Episode 88: Working With Intention: Breaking Through The Plateaus With Jeff Cook
There should be moments in our career where we should take a break and enjoy life. Working with intention allows you to create that much-needed balance between business and personal life. Join Amy Vetter and co-founder of ByteChek Jeff Cook as they delve into the topics of working with intention, breaking through the plateaus, and effective corporate communication for the company's growth. Furthermore, Jeff shares professional experiences he has gone through in his journey in the accounting profession, from audit to becoming a founder of a technology company. He elaborates on how being a great mentor changed his life and further elements in his career that he finds important in maintaining a productive but healthy life.
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Working With Intention: Breaking Through The Plateaus With Jeff Cook
Welcome to this episode of Breaking Beliefs, where I interviewed Jeff Cook, Cofounder and CFO of ByteChek. His career has spanned being a CPA with a background in both financial and IT auditing as well as being a SOC 2 Expert, AICPA Volunteer, and committee member. He has formed SOC practices at three different firms and then helped to develop ByteChek, a software automation tool designed to help both the client and the auditor. During our conversation, we talked about Jeff’s journey from starting out in Northern New Jersey and having a dad as a CPA that later became a CFO that guided his path in wanting to go into his accounting career and how he took pivots along the way from being an auditor into IT and eventually developing his own tech company with his co-founder. Hopefully, this episode will give you little nuggets that will help you in your leadership capabilities from Jeff’s learnings as well as be able to look at how our belief systems can change along the way that affects our ability to lead and improve as a human and in business. I hope you enjoy this episode. Please share, like, and subscribe to this show so that others can receive the benefits of these stories as well.
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I’m with Jeff Cook. Jeff, would you like to give the audience a little background on yourself?
Thank you, Amy. I’m Jeff Cook. I am the Cofounder and CFO at a company called ByteChek. We do a lot of automation around IT auditing, controls, and then also helping with IT audit assessments and things of that nature. I have years of professional career, a CPA for many years, and definitely took that non-traditional route which I’m sure we’re going to talk about a little bit. I’m happy to be here.
Thanks so much for being on. Let’s start in the beginning. Maybe you can start where you grew up, siblings and what your parents did. Give us a little background on yourself.
I grew up in Northern New Jersey, about 30 to 45 minutes outside of New York City, near a town called Morristown in Northern Jersey. My dad was a CPA as well. He was a CFO for many years, so that’s how I got some interest in accounting and took an Accounting course in high school. I aced that course. It was almost like it came naturally. I said, “If this stuff is that easy, maybe I should look into it in college because it looks like a pretty good career. My dad has had a pretty good career, so let me check that out.”
That’s how I ended up being an Accounting major and went to Loyola in Baltimore for college. That’s where I also met my wife. After Loyola, I did move back to New Jersey briefly. I worked at a company you might remember, a little company called Arthur Andersen back in the day. I was there interning and doing clerk-type work for a couple of summers with them before I even graduated, then once I graduated, I got the full time, and sure enough, nine months after I started full time is when everything collapsed. I was part of the 80,000 other people that lost their jobs in that weird situation.
For me, it turned out to be not a bad thing because what I did was, I was thinking about making the move to the DC area to be closer to my future wife. I ended up moving down to Maryland and joined up with a regional firm called Aronson and worked for them for over twelve years. I had some wonderful mentors, shout out to Lisa Cines, Lexy Kessler, and some unbelievable mentors I had during my Aronson career and learned so much there. I did traditional financial accounting and auditing for those years. I got my CPA during that time. What ended up happening was I took a shift. I’m rambling, by the way. Do you need me to back up?
Yes, let’s back up before you get there. Let’s go back. Your father was a CPA and what did your mom do?
My mom was a real estate agent by sell-side, whatever it was, in the New Jersey area. She knew New Jersey inside and out. We all grew up in New Jersey, so that was her deal.
Did you have siblings?
I’ve got a sister who is nine years older than me, so quite the gap. Sometimes it felt like having two moms at certain times. My sister did a variety of things over time. She worked in sonograms for a while, and then now she’s a dance teacher. She teaches dance with my nieces in their national winter dance competitions. My nieces are extraordinary. In fact, one of them goes to a dance school here in the DC area.
