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Leaders of the Ledger from CPA Practice Advisor in partnership with Rightworks spotlights the people and ideas shaping the future of the accounting profession.
Each episode host Rob Brown interviews influential firm leaders, innovators and rising stars to uncover how they are tackling today’s biggest challenges whether it is client advisory services, AI and technology, talent strategy or firm growth through M&A.
Built on CPA Practice Advisor’s trusted recognition lists like the 40 Under 40 Influencers in Accounting and other collections of prominent professionals, this show goes beyond the headlines to share practical insights, personal stories and proven strategies from those moving the profession forward.
If you are a firm owner, leader or ambitious professional who wants to stay ahead of the curve Leaders of the Ledger is your inside track to the conversations and connections that matter most in accounting.
Subscribe now to hear from the voices redefining what it means to lead in the profession.
Rob Brown (00:01.255)
Welcome to the brand new podcast, Leaders of the Ledger. We are launching a series on behalf of CPA Practice Advisor, one of the most formidable and insightful accounting platforms in the world. And I'm thrilled to have me today, Goran Gamitrovich. And he's going to tell us a little bit about his story. been identified as one of CPA Practice Advisors, 40 under 40. See, these are influential people coming up in the world of accounting, and we like to shine a light on them and learn a little bit about their story. This podcast,
is there to serve the profession and be a force for good and recognize what is going well. So Goran, it is lovely to have you with us. Good day, sir.
Goran Gmitrovic (00:42.41)
Lovely to meet you, Rob. Super excited and honored to be here today and getting a chance to talk to you.
Rob Brown (00:46.405)
Well you've been, you've been the right girl because you've been identified as an influencer. Do you see yourself that way?
Goran Gmitrovic (00:54.228)
It's a heavy question. Because when it comes to people close to my life, my family, my wife, my close friends, nobody would ever look at me in that light. This is something that's completely something new for me, especially getting a spotlight like this. Being, you
Rob Brown (00:57.092)
Hahaha
Goran Gmitrovic (01:21.344)
My first year that I was nominated for it, I self nominated myself and somehow the computer made enough mistakes for it chose me to be part of it. But it's not a feeling that's kind of like, you know, I did something special to get, you know, this type of honor or anything like that. It's to me, it's so meaningful because
Rob Brown (01:31.163)
The algorithm favoured you,
Goran Gmitrovic (01:48.182)
It's a representation of 12 years of extremely hard work, long nights, many hours putting into my own personal services, expanding our professional services firm, and getting that recognition and that representation now is definitely a huge honor. It's hard to reconcile it in my head, but I know that Outlook, the firm that I work for, has helped many people and has done it through.
kind of the core values that we call out in the article that CPA practice advisor posted.
Rob Brown (02:24.807)
Well, it is great to see it. And when I introduce myself, I say Rob Brown, host of many different podcasts in the accounting world. Do you have an elevator pitch or a way you introduce yourself when people ask, say, what do you do?
Goran Gmitrovic (02:38.886)
well that's so there's a couple things about me. kind of the two main identifying factors of me is one, I'm the owner founder of Outlook accounting and taxes out of Chicago, Illinois, and two, I'm from Croatia. So those are the two things that I usually start off with in my elevator. Yeah. To me, when I started Outlook about a dozen years ago and
Rob Brown (02:56.839)
They define you. Yeah. I understand.
Goran Gmitrovic (03:07.928)
kind of the journey that it's taken from there to get to where it is today has been a massive undertaking. feel like if the 36-year-old me could go back in time and talk to myself who had the energy back in college and back after college and say, this isn't going to be easy. Nothing in life that's worthy is ever going to be easy for you.
Could have made me think twice at that point if I knew all of the challenges and obstacles. And then it's also kind of very reflectory about why so many businesses shut down in the first year. It's extremely difficult to own such a, you know, being such a competitive industry and run, you know, a professional services firm, not only with, you know, morals, ethics, but also with high quality efficiency, making sure client excellence is always top of mind.
Rob Brown (03:40.06)
Yeah.
Rob Brown (03:49.127)
Hmm.
