This post is the second in a two part series: read last week's post here.
by Kevin
Our second tale comes from Ian Morris. I met Ian several years ago while he was still a college student at Oklahoma Christian University. Consequently, it has been particularly satisfying to see his career develop to where it is now. However, it wasn’t always smooth sailing for Ian. As careers often do, his journey demanded difficult decisions, as you can read below...
by Ian Morris
I had been working in Public Accounting for just over five years and was starting to get restless in my job and was reimagining where I wanted my career to head. This was the first time I truly felt like I did not know what the next step in my career would be. There was one feeling I felt every time that I thought of making a real change: FEAR. Fear, as I would come to learn a little later, was the one major hurdle to me taking action to seek and ultimately find an incredible opportunity.
After five years, I left one month prior to being promoted to manager. It all began to unravel in the summer of 2018. At that time I was working as a Tax Senior at Ernst &Young in Dallas, TX and was enjoying almost every aspect of it. I was performing my job at a high level, got to work with incredible colleagues and clients each day, and was just notified of a promotion to Manager later that fall. Sounds like a dream, right? Ever since I graduated college and got my CPA license five years prior this had been my goal and I truly loved it, most of the time. I began to reconsider after a conversation I had with a guy at church that was several years older than I, and had a very similar career as mine up to this point. The difference between him and I was that he decided to leave BEFORE making manager for, what I considered was, the dream exit opportunity.
This began me on the path of wondering if I, too, could find this elusive opportunity early on. What made the choice difficult was that again, I was overall very happy where I was at and had a stable and well defined career path for at least the next 7-10 years. My only hesitation with continuing in Public Accounting long term was the constant late hours and ever increasing administrative responsibilities as you progress. At the time my wife and I were expecting our first child, so those long hours at the office weighed especially heavy on my mind. After much thought and time, I made the decision to seek out a recruiter. I ended up working with three separate recruiters and moving on from the first two before gaining some traction with the third one. Through that process I learned that my biggest obstacle to finding my dream opportunity was my fear of the unknown and endless what ifs.
Once I learned what was holding me back I began to search for how to overcome this fear. At the time I had just purchased a book by Tim Ferris called Tools of Titans. In searching through this book for some inspiration I came across a section called Fear Setting, and it turned out to be just what I needed. It is a simple exercise of defining your fears pertaining to a specific decision you are struggling with and weighting the probability of that fear actually happening, then coming up with a solution to mitigate it. Through that exercise it became clear that I was stuck on what if I change jobs and end up unhappy, thus wasting time when I could have been progressing in Public Accounting. This fear was holding me back from exploring what possible opportunities were out there.
After doing this exercise a couple more times, meeting with my mentors (including Kevin), and talking it over with my wife, I decided to move forward with the job hunt and find that opportunity. At EY I was working primarily with real estate and private equity clients. I found the mix of real estate and private equity very interesting and knew this mix could be were very profitable depending on the company. Thankfully in Dallas, TX there are a number of these types of firms that my recruiter began seeking out for me.
I also wanted make a trajectory change in my career and get away from just focusing on taxes as that was not what I desired to do indefinitely. This proved to be difficult because not many companies wanted to take on, and pay, someone with five years’ experience in tax just to give them a fresh start. At this point I started to see the writing on the wall and had three viable options. I either make a change, stay in Public Accounting, or switch over to industry at some point as a tax manager or director. The latter two of these are great careers and pay well, but ultimately were not what I truly desired for myself long term. I hoped to one day be the CFO at a private equity fund, and making this trajectory change early on seemed like a good next step in that direction.
With a narrower list of companies I was willing to look at and also wanting to shift away from tax we began the search. At the time I was just starting with my third and final recruiter and was fortunate in that they had a couple companies in mind, one large investment company with public funds and one smaller private company that focused solely on real estate. I ended up interviewing at each of these companies plus one more and got an offer with the third one I interviewed at. Fortunately that ended up being my favorite of the three and I was ecstatic to have gotten an offer there. In the end after a little bit of negotiation we were able to come to an agreement and I happily made the move.
After almost two years at the new company I can say that this has been a great move and I have been truly fortunate in that I get to do what I enjoy each day. We are presented with new and exciting challenges daily and I feel I am continually learning new things. To wrap it all up, I would strongly encourage anyone who reads the blog to let the things you will learn through Kevin and Adam’s mentorship guide you. I would also encourage anyone who is struggling to make a difficult choice or determine which path to take, to do the Fear Setting exercise I mentioned. Both will change the way you confront your fears and lay out the path to making more sound decisions.