Issue #27 & July 20th, 2026
Happy Monday!
This week I’m handing the mic to Erin Pohan. She almost became a forensic accountant, but lucky for her (and us), she botched the interview and started a remote firm & an incredible conference instead.
She has some of the best reasoning I’ve heard for dropping the act, and simply being yourself. It can really take you places.
Take it away Erin!
I almost became a spy accountant and thank god I didn’t
I am someone who builds everything in public.
Which is why it is genuinely hilarious that there was a window in my life when I thought I was going to be an FBI forensic accountant. A spy with a briefcase. Secret cases by day, a secret life by design. I had the whole thing mapped out in my head: dim hallways, hushed offices, a version of me who spoke only in cryptic messages and moved through the world like a woman with classified information. By night and on weekends I would come home to my neighborhood, pick up my kids, and be a completely normal person. Nobody would ever know.
The whole vision was a disaster waiting to happen and I was the last to know.
In my mind I was already cracking financial crimes in a basement somewhere, carrying the weight of a greater mission, keeping it all close to the chest. I would fight something important. I would matter in a way that felt larger than a spreadsheet. I applied. I sat a two-hour proctored exam. I drove to a local track and ran miles, knocked out push-ups, trained for the fitness test with the kind of focus I had rarely applied to anything before. I was fully committed to becoming someone I was not.
I made it all the way to the in-person interview. New suit, buttoned all the way up. Ready to be the most composed, contained, unreadable version of myself that had ever existed.
And then I sat down across from the agent and completely, spectacularly, misread the room.
I talked. A lot. Warmly, enthusiastically, with all the open energy that has never once been optional for me. I told my story the way I always tell it: with zero filter and a lot of feeling. It did not occur to me in the moment that I was sitting in a building full of people trained to disappear, and I was radiating the energy of someone who had just arrived at a party she was really excited about.
(Actual rejection email I received)
The rejection landed hard. Not just because I had lost a job I wanted, but because I had convinced myself it was the only interesting door cracked open for someone like me in this profession, and now it was closed.
It took me a long time to stop grieving it and start finding it funny. Now I think it is one of the best stories I own. I walked into a federal building and lit the whole thing up. How did I not see that coming?
But here is what took even longer to understand. That rejection forced me to reckon with something I had never really questioned: my entire picture of who an accountant was supposed to be was wrong. Or at least, it was wrong for me. I had spent years in CPA firms wearing the costume of the profession — neutral slacks, sensible blazers, pantyhose — without ever asking whether any of it was actually me. The accounting world has a very specific idea of what it looks like, sounds like, and acts like, and I had accepted that picture as fact. It never occurred to me to question it.
It wasn't until I started UpKeeping and began building real relationships with my own clients that I understood what I had actually been missing. When you are the one sitting across from a business owner — or on a video call with them — you cannot put up a front. It would be an injustice to the relationship. These clients are trusting me with something incredibly important. The least I can do is show up as someone real in return. Anything less and we are building on the wrong foundation entirely.
The other gift of owning your own firm and working remotely, by the way, is that nobody is issuing a dress code. Being professional still matters to me — it just looks a lot different when you are comfortable in your own skin than when you are trying to fit a mold someone else handed you.
Somewhere out there, a very serious FBI agent is still relieved I did not get that job.
Honestly? Same.
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Steal this The Takeaways • The best rejections tell you who you are, not what you're worth. • The costume of the profession is an inherited default, not a requirement. • Authenticity is an operational choice, put yourself where your defaults are advantages. "The FBI turned her down for the exact trait her clients now hire her for." |
Question of the week
When did getting turned down do you a favor?
Have a lovely week,
- Tailor
P.S. see a few of you next week at Bridging the Gap Conference speaking on Tuesday!
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