Ep. 44: Sarah Elliott - Accounting, Entrepreneurship, and Leadership

Contact Sarah:

• https://www.linkedin.com/in/sarahelliottcpaacc/
• https://twitter.com/selliott99

About Sarah: https://www.intend2lead.com/sarah-elliott/
Intend2Lead: https://www.intend2lead.com/

Sarah's favorite quote: “As we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others.” – Marianne Williamson

FULL EPISODE TRANSCRIPT
Mitch: (00:05)

We are back with Episode 44 of Count Me In, IMA's podcast about all things affecting the accounting and finance world. Our conversation for today is between Adam and special guest, Sarah Elliott. Sarah talks to us about how her accounting background and skills enabled her to start and run multiple businesses, and she really emphasizes the importance of leadership. Let's go over to the conversation now.

Adam: (00:33)

So Sarah, can you please tell us a little bit about your accounting experience?

Sarah: (00:38)

Of course. So I am a CPA and I practiced in public accounting for 14 years in the audit space. So I spent 10 years at big four. I worked for PWC. Eight of those years were in Austin, Texas, which is where I am now. They had some really great experiences and challenges that PWC, I feel like somehow I worked on a lot of engagements where the company was restating which made things extra interesting and challenging. And so I just really got to learn a lot, love digging into the messiness of some of those things and making it through it. A couple of years later when it was time for me to become an equity partner, actually instead chose to take a leap of faith to start my own business because I had learned more about myself and I knew I wanted to make a bigger impact in the accounting profession. Then just one from, I really wanted to expand the impact to the profession as a whole. So I took that leap of faith in 2014 and I was five months pregnant at the time. So it was scary and exhilarating and fun. And I, I'm somehow here to tell the tale.

Adam: (01:56)

So, you know, you've mentioned that you started your own business you know, you, you've started elevate and ultimately intend to lead. Can you tell us like what contributed to wanting to start those and then what areas of interest of yours spark those spark the initiatives?

Sarah: (02:12)

Sure. So it's a, it's a bit of a convoluted story how all this came to be. So the, the short answer is both businesses are something that I wished I had had for myself at a point earlier in my own journey. So I saw a need. It was a need I had in me and I thought, wow, I really want to give this back to others. So the longer answer, and by the way, there's been a lot of twists and turns with elevate, so it feels stick with me. You'll see it's kind of an interesting story and I think as an entrepreneur it's not all that uncommon that we end up in a place where we didn't see setting out. We're really just figuring out as go. So initially right when I was in the practice of accounting, I had done some volunteerism through the AICPA on a couple of task forces. And my work there helps me see that there was a real need for leadership development in this profession. I saw the challenges that were not just at my firm, that they were the same as the entire profession. And so I started to see that there was alignment in our leadership challenges with my own gifts and my own passion. So that really inspired me to take that leap of faith, right, to leave the firm and the career that I had built in the security of that to really make a bigger impact on my own. So the first business I started was actually, it was called elevate advisors back then. And my intention was to provide strategic consulting services to the profession in leadership development. And I was five months pregnant, if you'll remember. So I had about four months of a runway before I had my kiddo. And what was interesting was in those four months, it's more of a generalist consultant, I realized that there was really more that I wanted to bring. I wanted to bring that magic of coaching, which had such a profound impact for me. I wanted to bring that to the accounting profession. So I made a decision in December of 2014 when I was nine months pregnant, about to pause, to go back to school for my coaching certification. So I went back to school for a year a couple of months after that when my baby was, I think he was about eight weeks old at the time. And then I rebranded elevate advisers to elevate coaching. And my focus at that time was really on coaching women in the profession because I really believe that we need more women leadership in this profession. We need more diversity and women leaders have so much to offer the profession what we really need right now. And I think women bring a really strong different type of leadership to this profession. We're really human side of leadership, collaboration, empathy, compassion, inclusion, creativity, and really need more of that. We need more balance in this profession. So I was focused on coaching for women in accounting [inaudible] then I met Brian Kush, who's my amazing partner for intend to lead. So I met him in the fall of 2015, you know, another coach, another CPA who had turned into a coach. But he was a few years ahead on his journey than where I was. And so a mutual friend said, Oh, you two need to meet. We met via phone. We instantly connected. We shared the same values and vision or innovating leadership development in the profession and for bringing the magic of coaching right to accounting.

Adam: (05:54)

So since this is a podcast for accountants, I have to ask, how did your accounting background help in starting and efficiently operating each of these businesses that you've just described? For us?

Sarah: (06:06)

I said, it's an interesting question because some obvious things come to mind, which is being good with numbers is great when it comes to running a business, right? So right from the start I knew how to create a budget, how to set goals, right and, and revenue goals, then I could project what it would cost to deliver a project and what cashflow needs I had. So those things just came to me. Second nature, a lot of things that I think accountants take for granted that much of the world is not adept with. And, and the work in audit is, well, it's just given me a lot of exposure to business things. So entity formation at contracts, how to write and use a contract. What payment terms you want with your customers, right? To make sure you can manage cash flows. So those are some of the obvious things that are helpful and necessary to run a sustainable business. And then I think there were less obvious things that really support entrepreneurship. So I was an auditor for 14 years and I worked with a lot of different businesses. So I have an innate knowledge through that experience of how business works beyond just the numbers because you're always learning what is the business to do, right? What is their model? And I learned a lot about what works and what doesn't work. So when you work with companies for a few years, you see the good, the bad, and the ugly. What makes the business really great and what actually makes businesses fail. Okay. And then becaus...