“It’s not just about winning clients. It’s about building a culture where people want to stay and grow.”
In this episode, Craig P. Anderson welcomes Cassie Dunn, Managing Partner at Haines, Isenbarger & Skiba LLC, to share her journey of leadership in the accounting world. Cassie opens up about the lessons she’s learned leading through growth, acquisitions, and client transitions, including why sometimes letting go of clients can be the best move for employee happiness and long-term success. She reflects on her earliest leadership roles, from high school cross country captain to coxswain in college, and how those experiences shaped her approach to humility, hard work, and empowering others. Craig and Cassie also tackle the role of soft skills in leadership, the challenges of talent shortages in accounting, and why culture is at the center of every decision she makes.
After You Listen:
Key Takeaways:
Things to listen for:
(00:00) Intro
(02:01) Lightning round leadership insights
(04:16) Why peer support matters in leadership
(07:17) Defining leadership and business growth
(08:19) How acquisition affects culture fit
(10:43) Reframing accounting as a decision-making discipline
(13:01) Leadership lessons from a former cross country team captain
(16:05) What to focus on as a leader of a growing company
(21:35) Value of learning soft skills early
Episode Transcript
This has been generated by AI and optimized by a human.
[00:00:00] Craig P. Anderson: They were my biggest customer. They were my most difficult customer. They made everyone's life miserable and I fought so hard to keep them. Welcome to Executive Evolution. I have over 25 years of leadership experience in corporate America. I learned a lot of lessons the hard way, and I created this podcast so that you won't have to.
[00:00:23] Craig P. Anderson: Early on in my career, I landed a whale of a client. It was a huge deal, probably. One of the two events that really set the path for my career, but the person who was the point of contact at that client had a lot of things going on with themselves, very difficult. Client made our customer service people miserable, would find my home number and call and demand things.
[00:00:47] Craig P. Anderson: It was really problematic and in retrospect, I really wonder how good of a thing it was. My company had the support to keep pushing forward on this client. Our operations people were less happy with it, and I really wonder if it was the right thing for the company today. I think I may have taken a different tack on that and really demanded from that person's leadership that they change if we were gonna continue our partnership together.
[00:01:14] Craig P. Anderson: But to Young Craig, with this first big deal, that deal was paramount to me. On today's episode of Executive Evolution, I'm joined by Cassie Dunn, the managing partner at Haines, Isenbarger & Skiba LLC, an accounting firm at Fort Wayne, Indiana. One of the things she talks about is the importance of culture fit, not just on her leadership team, on her team and the leadership team, but also a cultural fit with the clients that they have.
[00:01:39] Craig P. Anderson: So let's jump right in to hear the story of her Executive Evolution. Cassie, welcome to the Executive Evolution podcast. Thanks for being on today.
[00:01:47] Cassie Dunn: Thanks for having me, Craig.
[00:01:48] Craig P. Anderson: I'm very excited. Uh, you know, we've had an opportunity to work together, even though you are way far away up in the world of Fort Wayne, Indiana, which for those of you who don't know, Indianapolis is a good two and a half hours away.
[00:01:59] Craig P. Anderson: But I'm glad to have you here and take, hear the story of your Executive Evolution. So, are you ready for the lightning round?
[00:02:05] Cassie Dunn: I'm ready for the lightning round.
[00:02:07] Craig P. Anderson: All right, let's jump right in. First question, best book on leadership you've ever read.
[00:02:13] Cassie Dunn: So I'm gonna be honest, I'm terrible about actually finishing leadership books, but I
[00:02:17] Craig P. Anderson: think
[00:02:18] Cassie Dunn: Okay.
[00:02:18] Cassie Dunn: Favorite book I've ever read. I'm currently reading, I'm in the middle of a three part biography of Winston Churchill, written by William Manchester. In total, it ends up being about 2,500 pages, and I've read about 1600 of those 2,500. Right now it's entitled The Last Lion.
[00:02:33] Craig P. Anderson: Wow. Wow. Go ahead.
[00:02:37] Cassie Dunn: It's excellent.
