Following its acquisition of Marcum last year, Top 10 Firm CBIZ has begun centralizing its disparate technology services offerings under a single office, headed by Peter Scavuzzo who — after being CEO of Marcum Technology — has now become the firm’s national leader of technology, as well as its chief strategy officer. 

Prior to the acquisition, CBIZ had a decentralized approach to technology services. Different parts of the firm had their own technology offerings specific to their practice area, which would then be bundled as part of the larger advisory service. The idea to centralize these service offerings came up between when the acquisition was first announced in July and when the deal finally closed in November. During this time, the leadership of both firms discussed many possible ideas for improving efficiency and productivity in different areas of the firm, including this one, though it was not until the deal’s conclusion that the plan gained real momentum. 

“Come November 1, and shortly after, we had a lot of accelerated meetings, looking at what we workshopped and what we knew of each other. And we said, all right, let’s take action and let’s start making quick decisions and figure out where to go from here. And we formulated [the change] and, all right, this sounds good. We like this overall. So now let’s get this going,” Scavuzzo told Accounting Today. 

The new office, focused more on technology-centered client service offerings than internal IT operations more associated with the CIO, was formally established at the beginning of this year, and started integrating groups into its structure in February; the very first action was bringing together the data analytics groups from both firms, so they could operate as a single team.

The model the firm decided upon was that if the deliverable is rooted in technology, it will be aggregated into a single portfolio of technology services. Doing so allows CBIZ to offer a wide range of technology services. This includes the obvious areas such as IT infrastructure management as well as cybersecurity, including governance, risk controls, penetration testing and managed security. 

Outside typical operational IT functions, the new office acts as a strategic advisor to a company’s executive leadership when it comes to technology-aligned decisions. This means providing “thought leadership at a high level” on things like business transformation, AI implementation, or the enterprise system selection process. Professionals can theoretically go past even that by actually doing the implementation of these systems themselves. 

And finally, the office includes an emerging technology section that offers things like AI solutions, blockchain, data analytics or automation. 

“A company reads the news every day, and looks at how AI is having an impact. The CEO says, ‘Well, how is it going to impact me?’ [Say] I’m a health care CEO and I don’t want to just play, I want real, tangible use cases. I need someone to bring me through a journey quickly, because my IT team is traditionally operational, and they don’t have the depth of expertise, and I don’t want to miss out on the opportunity. We could step in and bring them through that, or anything else in the portfolio,” said Scavuzzo. 

He said that both CBIZ and Marcum had made heavy technology investments over the years, but that their particular specialties varied slightly, such as Marcum leaning a little more heavily on AI technology. By combining the firms’ different expertise in different areas, their new technology office became capable of offering services CBIZ could not offer before, leading to a wider variety of client offerings. One of the firm’s divisions, he noted, had been servicing a prominent client for a few years; this client noticed the new capacities under the combined office and wanted to learn more, so they brought his team onto the call. 

“Now, this is one division bringing in another division. We go in there and we win something CBIZ traditionally could not win. And then we’re getting a little deeper on the technology side, and we identify something to flip to a third division … The combination created a much more powerful offering,” he said, adding that “this win demonstrates what I think CBIZ intended to do by bringing Marcum into the portfolio: to be able to go into a client, a single service deliverable client, and now we’re going to be able to cross-sell and add more value to what we’re offering this client through multiple divisions of the company because of this combination,” he said. 

Getting to this point did require some change management, as it was a significant reordering of the firm’s structure, but Scavuzzo said that both CBIZ and Marcum already had a significant amount of M&A integration experience, having done hundreds of mergers between them. While no two transactions are exactly the same, he said there is a certain playbook that develops on how to execute integrations properly. While technology is part of it — noting that they need to integrate systems and data — he said that the people aspect is much more important. 

“Because while we’re integrating, we’re also forming new relationships and forming new bonds, and we are highly focused on accelerating that trust so that we both know, you know, we’re here to both make each other better,” he said. 

The benefits have been more people-oriented as well. Scavuzzo talked about how the data team, which before may have been siloed doing its own thing, is now in the same meetings as the AI leadership team, the strategic consulting group and other areas that, before, were not in the habit of regularly talking to each other. This has led not only to more relationship-building, but also the creation of new ideas and the identification of new opportunities. 

“Everybody’s just naturally engaging more, speaking more, in meetings, so when you’re dealing with a complex problem, you’re calling in all these people because you’ve built relationships with them. It’s a more natural collective service offering we could bring to our clients,” he said. 

Which, ultimately, is the goal: to provide clients equal if not better service than before. 

“To us, the client should either come out of it feeling no change or, if they do feel a change, it will all be on the positive side of the equation,” he said.