When you were younger, did you have hobbies or what were your interests before deciding you could ace being an accountant? Because let me tell you, I did not feel that way. You’re very lucky that when you went through Accounting, that’s how you felt the first time.
Back then too, it was like the green paper. It was in pencil and all that kind of good stuff.
I don’t understand it. I only understood bank statements and this was the opposite of bank statements. I could not wrap my head around it.
Somehow, I knew this had to be here and this had to be here. It has to balance out. As a kid, I loved being outside. We used to play outside all the time and played street hockey almost every day. In Northern Jersey, hockey is a pretty big deal, so we played street hockey a lot. We played some football on the lawns and stuff like that, too. In the winter, when the ponds would freeze, we’d play on the ponds and the pond hockey. It was cool. In the summertime, we used to play night tag. That was the big thing. We used to play outside. Video games were a thing, but they weren’t a huge thing. Video games were for rainy days or maybe after nighttime, but it was more about being outside.
That’s what you enjoyed. It was being outside. Was it about being with your friends? What was it?
It’s definitely being with friends, playing together, being outside, getting that fresh air and exercise. That’s what it was all about. We had such a great time with all that.
When you picture yourself growing up before you got into an Accounting class, what did you originally think you were going to be when you were going to grow up?
I didn’t know and I took one of those tests that you get from the guidance counselor. It tells you where you are supposed to be when you grow up and it turns out I was supposed to be a veterinarian.
Do you like animals?
I do. I grew up with cats, but now I’ve got the dogs. I like them both. I’m not a dog or a cat person. I’d say I’m either one, but I like animals a lot and learning about animals. I probably would have been okay. There are certain parts of the job I don’t think I would’ve liked, though. I’m very compassionate for the animals, so I would’ve had a hard time with some aspects.
My best friend’s a veterinarian. That’s a much dirtier job than people think. Everyone is like, “It’s so cute.”
There’s probably some ugly stuff.
It’s funny I took one of those tests when I was a freshman or sophomore in college. It came up with one answer and that was a tattoo artist. I did think about it later and it was like, “I have this creative side and this exact side. To be a tattoo artist, you have to have both.”
You’d have to be able to think about what it’s going to look good on this person.
Working With Intention: Leading and growing a company is a very different type of leadership than managing staff through an audit and so forth.
You have to be very exact.
I don’t have that at all. Where you were like, “I never would have been in Accounting in high school.” I did not have that creative side. I couldn’t draw and any of that kind of stuff. It was not my thing.
Did your dad take you to the office or did you hear about his clients? What type of accounting was he doing?
He started it back when it was the Big Eight. He was in the Big Eight for a little while. He left public accounting when he was a senior, and then he transitioned more into traditional controller type of role and then evolving into more of that CFO type of role. By the time I was growing up and learning about work, he was already at a CFO level. He would take me to the office when I was little, especially if he was working on the weekends or something. He would take me in and I used to build little radio-controlled cars, those RC cars. I would take my RC car to the office and since nobody was there, it was a weekend, I would drive my RC car up and down the hall. That was pretty fun. It turns out, I ended up doing that as an adult too, and Aronson is going to kill me, but I used to sometimes on the weekends during busy season, there would be a couple of us in there and we’d be working hard. I’m bringing this little radio-controlled helicopter I had and fly in the office and send notes to people because it’s still stuck there even as an adult.
Now you can do it with children.
I work from home mostly. It’s not even a challenge at this point.
When you went into accounting, you decided the audit side instead of tax. How did you make that decision or why?
When I was at Arthur Andersen doing that clerk stuff and then the intern stuff, I started out as a tax clerk, so I was on the tax side. I learned a little bit about the tax side and I said to myself, “I liked it. Why don’t I intern for a summer on the audit side to see what that’s like?” I tried that and ended up liking that audit aspect a little bit more. Once I was full-time, I dedicated myself to the audit side. When I was at Aronson, I did a little bit of tax work in the beginning but mostly, it was an audit throughout my career there.
How did you end up building your career there or taking whatever knowledge you had? You’ve referenced that you’re good at accounting and understand it but there’s a big difference when you needed to start moving into management roles and supervising people.