[00:02:38] Cassie Dunn: Now, what's interesting about Winston Churchill as a leader is he was actually a terrible boss, but he was a phenomenal leader. I am super into it right now. Obviously, I've read 1600 pages over the summer and into the fall, so
[00:02:49] Craig P. Anderson: that's great. Yeah. The only one I've ever persevered through of like big historical figure autobiographies was the Teddy Roosevelt.
[00:02:54] Craig P. Anderson: I've read like three Teddy Roosevelt once. 'cause it was just like, and for him, I think it's like he's more of an incredible person and relative to a leader. I mean good leader too, but. His personal story is so fascinating, but Churchill to take 'cause wasn't he kind of a failure and then became Prime Minister?
[00:03:10] Craig P. Anderson: Wasn't that kind of his arc?
[00:03:12] Cassie Dunn: Yeah, he had been in Parliament forever, but during the thirties he was what was called out of the government in Great Britain. He wasn't in the cabinet, so he just, he was still in parliament, but he really had no voice and during all of the thirties, he was basically screaming at the top of his lungs.
[00:03:27] Cassie Dunn: Hitler's bad, Germany's a problem. We need to not be cutting defense spending. We need to be ramping up defense spending. Basically everybody put their hands over their ears and didn't listen. Oh, wow. Until France fell and they were like, oh no, we need a guy. Oh good. We have one.
[00:03:43] Craig P. Anderson: We be, we got a guy. And sometimes that's leadership.
[00:03:46] Craig P. Anderson: He's Maybe you're not the guy. Yeah. Wow. Love it. He able
[00:03:51] Cassie Dunn: to really mobilize the country and bring everyone together for a common vision.
[00:03:55] Craig P. Anderson: I love it. Yeah. Oh man, I, I have to check that out. Or at least watch a movie about 'em.
[00:03:59] Cassie Dunn: There's a great biographical film you can find from that. Like I said, the somewhere around 2,500 pages I'm into right now,
[00:04:06] Craig P. Anderson: that's a read for sure.
[00:04:07] Craig P. Anderson: Okay. Question number two. Whoa. Who is your leadership crush? I
[00:04:14] Cassie Dunn: told you that's the one I'm having a hard time with. Craig. I don't know that I have one. Um, okay. I am involved in a group, uh, here in the Fort Wayne area of local women business leaders, and probably I would say I have a crush on all of them.
[00:04:27] Cassie Dunn: Number of the people that went before me and made what I'm doing possible.
[00:04:30] Craig P. Anderson: Yeah, talk about the value of kind of that group coaching experience. 'cause I have one down here for like, not-for-profit leaders too, but talk about why that is so helpful for you to invest time. You're a busy person.
[00:04:41] Cassie Dunn: I am a busy person and so many of the people that have done what I do aren't also wives and mothers.
[00:04:48] Cassie Dunn: They might be husbands and fathers, but from where I sit, wives and mothers have a whole different. Uh, plate of food in front of them, if you will.
[00:04:54] Craig P. Anderson: Yeah.
[00:04:55] Cassie Dunn: Yeah. And it's just really nice to talk to people who are either doing it right now alongside me or have already done it. I have true peers who are leading businesses in my area.
[00:05:06] Cassie Dunn: Going through the same things has been really helpful as I've navigated this.
[00:05:10] Craig P. Anderson: Yeah, I, I find so often that when we're kind of in that leadership chair, problems happen. We're like, oh my gosh, what is this? This has never happened before. How do I get through it? And then you get around a group of peers and you find out, well, it's just new to you, and people have survived it, and people have kind found solutions.
[00:05:26] Craig P. Anderson: And that's what's so I think. Helpful about those groups is they give you perspective and support in a way that I don't think you can get in many other circumstances.
[00:05:35] Cassie Dunn: That's absolutely how I feel about it. One of the biggest questions we've actually been wrestling with probably in the last three months within our firm is who we define as my peers.
[00:05:45] Craig P. Anderson: Oh. Yeah. Nice. How so? Like where, where is that? Trying to figure out where, you know, where are you guys at with that?
