Today, my guest is Kane Polakoff. Kane is the Client Advisory Services Practice Leader at CohnReznick. Kane and I met for the first time, actually, just this past December when we were both speaking at Insuring Success, Gail Perry and CPA Practice Advisors’ Conference they put on. That was a lot of fun, enjoyed it. Today, we’re going to be talking about CAS and who knows what else. We’ll probably go into a few different topics, but Kane, welcome to The Unique CPA.

Yeah, thank you, Randy, it’s a pleasure to see you again. You’re lucky that you’re on the West Coast because I’m in lovely, very warm Detroit, Michigan right now, where it’s about five degrees outside, and we’ve got about eight inches of snow.

Oh, nice, nice. You’re the second person I’ve been talking to today that’s in Detroit. Sounds like a lot of fun out there. I don’t miss that. I’ll be back in Chicago in a couple weeks, and I’m sure we’ll have plenty of chances for snow and cold when we get back, but I’ve been out of town for the first two months of 2025.

You’re a smart man. 

Yeah, well, I’m old, so I can do that now. So I gave you a very quick intro, which did no justice to what you’re doing. You are Practice Leader for CAS at CohnReznick, but you’re also super active in the profession with a lot of different things. Why don’t you expand on a little background on yourself and the things you’re doing?

Thanks, Randy. So I’ve been in the space almost 30 years, so I feel like I’m getting old. Started off at Accenture working on, even before it was called business process outsourcing, leveraging global operations and how to become more efficient with running processes for Fortune 100 companies. And then over my span of time before I came to CohnReznick, I had the luxury of getting into business process outsourcing, learning how to leverage technology, people, and processes to deliver a better solution or better deliverables to our clients. Over the last five, six years I’ve been in public accounting, and both times when I was at my previous organization, I had the challenge of starting a CAS practice from scratch, which was very fun over almost four years at my previous firm. I’ve been now at CohnReznick, which is a top 20 public accounting firm, building a CAS practice again. So I’ve had a lot of fun and I can share all the fun, easy stories about building a CAS practice because it is very difficult, yeah, from the foundation, you know, to separate, how to build it by verticals from levels to global, to what technology. All the fun things that come with that and also, most importantly, how do you take care of your employees and your clients? So that’s been my journey, and I’ve had a lot of fun meeting a lot of great people like yourselves and always love to share my stories and help provide insight where I can.

Yeah, I didn’t even mention this to you before we started recording, but just three days ago, I talked to Christine Triantos, and she says she knows you very well.

Yeah, I’ve known her, I mean, she was running the CAS practice at BDO for many years. I know she went on her own doing a lot of consulting and now a big part of what she does now is all the things that she’s learned to help other smaller public accounting firms or even consulting firms provide CAS. So yeah, she’s great.

Yeah, and that’s what we did talk about this CAS. So I’m well versed now. This is just going to be so smooth, no—kidding.

Maybe I’ll be quiet and you can speak.

Nope, that will not happen. I need your expertise for sure. So, one of the questions I asked her, and I want to ask you too, is just how do you define CAS or what is CAS? Because I think there is, even with talking to her, there’s still a misconception or people have their own definition, which is probably fine, but maybe there should be a standard definition so we all know what we mean when we’re talking about CAS.

Yeah. Well that’s always the fun question. To help define, I always like to start off with what are the ingredients of CAS and how it has become what we do today. So, I break it down from a people, process, and technology perspective. So I’ll start with people. Within a CAS practice, we are providing accounting services, but even not only accounting services, you have payroll, you have IT implementations, and even HR services. I’ll stick to accounting because it’s most prevalent still today as we branch into other services clients are looking for. But on the people side, we are really an extension of our client’s accounting department. It can be many different factors. One, we’re doing the transactional work—AP, accounts payable, accounts receivable, bank reconciliation. Other times we’re doing controllership and even CFO roles. We have some clients that we’re taking on the whole entire accounting department and supporting them. We even have some clients that will take on a portion, so maybe they’ll have a controller CFO, we’ll do the transactional level. So, it’s kind of a hybrid approach. So that’s on the people side. 

