Wanted : Business Storytellers!

About two weeks ago, at the annual Public Accountants' Conference held by ISCA (Practitioner Renaissance), the highly respected Mr. Ho Kwon Ping (Founder, Banyan Group) gave a keynote speech. What struck me during the speech, amongst other valuable insights, was his waxing lyrical of the value his accountants and auditors bring to the table.

It must have been a great surprise for him then to learn that the profession is facing a crisis not only locally, not only regionally, but also globally.

Yesterday, ISCA held another engagement session with the SMPs and sought to gather our feedback and take on what still needs to be addressed to tackle the issue at hand. The efforts taken so far by ISCA (shared to us during the session) in this area are heartening, and kudos to them for even wanting to learn what more can be done from us smaller stakeholders.

One of the efforts to promote the attractiveness of the profession was to market how well the profession can pay. To prove this point, the Big 4 led the charge and publicized raising their starting pay by about 20%.

I opined that while this is one way to make the profession more appealing again, I can't shake the feeling that we are still missing the forest for the trees. Most folks out there still don't know what our profession does, beyond the perceived convention that we are bean-counters and checkers and analysts, etc. What's so great about that?

In contrast, most people know what a doctor does, what a lawyer does. So what does the accountant do? Balance the books? Prepare boring highfalutin statements and reports? Surely this isn't what Mr. Ho values from the accountants serving him?

In 2017, I happened to overhear a loud conversation discussing the importance of financial statements. And while I wished I had been the one to crystallize the concept, this gentleman's take and brilliant point was that the financial statements are the language of business. Any business out there wanting your investment would like to tell you how great and successful their business is, but only through the financial statements can that be articulated properly. The reporting standards form the grammar of the language, allowing businesses to speak a common language when telling their story through financial statements.

From this wonderful snippet, I would (and have said to many people over the years) say that Accountancy is the study of the language of business. And accountants are its linguists. When I shared this with the ISCA President two years ago, his initial remark was 'what's so great about that?' Who would be interested in that?

I countered that while it might not be great and while it might not interest many; at the very least we can now tell people what it is that we do exactly. More importantly, this is our purpose: to help businesses tell their story. The accountant from the business writes the story, the accountancy-trained analyst analyzes the story, and the auditor checks out the story.
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So if that interests you and you aspire to be a storyteller for businesses, go study Accountancy! And do hit us up once you're there and out of there!