Goran Gmitrovic (04:05.538)
But to me, Outlook has been my whole DNA over the past 10 years. That's something that I've been driving, something that I've been focused on bringing to our main goal is to bring it to the top 500 IPA companies in the nation in the next five years. And I think that we can get to that. But I always want to make sure that we don't rest on our laurels either, that we always continue to innovate and learn new things, find new clients.
Rob Brown (04:27.654)
Hmm.
Goran Gmitrovic (04:33.43)
get into new interesting industries and just be a one-stop shop for all of America. Take over TurboTax.
Rob Brown (04:42.769)
Global domination. When we started to get an insight into your psyche, your personality, just take us back to Goran Gamitrovich at 16 years old. Did you always want to be an accountant? Was this route planned out for you?
Goran Gmitrovic (04:56.014)
Wow, that's nostalgia question right there.
Rob Brown (05:00.679)
Well it's an origin story, Goran, isn't it? It's where you came from to be here.
Goran Gmitrovic (05:06.122)
It's either you're a hero of your own story or a villain of your own story. That's the 16 year old mark in me. So when I was 16, I was a football player. I was a football player with epilepsy. I was a very interesting person at that time. Not a lot of my doctor fought me for many, many years about, hey, can't play football. I'm like, I'm gonna though. It's my thing.
Rob Brown (05:12.081)
Sure.
Rob Brown (05:18.555)
Okay.
Goran Gmitrovic (05:34.574)
So at 16 years old, the only academics that I knew of was film, watching football film and playing football. then my senior year, I got hurt where I couldn't play any longer after that. And that's when the mindset started shifting in my head. I was like, okay, I've never really cared about my academics. It's never been an important factor to me. I always relied on my sports and my athletic ability.
And then at 18 years old, I was like, what's going to happen next to me? And there was a mentor in my life at that time who was going to DePaul University, studying accounting, somebody I looked up to very, very much, still do. And he, a way, unconsciously, subconsciously influenced me in a way through just his successes.
Rob Brown (06:07.975)
Hmm.
Goran Gmitrovic (06:30.686)
what he was doing in life and got me involved in understanding not only accounting from that way but also mathematics from that way because it's a whole sport of equations at the end of the day. There's usually, when I entered into accounting, I was always like, okay, there's only one right answer. That's what attracted me to it. Through experience to realize there's not only one right answer, there's a lot of right answers.
Rob Brown (06:44.806)
Yeah.
Rob Brown (06:59.514)
Sure.
Goran Gmitrovic (07:00.234)
Sometimes they can be said differently. when I decided to go through and start doing accounting, because that was never my thing. It was just something that I was trying to be kind of mirror my mentor. OK, he's successful. I want to be successful. I can't do this anymore. This is the only other path that I know. And that was kind of like fight or flight for me. So was like, OK, my GPA, not that great right now because
All I focused on is football. I never focused on academics. So I'm going to go to community college for a couple of years, get my GPA up in community college. Then I'm going to go to the same school that he went to and all of that happened. And it's one of those things like when you manifest it so much in your life that it all becomes kind of a reality in your head that kind of spins out into actual reality. you know, from there, it was, I didn't have time to distract myself.
Rob Brown (07:30.619)
Haha.
Yeah.
Goran Gmitrovic (07:57.964)
I didn't have an option to fail. It was only me and my mom at that time. And I didn't, it was, was, to me, I didn't have a backup plan. It was, I need to be really good at this. I need to, I need to be a rock star. All my eggs are in one basket. Literally taking a second mortgage out on the house to get me through school. Like we got a
Rob Brown (08:15.067)
You were all in.
Goran Gmitrovic (08:26.712)
we gotta make sure that I do good. my brain started accepting the fact that it needed to start reading a little more books, stop watching a little less film and somehow got through the poll successfully and opened up my firm about a year afterwards and spent a little time throughout the years around the big fours, contractor and things like that and got me, got me.
help in a lot of different ways in expanding a leadership mindset, expanding an entrepreneurial mindset, understanding the crevices of this cruel industry at the end of the day.
Rob Brown (09:05.126)
Yes, it takes no prisoners in a way, but it is a good game to be in. We'll come to that. But what kind of shape do you feel accounting is in as a profession right now, Grant?
