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Langan: Our promise comes alive when we live our culture, when we are entrepreneurs, owners, and leaders. At the center of the CLA promise is our promise to know you and help you, and especially in pursuing the why, to create opportunities for our clients, our people, and communities. The strategic advantages that support our promise include two we will focus on today; deep industry specialization and being the career building firm.

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Our

belief is that industry specialization connects us to our clients in a deeper

and more meaningful way than a narrow focus on a particular service specialty,

and in doing so, it creates more meaningful opportunities for our clients, our

people, and even in today’s example, our communities.

[00:01:02]

Welcome,

CLA family, to our Industry Forward podcast, designed to tell the industry

stories behind the CLA promise. I’m John Langan, Chief Industry Officer at CLA.

What does the life cycle of industry specialization look like and how does it

create these opportunities? To help us answer these questions, we’ve invited

Nat Bartholomew, our Washington D.C. based National Association Practice leader

and John Tauer, our Minneapolis based non-profit based industry leader, to

speak to us today.

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Both

Nat and John have built and led significant association practices over their

career that have created opportunities for their clients, their teams, the

firm, and themselves. So Nat, let’s start with you. How did you first come to

service associations and decide that this would be your primary concentration?

[00:01:50]

Nat: Well, John, I wish I had a cool answer right out of the blocks, but honestly, it was an opportunity. I took it and I ran with it. One of the managers in our association practice was a member at ASAE and left the firm. And so when that person left, I just picked up their membership and started to go. The idea was, I heard it was cool meetings, it was fun, it was great destinations, and honestly, that’s kind of what took me into this.

[00:02:15]

But

what really happened next was, I had a lot of fun, had a lot of fun doing it,

and so I became a specialist in the nonprofit sector and really started looking

at associations as really, truly a different group. I wanted to succeed, so

bottom line, I attended, I listened, I read, I did everything I could do, you

know, just any opportunity to get me in front of associations. You know, when

people ask me, they say, “What do you do, Nat? You know, what is it you

do?”

[00:02:42]

And

after trying to explain I’m not just an accountant or I can’t do taxes, it’s,

you know, I explain, I interpret financial information for the best of the best

in every profession and industry under the sun. Last Monday, I was with the

board of the National Association of Broadcasters. That means the CEO of TVs

and radio stations–the largest media groups in the nation, on the planet.

[00:03:05]

By

Wednesday, I was with the Military Officers Association of America, their

board, down in Phoenix, Arizona. I met with admirals and generals. And then

that Friday, I was with the CFO of National Rural Electric Cooperative

Association. They’ve got 20 related entities. They’ve got two ten-story office

buildings in Arlington, 25 billion in three investments, in investment funds,