All right, so this first episode of The CPA exam series of career convos with Nikki I wanna talk you through where I started going back to the beginning and where it started how it started and how I got to where I am so going back to the beginning as far as going back to when I graduated with my accounting degree from Fisher at the Ohio State University so at that time like the the quarter of graduation the few months after and how that whole prep went. So we had been we meaning accounting students, career counselors, professors, advisors. They have been telling us about how the B strategic and exploring career opportunities and looking at public accounting versus industry had a few conversations about the CPA license, especially because the CPA exam had just changed a few years prior from the pen and paper to the computerized exam a few years prior, we had also had the introduction of socks after the whole Enron, Arthur Anderson, Tycho, all of those scandals came bubbling to the surface, and in my mind, I was like, yeah, if I'm an accountant, I have to be a CPA. That's like, going to medical school and not doing the residency. So I feel like it wouldn't be complete. I feel like my career would be incompl if I had got an accounting degree and I wasn't a CPA. I wasn't a certified public accountant. So with that, I cap it in the back of my mind, like, I do need to go and get this CPA license. At the time, my 22 year old man is thinking all I have to do is take the exam and I get a license. So I was saying I do need to do that at some point. But doing that means that I'm gonna be studying some more like I've been doing for the last five years. And right now, I wanna see what this accountant degree talking about and I wanna go out here and get me a corporate accounting job and make me some money so when I see what that's about, then I'll come back and see what I need to do to get my CPA license. So that was that. So I start my career in industry. There were reasons why I chose to not pursue public accounting. There's a whole nother career combos with Niki episode about why I my career is all industry, why I did not choose public accounting. So you can listen to that career combvos with Nikki. That might be the name of it of this episode. Why why I didn't do public accounting or something like that? So getting my first job out of school and in those first few years, I'd say the first five years I was the definition of a job hopper and it wasn't job popping like being at a job for six months and leaving and doing something else and being here for a year and doing that. It was a lot going on at the time. There were the first job I had. I was there for about six months and then they told me that the company, the division I worked for was going to be divested. And so the role I had, which was a financial analyst, was a role that was newly created just for me. So you create this new role for me. I'm in the role for six months. The company is put on the block for sale and now my role potentially goes away just out of college. I didn't wanna deal with that type of uncertainty. I was like nope not gonna do this. Let me find something a little bit more stable so I moved around. I moved to different cities in Ohio so that was part of my moves and there was also a point where I felt like I'm done with Ohio. I've lived in every major city. There's really nothing else for me to do here. Here comes another terrible winter and I don't wanna do this no more so then another move came another job move came when I relocated from Ohio to Georgia and so in those five years, I moved around a lot, but I learned a lot too and every job I had, I was intentional about soaking up everything I could about accounting so my first job was manufacturing cost accounting. I learned really quickly and I remembered my cost accounting classes. I remember or I it it sunk in with me real quick that manufacturing is not an industry. I would be interested in so, but I learned it and I I had a job where it was a real on the job type of experience where every morning I would have to mess up my freeze curls cause I had to put on the hard hat and I had to take off my stilettos and put on some steel toe boots and go out into the plant talk to the production manager talk to them about what happened overnight what what products got made what came in on the the rail cars what we need to do for audit what we need to do for the annual physical inventory count all of those things I learned and then my second job I learned about joint venture accounting and um the month enclosed cycle producing corporate tax returns, nuclear pharmacy, which if you think about nuclear pharmacy, you think about like weapons of mass destruction, at least I did, but I learned something about pharmaceuticals, healthcare industry, um, really learn how to work on the team. I learned how politics and reporting structures and hierarchy so I learned a lot of technical accounting stuff, but I learned a lot of non-technical cultural things, a lot of those, what I call unwritten career rules are things that I learn and then another job I learned about inner company accounting and when you work for a subsidiary and you have to close the books with the subsidiary, then you have to close again so two month in closes in one month you close a subsidiary then you close with the parent consolidated financials complicated account reconciliation um reconciling equity accounts. I got to do a lot of different things. I got to see what happens not only on the due diligence and the the boardroom side of divestigures and MMA, but also the political side of it when the companies who are merging or divesting or whatever they're doing in the transaction aren't really seeing