[00:05:52] Cassie Dunn: We're still wrestling with it a little bit. I have a core group of leaders within my firm that I kind of use as my sounding board internally. Like I said, I have the group I told you about that I use a little bit externally.
[00:06:04] Cassie Dunn: The question came around 'cause I was invited to join like a CEO consortium type group and the cell was, it's a group of your peers that can help hold you accountable. But I was going to be the only female in the group, and I was gonna be the only person leading a financial services type firm in the group.
[00:06:20] Cassie Dunn: And so the, the real question was, are those other CEOs in that group, truly my peers, are they going to be wrestling with the same questions I wrestle with?
[00:06:30] Craig P. Anderson: Yeah. Yeah. And that's a tricky thing in the group is to get the right balance. And also, 'cause you probably don't also want a group of people all in your local area, all who run the same kind of business you run.
[00:06:40] Craig P. Anderson: Right. Because you're, you know, you're pilfering each other at that point. Right. So it's a difficult balance to strike.
[00:06:47] Cassie Dunn: Yeah.
[00:06:48] Craig P. Anderson: Okay. So where are, so do you see as an opportunity for that, something bigger? Like if it were a national Zoom based group versus a local group, is that something that might be more attractive?
[00:06:59] Cassie Dunn: That is what we're leaning. Our local, our Indiana society has tried to put something together and we didn't get the first cohort. We just had some other stuff going on that we were focusing on the, in, like on the firm at the time. But we think going forward, that would probably be our best bet, is other local, similar sized firms, but not local to our area.
[00:07:18] Craig P. Anderson: Right. Yeah. Really interesting. Okay, final question. In the lightning round, in 10 words or less, how do you define leadership? Okay, I've got this one.
[00:07:28] Cassie Dunn: Empowering others to grow and do their best work.
[00:07:33] Craig P. Anderson: I love it. And that has been such a story for you. 'cause when we first met, you were taking over your firm that you own now, and you had a whole team and you had to find a way to make that happen.
[00:07:45] Craig P. Anderson: Through all this transition and change and then subsequently as we've caught up a lot of growth too.
[00:07:50] Cassie Dunn: Yeah. Since we've, since you met me, my firm has almost doubled both in like from a revenue perspective, but also from a number of employees, number of clients. Everything has doubled.
[00:08:01] Craig P. Anderson: Yeah. Wow. So that has really been, that's a challenge I think, in so many ways.
[00:08:07] Craig P. Anderson: 'cause now you probably had to have significantly more staff and you had this really great culture that you'd built and great teamwork, and everybody worked well together. Yeah. How do you keep that together as you scale?
[00:08:20] Cassie Dunn: We were very lucky. Um, a big part of our growth came from an acquisition of another firm.
[00:08:25] Cassie Dunn: Okay. However, the firm we acquired the partner in that firm had worked in my firm previously.
[00:08:33] Craig P. Anderson: Ah,
[00:08:33] Cassie Dunn: so came from a very similar background, started with Ernst and Young in their big four days, which is where I came from, which is where the partners that came before me came from. Yeah. And then she also worked in the firm that I own and then went out and started her own firm, which I then acquired and folded all them back in.
[00:08:52] Cassie Dunn: So we were able to acquire a firm that had a very similar culture. I wouldn't say exactly that in culture, but a very similar culture and was, was led by someone who came from a very similar background. Okay. And so we were very fortunate that the culture shock wasn't that shocking.
[00:09:08] Craig P. Anderson: Yeah. And, and as a learning from that experience, and who knows what you might do in the future, but we always talk about due diligence when we buy companies and, and usually that means we look at books, we look at re, you know, we look at all those kind of business things.
[00:09:23] Craig P. Anderson: How big of a lift do you think it's gonna be to figure out what the culture is of an organization before you were to make an acquisition in the future, if you were,
[00:09:32] Cassie Dunn: I do think that's a big deal. I think. One, I would say we learned that we would maybe wanna do a little bit more due diligence on the financials as well, but that's, I mean, it's all worked out fine.
