# What It's Like to be Every Level of Big 4 Accounting

Channel: POVBiz
Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cIDmDA9T3hY
Duration: 12 min
Language: English
Words: 1977
Transcript page: https://viewrankai.com/tools/youtube-transcript/cIDmDA9T3hY

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[0:00] Level one, the intern. It isn't busy season yet. That's the trick. You're 20, junior year. You applied to all four: Deloitte, PwC, EY, KPMG. You got two callbacks. You accepted the Deloitte offer because the recruiter followed up fastest, and at 20 that feels like a signal. They pay you $22 an hour. You work alongside actual staff accountants on real client files. The work is structured, bounded. Someone checks everything you do. Errors get caught before they matter. You go home at 6:00 p.m. most days. You think this is the job. It isn't the job. January isn't here yet. At the end of 10 weeks, they take you into a glass conference room,

[0:42] return offer, full-time, starting salary $67,000. You accept. Your accounting professor nods when you tell him. He says, "Good firm." He doesn't say anything else. You think that means something positive. It means he's been through a busy season. Level two, the staff accountant. January 2nd. You are back at your desk. The office feels different. You're 22. The return offer was real. The September through December version of this job was not. That version had training programs and welcome lunches and partners stopping by your desk to introduce themselves. This version has a stack of client files and a senior accountant

[1:18] telling you the fieldwork starts Monday. Your salary is $67,000. In New York or San Francisco, that number requires a roommate and a budget. You have both. The CPA exam is also happening. Four parts: financial accounting, auditing, regulation, business concepts. You have 18 months to pass all four after becoming eligible. You study on weeknights after 10:00 p.m. when the client work is done. You study on Sunday mornings. Busy season is January through April. The CPA exam doesn't pause for busy season. Nothing pauses for busy season. During busy season, you work 70 hours a week every week for 14 weeks straight. Weekends disappear. Your friends stop texting because you stop responding. You gain 11

[2:03] lb from desk food and no movement, or you lose eight from forgetting to eat. There is no middle option. Tax deadline is April 15th. On April 16th, the office exhales. Someone brings donuts. People laugh at things [music] that aren't funny. The relief of it is physical. Then someone mentions busy season starts again in 9 months. You pass two CPA parts on the first attempt. You fail

[2:26] one. You retake [music] it. You pass. You are building something, the credential, the experience, the exit opportunity you will use in two or three years to land somewhere better. That is the plan. Everyone on your floor has the same plan. Level three, the senior accountant. You run the engagement now. The client has $4 billion in revenue. You are 25 years old. Your salary is

[2:49] $85,000. Your title is senior accountant. You manage two staff accountants who are 1 year behind you on the same path. You review their work. You clear their comments. You interface with the client's accounting team directly. The client's controller is 47 and has been doing this longer than you've been alive. He doesn't say this. His tone does. The work is detailed, repetitive by design. Audit is a checklist, a very important checklist with significant consequences if items are missed, but a checklist. You test samples. You

[3:22] document conclusions. You tie numbers. You send review notes up to the manager. The manager sends them back with questions. You answer the questions. You document the answers. You move to the next item. You are good at this, efficient, fast. [music] The manager tells the partner you're one of the best seniors on the team. The partner nods. You don't hear about this directly. You hear about it through the senior manager in a hallway conversation you were meant to overhear. This is how Big Four delivers good news. Same as

[3:51] Goldman. Directly is for the other kind. Busy season this year is harder than last. You're running two engagements simultaneously. Different clients, same deadline. [music] You work until midnight on weekdays, later on weekends. The staff accountants leave at 9:00 p.m. because you tell them to. You stay [music] because nobody tells you to leave and the work doesn't finish itself. Exit conversations are happening around you. A staff accountant left for a corporate accounting role at a tech

[4:17] company. $95,000. Better hours, equity. [music] Everyone discusses it at lunch with a specific expression that contains equal parts judgment and envy. You tell yourself you'll leave after one more busy season. You said that last year. Level four, the manager. You stayed. Most people don't. You're 28, manager now. Salary is $120,000 plus bonus. The bonus depends on performance and utilization and client feedback and a fourth factor nobody fully explains [music] that seems to correlate with how much the partner likes you. You manage a team of six, two seniors, four staff. You are responsible for their development, their performance reviews, their morale during busy season, and their technical work

[5:03] product. You are also responsible for your own client relationships, your own deliverables, and your own utilization rate, which needs to stay above 80% or the conversation with the senior manager gets uncomfortable. You do not have fewer hours than senior accountant. You have different hours. Seniors work long because the work takes long. Managers work long because the work takes long and somebody also has to manage the people doing it. Your corporate accounting counterpart who left two years ago is now a senior financial

