Ascend’s Chief People Officer Erin Stahmer on Rethinking Career Paths
The accounting industry is all about people, from the expert CPAs who advise their clients to the teams supporting them at each firm. But the industry has a talent problem. Experienced CPAs are ready to retire— or at least plan for a successor— but fewer college students are pursuing accounting degrees in favor of other STEM career paths. So when CEO David Wurtzbacher and Chief People Officer (CPO) Erin Stahmer set out to found Ascend, an Alpine Investors-backed platform that partners with entrepreneurial CPAs to usher in their next stage of growth, they knew that getting the people side of the business right would be crucial to their success. Envisioning the future of work at Ascend and in the entire accounting industry, former Alpine VP and Head of Playbook Erin Stahmer shares how she takes a PeopleFirst approach to her work, why the CPO role is one she’s passionate about and why she never refers to employees as “resources.”
PeopleFirst is both an ethos and a way of running your business. It's making sure that people are at the heart of every decision you make. It’s creating space and time on a regular basis to zoom out and work on the business instead of just being in the business.
I spent college and the early years of my career exploring how I could best leverage my skills to make an impact. After roles in consulting and product management, I went back to business school at the Stanford Graduate School of Business (GSB) with two goals: first, to deepen my fundamental business knowledge, and second, to equip myself with the skills needed to be a great people manager and leader. At Stanford, I discovered that leadership development and coaching was a career path unto itself – and one I was very passionate about. That’s also where I met GSB professor and Alpine founder Graham Weaver, who invited me to join Alpine in 2018 to help the private equity firm build its leadership and strategy programs. For the first time in my career, it felt like everything was flowing. I realized that becoming a people leader was the ultimate path for me.
