Ep. 56: Peter Margaritas - Storytelling in the Foreign Language of Accounting

Peter's website: www.petermargaritis.com

Peter's books (Both books can be found on Amazon in paperback and Kindle. Improv Is No Joke can be found on Audible)"

• www.TakingTheNumbOutOfNumbersBook.com
• http://petermargaritis.com/improv-is-no-joke-book/

Change Your Mindset Podcast (Can be found on Apple Podcasts, C-Suite Radio, Spotify, iHeartRadio, and many other podcast platforms)

• Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/change-your-mindset/id1127514117
• C-Suite Radio: https://c-suitenetwork.com/radio/shows/change-your-mindset/
• Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/5EXc70lxp3g6SWXBab596y
• iHeartRadio: https://www.iheart.com/podcast/256-change-your-mindset-30921543/

FULL EPISODE TRANSCRIPT
Adam: (00:00)

We are back for another episode of Count Me In. I'm your host, Adam Larson, and we are now up to our 56 episode of the series. For today's discussion, we are going to hear Peter Margaritas, the accidental accountant. Talk to Mitch about the value of storytelling and accounting. Peter is an engaging storyteller himself. So we will cookie jump over to hear his perspective now.

Mitch: (00:25)

Thanks for joining us today Peter. And as I was just kind of mentioning to you, I've done a little poking around, a little background checking here and I came across, the accidental accountant. So I'm wondering if you can kick that off and, you know, tell us a little bit about what that means.

Peter: (00:46)

Oh, what that means was I didn't get into this profession until I was 30 years old. I'm Greek, I'm a Greek American. I really should be in a restaurant versus being a CPA. And I grew up in a very good Gary us environment, worked in many restaurants, were very customer focused. And when I got into the accounting profession, I understood it. I loved it. I'm not kind that does it very well. And actually in one of my reviews from my employer before I even sat down, she said, how in the heck did you ever become a CPA? The CPA can get all the way down to this detail. I'd only get you about three quarters of the way. You're an accidental accountant. And I thanked her for that. That was the nicest thing she had said. And so I, I've actually taken that and it's registered trademark and is, I'm doing business as the accidental accountants.

Mitch: (01:40)

That's great. So as I'm going through this and I come across some of your other work here and I saw an article that you put out there, I believe it was accounting today. And, my next question is really about the profession in general and, and how has data and technology really changed the accounting industry in your opinion? The article was written about whether or not gap is really in touch with today's economy. So how does that all piece together?

Peter: (02:06)

I think by the 1900's I mean we really talking about data analytics or even in the 20s now we're so data-driven and analytics-driven and, but if you sit and think about what accounting standards when they're written and when FASBI is proposing them primarily for publicly held entities, especially very large publicly held entities and they do feel tested and they get these luxury organizations to be part of part of it. But a lot of companies out there use gap statements because it's required of them to use gap statements. And they're much smaller entities. I mean the complexity of a gap, the revenue, the new revenue recognition standard, which is principles based now rules-based, there's over 700 pages. The convocation has over 10,000 pages. So what we're trying, and it seems like we're always trying to catch up, and think about back when the derivatives and during the Enron years and we were trying to write standards, what was it? Fin 46 and Fin46R then, there were SPEs, now they're VIE's we were writing them. We felt like we were, yeah, four or five years behind. We looking at today, you know, the SAS applications, you know, business software applications are being delivered on demand via the cloud and some of the metrics that are important within these organizations as recurring revenue, you know, churn rate, the number of subscribers which are crucial to their business. There's no way fashion is not addressed any of these things. So there's, I've, I've always felt that there always has been somewhat of a, gap, lack of a better term between, you know, what we're writing and where the U S economy is going. And we've, it's gotten so complex that counselors can even describe to the clients. And when I say clients, I mean both internal and external CFOs, you know, in the, in that group to their clients, what the purpose behind it. What we're doing, how do we apply it? It's very, very complex.

Mitch: (04:28)

So I guess, you know, what I'm curious about really is, aside from the complexities, aside from being behind the times, essentially, what challenges is this really causing for today's accountants? And how are these standards, you know, really hurting the performance of today's accountant.

Peter: (04:49)

I'll share a story with you. As soon after that article came out, I had a partner firm contacted me here in the central Ohio area and she said, I love your article and as you shared the story with me that their firm was doing a after hours gathering, CPE kind of gathering and they invited all the community and local banks in the area into this thing. And basically they were talking to the banks to see if they would start accepting the AICPA SME model for standards versus US gap because of the complexity. Yeah. I'm a former banker and I, bankers don't really understand the complexity that we're dealing with and when we're trying to, like my buddy who is still in banking when rev, rec, and leasing was coming out, he contacted me, he goes, so you guys just make standards to keep your jobs to be irrelevant to, is this like full employment? Now? What, why not? But perception and reality are so different. And when we try to communicate these standards to our clients within the organization, like consolidations vie's, there's thousands and thousands, hundreds of pages out there on this topic. And when we're just data dumping information, Oh, we're doing this, put it in sleep. Well we need to learn how to well well I asked my audiences is well a question like how many of you speak a foreign language? And I mean a few hands, you know, French, Spanish, Japanese. I said, let me reword that question. How many speak the foreign language of business call accounting? And they all start laughing and I went, it is a foreign language to the sales department, to human resources, to every part of the organization. Other than accounting and finance. Have you ever tried to explain anything to a sales, our HR person, whomever, can you listen to yourself? You're speaking in the foreign language of accounting, we have to become better translators of this language into plain English. And I think that's our biggest challenge is recognizing that we speak a foreign l...