eye to eye, and this is more of a, you know, on paper thing, but because it works, it's a mutual benefit, but we don't like each other. Like there were so many things I was able to see, even as I moved around. And so within five years, I went from a financial analyst to, wait, 456 yeah, so within five years, I went from a financial analyst to a manager managing a team of 30 people managing multiple departments and it's still in my mind now you know I've I've seen a lot. I've done a lot in a short time. I need to revisit the CPA thing figure out what that needs to look like and start putting my plan together for what I'm gonna do but by this time, I am pregnant with my son working the manager job. This was like 2007 so still within those five years so it was more like, no, it wasn't even five years. It was more like three years within three years, I went from a financial analyst to a manager and then at this time, I' I'm pregnant in 2007. I have my son in 2008 and I got to the point where I took an extended maternity leave and when it was time to go back to work, I was having these mixed emotions like I don't wanna drop my baby off or somebody else to take care of him. I don't want him to go to daycare with all the germs and it's just like a stand in Petri dish in there and I would rather be home with him. I don't wanna go back into the office. I don't wanna deal with these people and I was like, if I was a CPA, I could build my own business and I wouldn't have to worry about dealing with these people and I could make my own rules and build my business my way and this, that, and the third. So in 2009, I started the Winston accounting group today it's the Winston CPA group but at the time it had to be the Winston accounting group because I wasn't the CPA so I couldn't put any reference to CPA in my company's name so at that time, I grew my business through word the mouth. This is when you know the the entrepreneurs, the creatives, the the business owners, the black girl magic was really starting to pop on Twitter. And so I got to know a lot of people on Twitter business besties if you'll call them I got my first client off of Twitter actually somebody who I used to talk to on a daily basis on Twitter referred one of their um business associates to me. And I helped her with some stuff. And to this day, I still have the testimonial that my first client gave about how she enjoyed working with me, how thorough I was, how she would definitely recommend me and work with me again. And I solved all of her problems and, you know, addressed all her issues. And I was like, yeah, if I can do this without the CPA, imagine what I'm going to do when I am a CPA and so the Winston accounting group was there. I still had my corporate job and I'm I'm I'm a new mama and I'm trying to figure out this whole employeepreneur thing. So I do like, I I do like corporate accounting. I do like my job. So I don't want to leave my job, but I still want to build something of my own and I want to do it in a way that feels right to me that it can grow and evolve with me. So I don't have to feel like I'm rushing just to throw a business out there to say I have a business, but I have time to really let it simmer, let it marinate, let it build it out and give it the time that it deserves to grow and develop and evolve so I did that got into doing taxes for a few years fast forward to 2011 I'm pregnant with my daughter. I'm put on bed rest for 18 weeks. That shit was crazy. That's a whole nother story for a whole nother day over on the work at mamas podcast and I was like okay now I got two kids and having two kids is way different than having one kid and I got the same 24 hours, but I have way more responsibilities. I got my job. I got two babies. I'm trying to build a business and I got to figure out how I'm going to make this work. But here I go again still got that CPA in the back of my mind. And so becoming a CPA occupant some prime real estate in my head for probably the next two to three years and so within that time frame, of course I'm a mama. I'm working. I'm trying to juggle and manage it all and still building up my my corporate accounting career and my brand as an accounting professional. So I started being invited to join boards and serve as um serve on the board of directors serve as advisor um serve on different councils and things like that. And so one of the boards I was on, I was a board member of NABA Atlanta and we have board members every month at the SEC building and there were maybe eight of us, eight or nine of us and I would say 70% of the board were CPAs. I was part of the 30% that was not and I would talk to them about it. I looked forward to our board meetings because I enjoyed being around them. I felt like let me see what the energy and what the air and what the aura is like when you're in the midst of CPAs and how that inspires and rubs off on me and I would tell my board members about my intentions. Yeah, I wanna. I'm gonna study for the exam. It's on my list. I'm gonna do it, but it's a lot going on right now. Shit crazy at work. My kids are little, you know all all these all these things, all these factors that were hindering me from becoming a CPA and I remember August of 2014. It was dark and we were late leaving the board meeting because we finished the board meeting and then we hung around and just pontificated and lollig gagged for a minute, and I walked out with one of my board members and we got on the subject of the CPA and she asked me why are you not a CPA and I told her exactly what I just mentioned. I'm working on it. It's on my list of things I'm gonna do, but work is crazy. It's a lot going on. I'm traveling. My kids are little. I was just giving her my whole