Then what has been so fascinating over the last five to 10 years, you see the evolution and explosion of CAS because of the investments and evolution of technology. Not just AI. We talked about cloud-based, we talked about general ledger systems. So, in the past, when I was at Accenture, you’d pay a million, two million dollars to implement SAP or Oracle. Now here, we’re deploying different tools—I’ll just name a few—you know, like Sage, Intact, NetSuite, QuickBooks Online, Xero… and you’re able to get it up and running pretty quickly. But there’s actually an ecosystem of AP automation, closed management, travel expense, and automating, you know, all those processes together. 

And then on the process side, you have the controls, the separation of duties, you have the automation, and everything combined is what I see has become CAS. So you’re pulling information from bank accounts, from, it could be even HRS system, from a sales, like a POS system, like in restaurants, and we’re spending more and more time on the advisory side, and that’s why I say CAS is Client Advisory Services, which the accounting is silent in, in that because we’re—so the accounting is one aspect, but we’re actually looking at variances where we’re looking at key performance indicators and we’re partnering with our clients. to help them look forward. Now, when you think of accounting, you think of us as historians. 

Right. 

But what we’re trying to get to is if you send a financial statement that’s two months outdated, that data is stale. So it’s how do we get that information quicker into our client’s fingertips for them to make decisions with us supporting them. And I think that’s where the evolution of what we call CAS 2.0 is going to is most of our clients become to have a hard time being timely and accurate with their financial statements. The job of what we as a profession is to not only that should be the foundation, but then it’s to be able then to deliver better services to help articulate and compare and to support our clients. So that’s a long answer to your question, Randy.

I like long answers because then I don’t have to talk as much, so we can keep that up, I have no problem. And actually, that wasn’t long compared to a lot of them, so you can keep going on. But, here’s a question I have, or my history, I’ll age myself now: So, I started my firm, generalist accounting firm, back in the early 90s. And we were doing, and I don’t even know if this term is used anymore, but write-up work. Do people still call it write up work, or is it now CAS as part of, write up is part of CAS? 

So we have CAS organizations that are moving from write-up to CAS, so the write up is really just an outcome to provide information for year end tax returns. So ultimately, a lot of it actually is dealt with within the tax department. So they’re not really so concerned about the monthly financial statements. They’re able to get everything into the trial balance, to load into the tax return software and to be able to move it forward. So we do have clients that have, that we are doing write up work that are now looking for more front end CAS work. So that is an evolution there. And there are, as I look not only within CohnReznick, but when talking to other leaders within the industry, but they are converting that to CAS. So that is something, because for us, we do partner very closely with our tax folks, too. And, you know, tax, if you look at compliance and you look at advisory, they really go hand in hand. So, for a year end, which we’re dealing with that right now for all of our tax partners and managers and senior managers, we’re getting all that information to them so they can do the tax return. 

Okay, so that makes sense. And then for us, it was, you know, we were using Creative Solutions Write-Up, I think it was called. 

Yeah, no, I remember that. Yeah, that was that the program I think is 25, 30 years old now.  And firms are using that. I mean, that’s still a tool that is used and it flows right into the CAS process. 

And then, so the thing that happened though, back in, I don’t know when this started happening, but QuickBooks came around and everybody’s like, oh, rate up’s going away because everybody can do their own accounting now. And obviously, that really didn’t stay that way, but it became more automated and technology involved where it makes more sense for a CAS company, CAS service, to get involved. Is that kind of the, how did you see that evolution of write-up to everybody doing it themselves to, it’s back in our hands? 

