How to become Partner at the Big 4 Accounting Firms

How do you become a big four accounting firm partner. There are a couple of important items to keep in mind if you are going to become a big four partner. What do you think those are. Most people probably think that you need to be really good at sales or that you need to be extremely technical. What do you think is most important for a big four part or somebody that’s on the path to partnership. You probably think of somebody that’s really good networking or somebody that has a really big network. Maybe you need a  big book of business. Is it how many clients that you have in your book of business? Is it the size of those clients? Does it matter which region you work in?

Don’t get me wrong…

All of those things do have an impact on a person’s path the partnership but there are two essential things that you need to focus on if you want to make partner. Let’s discuss the first item that matters:

The first thing that matters the most is the amount of time you have in your chair. You might be saying well that can’t be true because spending time in the chair isn’t going to make you partner. You might also be saying….I know a lot of people that are capable of sitting in a chair for a number of hours.

They all can’t possibly make partner. See that’s the problem right there. Faulty logic. Sticking in your chair at the big 4 seems easy, but not many people actually stick around at the big four to make partner. Most of the people leave.

They leave for number of reasons. One of them is that you have to work around the clock all the time. You have to be there for your client and your team whenever they need you. You also have to travel for client work. This means less time doing what you like, less time with your family members and loved ones. Because you have less time doing what you like and you spend less time the people you love, your quality-of-life diminishes. Most people perform a cost-benefit analysis and realize that the amount of money they get paid at the big four is not enough to compensate for the loss of the quality-of-life. Because of this, very few people do stick around at the big four. Just by sticking around in the big four through all the thick and thin, you increase your chances of making partner exponentially. So if you want to make partner, glue your butt to a seat that is located in a big 4 office. That is priority number 1. Once you’ve glued yourself to a seat, we’ll discuss the second most important item to making partner.

The next most important thing to making partner at the big four is internal politics. Like I said before the number of clients, the technical know-how, the networking skills, don’t matter as much as your ability to play internal politics. What is internal politics. Internal politics includes things like brown nosing, making yourself seem important, making yourself seem like a problem solver, and making yourself seem like the busiest person in the group. Now none of that has to be true. You don’t have to be the busiest person that works in your group let alone the firm. You don’t have to be the most technical person that works there either. You do have to be willing to make yourself look like it though.

This means sitting through miserable public accounting meetings and talking about how great of a job you’re doing. Talking about all of your client work and making it seem extremely important even if it’s not. That’s another secret of the big four. There isn’t much work that gets done. Most of the big four work is just review work. You review what your clients have done and just provide a thumbs-up or thumbs-down. Outside of that its administrative work and a lot of useless meetings to discuss the work that’s about to be done or that was just completed. You can’t get in the mindset that you need to be busy all the time. The people that are just head down in an Excel file never make it to partner. They burn themselves out early on in the process. Don’t let yourself be that person.

If you want to make partner, you need to make yourself look good and you need to stick around. Write those two things down somewhere and look at them every day. Make them your most important goals at the big 4. Keep them in front of you at your desk.

You will work on those two items if you keep them in front of you. They’ll provide a good reminder. Any time you get too busy, look down at your goals. You will then make sure to delegate that busy work to somebody else that doesn’t have your same goals. You need people to do your work in order for you to spend more time on making yourself look good. You also need to make your job sustainable so that you could stick around. This means you can’t burn yourself out doing everybody else’s work and saying yes to every single project. You need to say yes to the projects that matter and that will make you look good. You also need to spend time developing your brand internally. You don’t need to bother developing your brand to clients and delivering great work to clients. That’s where a lot of people waste their time in the big four accounting firms. You only need to look good internally. One great way of doing this is by making other partners lives easier. Note that I said partners and not clients.

In conclusion, if you want to make partner buckle up and hang on for dear life. It’s going to take a while but if you’re willing to spend the time in your chair and make yourself look like an all star you can get there.