My Personal and Career Visions

I never really thought about my personal and career visions being consistent with each other as for the longest time, I had to make sure I was just making the money needed to survive. Career was not “what do I want to do with the rest of my life” so much as “what can I do to make enough money to pay basic living expenses?” While I have seen friends become unhappy when they make their career the most important and forget to focus on their personal life, I never thought I would be in this position. It is times when I have to write things like this that make me realize exactly how far I have come since I first decided to make myself and my future a priority and go back to school. You see, after high school, I had no idea what I wanted to do in life. I have been on my own since I was 16, so I was not afforded the luxury of automatically knowing that I was going to attend college after high school. For years, I really wished I was doing something that was more of a career but was not exactly sure how to get there. With the help of a dear friend who made me realize that the only thing stopping me from achieving success in a career was, in fact, me—I started dreaming big and got into college. I knew I always like math because it was just like me—figures that are black and white on a page. What you see with numbers is what you get. When I started taking advanced tax and accounting courses, I really enjoyed the subject matter and thought for the first time that this was something I could do as a career. When I heard about becoming a CPA, I just knew that this was exactly what I wanted to do. I want to be able to not only prepare tax returns for clients, but also represent clients if necessary with the IRS, and the CPA designation would allow me to do just that. CPA’s also do more thorough and detailed analysis as well as advise on tax and financial matters—which allows me maximum flexibility when offering services to small business clients.

 My ideal life in 15 years is to have a CPA firm that has a bookkeeper and an accountant. This would allow me to separate routine tasks and let me focus on more high-level analysis- which is what I enjoy most. I want to be able to also have a practice that can have multiple revenue streams so that I am not dependent on any one particular avenue of revenue for success. For example, I want to be able to not only work on tax returns during tax season, but I also want to be able to teach tax classes to the community as well as work with small businesses on their financial business plan so that I am receiving all of their tax and accounting work. I was fortunate during my college career to have instructors and professors mentor me along the way, and I really want to give back and do the same thing for other students who were just like me.

 I also want a practice that allows me to work with small business clients helping them fulfill their financial goals and dreams. Being a CPA will allow me to show small businesses how to create proper controls and procedures for managing their revenue. I would love to be able to take timely and accurate financial data and educate small businesses on the best practices how to use the date to manage their business and achieve their objectives, targets, measures, and initiatives. Ideally, I would be able to make clients feel more at ease by giving them am more user-friendly tax and accounting experience. Small business owners feel very comfortable talking about their unique selling proposition or how they are going to make their product, but they are not necessarily as comfortable discussing how tax codes can affect their profits. I envision myself as someone who can remove these mental tax/accounting roadblocks in small business owners heads to ensure best possible levels of creativity and productivity.