Goran Gmitrovic (09:16.846)
This is a very interesting shift. I've actually never experienced something like this in my life, where since AI is becoming so involved in kind of the day-to-day operational basis of all accountants and tax accountants, it's becoming a struggle to realize what was done through, know, chat GPT and what was done through insight. Because I still do feel that there's a huge difference between the two of them.
Chat GPT can give you some wonderful answers to rewritten emails or changing your tone or whatnot. But when it comes to actual insight for the client, actual conversations, brainstorming sessions and things like that, I think in about 10 to 12 years, maybe it'll be sophisticated enough where it can have those conversations with people. But I think for right now, as the accounting industry is moving towards more of an automated platform and
I can even count on that because I opened up a second company with my business partner called Simply Flow AI, which is going to be a data automation tool for tax preparers. It's going to be a scan and populate tool that's going to support more on the business side than on the individual side like the other competitors. But AI is driving all of that at the end of day. And getting all of that, it kind of...
infrastructure built into the accounting industry, especially making sure that it's done with ethics, it's done morally, that it's in a way that doesn't represent the criminal activities of America, for example, where it represents more the single mother situations or middle class situations, things like that where
Rob Brown (11:00.987)
Yeah.
Goran Gmitrovic (11:11.958)
You can get AI to support solutions like that. But when it comes to more complex use cases like international use cases or talking about grantor trusts or international estates and things like that, it all gets very complicated very easily. And I don't think Chad GPT is at the area or AI is at the area where it can build.
Rob Brown (11:15.452)
Hmm.
Goran Gmitrovic (11:36.76)
kind of build that knowledge base, at least for another few years. But the biggest shift to me has been the move into AI and how that's kind of representing a lot of accountants lately. And it's more difficult dealing with clients because all they do after you answer a question and they don't like your answers, they go to chat GPT and they see, okay, tell me why he's wrong. And it's, you know, you're fighting with AI the entire day.
Rob Brown (11:38.503)
Mm.
Rob Brown (11:56.646)
Yeah.
Rob Brown (12:00.347)
Doctors are having the same complaints and that patients are coming to them and they've already self diagnosed. They already know what's wrong. They already know what their symptoms are. I'm just thinking as you're talking that the different heads or hats that a modern day accountant has to play because you get in the game and you're very technical and you study your exams and you know the numbers and I'm a former high school math teacher so I get the numbers piece. But then you've got to be part accountant, part technically proficient, part entrepreneur.
part advisor, part AI engineer, part technologist. There's a lot of roles you need to fulfill to look after the client and do your job these days.
Goran Gmitrovic (12:40.526)
Yeah, absolutely. You got to be a jack of all trades. Outlook started as a one man company, just me. Back in 2014, 2015, 2016, it was me and my girlfriend, who is my wife at now, stuffing envelopes, sending it out to neighbors, soliciting door to door.
Rob Brown (12:47.953)
Yeah.
Rob Brown (13:08.933)
Hmm, wow. Old school.
Goran Gmitrovic (13:09.198)
putting up flyers, walking to business, you know, through the rain, sleet, snow, it didn't matter. Because the biggest sales season for accounting and tax firms is in the winter. Because everybody's either getting rid of their accountants or they're looking for to shift into a new business and they're looking to set that up before tax season starts. So between the months of like November and January, those are, that's like the sweet spot for sales, right? And in Chicago, winters are not that kind to you.
So, me and my wife at the time, you know, we'd spend our Saturdays, Sundays, you know, Monday, you know, pretty much every day from early morning to the evenings, walking door to door, passing out flyers, talking to, you know, a variety of businesses, selling our tax returns for $50 a pop, just trying to build some recognition and brand name to that, you know.
doing that and then you know when you have the client it's yes exactly you have to be a part technologist you have to act like the tools that you subscribe to are your own tools so you have to be like a customer service to them but yeah this is how you enter the portal this is how you upload a document and then at the same time you got to be a therapist sometimes too oh well i don't think i should owe that much money i always get money back so can pay off my credit cards i'm like okay well
Rob Brown (14:14.065)
Hmm.
