Ep. 56: Peter Margaritas - Storytelling in the Foreign Language of Accounting

Peter's website: www.petermargaritis.com


Peter's books (Both books can be found on Amazon
in paperback and Kindle.  Improv Is No Joke can be found on
Audible)"


www.TakingTheNumbOutOfNumbersBook.com

http://petermargaritis.com/improv-is-no-joke-book/



Change Your Mindset Podcast (Can be found on
Apple Podcasts, C-Suite Radio, Spotify, iHeartRadio, and many
other podcast platforms)


Apple Podcasts:
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/change-your-mindset/id1127514117

C-Suite Radio:
https://c-suitenetwork.com/radio/shows/change-your-mindset/

Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/5EXc70lxp3g6SWXBab596y

iHeartRadio:
https://www.iheart.com/podcast/256-change-your-mindset-30921543/




FULL EPISODE TRANSCRIPT
Adam: (00:00)


We are back for another episode of Count Me In. I'm your host,
Adam Larson, and we are now up to our 56 episode of the series.
For today's discussion, we are going to hear Peter Margaritas,
the accidental accountant. Talk to Mitch about the value of
storytelling and accounting. Peter is an engaging storyteller
himself. So we will cookie jump over to hear his perspective
now. 


 


Mitch: (00:25)


Thanks for joining us today Peter. And as I was just kind of
mentioning to you, I've done a little poking around, a little
background checking here and I came across, the accidental
accountant. So I'm wondering if you can kick that off and, you
know, tell us a little bit about what that means. 


 


Peter: (00:46)


Oh, what that means was I didn't get into this profession until I
was 30 years old. I'm Greek, I'm a Greek American. I really
should be in a restaurant versus being a CPA. And I grew up in a
very good Gary us environment, worked in many restaurants, were
very customer focused. And when I got into the accounting
profession, I understood it. I loved it. I'm not kind that does
it very well. And actually in one of my reviews from my employer
before I even sat down, she said, how in the heck did you ever
become a CPA? The CPA can get all the way down to this detail.
I'd only get you about three quarters of the way. You're an
accidental accountant. And I thanked her for that. That was the
nicest thing she had said. And so I, I've actually taken that and
it's registered trademark and is, I'm doing business as the
accidental accountants. 


 


Mitch: (01:40)


That's great. So as I'm going through this and I come across some
of your other work here and I saw an article that you put out
there, I believe it was accounting today. And, my next question
is really about the profession in general and, and how has data
and technology really changed the accounting industry in your
opinion? The article was written about whether or not gap is
really in touch with today's economy. So how does that all piece
together? 


 


Peter: (02:06)


I think by the 1900's I mean we really talking about data
analytics or even in the 20s now we're so data-driven and
analytics-driven and, but if you sit and think about what
accounting standards when they're written and when FASBI is
proposing them primarily for publicly held entities, especially
very large publicly held entities and they do feel tested and
they get these luxury organizations to be part of part of it. But
a lot of companies out there use gap statements because it's
required of them to use gap statements. And they're much smaller
entities. I mean the complexity of a gap, the revenue, the new
revenue recognition standard, which is principles based now
rules-based, there's over 700 pages. The convocation has over
10,000 pages. So what we're trying, and it seems like we're
always trying to catch up, and think about back when the
derivatives and during the Enron years and we were trying to
write standards, what was it? Fin 46 and Fin46R then, there were
SPEs, now they're VIE's we were writing them. We felt like we
were, yeah, four or five years behind. We looking at today, you
know, the SAS applications, you know, business software
applications are being delivered on demand via the cloud and some
of the metrics that are important within these organizations as
recurring revenue, you know, churn rate, the number of
subscribers which are crucial to their business. There's no way
fashion is not addressed any of these things. So there's, I've,
I've always felt that there always has been somewhat of a, gap,
lack of a better term between, you know, what we're writing and
where the U S economy is going. And we've, it's gotten so complex
that counselors can even describe to the clients. And when I say
clients, I mean both internal and external CFOs, you know, in
the, in that group to their clients, what the purpose behind it.
What we're doing, how do we apply it? It's very, very
complex. 


 


Mitch: (04:28)


So I guess, you know, what I'm curious about really is, aside
from the complexities, aside from being behind the times,
essentially, what challenges is this really causing for today's
accountants? And how are these standards, you know, really
hurting the performance of today's accountant. 


 


Peter: (04:49)


I'll share a story with you. As soon after that article came out,
I had a partner firm contacted me here in the central Ohio area
and she said, I love your article and as you shared the story
with me that their firm was doing a after hours gathering, CPE
kind of gathering and they invited all the community and local
banks in the area into this thing. And basically they were
talking to the banks to see if they would start accepting the
AICPA SME model for standards versus US gap because of the
complexity. Yeah. I'm a former banker and I, bankers don't really
understand the complexity that we're dealing with and when we're
trying to, like my buddy who is still in banking when rev, rec,
and leasing was coming out, he contacted me, he goes, so you guys
just make standards to keep your jobs to be irrelevant to, is
this like full employment? Now? What, why not? But perception and
reality are so different. And when we try to communicate these
standards to our clients within the organization, like
consolidations vie's, there's thousands and thousands, hundreds
of pages out there on this topic. And when we're just data
dumping information, Oh, we're doing this, put it in sleep. Well
we need to learn how to well well I asked my audiences is well a
question like how many of you speak a foreign language? And I
mean a few hands, you know, French, Spanish, Japanese. I said,
let me reword that question. How many speak the foreign language
of business call accounting? And they all start laughing and I
went, it is a foreign language to the sales department, to human
resources, to every part of the organization. Other than
accounting and finance. Have you ever tried to explain anything
to a sales, our HR person, whomever, can you listen to yourself?
You're speaking in the foreign language of accounting, we have to
become better translators of this language into plain English.
And I think that's our biggest challenge is recognizing that we
speak a foreign l...