When you've got a great work ethic, you are bound to succeed in life. However, it's okay to make mistakes along the way. It is part of the journey. Just do your best. In today's episode, Grace Horvath of CPAmerica talks about her beginnings growing up in an immigrant family and the career pivots she has made along the way. She shares what she has learned from her upbringing, as well as her work experience that began at Christian Dior in Sales while she was working to earn her degree in English and Humanities. Grace also talks about the honesty and vulnerability to admit where she was not good at and how she overcame slips and challenges. These lessons are ones she still uses today as a leader and to build lasting relationships with members of her association.

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Do Your Best: It's Okay When You Make Mistakes Along The Way With Grace Horvath

In this episode, I interview Grace Horvath, who is the Vice President of Services at CPAmerica. CPAmerica is a national not-for-profit trade association that serves independent CPA firms. Grace is responsible for driving the strategies for the delivery of services and resources provided to its member firms. These are designed to increase firm growth, profitability and sustainability. Grace has specialized in business development, marketing programs and services throughout her career in a variety of industries. She has dedicated her career to service and also personally makes a difference at home and abroad through her affiliation with the Rotary and other civic and charitable organizations. In this discussion, Grace talks about her beginnings, where she grew up in an immigrant family and the career pivots she has made along the way. She shares what she learned from her upbringing as well as her work experience that began at Christian Dior in sales while she was working to earn her degree in English and Humanities. These lessons are one she still uses now as a leader and in her home life. I'm going to start off and let Grace talk a little bit about her background and story.

I have a background in sales and marketing. I was not even looking for a position when I was invited to interview for a job at CPAmerica. My role there now has evolved. I was hired as part of a succession plan for my predecessor who had done an incredible job. I have very big shoes to fill and this woman was so highly respected. I’ve stepped into a pretty good role.

Why was she highly respected? What was that she did?

She was highly intelligent. She was very thoughtful. She had a good way of understanding what our members need and creating resources to help them with what it is that we do. She was very respected for her knowledge. I came in with no knowledge of the profession at all. I had a background where I worked for a provider for associations. I was very intimately clear with the association structure, the membership structure and why people want to be members and their expectations out of what they consider valuable. On the flip side of that, my husband is an engineer and I'm like, “I know about this professional services model. I get it.” That was pretty much the extent of my knowledge.

What did you go to college for? What was your degree?

Ironically, I started in Accounting and I graduated with honors with a degree in English with a secondary in Humanities.

First of all, why did you start in Accounting? What was it about Accounting?

I didn't know what I wanted to do and that seemed practical and safe.

Was there anyone in your family that was an accountant?

No, I was the first person in my family to go to college.

Where are you from?

I'm from Miami. I was born and raised in Miami. I went to school at Florida International University. I worked for about fourteen years for Christian Dior cosmetics. It’s a subsidiary of Louis Vuitton Moet Hennessy. That was fourteen years of very thorough, extensive and excellent sales training. As I advanced with them over the years, I remember getting this promotion. I was now going to have a territory and I didn't even know what that meant. I was so young. I'm thinking, “This is great. I get these fabulous discounts. I get to drive around all these stores.” They're like, “No, you're going to develop business.” “What do you mean I'm going to develop business?” They say, “Your job is not to stand in here and wait for people to come in. Your job is to make sure that people are coming in and find it.” I knew the product very well because that company has one of the most incredible training on product knowledge and training on sales. I was very comfortable with what I did with them, but that was totally new. The first time you walk into a chamber meeting, you're like, “What am I going to do here?”

How did you have the confidence to go? I know for a lot of people, selling is a hard thing. I have one idea of what sales are, but it's totally different to cold sell and put yourself out there. Once the shift happened, how did you find the confidence to say, “I'm going to be able to do this or did you not think that initially?

Spending time with that company, a lot of what we spent time on was being very polished and very poised. We were selling very expensive products. You're appealing to things that are very sensitive. You're appealing to women. You're appealing to them about things such as anti-aging. I'm a girl who's standing there at 22 years old. I don't have any wrinkles on my face. I'm a size zero, but I'm speaking to a woman who's middle-aged and who has the money to drop, which was ungodly at the time, $500 to $700 because she thinks this is going to make her feel good. You had to learn how to listen, appeal and do the same thing that we say in the accounting profession right now, which is you're not selling anything, you're helping.

