richard kopelman: inside aprio’s bold makeover | accounting influencers | part 1 of 2

• developing a growth culture with mindset: the new psychology of success
• investing in technology, data, and automation.
• creating a 31-point culture to be recognized as a top employer.
• run the business as a business, not just a collection of practices, and the importance of a national footprint.
• over-hiring interns and new hires and making lateral hires to grow the team.

more about richard kopelman

transcript
(not edited)

rob brown 

what do you think are the biggest challenges that accounting professionals face these days, particularly if they want to grow or thrive? i think a lot of it is about mindset, which might be something different than what you’ve heard from other guests, but i think there’s a lot of negative mindset in the profession. where’s that coming from?

richard kopelman 

i don’t know. maybe it’s the conservative nature of people. we’re taught to look for the negative. we’re taught to look for what’s wrong as technicians. but i think we have to take that hat off, and we have to focus on the positive aspects and be positive with our clients. and when i look at our clients, the successful ones, they’re hard driving, they’re positive about their business, their profession, and their industry, and we should be the same way.

rob brown 

i wonder, though richard the nature of a cpa, a chartered accountant, they are risk managers, mitigators of risk risk averse generally. that doesn’t lend itself to a positive, optimistic. can do mindset is that being unfair? would you go along with that?

richard kopelman 

i think that’s i think there’s some truth to that. again, i think people need to take their hat off and put the entrepreneurial hat on and put the business owner hat on, or future business owner hat on and look at the world in a different, very different way. three or well, no, it’s probably seven years ago, we brought in the author of a book called mindset, and we had a discussion about, how do we drive a growth mindset in the business? it’s a famous book, growth mindset is not something you’d find in accountants, certainly, as you said, entrepreneurs, business owners. but are you looking at two different animals? because if accountants had entrepreneurial blood in them, they’d perhaps be running their own firm or running their own business, and not being an accountant. well, i think in at least our world, in the clients that we’re serving, which are lower middle market and middle market companies and their families, they’re entrepreneurs, and we view ourselves as entrepreneurs, serving entrepreneurs. i think it’s a choice people make. right? we wake up every day. are we going to have a positive attitude or not, and our fundamentals that back up the aprio brand are 31 fundamentals, i believe, actually drive a growth mindset the aprio story. let’s talk about that for a little bit, from lowly ha and w to a global brand that it is. did you sit down around the desk with a few colleagues and sir, right, we’re going from here to here in in 60 seconds. old gas snow breaks, and here’s how we’re going to do it. what was the vision? yeah, i don’t think it was quite as cried because, oh, after all, we are accountants, so, you know, justify and look at the numbers quite. a bit okay. we did sit down. we hired a third party. it was right after our advertising agency came in and suggested that our new ad campaign should be he haw now, going back 30 or 40 years, that was a tv show, and i kindly said to them, thank you for the idea there’s the door. let’s focus on you know, let’s focus on now what we can become. it could have been all so different if you’d have gone with that.

rob brown 

richard, it could have been very different if it wasn’t, yes, yes, i don’t think we’d have the growth that we’ve had over the last six, seven years, since we’ve changed the name. well, that that’s a fact that you did hire a brand. it’s in the public domain that she spent a lot of money with them. this is, this is not a cheap rebrand. this was a whole change in philosophy and direction and everything. so how difficult is it a rebrand like that?

