Ep. 35: Keith Lewis - Separate Yourself = Quantifying Accounting Abilities

Contact Keith:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/keithlewiscma/
Keith's website: https://www.keithericlewis.com


FULL EPISODE TRANSCRIPT
Adam: (00:05)


Welcome back to Count Me In, IMA’s podcast about all things
affecting the accounting and finance world. I am your host, Adam
Larson, and this is episode 35 of our series. In a moment you
will hear Keith Lewis, management accountant and an international
speaker share his big picture thoughts on how individuals can
utilize best practices and develop the skills needed to set them
apart when looking to build their own brand in today's
competitive accounting market. Keep listening now for more
details in his full conversation with me. 


 


Mitch: (00:39)


What steps does one need to take in order to really quantify
their skills on a resume? 


 


Keith: (00:45)


Well, Mitch that's a great question and one of the things that
you need to focus on is three key things that you want to focus
on is how many, how often, and how much, how many people have you
interacted with? Did they span across different business units on
a horizontal level? Did you go up to the higher ups, the C level
executives on a vertical basis, and how many individuals were you
able to touch in terms of your reach within your position? The
second key thing that you want to focus on is how it walked in.
Was this a daily task or the weekly, monthly Semi-annually, or
annually and then finally how much, how much were you able to
save the company or make the company by the process that you were
taken in order to get results driven action? How I take it back
to an experience that I had and a couple of the positions that
I've worked in, I created standard operating procedures, which is
also known as SOPs. These things were put in place for our new
hires and assisted with the in the onboarding process. This save
time during the time that they were being on onboarding and it
helped the employees to be come more productive sooner than
normal. 


 


Mitch: (02:08)


So what strategy goes into how you want to be perceived by the
employers once you're able to quantify this on your resume? 


 


Keith: (02:17)


Another great question. The dots for your brand will be connected
via the combination of your resume and your social media
platforms. Somebody has checked your platform, your LinkedIn,
your GlassDoor to see the connections that you have and how is it
aligned to the resume that you're presenting. You need to stop
viewing yourself as a company of one. You're here to provide a
service for a company either via W2, 1099, or direct B2B if
you're a business owner. Finally, you are a sales consultant and
the best product that you have and everybody wants is you. You
just need to know how to actually quantify your skills, know what
your value proposition and presented to the individuals. 


 


Mitch: (03:04)


That's a great point. And now once you're able to quantify your
skills and you kind of have this perception that you're looking
to display, what is the best way for you to utilize something
like LinkedIn when it comes to building your brand and further
establishing who you are? 


 


Keith: (03:26)


I like to use LinkedIn as my canvas. I remember at one point in
order to reach out to the decision makers within a company, you
have to cold call the company, act as if you weren't who you were
in order to get a contact. Just to be able to reach out to him.
Put your best foot forward. Now you have tools like LinkedIn
where you're able to wait the decision makers within the company
that you may want to go to or get interesting information from
companies that you've seen information about. I think that this
is very important that you have a consistent message on your
LinkedIn that is really cohesive to what you are representing on
your resume. You want to create posts that helpful that to
provide insights to individuals and give them actionable items
that can better their situation no matter what position they're
in currently.


 


Mitch: (04:23)


How can we further differentiate ourselves from all of the other
applications though? What's another tip that I could do to
separate myself from others during the interview process? 


 


Keith: (04:36)


Well, this is a great thing and I'm a true believer that one of
the best ways to separate yourself, there's a thank you card.
I've been able to position myself in a lot of great opportunities
based off the fact that I did a thank you card. It seems to be
very rare, but the one thing that people don't take into
consideration is that when you're asking the questions at the end
that every interviewer asked you if you have, you have two
purposes. One is to further build that common ground, which with
whoever you're interviewing during that time and two, you want to
provide the basis for your thank you cards. So when I crossed my
handwritten thank you cards, I specifically make an effort not to
discuss the position at all. All I want to do is thank them for
the opportunity that they'd provided and taking the time out to
actually meet with me. I focus on common ground building items
during the interview instead. An example of that is one of the
thank you caused that I've crafted during one of the interviews
at a company I interview for, I found out that they had young
children through my questioning and I mentioned to them that
there was a guy that was based out of Philadelphia named grandpa
bubbles that hosts different free events in the parks in the
surrounding area. Now totally it was something that she may be
interested in and even provided the website for. She really
appreciated that because it wasn't about, the interview wasn't
about the position. It was really about just building that
genuine connection and that's what you're able to do through a
thank you card. 


 


Mitch: (06:13)


Just as a quick follow-up to that question, what is the benefit
of a handwritten thank you card as opposed to, you know, the more
traditional email today? 


 


Keith: (06:25)


Well, I think that a handwritten thank you card, it shows the
efforts. It's very easy to go online and just write some type of
email that you send out to somebody. It seems very generic and is
not very personable. I feel that the handwritten, especially if
you're doing a handwritten thank you card, it shows the time and
the effort and the genuine interest of this person to actually
want to reach out to you and thanks. Good. 


 


Mitch: (06:53)


I think that's a great piece of advice and you've been able to
share some of your personal experiences. So I'm just kind of
curious, what do you think has been the number one marketing tool
that you've been able to use when approaching other
companies? 


 


Keith: (07:08)


I think that's also another excellent question. I think that
there's a number of things that I've used and been able to do
that helped me and my upward mobility within the different
companies that I worked for. I would say obtaining the CMA
certification has probably been the number one marketing tool
that I've had up til this point in my career. Expertise and
understanding that I have been able to gain from the breath is
knowledge that's contain...