sob story of why the CPA exam was a thought in my head and not an action in reality and I told her all of that and when you when you share that with somebody and you're you're just laying out for them while you haven't done it yet, it feels like a lot. It can feel heavy. It can feel overwhelming. And I don't know why I was expecting empathy and I thought she was gonna say oh yeah that makes sense. I get it but instead she said OK so we're stopping you and I said well it's a lot going on. I don't even know how I'm gonna find the time to do it cause I can barely find time for my life right now and she said OK well stopping you and I kept giving her different things like wondering when she was gonna say okay I get it. I feel you, but I didn't get that from her. She lit a fire under me. All she kept saying was "What's stopping you?" And she talked me out of my excuses until I didn't have any more excuses to give by the seventh or eighth time that she had said was stopping you and I said you right. What's stopping me and she challenged me and she said, so I want to know that by our next board meeting that you've at least looked at review courses, I said OK I'll do that but me having a firelight under me like that and feeling like nobody ain't nobody gonna challenge me and I'm not gonna lose the challenge. So I'm gonna do you more than this is what I'm saying in my head. I'm not saying it to her. This is what I'm saying actually in my car on the way home from the board meeting like.. This is what you know, I'm going to do you one better. I'm not just going to come back and look at the course materials. I'm going to show you that I've enrolled in the course in the review program and I'm going to get started So our September board meeting rolls around and I showed her like I picked a course and I start my classes so I had picked a review course where I work during the day. I leave work about 5 o'clock and then I would go to hotel conference conference room and I would sit there from 6 to 10 with 10 or 15 other CPA candidates and we would do live review sessions now what these sessions were so I had coarse materials. I had the book. I had flashcards. I had videos. I had test banks and the in-person was basically a live verbatim regurgitation of what was in the book. So if you just think about, I can go home take my book take my fire book, for example, cause I did far first take my far book and I can read all 68 pages of this chapter or I can go to this study group, which is essentially what it was and we can read the pages out loud and we can talk through stuff and we can take breaks and say hi to each other and we can talk to the instructor for a few minutes after so initially I felt like I'm gonna get I need to I need to be in class. I need to talk to people. I need to see it. I need to feel it understand it and I was like you know I don't know what that did for me because I thought I was gonna get something different out of the in, the live in person, but we just really just literally read the pages of the chapter and we still had to go. I still had to go home and do the practice questions figure out the concepts and try to memorize the things that they were telling me to memorize and I went through all of that. I took far first past it with no problem. The reason I passed it with no problem is because all of those years where I had set and thought about it, contemplated pontificated analyzed overanalyzed made excuses all of those years where I was doing that I was working in corporate accounting and so corporate accounting is a great foundation for understanding far and a lot of the far blueprint was essentially my day job so this was almost like a test of how good I was at my job so far it was nothing past it past it with no issues and then I felt like well of all the other exams are like this shit I can be done in six months like this is nothing. I'll be done in six months. So I'm done with that. Flip over to Audit. So same thing I have my books. I have the videos. I have the Test bank. I have um and I'm still going to the live sessions for audit, but at this point second time around, I felt like I got this and Far was a whole lot of content and audit is like half of the content. The audit book was like half the size of the fire book. I was like I got this. I might not even need to come to all these in-person sessions and I could really just figure this out on my own so I at the time, I think Audit went up to A5, maybe a six, and I probably did. I probably studied up through a three, maybe a4 so there was at least one whole section of audit that I skipped because I felt like I got this and maybe it's not gonna be as hard as I thought I procrastinated for nothing. Let me just go on the skirt through, knock these out and I did that and I got the 72 and a couple things were going on there as far as getting that fail like being on such a high from passing far and feeling like I was nervous about something that I shouldn't have been nervous about and if I can pass this section and this section is easy all the other ones are gonna be like that so that 72 knocked me back a little bit and it humbled me real quick and that is where shit started to get real so I'm a pause for now cause I want y'all to take in this part and then part two I'll talk about what happened when I opened my email that said score notification and I saw that 72 for audit so I stopped there whatever thoughts questions, comments, fields thoughts and feels you have about this particular episode. Let me know. You can share it. You can send me a note. You can reach out on link 10, but um I wanna give you' that for now and then we'll come back and we'll talk about part two when I failed an exam for the first time