It turns out that was one of my favorite aspects of the job. I enjoy being a mentor. I enjoy teaching a lot. Having people working with me, had to mentor throughout my time there, check on their progress, and see how they were doing was one of the most enjoyable aspects of what I did. I’m the type of person where the person or persons who are working for me should become better at whatever it is because I should teach them everything I know and then they add their own layer to it, which makes them even better at it than me. I’m a firm believer in that. You need to pass on your knowledge so that other people can do a great job. That aspect of it never bothered me. The only thing I didn’t like was the billing stuff but all the human interactions, I love that part of it.
Where did that come from?
I don’t know. I think it was always the aspects of being able to talk to people, especially when I’m in a small group. When we’re in a conference room with three of us, I can read what people are doing, help break the ice, and help make things a little bit more lighthearted in what we’re doing. During the busy season, you’re working 60 to 70 hours a week and you’re sitting in conference rooms for months on end. You’ve got to be able to lighten it up a little bit. You’ve got to be able to have some have fun, so I liked doing that aspect of it. It came naturally for me to be able to interact with people like that.
Where there any industries that you specialize in or that you found you were pivoting your career toward?
Aronson gave us a great opportunity to try out different industries. I did try out the real estate, construction, and government contracting industries. As I got to the senior level, I focused more on government contracting. Over the years, once I was senior manager, etc. I migrated into that Gov Con aspect and focused on that and some of the tech stuff, too. I was also doing a little bit of tech companies but mostly government.
You said that you had your mentors as well. Did you seek them out or did they seek you out? How did they help you? What things did you learn from them along the way?
I would say they definitely helped seek me out, but it was a natural fit. I had other mentors over the years that came and went, and they were good, but particularly, I’ll talk about Lisa. Lisa helped me and taught me this, and I do this for people now. She always asked the right questions or phrased things the right way, where I had to come up with the answers myself, even though she already knew what the answer was going to be, but she never let me have it. She always let me find my path to get to that answer. That’s super important because you have to be able to make decisions on your own. You have to be able to figure out what path you want to take and how to get there.
That’s where I try to do that for people. When I mentor people who are in the tech industry and they’re looking for a new job, I talk about, “What are you looking for? What do you think you need to do if you’re going to want to achieve that?” I let them talk it out. Eventually, they find their answer, so that was something that was super helpful for me. It helps me to this day. I still talk to both of them on a regular basis.
I know you can model it but is there any training or things that you started diving deeper and to understand that?
I don’t do a lot of formal training on mentoring. I probably could do a little bit where I could polish up some stuff. I’ve always had this natural ability to talk to people and hear what they’re saying. Sometimes, I do need to think about things for a bit. If I’m mentoring somebody and they give me a little challenging thing, I’ll be like, “Let me think about that and let’s have another conversation in a day or two.” As far as formal stuff, I never had a lot of formal training for mentoring or anything.
I’m more talking about the questioning aspect because with questioning, not only does it help you in that aspect, it helps you working with clients and in sales. Even that example that you were saying to not respond right away when you don’t know the answer is a hard thing for a lot of people to say, “I’ll get back to you.”
I’ll tell you the one thing I do and this goes for clients, people I mentor, and everything. I’ll be always like, “What’s your goal? Where do you want to be? What do you want to do? What do you want to achieve? What’s your end goal?” Sometimes, we even shift that end goal a little bit as the conversation goes, but at least if I understand what the end goal is and I can then backtrack my way of, “How do we get there?” Sometimes, I might have that situation where I have to say, “Let me get back to you. Maybe there’s a step in the middle that if we’re going to go like this to get to your goal, there might be a step here. I have to figure out how do we bridge that gap.” That’s what I need to think about, “Let me get back to you on that portion of it,” or something like that.
Looking at your career, were there moments that you doubted it, had any breaks, and enjoying what you were doing? How did you go through that?
When you’re getting into the beginning of March and busy season in public accounting, and you’re sitting in the office on a Sunday, you’re going, “What am I doing?” You fight through it and it’s like anything else. It’s like working out, for example. It’s the same thing. You work out and hit plateaus, but then you breakthrough that plateau, and you’d go up again. It’s the same thing in busy season. You’re going to hit ups and downs. You’re going to hit plateaus and got to break through it. That would be something I definitely looked at for a while, but then when you get out of it, the clouds and the fog clears from busy season, you think about how much you learned, moved forward, and more advanced you are than you were six months ago even. That drove me to keep the knowledge going and get smarter every year. It was a big switch out of public accounting. That was the next thing or a question, “Am I doing the right thing?” You’re out of traditional accounting and go into this IT auditing type of thing.
