Narrator: Welcome to Own the Promise. On today’s podcast, CEO Denny Schleper talks about an Accounting Today article that highlights some of CLA’s accomplishments over the past year. Not only was CLA solidly ranked as eighth in the country among professional service firms, but the article focused on the significant and successful cultural transformation that is occurring in our firm. This cultural transformation was referred to as our major competitive advantage.

Denny Schleper: Good morning, CLA. It is April 2017 already. It’s amazing that 2017 has gone by so fast. However, it’s gone by fast for many of us because of the incredible busy season that we are all experiencing. I know that many of you are spending some very long times in your vehicles, traveling to serve clients. There’s many others of you that are spending long hours in airplanes and in airports, looking to serve clients, as well.

And then obviously there’s many of you that, day after day, are probably getting into the office extremely early in the morning, staying late at night, again trying to serve our clients. Sometimes six days a week. Probably some of you seven days a week. It’s an incredible effort that we’re all putting forward to serve our clients and fulfill the promise. And it clearly is showing the results of those efforts of living the promise.

We are off to an incredible start in 2017, and I just wanted to share with you some of that success and hopefully share with you the rewards of all of your efforts across CLA. You know, one of the publications in our industry is the “Accounting Today” publication. And the “Accounting Today” every year puts out the top 100 firms in the country. And of course much of this is concentrated on the accounting practice, but just like CLA, many of the accounting practices have transformed more towards professional services, some of them containing the outsourcing and some of them containing wealth advisory, as well.

But when you look at those statistics for 2017, it becomes clear now that CLA has moved into the eighth position as the eighth largest firm in the country. And while one could argue this doesn’t mean much, it also does mean something as far as the results of all of our efforts — our efforts to grow and our efforts to continue to offer career opportunities to everyone. I think it is a significant miles mark for CLA. And again, that’s congratulations to all of us and the efforts that we put forward. What the “Accounting Today” publication also does is, it looks at those top hundred firms and then it follows up with a publication on really ten firms that they select that they believe had either great years or are on a certain trend of growth that they would like to highlight.

CLA is going to be one of those firms in a publication — an article that comes out soon. And some of that article material was shared with me. And they interviewed Alan Coulton. Alan is a consultant to our industry, really a friend of the firm. But what I’d like to do is just read you a quote that’ll be in this article from Alan, which I think really does summarize very well our competitive advantage and the great results that we are all having at CLA.

Alan states, “2016 was a magical year for CLA in terms of overall growth. Everyone talks about the mergers they did and the high-performing firms that joined them, but they also had exceptional organic growth, as well. At a time when many of their competitors were milking compliance services, CLA was reinvesting in building out the firm of the future. Today, they have a major competitive advantage due to their outsourcing, advisory, and wealth management platforms. The secret sauce, though, lies in how they have transformed their culture to get their people to truly see themselves as business and financial advisors.