Rob Brown (14:24.465)
Hahaha
Goran Gmitrovic (14:29.654)
If I could tell you that you have a different tax bracket, I would, but I can't. And then it's, you know, to be successful in this, it's a people business at the end of the day. The clients build you and they create your business and you need to protect them from every possible which thing. Even from, you know, just simple.
Rob Brown (14:34.171)
No.
Goran Gmitrovic (14:54.872)
Diagnostics on their tax return to a little tax planning for the future, to ways of saving money, throwing maybe one hour of time on their calendar once a year just to check in with them, see if anything new has happened, just so they can feel that you care and that they're heard and they're understood. And that's very important to me because I know what it's like to be on the other side, right? Especially, you know, like if I needed to get a lawyer or if I needed to find a doctor and I feel like I'm not being heard or being seen then.
gives me, you know, kind of that hesitancy to be with them. Even if they might be the smartest person in the room, a client would rather have somebody that could listen to them, cares about their situation, and can help them get to the next step, rather than somebody who's just gonna type in a bunch of numbers and be like, okay, here you go, done, next.
Rob Brown (15:43.077)
Yeah. And the pandemic brought that out. Accountants literally did have to be therapists and counselors and shoulders to cry on and helping businesses keep the lights on. Tell us a little bit about where you go. Who is your tribe, your community? Where do you go for information, for advice, for insight, for camaraderie, for encouragement? Because it can be lonely, can't it? Running your own firm.
Goran Gmitrovic (16:07.534)
It can be, yeah, it's very true. Outlook now has 28 resources worldwide. And we got three very good leaders that are standing right next to me and are very good at their jobs and they're very helpful at everything that they do and they're very invested into the firm. So I definitely turn to them for a lot of, let's brainstorm this out, let's think this through, I need some.
know, leadership thought to this, we need to figure out if this is right for the firm or not. But kind of beyond that, you're still kind of at a place where you're by yourself, because at the end of the day, it all starts with you and it all ends with you. Right? A place that I go to personally for support is CPA Practice Advisor, actually. It is a benchmark tool in the United States and in the world where it helps with a lot of...
Sorry, with a lot of tracking against vendor, vendor softwares, saying what's best in the technology market, saying what the new regulations are that are coming through from the IRS, saying what the latest thing that Trump is thinking to do with our tax code and keeping busy with that. And the people that got us around CPA practice, either through comments or through their community or through the school community are very helpful.
Rob Brown (17:22.246)
Haha.
Goran Gmitrovic (17:37.878)
And I've built some great relationships with that as well. CPA practice advisor led me to a couple of vendor relationships that I've built six, seven years ago that have been, you know.
Those relationships are now in my little circle of people, right? There are people that I trust, that I care about, that even though it's a very competitive market and we all work against each other, there's so much work to be done and there's so much to do to get the tax code to where it needs to be in the future to understand how future generations or how the new retirement generation is going to be. Baby boomers are...
kind of phasing out right now. New generation is kind of phasing in, so there's going to be a huge shift in competency levels as well. So you're losing something that's built kind of the infrastructure of accounting. You're losing that generation. You're getting this new generation in. To be able to kind of create a seamless transition between the two, you need to have a community. You need to have a national community that's behind you that's supporting each other.
Whether it go from simple technical questions to actual insightful business questions about, how are you automating this? What are you doing when it comes to, you know, products like white works versus Amazon versus this versus that pros cons of everything, because all of that is can be conspired really fast. It's expensive to be in this industry too. Uh, for just our technology for a month. mean, we drop, you know, over five figures a month on that. Um,
Rob Brown (19:09.809)
Hmm.
Goran Gmitrovic (19:17.684)
That's if you don't have the right insight, one, you're losing money and two, you're behind the eight ball at that point. You need to, you need to know the right people to help support you and you need to do the same vice versa as well.
Rob Brown (19:30.853)
Yeah, very well said. You need that peer over the garden wall or that look into somebody's medicine cabinet and check what they're doing and that sense check. yeah, well said there. A couple more questions, Goran. What excites you most about the future for Outlook, for you, for the accounting profession generally?