When you step back from it and said, “I'm not here to sell you anything. Let's talk about what you need and let me hear what it is you would like to have happened. Let's see if I can help you with that.” That in turn would build loyalty and you learn the relationship building. When I had to go out and start doing that, it was the same thing on a much bigger scale. Instead of being one individual, it was organizations and places where we were trying to get people to come in or let them come to us to do events for them and so on and so forth. It was that same premise of relationship building. You asked me about shifts. Were there things that happened in your career or your life that would make you a point of transition? Part of that point of transition was taking the focus off of me and focusing on the people that I'm supposed to be helping. That was a big turning point and I was lucky to have that experience at a younger age.

You said your parents didn’t go to college. How did you grow up? What were your examples with your parents and what were some of the belief systems that they instilled in you?

I had an interesting childhood. We were poor. My mom's parents were immigrants from Cuba. She had me very young. My father had lost his father. He was raised by two Southern women. This is in the ‘60s. There are a lot of things going on in the ‘60s. When you're sixteen, seventeen years old and you have a kid, it's hard to focus on that. I was surrounded by a lot of powerful women. On my dad's side, it was my granny and my great aunt. On my mom's side, it was my grandmother. There were all these women making it on their own. They focused on me like, “This is not going to be your life and you're not going to rely on anybody.” Clearly what they had seen was relying on other people wasn't getting them very far in life. They taught me to be fiercely independent and to rely on myself. In college, that was not an option. It was like, “You're going to do this. You're going to pay for it and you're going to work through it, but you're going to go do that.”

Was that something you wanted to do? I know they were telling you to do it, but was it something that you were like, “Yes, I want this?”

Yes.

Is it because you saw their life wasn't something you wanted?

It’s so difficult. The crowning moment when you learn to drive a car, you take the car out by yourself. “I'm driving. This is so cool.” You're thinking about all the things you're going to do. To drive to the store and have to pull out the food stamp booklet. Here's somebody that you know from school and you want to crawl under the cash register. I was like, “This is not going to be my life.” I'm not living a difficult life like this.

I know there are a lot of our backstories. One of the stories I told in the session is about my family losing everything when I was in high school. I have found in my life too because of it, I've always got back up jobs because I'm always afraid to lose everything. Are there decisions that you make because of some of that fear from growing up?

You should see my pantry. I open the pantry and I'm like, “I have a problem.” You weren't even worrying about, “What am I going to eat?” You were worried about, “Am I going to eat today?” I look in there and like, “Mom, you have eight cans of tomatoes.” You learn a lot of things. Definitely for me, it made me stronger. People in my family work very hard. They have a very good work ethic. They expected me to work very hard. There was accountability for grades, accountability for having a job, earning and contributing to the household because it was necessary. That instilled not only the work ethic, but it was also a responsibility to take care of yourself and to understand that life is very difficult. You have to be strong, smart and self-sufficient in order to protect yourself. Even if you want to get to the next level and say, “Let me get on just protecting myself. How about I might like to enjoy life?”

It’s giving yourself the freedom to do that. I know it took me a long time to be like, “I'm not the sixteen-year-old Amy anymore.” If I want to take a vacation, take a vacation. It's like giving yourself that grace like I earned that vacation and not feel guilty about it. It sounds like your family didn't blame outside circumstances. They took responsibility for their own journeys and put that in you.

I never saw my family as victims and they never portrayed themselves as victims. My family was interesting. They’re a little bit crazy. There were definitely things going on there, but there were a lot of other things there that I saw that was cool, that was instilled into me like money was not what made you happy. You could make things comfortable with things I learned like friendships and supportive friends and how important those things were and community and education. We were serious about education. You learn a lot in those circumstances.

Accounting didn't work for you, so why did you choose English and Humanities?

I started out in Accounting. I was immature when I went to college. I had a hard time transitioning from the mindset of, “Here you are in high school and you have to do this. You have to go to school.” You go on to college and you’re like, "You don't have to be there.” I was struggling with this contradiction of still that youthful, “I don't want to do this work and I don't want to listen to this teacher. I'm not doing well on the grades. This person doesn't know how to explain anything.” I got sick one semester and I missed a whole semester. I got sick at a time when I couldn't drop the class. I completely failed the semester and that was so utterly mortifying. I was like, “This is totally not acceptable and this is completely 100% my fault.” I got sick but I shouldn't have been struggling like this to begin with.

I wasn't appreciating the circumstances. Once I went back after that, I have started taking core classes. I had to take these core literature classes. The professors where I went at FIU in the Humanities Department were incredible. They sparked a passion in me that I was eating this stuff up. What the correlation that I liked in between literature and humanities. You're studying, reading and getting into this interesting analysis of the work. You realize that all of the best literature that we have is very closely tied to the political climate and what's going on in history and in the world.

