Janet Keller

The best career advice I ever received, or I'm feeling like I just created myself, is obviously I'm a big advocate of accountability and making sure everybody - as you can see from what I just mentioned, there's a lot of moving parts in this particular job. The best way to keep on top of it, and the best advice was to obviously make sure you are always making meetings with people instead of just going back and forth. It's always better to talk in person to make sure things are being followed up on, because follow-up is the biggest thing, and that's where things kind of fall through the cracks. Hearing this from others that I thought were successful, and putting those types of things in place - I put those things in place, and I would feel that that's one thing that I would make sure that I would tell other people, is having meetings and doing face-to-face sometimes is better than just sending off emails and things like that. It's better to just really, really dive in and do a one-on-one with individuals when you are in a project management type of field or dealing with many projects, because it allows you to not have anything fall through the cracks, and to stay on top of things much more better.

Be flexible and be versatile in how you do things, being sure that you're looking and doing your own research before you approach different clients, so then you know you're giving them the right information. And always be proactive. In my area, I don't care if I got a message from a society member and they have an issue, I think the most important thing is don't let - if you can't find something right away, tell them that you're investigating it, you're looking into it, they know you're on top of it. So then when they need something, it's funny how they will come to you all the time, and that's what you want when you're relationship selling. You want them to come to you, even if it is an issue, and you're going to be having one of your staff do it. You're the key person, and that proactiveness, I think, is the key to a successful relationship with partners, clients, whoever you're dealing with, whoever your customer base is.

Opportunities are the ever-so-changing - if you're familiar with the accounting industry, it's ever so changing with all the different regulations, and depends on different types of political changes, things like that. So it's always a moving target on a lot of opportunities that could present themselves. The challenge is obviously keeping up on it and making sure that we're reporting out to our society partners on a timely basis, so then they can report out to their members too, because we want to remain as the influencer that they go to. There are other vendors, obviously, in our industry, like there are in others, but for CPA Crossings, we have a strong relationship of over 20 years that we've been doing this with different CPA societies. We're dealing with 52 states, we want to be the one that they're not just going to us as a vendor of CPE education, but they're going as an influencer, because we know, and we have a research team, we know all the trends that are happening, and we do a very good job of keeping up with all of those. So that's a challenge, because even though there's 52 states, it doesn't seem like a lot, but with everything that's going on between town halls and conferences and all the different updates that are happening, it's tough to push those out and make sure that they're knowledgeable to help them push it out and make sure their members are knowledgeable.