Name: How to Have a Confident Career - Michael Kravshik Interview
Uploaded: 2026-01-02T10:24:36.000Z
Duration: 25 min 14 s
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Future simple

It's Linda Raynier of Lindaraynier.com guiding you to a career and life you'll truly enjoy.

And I am so excited for today's episode because I will be interviewing someone who, just like me, so started off in a very traditional, stable career path and ended up veering away from that path and created his own career because he followed his passion.

Michael Krabscheck, CPA, CA is the founder and CEO of Luminary, the digital community that makes CPAs lives easier and careers progress faster.

Prior to founding Luminary, Michael was the CFOcoo of wearable technology startup Gesture Logic.

At GestureLogic, Michael ran product management, finance, marketing, and

general operations, helping to raise $1.9 million, growing the team to 15, and launching a successful crowdfunding campaign.

Luminary makes CPAs lives easier and careers progress faster.

With over 8,000 members, they are the largest digital community of CPAs in Canada.

They connect CPAs with jobs, volunteer opportunities, education, events, networking, content, and more.

Michael, thanks so much for being here on my channel.

This is actually the first time I've ever had a guest on my show, so thanks so much for being here.

I'm happy to have the honor of the first guest.

All right, so not many people on my channel are actually familiar with what you do and who you are, and

so why don't you tell us a little bit about youngster Michael and.

And how did you get to where you are today?

As you know, I started as a chartered professional accountant like you did.

And after a couple of years of working at a big four audit firm and then working in consulting, I decided that that wasn't the path that I wanted to take, and

I went back to school and did what every good chartered accountant does and got a master's degree in counterterrorism.

And ended up working in that space at Scotiabank for.

For a little bit before entering the startup world.

And that's what kind of got me on my current path.

I worked at a wearable tech company as a cfo coo, and

eventually decided to start my own when I left that company.

Yeah, Counterterrorism, that's not something that I don't think a lot of people go into, so that's really interesting.

So just like you had mentioned, you had the direction from an early age kind of to go on that CPA route.

What was your initial draw to becoming an Accountant initially, yeah.

I mean, when I look back on it, I think like a.

You know, I was always pretty comfortable with numbers.

I knew that it was a good building block to kind of start a career path on.

I think that maybe I was a little naive in terms of how to actually go and take that a different direction.

I think I was pretty confident right from the beginning that I didn't want to be a traditional accountant.

Coming out of getting my designation, you know, at business school, it was, what are you gonna do?

Accounting, finance, consulting, and marketing.

It was like you got one of four to go after.

As if those are the only four things that exist.

But, you know, you're kind of young and impressionable, and

you feel like you have to take some predefined path.

And so I kind of boxed myself into those four categories, and

really, finance and accounting were the ones that stuck out on top.

And when I started going to a lot of the information sessions and meeting a lot of the people, ultimately it was actually the people that made me decide to go to accounting rather than finance.

Thinking back on it, I wish that I had been more open to kind of different.

You know, it's interesting that you say that, because the same thing kind of happened to me.

I always thought, you know, it's accounting or HR marketing, and I think finance.

And literally those were the four options that, you know, when you're someone who has a business degree, you think that those are the only routes that you can take.

So that's cool that it kind of happened the same way for you, and

now you're doing something completely different, which I really want to talk about in terms of you making the decision to leave your CPA consulting background behind.

You went ahead and you founded your current company, Luminary.

And why don't you tell our audience a little bit more about that, what that means, what it does, what you do, and.

You know, it's a great question, Linda, because it's.

You know, it's funny how I took a particular career path, pivoted away from that, and

now find myself using that skill set and that background in my current role, starting my own company.

And I'll start by, I guess, introducing my company, Luminary.

What we do is we make CPAs lives easier and their careers progress faster.

And that also includes the CPA candidates and students that are Looking to go in that direction as well.

So what that means in practical terms is we're really like an online digital community of CPAs and we have a great platform behind it that allows US to connect CPAs with the opportunities that matter to them.

it also means volunteer opportunities, networking events, educational opportunities, really fun content that highlights CPAs that have gone in various directions, including one that became a YouTube star and also has, you know, everything across the gamut from serious articles about our profession to fun memes that accountants will find interesting and hopefully laugh at, obviously with an overarching kind to focus on their professional lives and.

Okay, so let's take it a step back because that's a lot.

What it means is, I mean, technically the word is an actual English word which a lot of people I don't think have heard of, I guess because it's kind of obscure.

One is celestial bodies of light, so things like stars and nebulae.

But the other meaning, the one that we did use it is a luminary is kind of a thought leader or somebody who's accomplished greatness within their given field.

So you might say that like, you know, Mark Zuckerberg is a luminary of the tech.

So yeah, it's just overall what we mean by it is that people who get their CPA designations are luminaries.

They are experts and thought leaders and the field.

And we want to help them, you know, live that, live that experience.

I think that's wonderful and I think that's great.

And I think it even closely ties into what I do here through my channel, helping other professionals.

I mean, not all the professionals that watch my channel are CPAs, but

they are specialized in their own fields.

And I think it's so great that you've created a community for like minded professionals to get together and be able to develop their careers just by having events and having opportunities available to them that a lot of professionals aren't finding.

I want to kind of tie it back to you in terms of, so you run this amazing company that's created this community for professionals, CPAs in particular.

There was something within you that led you to this career path that you're on right now, this business that you've developed.

So can you tell us a little bit more about that?

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How to Have a Confident Career - Michael Kravshik Interview

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