Family is often defined as, “People who support and hopefully love you and the people you confide in and trust.” Denny discusses what makes us a CLA Family and asks us to embrace it, continuing to create a supportive environment where we create opportunities for our clients, our people and the communities we live in.

Narrator: Welcome to “Own The Promise,” a CLA podcast created to share what guides every decision we make and every relationship we cultivate.

[00:00:14]

Denny: Hello, CLA family. This is Denny coming to you in September in 2018, obviously at the end of our summer at CLA. I hope all of you enjoyed a wonderful Labor Day weekend, which did officially mark the end of summer. What I plan to do–hopefully, all of you have received an invitation for a live stream that we’re gonna be presenting to the firm on September 11th.

This is the first time we are trying to do this in a live session where I will have the opportunity to come to the entire CLA family and really give all of you an update on what I believe is the success of the summer at CLA as well as where we are at year-to-date and also where I think CLA is headed, not only for the rest of 2018, but into 2019.

I hope all of you can find the time, be it if you’re in an office, at a client, or at home, to join us for that live stream on September 11th. In over the last probably two months or so, I continuously have had this good feeling, and obviously a good feeling about what has happened within CLA. But I’ve tried to narrow it down a little bit more for myself–where is that good feeling coming from?

[00:01:34]

And the more I’ve thought about that, I really have come down to this idea of the CLA family. Just as I’ve addressed you today and I do on all of my podcasts, addressing you as the CLA family, I really wanted to dig into that a little bit further if I could. The reality of the CLA family and all of us–and I do believe it’s almost all of us referring to ourselves as the CLA family–it really started back at the end of 2016.

I very consciously decided to start calling us the CLA family, but I was a bit apprehensive, to be honest with all of you. I didn’t know if that would come off, somehow, disingenuous. I thought maybe some of you would look at that and say, “I have my own family, and CLA is not it.” I was worried about those types of reactions.

[0:02:35]

And I have been so incredibly impressed with how all of you have really embraced the true meaning of that family. I even went back and I looked–I always like doing this when I kinda wanna think through why things affect me the way they do, so I go back to some of the meanings, and I look up definitions. If you really just go to the basic meaning of a family, we all know that it can–and CLA is proving this–that it can go beyond blood relation.

It’s really defined as “family consists of the people who support and hopefully love you and the people you can confide in and trust.” Simple definition of family. And I think that relates so well to what is happening at CLA and how all of us are really treating one another. But with that family obviously comes certain values that a family has.

[00:03:35]

Again, if you were just to look this up, you would see things such as a family being honest and trustworthy with one another, being courageous, never giving up, adding value to the world, being patient, taking personal responsibility. And when I see these types of moral values, what I think about is that’s exactly what CLA’s promise is, although we use different language. We talk about being owners.

We talk about being leaders. We talk about being entrepreneurial people. We talk about being accountable, and we’ve all heard that definition of being accountable,