Margaret Atkins Munro

I attribute my success to thinking differently than traditional accountants because I don't have formal accounting training. My educational background in Medieval History taught me how to think critically and approach problems from different angles. Numbers just speak to me, and I'm equally good in math as I am verbal, so I can transfer my knowledge of numbers into understandable words without resorting to accounting jargon, wusing both my right brain and left brain. I look at what I see and often pull very different conclusions from the data than other, more traditionally trained accountants, going in different directions, which makes me a unicorn in my field. I've had tremendous mentors throughout my career who gave me license to explore and do more, and the only way I can thank them is to pay it forward by mentoring others. I've always been willing to take jumps and embrace opportunities even when they're scary, and I think you learn way more from your failures than you do from your successes, so I'm open to failure. I've never done this for the money and have never earned what I should have earned, but I've had a really interesting and varied career, and I have no regrets about doing what I do.

There are a couple of items that quickly come to mind:

First, always be polite. Even when someone treats you poorly, take the high road. It is far better to let you determine who you are and how you behave than let someone else dictate that for you.

Second, there is no job in the office that I am too good to do. If filing needs to be done, and I have time on my hands, then I will file. If coffee needs to be made, then I will make the coffee if I have the time. I will never ask one of my employees to do work which I do not know how to do, and even though I am the boss, that doesn't excuse me from doing my fair share of the drudge work.

I would say, do not sell yourself short. Do not sit there and accept less than you are worth, both financially and professionally, and everything else. Call out the misogyny as you see it. Stand up for yourself. Be that woman. Make sure of your facts, by all means, but then stick to them. Don't let other people trample you or put you in a corner, or take your light. I've worked in a man's profession and a man's world, and the amount of misogyny that I have encountered over the years has been ferocious. It's important to recognize the people who will lift you up versus those who see you as a threat and are interested in using what you're producing to enhance their own persona rather than raising you up.

I think what I'm seeing for people who want to go into this field is that they actually have to go and get accounting degrees, and there are a lot of people out there who may be really great with numbers and who could sit the special enrollment exam, but when AI is vetting resumes and you don't have that CPA listed and that accounting degree and that master's in taxation, they're not even going to look at you. I think that's a huge problem because you're losing a lot of talent. Accountants are taught to be accountants, not taught to think outside the box. They're taught to think the way accountants are supposed to think, but there's no supposed to. We're in all new territory. The world is changing so rapidly, and you have to be able to think outside the box. If I were hiring, I would go after the history majors because they have to write theses and think critically, hypothesize a question, think it through, and come out with a conclusion. They're not told to put peg A into hole A. I want somebody who can think critically, and I don't believe that accountants and MBAs necessarily are taught to think critically.

Ethics and integrity. That's an easy one. I can't believe that people would ask a professional to lie on their tax returns, asking me to risk my livelihood and my family's well-being. I don't go there. I am not paid to lie for you, and I will hand their books back to clients who ask me to. I will get you every penny I legally can, but I'm not going to take a specious position just because it might save you a little tax money. Taxes are the price we pay for a civilized society, and while none of us enjoy paying our taxes, that's the price we pay for living with paved roads, police and fire protection, schools, and all the other things. I have to sleep at night. When I make a mistake, I will tell my clients that I made a mistake, that it's my error, and the cost of fixing the error is always on me. It's my mistake, and I will never push the blame off on somebody else. If it's somebody that works for me, it's still my mistake because I should have caught it. That's really important to me.