What caused you do that?
It was 2010 when Sarbanes-Oxley was kicking in for the public companies or had been kicking in for a little bit now. It started to trickle down to the privately held companies where you now had to look at IT controls for financial statement audits. We had nobody at the firm at that time that was doing it, so I took it upon myself to learn what that was. How did it work? What did you need to look out for the financials? How did IT controls work? I learned it and developed a work program for the firm to do it for their financial statement audits. From there, natural progression into figuring out about SOC 2, what does that mean? SOC 1, what does that mean? I ended up saying, “On all my research, there’s a lot of CPA firms doing this stuff. Maybe we should, too.” I started this IT audit practice at the firm and that’s how I got into it.
Working With Intention: Open communication is a big thing. You have to communicate effectively and ask what’s going on so the people can be aware of it.
For a while, I was dividing my time between IT audit and financial audit. I made the decision finally. I said, “I like this IT audit thing and I want to take it to the next level.” Nothing with Aronson negative. It wasn’t the right time for their clients for that, so I went and joined the cybersecurity firms to help with the IT audit and the SOC aspects of what they needed. That’s where it took off from there because now, I had people who’ve done IT audits for many years. They were able to help me get better at the audit process. They refined my SOC skills even more. I got involved with the AICPA more when it came to SOC. It started growing from there and spiraling a little bit.
How did you get on the technology side of it?
That firm I was at after Aronson was called Veris Group. I started the SOC practice there in that firm. Not too long after I started, it got acquired by a bigger company called Coalfire. They’re a cybersecurity firm as well and we joined up with their SOC practice. I did a lot of quality control work in their SOC practice and I even got more involved with AICPA. That was around the time I started getting involved with the SOC 2 guide and getting on those committees and task force. From there, my co-founder for ByteChek, AJ Yawn, he and I worked at Coalfire together. He was definitely way more technical than I was. He knew cloud technology and cybersecurity better than I do. I definitely understood the reporting aspects and I knew enough about the tactics to be dangerous, but that’s where he and I started talking about these ideas for automation in IT audits. What if we can do this?
Once he left and I left with different reasons and different times but we got back together after we both left. I wanted to check in and see how he was doing and sure enough, he said, “Why don’t we give this IT audit automation thing a chance to develop software to do it?” That’s what we did and took the aspects of how we can make clients more secure, but also how do we help the auditors? He was an auditor and I’m an auditor. A lot of these other firms out there don’t think about the audit side, but that’s where we took that into account.
What exactly did you develop?
It’s a tool that is cloud-based. Our clients don’t have to be cloud-based but to get the most benefit of it. With cloud-based applications, we can integrate to their cloud environments. AWS, GitHub, and JIRA pull the information from where the data lives, the source data, and be able to determine they are meeting controls for SOC 2, for HIPAA, for ISO, and all those kinds of frameworks and say, “You’ve got data in AWS. It helps meet your logical access requirements for SOC 2. You’re good to go or not.” From there, the auditor can log in and also view that data and get what they need to support their audit. It’s a very high-level overview of what we’re doing, but that’s on its surface where it is.
This is a big transition in skill set, developing tech versus doing the work. How have you felt about your expertise and learning pathway of making this pivot in your career?
I said to AJ when I joined up, I was like, “AJ, this feels like the culmination of my career to this point,” because again, he knows the tech stuff ten times better than I do, but I know what the stuff needs to do on the backend and what it needs to do in order to satisfy a SOC 2 report. I provide that input to the product. He makes it work. I’m also the CFO of this company, so we’re bringing back my accounting. We’re bringing back all that auditing that I did for so many years, so between the first half of my career of doing accounting and auditing and now the back half of my career focusing on IT auditing and SOC 2 and cybersecurity, it’s all come together in this company where I’ve gotten to do both.
Leading and growing a company is a very different type of leadership than managing staff through an audit and so forth. What would you say your strengths are as far as that and what gaps have you found that you’ve needed to fill?