Well, I can go back to the Pony Express. I don’t know if I want to go that far back now, Randy, but, I mean, there are a lot of cases that clients would put all their stuff in a shoebox or even a, you know, and just ship it over to the accountants to do that work. I mean, I think that’s how it started. And even, you know, before QuickBooks Online became a tool, it was QuickBooks Desktop or even Sage 50, which is the old Peachtree, or you get all those cases where the information would be just, it almost would be extracted and sent over to the accountant to do the work, and then the information would come back in paper form, but it wouldn’t be done systematically. So, when you think about, you know, Sage Intact Internet, which is internet accounting back in the late 90s, and even QuickBooks Online or NetSuite, and it was definitely revolutionized, and even with QuickBooks Online today, to be able to get access to that information real time, instead of having to take it from exporting, it’s like taking a Commodore 128, you remember you put in those disks, take it out of those disks, I had one of those, and then send them over to somebody else to do the processing, but that became obsolete now.

Alright, so that was the history lesson for me, this is what I lived, and I’ve seen the change, so I appreciate that. I want, there’s a bunch of different things we can go in, but I think, because you mentioned at the beginning about, hey, you know, you came to CohnReznick, and pretty much—I don’t think “pretty much”—I think started this from scratch, right? The CAS practice? 

Yeah, so there were small little pockets within the firm, and it wasn’t, there was, you know, CAS didn’t exist there, it was called MSU. So I had the fortune of, I mean, it’s a great firm, great support, to kind of build the vision of what this practice has become today. And we’re still building it, but it’s been fun. So what we did is we kind of identified within the firm, what are the key verticals that we’re very good at? So those verticals are real estate, hospitality, non for profit, renewable energy, and government contracting, to say, as an example. And what I find, and I’ve learned, where the first time around, when I built my first practice, we were more generalist. So we were able to do more, but we weren’t able to go deep. And I think there’s an expectation that clients want that deep knowledge, the same nomenclature. So if you’re in the restaurant space, you want somebody who’s worked there and understands that, or non for profit. So we built it by verticals, and we identified individuals within the firm and also hired folks that had that type of experience. And then, so that was one of the key things that we did. And the second thing is when you look at the technology. So for real estate, we looked at Yardi. Where’s a good fit? Where not for profit was Sage Intact or NetSuite, so we kind of built the tech stack by vertical to be able to support that and the ecosystem, what kind of AP automation tools and things like that. 

The other thing that we also did was put together a global operation. So we’ve got about 1200 people in our Chennai operation. We’ve had a global operation for about 15 years. And having that substantial leadership and that structure in place helped us to not only hire people here locally to support, but also globally, which some of the challenges that we’ve all faced to continue to scale quickly with the right people—it’s not about the numbers of people you have, but it’s the type of people you have within those numbers. And you know, that’s allowed us to  grow about 60 percent top line this year, and we continue to see substantial growth as we move forward. So that’s the simple answer. You know, it’s not so easy. I mean, everything from. Marketing, to collateral, to contracting, to pricing, to reporting, all that had to be created, which was fun. 

Yeah, and you did it on a large level, companies even doing it on a small level, you know, a small firm, you know, five people or something like that trying to do this, figuring out the resources, figuring out, you know, what is their balance between compliance and CAS services. Do you have an idea on how you do that or what makes sense or, you know, compliance is obviously important. We have to do it. We have to prepare a tax return. We have to prepare financial statements. But, you know, how do you find that right balance, I guess, between the two of those? 

Well, I mean, I think that, I mean, we’re very small compared to the compliance and tax group that we have at CohnReznick—I mean, we’re still very small. But I think what we’re finding is that it’s beneficial, benefiting the tax group because it makes it easier for them to do the tax return and get all the information they need. Some of the biggest challenges that a tax professional is, is getting all the information they need to do a tax return. So in essence, we will have that information to glean, so we actually become that conduit to provide that information to our clients. So I think that’s an upside and continues to be an upside where compliance and advisory are able to come together hand in hand because we’re helping to expedite that process. And it’s a benefit for the client too, because it’s going to take the tax professionals less time to do the tax return, which can reduce the fees also on that end. So there’s a benefit there also. 

