The Association for Accounting Marketing is accepting nominations for the 2025 Marketer of the Year Award. It also launched the Business Developer of the Year award.

Senior marketing professionals in accounting firms with at least three years experience in a key marketing role – whether at the same firm or across multiple firms – are eligible to apply. Nominations, both self-nominations and peer nominations, are open until Feb. 4, through AAM’s online portal.

“In today’s rapidly changing accounting landscape, the role of marketing leaders has grown significantly,” AAM executive director Rhonda Clark said in a statement. “These professionals are essential strategic partners within their firms, driving innovation, fostering growth, and shaping the future of the profession through technology and the adoption of visionary strategies.” 

An outside panel of judges from The Society for Marketing Professional Services will assess nominees, basing their evaluation on a list of criteria, including strategic contributions, measurable financial impact, collaboration efforts and forward-thinking approaches in strategy, analytics, and technology. The judging criteria is designed to ensure a level playing field for all participants as detailed here on the AAM website.

The 2023 winner was Lucas LaChance, a partner of practice growth at Lane Gorman Trubitt, who leads the firm’s brand visibility, awareness and engagement strategies. 

The Business Developer of the Year award will be presented annually to a professional “who exemplifies excellence in business development, showcasing innovative strategies and a commitment to advancing the profession,” the announcement reads. Nominees will be evaluated by a panel of judges from the SMPS on criteria including strategic contributions, measurable financial impact, collaboration efforts and forward-thinking approaches in strategy, analytics and lead generation.

“We are thrilled to introduce this award as a means to spotlight the critical role that business developers play in the success of accounting firms,” Clark said in another statement. “Their efforts in cultivating client relationships and driving firm growth are invaluable, and this award serves to acknowledge and celebrate their contributions.”

Nominations are open until Feb. 4, and the winner will be announced at the 2025 AAM Summit, from May 13-15 in Phoenix, Arizona. 

Business and tech consultancy Net at Work has acquired the Sage and Acumatica practices of accounting and ERP product reseller and developer e2b teknologies.

“We are truly honored to welcome e2b teknologies’ clients to the Net at Work family,” said Alex Solomon, co-founder and co-CEO of Net at Work. “e2b is a staple of the Sage and Acumatica communities, and we are proud to continue their legacy of delivering software excellence. With our shared values of innovation, client-first service and commitment to driving operational efficiencies, we will continue to ensure each client’s technologies and business applications perform at optimal levels in today’s dynamic landscape.”

As a Sage and Acumatica Authorized Developer, e2b teknologies will continue to provide value-added custom application solutions for the Acumatica and Sage ecosystem. Bill Henslee, CEO of e2b technologies, was confident these businesses will be in good hands with Net at Work.

“e2b teknologies has long recognized Net at Work as the leader in the industry,” he said. “We are confident that Net at Work’s dedicated teams will provide our customers with a premier level of service and resources. Our Sage and Acumatica clients can look forward to exceptional support across a wide array of business technologies as well as the advantage of expanded hosting and professional services to help achieve their business goals.”

This is far from the first time Net at Work, a VAR 100 reseller, has acquired a Sage and Acumatica practice over the years. Most recently, it traded its own e-commerce agency, Pixafy, to India-based e-commerce agency and technology provider Kensium in exchange for Kensium’s Acumatica practice. In 2023, it announced its acquisition of Innovation ERP,  a Sage X3 and Sage 300 consulting firm.  The Innovation ERP team became part of Net at Work. In 2022, it acquired both ProServe solutions, a leading Acumatic partner, and Top 25 firm Eide Bailly’s Sage Practice. Before that, in 2020, it acquired two Sage partners: Planet Earth Projects, a Connecticut-based value-added reseller of Sage 300 ERP, Sage CRM and MISys software, and Sysera, a Sage 300 reseller based in Pleasanton, California.

As an accounting firm owner, professor, athletic coach and parent, I spend a great deal of time with young people. Do they drive me crazy at times? You bet! But unlike many boomers among my peers, I have incredible confidence in millennials and Gen Zers, and I look forward to them becoming the next generation of leaders. 

Everyone knows NextGen is great with technology. But I’ve also found them to be more entrepreneurial than earlier generations. They’re not afraid to take risks and they’re less likely to be attracted to corporate life and the notion of security. They’re also more socially conscious and better attuned to work-life balance and preserving mental health than my “grind it out” generation. Again, that gives me hope. 

But I have a lot of concerns about today’s young people and that’s part of what motivated me to write my latest book, Making a Difference: Life Skills You Can Learn from Sports, Academics, Work (and Failure).

