Why are you an auditor?

Over the years, I've worked with many third-party auditors. And often, over lunch, they start talking about their work. I like to ask how they got into auditing as a profession. Many of them started in very predictable ways: they worked as Quality managers or engineers for some company, and then made the sideways move into auditing. Sometimes it was because they wanted more variety in their work; sometimes they lost their jobs (or retired) and needed a new job that drew on some existing expertise. Many of the stories were variations on that basic model.

But one of the most interesting stories I heard was very different. This man's background had not been in Quality. He was an engineer, and a would-be entrepreneur. And he told us he had invented a product that he thought would sell itself.

Let me call him Amir. (I no longer remember his name, but I'm sure that's not it.)

Anyway, Amir quit his job, bundled all his savings into starting a new company to market his new invention … and promptly went broke. Oops. 

So far, it's not an unusual story. A lot of people try to strike out on their own and then fail. What was special is what he did next.

When his company failed, Amir did a systematic root-cause analysis of the failure. And he determined, after careful scrutiny, that the reason his company had failed is that he had no idea how to run a business!

So he set out to learn. He reasoned that the best way to learn how to run a company was to look at a lot of them, successes and failures alike. And therefore he sought out work as a third-party auditor, which would let him see a wide range of companies. His hope was that through his experience as an auditor, he could learn which management practices worked, and which ones didn't. 

His long-term plan was that, once he had saved up some more money and learned how to run a business, he was going to quit auditing and go back to restart his company so that he could finally market his invention.

I lost touch with him years ago, so I have no idea whether his career ever worked out as planned. But I was always impressed by the systematic thinking behind it.