gary shamis: strategy is easy. execution is key | gear up for growth

moving beyond a “partner-driven” model is essential to scale operations and continue growth.

more gary shamis: private equity hazards for young partners, on accounting influencers with rob brown here |

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execution is also important regarding talent and engaging a younger workforce. “you’re not going to get talented people to join your organization unless they see opportunities,” says shamis, “and the number one way they really judge opportunities is by a growing organization.” 

firms also need to align their culture and practices to the preferences of the millennial and gen x workforce. “if you’re going to build an organization today and you want to be successful, you have to build an organization that’s going to appeal to them, not to you,” says shamis. “i think firms understand that. whether or not they can execute on that is really the challenge.” 

other highlights include: 

1. managing partners should prioritize leading the firm rather than accumulating chargeable hours. 
2. moving beyond a “partner-driven” model is essential to scale operations and continue growth. 
3. specializing in specific industries or services enhances a firm’s market position and minimizes risk compared to broad, unfocused approaches. 
4. speculation about whether a new wave of entrepreneurial ventures in accounting may emerge. 
5. effective leadership involves internal analysis and learning from best practices outside the firm. 
6. there is a movement in the industry where professionals from larger firms are transitioning to smaller firms or leaving private equity-backed organizations due to cultural mismatches. 

about gary shamis

gary shamis founded winding river consulting in 2016 after growing ss&g to the 37th largest firm in the u.s.? he is the co-founder and host of the winning ways conference and facilitates the company’s managing partner boot camp and basic training boot camp.  

transcript
(produced by automation. not edited for spelling or grammar.)

jean: hello, thank you for joining “gear up for growth,” powered by 卡塔尔世界杯常规比赛时间. i’m jean caragher, president of capstone marketing and your host. this episode is focused on essential leadership skills for growth. our guest is gary shamis, president and ceo of winding river consulting, which he formed nearly eight years ago. many of you will also remember gary during his three decades of leadership at ss&g. gary is also known for winning is everything, winning ways, his managing partner boot camp, and his new basic training boot camp. gary, welcome to “gear up for growth.”

gary: thank you. happy to be here.

jean: so, gary, let’s start with a finding from a research study i did with our friend rick telberg at 卡塔尔世界杯常规比赛时间 called “seven keys to successful cpa firm management.” and one of the multipliers that we came up with was that revenue growth of leading firms is 19 times more likely to surpass that of competitors. and when we looked at the responses and the other evidence in the survey, we came up with some essential leadership traits, like following a written marketing plan, meeting regularly to check the progress on that plan, having specific and measurable goals, continuous training. tell me what are your thoughts about these traits and what would you add?

gary: you know, maybe i’d like to start off by just talking about growth. and, you know, i talked a lot about staying independent. i developed a presentation and done it many times. and when i talk about it, i talk about the four table stakes. the four things you have to do in order to stay independent. i’m not going to talk about that now. maybe we’ll get into that in a second. but i do want to talk about is once you decide you want to stay independent, now then all the fun starts. you know, what do you have to do to thrive as a firm going forward? and i talk about six or seven things that you really have to focus on as a leader going forward. and one of those items is you have to have growth in the organization. and it’s somewhat counterintuitive to the industry right now, because i think firms have to grow, but then firms are plagued with these capacity issues without people. you know, so what do you do? you exacerbate a problem by growing on the one side. yeah, we want to grow and we want to get bigger and we want to… you know, it’s a big part of what we’re doing.

we can’t find enough people to do it. so, i think there’s two sides to that. i think the growth side is really important. and, you know, why is it important? well, from my perspective, the number one reason why it’s important is talent. you know, even though we may end up with artificial intelligence and maybe people won’t be quite as important, i have a hard time believing that. but if you want talented people and this is a people business, you’re not going to get talented people though to join your organization unless they see opportunities. and the number one way they really judge opportunities is by a growing organization. so, i think it becomes just imperative that we have to be able to grow these organizations to attract the best people we can. if not, we’re not going to get those people.

jean: right. so, when we think about leadership in a growing firm, what in your mind is the most important skill that that leader must have? there are many. but as you’ve trained a lot of leaders, you’ve worked with lots of partners, is there a skill that pops out as more essential than others?

