Public accounting is one of the most grind-oriented careers out there, especially for those on the partner track. An accountant’s career path is prescribed from the moment a freshly minted associate signs their letter of employment, and it looks roughly like this:
These are rough estimates, and each individual’s path will vary depending on their firm and personal situation. Still, you can expect to spend at least 10 years working to make partner, and that’s considered a short length of time these days. Most accountants will spend 12-18 years trying to make partner. If that’s your goal, you need to be mentally and physically prepared to survive more than a decade of full-time, hardcore number crunching. Even those who don’t have partnership aspirations are likely to experience burnout at some point in their careers. Public accounting firms excel at ratcheting up the pressure in your early years when you’re still developing coping strategies for work stress.
Tyler and I decided to co-author this article because we’ve both experienced burnout in our PA careers, and we’ve taken different strategies to manage that stress. We’re going to present our recommendations with one voice, but we also want to be forthright about our individual experiences.
Tyler left public accounting as a senior associate with five years of experience, just before the promotion to manager. I am still working in public accounting as a manager and have been 10-keying for over seven years. Based on our combined experiences, we feel comfortable recommending several Do’s and Don’ts for those looking to survive the grind. And if the grind becomes too much, we hope Tyler’s experience encourages you that there is life after public accounting. There’s no shame in bowing out if the stress starts impacting your health and happiness.
Surviving the Grind: Do These Things
Exercise and Eat Well
It should come as no surprise that we’re leading off with basic health tips. If your body is a machine that you plan to use and abuse for the next 15 years, you need to perform preventative maintenance. That means getting some sort of exercise most days, even if it’s just walking around the block for 30 minutes. It also means eating a balanced diet. You can’t validate financial statements on Red Bull and ramen alone.
Taking care of your body is especially important during busy season. The demands on your time will be immense, and taking breaks to refresh your body and mind make the marathon possible. We both find that regular breaks allow us to work more effectively, which can actually shorten those interminable days.
Examples:
- Associate Adam uses a meal service during busy season to help maintain a proper diet. He also makes sure to take a full hour lunch break (when possible) and eats dinner with his family. If it’s busy season, he’ll return to work late in the evenings after playing pickleball with his neighbors.
- Manager Meredith uses her dog as an excuse to sneak in short walks throughout the day. She does meal prep on Sundays to make sure she has plenty of options for healthy meals throughout the week. She also goes to exercise classes several times per week in order to stay physically fit.
Firmly Apply Boundaries
There’s a paradox to working in a professional environment: the more effectively you police the boundaries between your work life and personal life, the more respect you get from your work colleagues. Common sense would typically suggest the opposite. If you’re always available to help your colleagues, you would expect them to like you more, right? In most environments, that’s simply not the case.
The “Why” behind this paradox is full of nuances, ambiguities, and social dynamics, but it boils down to these (very oversimplified) features:
- If you are able to set and enforce boundaries, you are probably an organized and efficient worker. Time management is a key skill for successful employees, and being able to structure your day indicates that you have this skill.
- If you are able to enforce these boundaries, you probably have a reputation for being trustworthy and reliable. A fresh associate can announce that they’re going to sign off at 5:00 PM every day, but that won’t stop work calls from happening in the evenings unless the team trusts that this associate will get their work done properly and on-time.
- If you set and enforce these boundaries, you enable and encourage others to do the same. A hard-working, reliable employee who manages to separate their work life from their home life inspires others to behave similarly. People admire these features in their colleagues. Thus, setting boundaries can actually make your colleagues respect you more despite working shorter hours.
Again, successfully setting boundaries is contingent on your having a reputation for reliable work. But if you already have that reputation, surviving the grind will be much easier if you can shorten your working hours and garner more respect from your colleagues.
Examples:
- Director Doug takes his kids to school each morning. He has an understanding with his teammates, which is reinforced on his Outlook calendar, that he is unavailable from 7:30 AM to 8:30 AM every day. His colleagues and clients appreciate Doug’s work ethic and trust him to help them when he’s available later in the morning.
- Senior Sarah does bar trivia with her friends every Wednesday night from 6:00 PM to 8:00 PM. Her coworkers understand that she won’t be able to use her phone or laptop during this time period (that would be cheating!), so no one bothers her then. They also understand that she will address any emergencies after bar trivia, unless Sarah lost the chug-off tiebreaker, in which case she will handle those items in the morning.
Be Honest About Your Goals
We’ve spoken with a lot of partners and principals over the years. While partners are not a monolith, they do tend to have one thing in common: they knew very early in their careers that they wanted to be partners. Most started their public accounting careers with the intent of making partner. Those that didn’t almost universally knew within the first year. It’s rare to find a partner with a backstory that reads like, “Yeah, I just kind of bumbled along for 15 years until my mentor offered to make me partner.”
