Toward the end of my tenure as CEO, someone on our staff asked me a question I hadn’t thought about in years.

“Why did you choose accounting?”

I talked about helping clients solve problems, serving as a trusted advisor, mentoring the next generation of professionals – everything I had come to value during a career in public accounting. While all those things are true, I later realized none of them answered the question.

They explain why I stayed. They aren’t why I started. What first attracted me to accounting was something much simpler: the concept of reconciliation.

Like many in the profession, when I started (for me in an audit practice), I was taught that if the numbers don’t reconcile, something’s wrong. Debits and credits must balance. Differences can’t be ignored. Those differences point to an underlying issue that must be understood before you can move forward.

That idea made sense to me. It wasn’t just about mathematical accuracy. It was about finding clarity.

Reconciliation Is Not Just an Accounting Concept

Over time, my career expanded beyond audit into advisory work and consulting. Clients began pulling me into conversations far beyond compliance. Some of those conversations were with forward-thinking organizations and included topics such as growth, strategy, organizational change, and the decisions that shape where a business is headed. Other conversations were filled with desperation as organizations fought to survive. This is where the real lesson began to form, and where reconciliation stopped being an accounting concept for me. It became a leadership discipline.

Why Firms Struggle Today

It used to be easier to run an accounting firm.

Pre-COVID, if you had enough people and maintained reasonable utilization, most firms could generate acceptable results. Today, it’s no longer that simple. The environment is more complex, more layered, and more interconnected.

Years ago, many challenges had only one or two dimensions. Today, almost every strategic move introduces multiple interdependent decisions.

If those decisions aren’t aligned properly, you can end up with activity that’s misplaced. When essential parts of the organization don’t reinforce one another, firms can get stuck – or worse –easily head in the wrong direction. Eventually, operating results reflect that disconnect.

When It’s Not Working

This lack of reconciliation typically results in short-term thinking, where firms focus on immediate fixes rather than long-term goals. And when things are out of balance, leaders question why growth isn’t where they expected it to be, why turnover is increasing, or why results don’t match effort, among other things.

It can feel like untangling a knot. You pull one thread, and three more tighten elsewhere.

I’ve come to believe that disappointing results are rarely due to a lack of effort. More often, it’s evidence of misalignment. The numbers are doing what they’ve always done: revealing that something beneath the surface isn’t reconciling.

The impulse is to force a quick solution. But in many cases, the first step is simply understanding the mismatch. Sometimes timing is off. Sometimes execution lags intention, and sometimes the strategy itself no longer fits the vision. In short, firms are working hard on the wrong things – or working in ways that no longer fit what the strategy requires.

What Reconciliation Makes Possible

When everything does harmonize, leaders start thinking further out. Instead of reacting to the next quarter, they’re planning for next year – and the year after that. That shift in time horizon is often the clearest signal that reconciliation is working.

When vision, strategy, and operations match, leadership changes shape. There’s less firefighting, more confidence in the firm’s direction, and most importantly, growth becomes intentional rather than accidental. Not only that, but work is more rewarding and fun than handling immediate problems.

A Final Lesson – Vision, Strategy, and Operations

Reconciliation shows up most clearly in vision, strategy and operations.

Vision is simply where you’re going. Think of it as “what you want to be when you grow up.”

Strategy is how you plan to get there.

Operations are the support systems that make strategy a reality.

I’ve seen firms articulate a strong vision but never build the strategy to support it. I’ve also seen strong strategies fail because operations didn’t evolve quickly enough to support them.

Looking back across my career – including 13 years as CEO of a Top 100 firm that grew from $20 million to $115 million in revenue – I’ve been fortunate to serve in roles where I was constantly learning – first in audit, then alongside clients navigating their own transformation, and then firm leadership.

Each stage reinforced the same idea: When things reconcile, you gain confidence in the numbers. When leadership reconciles vision, strategy, and operations, you gain confidence in the organization.

Today, as I begin a new chapter with Thomson Consulting, that’s the perspective I bring forward as a lived pattern I’ve seen repeat across firms of every size.

The same principle that drew me to accounting years ago continues to guide how I think about leadership today. The numbers have always told an important story. I’ve simply come to believe they aren’t the only things that need to reconcile.