What I was enjoying and I considered a career in academia because I was so passionate about what we were doing and I would look at that outside of the world of people complaining and worrying. Look at the way our politics are now like a mess. If you were to study history and literature, and thought about culture as a whole, you'd see that we're not that different. You wouldn't be so freaked out all the time. When I came out with that degree, it was like, “I was doing this parallel to working.” I was working and building up this career. At the time in academia, I was like, “I want to go and get a Master's. I'm going to become this great professor. I'm going to move to England and work at Oxford.” My female professors were like, “Grace, you're probably already making more money than we are on sale. We understand that this is still a chauvinist profession.” This was in the ‘80s. They said, “You’ve got a great mind and you have an education, but even if you want to get a Master's degree, you should go a different direction. Don't stay in this area of academia,” which is stunning to me. They're like, “We love what we do, but we've been working with you for years. You have other opportunities and you should take them.”

This is an important thing. It's funny how life has changed because those are the types of things, computers can't replace a lot of the liberal arts things. There's something within us that didn't feel like work to you once you found that. It was enjoyable.

I knew I have to do self-study and I have eight weeks to come up with a 200-page paper and I’m excited.

That's the thing when you find that passion and you break from originally going into Accounting because that seems safe versus you go into this and you're like, “This doesn't feel like work.” You’ve got to shift your belief system again to say, “I can't make a career out of this right now,” because of the advice you're getting. Whether that was true or not, you never know. How do you use something you're passionate about in your career now or then?

At the time, what I derived out of it while I was going through it and when I graduated and got my degree is first the sense of pride in graduating from college. I’m the first one to do that. When my dad passed away, he was living in a garage apartment. He had in there this picture of me graduating college next to his bed. That was cool. The path that I chose and the education that I got is pretty intellectual. It develops your ability to think. I got a sense of confidence in my abilities to communicate and to have a better understanding of the world. That was the education portion of it. The underlying result is the maturity that you gain through school. During that time, I met my first husband. We fell in love and we had a baby. I'm working, I have a baby and I'm going to school because I know I've got to finish. It took me nine years to finish. By the time I came out of this thing, it was like, “I am a full-blown grownup right now.”

Sometimes you look back and you're like, “I'm in this body of an older person.” You're still thinking you're in that age.

As soon as you have a kid, life changes and things like worrying about the fear of missing out. I have a kid now and it changes everything. That was a life-changer as well.

With the lessons you've learned along the way and also what I'm hearing too is your critical thinking skills are not taking things at face value. You know how to decipher or have the empathetic skills of trying to understand an entire situation in order to help a relationship, sales or whatever. With the lessons that you've learned, where did you as a leader get hiccups along the way and go, “My way is not working, I thought this was the way to lead people?” A lot of times even in this profession, people aren't trained. They're promoted because they do well, but once you get to a certain position, you're a people leader and not a subject matter expert anymore. How did you make that shift? Where did you find you made mistakes along the way?

There are probably very few people who love managing people and who are good at managing people and who say, “I want to do nothing.” Most leaders that you talk to say, “Give me the most difficult thing in front of me and I would rather do that than manage people.” I remember when I first had to get into that. In the early part of my career, I was training and developing people, but I was training them to do a skill. I wasn't responsible for their performance or how they felt. I was helping them develop the skills they needed. When I got into the first job that I had to be responsible for the coaching, the performance evaluation and the management of a particular individual, I realized that I was bad at it.

Why did you think that?

The first thing that was difficult was I didn't like this person. It’s probably doesn’t sound like a nice thing to admit, but you don't like it anyway. The role of the job that she was supposed to be doing, I'm like, “You're totally not doing a good job. You take advantage and you're supposed to be at work and you're not.” All these things were going on. You're forced to say, “How am I going to get around this?” I did not end up being successful with that person. I had gone to something else. You're thinking to yourself, "If I'm ever going to get past this, if I'm never going to get to the next level, I have to figure out how to communicate with this person.”

It's not about whether I like them. We have an objective here. “This is my job and this is your job. This is the end result that the company or whatever wants us to achieve. How am I going to help you do that? How am I going to help you succeed?” I don't know what I thought about it in such a concise way at the time, but it was this dawning revelation. You can't tell somebody what to do. That does not work. Think about it, you don't want anybody telling you what to do. You have to try to become inspirational.

It’s the same thing as sales. You figure out what their pain points are and how to help enhance them so that they feel like you're not being sold to or you're not being led in a certain way, that they're part of the process. What things have you learned along the way in your own life that you instill in others that you think you leave as a legacy with people or the example that you show?