[00:09:43] Cassie Dunn: We've, we've figured out a, a procedure and we're getting there to make sure fees are aligned and client expectations are aligned and things like that. Yeah. Culture, to me, that is the biggest part because truly in the accounting world right now, if we do another acquisition, it's going to be because we need to acquire talent.
[00:09:59] Cassie Dunn: Yeah, not necessarily because we need to acquire clients. I mean, we would obviously keep some portion of clients from what, who, who, uh, an acquisition target. But primarily we would be looking for experienced hires who were good work that we do. And so I think almost all of our due diligence, again, would be trying to, it, it would be, I think it would be a lot of, I don't know if you'd call them interviews, but definitely meetings, you know, peer to peer meetings, peer to supervisor meetings, all sorts of stuff like that, trying to determine.
[00:10:29] Cassie Dunn: If everyone believed it was a good culture fit.
[00:10:32] Craig P. Anderson: Yeah. And, and what's that like for leaders today? Because, you know, I don't have a big team, but I know a lot of people in bigger businesses, especially specialized areas like accounting, where you have kind of this discreet set of talents and services. You guys are like Liam Neeson.
[00:10:47] Craig P. Anderson: I have a very specific set of talents. How hard is it right now to find the talent for a growing business? In your area,
[00:10:56] Cassie Dunn: specifically? In my area. It's horrible. I don't know if you've heard but it, if you're an accountant geek like I am, it's all over. The new we read, which is the news that no one else on the planet read it, tell you there's an accountant shortage that for the last half a decade or so, universities have been cranking out, not nearly enough accountants to fill the roles that are coming up.
[00:11:17] Cassie Dunn: At one point we're about, at the end of it, kind of what they saw as the cliff, if you will. Where they were saying this, you know, we're, we're 50,000 short a year, so after five years, we're gonna be a quarter of a million accountants short in the US and we're right about there. So it is very difficult, especially if you're doing new hires, you have to think outside the box.
[00:11:34] Cassie Dunn: You have to hire non accounting majors and try to turn them into accountants basically. So you take business majors and economics majors and finance majors, and you try to teach them accounting or you acquire a firm that already has some.
[00:11:48] Craig P. Anderson: Yeah. And I, that's so interesting. I, I would love to understand those dynamics better.
[00:11:52] Craig P. Anderson: When you look at who's coming outta the universities who all have ideas that they wanna go work for big banks or big financial services firms, those jobs probably aren't there right now. So then how do you convince them to say, Hey, let me introduce you to the very sexy world of accounting.
[00:12:06] Cassie Dunn: You know, our cell has always been that an accounting de well, you know, whether they have an accounting degree or not, even when we're talking to kids, going into college to sell accounting degrees.
[00:12:13] Cassie Dunn: But coming out that accounting is a decision making. Discipline. Mm-hmm. A major is there's not a career path on earth where learning how to make decisions isn't going to improve your performance no matter what you wanna be when you grow up, if you will. Working in public accounting, especially for a while, is going to give you a background that has value and, and it's teaching you a skill that.
[00:12:38] Cassie Dunn: You know, to your point, even when the markets turn, even when things get slow, people still need tax returns prepared, right? Everyone still need financial statements. In fact, sometimes the need for like audits or reviews of financial statements go up because more entities are having to borrow more, and therefore banks are requiring they have, you know, an independent public accounting firm look at their books and records.
[00:12:58] Cassie Dunn: We're not a hundred percent recession proof, but we do have an element of that.
[00:13:02] Craig P. Anderson: Yeah. Yeah. Excellent.
[00:13:04] Cassie Dunn: Okay,
[00:13:05] Craig P. Anderson: let's swing back to talking about leadership. 'cause it certainly sounds like you've got your challenges. So tell me, Cassie, what was your first leadership role?
[00:13:13] Cassie Dunn: So, my husband and I actually disagreed about this last night when we were talking about it.
[00:13:17] Cassie Dunn: He thinks it was in college when I was a coxswain on the rowing team. Sure.
[00:13:21] Craig P. Anderson: Which
[00:13:22] Cassie Dunn: arguably is a pretty intense leadership role. I thought it was in high school. I was a captain on the cross-country team.
[00:13:30] Craig P. Anderson: Okay. Well, which did you pick?