You just mentioned the clients, and you mentioned pricing earlier, which I’m going to want to talk about a little bit too, I think, because that’s important, but I’ve read some statistics, I can’t say the words, statistics, I think I said it right, I got it, this was a couple years ago, and I’m sure it’s changed, but the statistics were saying that clients Are willing to pay more for advisory work. They want this—they want this to be offered to them—and that same survey was showing that the tax advisor, tax preparer, tax firm, the CPAs were not offering the services at the level that the clients wanted. So there was this 72 percent of the clients would pay for it—and I’m making these numbers up, but I think I’m fairly close—35 percent offered it, and so there’s this huge opportunity. Clients want to pay more for these services. Do clients actually know what they want when they’re looking for more? I mean, what do you see with what the services are that they, or do they have to be educated on, hey, this is what we have, and it’s beneficial for you? How do you get going with CAS with clients from that standpoint? 

Yeah, so it is an education. I mean, we’ll go back to the write-up work that you talked about earlier. And that you may charge a client 500 a month and just, or even 250 a month for the write-up work. Cause it’s really a means to the end. Where for CAS services, you know, we have some clients that, you know, we’re billing close to a hundred thousand dollars a month. And, you know, it depends on what it is. 

That’s a decent number! 

Yeah. And the education is definitely, it’s about the value and the scope of services. But when you think, when you look inside an accounting department and the expectation of what a CFO has or a CEO has of their accounting department, that’s the same type of expectation they would have even more so for us. So it’s to be able to get the information to them, to provide reports to boards, to many different things that are value added. And I think that there’s so much pain that existing organizations have, that they’re not getting that, that they’re willing to pay more, but you can’t be afraid to ask. And I think that’s what’s changing in the industry is that we’re setting the expectation: This is all the scope of services that we’re going to do for you, here’s the amount of time and effort that we think it’s going to take. And by the way, here’s the fees that we’re going to charge for you on a monthly basis. And we’ve been pretty lucky, I mean, the market, there is such a demand for what the services are that. They’re willing to pay that. But you have to provide great service. If you charge whatever you charge and you don’t do a good job, then you just like anybody, they’ll leave you.

So the bar is higher, so that’s where, I think you hear in the past that organizations were looking at poor performers and tax or audit and moving them to CAS. And those individuals, they would not survive here. So we’re looking, we are hiring top talent. And we’re trying to recruit out of schools and colleges because it’s very high paced, you’ve got to be able to multitask, you’ve got to be able to understand the numbers, you’ve got to be able to present, you’ve got to be able to handle challenges, you’ve got to be able to troubleshoot. And those are the expectations that we have now within CAS to be able to support our clients. So that has changed too, where 10 years ago, people would tell me, yeah, I would get a bunch of folks and I’d have to deal with those individuals, even though they weren’t able to do the work, but that’s changed now too.

Yeah. And I think what you just mentioned, all those aspects of dealing with clients when you’re in a CAS setting is what people want from an employee standpoint. They want to have an impact. They want to be able to troubleshoot and help and make a difference. And so I can see that top performers would be an area where they’d like to hang out, and I assume, obviously, that’s how you’re handling it. Just my commentary there. Let me go to a question though. Because you did mention pricing again, and that the clients will pay this. How do you look at pricing? Do you run CAS as an hourly billing? Do you run CAS as a fixed fee? Is there some hybrid model? How does this work for you guys? 

So there normally is a hybrid model, but always, the hardest part is the first three months of any engagement because the expectation, you can scope it, you can send questionnaires, you can ask questions, but typically it turns out to be a lot harder than what is initially proposed by the client because there’s a reason why the client is asking for that. So we normally try to do time and materials for at least the first two or three months, setting expectations of a budget for that based on certain assumptions and criteria. And then after the three months, we’re okay to move to a flat fee with a clear delineation of the scope, or continue on at time and materials because as we automate, it reduces the amount of the hours, which becomes a variable cost to our client. So our clients do like that as well. 

Okay. When you build efficiencies in through automation, I assume you are reaping some of that value that’s built in there?

