BY DAN HILDEBRAN
One of the newest members of the Keystone Heights Rotary Club said three of the best decisions in his life were influenced by role models. Now, he wants to return the favor by guiding young people through their teenage and young adult years.
Brent Bathurst is a senior tax manager with the Providence, Rhode Island-based CPA firm of Kahn, Litwin, Renza & Co. Ltd. The 76th-largest CPA firm in the U.S., KLR recently opened a branch in Bradenton, and Bathurst works remotely from his Lake Region home for the company.
Bathurst said he was raised in a rough West Jacksonville neighborhood.
“My childhood was mostly baseball and martial arts,” he recalled, “and I was very fortunate to go to a private school because of the neighborhood. Most of the people who grew up in the neighborhood that I came from didn’t fare too well in their lives. A couple did. Most of the time, it was because they joined the military or their families moved away.”
He’ll probably end up in prison
Bathurst said one of his friends joined the Army and returned later to the Wesconnett neighborhood a changed man.
“He was one that was always in trouble,” the CPA recalled. “He was someone that everyone said he’ll probably end up in prison and all those kinds of things. But once he joined the Army, his life completely turned around. Now he’s a pilot in Alaska, takes people on hunting trips and he’s retired from the Army. He was a paratrooper in the 82nd Airborne. When he came back from, I think it was his first deployment, we were talking, and he told me, the best thing you can ever do is get out of this neighborhood as fast as you can.”
Bathurst said the encounter had a profound impact on his outlook.
“I remember being very, very proud of him,” Bathurst said. “A lot of pride to see someone that everybody thought was going to be a bottom-of-the-barrel kind of person go off and make something of his life and come back with a completely different perspective.”
Bathurst followed in his friend’s footsteps, telling an Army recruiter that he wanted to jump out of airplanes with a combat unit and leave Jacksonville as soon as possible.
“About a week later, I was on a bus to basic training.”
Deployed to Bagdad in 2008, Bathurst said he dreamed of becoming a Green Beret and pursuing a federal law enforcement career.
However, a severe hearing loss during his Bagdad deployment disqualified him from those aspirations.
College was for ‘other people’
Bathurst said an accounting career had never entered his mind while considering other life options. He added that no one in his immediate family had gone to college.
“College wasn’t really something you thought about, and you thought that was for other people, people who come from money, and that’s just the norm,” he remembered.
However, he did have a distant cousin who was a hedge fund manager, and as Bathurst looked at his cousin’s life, he liked what he saw.
“He had a plane,” the speaker recalled. “I thought that was really cool. I was like, oh, it looks like you can make a pretty good profession for yourself in the world of finance.”
While taking some accounting classes in college, Bathurst discovered a fascination with tax law.
“And that’s when I changed course and decided I was going to become a CPA and enter the profession doing tax returns,” he said.
After finishing his military service, bachelor’s degree, and additional classes required for the CPA exam, Bathurst landed his first job at a Jacksonville CPA firm.
Fell in love with the girl and her hometown
While acclimating himself to the 16-hour days of tax season, Bathurst met a Keystone Heights girl and fell in love with both the woman and the area.
He said that after convincing his future wife to marry him, he moved to the Lake Region and began the one-hour-plus commute up State Road 21 and into the grind of Blanding Boulevard and Jacksonville traffic.
The CPA switched to a Gainesville firm to lighten the commute and then to an Australian-based bank with investments in the U.S. That change required him to resume his drive back to Jacksonville.
Initially, the move to private equity had him working with the world’s largest infrastructure fund. The bank then designated him as one of its partnership tax specialists because partnership tax law was complex and involved big impacts.
Bathurst said that around five years later, he missed the fulfillment of interacting with individual clients. He recalled that he once saved his company $30 million by discovering an error. But because his firm was so big, the savings didn’t impact the company much.
One of his colleagues had joined KLR, and his oldest child had grown up and left home, leaving Bathurst surprised at how fast the child had grown up and left.
“My last three kids are all teenagers, and five years from now, all of our kids are adults, and it’s going really quick,” he recalled. “So, I decided I’ve got to do something that puts me back at home more, gives me more time with my family, and gives me the fulfillment that I’m looking for in the long term.”
When the COVID-19 pandemic hit, many CPA firms realized their staff could work remotely. At the same time, the number of students sitting for the CPA exam fell by 30% and has not recovered, leaving the accounting profession short on staff.
“So, KLR became very appealing to me,” Bathurst said. “One, because I can come back home to Keystone, work remotely, and still have a successful career. And two, it’s kind of a middle-ground type of firm. That’s something that’s very important to me. If I’m going to come back to public accounting, I want to be able to serve people in my community. I want to be able to serve small businesses and be able to offer my services locally without giving up the resources and the areas of tax law that I like to practice in a larger corporate setting. They kind of fit that niche perfectly.”
It doesn’t take much to impact a life
Bathurst said that as he looked back on his life, he could see the value of more experienced friends guiding him to good decisions, from his neighborhood buddy who influenced him to join the Army to his cousin in the finance industry to his former co-worker who landed at KLR.
Now, he wants to return the favor by guiding young people to make wise choices.
“I think mentorship is probably what’s most important,” he said. “You need someone that you look up to. You need a role model. I think that’s where a lot of children are coming out of these rough environments. They don’t have a good role model.”
Bathurst said that besides the people who influenced him in significant career decisions, he has also been guided by other role models at church, on the job, and in the military.
He added that for children raised in families where going to college is “for other people” and living a prosperous and fulfilling life appears out of reach, young people need additional life examples to follow.
He said he volunteered in a mentoring program in Gainesville and is looking for similar opportunities in the Lake Region.
He said it doesn’t take much to impact a young life, adding that he didn’t even have a relationship with his cousin who lived in Ohio.
“But I heard stories about him, and I began asking, How did he do that, and how can I do that?” Bathurst recalled. “I needed a motivator, a spark, and that’s what role models and mentors do. They give you hope. They show you that you can do it, and some offer to walk with you during your journey.”