[5:33] analyst. She earns $115,000. Better hours, no busy season. She texts [music] you every April 16th. Same message every year. Survive another one? You respond the same way every year. Barely. You mean it less each time. That's the part that worries you. Level five, the senior manager. This is the last real decision point. Everyone who reaches it knows that. You're 32. Senior manager. Salary is $170,000 plus bonus. The total package is $210,000 in a good year. For the first time since joining the firm, the number feels proportional to the work. It only took a decade. The partner track conversation is happening. Not formally, informally first. Always informally first. A

[6:19] partner you've worked closely with mentions your name in a planning meeting. Someone repeats this to you. You are being considered. Consideration is not a guarantee. Consideration is the beginning of a process that takes two more years and requires business development and client origination and political relationships with the right partners in the right service lines. You also have an exit option. A Fortune 500 company approached your recruiter. VP of financial reporting. $230,000 base. Better hours. No busy season. Real equity. The kind of role you told yourself you were building toward when you were a staff accountant staring at the clock on April 14th. You are

[6:59] genuinely considering both. That's new. For seven years the exit was theoretical. Something you'd do eventually. Now it has a number attached and a timeline and a hiring manager who wants an answer by Friday. You [music] ask for an extension. You get two weeks. You spend two weeks doing math that doesn't resolve cleanly. Partner upside

[7:18] is enormous. Partner probability is not. One in 50 makes it from staff to equity partner. You are further along than most. You are not certain. Friday arrives again. You tell the recruiter you're staying. You're not sure if that was ambition or inertia. The honest answer is you don't know yet. Level six, the director. [music] The partner track stalled. Not stopped, stalled. You're 35. director. The title sits one level below partner on every org chart and carries none of the

[7:48] equity. Your salary is $220,000. Your bonus brings you to $270,000 in a strong year. The compensation is genuinely excellent. [music] The title is genuinely ambiguous. Director is the big four version of counsel, the firm's solution to a specific problem. You generate too much value to lose. [music] Your client relationships are real and transferable, but the partnership slots are limited and the politics didn't fully resolve in your favor, and so here you are, director, almost. Clients don't notice the distinction. You run their engagements. You attend their board meetings. You sign off on their financials. From their perspective, you

[8:27] are indistinguishable from a partner. From inside the firm, the distinction is visible to everyone and discussed by no one. Partners are collegial, inclusive. [music] They copy you on the important emails. They don't copy you on all of them. You have a second conversation with a recruiter. Different company this time. CFO role at a mid-sized private equity-backed business. $300,000 total comp. Meaningful equity if the exit goes well. You take the call. You listen to the whole thing. You don't take the meeting. You tell yourself it isn't the right opportunity. That's partially true. The fuller truth is that you've been here 13 years and leaving now feels like admitting the exit plan you had at

[9:08] 22 was right and the 13 years in between were something other than what you told yourself they were. The partner decision comes up again in the next cycle. You are optimistic. You have been optimistic before. Level seven, the partner, one in [music] 50. You are the one. You're 39, equity partner. Your compensation is tied to the firm's performance and your personal book of business. Last [music]

[9:31] year, you took home $620,000. The year before, $580,000. The trajectory is right. You own clients now, not just service them, own them. The relationship is yours. When they need something, they call you directly. When they go out to bid on services, your name is the reason they don't leave. You are the product as much as the work is, [music] which means you sell now. That's the part nobody fully explains before you make partner. The technical work doesn't stop. The audit doesn't sign itself, but selling is the new primary responsibility. Proposals, networking, industry conferences, dinners with CFOs who are evaluating whether to stay with your firm or move

[10:13] to a competitor. You are good at selling. You had to become good at it. The alternative was watching your book shrink until the partnership conversation went in the wrong direction. Busy seasons still happens. You thought it would stop mattering at this level. It doesn't. Your teams run the fieldwork, but your clients call during busy season with questions that require your answer, not a manager's answer. Your phone rings on Saturdays in February. You pick up because the relationship requires it. You picked up the phone on your daughter's birthday last March. A client audit committee had questions before signing off. 40 minutes. You came back to the table and

[10:50] everyone pretended not to notice. [music] You noticed. The work is yours now, fully yours. Everything about that is exactly what you wanted. The rotation. Right now, it's October. A junior at a state school is sitting in a campus recruitment session. Deloitte logo on the screen. A second-year manager is presenting. She looks polished, confident. She talks about career development and global opportunities and the quality of the exit options. She doesn't mention January. Nobody mentions January in October. The junior submits her application that evening. Her grades are good. Her internship was at a regional firm. Good enough. She gets the callback. She gets the offer. She accepts because the name means something

[11:34] and the credential is real and she has a plan. Two years, maybe three. Get the CPA, get the experience, exit to industry. Everyone does it. Clean, simple, sensible. She tells her roommate the plan that night. Her roommate's boyfriend did the same thing four years ago. He made senior manager last month. He's still working on the plan.

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