[00:13:32] Cassie Dunn: I think I'm gonna go with CrossCountry and there is a reason for that.
[00:13:36] Craig P. Anderson: Uh, okay. What? Yeah, so tell me about it.
[00:13:38] Cassie Dunn: So, I was a captain on the CrossCountry team. I was not that good of a runner. I was an okay runner. And I had said all along, I'd always told my dad, I said, if we're ever gonna come outta sectional, we're ever gonna be a regional qualifying team. I can't be a top three runner on this team.
[00:13:53] Cassie Dunn: I need to at best be a number five runner in this team and my senior year. I was finally, I was the captain and I was the number five runner on the cross, and we finally made it to regional. And I just think it was a great opportunity to learn how to lead without being the fastest, you know, I wasn't the best, right?
[00:14:10] Cassie Dunn: I wasn't the most talented. I wasn't leading out every practice, but I was still leading the team.
[00:14:16] Craig P. Anderson: Yeah. And, and I think that's interesting. 'cause we, we always, sometimes I think it's a joke, but I think it's also very real, that like the best sales leaders are not your best salespeople. And you know, that's a somewhat of the story there.
[00:14:28] Craig P. Anderson: So what did you bring to the table that kind of helped push you down to the best, the fifth best runner? From the third best runner? Was it like we were just talking about, was it recruiting talent? What did you have to do
[00:14:39] Cassie Dunn: a little bit? You know, we had a couple of freshmen that ran one and two that year, and that was a huge part of how we were able to do that.
[00:14:45] Cassie Dunn: And my role was encouraging them. You don't need to run behind the upperclassmen, we need you to run the way you can run. Yeah, we needed to get out and race. Some of the, one girl was, she had one pace now it was blisteringly fast. We still ran a 4K in Indiana at the time, over a 4K. But we were trying to get her to sprint.
[00:15:03] Cassie Dunn: I could sprint and it was, you know, literally coming up behind her and pushing her during practices on sprint workouts. You know, just stuff like that where I was trying, I was trying to encourage, you gotta get faster than me. You need to be faster than me. We need you to go. And that kind of, and I, I had a good work ethic.
[00:15:19] Cassie Dunn: I worked hard. And leading by working hard and convincing others to work hard.
[00:15:24] Craig P. Anderson: Okay. And when you think about that time and that period in your life around leadership, what did you pull away from that as? As key lessons?
[00:15:34] Cassie Dunn: I mean, I think obviously I learned some humility in leadership from that. We worked from you on into, or not that was gonna be in, that gonna be a lesson that came away from that.
[00:15:44] Cassie Dunn: And just the value of. People working together for the good of everyone. Nobody was out for themselves. Yeah. We had one girl who was gonna make it out on her own, out of sectional, but it was gonna be way better if we could all go together.
[00:15:57] Craig P. Anderson: Yeah. Yeah. And then I think about, you know, as you talk about how you've kind of pulled teams together since then, that that resonates.
[00:16:04] Craig P. Anderson: Mm-hmm. So now let's fast forward over the years, and I'm sure you've had other leadership opportunities, but in your current role as the boss sitting in the big chair. What are the big things that you focus on every day as a leader of a growing company?
[00:16:18] Cassie Dunn: So one of the things I say a lot, I say to my employees, and I say to anybody who asks that, my biggest job within the firm is to make sure everyone else has what they need to do their jobs.
[00:16:29] Cassie Dunn: So a lot of my time in the last three and a half years has been spent looking at our space. And so we moved because I thought if we were in a, we had two offices after our acquisition, I didn't think that was working well for everyone. So we went out and found new space and we got everyone together under one roof and we, you know, we did lighting studies to make sure we had the right kind of lighting for everyone to do.
[00:16:50] Cassie Dunn: Yeah. That we weren't exhausting eyes 'cause we worked from long hours during busy season technology. We've invested very heavy in technology to make sure our people have the right tools and if not the most current, at least up there in the realm of pretty current tools, the best tools that are on the market to do the work that we do.
