Authors and Consultants

Mark Robilliard is a Co-founder and CEO Americas of Color Accounting International, an education and publishing firm headquartered in Washington DC. He’s an Aussie who lives in the US and travels widely, leading seminars in financial statement and business acumen skills, for lawyers, bankers and business people. Some of his teaching for senior execs is done in secret.
 

He is a Fellow of Chartered Accountants Australia New Zealand and was the National Training Manager for KPMG Australia. He has also lead the Human Resources Department for the largest insurer in Australia. When he was an audit manager, he was responsible for the audit of a large regional non-profit public hospital in country Victoria (Australia) and has subsequently done some minor consulting work with hospital administrators.

Mark is on the adjunct faculty of American University and has taught at other secondary, tertiary and post-grad institutions in the US and Australia. He has co-authored a number of books, including Accounting Comes Alive: The Color Accounting Parable, and Color Accounting: The New Graphical System That Makes Learning Accounting Easy And Quick. He believes that accounting literacy is the under-appreciated foundation upon which all financial literacy and business acumen should be built.

Additionally, Mark has further studied advanced communication subjects such as neuro-linguistic programming (NLP), in which he has completed Master Level.

One of Mark’s special skills is his ability as a group facilitator. He has designed and facilitated hundreds of workshops and trainings for many thousands of participants from team problem-solving workshops to large-scale organizational change projects to a hostile meeting between a multi-national insurer and a very large bank with a view to forming an alliance (which they did).

Mark enjoys creating innovative and artful solutions to seemingly intractable problems. He has been the lead or co-contributor on the following noteworthy projects:

• Color Accounting™, the gold standard in accounting literacy and business acumen.
  • Ranked 29th in the Australian Anthill Smart Innovations Award – a surprising achievement as the judges did not experience the actual workshop.
  • Published international best-seller, “Accounting Comes Alive: The Color Accounting Parable”. 50,000+ copies to date, it has been prescribed as a student text. Two other books since published with more in the pipeline.
  • Used Color Accounting to create a secondary school curriculum for South African accounting students. In one school, accounting went from being the least popular elective to receiving the highest marks for any subject in the school for Year 12.
• Series of innovative and unique professional development programs for employees (including leaders and managers). Two of these programs won Australian awards for best practice in human resources (training and development). These experiences became the subject of a doctoral thesis.
• A competitive management challenge run annually for many years throughout local government in Australia, NZ and South Africa.

Mark has provided consulting advice and services to assist Canteen Australia, a non-profit organisation to support young people living with cancer. He has also provided personal assistance to young people with learning difficulties.

He lives in Wisconsin, USA with his wife and daughter where they love to travel and experience other cultures and lifestyles.