u/AviatorHog

Rather than instructing people to go through an additional year of school ...and debt for what? The Academic lobby and representation on the AICPA's board.

In fact, there shouldn't even be a College degree requirement. If you can pass the CPA exam that should be the extent of your CPA Academic program. That's it. The real debate should be around experience (which I think should be closer to 5 years than 1 year).

Go mentor a new CPA firm owner, or coach your successor. Stop hogging up the work and clients. Let it go already!

Its insane how I'm constantly hearing about these 70-something CPAs still serving clients as the principal client relationship manager AND deliverables producers!

Im doing an online JD program that will enable me to have the necessary flexibility to tend with full time work if necessary and give me the requirements to sit for the bar. The program is very cheap (less than 6k a year per year), so no student loans necessary.

My hopes are that for an employing trust and estate practice, my CPA and varying degrees of exposure to various trust returns will be enough for a T&E practice to take a chance on me as a paralegal despite not having direct law firm experience nor studying at an ABA-accredited law school.

And much to my surprise...many of these paralegal roles pay pretty comparably to my current pay, but I wouldn't mind taking a pay cut for the opportunity

Something that may be a credit to my candidacy is that most of our client principals are lawyer patriarchs/matriarchs often with adult children in the family business. So we end up doing the trust/estate accounting AND law firm accounting including stuff like IOLTA/trust/retainer accounting and case matters accounting.

Im doing an online JD program that will enable me to have the necessary flexibility to tend with full time work if necessary and give me the requirements to sit for the bar. The program is very cheap (less than 6k a year per year), so no student loans necessary.

My hopes are that for an employing trust and estate practice, my CPA and varying degrees of exposure to various trust returns will be enough for a T&E practice to take a chance on me as a paralegal despite not having direct law firm experience nor studying at an ABA-accredited law school.

And much to my surprise...many of these paralegal roles pay pretty comparably to my current pay, but I wouldn't mind taking a pay cut for the opportunity

edit: Something that may be a credit to my candidacy is that most of our client principals are lawyer patriarchs/matriarchs often with adult children in the family business. So we end up doing the trust/estate accounting AND law firm accounting including stuff like IOLTA/trust/retainer accounting and case matters accounting.

In this market experienced tax talent is king.

Firms are having a hard time finding fully remote tax seniors with $125k+ salaries.... with recruiting agencies. Your onsite role is sitting right beside those with moderately to meaningfully lower pay due to being a smaller market.

A small firm or small market firm's biggest talent acquisition opportunity is flexibility. It costs little to nothing to extend to tax talent and probably even costs less due to less office space needs. And people will tolerate a lower salary if they don't have to wake up an hour earlier to put on a suit or biz casual corporate uniform to waste away in traffic for an hour.

Its like these firm partners and executives are pathologically stubborn or something.

It seems like something easy to bootstrap. Low cap ex high margin professional services just like accounting, but not as common?

A particularly sensitive wound is if they've been promised monthly financials , but aren't getting them on-time. Even worse if more than one month is in arrears.

I personally mention that based on my observations both as an independent service provider getting stories from cleanup clients and when I've worked for other firms: it always means that one or more people have dropped the ball and your client relationship manager(s) isn't telling you and hasn't found a suitable solution.

Additionally, there should be a post flair for business development/sales.