[00:17:09] Cassie Dunn: Listening to employees about clients they don't like to work with or that aren't good fits for us, and getting rid of those clients that are our energy takers from our employees versus energy givers. Those are the the things that I focused on.
[00:17:23] Craig P. Anderson: And, and on that last point, I'm really interested in that because we all have had like the toxic customer, but sometimes, you know, I can think of one in my past that was, they were so big and to kick, you know, to get rid of 'em was so hard.
[00:17:36] Craig P. Anderson: So what do you find when you actually handle that for your team? What are the dividends for you? Like what makes it worse saying, oh yeah, well this is a big client, but they're killing my people, so bye-bye. What's the payoff for that for you?
[00:17:51] Cassie Dunn: For us, and what we've found is having happy employees pays off.
[00:17:55] Cassie Dunn: We collect so much better. We do so much better on all the work. They work better? Yeah, they work faster. They work more efficiently than when they're bogged down and emotionally strained. Because of, of clients that are hard to work with, they call it culling In our industry, our client culling, uh, two years ago we cu 150 clients and by nine months into the year, we'd added 175 back is paid off Well for us, creating a little bit of room to add new clients has let us pick up clients we really wanna have.
[00:18:25] Cassie Dunn: And so that I try not to focus on what we've let walk out the door and more focus on what we've made room to walk back in.
[00:18:32] Craig P. Anderson: But it, it kind of reminds me what you talked about before about the importance of culture and an acquisition. Also the importance of culture in your client selection and, and you've grown enough where you have some liberties with that to say, I don't think you're a good fit for us, but it really pays dividends 'cause it actually feeds right back into your culture and what you're trying to grow.
[00:18:51] Craig P. Anderson: And when you're attracting clients, I could just imagine what the pitch is, you know, to, to an employee. We're gonna teach you accounting and we fire all the really nasty clients. You know you're gonna like this job.
[00:19:02] Cassie Dunn: Love it. It's really fun. Yeah. Yeah.
[00:19:04] Craig P. Anderson: I love it. But
[00:19:05] Cassie Dunn: we, you tell 'em that it, I mean, it's one of those things that sounds super trite and super weird, but it has made a huge difference with culture and just everyone's feeling toward things.
[00:19:15] Cassie Dunn: Everybody gets three a year that they don't have to have a reason. It's just, I don't want 'em to be a client here anymore. Obviously, there would be some exception to that, but once you go over three, you have to have a business case for me, why they can't be a client anymore.
[00:19:29] Craig P. Anderson: Nice. Nice. That is so great.
[00:19:32] Craig P. Anderson: Yeah. So harkening back to kind of that first leadership role on on the team, what did you pull from that that is still really relevant for you today?
[00:19:43] Cassie Dunn: I do think in accounting, the value of hard work, of being willing to say, we can work really hard for a short period of time to see a payoff because there is a lot of that in the accounting profession.
[00:19:52] Cassie Dunn: When you think about how a tax seasons especially goes where there's such a concentrated amount of work between. March 1st and April 15th that we can auger in. We can push through, we can work really hard right now and we'll see the dividends later. Yeah. And,
[00:20:08] Craig P. Anderson: and another question I have for you, 'cause I run into this a lot and a lot of my clients are like this.
[00:20:12] Craig P. Anderson: They're, they're people who are really good at what they do. They're a great accountant, they're a great marketer. They're a great public relations person, right. And they're really good at that. Their business grows because they're really good at it. Then they hire a couple people. They hire a couple more.
[00:20:24] Craig P. Anderson: And then suddenly they're having to get things done through other people. And in some cases, people that they don't talk to every day 'cause they report to somebody else. And I'm guessing as you went through your degree programs, there was no leadership accounting class. What kind of helped you develop leadership skills when you were at, you know, when what you were trained to be and what you were good at was being an accountant.
[00:20:47] Craig P. Anderson: How did that leadership layer play in over time?
[00:20:51] Cassie Dunn: I was lucky because I was a captain in high school and I was a coxswain in college and you know, some of those things. And then I started my career with Ernst and Young and they, yes, our training was about being an accountant, but they trained a lot of soft skills in those big firms.
