For more than three decades, Dr. Alyssia Benford has made a career out of finding answers in places where the numbers do not immediately make sense.
As a CPA and co-founding partner of Benford Brown and Associates, LLC, she has worked in forensic accounting, an industry where getting to the truth requires more than checking whether the math adds up. There are decisions behind the numbers, circumstances that shaped those decisions, and, sometimes, details that only become meaningful once someone knows where to look.
Benford is taking some of that thinking outside the accounting world with her new book, Best Case Scenario: A Forensic Deep Dive Into Leadership, Empowerment, & Breaking Barriers. The book draws on her career and personal experiences to explore what happens when people examine their own choices with some of the same curiosity a forensic accountant brings to a complicated set of books.
Building the Career That Wasn’t There
Benford co-founded Benford Brown & Associates in 1996 after working in large corporate environments, including Deloitte and Motorola. The accounting firm she built with Kimi Brown Ellen was minority- and woman-owned at a time when the upper levels of the profession offered relatively few examples of either.
Years later, Benford was fairly candid about why entrepreneurship appealed to her. She told the Illinois CPA Society that she and her partners had to create an environment that worked for them because the firms where they had worked did not.
The decision involved more than wanting to own a business. Benford was looking for a career in which unreasonable hours and rigid partnership expectations did not dictate advancement, and where being a Black woman would not work against her professionally.
That history gives Best Case Scenario some weight behind its language about breaking barriers. Benford is writing about a problem she had to solve in her own career, when waiting for an existing institution to become more accommodating was less useful than building something different.
Benford Brown & Associates has since developed into a full-service CPA firm whose work includes forensic accounting. Benford herself has been retained for investigatory accounting work that required reconstructing financial activity from available records and evidence.
Taking a Forensic Look at Life
An interesting choice in the book is Benford’s use of the word “forensic.” In accounting, forensic work asks someone to look beneath the obvious answer since a number alone is rarely enough. The accountant has to understand how it got there and whether the surrounding evidence tells the same story.
Best Case Scenario applies a similar instinct to leadership. Benford writes about perseverance and purpose through the experiences that shaped her own life, asking readers to pay closer attention to the decisions that create an outcome rather than treating success as something that simply arrives.
Benford also writes about faith, mentorship, and the responsibility successful people have to create room for others behind them.
The emphasis on relationships is similar to the way she has approached business. One of Benford’s recurring philosophies is that people are either in the relationship business or they are out of business. It might sound like an unusual maxim for an accountant, but it is one she reached after a career spent discovering that numbers often require a human explanation.
Finding the Best Case Scenario
A forensic accountant is accustomed to examining what actually happened, including the decisions people might prefer had happened differently. Benford is more interested here in what happens next.
The “best case scenario” she describes is not an ideal outcome waiting to be discovered once circumstances cooperate. It is something people construct through the choices they make, including the uncomfortable decision to stop waiting for an institution to provide an opportunity that may never come.
Benford did that herself when she helped build a firm in 1996. Three decades later, she is using the lessons from that decision to make a larger point about leadership.
Sometimes the numbers tell you where you ended up. Understanding how you got there is a different kind of accounting.