The strengths, I would say, come from the ability to see where directions need to go and make sure that we’re doing what we need to do but also doing it fast. In tech especially, things and a lot of tech people move very quickly. That’s the nature of how they work. At the same time, I still have an accounting brain, so you need to make sure of this, then you can legally look at this. There’s a legal aspect of that CPA exam that still triggers in my brain every now and then. You got to think about all those types of things and make sure that the company is running properly in that way. I help that aspect of it. That’s a good strength for what I help the company with. The weakness I would say is you have so much more responsibility as a chief or whatever officer of a company that you have when it comes to all the people that are working for you, the outputs of what they’re doing, and the client satisfaction. The buck stops with you. You have to be able to make sure everybody is staying compliant.
That’s something I’d say could be a little bit better. It’s hard, as a CFO, to be able to talk to people one-on-one regularly, be in the trenches with them, especially in these virtual environments these days. Our company is completely 100% remote and I haven’t been to an audit onsite for years. You got to be able to maintain some one-to-one with some of these people to make sure that they’re getting what they need, the clients are getting what they need, etc. That’s something that’s extremely challenging in these environments.
How do you fill that?
I’m not going to endorse it. I’m going to say we use Slack. Microsoft Teams is another way to do it, but we have Slack. We call that our virtual office. In these Slack channels, not only do we have work-related stuff and client-related stuff, but we have a channel, for example, called Question of The Day. You can post a question in there. Questions like, “Do you like hotdogs or hamburgers better?” We ask random questions in there. We had a wonderful little trivia night type of question in the company where we did a virtual trivia night where everybody was there. The winner got like a prize. You got to do things like that to keep people engaged in these remote environments. You have meetings but then once you hang up that meeting, you’re right back in this home office by yourself. That’s how we treat that virtual office and with Slack, Teams, and everything else, you can still have one-to-one conversations, etc. We try to post funny things. We’re big on memes. We love memes. We do a lot of that too to keep people happy and laughing.
You’ve talked about you’ve had moments, especially during these times or maybe other times through your career of making sure that your whole mind-body-spirit is good. How do you know when you’re getting off track and what do you do to offset that to make sure you’re putting out the energy you want?
That is so super important. I can’t stress that enough. For years and I still do, I was weightlifting. In the last couple of years, I’ve shifted more into that yoga type of mindset where you keep that mind-body connection. I have to admit I’m not the best meditation person. I’m still trying to figure out how to make it work, but that’s important, too. Even mental health-wise, maybe people need to see someone on a regular basis or it’s a conversation now and then with somebody but you need to keep the mind, body, spirit all aligned and healthy because that’s going to, in turn, make not only your business relationships healthier and make your personal relationships healthier.
Part of that is also taking breaks. You don’t get a trophy at the end of the day for working 80 hours a week. Don’t get me wrong. I understand owning businesses, especially is hard and you’ve got to work a lot of hours. That doesn’t mean you can’t take a break. Even at our company, we have a 10% rule, which means 10% of the week and we’re basing this on a 40-hour week. Four hours out of the week, we want people to use those four hours whatever they want if they want to go and do yoga, go for a walk, read, study for something that they’re studying for, and if they still want to work, that’s fine, too. We allow people to do that. No judgments. That’s super important because being refreshed and mentally clear creates better and more satisfied work in the end for people.
Do you ever discuss what people do during those four hours?
Yeah. We’ll say, “How are you using your 10% this week?” If somebody doesn’t want to talk about it, that’s cool, but a lot of times, we see a lot of cool stuff, too. Some people will be like, “I went for a hike, I played golf, or I did some meditation for an hour and then decided to use the three hours of work because I felt so good after.” We love hearing about that, so we’ll ask those questions a lot to see how people are doing and to see what they’re doing, and maybe give other people ideas on something they can do that they didn’t think of, so it definitely helps.
What do you do to create boundaries around that? Those types of corporate things are, you can say it and then someone schedules a meeting over the one hour they wanted to take for something. How is the corporate communication to make sure that it’s taken seriously or as a priority? It doesn’t create more work. Let’s put it that way.