[00:21:04] Cassie Dunn: I am still such a big advocate of accounting majors going straight into the big four and doing three to five to seven years there, what you can, the way they train and what they teach, it just cannot be replicated in a smaller firm environment. Yeah.
[00:21:20] Craig P. Anderson: Yeah.
[00:21:20] Cassie Dunn: You know, there, by the time you're in your second year, you're already doing a little bit of supervision over first year accountants, and by the time you're starting your third year, you're, they're what you, they call a senior and you're supervising teams of staff and they pull you through that very quickly.
[00:21:37] Cassie Dunn: But they also, they set you up with mentors and they, they do a lot of teaching of soft skills.
[00:21:43] Craig P. Anderson: Love it. Okay. I always like to wrap up, Cassie, with the one question, you can travel back in time. You don't get to go meet Winston Churchill. You can do that after this. But if you could go back in time to that young, Cassie, what's the one piece of advice you would give her that would've made leadership easier to bear, easier to do, made her a better leader?
[00:22:04] Cassie Dunn: I probably should have listened more when they were teaching soft skills early on. There's a meme out there that's like, I'm, I'm, what is that? I'm not aggressive. I have leadership skills or whatever. And it's,
[00:22:13] Craig P. Anderson: yeah,
[00:22:14] Cassie Dunn: girls and, and I maybe leaned into that a little bit too hard. Overcorrected a little bit.
[00:22:19] Cassie Dunn: Probably could have been a little smaller, I think.
[00:22:21] Craig P. Anderson: Love it. Love it. Alright, well, Cassie, thank you for sharing your story today. If people want to find you connect with you, do business with you, what's the best way for them to get in touch with you?
[00:22:32] Cassie Dunn: I am on LinkedIn. Our firm is Haines, Isenbarger & Skiba LLC.
[00:22:36] Cassie Dunn: We do have a website. It's hainescpa.com.
[00:22:39] Craig P. Anderson: Okay. Any of those. We will drop all those links in the show notes again. Thanks, Cassie, for sharing the story of your Executive Evolution. Appreciate it.
[00:22:47] Cassie Dunn: Thank you, Craig. It was fun.
[00:22:51] Craig P. Anderson: I really appreciate that interview with Cassie Dunn. So often I talk about, and I mentioned this in the podcast, that a lot of times people in highly specialized areas like law, accounting, marketing are people who are really passionate, good at the work, but then leadership is a whole different layer, and I was so glad to have someone on who could speak to that today and how to make that transition.
[00:23:11] Craig P. Anderson: As always, I like to break down the key takeaways for me from the interview in the areas of confidence, competence, and calm. In the area of confidence, I want to come back to the confidence that the right direction for her business was to build the right culture, and then extending that to having clients that are a right cultural fit for her organization.
[00:23:30] Craig P. Anderson: So much so that she has confidence, she's so right on culture, that she's would rather lose the client than disrupt the balance that she's created in the organization. And that takes a lot of confidence in knowing your approach is the right one in the area of competence. I thought this was great that her advice for a younger self was pay more attention to the soft skills.
[00:23:48] Craig P. Anderson: We don't often think of that soft skill training, but so often most of the issues that I run into with leadership around my clients, come back to those soft skills, pay attention, develop those. They're gonna be such an important asset for you in your leadership career. And then finally, in the area of calm.
[00:24:04] Craig P. Anderson: And I have this experience 'cause I've been in these groups and I coach these groups. Groups of other leaders, of peers who are there in a group coaching experience, mastermind, whatever you want to call it, that are there for mutual support, mutual encouragement, and really accountability. Because when you're running the practice, you have accountability to yourself.
[00:24:23] Craig P. Anderson: But having a group to which you're accountable to which you can gain advice from really helps you maintain your calm. As you go through the day-to-day and year to year of running your business. So thanks again, Cassie, for sharing the story of your Executive Evolution. We have all the links for her information in the show notes.
[00:24:39] Craig P. Anderson: Remember, you can go from being an accidental leader to the greatest leader of all time. All it takes is developing your confidence, competence, and calm. See you next time on Executive Evolution.