Time management

I still can’t get over how many smart, motivated, well-educated young people struggle with time management. From my young staffers to my students to my athletes, they just can’t seem to think beyond what’s due today. Chipping away at assignments and deliverables that will be due next week, next month or the end of the quarter might as well be 20 years down the road because they just can seem to look that far ahead. I don’t know if it’s from all the distractions of their screens and social media, but they have much more trouble staying focused than my young employees, students and athletes did 10 or 20 years ago.

In my book, I devote a lot of time to the power of writing things down (with a pen or pencil, not a stylus). Because when you put things in writing, it seems to have permanence. When you put things in an app, online calendar or spreadsheet, it seems too easy to close it or look the other way. I’ve also found young people today don’t like to check their work. I’m amazed at how fast they get things done — often with great accuracy — but they just don’t have the patience to double-check the numbers, proofread their grammar and spelling, and make sure documents and presentations are presented cleanly and professionally. It’s the same for my students as it is for my young employees. Life just seems like an endless race to check things off the list as quickly as possible. For a Generation Selfie that documents every minute detail of their lives on their phones, they seem surprisingly unattuned to details in the real world.On a related note, young people today don’t seem to want to communicate with their superiors when a task or assignment is completed. They just seem to want to get it done as quickly as possible and then move on to the next thing on the list. I suspect all the time on screens and social media is accelerating their attention span.

Accountability

In my book and in my daily interactions with students, athletes and my young associates, I’m constantly reminding them to take a deep breath, double-check their work, ask themselves if they’ve really given it their best effort. If the answer is yes, then great, let me know you’ve completed the assignment to the best of your ability. Don’t assume I’ll find it somewhere without you letting me know. Perhaps they’re afraid of criticism or suggestions, but eventually they’ll have to document and defend their work. Might as well let your superior(s) know that you’ve turned in your work. I’m not sure why everything in their lives must be a race.

Despite their hyper-accelerated lifestyle, I’ve found that many of today’s young people are procrastinators. Maybe it’s because they operate at hypersonic speed, but it’s almost expected that they’ll wait until the very last minute to get something done before the deadline. It doesn’t seem to matter if we’re talking class assignments, college applications, client work or final preparations for a major athletic competition. Pulling “all-nighters” may be a badge of honor in many circles, but it just creates unnecessary anxiety in real life — which can cause serious mental and physical impairment. In this age of life hacks, participation trophies and helicopter parents, I worry that we’ve insulated our young people too much from failure. I’m all for work-life balance and technological efficiency, but I worry that we have forgotten how to roll up our sleeves, how to grind through adversity and just work hard when we need to. 

German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche famously said, “What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.”This may seem extreme and this quote certainly gets butchered a lot, but if I’ve learned nothing else in life, it’s that you can get stronger and better at something without going through some adversity.My parents always told my siblings and me that work is a privilege, not a form of drudgery. In my latest book, I’ve tried to elevate the notion of hard work into a mindset that young people can adopt, without risking burnout or jeopardizing relationships with friends, family and significant others. It’s taken me almost seven decades on the planet to realize this, but I’ve found some very simple but impactful techniques for having a successful career and a more fulfilling life: 

• The incredible power of writing things down; 

• Making your money work for you 24/7;

• Treating work as a privilege, not as an obligation; 

• Showing gratitude for what you have vs. lamenting what you don’t have; 

• Being accountable for your actions;

• Committing to lifelong learning;

• Using failure to your advantage; 

• Overcoming prejudice and discrimination; and,
• Tapping the power of positive visualization (envision the ball going into the       net).   

I believe you can set ambitious, but realistic, goals through a disciplined and balanced approach to life. Trust me, it took me a long time to grow up, and I have made plenty of mistakes in my life, but I learned something valuable with each stumble. Hopefully the next generation can learn from the mistakes I made and incorporate those teachable moments into their own lives.

Lessons from mistakes

When it comes to learning from your mistakes, here are four key concepts that I ask my employees, students and athletes to keep in mind at all times: 

1. Accountability: Acknowledge that you made a mistake. For instance, you filed an incorrect tax return.  
2. Analysis: Research briefly why it happened. For instance, we rushed the filing without cross-checking all the supporting tax information. 
3. Check and doublecheck: Put a quality control step in place. We use checklists (requiring two review signatures before we file) so the same mistake does not happen again. 
4. Understand that mistakes have consequences: Filing an amended return is costly since the client does not pay us for the extra work, and it reflects poorly on our reputation. Acknowledge the mistake, work hard to correct it and make sure it doesn’t happen again. 

From working in a flea market to sweeping floors in New York City’s Diamond District to being rejected by over 500 accounting firms before landing my first real job, my story is one of resilience and inspiration (with lots of perspiration). It’s taken me more than half a century to connect the dots between athletics, academics and work to find my true calling, but they’re all related by putting in the “reps,” bouncing back from setbacks, managing my time, working toward short-term and long-term goals and not taking shortcuts. If that makes me “old-school,” I’m proud to call it my alma mater.