The Family Business

By Haley MacDonell

“What do you want to be when you grow up?”

The question may be trickier to respond to as we get older, but kids often have an easy answer. According to a survey of 2,000 Americans by Zety, some of our most common childhood dream jobs were doctor, musician, movie star and athlete. When we grow up, we take inspiration from what we see in media and the people in our own lives, including our families. Meet fathers and sons who share their interest in the accounting profession.

The Scotts

Nathan Scott felt like he knew more about taxes than the average kid. After all, his dad was an accountant. He remembers the days spent in the office during summer break and recalls being shocked at learning about the high percentage of taxes taken out of a paycheck.

in the office in those days, including Nathan’s father. There was often an empty office space where Nathan or any of his siblings could spend the day playing games on the computer.

Years later, Nathan pursued an accounting degree, following two of his older siblings who also stayed in the numbers game and studied finance.

“I did get some advice from my dad when I was in school,” Nathan remembered. “And now, he’s thinking about what he’ll do with the firm in the next 10 years. I always considered that as a route, to go into the family business.”

It wasn’t until his sophomore year of college, after taking a few accounting courses himself, that Nathan truly saw the way the business worked during a summer job with his dad. He helped around the office and tagged along on visits to meet with local companies on bookkeeping jobs.

“He’s a genius,” Nathan said. “That’s how I always saw him as a kid, and that’s what I saw close up when I actually worked with him. It was cool to see him not only doing the math, but also interacting with the clients.”

Out of college, Nathan started his career in public accounting and transitioned to corporate accounting in 2022. Now, he is a senior accountant at onsemi, a maker of semiconductor products and solutions, and has earned his CPA designation.

The exam has changed a lot since his dad took the exam with pen and paper — and without a calculator, which wasn’t permitted on the exam until 1994. Patrick remembers taking all four parts over the span of a few days, whereas Nathan had 18 months to complete the exam.

“That’s overwhelming,” Nathan said. “Having 18 months to complete the exam was an advantage, and I was able to really focus on certain sections. Maybe, the questions can be more challenging, because they know you’re really focused on a specific section. It’s a very difficult test either way.”

For Nathan, it was a no-brainer to become an accountant, and he’s eager to return the favor of offering advice to accounting students considering the profession.

“CPAs have tons of different options,” Nathan said. “I feel like I could go in so many different directions, and I know there are international opportunities. That’s something I really want to do one day.”

When Nathan’s father, Patrick, graduated with an economics degree years before, he had returned to his hometown to look for a job. Nathan’s grandfather recommended Patrick apply at a local accounting firm that they had a good relationship with. Patrick eventually became a CPA and received an Elijah Watt Sells award for stellar scores across all four sections. Patrick got the job and worked his way up from the bottom, eventually buying out the owner.

As a kid, Nathan and his siblings all took turns spending days during the summer at their dad’s office, a business with a legacy. A few of the clients are children of his original clients, families they’ve now known for decades. The practice had a small team working

The Kennedys

Growing up, Lawrence Kennedy remembers his dad working from home. He was always around, but what exactly he did - that was less clear. He knew it was something to do with accounting and testifying in court occasionally.

“Through junior year, I had no idea what accounting was, other than taxes,” Lawrence said, “and I knew my dad didn’t do taxes, at least not directly.”

Brendan, his father, worked in business valuation and litigation support, a niche of the accounting profession that assesses economic value for the purpose of partner ownership, taxes, divorce proceedings and other disputes. It’s a small section of the industry, with only 3,200 CPAs holding the Accredited in Business Valuation (ABV®) credential as of 2018. In 2006, Brendan started his own business that grew and would later be merged with ATLAS CPAs & Advisors PLLC in 2019.

Out of high school, Lawrence worked different jobs to see what career he wanted to pursue. His sister, Jacquie, was in college studying education and worked for their dad until the last semester of school. When the job opened up, Lawrence knew he wanted to be the replacement.

He helped out with data input, research and some analysis. At the time, his dad worked from home, so they worked together in a bedroom converted into an office. One of the first client services he shadowed was a lost profit and lost business value litigation case, complicated by destroyed inventory and a difficult landlord making renovations.

“The more I saw what my dad was doing, the more I realized how interesting it was,” Lawrence said. “I enjoyed the analysis and developing a reasoning behind why a company performs a certain way. At the end of the day, in that case, we prevailed. This client’s business was destroyed, and we were able to help him get something to compensate for what had happened.”

From that case forward, Lawrence’s interest in accounting grew.

“He started to see that as something he could do,” Brendan remembered. “Accounting has provided me with a good living and good opportunities, and it’s always challenging. I was very pleased to see him pursue this, and I think he’ll be better than me one day.”

When Brendan was first starting out, his original ambition was agribusiness, but he soon traded out chemistry for accounting. He went on to pursue his CPA, inspired by his brother and sister who were also accountants.

After a year in the administrative position, Lawrence began an accounting degree and went on to earn his associates in business and then bachelor’s degree in accounting by 2021.

In classes, he started putting the pieces together. Some of the concepts and work seemed familiar from professional experiences in bookkeeping or fraud investigations, but now he understood the correct terms and vocabulary to talk about it with confidence. Some topics like adjusting entries were completely new to him.

It’s been 10 years since Lawrence and Brendan started working together, and many of the first years were spent working out of the house. Now, Brendan is a partner and Lawrence is a senior valuation analyst, both working in business valuation and litigation support. Though part of a larger organization, they often work closely in their department of four to handle client cases.

“I’m not sure I give him the praise that he deserves, because he’s my son,” Brendan explains. “I don’t want to appear like I’m bragging on my son, but he deserves to be bragged about sometimes.” l