Goran Gmitrovic (19:50.334)
That's a good question.
Rob Brown (19:53.255)
Well, there's a lot going on right now, isn't there's a lot of disruption, private equity, AI is coming in. You mentioned that there's a lot of reasons why we feel the relevance of accounting professionals might be diminished or under threat, but also that creates a lot of opportunities. So, and you're a very passionate guy. You're a very good advocate for the brand of accounting. You're an ambassador for your firm and for the profession. So you must be excited about what's coming up.
Goran Gmitrovic (20:19.214)
It's an exciting time, but also a scary time because it's a time that's never really happened before because everything in accounting, even from the early 1900s, has been cut from the same cloth. Green sheets, whether they're actual green sheets or digitized, it's still green sheets at the end of the day. But now with AI coming,
Rob Brown (20:34.395)
Yeah, double entry bookkeeping has never changed really has it?
Yeah.
Goran Gmitrovic (20:48.536)
coming through and private equity firms buying every mom and pop boutique shop for accountants and not really allowing the small boutiques to grow into kind of an IPA 500. That's ultimately where Outlook wants to be because these equity firms are coming in with a high dollar value, buying people out, buying their books of businesses and kind of growing the top 5 % of accounting firms in the nation, which there's nothing wrong with that either.
A lot of people at the end of day, their goal is, I'm going to sell my business in five years, seven years, 10 years, whatever it may be. This might have happened at a time where a lot of private equity firms are kind of snatching as much as they can up. It could have been coincidentally for that. But at the same time, it's diluting that it's creating a bigger gap between the firms that are known as household names versus the firms that are trying to.
kind of get to that place, right? So the AI shift is something new, it's something different. It is diminishing staff accountants in a way, I agree with that completely. And I don't think it should be because at the end of the day, I feel the power of a person and the power of insight and being on camera in front of somebody or meeting somebody in person out has a greater weight than being able to ask.
AI questions or ask chat GPT questions. Maybe at a technical level that would make sense, right? But at a level where you're building that human connection, where you're building those partnerships, those strategic partnerships to support yourself and your clients, you need to have that face-to-face time. I think it's very important when two people sit down for a cup of coffee, have a half hour conversation, look at each other in the eye, shake hands, have
you know, healthy banter, have a beer at a bar or something like that. I think that's how relationships get built because I was born in the era where we were going through, it was a very different era because I didn't have my first cell phone until I was 17 years old, right? Now you got kids at the age of nine having cell phones in their pocket, looking at their screens all day, where to me it was like all I knew was how to play outside, how to...
Rob Brown (22:58.851)
Haha.
Goran Gmitrovic (23:10.498)
be part of a community, how to be with around people, how to play football, how to play soccer, how to play this, how to play that versus nowadays, like everything is done behind the screen and losing that human aspect to the industry is gonna be very, I feel critical in a negative way. Like if AI does take everything over, which...
I could say that I can see that happening in the future, where AI does primarily take over all data input aspects, which I would say when it comes to the tax industry, kind of just purely data input is about 30 % of it, which is pretty massive when it comes to your data entry specialists and things like that. But when it comes to actual planning for trusts, wills, retirements, states,
Rob Brown (23:51.655)
Mm.
Goran Gmitrovic (24:07.374)
et cetera, things like that. I think that you're always going to need somebody for that. And the shift between kind of going from the human to the robot right now, that's what makes it all so scary because AI doesn't even know it's understand its own boundaries yet. Right? So a lot of times it's wrong and what it does. And a lot of times people are wrong too, right? People make mistakes all the time, but it's very important to kind of keep your head on the swivel at this time and make sure that one,
Rob Brown (24:19.121)
Hehe.
Goran Gmitrovic (24:37.038)
You're not resting on your laurels of what kind of brought you to this place, but you're also optimizing relationships. You're creating new ones. You're making sure that you're being, you're part of different communities, different support groups and things like that to support entrepreneurship, to support small business growth and things like that.
