Accounting
Stop being so faithful to your old ideas
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I was listening to a podcast the other day, and the guest and host kept using the term “promiscuity.” At first I was taken aback until I realized they were talking about being intellectually promiscuous — not falling so in love with an idea that you’re unwilling to change for the better.
The mindset is that great managers and leaders are always willing to change the way they think and run their businesses. Instead of staying married to the same old ideas and processes, maybe it’s time for us in this profession to become more intellectually promiscuous.
Before we go any further, let’s clear the air: I’ve been happily married for almost 20 years. With a happy marriage, you are 100% committed, and you’ve “burned the boats” on self-doubt. Businesses are different. Technology changes, client expectations change, and your ideas should be changing too.
As accountants, we’re constantly feeling time pressure. Too often we don’t give ourselves enough time to work on our businesses because we’re so busy working in our businesses. Steven Covey would say, “We’re so busy sawing that we don’t have time to sharpen the saw.”
When getting work out the door is the top (and only) priority for your firm every day, you don’t have the luxury of looking for ways to get the work done faster, more efficiently and less stressfully. As a result, you get married to the same few ideas about how to run a firm, what it means to be a CPA and how to treat clients. It’s hard to get better and grow when you have such a narrow mindset. Ultimately it leads to declining revenue and staff turnover.
Fortunately (or unfortunately, depending on your perspective), change is here to stay. You can’t keep saying: “We’re going to ‘white knuckle’ our way through this thing until all this change is done.” That’s not going to work. Being
Al Davis, maverick former owner of the Oakland/Las Vegas Raiders liked to say, “I’d rather be right than be consistent.” Davis never stopped pushing the boundaries of how an NFL owner should behave. Sure, Davis made plenty of enemies, but he never stopped looking for ways to give his team an edge in the cutthroat world of professional football.
As accounting firm leaders, competitive threats are all around us. Those threats used to be limited to rival accounting firms. Now, every aspect of your business is being encroached on by other industries that want in your clients’ pockets.
As the old saying goes: “What got you here won’t get you there.” The way you ran your business five or 10 years ago won’t keep working today; it’s certainly not going to work in the future. You need to keep evolving if you want to stay in the game.
Client expectations. Client communications. Client response time. All those things have changed dramatically and will continue to change dramatically in the years ahead. Clients now expect it to be as easy to do business with their CPA as it is to do business with Amazon, Netflix and Uber. Take client portals, which weren’t even a term 10 years ago.
Even five years ago, having a client portal meant that you sent clients a link to a shared file where they could upload documents. That may have seemed cutting-edge then, but today you can’t say you have a client portal unless it offers real-time communication, CRM, data gathering and workflow tools. That’s how quickly things have changed. Clients want more real-time access to their information and their accountant with less friction and more efficiency. That’s never going to change.
When portals first emerged, many firm leaders downplayed them. They told themselves clients would never use them or trust them. That’s just being foolishly faithful to the idea that clients really enjoyed gathering up their documents and receipts, making photocopies and schlepping down to your office, paying for parking and dropping off their bundle so they could sit around for weeks waiting for you to call them with the results of their return. Why? Because that’s the way it has always been done. Ouch!
Great ideas from outside the industry (and from those in the trenches)
Part of being intellectually promiscuous is recognizing that many good ideas impacting our profession are coming from outside the accounting industry. Take private equity and other sources of capital coming into our world. These players are aggressive. They’re bringing ideas that work successfully outside of professional services and implementing them in the accounting world.
The more attached you get to certain notions about how things should be done, the harder it gets to keep up, much less evolve. That’s because you’ve associated yourself and your personal brand with those legacy ideas. But if you can stay emotionally detached from your firm’s processes and ideas and simply tell your team, “I don’t care who’s right. I only care that we get it right,” then you’re on the right track. But not every firm leader has the courage to make that leap. Also, the best ideas about how to interface with clients, how to get them onboarded and how to run more efficiently, are going to come from your client service associates — the folks in the trenches — not from the partners. If you’re still defending ideas because they’re yours, or because they weren’t invented by your firm or by top management, then you may not be on the right path for the future.
When it comes to a lifelong relationship, marriage is a great thing. When it comes to ideas, be more promiscuous. Try new things, get comfortable being uncomfortable. Your firm will be better for it. How are you upgrading your processes and ideas? I’d
Eide Bailly LLP, a Top 25 Firm based in Fargo, North Dakota, is expanding in the Midwest, adding Volpe Brown & Co. LLC, a firm headquartered in North Canton, Ohio that specializes in serving McDonald’s franchises.
The deal is set to take effect on May 5. It will expand Eide Bailly’s footprint in northeast Ohio and add a team with over 40 years of experience in client accounting services, complex reporting, tax and advisory work, especially for McDonald’s franchise owner operators.
