Melanie A. Friend-Schoenlein

Meet our very first Partner of the Month!

🎉 ✨ How It All Started & Why I Love What I Do ✨

When I was growing up my parents always stressed the importance of being able to take care of yourself.  They were from a generation when a lot, if not most, women did not work outside of the home, and they had seen women end up being “stuck” in bad marriages because they had no resources to care for themselves or their kids on their own.  I always liked math, so I ended up taking accounting in high school and it just clicked with me.  Others in the class struggled and I got an A+ which to me was a sign that this was the profession for me.  College and especially the CPA were difficult, and I definitely had times that I struggled, but it always felt like the right fit for me.  Fortunately, between my junior and senior years of college, I thought an “internship” might be a good idea and I sent my pitiful resume out to all the accounting firms in Medina.  I ended up getting hired by Warren Raese to work for Raese & Strickland, which is my current firm just re-named, for that summer and the rest is history.  Warren was an exceptional mentor to me and allowed me to be a partner pretty quickly.  I’m fortunate he saw something in me way back then!

💡 Why I love it

I really like to be able to meet with people who find financial and tax matters confusing and scary and take that burden from them.  I’ve become friends with so many of my clients.  I also find it interesting to meet people in a wide range of occupations and learn about what they do.  Overall though my favorite part is more what my job has given me in my life.  I’m thankful that this job has allowed me to have a flexible schedule, especially when my kids were young, I’m able to take a decent amount of time off outside of tax season to travel and do the things I love outside of work.

💪 Challenges

The two most challenging parts of my job are 1-dealing with deadlines and the number of hours of work to meet those deadlines and 2-finding great staff to help me.  There is a dire shortage of accountants, and we definitely feel it.  I work a lot during tax season (January – April) and after 30 years in this business, I’m used to it, but it is a challenge that not everyone is up to, which is why it’s difficult to find new candidates in this field.