Excellence is very important to me. The way that I like to hopefully inspire the people that work with me and for me or my friends, what they should expect of me, what should my children expect of me is it's very important to me to do your best. Whether I invited you over and I'm making you a meal or working on a PowerPoint presentation or putting together a project that you're doing, you don't want to turn out something that's mediocre. Especially to the point that it's obvious like, “This person didn't even try.” That was clearly something that you were trying to get over with. That commitment to following through on something, doing what you said you were going to do and that it should be the best it can possibly be is very important to me.

That's always something that I told my children growing up. It's not about getting the A, it’s that you did your best. Even if you got an A-minus, if you think you did your best, that was more right. You have to be proud of yourself.

You don't want to disappoint people. Don't you remember those times in your life when you got called out disappointing somebody? How when you were a little kid or even as a young adult, a young professional and somebody was frank with you and said, “I'm disappointed in you because I know you could have done this better.” You're like, “You're right. I know I could.” A great part of getting older is knowing and understand that about yourself and not having to spend time worrying about disappointing people because you’re committed to doing the best you can do.

You said you have a daughter. Have you found any of what you've learned transferred to them or things from your mom and your grandma? What are some things, the belief systems that you've brought into your adulthood in parenting?

My son is a Millennial and my daughter would be the next one back. I'm very proud of them. My kids are both always been hard workers. Amazingly what I've seen in the two of them is they're both extremely empathetic people as well. They always consider what a person might be going through instead of immediately making assumptions as to why somebody is doing something. Their father and I did instill that and raise that in them, that kindness and doing your best was important. Something that is missing in a lot of younger people is knowing that you're not always going to win. You're going to mess things up and you're going to make mistakes.

When my daughter was going to college, they were stressing them out at school. At ten, they were expecting her to know what she was going to be doing at 40. I was committed to trying to alleviate that pressure off of her and telling her to do well. “You need to be doing the best you can, but let your life go in a path that you're going to discover who you are, what you want to do, who you're going to be and what makes you happy.” She was able to do that. Instilling in her that patience to reveal what your passion is going to be and not get sidestep thinking that you’ve got to be stuck doing something else because somebody told you at twelve years old, that you needed to pick that.

That's something very important, whether you're a leader, whether in your family, that you allow people to surface their passions. You work with those passions because if you try to push them in a direction to make you comfortable, it doesn't necessarily work out. You reminded me because one of the participants in my session, we were talking about our upbringing and how that affected things. He was talking about that he realized he had never shared with his children his struggles. He had made a commitment to himself that he was going to share that with his adult children so that they understood other circumstances. Everyone makes their assumptions about why they think you do what you do. They have a life that's different than your upbringing or his upbringing. It's important to know what got them there as well. That sense of vulnerability and sharing is important.

Another thing about my kids too that I feel they got from me and from their dad and lessons I learned was like, “I hate excuses.” Don’t make excuses. Own up to whatever the situation is and do better the next time. Don't blame other people for things that are not going your way.

That's important even in the state of not just the accounting profession, but any professions dealing with technology transformation right now. We'd like to blame that rather than stepping back and saying, “What are my fears? What are my belief systems that are getting in the way of progress?” That's why things like this are great ways to help people come together and a community way share best practices.

I love that about these conferences and about CPAmerica. We’re a sharing organization. Sharing comes with a lot of responsibilities and the process that you are going to have to make yourself somewhat vulnerable. You have to expose yourself. You're going to have to be willing to be generous and to be thinking about how you can help someone else. When you come to these conferences, it's great, especially when you get into the smaller sharing sessions and it takes them a while to get warmed up. Somebody will finally be like, “I've got this thing going on at my firm. Does anybody else have this thing going on?” That could potentially be something that you're afraid to say because you're like, “If I put out this is going on, they may think I don't know how to run my business.” Somebody else will be like, “This is how we handle it. We tried to fix it or we tried this and that was a total failure for these reasons.” It's a very transparent process to bring these people together in this organization.

I don't think there's anything as lonely as leadership. When you can find communities where there are other people on your same shoes, dealing with the same things that you can be open and honest with and not in fear of repercussion, that's when we all get better than trying to solve it alone.

It's almost like you know you've made it to leadership when no one in the office invites you to lunch.

I like to wrap up with some rapid-fire questions. You pick a category. The category is either family and friends, money, spiritual or health.

Family and friends.

With family and friends, things or actions I don't have that I want.

It’s more time with them.

Things or actions I do have that I want.

It’s extreme intimacy and trust.

You've created an environment for everyone to feel like they can show their bad side or their good side.

