An Essay · The Pivots That Follow
I told him his company had no #2. Five miles later, I pulled off the interstate and called back to volunteer.
I got five miles down I-20 before I understood what I'd actually just said.
I'd spent the day at Cowin Equipment Company presenting the results of a consulting project — something I'd done for them off and on for years, going back to when my father was still running the place. This particular engagement wrapped in 2015, and I sat across from Jamie Cowin, the owner, and walked him through everything I'd found. Near the end, I told him the one thing that had been staring at me the whole project: with my father having retired as COO the year before, and the company's other senior executive gone a few years before that, Cowin didn't have a #2. Not a soft gap. A glaring one. I said so plainly, packed up, and drove back toward Auburn, where I was still Director of the School of Accountancy and had every reason to think that conversation was finished.
It took Irondale — about five miles down the interstate — for the sentence I'd just said out loud to catch up with me. You have no #2. I'd diagnosed the problem in the third person, the way a consultant is supposed to, and gotten in my car like it wasn't my problem to solve. I pulled off I-20 and called Jamie back.
There was no open position. I want to be clear about that, because it's the whole point of the story. I hadn't just turned down an offer and reconsidered. There was nothing to reconsider. Twenty minutes earlier I had told a business owner, in his own office, that his company had a hole in it. Now I was on the shoulder of a highway in Irondale, Alabama, telling him I should be the one who fills it. It took me fifteen minutes, door to door, to go from diagnosing the gap to nominating myself for it.
I've thought a lot about why that particular fifteen minutes went the way it did, because on paper it makes no sense. I had tenure. I'd spent four years as Director of the School of Accountancy, a job I genuinely loved, at a university I'd given a decade to. Both of my brothers, Stephen and Brad, were already at Cowin, which meant I'd get to see them most days — that pulled at me too, more than I probably let on to myself at the time. But none of that is a business case. None of that is why an accountant pulls off a highway to volunteer for a job that doesn't exist.
Here's my best answer: the accountant's training doesn't just teach you to find the gap. It teaches you to trust the gap once you've found it. I'd spent that whole engagement doing exactly what the degree trained me to do — sit with messy information, follow it past the parts people were comfortable looking at, and say the true thing even when it's inconvenient. "You have no #2" wasn't a clever observation. It was just what the data said, if you were willing to read it honestly. And once I'd said it out loud, in Jamie's office, treating it as somebody else's problem to solve started to feel like the one dishonest move in an otherwise honest afternoon. If I believed the finding, I had to believe what it implied about me, too.
That's not the story people expect from an accountant. We have a reputation for caution — the profession that hedges, that qualifies, that waits for someone else to make the call. And plenty of that reputation is earned; a good accountant should be careful with an opinion. But there's a difference between being careful with your conclusions and being gun-shy about acting on them.
I called Jamie, made my case, and the position that didn't exist that morning existed by the time I hung up the phone. I left the school I loved, took a smaller title than the one I'd held for years, and went to go be a #2 at a company that hadn't budgeted for one. On paper, to almost anyone watching, it looked like a step sideways at best. It turned out to be the truest launch of my career — the one that eventually put me in the chair my own father had once sat in.
I tell this story now because I think most people have their own version of that five miles. A moment where you've correctly diagnosed something — a gap on your team, a problem no one's solving, an opportunity sitting in plain sight — and the honest next thought, the one you talk yourself out of before you reach your own exit, is that could be me. The accounting degree didn't teach me depreciation schedules so I could recognize that moment. It taught me to trust my own read of the evidence enough to act on it, even when the evidence pointed straight back at me and the math on paper said don't.
— DeWayne
Part of Accounting as a Launchpad, a 12toKNOW series. Also in the series: the anchor essay, I Run a Heavy-Equipment Company. An Accounting Degree Is How I Got Here., and Depreciation Doesn't Matter.