“After meeting with Eide Bailly’s leadership and experiencing the professionalism and care shown during due diligence, I knew this was the right path forward,” said Volpe Brown founder Tony Volpe in a statement Monday. “Their values, culture, and people-first mindset mirror what we’ve built over four decades.”
Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed. Eide Bailly ranked No. 19 on
“This addition reflects Eide Bailly’s commitment to aligning with firms that share our vision of forward-thinking service, client care, and a strong internal culture,” said Eide Bailly managing partner and CEO Jeremy Hauk in a statement. “We’re proud to welcome the Volpe Brown team and continue building our presence in Ohio with people who care deeply about their clients and community.”
Eide Bailly’s already has some employees in Canton, Ohio, but as part of the transition, they will relocate to Volpe Brown’s office in North Canton.
Eide Bailly expanded to Ohio just last year by merging in
Andersen Group, the resurrected version of the former accounting giant Arthur Andersen, has made plans to go public, submitting a draft registration statement on Form S-1 with the Securities and Exchange Commission.
The firm said Monday the registration relates to a proposed initial public offering of its common stock. But the number of shares to be offered and price range for the proposed offering have not yet been determined. The IPO is expected to take place after the SEC completes its review process, subject to market and other conditions, according to Andersen.
In February, Andersen announced plans to
It was originally known as WTAS (short for Wealth and Tax Advisory Services USA Inc.), which was founded in 2002 by CEO Mark Vorsatz and 22 former Arthur Andersen partners. Vorsatz renamed the firm Andersen Tax in 2014 after acquiring the trademarks and copyrights from Arthur Andersen LLP and Andersen Worldwide, and has since grown the network worldwide.
Andersen Global now has over 19,000 professionals worldwide and a presence in over 500 locations through its member firms and collaborating firms. In the U.S., Andersen has more than 2,000 people in 24 cities across the country.
Andersen Consulting will be offering services such as human capital management, cybersecurity, business transformation, strategy, technology, artificial intelligence and sustainability. Existing consulting clients include Abbott, BMW, Cisco, Heineken, IKEA, ING, LEGO, Mercedes-Benz, Michelin, Microsoft, Pizza Hut/Sapphire, T-Mobile and Toyota.
Semple, Marchal & Cooper LLP, a Phoenix-based firm that took over the audits of Trump Media & Technology Group last year, has filed suit against the BDO Alliance and its chairman after it was ejected from the alliance following an angry phone call.
The firm’s lawsuit alleges it was kicked out of the alliance because it took on Trump Media as a client, a contention the BDO Alliance denies.
Trump Media, the parent company of the Truth Social network founded by Donald Trump,
SM&C has been a member of the BDO Alliance for 30-plus years and was a founding member in 1994, according to a lawsuit it filed in March in an Arizona court, and over that time has paid more than $2 million in fees. There was only a brief hiatus in the firm’s membership in the alliance during that time due to a conflict of interest that the firm says has since been resolved. One of its founding partners, Robert Semple, has also been a member of the Alliance Partners’ Advisory Council for approximately 10 years. The firm has remained in good standing, at least until June of last year.
The firm’s lawsuit claims that after news reports began to circulate last May that Semple, Marchal & Cooper was Trump Media’s new auditing firm, the firm’s director of assurance services, senior partner Steven Marchal, received a phone call from Michael Horwitz, executive director of the BDO Alliance, in which Horwitz questioned the firm’s decision to take on Trump Media as a client, and asked why it didn’t alert the alliance in advance.
The suit further alleges that Horwitz threatened to kick SM&C out of the alliance if it didn’t resign from the audit, and claims that after the firm refused, it received a letter from the alliance dated May 31, 2024, with an effective date of June 30, 2024, that terminated the firm’s membership.
The BDO Alliance strongly disputes the allegation.
“The allegations in the complaint are frivolous and lack any foundation in the reality of why BDO Alliance USA chose to exercise its right to sever its relationship with the plaintiff,” it wrote in a statement to Accounting Today. “While members are independent firms charged with their own professional decision-making, BDO Alliance USA has the rarely used right to sever that relationship when quality and other issues are present. Plaintiff’s effort to distort the decision to sever the relationship will be vigorously defended in the judicial process.”
SM&C’s suit claims that the termination of the firm’s membership in the alliance has created the false and misleading implication that it happened either because somehow its independence as an auditor had been compromised by its political affiliation or because of some other supposed misconduct. But the firm asserts it has not compromised its independence nor engaged in any misconduct. Instead it says the alliance wanted it to compromise its independence by allowing political views to “infect” its role as an auditor of a publicly traded company.
Semple, Marchal & Cooper declined further comment beyond the lawsuit.
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