There's More Than One Kind of Accountant

The title tells you the function. It doesn't tell you the job.

Accounting alone fragments quickly. Tax, management, and financial accounting require different expertise. SaaS revenue recognition has nothing to do with percentage-of-completion. International and domestic are different work. So are small-company and large-company accounting, and operating inside a mature ERP versus building the reporting infrastructure a company doesn't yet have.

The same is true of marketers, product managers, engineers, and salespeople. The mistake isn't confined to inexperienced founders. I've watched large companies, and their PE investors and the CEOs they install, make it just as reliably. They hire a technology leader out of networking and IT and expect proprietary software. They hire front-end engineers and expect back-end systems. They hire someone who has integrated, deployed, and migrated enterprise systems and expect them to develop one. They hire brand and PR and expect B2B sourcing, or content and social when what the CEO wants is direct response. The résumés are strong. They're strong at different jobs.

Marketing channels make the point plainly. Television, direct mail, and paid search aren't three versions of the same job. They sit at different points on buyer intent — television close to none, mail low, search high — which means different purchase paths, different customers, and different craft. A marketer who has built one of them has not built the others.

The failure is legible. The reason isn't.

These are talented people. That's what makes the failure hard to read. When a weak hire fails, everyone understands why. When a strong one does, the management team goes looking for an explanation — and the one on offer is rarely the real one. The post-mortem lands on fit, or chemistry, or the market. Rarely on the fact that the talent was real and aligned to a different role.

So the search for an answer turns into a search for someone to hold responsible. The direct costs are the obvious ones: the compensation, and a year nobody gets back. The damage that lasts is to the team, which has now divided over a question it can't resolve — with the CEO's judgment quietly in play, and the next search running under that shadow.

Scale cuts two ways

The first question is whether the person has done the work you need done. The second is whether they've done it in an environment that resembles yours.

The obvious version is whether someone from a large company can operate small. A director who had a marketing operations team, an agency of record, a legal department, established processes, and a manager above them has never had to do the work alone. Remove the resources, the process, and the oversight, and you learn how much of the performance belonged to the person and how much belonged to the system around them. In a startup there's nobody to fill the gaps.

Was it them, or was it the company?

The harder question is attribution.

A résumé showing that someone worked at a market leader while revenue grew 40% tells you the company grew 40%. It doesn't tell you why. The candidate may have been responsible for a meaningful part of that growth. They may have performed well inside an already powerful machine. They may have been standing nearby.

The interview has to separate those possibilities, and most interviews never get far enough to try. What changed because this person was there? What did they personally decide, and what did they build? What went badly, and what did they do about it? What evidence ties the result to them rather than to the machine around them?

Without those answers you're collecting impressions — and polished candidates are very good at producing impressions.

The résumé describes an environment in which someone succeeded. Your job is to work out whether the environment was the reason.

There are many good accountants. Many good marketers, engineers, product managers, and salespeople. The question isn't whether the candidate is good. It's whether they're good at the job you actually have, in the company you actually are, at the stage you're actually in.