Rob Brown (24:57.169)
Well, that's excellent advice for people coming through to stay relevant, to stay informed, to stay current, to stay in the game and keep contributing. A final question, Goran. I've got to ask you, I'm here in the United Kingdom. You're there in Chicago in the United States, but you're very proud Croatian. So you've got a strong heritage in that regard. Accounting is an international concern, isn't it? These days, it's no longer that you're a high street accountant and you just look after...
people that live in your community. It's everywhere. So speak to us about the international nature of the brand of accounting and how it's everywhere.
Goran Gmitrovic (25:32.91)
That's an excellent question. That's kind of funny you mention that because I mentioned in the article that we're creating a white paper right now for international taxation. one thing that we're doing is we're creating a proprietary tool that's going to be comparing tax laws from the European Union versus the tax laws in America.
Rob Brown (25:42.972)
Right.
Rob Brown (25:55.943)
Good luck with that. No.
Goran Gmitrovic (25:58.528)
It's not going to be an easy feat, if we get it to be marketable, and we are hoping to get it marketable by after tax season next year, it should be very helpful for expat taxes. I have an entire community out in Croatia that are expat people that need to file their taxes with either the foreign earned income exclusion or they're trying to get bona fide residency or one thing or another thing.
And then you always have to deal with the type of treaties that you have. So specifically for Croatia right now, we still haven't ratified our treaty, but there's other countries in the European Union like Germany, Austria, France, places like that, that do have bona fide treaties with the United States of America. So getting all of that digitized, putting it into a software telling it, okay, this is the income that was made in the United States of America. This is the income that was made in Germany.
what is the most optimal way for this person to complete their taxes if they spent 183 days of residency in X country and in B country, for example. Things like that. And it's going to be a tool that supports individual income expat taxes versus business taxes as well. Because Outlook has a subsidiary in Croatia right now as well.
So we have an office in Croatia and we're going to be opening up an office in India as well. And to figure out the most tax-advantages position for yourself, you're always looking at, okay, is us positioning our revenue in this country going to make sense for our main business service line in America? Is us opening up an office over here going to give us any grants, going to give us any benefits? What is the country going to do for us?
Rob Brown (27:44.156)
Hmm.
Goran Gmitrovic (27:51.822)
Because a lot of people, back 30 years ago, if we were having this conversation, everybody was going to the Cayman Islands or the Bahamas to hide their money for some reason, even though that's only a movie thing. That never actually occurred the way that people think it occurred. But there's so many ways now that if you have the resources and if you have the sustenance in your business that you can create international wealth for yourself.
Rob Brown (28:04.753)
Haha.
Goran Gmitrovic (28:21.198)
by honing in on better profit rates. Like for example, in Croatia, 10 % profit tax on my business taxes. So we need to hire a few people out there. We need to create a transfer pricing agreement. We need to send our revenue from America to our administrative staff over there for their salaries. And at the end of the day, we only pay 10 % taxes over there while over here everything's passed through. And if you're talking to a...
wealthy entrepreneur, can go up to their 37 % tax bracket, 39 % tax bracket, a huge variety of differences between the two. But you're also giving away control to another country as well.
Rob Brown (29:03.727)
You are a fine example of how accounting and firms are transcending countries and cultures and borders, but magnificent what you're doing Goran. You really created a legacy. This is the Leaders of the Ledger podcast on behalf of CPA Practice Advisor. I am your host, Rob Brown. We've been talking to Goran Gimitrovic and talking about his influence and his passions for the accounting game. We thank you so much for sharing your insights today.
and giving us a little peer into your life and the great things that you're doing. Thank you so much for joining us.
Goran Gmitrovic (29:36.354)
Thank you, Rabbi. I appreciate you. It was wonderful being here today.
Rob Brown (29:39.857)
Folks, you can check out the show on all podcast apps and platforms. It's going to be on YouTube as well. So it will be on video because it is a fact these days that podcasts are consumed more on YouTube than almost any of the platforms. So we are everywhere and it's brilliant to meet guests like Goran just to get an insight into people on the front line and shining a light on the great things that they are doing because they are making a difference. They are setting the standards by which many other accountants are following and being inspired by. So thanks so much for joining us.
and we'll see you on next week's episode.