gary: you know, i don’t think so. to me, great leaders have the whole package. and the whole package is just not doing one thing. it’s being able to do a lot of things. it’s being able to pivot. it’s being able to communicate. it’s being able to look around corners. it’s the ability to execute a plan. now, there’s a whole lot of things they have to do. you know, if you force me to pick one of those things in terms of leader and what the most important is, i would say it’s execution of the plan. i teach a course on strategy and execution. and i have come to the conclusion that strategy is not hard. strategy is easy. and there’s no secrets around strategy. you want to understand what you should be doing. you know, hire me, hire other consultants who are out there and they can tell you what’s contemporary and what you have to be doing. but the difference is your ability to execute that plan. and if you look at the biggest firms in the country, if you look at what they’ve accomplished at all these large firms, cla, forvis, markham, the only difference between that and a $30 million firm is their ability to execute a plan going forward at a higher level. so, execution is the biggest element in my mind.

and then, you know, what i try and convince people in managing partner boot camp is that it is the most important thing, but you can’t get it done unless you set aside time to do it. and i really frown on managing partners having chargeable hours because i think it’s, you know, with one chargeable hour, you know, you could earn a little bit of money. with one chargeable hour that’s spread over a whole organization of hundreds of people or dozens of people, you could have much more influence. now, you know, i know smaller firms, it’s a challenge because that managing partner has got to be producing and bringing in business and having a book of business. so, it’s much more of a challenge. and i could empathize with that. you know, i started a startup firm that i grew at $100 million. so, i once had a small firm and i once had a big book of business. i know how hard it is. but i think the ultimate goal is to try and find the time to execute the plan.

jean: right. because that is a challenge for everything, right? because there’s only so many hours in a day, and how you could divide up those hours and figure out what you’re going to do? gary, so if you think about, you know, these firms with less than 100 people or maybe up to 150, so the smaller end of the firms, do you find that most of these firms don’t have these plans in place or that they do have the plans, but they just have trouble executing them like you just mentioned?

gary: you know, i think if they’re 100 to 150 people, they’re doing something, right? you know, multiply that times $200,000 a person. that’s a $20 to $30 million firm. those are complex organizations. it’s people who have worked very hard over many years to go to that level. so, they kind of get it. you know, where i see firms stall out at that level is firms that continue to operate as a partnership and not really run as a business. and if you continue operating a partnership, when you find out it’s really hard to get beyond that $20 or $30 billion level or 100 or 150 people level without really adopting a corporate form of business, i can’t tell you how many times i see that. i’ll walk into a situation and it’s like, it’s so obvious to me. and what they’ve done is, you know, they continue to let partners have a say so, and it just doesn’t work that way. so, firms have got to get through that level in order to get to that next level going forward.

jean: and that was one of my questions about the challenge, you know, of leading a partnership. is there a greater challenge in leading a partnership over others? and if so, how do you overcome that? when you say you’ve got to have more of this corporate governance, how do you make that happen?

gary: sometimes it can be bloody. sometimes it can be very difficult, but it has to happen. you have to disenfranchise your partners. you know, i write in my book about, one of the chapters of the book on building blocks on ss&g. i talk about my relationship with a guy named dick pogue. and dick pogue was the managing partner of jones day, and he was the head on our advisory board. jones day is top five law firm in the world right now. he was the managing partner who took that from a cleveland-based law firm and set it on its journey going forward. and i had the luxury and i had the honor and the privilege to work with dick, him being on our board. and, you know, i remember asking him, “you know, dick, what are the key things i have to focus on, in terms of moving this firm to the next level?” and he said two things. one is, run it like a business. in order to run it like a business, you need to disenfranchise your partners. and, you know, what does disenfranchise your partners mean? when people become a partner, they think that they have franchise rights, which lets them decide how to run the business. and you can’t let that happen. partners have to focus on three things and three things only. and by the way, when we put together our basic training boot camp, this is really what we focused it on. and the elements of that program were what are the three things that partners need to do to be most successful and help the organization? and what they need to do is they need to develop business.

they need to take care of clients and they need to grow people. and those are the three things that they need to focus to do. they don’t need to focus on the paint color in the lobby. they don’t need to focus on the technology we’re going to be putting in place from a practice management standpoint. and so to get there sometimes could be very, very difficult because you’re talking about disenfranchising your partners and not having a monthly or a biweekly partner meeting to talk about everything you could talk about. now, when you have a smaller firm, four or five partners, it’s still going to be a franchise and you’ll have to deal with that and figure out how to go forward from there. but when you grow and you have these large organizations, they just don’t work. you get absolutely stalled. and i see it all the time. and when your question is, how do you get over that? sometimes it’s very difficult to do that. and because they don’t want to give up their franchise rights, these partners. and if they don’t, then you kind of could be stuck the way you’re getting at it. and you’re just always going to be a $20 or $25 million firm and never really grow from there.

jean: right. i think that would take extraordinary leadership and the ability to communicate what changing the structure means to the firm as a whole and to each individual partner. we’ll no longer partners, you know, what i’m saying? for each of them and for the future of the firm, like, someone has to have the vision of what the firm could be if they made this change.

