The first few months felt odd. There was a learning curve right out of the gate, so naturally I was uncomfortable. I was the new guy and I felt like a fish out of water. Prior to this experience, I spent the first few years of my career at EY, where in hindsight when I walked in on day one I was treated like the baby I was that knew absolutely nothing. I was slowly weaned off the spoon-feeding at EY, and it wasn't until I left and walked into one of the best performing investment banks on Wall Street that I had actually realized it.
One of the earliest impressions I have of Goldman was the recruiter telling me "We're a flatter organization, and it's a true meritocracy." It definitely sounded cool and my naivete immediately thought "great, I should make Partner by next year given the badass I am." One year later, I had a real fresh perspective.
Over my first six months working in Goldman's Finance Division I had a few ups and many downs. To say it was humbling is an understatement. I learned a lot about Capital Markets fairly quickly, and in hindsight was involved in the reporting of some very influential transactions: the Uber, Spotify, Palantir, and Dropbox IPOs, among others. The technical aspects of what I learned through my time at the firm helped me in my overall development, but the technical skillsets were not the most valuable things that I learned.
After my first couple of weeks I started joining one of the VPs on our team for the daily P&L reporting meeting. For context, less than an hour after market closes, the daily P&L gets read out by each division within the firm (globally) to the senior executive team. It's a very quick, fast-paced meeting that calls out the main drivers to the firm's performance that day. In the first few meetings, I had no idea what was going on other than listening to a bunch of people rattling off what sounded like finance gibberish. Was I intimidated? A little.
I realized I had a lot to learn, and quickly. A little over a month in, it was my time to actually call out the daily P&L for the Investment Banking Division. I butchered it, and I heard about it as soon as I got back in the elevator after leaving the meeting. What happened over the next couple of years was this: I pushed myself to get better, to learn quickly, to ask a lot of questions, and to take a lot of initiative. I was uncomfortable — a lot — but it was great. And it helped me tremendously.
I paid very close attention to the highest performers at the firm and I started to notice something. It wasn't about what they knew that made them top performers. In fact, many of them would probably tell you they weren't very technically competent when it came to accounting and finance at all. What they did well had everything to do with how they spoke, how they wrote, how they carried themselves, how they commanded a room; little to do with numbers and markets at the end of the day.
What I realized over time, and more so in hindsight, was that value accrued to people that could do two things well: understand problems, and communicate very effectively. Warren Buffett reportedly credits much of his success to a Dale Carnegie public speaking course, the diploma is framed and hanging in his office. That didn't surprise me. When I recall my time within the walls of Goldman Sachs, the things I remember having the biggest impact weren't the specific deals or big P&L days. It was all about the people dynamics.
When I was there, I was "learning through my skin." I was subconsciously picking up on the things that made people great, and those things were not the obvious ones that I think most people would point to.
Six years later, I’m running one of the fastest growing accounting firms in the country, with over 70 incredible people on staff. The irony isn’t lost on me — I run an accounting firm, and the most important things I do every day have almost nothing to do with accounting. I hire for communication. I build culture through how I show up in a room. I win clients not on technical merit alone, but on trust built through how we speak and how we listen.
In accounting, retained earnings are the profits a company holds onto — value that accumulates quietly over time rather than gets paid out. Looking back, the Goldman years were exactly that for me. Not the deals, not the prestige, not the brand on a résumé. The retained earnings were the lessons I didn’t even know I was collecting until years later, when I needed them most.