Let’s set the scene: Four aspiring accountants sit at a table in a high school classroom. The classic “my dad’s firm is better than your dad’s firm” conversation begins, and the one girl in the group says, “I’ll decide which is the best.”
She picked Squire Accounting.
Jonyce Bullock grew up playing with the tools of her father’s accounting trade — a yellow pad, a pencil, and an old calculator adding machine.
“My favorite thing was to add numbers with that old calculator, and then make things with the adding tape — like nurses hats or streamers,” Jonyce says. “I always knew I was going to grow up and be an accountant like my dad.”
So, when she sat in that high school class with the grandson of Squire’s founder, and sons of the founders of two other CPA firms, her focus was already set on balance sheets. During that class, one of the partners of Squire at the time, Ron King, came to teach for a week.
“I remember thinking, ‘I really like Squire and I want to do accounting,’” she recalls.
Even as a teenager, she saw accounting as a practical career that could offer flexibility and stability for when she would have a family someday.
Jonyce remembers going through her career packet in junior high, and reading on the back, “Unless you can promise your daughter that she will marry, that her husband will make enough money, that he will never get sick or he will never die, you need to empower her to be able to provide for herself.”
She took this seriously — and today balances the roles of CEO of Squire, wife, mother, and the newest role of grandmother. She’s got the best of all worlds.
WHERE I WANT TO STAY
In an industry with an apprenticeship-focused model, Jonyce’s first role with Squire was as a college intern. It was 1999, right before the turn of the century, and Jonyce was quickly impressed with the culture of collaboration and trust, and the opportunity to work with clients directly.
But when her own story took a turn and she suffered from a miscarriage, Jonyce wasn’t sure what Squire’s reaction would be.
“I thought, ‘Oh no … it’s tax season. They’re going to be mad at me,’” she recalls.
Quite the opposite.
As soon as she showed up at the office, one of the partners incredulously asked, “Why are you here today?”
“Well, tax deadlines are in a couple weeks,” Jonyce replied.
“Jonyce,” he responded, “Squire is about family. We can file an extension. And if clients don’t understand, then they’re not the right clients for us.”
This solidified Jonyce’s decision to choose Squire.
“This is where I wanted to be and where I wanted to stay,” she says.
A SEAT AT THE TABLE
Squire is an accounting staple founded in Orem with offices in both Utah County and Salt Lake County, offering essential tax, audit and advisory services — and has been adding numbers for 50+ years. Key to its longevity is the company’s focus on three main values: personal connection, proactive ownership and thoughtful innovation.
These are also the values she practiced (and still practices) that led to her selection as CEO in 2018.
“The team went through the process of asking, ‘What does the firm need in the future — and who do we have that can do that?’” Jonyce says. “They came to me and said, ‘We realize you still have kids at home and you are one of our youngest partners, but we really think you can do this.’”
Up to that point, Jonyce had been leading Squire’s advisory area for six years, so she had been building her leadership muscles. But the role of “CEO” brought on new challenges — and she immediately knew the personal pain points she’d have to face.
“My nature is to keep a harmonious, nice culture. I don’t want to hurt people’s feelings,” Jonyce says. “I knew immediately that the hardest thing for me was going to be learning how to have hard, crucial conversations.”
She took the Crucial Conversations course in preparation, and now has more confidence in tough, but necessary, situations. Jonyce’s self-description as “painfully shy as a child” doesn’t add up anymore.
But it has taken a toll on her vocal cords.
“For a while, I was losing my voice every day, so I went to a place that specializes in vocal cord treatment,” she says.
After the exam, the doctor asked Jonyce what she did for work. The title of “female executive” told the doctor all she needed to know.
Jonyce’s vocal cords wouldn’t close. Rather than speaking from her diaphragm, she was speaking from her neck and chest.
Her doctor told her, “I notice this tends to be a problem in female executives, because they have to physically fight to be heard in the room.”
Jonyce started to cry.
“Even now, my partners totally respect me, but running my board meetings, I’m still the only female in the room,” Jonyce says.
With this awareness, she has learned to change the way she speaks in board meetings — and has learned that she belongs at the table.
FOCUS ON THE STORY
As CEO, one of Jonyce’s favorite implementations has been yearly themes. With 230 employees, Squire needed a way to unite the whole since the team was too large for joint staff meetings.
This year’s theme is “storytelling.”
“Accountants aren’t natural storytellers; we’re better with data and numbers,” Jonyce says. “But on social media in the past, people were talking very negatively about accounting. The American Institute of Certified Public Accountants (AICPA) identified that the profession needs to change the way we talk about ourselves — why aren’t we talking about the business we saved, or the person we helped retire?”
Jonyce served on the AICPA board from 2021-2024 (which includes only 32 people globally). In this role, she was inspired by the words of a colleague, Asif Sadiq, chief diversity officer for Warner Bros. Discovery.
“The problem is that we’re making it about programs and not about people,” Asif says. “When we understand each other’s stories, the rest doesn’t matter.”
With that in mind, Squire is focusing more on the stories of the people they serve — like the stories of the businesses they’re helping save or the people they’re helping retire.
From the little girl making crafts with the calculator paper, to becoming the CEO of Squire, Jonyce’s journey has been a story full of unexpected calculations — but there’s nowhere else she’d rather be.
“If I could have a conversation with my 1999 self,” Jonyce says, “I’d tell myself that I belonged at the table and that I should start acting like it.”
The Jonyce from 1999 would be proud of the 2025 CEO of Squire.