gary: so, let me go back and give it to you on a personal level. i’m going back 25 years to 1999. and in 1999 at my firm, we made a decision based upon working with dick pogue that i was going to only focus on running the firm and i was going to give up my book of business. now, at that point in time, we were a $12 million firm and i had a $4 million book of business. so, what does a $4 million book of business look like today? i don’t even know. probably $10 million or more. so, i had a huge book of business, but we made this, you know, the significant decision that i was going to go and focus solely on running the firm going forward. so, in the very beginning, you know, what happened was, i had partners are like, “you know, you can’t do that. you know, you have your chargeable hours. what are you going to be doing?” and my intent was to have very few chargeable hours.

now, i moved my clients over other people. you know, what happens is, you know, that is, it’s not a perfect fit. and what happens is if everything goes right, i never hear from those clients or that partner that they have a problem. i’m always dealing with the problem. hey, we have a problem. they call you for that. so, you never really give up that relationship with your clients. but what you do is you repurpose your time to try and grow the organization. so, what happened was, is that every year, okay, that my charge hours went down, guess what? average partner income went up every year. so, those naysayers at the beginning who said, “you can’t do that,” two or three years down the road, they were saying, “well, gary, why do you have any chargeable hours at all?” so, we were able to convince them pretty quickly, you know, given the results of having somebody run the organization and what it meant to them from a profitability standpoint, that they quickly got it going forward.

jean: right. so, it’s amazing because your responses keep coming into questions that i had planned to ask you because i wanted you to reminisce a little bit about, you know, your days at ss&g. how did you gain the consensus with that partner group to make that corporate change?

gary: you know, looking back, i’m a pretty confident guy and i didn’t really think that i wouldn’t be unsuccessful doing it, but it’s a big leap. and, you know, let me refer back to the law firm industry. and, you know, when you give up your clients, which i gave up, you know, you give up your power. i mean, that’s your economic base, you know, and that firm is those clients. and i was willing to give them up and move forward. in the legal profession, and maybe someone in the accounting profession, you know, based upon advice i’ve been giving firms for years. sometimes to get people to take that leap, what you got to do is you have to protect them on the back end. because if it doesn’t work out and they gave away all their clients, what happens? so, oftentimes you’ll see it again, especially in the legal community. they will give that person who’s taking that leap to move the firm forward, maybe two or three years to rebuild their practice or convert clients back to them in order to do it.

so, they give them some kind of safety belt. i’ll tell you, i never had that. i just did it. i was pretty confident it was the right way to go. i really believed dick pogue. you know, i wanted to build an organization like him and i did it. so, it was, you know, really kind of taking that big leap. now, of course, i had an exact… at that point in time, there was a handful of us, that had the majority ownership of the firm. we were only a $12 million firm back then. so, those, that were also in a highly ownership position, they backed what was happening. you know, so we went forward and some of them was a leap of faith. i would say one of them, you know, one or two of them were the ones saying, “you know, how do you give up your clients or charge hours?” and, you know, in the end, it paid off.

jean: well, it paid off because you had a different vision of that.

gary: well, but not the vision. i always had the vision, but i didn’t have the time to execute. so, this gave me the time to do the execution. and if you think about it in 1999, we had an office in cleveland, we had an office in akron, okay? that was it. when we sold the bdo 15 years later, you know, i had as many people in chicago as bdo did. we had about 130 people in the chicago office. we were in columbus. we were in cincinnati. we were in new york city. you know, we had really expanded our verticals with respect to our restaurant practice. we were doing institutional pharmacy work. and so a whole lot of things, we were able to expand and grow because i had the time to really focus on that. you know, would bdo had been as interested in a firm that had offices in cleveland and akron to acquire? no, they wouldn’t have. you know, but it was this organization and some of these strong verticals, that was so appealing to them.

jean: right. and i know that you’ve always done a great job with niche marketing. and of course, i’m a huge fan of niche marketing because that’s the easiest, right? the least risky way to grow practice, right? is to capitalize on that expertise.

gary: yeah, that’s an understatement from my perspective to say that i’m a fan of it. i just think it’s just… i mean, i don’t know why you would do anything else and so…

jean: right. yeah. we’re on the same page with that. so, let’s take a look back. i know that both of us can recall the 1980s, where a lot of practitioners left bigger firms to form their own firms. and we haven’t seen anything like that since the ’80s. do you sense another breakout of entrepreneurship and practitioners leaving firms to form their own?