First of all, we are so much more based on tasks that proposed to those hours. We believe in, “Here are the things you have to do and here’s when they’re due by. I don’t care if you want to do them now or next week. If it’s due two weeks or next week, you can do them at 2:00 in the morning if you like. As long as you’re attending the meetings that you’re supposed to attend during the day, but if you want to work later at night and you need to do something with your kids during the day or whatever it is, go ahead. Do it that way.” It’s task-based. For that 10%, we’ll say, “Block your calendar. Don’t have meetings during that time.” If something comes up, that’s an absolute, urgent thing that we need help with, we’ll ask you if it’s okay or not, but most of the time, that doesn’t happen. The other thing too is we’ll tell them, “Go off of Slack. Don’t be available during that time if you’re having your 10% time.” We definitely want people to take advantage of that for sure.
Where did you come up with this idea to do this and why?
I have to give credit to AJ for that one. That was AJ’s idea. He’s had some military background. He was a Captain in the Army. He also recognizes what long hours and stress can do for people and how important those 10% breaks can be for people and what they do. He was a leader for many years in the Army, so he understands that kind of stuff. That was his idea to do that. When I heard about it, I was all for it.
As far as your relationship with AJ being co-founders, what have you had to learn as far as being partners and able to disagree, move forward, and keep a vision?
These are all things that are so true when it comes to co-founding a company. He and I, when we met, we’re great friends. We’re still great friends, but we’ve definitely had our arguments. We have different opinions on things and maybe the way we executed something wasn’t the way the other person thought it was going to be done. What we did, to be honest with you, is we came to the table with each other and said, “Here was what happened. Here was the issue I had with it and we worked it out.” “I understand now where you’re coming from. I won’t do that again. Now I understand what you’re thinking.” You have to learn how that other person thinks, how they operate, and also what you need to be able to stand up and say, “I don’t agree with this versus I get what you’re saying. I think that can work.” You have to feel them out. I wouldn’t say there’s a one size fits all answer in that.
That’s the other thing. I’ve had people ask me before, “Should I go into business with my best friend?” I say, “Yeah. You can go into business with your best friend. Just be aware you’re going to argue with them on certain things. You have to be able to get through that and communicate and have open communication.” Open communication is one of the biggest things. You have to say, “I did X, Y, and Z.” Sometimes it’s going to depend, too. You might think it’s not a big deal, but maybe they did, so making sure you have that open communication of what’s going on so that other people can be aware of it.
Do you have some agreed-upon way that you resolve arguments or bring things to the table?
We start arguing on Slack. Him or I will immediately say, “Phone call.” I found this out back even in public accounting when I was doing that, that a lot of times when you write an email or now it’s Slack and Teams, words can be misinterpreted the way you wrote them in the email or Slack message. They might be picked up in a different tone on the other end. You didn’t intend that. A lot of times, if there’s an argument starting, that’s when I’ll say, “Let’s have a phone call,” so that we can talk it out on the phone because then when you can hear the person, you can understand their tone and where they’re coming from.
Working With Intention: When you procrastinate on something, you’re still going to deal with it later, which creates more stress.
In-person sometimes is even better. When I was in an office, working with people in the office, and I had to have a serious conversation, I always want to have that person face-to-face. It’s super important to communicate that way. My big advice for people is when you’ve got something that you need to work with somebody on or they might disagree with, always pick up a phone and have an actual conversation so they can hear your voice rather than write an email.
I like to end with some rapid-fire questions. I’m going to ask you some questions but you pick a category either family and friends, money, spiritual, or health.
Health.
Things or actions that I don’t have that I want?
I would like a more regular routine as to working out. As a co-founder, you start to lose a lot of hours in the week. It takes a lot of hours to build around a company. I used to work out 4 or 5 times a week, regularly in the morning. It has gone away, so I’d like to get back to that.
Things or actions that I do have that I want with my health?
I’ve started it and I’m doing more yoga. I love that and want to keep that going. Stretching flexibility as you get older especially is more important because I do enjoy playing golf as well. Those are my hobbies these days, golf and martial arts. Flexibility is super important for both.
Things or actions I don’t have that I don’t want?
Bad food. I’m not a proponent of junk food. I don’t eat fast food. I don’t want that.
Things or actions that I do have that I don’t want?
Procrastination and that’s not necessarily health-related, but I would say it’s mental health related. When you procrastinate on something and then you got to deal with it later, it can create more stress. I would love to get rid of that.
Thank you so much for all that you shared. Before we end, is there anything that you want to make sure we didn’t cover off or any takeaways that you want to make sure people leave with?
