when transactions post automatically, what will accountants do?
by jody padar
from success to significance: the radical cpa guide
al deleon, founding partner of deleon & stang in virginia and maryland, has introduced the anticipatory organization model to the firm.
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what does that mean exactly?
as an anticipatory organization, deleon & stang assists clients in recognizing hard and soft trends that could be influencing their business. by identifying these trends through a “flash forward” approach and the use of technology, deleon & stang can help business owners (including themselves) take advantage of opportunities and drive innovation.
this model was co-created with the maryland association of cpas’ tom hood and futurist daniel burrus. i was able to catch up with deleon and hear how this approach has impacted his firm.
first, he gave me a little history about his firm: “we are 32 years old; our gross revenue right now is about $7.5 million, and we have about 45 people. we have two offices and we’re about to open a third. we are a large local firm. we do all sort of accounting work, mostly financial statement audits, reviews, comps and outsourced cfo. we have an investment advisory subsidiary and a pretty big tax department; we do a lot of individual tax and business tax.”
jp: okay, i know that you and your firm went through tom hood’s anticipatory cpa program.
ad: we did.
jp: can you tell us a little about why you chose to go through the program, and then how you’ve seen it change your firm?
ad: well, we went through it because we love tom. tom introduced it to us; he does our strategic planning retreat, has done so now for probably 10 years, and we really liked the idea. we put our whole staff through the training. we actually have an anticipatory organization committee within the firm, where we try to encourage people to use this anticipatory forward-thinking concept with our clients. when (our employees) have a story to tell, we publicize them and try to keep the energy going.
for the most part we find clients are pretty receptive to the idea. it’s a little hard for some of them to get their head around it because they’re in the weeds doing whatever they do every day. it’s very hard to get people to step back and think about what it’s going to be like in the future and what do i need to do now?
but we’re using it within our firm to try to plan where we’re going from a strategic standpoint. for example, we’re very concerned about the automation of the basic accounting services and even tax services that could be coming down the pipe. how do we adjust our services to provide value add so that we don’t get uberized, so to speak, with the technology changes that are coming along?
jp: do you think that your younger cpas, or people who are newer to the profession, have liked this approach and have experienced it as relevant to them?
ad: oh yeah, absolutely. they like it probably more than the more seasoned folks because they see the technology stuff as being cool, and they like seeing all the different technologies that are available these days. so, they resonate pretty well with that.
we’re not really generating a lot of engagements from the anticipatory, it’s more using it to serve the clients, get the clients thinking about what they need to do, especially around succession planning.
there are so many businesses that need succession planning these days.
so, that was actually the area that we focused on with respect to anticipatory organizations … trying to help clients develop a succession plan and figure out what the business is going to look like in 10 years. who’s going to be running it? what kind of competition are they going to be facing? what kind of technologies could disrupt them? that kind of stuff.
jp: many cpas think that they already are proactive. what’s the difference between being proactive and being anticipatory?
ad: it’s just a different way of looking at it. it’s still proactive, but proactive in the sense that it’s trying to help the client look at his business and his industry, and the technology changes that are taking place, and think about strategic planning from the perspective of, what is the competition going to be doing? what is it going to look like in five or 10 years, or even faster? that’s the other thing too, some of this stuff happens very fast.
i’ll give you an example. one of our clients is (a) taxi credit union in new york city. all they do is make taxi medallion loans, for years, and it’s a very profitable credit union. all their loans are 100 percent collateralized by taxi medallions that had a solid market that would never go down … until uber.
they were taken over; they’re being (placed under conservatorship) because their loan losses are so high. they had a $28 million loss last year; we had to give them a going concern opinion. and many times we suggested to them, “look, you need to try to think about diversifying your loan portfolio, get into auto loans, expand your field of membership, get into mortgages.” they never wanted to do it because they were doing so great with taxi medallion loans, they thought, “well, why should we get involved in other loan products that are less profitable and more risky?”
that was even before we got into the anticipatory organization stuff. but that is an example of a client that didn’t (take our advice). we didn’t know that uber was coming along, but we said, “there’s a lot of value in diversifying.” and they didn’t do it, and now they’re basically going out of business.
jp: do you think that if cpas don’t become anticipatory, like all cpas as the profession, that we risk losing relevance to our client base?
ad: i don’t know. there’s always going to be need for cpas to do the basic compliance work and the tax returns and things like that; it’s really no different than the way it’s been for 100 years, things always change, just that now it’s changing fast.
we’ve always been pretty innovative anyway, but what it’s done is help us think that we have to move faster and think about things that we might not have otherwise thought about.
for example, just take outsourced accounting. we worked on that a number of years ago, built up a department that does that kind of work, and we started using technology so we could do the work virtually. we started using things like bill.com so that clients could pay electronically, put quickbooks on a secure server, all that kind of stuff.
that was using technology. what we’re doing now is, we’re thinking about how we’re going to deal with the situation that nobody needs us to post the transactions anymore, these transactions are going to get posted automatically. the low end of that work is going to be all automatic. so that’s what we’re thinking about now, how are we going to deal with that? how are we going to help clients use that efficiently? which would hopefully give us time to help them at a high-end level.
the strategic planning meetings that we do every year help, and as i said, tom helps us facilitate it. so really, throughout the organization, we’re pretty much all on the same page. we’re aligned; we’ve always had good alignment from the partners. but tom definitely helps us understand that the pace of change is fast and we have to continue to learn and we have to continue to try to keep up and anticipate what could be coming down the road.
jp: when you hear about other firms that don’t embrace innovation and technology and change, do you have any suggestions for them? or helpful tips for someone who wants to create change but is having a problem at the partner level to get buy-in?
ad: wake up. i do think strategic planning is important, and the way we do it here is we use everybody at the firm.
we end up with half a dozen big initiatives that we want to work on, bold steps. so then there’s an internal committee for each one and they work on it throughout the year, reporting on it throughout the year. then we get back for the next year’s session and we say, “okay, how did we do?” we don’t always get everything done, of course, but nobody does.
that’s really how we do that. as i said, it’s kind of built into our culture here, so getting alignment and agreement from the partners is not a problem.
i had a guy the other day, he goes, “what do you think about this cloud computing idea?” i’m like, “holy mackerel! he’s just thinking about that now?”
so, you know, what they need is a heavy dose of tom hood.