The reason people self-select for partnership so early in their careers is because it requires massive amounts of dedication to climb that high in the hierarchy. A good parallel is the medical profession. Aspiring doctors understand that that they’ll spend four years getting their undergraduate degree, take the MCAT, get into and graduate from medical school, survive residency, and complete a fellowship before becoming a fully licensed doctor. By the time someone is taking the MCAT, they’ve decided on their path. They may not make it all the way to becoming a doctor, but they’re dedicated to pursuing that goal. Similarly, by the time most aspriring partners become an associate, they’ve dedicated themselves to pursuing partnership.
If you started a career in public accounting without the goal of making partner, congratulations! You’re just like Tyler and me, and like 95% of the rest of us in the field. Some of us recognize that we’re not on the partner track immediately, or in three years in like Tyler, or in five years in like me. Others decide to just stick it out for as long as they can bear it to see how high they can climb. No approach is more correct than another, as long as you’re honest with yourself.
If you know you’re on the partner track, then you have a very long road ahead of you. You need to be as dedicated to maintaining your health and mental well-being as you are to producing quality workpapers and networking. If you’re not sure you want to make partner, or you’re sure you definitely don’t want to be a partner, then your road is probably shorter. You still need to take care of yourself, but the stakes are lower. You can focus more on things you enjoy rather than on dedicating all of your energies to your career.
Ultimately, being honest about your career aspirations is about adopting the appropriate mindset for your situation. If partnership isn’t in your future, then it’s perfectly reasonable to be an average accountant and focus on life outside of work. Give yourself some grace to mess things up, take extra time to learn those tricky concepts, and not angle for the early promotion.
Surviving the Grind: Don’t Do These Things
Burn Out Angling for a Promotion
Speaking of early promotions, we want to share the Early Promotion Parable:
Once upon a time, there was a senior associate. She desperately wanted to make manager, and reached an agreement with her bosses. She would work hard for the next six months to achieve a utilization rate above the benchmark for her peers, and if she achieved that goal, she would receive the promotion to manager.
After six months, our senior associate had upheld her end of the bargain. In the process of working extra hours to reach her utilization target, she burned herself out. She was running on fumes, but she felt accomplished at achieving her goal and receiving her reward. Her bosses did not uphold their end of the bargain. “Economic headwinds” resulted in the firm eliminating all early promotions that year. The senior associate’s burnout resulted in a litany of medical issues: she was grinding her teeth at night; she developed migraines; she was gaining weight from lack of exercise. Our senior decided to resign to protect her health. Had she stuck around another six months, she would have received her promotion to manager on the typical timeline.
This parable tells us two things:
- Unless you get them in writing, and with the approvals of the power brokers in your firm, promises don’t carry much water in public accounting.
- If your goal is to achieve a promotion, it’s better to approach it methodically rather than rushing it. Or, to borrow a tired cliché: public accounting is a marathon, not a sprint.
If you’re new to public accounting, six months may seem like a long time to wait for a promotion, especially if your bosses reneged on a promise to promote you previously. But over the course of a career, six months is insignificant. Our senior associate would have been better off working slower and maintaining her health. Public accounting rewards the patient, not the ambitious.
Put Work Before Your Health
A corollary to the Early Promotion Parable relates to sacrificing your health for your work. To borrow another tired cliché, “Do you want to live to work, or work to live?” You’ll see many colleagues living to work. They’ll sacrifice their free time, their social lives, and their health to pursue their goals of climbing the corporate ladder. Their rewards will be great if they achieve partner, but the costs are great as well.
Every person must decide for themselves how much they sacrifice their personal life for their work life. We’re of the mindset that once you experience health issues from work, it’s time to make a change. Maybe that’s negotiating a reduced work schedule, or asking to take a personal leave of absence, or quitting altogether. Public accounting jobs will always be there, but your health won’t. We strongly advocate for protecting it while it’s still in working order.
Buy the Dream of More Free Time as You Climb
There’s yet another common adage in public accounting: “You’ll work longer hours when you’re younger, but you’ll have more free time as you climb the ranks.” This is partly true.
You will work long hours as an associate and senior associate, but you’ll also work long hours as a manager, senior manager and partner, too. The difference isn’t in the amount of free time you have, but in the flexibility of when you work. The higher up you are in the hierarchy, the less restricted your schedule becomes. Associates are expected to be available from 9:00 AM to 6:00 PM, and sometimes outside of those hours when things are busy. Managers and partners may quietly disappear during those hours and catch up on work later in the evenings.
If you value that flexibility, rising up the ranks may provide the illusion of having more free time. But you also don’t get promotions by being lazy and ineffective. You’re still going to work long hours, and often even more hours than you did as an associate. You just have more choice over when and how you work.
We encourage you to share in the comments below if you’re experiencing burn out, or think you might be headed down that path. Everyone’s situation is unique, and burn out can manifest in a number of ways including hypertension, apathy, overeating/undereating, irritability, inability to focus, and more.