Accounting Leadership with Jody Grunden

After I listened to Jody’s interview on the producer’s cut, my first thought was, “This is Andrew Warner (Mixergy) material.” That’s the greatest compliment I can give this creative thinker with an accounting and finance background. During this conversation, we fixated on first principles in Jody’s profession, which includes the Peter Drucker directive for effective professionals, the Harold Geneen career path, and why AI is a positive, not a negative. Finally, there is no accounting stereotype in Jody’s world.

Episode Highlights

The reason Jody chose the accounting profession.
The merger between Summit Virtual CFO and Anders CPAs.
The myth of the accountant stereotype.
The remedies for today’s accounting shortage.
The reason Peter Drucker’s principles for effective executives applies to accounting and finance professionals.
Revisiting the accountant who created one of the world’s largest conglomerates.
A brief chat about AI and why it should not be feared, like MRP, client-server computing, and spreadsheets from the past.
Suggestions for a better, more practical accounting curriculum.
Where the AICPA fell short with its financial reporting framework for small and mid-sized entities.
Jody’s 1-hour TEDx presentation for business students about to graduate.

Props To the First Accounting Leaders in Remote Accounting

As I was listening to Jody talk about his history with remote accounting, I couldn’t help but think of the pioneers and service providers in this space:

Citrix made remote accounting easy and possible for visionary accounting firms in the 1990s, and many software vendors used this technology to enable controllership firms to serve their clients better.
One ASP that took advantage of Citrix was iNSYNQ, acquired in 2019 through an industry rollup. One of my first clients and I used that ASP in 2003 and beyond. Great product. At that point, I realized my client prospects covered the entire country, not just Missouri.
TAD Accounting, based in Washington, also validated that national and remote global accounting was possible as early as 2002.
I don’t have a research team that is big enough to prove this, but most New Clients Incorporated (NCI) clients were billing on a flat-fee basis, not by the hour. I met Duane Gravley at a conference in 2004, and I was impressed with the service he created, which was similar to Jody’s in the late 1980s. Duane is probably retired by now, but I’m pegging his as one of the first-ever controllership firms that did remote accounting.