Yeah, well, we factor that based on the hours, but yeah, the answer is yes. So, I mean, we want to look at it just as our steps in our process to be as efficient as possible. But in essence, what a client is normally paying to run their own accounting department should be very similar to what we’re doing, but we should be providing better value. So it’s not necessarily a cost savings play per se. I mean, that was more early 2000s where it’s pure labor arbitrage. This is a, getting a better result at a price that’s reasonable for them too. 

Got it. So one of the things when you’re jumping in this, which you did, you jumped in from, you know, these little pockets of CAS here and there within the firm and coordinated it, and so part of that is then building the scalable, you know, CAS team, effective CAS team, but you mentioned global offshoring, global employees operations. I guess this twofold question: you know, how’s that work with your offshoring teams, and then how’s that affect the, you know, the scalability and having effective teams?

Yeah, Global Operations, and I’ve been fortunate, I don’t know if you’ve ever read the Thomas Friedman book, The World is Flat, but it definitely talks about the expansion of how things have consisted. I was fortunate to go to Chennai, India back in 2003 for my first time. As of last December, it was my 35th time going there. 

Oh, wow. 

I’ve had, whether it’s, you know, India, all over India, the Philippines, China, Europe, Mexico, Caribbean, have had a lot of opportunities to kind of look at global capacity and how that plays. But what’s more important is to understand the culture, how people think, what does it take to be successful? And early on in my career, there was a lot of difficulty with organizations trying to set up offshore collaboration because it was always the U.S. versus this or U.S. versus that. You know, the biggest part, and we didn’t, haven’t touched on is really culture, is setting up that culture the right way, putting the right ownership and transparency on everything from, you know, mission to goals to expectations. So it’s not, it’s just the CohnReznick U.S. team versus the CohnReznick global team. It’s one team. 

And it’s easy to say that, but it’s harder to do that. And I think it comes down to building that camaraderie, like we brought in our senior manager and had him come to the U.S., you know, I’ve gone out there now three times in the last two years and spending time every day on teams or other things to be able to do that. So we built the organization very similar to that we built here in the U.S. where we built it by verticals, we have different levels, we set expectations, you know, their managers and our managers collaborate, senior managers collaborate, and it takes a process. I mean, I think the other thing is really a clear delineation of the scope of services and to transition properly and to make sure that the feedback is provided timely and accurately. And, you know, initially it was a little bit of a challenge. When you get it going, it takes a while to get things up and running. Because at the same time, they’ve got to get certified in different technology, they got to get certified in, you know, many different things that we run our tech stack. 

So, over, almost now over two years, we’ve come to a point that we have a, you know, solid global operation that really has helped us to expand. And now we’re building out our operation in the Philippines now, too. So, we’ll have that, and we’re taking advantage of what’s called the Sun Methodology. So we’re using the shift timing, so we’re not working a night shift in Chennai, but we’re working, you know, different shifts. So we’re benefiting from the U.S. as well as Chennai. And then the Philippines, we’re going to run a night shift. So that way we have really a 24/7 operation. So we’re able to get the information quicker, on top of that we’re trying to deploy technology to continue to enhance that process too. 

Nice, and then just one question on the global operations, the offshoring, are these organizations that CohnReznick owns that, or are you an outsourced partner on that?

Yeah, so we’ve owned this operation, it is our operation for 15 years. I have been on the other side, you know, I have, I was a third party offshore provider too in my time. So you can have your own captive—it could be a third party or what’s called a BPO captive. So there’s different ways, I know there’s some clients that do both, so it really just depends on your appetite and what your comfort is as well.

Alright. Well you touched on one of my most passionate topics is culture, and so building a culture, a positive culture in this environment, but another topic of mine that you and I have touched on a little bit before recording is mental health awareness, especially in the, you know, in general in the world and in accounting, and I know you have a passion for mental health awareness as well. Do you want to go into that?

