I actually took my first accounting class in high school and just filled one of the requirements that I needed in high school. It sounded interesting to me. When I got into it and actually went through the class, I was pretty intrigued by it. I enjoyed it quite a bit more than I thought I would. I started from there talking to my dad, who was in the finance and others that he introduced me with that were in the accounting profession and kind of continued that interest through the end of my high school career. When I got into college and needed to decide on a major, that kind of prompted me to choose the accounts degree or accounting major. If I don't like it, I can always switch and it just kind of carried me through. I got into college, enjoying it there as well. There were some tough classes for sure, but I did enjoy it, and I started to realize, even then, as I started to meet more with some of the professionals that how stable of a profession the accounting profession is to have a family and provide some stability for that family down the road. I felt like this feels right. It does seem to be a good profession for me. I enjoy the work. I just continued, and then that kind of got me kind of where I am on this today. That was kind of my start. But getting a job in public accounting with one of the big four firms. Guess back when I was recruiting, it was the big five. Arthur Andersen still around, and I had offers from several of them, and I selected PwC based on the kind of interactions that I had with the staff there. The strong story that PwC shares with me and I've had a great career at PwC ever since. It's been a challenging career, has been a rewarding career. I've learned a lot, which is what keeps becoming there every day.

Starting with what responsibilities or decisions do I handle it work. In the public accounting world and in the accounting firms, it's fairly similar across most of the firms. There's a very structured kind of management or promotion process. The responsibilities that you handle at work are dependent upon your level, right? The things that you do as a new associate versus a senior associate or a manager or even a partner are somewhat different. But we all work together, and it's a great combination of responsibilities. I'm a partner, at PwC and I'm a partner in our audit practice. The things that I deal with right now every day are I supervise on and oversee engagements. The companies that need financial statement audits as they need other attest type work. Then we will send in a team. They will do the work, and I will be a part of that team such that I'm gonna do the final sign off. As the team does the work, even stepping back as we sculpt the work and plan for the work, I'm involved to help make sure we're spending the right amount of time and effort around the maybe the higher risk areas in that work. On that, I review that work someone completes. It is usually one or two levels of review. I'm also reviewing the network, and then, in the end, I need to get comfortable as the partner to just sign off on the entire engagement and say, "Yeah, we're good. We've got everything we need to do. We've addressed all the risks" and then we issue an opinion on the financial statements, and that opinion is something that I sign and basically tell the market or tell whoever are the users of financial statements are that the financial statements are free of material misstatement, they're correct. They're applying generally accepted accounting principles the right way and that opinion hopefully carries some weight in the marketplace. That's kind of the day job, the normal nuts, and bolts of what a public accounting firm does and what a partner may do in an engagement like that. I also have responsibilities to manage people. I'm on the market team leader, which means I kind of lead our entire practice for our market. I also oversee a few partners. I oversee the kind of the entire office in our practice relative to the audits that we do. There's a number of people that we manage, and we're dealing with. HR matters and people questions around promotions and career development and things like that. We're also out of the marketplace getting our brand out, getting our name out. PwC rates as a strong brand in a number of sectors, and we're out promoting that and trying to win new clients. There's a relationship development element too. We're out of the marketplace. I'm going to lunch with CFO's or working with controllers or CEOs or board members just developing relationships to hope to maybe win new work. That's another element of my responsibilities as well. One of the questions you mentioned here was just around my schedule or weekly hours. We still have a fairly traditional busy season. When I look at my clients, I have a lot of December 31 year ends. Usually, the audits need to be done within 90 days, 60 or 90 days after that year-end. And January, February March gets pretty busy for me. We're working. My teams are probably working anywhere from 50 to 70 hours a week and right up against a deadline and I usually share some of those hours with them. My days may not be quite as long as a partner. You kind of have the ability to stay engaged with the team, but maybe not be in the field on a daily basis like they are but you're so supervising. My hours, maybe somewhere closer to the 50 or 60 range. But the work gets done, and then after that busy season, it goes down to anywhere from 40 to 50 hours a week. I would say on a pretty regular basis and as we have certain client deadlines or sort of internal lines and the weak or two or whatever. Before those deadlines could sometimes also get pretty busy. The hours would come up. The offset for that is when we're not busy, we have a great vacation and great policies for time off and family time, and whether it's maternity or paternity and the benefits, they're really strong, so that when we don't have to be busy, we can really enjoy and take some time off.

PwC has been on a journey for a number of years to digitize our audit process and our work and the same on the backside as well. We've introduced a number of tools over a number of years that we use very heavily in the work that we do and even in the last few years, it's just exploded. We've been on what we call our digital upscaling journey, where we're training all of our people, not just a select group of specialists, all of our people, on all of these tools, that are enhancing the way we work. Just from a basic perspective, we use a Google suite for our email and collaboration, with Google Docs and Google sheets and all of that is kind of Google based. That's kind of one element of our business which is internal. The audit software that we use is actually internally developed. It's called Aura, and it's online-based now. We're moving it to all just online in the cloud-based software, and it kind of takes us through an entire audit program on every engagement, from planning to execution to completion and working on addressing the right risks and sampling and all the things that you need is all kind of embedded in that tool. Those are the tools that new students are hired or people are hired by our firm, we spend a fair amount of time training them on that specific tool because it is proprietary for us. But a couple of the tools that we just in the last several years really ramped upon and we're training all of our people to do, really are things like robotics, process, automation or artificial intelligence, or workflow tools and storytelling tools. And we use tools like Alteryx or UIPath or Tableau, those are the tools that our people are really starting to utilize in a really significant way. Those were some things that we do. We're still very big in with Excel. That's a very big tool that we use in a lot of our world, but those were some fun new tools that we're getting into.