this?” She still to this day calls me Jen. We're in the Jen phase. She'll say, “Jen, I have some feedback.” It's mostly about how I'm managing my fifteen-year-old. My oldest has opinions about some things I need to shift, phone management and some things like that. I don't want to ever shift away from that authenticity and the honesty that we have between us that I'm not the boss and I don't know everything. I need their support and help to be a better person and a better leader and better parent. I get the privilege of giving them the same feedback because I'm open to theirs. It's the same with my husband. It’s just the truth.
The last one, things or actions that I do have that I don't want with my family and friends.
Convergence Coaching: Generosity is the number one hallmark of a functional person, team, or company.
It’s distance and absence. Because of distance and absence is sometimes having to talk about tough stuff without a ton of relatedness, “I haven't seen you in a while, but now we're going to have to get right into why is your American Express bills?” I don't want to be performance managing my college kids when I haven't had the time to talk to them and relate to them. Occasionally, that stuff creeps in and I've love to get rid of it.
Is there anything you want to make sure that you get across or that you share with the readers?
I'm super committed and my team is super committed to driving change in our CPA profession, the accounting profession and the world as a result of that. I would love input from all generations that have opinions about what messages I should be bringing forward, what things do they see that I don't see that we need to make sure to say to leaders and to individual next-gen leaders. People have good ideas out there and when they give them to me, I will run with them. That would be it. Communicating them to me in email or on social media or whatever. I love to hear people about those kinds of ideas.
It was great to be able to be here with you and be able to do this interview in person. Thanks for all of your great advice and stories that you shared.
Thanks for asking. I’m glad to be asked.
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I hope you enjoyed my discussion with Jennifer. We discussed everything from her career to her family and all the people she's met along the way where she's learned different lessons that have helped her throughout her career. I want to take our mindful moments to highlight some of the areas that stood out for me. One of them was about her saying, “I need to be 100% responsible for my circumstances.” I think that's important. Whether we're a leader, whether we are working for somebody or it's one of our peers that when we get frustrated during our day or different interactions happen that we're uncomfortable with or frustrated with. Understanding what was our responsibility in that interaction and taking a moment to pause and think about how could I do that differently the next time so that I understand my place in this.
The other thing that she talked about was her parents and her parents saying to her that you can be anything. The power of a mantra that she lived to that she would take on opportunities because she believes she could be anything. We need to remember how important it is to have those positive things that we are saying, whether it's people in our family or people we work with, that understanding the impact of our words is so important in motivating others. When her father said to her, “The worst lie you will ever tell will be the one that you tell yourself. At the end of the day, you have to look in the mirror and be okay with who you are.” We can go and think that we're getting over in our day or if there's certain political things that we're trying to work through an organization but at the end of the day, we have to be okay with our self.
When we don't show up authentically or we tell ourselves the lie that it was totally somebody else's fault for a situation and so forth, we impede progress for ourselves and for the people around us. This lesson is very important. Not only can you be anything, but how can you be authentic as you go about your career and your personal life, which I think Jennifer is a great example of that. Another leadership goal that she talked about was generosity. We talk about a lot of things with leadership where you need to understand different ways to motivate your people and so forth. There's nothing stronger than being generous and that it should be stronger than your own personal interests if you are going to be a people manager. At the end of the day, we are responsible for the careers of others.
When we shift into leadership positions, it's important to shift the way that we think so that we think in the way of being generous. Even questioning that in our week, have we been generous this week? Is there anything we've done to be generous with our time, generous with our emotions, generous of what somebody else needed? Can we answer those questions and know that we were there for others? I know that a lot of people struggle with sales. When we flip the area of sales and understand that it goes back to the same premise that it's not just about your people that you are being generous to, but also the people you sell to. As long as your intentions are good, it's not selfish to sell. A lot of times it's hard for us to innovate, change and be creative because what that means is we're going to have to sell a new service and a new product something else.
In order to do that, we need to understand the pain points we are solving, not just the product or service that we want to put out there. What is the actual pain point that we are solving that will help someone else? It can't just be for the money and the business. How are we helping globally the world, the employees, the customers, ourselves and all those people connected to understand that what we are doing is for a bigger purpose? When we understand that bigger purpose, sales doesn't feel selfish. It aligns with our values. Jennifer talked about that it's important to designate what your values are and what is your bigger purpose so that with whatever you do, whether is your personal career, whether it's selling or how you interact with your family, that you are making sure that you align back to those values. You show up authentic that you're generous as a leader and you remember that you can do and be anything
I hope you will take a moment to pause before entering back into your day to reflect on this and note one to two actions you are inspired to do from our conversation that you could incorporate into your life. To go back to this episode or any other, you can find them at AmyVetter.com/breakingbeliefspodcast and related videos on my YouTube Channel. For daily inspiration, follow me on Instagram, Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn,@AmyVetterCPA. I hope that you will choose to like this and subscribe to this on iTunes, Spotify and more so that you can join us for more inspiration on our next episode.
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About Jennifer Wilson
Jennifer is co-founder and partner of ConvergenceCoaching, LLC, a national consulting firm dedicated to developing leaders and transforming teams. Jennifer’s ultimate goal is to make a transformational difference in the lives of her clients and in their businesses.
Named as one of Accounting Today’s 100 Most Influential People in Accounting, INSIDE Public Accounting’s Top 10 Most Recommended Consultants, and CPA Practice Advisor’s Top 25 Thought Leaders and Most Powerful Women in Accounting, Jennifer has worked in both the public accounting and industry sectors before cofounding ConvergenceCoaching, LLC. As a partner for the top ten accounting firm, BDO USA, Jennifer ran the National Financial Solutions Group practice with nearly 100 consultants providing financial systems selection, implementation, and support services to clients.
Jennifer is a member of the Association for Accounting Administration (AAA), Association for Accounting Marketing (AAM), American Marketing Association, American Institute of CPAs (AICPA), Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM), and International Coach Federation. Jennifer is a member of the New Horizon Group, CPA Consultants’ Alliance, and CPA Practice Advisor Thought Leaders, and The Consultants’ Trust, all forums for leading consultants to the accounting profession.
She is a regular guest columnist and blogger for Accounting Today, Accounting Tomorrow, and AICPA CPA Insider with many recently published articles on leadership, the next-generation firm, partner development, talent management, and business development. She is a nationally recognized speaker, teacher, and facilitator delivering leadership and management programs to associations, state societies, and firms. In her free time, Jennifer enjoys spending time with her husband and three girls, gardening, reading, going to the movies, practicing yoga, running, and is also active in her church.
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