Yeah. And I’ve learned, I think, early on in my career, I’ll just start there, is that I’ve been in an organization, that culture was great, and it changed like a snap of your finger. And it’s funny, you can do what you’re doing, the same thing you’re doing with the same people, but something changes at the top or something else can really make your life miserable. So, you know, going back to culture, you know, for me is I’ve learned what not to do, I hope, and I try my best to be a positive role model, whether it’s mentoring people or even mentoring my staff. But you know, I think since COVID just going into mental health, you know, my family has had challenges with working with somebody within our family too, that’s had that and kind of having to deal with that firsthand, and also have had members within my team that have struggled very severely, you know, I’m very fortunate that, you know, they were able to feel comfortable to communicate that with me, and to be able to find ways to be there for them and not just myself, but our leadership group, to be able to find a balancing where we had a couple that they moved to part time, or took a leave of absence. And, you know, I think it’s important—I always think people need to have a purpose in life, of what they need to do, and I want them to feel that, if they’re here with us, that they have a purpose of not only providing great service to our clients, but they’re not a number, we care about them. 

So, it’s pretty prevalent, I mean, talking to a lot of kids, younger kids, and, just, you know, a lot of our friends, and I think everybody has a story to talk about, you know, something that’s very difficult. And, you know, I think the ones that are able to get through are the ones that have the success and the support network of people that are here to help them, and to not just look at it as a job, but to help them try to get through that situation, to make time to go to the doctor, to make time to do whatever they need to do, or need to take a half day off, or they need to take a couple days off, so I think that that flexibility is something that I’ve tried to instill, you know, within our team. And I think it’s something that continues, which I’m excited about, it’s becoming more and more open. I think 10, 15 years ago, nobody would ever say something about this, but I think people are more open to share and to be able to convey how they really feel. And once people do that, I think that the reaction from people like ourselves are to help and what they can do to make that better. And it’s a big problem out there. There’s not enough practitioners or psychologists or psychiatrists to be able to support that today. And I think we are fortunate to be able to find the right support within our family, but we were lucky about that, but I know a lot of them out there are not. So I’m hoping that definitely changes in the future. 

Yep, no, I agree. And when I was struggling, you know, and people have heard this story before, so I won’t go into it, but post-stroke, it took me a while to find the person that matched me, because there’s plenty of therapists out there, plenty of people to talk to, but there has to be somebody that you connect with, and that’s what I found out, and when I did, that made all the difference in the world. So I’m glad to see that, that you guys as a firm, that you personally are addressing that and have the empathy to understand that people are dealing with something. Having a couple of things you said, that people felt comfortable coming to you—that’s huge. Because mental health is sometimes so stigmatized that it can’t show any weakness that people don’t feel comfortable. And that’s a big change we have to make, and it sounds like you are at least promoting that, which I applaud you for.

Alright Kane, well this has been fun. I think before we wrap up, I want to give you an opportunity to kind of, you know, put a bow on top of our discussion today. 

Yeah, and I think that, you know, what’s so exciting about CAS is that over the last even three or four years there’s been such a bunch of evolution and growth as you see from accounting today at the top, you know, two fastest growing within a public accounting firm. And what that means is there’s a lot of folks out here like myself that have gone and learned the hard way, have tried different things and have learned from it. I know there’s a lot of folks out there that are just starting that journey or are at an early part of their journey and there are people like ourselves out there that are happy to help and help provide a little bit of guidance and support. So, you know, don’t be shy. Don’t be on an island by yourself. There’s a lot of different conferences that are out there you can go to, a lot of good podcasts that can be provided. Or a simple thing is just reach out on LinkedIn and send a message, hey, I have a question about this. And I think you’ll find a lot of people like myself will reach out and try to help you. And yeah, I think there’s so much work and opportunity in CAS today that it’s going to need all of us out there to be able to support the needs of the clients to be able to get them successful. So I wish everybody the best of luck if you’re doing a CAS practice, and it’s been a great honor to be part of that journey and the growth, and hopefully I’ll see you guys soon at a conference or a podcast soon.