gary: yes, but in a different way. and if you go back to that time, somebody like me could go and start a firm because the knowledge to run a firm and to provide services to a client was much simpler than it is today. you can be a generalist. i started out as an auditor at touche ross. and when i ended up, you know, skirting involved with my firm, i realized that there was limited value in being an auditor. but the real value proposition was being a tax person. so, i had to become a tax person. but i could do it and i could do all different kinds of things. so, you know, entry right now for a startup, a young person is close to impossible. i do work with a couple of younger firms that i’m very inspired by seeing what they’re doing. one of them in particular is a firm called hall cpa out of raleigh. he’s 33 years old. what he did is he did start a firm from scratch. and he’s doing $13 million in business right now. he’s a strong vertical player, only doing tax for real estate companies. he’s done an amazing job.

so, you know, he figured out how to potentially do that. i’m working with a more traditional firm that i want. i’d love to see them do more of what hall is doing, which is a potential startup. so, i think those days are over. but i think what you’re going to see is i think there’s going to be a lot of opportunity you’re going to see from people bolting from some of these private equities and some of these large merged-up firms. and not that they’re… you know, this is not any way, you know, condemning these larger organizations. they’re just different. you know, when i sold the bdo, i’m not at bdo anymore because it just wasn’t a good fit for me. i was entrepreneurial. they’re bureaucratic. you have all these billion-dollar firms, they have to be bureaucratic. they’re not going to be entrepreneurial. so, you’re going to find people who aren’t going to fit. and, you know, if they’re able to do so and leave these firms, i think you’re going to see a lot of that happening. and i’m starting to see some of that happening. so, you know, some of that is some of these people potentially leaving and joining smaller firms, maybe not setting up their own shop. but it’s not going to be a fit for everyone. and i think we’re going to see some more of that as we go forward.

jean: and i think that lifestyle choices are part of the equation these days. and these examples that you gave and other folks that are choosing to work in smaller firms is that they want more flexibility and they don’t want to be, you know, working day and night, that they want more from their lives and their free time. would you agree?

gary: yeah. you know, i would look at it more as a generalization. and i think the big firms are aware of it, you know, whether or not they can make good on that. i’m not so sure, but they’re aware of it. you know, i talk a lot about it when i give presentations or in the past. i used to always say that the biggest challenge in public accounting was that firms were owned by baby boomers and they were populated by millennials and gen xers. and i always refer to a book that a good friend of mine, rebecca ryan, wrote. the book was about millennials and the title of the book was “live first, work second.” and i take that book to a bunch of people and again, doing a presentation, baby boomers, i show them the book. i said, “if you were in that book, what would the title be?” and everybody laughs and chuckles because it would be “work first, live second.” and that was a huge, huge problem.

and, you know, if you look at the workforce today, 70% of the workforce today is gen xers or millennials. so, if you’re going to build an organization today and you want to be successful, you have to build an organization that’s going to appeal to them, not to you. so, i think firms understand that. now, whether or not they could execute on that is really the challenge. and i don’t think it’s as much as size, as really the ability to execute on that, the ability to make a workplace that’s going to be a good fit for them. and i think some of the larger firms have been successful in doing that. you know, so i don’t think it’s necessarily only available to smaller firms. but in general, you know, that’s got to be the focus.

jean: right. so, how does a leader need to adapt to engage these younger generations of staff that are populating their firms?

gary: well, you know, again, it’s the whole package. you know, just the whole package. it’s communication, it’s having difficult conversations. these are all the kinds of things we teach in boot camp. but probably i would say and if i’ve got… i’m asking myself a question. you know, what was the skillset that was really beneficial to you? now, certainly, the time to execute it, that was good at execution. but that was granting me time. but i think leaders who can kind of just take it all in and understand what’s the most significant of those who are going to be the ones who are going to be able to do that. so, you know, understanding, yeah, that 70% of the workforce, we got to create the kind of work for them or the workplace for them that makes sense where they may want to be here. you know, in this whole capacity without people, there’s four levers but one of the biggest lever or the biggest lever still is hiring and retaining people. hiring is very challenging but retaining, you know, that’s… if you’ve failed, it’s because you’ve failed, okay?

what are you doing in order to retain these people and creating that kind of environment that they’re going to potentially stay there? so, i think a leader is to have a really broad awareness of what’s going on. when i teach my strategy course, you know what i see is one of the biggest weaknesses i see with firms, i see it all the time, is firms develop strategy in a bubble. and what’s the bubble? the bubble is they don’t get outside the bubble to understand. they go, they analyze their own firms and they try and make changes. well, how can that be successful? so, i think in order to understand strategy or have this awareness, you just got to get outside the bubble, see what best practices are at other cpa firms. you know, understand the environment as to what gen xers and millennials want. and things like that going forward.

