David Bergstein: Your Competition Isn't Who You think It Is

Steven Sacks, author of The NEW Fundamentals, interviews David Bergstein, who says a perfect storm of emerging technologies, a competitive shakeout in accounting, and COVID-fueled change is creating a new range of challenges for accounting firms. The good news is: There are more opportunities than challenges. But You need to move fast. The window of opportunity won't last forever. "The world is changing," says Bergstein, now chief innovation officer of Brookstone CPA, based in Margate, Fla. Before launching Brookstone, Bergstein was most recently as "cloud evangelist" for Intuit. "CPAs are leaning more and more into technology to do what I'll call the back-office work. So advisory services are coming to the forefront." Pointedly, Bergstein notes that non-CPA firms are challenging the CPA business by taking advantage of the newest technologies and offering advisory services. "People are calling themselves business coaches, business managers, strategic advisors. There's no licensure required to do that. What those people are doing is utilizing the technology to put the books together. They're not offering audited financial statements."