Alright. Well, a couple of things you said there, and I’m going to have two final questions before we close out. One is the reaching out—we are a very collaborative profession, in my mind, more so than others, and saying that, and the people, hey, we want everybody to be successful. I might have an answer that you don’t have, and if you have a question, reach out to me. I think that’s great. Another example of that is, I put a post out on LinkedIn, LinkedIn a couple weeks ago about my story, you know, we were just talking about mental health awareness and my struggles post-stroke, and it’s amazing how many LinkedIn direct messages I got from people who had been struggling with something, and actually a handful that recently had a stroke too, and just wanted to talk. And so yeah, just putting yourself out there is important, but also what you said, telling people it’s okay to reach out to me if you have questions is important too, so thank you for that. 

Well, that’s how I started, too. I mean, I started when, from, I had to start a practice, and I didn’t even know what CAS meant, so I had to, you know, ask questions, and it’s a lot easier to ask people that have gone through it, and have failed, and can give you some guidance, and say, hey, what tech stack should I pick, you know? Should I hire a senior manager to start? Should I go by vertical? What size clients should I go after? I mean, those are just a couple questions. You know, I was very fortunate early on that I was able to get a lot of those answers to help me at least to make the decision than having to wait six more months to figure that out as an example.

Yep. And in case any, we didn’t say everything that Kane’s involved in, but go to his LinkedIn page, you’ll see he is somebody with a lot of resources available that he can answer questions for you. Alright, two final questions: Accounting, great. CAS, great. Tax, great. All this, but what do you do when you’re not thinking about CAS services, what are your outside of work passions?

Yeah, well, so I love going to the gym in the morning. Well, the first thing I do in the morning is I get up early and instead of having to take caffeine, especially in the wintertime, I take my two dogs and I walk outside. So it could be a blizzard, like it was, you know, this morning was freezing, but, you know, get out there, get fresh, watch the stars and the moon and, and all that. And then I go to the gym after that. I love spending time with my two dogs and my wife. My two girls are in college now, so whenever they come home, I can spend time. I do love to travel. I’ve traveled internationally a lot around the U.S. I do love sports. So I was actually a college athlete. That was a long time ago. I’m playing a lot of pickleball now, not as much soccer, what I used to play, but trying to get active there. Definitely love theater. Love seeing, you know, listening to music, and I love taking naps. That’s one of my favorite things is during the weekend to be able to fall asleep, waking up with dew on my face.

That’s the first time I’ve had that answer as one of your passions, so nice. I like it. And I’ve got to ask, soccer then, was that your college sport? 

I had the fortune to play college soccer and you know, I played a lot of sports in high school and growing up, so it’s kind of balanced. It’s kind of a good balance for me. I played up until about five years ago, and where I got plantar fasciitis, and I had to put them up, so, but it was fun. 

Yeah, well, pickleball, I’ve never played. We recently moved into a house with a pretty big lot, and so I’m trying to find a place to build a pickleball court. 

Nice, we’ll come over and play. Let me know.

Yeah. Although I just got the quote on the new deck at $125,000, so I’m thinking the pickleball court is gonna have to be on hold for a little bit. We’ll see on that. But, alright, final question then, if people want to get a hold of you, they want, you know, you said reach out, where places they should look, obviously, CohnReznick, you’re there, LinkedIn, but where would you suggest people get a hold of you?

CohnReznick, you can just search for my name and it’ll go straight to me, or you can, on LinkedIn, you can just send me a message. I’m pretty active on LinkedIn. So, if you send me a message, I’ll normally respond pretty quickly, unless I’m traveling.

And one thing I didn’t say, which I actually wanted to, is congratulations on Accounting Today Top 100 this past December.

Yeah, thanks, Randy. 

Yeah, that’s always fun to get recognition that something you’re doing is making a difference, I’m sure. 

Yeah, thank you. 

And Kane, thanks— we really appreciate you being on The Unique CPA. 

Yeah, my pleasure, thanks, Randy.