Hazel Zhang

I think compared with my peers, a lot of people are better than me, and just… I don't think I'm the successful one. But what the leadership told me to do. I think as clients, we follow the path. There's really not much risk that people can fail. It's a very stable, very set path in this field.

One thing is to find your mentor at an early stage is very important. I had a couple mentors when I was younger, when I just started my career. They helped me to provide helpful advices and told me what to do when I had questions. If you have a close mentor, they will provide feedback in real time, and then we can correct ourselves as soon as we find out. So that's very helpful to form the correct professional behavior and our judgment in a younger career stage.

I really don't think there's any difference of women in this industry or men in this industry. In my past experience, I really don't see there is any barrier of women in this industry. I think women can do as same or better than men in this industry, because they are more focused on detail, and they are more caring about people that make they can build relationships better, and maintain a relationship better. Women generally are more patient, and be able to interact with different personal styles. I think women kind of have a natural advantage in this field, and I really encourage women to pursue this field. It's a very good career path, stable, good economic value. With the technology, it is good to combine technology skill and accounting skill or tax skill together to pursue the goal and deliver better quality or more efficiently work product.

The challenge is I want to gradually build my own practice, so it's kind of hard to get client. Although I served a lot of clients in the past, but I was not in the position to pursue the opportunity. I was more on the execution. Now I realize how hard it is to get clients, build trust with them. I had free consultation with clients, potential client, and then they got advices from me, and then after that, they did not engage me to do any work. So it was a lot of back and forth, a lot of time, but there was no real economic value.

For work, I think responsibility, sense of responsibility, is very important to me. And caring for the team is very important as well. My work quality, the sense of responsibility keep me accountable, and be responsible for whatever I deliver to either client or to the stakeholder of our financials or tax returns. For personal life, similarly, for family, I have two girls, they're young, so I think it's very important that we care for the kids, and give them a lot of support, and a lot of company from a young age.