Whether it's my kids, they will be brutally honest. They'll be like, "Mom, this is how you're acting.” The same with my girlfriends or with my friendships, guy and girlfriends. You have those friendships where you can be very honest with each other. That's how you grow and that's how you know you're surrounded by people who love you because they'll be honest with you.

Things or actions I don't have that I don't want with my family.

It’s the drama.

Things or actions that I do have that I don't want.

I try hard to not have anything in my life I don’t want. I've reached an age where I feel I have the experience and maturity to illness. I can generally control that. As far as drama, dishonesty or lack of trust, you can make decisions to not have heard it out.

It’s also how you're guiding your life too. If something comes up that doesn't correlate with you, you're like, “We either got to fix it or clear it.”

I was brought up in a way or the things I observed, I've worked very hard to get to a place where generally what's in my life is what I want.

Anything that you want to make sure the audience take away or know more about before we end?

I've told you so much.

I appreciate all the sharing because we all go through our individual journeys and we can all learn from everybody's story and how we overcome our own things and we think it's us.

I just like to thank your audience for this. Tell me about your audience.

It’s professional services. A lot of people that are in careers or going through a transformation in their own lives and trying to figure out their path or learn from others and get better.

One of the most important things especially in professional services and for somebody who wants a long-term career and wants to become a partner and maybe someday wants to become a managing partner. People have to be able to trust you on every level. They have to know that you're going to do what you say you're going to do. They have to know that you are reliable and accountable. It's okay to let people see you be vulnerable. Even if you're the one at the top or close to the top, it's okay to let people know when you've made a mistake and when something's your fault. Don’t shrug your shoulders saying, “This is how we're going to get through this and go to the next level.”

Thank you very much.

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In this episode's mindful moments, I would like to step back and think about some of the stories that Grace shared and her learnings along the way that have helped her in her career, but also in her family life. She did a great job of giving us a flavor of the way that she grew up and some of her perceptions of coming from an immigrant family that was poor and the learnings that she had from the women around her. I thought it was very interesting that they supported her to make sure that she was not going to have the life that they had. She had her own perception by stepping back and seeing how hard their life was, but they were supporting her in such a strong way to make sure that she would get herself a different life than they had experienced during her upbringing.

It's important that the community we have around us are supportive in positive ways to make sure that we get to achieve the life of our dreams. Whether we have that support in our life or not, we need to make sure that we are providing that support to others. A couple of the lessons that she learned from her family was about not relying on other people. You are responsible to take care of yourself and not blaming the outside world for your circumstances. It's important to have a good work ethic and to take care of yourself. A lot of times, we want to look around us and blame situations even if it's technology, innovation, business, change in management and processes. Anything that we encounter that we want to look on the outside and say, “This person is not doing that or this technology is not doing what I need,” instead of saying, "What do I need to make sure that I take care of it, that I am independent in this process enough to take responsibility for what I need to do?”

At the end of the day, making sure that we are living a life that does fulfill what we need. One of the things, even from her upbringing of being poor and seeing the struggle, the lesson wasn't that money will make you happy. I hope you learned that money is not what's going to make you happy. It's the friends and community relationships that you create that are most important. She's proof of that with her family experiences that even though they had what they had or didn't have, they all supported one another. They were vehement in making sure that each person was going to be at their best, which led to some of her leadership lessons about how important excellence is. She learned a little bit in the beginnings of her career as well as in sales with Christian Dior, that how important it was to be polished employees and make sure that you are delivering an excellent service.

That’s a lesson that we're not going through our day and letting it happen or going through the mechanics of our work. Are we achieving excellence in what we do? If we step back and looked at ourselves, would we think we did our best so we could be hitting every sales number? We can be achieving every milestone we want. At the end of the day, are we proud of the work that we do? Are we proud of how we show up with the people around us and that we are contributing to that? We're not making excuses or thinking that we'll never make mistakes along the way because we will, that we're not so hard on ourselves, but it's the learning around the way and did we do our best?

Important Links: 

• CPAmerica

• Louis Vuitton Moet Hennessy

About Grace Horvath

As Vice President of Services at CPAmerica, Inc., a national not-for-profit trade association serving independent CPA firms, Grace drives the strategies for delivery of services and resources provided to member firms designed to increase firm growth, profitability and sustainability including educational and networking events, firm marketing tools, and domestic & international business development.

Grace has specialized in business development, marketing, and program & services development and implementation in a variety of industries. She has dedicated her career to service and also personally making a difference at home and abroad through her affiliation with Rotary and other civic and charitable organizations.

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