jean: okay. so, to get back to your boot camps for a second, so when you think about… and did you tell me before we started the recording are you on the 19th?

gary: we’re starting on the 19th cohort. it’ll be in may. so, now i was telling you before, is i feel like i’m just ingenuous because i teach people leadership development. and i’ve never had a course in leadership development. and going back to when i got my master’s in accounting a million years ago, i may have had a couple of business courses. so, i’m a self-taught leadership development type one. but we’ve gone through 18 of them. and we’re on number 19. so, i must be doing something right.

jean: that’s right. so, when you think about the participants that have been in your boot camps, what skills do the participants want or need to build?

gary: well, you know, when you talk about growth, and i’m assuming when you say build, we’re talking about growth here.

jean: well, i’m talking about, you know, a person is going to attend that boot camp and they have their set of skills coming in. and these are new managing partners, right? what do you find… so, let me ask you. let me take it from a different viewpoint. what skill do you see in the participants? is there one in particular that you find that they need the most help in?

gary: like, i say, a great leader is a combination of a lot of things. you know, what are some of the things that we address, you know, that they may not be aware of? you know, difficult conversations. you know, who wants to have a difficult conversation? nobody wants to. but in order to advance an organization, you have to have difficult conversations. you can’t shy away from them. so, we have a whole course. we teach difficult conversations. you know, we have a whole course that hopefully no one will ever have to use. but we’re going to waste an hour and 15 minutes of their time talking about crisis management. what do you do in a crisis? and i will tell you, the number one reaction of what you do in a crisis is the wrong thing to do. and the number one thing you do in a crisis and you have an issue like that is you call your attorney, okay? we got to call the attorney and ask them what to do.

and not what, you don’t know what happens. ninety-nine and a half percent of all litigious situations like that are settled out of court. so, do you really need an attorney? no, it’s really, you know, the court of public opinion you want to control. and he’s saying the right things. you know, when the reporter comes from the local news station because they went into your dumpster and they found tax returns that you didn’t destroy and they asked you about it and you say, “no comment.” well, no comment, and what that is, is, you know, that is gibberish for saying, “i’m guilty.” you know, is to how to handle those things. so, things like that kind of like maybe surprises them as to how we approach things like that. you know, other skills certainly are communication skills. you know, we talk a lot, we do a lot of communication and communication is as much listening as it is talking.

we do presentation skills. you know, as a managing partner and a leader, how often do you have to present and how many of these people have had any kind of formal training and presentation? and we find out very few of them have. so, presentation skills. how do you develop a presentation? i mean, when you talk about, one of the worst presentations you see when somebody puts up a million words on a powerpoint and starts talking through it. and we say you don’t do that. you know, what you need to do is put a few words and then, you know, use your words to talk about using that as a point moving forward. so, those are the kind of things that we look at going forward. you know, we look at with respect to trying to train these kind of people. it’s really a package if they’re really good at it.

jean: right. wonderful. okay, so i’ve got one more question for you. so, this is your bonus question. what is one item on your bucket list?

gary: one item on my bucket list.

jean: do you have a bucket list?

gary: well, i’m not a big bucket list person. i’m not, you know…

jean: what’s something that you’re looking forward to doing in the…

gary: well, you know, i got grandkids, four on the way. that’s really exciting. you know, i’m going to go to… we’re trying to organize a trip to japan next year. and i’ve gone to about 40 or 45 countries. so, i like to travel. you know, so i really don’t have a bucket list. i mean, people… i mean, everybody’s something, what i am is i’m a juggler. i juggle all kinds of different stuff all the time. i own a restaurant right now. we’re opening up a second restaurant. that’s for my background in ss&g being in the restaurant business. this business started because i wanted to continue working. and it’s gone crazy. i didn’t expect to have it. i think i was telling you before that we have about 11 or 12 people working here right now. really? you know, where did that come from? you know, and i like to play golf and spend time in florida and like to hike. so, i just like to juggle. so, i guess my bucket list would be just to continue what i’m doing as long as i can. stay healthy, enjoy it, things like that.

jean: that’s a great answer. i’ve been speaking today with gary shamis, ceo of winding river consulting. thank you, gary, for your time today.

gary: i’m pleased to be here and love the opportunity. and we haven’t talked in a long time, jean, so it’s great catching up with you.

jean: well, as well. thank you so much. and thank you for tuning into “gear up for growth.” be sure to check us out next time, when we focus on another topic crucial for accounting firms aiming for smart growth in today’s competitive marketplace. i’ll see you then.