I would say one of the biggest things is, find your path to mental health as much as physical health. That mind-body connection that I mentioned before is super important. I touched on I do martial arts. I’ve been doing martial arts for many years and sometimes doing some of the movements there and those katas that we do bring me better into a mental health state. Yoga and meditation can help. It’s so important and so underestimated. A lot of people are getting it now more than they used to but there’s still a stigma out there for a lot of people that’s like, “I don’t need that. I’m fine. I’m wonderful.” It’s like, “I don’t know if I always believe that.” It’s important for people to recognize that not everything might be perfect and that’s okay. You need to work through it and figure it out.
Thank you so much for being on and I appreciate you sharing your story.
It was a pleasure. I’m always happy to be here. I hope to keep talking to you in the future.
Sounds good. Thanks.
Thank you.
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For my Mindful Moments with my interview with Jeff Cook, who began his career as a CPA and as we talked about, his father had been a CPA and later on a CFO in corporations. He followed his career and eventually decided to go down the same path. What I thought was so interesting because it was different than my own experience was when he started his first Accounting class, it came easy to him. I had a very different experience, but in essence, it tied him into the profession. Knowing that his dad had had this great career solidified his path to becoming a CPA as well. Many of us, when we look back at why we start a career or why we don’t go into a career, it can be for similar reasons of what we’re used to and what we’ve seen. Understanding our impact on the people around us and the impression that we give on the work that we do is so important.
If we’re coming home every day complaining and not having fun in what we do, our children, friends, and spouses see it. We start losing that happiness that we have. If we want to inspire people around us and also feel differently about what we do, it’s important that we don’t pigeonhole ourselves in one thing that we started out as. As you saw through Jeff’s career, it pivoted along the way of different opportunities that came into his life that he didn’t even know he would be interested in when he first started out as an accountant and a CPA. He went down a traditional path but then started spearheading his area where he saw opportunity when Sarbanes-Oxley came out and the SOC reports and so forth.
Keeping your eyes open to where the opportunities are can drive a path for you that you might have not predicted. Sometimes, it’s important that we don’t hold on too hard to what we think might happen in our career but instead, follow where our passion goes without leaving the expertise that we have. Maybe you’re frustrated in the work that you’re doing, but it’s important to step back and observe and say, “What are the things I like about what I do and what things would I like to remove? Where am I willing to take a risk? Where am I willing to learn more?”
That was what his path was about. No one taught him about this field that he ended up going into. He started joining groups, committees and getting involved in associations so that he could get more and more experience in the work that he was finding a passion in, which led him to working with a cybersecurity firm that eventually led him to creating software that would solve for people and practitioners that were like him.
Those are the things we can’t predict in our career but that’s where the excitement happens. It’s stepping back as the observer of our career, finding where those pockets are of excitement, and pushing ourselves to continue to learn. In addition, one of the important things that we talked about that he does in his company that I wanted to point out was the 10% rule. It was important for all of his staff to not work themselves so hard that they lose the joy in their work. They took 10% of their week, which is four hours of a 40-hour week, use it the way that they want. There’s no pressure about it. It is a culture where everybody understands that if they see that on someone’s calendar and don’t push someone to give that up that it’s as important as the other work that you do.
The importance of these things when we take breaks is it releases our mind, it allows us to step back, and maybe solve problems that we couldn’t solve when we kept pushing ourselves throughout the workday. When we create a hobby, take a walk, or try to do any mindfulness activity that will offset the stressors of the day, what that will do is help us in being more productive in our workday. Working more hours does not mean more production. What does mean more production is the quality of time that we’re working and we’re keeping our brain healthy.
Part of that, which we ended our conversation, was on the mental health aspect. It’s that we take the needed breaks, but we also do the things that we need to do for ourselves personally and not look at it as selfish to have hobbies, to have a stigma around seeing a therapist, or having an executive coach or whatever outside party that can help be that party that doesn’t have any skin in the game and can give you suggestions that will help you in your life so that you’re able to create the energy that you want in your body so that you’re better for the people around you.
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About Jeff Cook
20+ year career CPA with a background in both financial and IT auditing. SOC 2 Expert & AICPA volunteer. Has formed SOC practices at three different firms, then helped develop ByteChek, a software automation tool designed to help both client and auditor.