Women’s History Month Q&A With Lisa Raines

Every Tuesday throughout Women’s History Month, I’m highlighting women CPAs that have inspired me and have made a difference across the profession!?

My third spotlight is Lisa Raines.

What’s your title at PwC? Director?

Where are you based?? Portland, Oregon

What’s your favorite way to unwind? I love to cook and try out a fun new recipe while watching some reality TV (anything Bravo) in the background

What technology can’t you live without? From a personal perspective - I’m a fan of IG - I love seeing pictures and stories from my family and friends and I also use IG for great shopping motivation! From a work perspective - I can’t live without collaboration tools such as Google Docs or Microsoft OneDrive. Being able to review and collaborate with my teammates in real time and tag people to review comments is something I use everyday!

What’s your leadership style in three words: Curious, Observant, Determined

I LOVE being a CPA, yet enrollment in college accounting majors and the total number of accountants and auditors has decreased over the past several years. I want to help fix that! Tell me, why did you become a CPA?

I actually enrolled at Oregon State University to become an engineering major, but after deciding to take some undergrad business courses, my accounting courses just clicked. I really enjoyed the technical accounting courses as well as cost accounting and ultimately decided to become an auditor because I wasn’t sure what type of business I wanted to go into and saw audit as a really great way to get exposed to a number of different companies across industries and learn about how business operates. I’ve stayed in audit because I love problem solving, teamwork, and feeling like I’m providing value to my clients.

What’s one of your most memorable professional moments? Why is it important to you?

It is hard to define one specific moment, but the ones that have contributed the most to my professional development have all tied back to times where a challenging issue was identified. Through those challenges I practiced escalation and learning when to involve more experienced team members, how to deliver critical feedback to clients in a professional manner while keeping an open mind to alternative perspectives, and I enhanced my ability to prioritize other tasks both personally and professionally while I focused on resolving the issue.

What’s the one thing that has surprised you most about the accounting profession that you never would have expected?

How little “number crunching” you actually do! While we certainly evaluate the numbers while auditing, a lot of our focus is on understanding processes and evaluating risks including both quantitative and qualitative considerations. I spend more time reading memos than doing math!

What advice would you give your 22-year-old self?

Seek out diversity of experiences early in your career. I learned so much in my first few years at the Firm by working on ~10 different clients and getting a variety of different experiences and learning from multiple different supervisors with different perspectives.