Your first impression on arriving at the Gina DeVine, CPA, PC office will be the calm and peaceful environment, unusual in our business, and quite deliberate on our part. Some of the serenity is thanks to the soothing and fun colors, and arrangement of the space, but most of all it’s the wonderful collection of personalities among the team here in this office.
Gina DeVine
It’s been a circuitous route to this place. I was a Chemistry major as an undergrad, and learned accounting and business while working in the mid-70s in the natural foods cooperative industry in Ohio. It was a great life changing inspiration to work in a collective that formed a regional distribution center for member cooperatives in a 5-state area. We thought we had invented business systems, but as it turned out they were just variations on earlier themes, if not just inserted into a vanguard framework. I continue to be grateful for the lessons of that experience.
Fast forward through many rewarding years as an accountant in various industries – food, yarns, printing – and later in private practice. I returned to attend graduate school at Duke Fuqua in the early 90s and was amazed to learn exactly how vanguard we’d actually been as champions of collective and democratic management in the 70s. Graduating with an MBA in 1993, also the week of my 40th birthday, was an awesome milestone.
Having been a ‘garden variety’ accountant, I turned my gaze to sitting for the CPA exam, and successfully passed the test in 1997 – another milestone – for which I’m proud and grateful.
In 2003, a perfect storm (that’s all I’m saying!) led me to seek part time instructional work at the University of Hawaii – Hilo, and I’ve continued to teach undergraduate courses in Accounting and Taxation since then. For the record, these are not distance classes – I actually go there, live there part-year, and now one of my children and grandchildren live there too. Am I lucky or what?
So, the reader might ask, why on earth keep this practice in Carrboro, NC? The short and oh-so-sweet answer is You. I love doing what I do on both sides of the Pacific Ocean. The teaching and doing here compliments wonderfully the teaching and doing there, and vice versa. The students love to hear real life stories of business situations, and the clients here love to hear stories of teaching in Hawaii. The perfect storm continues. May it never end.
Pam Clarke
Pam began keeping books for her father’s business near Memphis, TN while she was in high school. After college and marriage, she worked in the restaurant business in New Orleans, Memphis and Maryland, going back to school to study accounting. She has done bookkeeping for service, manufacturing and retail companies, computerized accounting systems using different softwares and managed accounting departments for agencies with up to 225 employees. She moved to North Carolina in 2004, keeps books for several small non-profits in the area and is on the Board of Directors for one of them. She joined Gina DeVine, CPA in 2011 and in 2012 resigned her full-time position to do more small-business bookkeeping.