richard kopelman 

i would say, i would say it was difficult, it was time consuming, it was focused, and it was very purposeful. as you have said, not just changing the name, because that’s one thing. and i remember focusing on we were going to be changing the name, which means head and heart. it’s where aprio comes from. but how are we going to operationalize that, and how are we going to have a growth mindset, and we develop these 31 fundamentals of behavior that back up the brand and drive the growth mindset, that transition is ongoing. we are constantly living the daily rituals of practicing our fundamentals of the week. in looking at that question again, what are the challenges accounting firms face if they want to grow? mindset, okay, mindset, from the leadership mindset with the vision, maybe even a courageous mindset. anything else you think represents a challenge for growth for firms, yeah, we could probably go through everything across right, technology, systems, institutionalizing, process, people, just stretching. people as you are, expanding on a rapid basis. sometimes we fondly talk about what we’re going through is building, flying, writing the manual, gassing up the plane all at the same time. and that’s what i’ve watched clients experience for the last 30 years that are in high growth. we’ve been experiencing it ourselves. you know, i always think maybe i’ve seen all the challenges, and then another one appears. and i’m like, well, i guess we’re not done seeing the challenges yet, and they happen at different phases of the business. what we experienced at 70 million, versus at 150 million, versus what we’re experiencing today now, at approaching 450 million, going into 2024 the challenges are different, yet the solutions you can deploy and what scale provides in order to afford those solutions are totally different.

as you scale the business. is there any aspect of the accounting sector that hasn’t evolved as quickly as it should have, in your eyes.

richard kopelman 

oh, i think technology, we’ve been, you know, you and i were just talking about that. i think technology’s not evolving as fast as it as it needs to, okay, and and in the profession in general, i think mindset, you know, how people are the behaviors aren’t evolving as quickly as customer changes. client demands are changing. well, the technology vendors would argue that they’re going too fast for accounting firms. they’re evolving too fast that you can’t keep up. what is it? well, no, i agree with that, by the way, the technology advancements are there? it’s, it’s the i saw a chart once. i don’t know, i probably saw 10 years ago that the human mind’s ability to absorb new technology is slower than technology advancement itself. yeah, i’ve seen that too, and so i think that’s what we’re experiencing right now in the profession, in terms of aprio staying ahead of the technology.

rob brown 

what’s your plan there?

richard kopelman 

yeah, we’ve just brought in, nine months ago, a new digital officer to lead all of technology across the business. and we are. we have now developed a team just focused on data, because i think that data is way underutilized side the profession. i throw that under the umbrella of technology. we have a separate automation team. of course, we’re focused on cybersecurity, as everybody should be across the globe. so those are some key areas that we’re focused on today. the technology roles are vital because accounting firms are not known as being.

rob brown 

with buyers of technology, particularly with making those big strategic investments in tech and marrying it to everything else.

richard kopelman 

so great point. i think the profession has suffered from application over limitation, oh no, over application buying, in other words, up with this suite of applications enough talks to each other, yes and where, where we’re, what we’re experiencing right now is that shift from applications to enterprise applications. so you’re, you know, moving from an application to solve a particular problem or for particular need to applications that are, you know, solving multiple, multiple problems at the at the same time, and that’s the that’s the shift at least we’re going through right now, and we couldn’t have done it without scale. so scale creates, you know, again, that ability to make that transformation.

rob brown 

we often ask on this show,

rob brown 

richard, what separates the good firms from the great and to you, what is really working for the successful accounting firms? because we seem to be having a gap being created between the good and the great firms. or if you want to be more dramatic about it, the firms that will succeed and survive and the firms will decline and become irrelevant and get bored or whatever. so what’s really working for successful accounting firm?

richard kopelman 

you know, that’s a broad question, and i don’t know enough about other firms to necessarily answer that broad comment on one that you do know well about which, yeah, i’ll answer for us, i think, i think mindset and attitude is number one. the can do attitude it is, you know, continuing to look to improve the business. we call that, being relentless about improvement. it’s one of our fundamentals. but you also have to celebrate the successes when you have the wins along the way, and making those you know, you have to be willing to make investments. you have to run the business as a business, not as a combination of practices. and that’s what i see, probably more often than not, as i see accounting practices, not financial services businesses.

rob brown 

you’ve been on the record of saying how the industry is changing and you want to position the firm for the next 65 years. i’ve seen that in what does that involve?

richard kopelman 

yeah, all the things we’ve been talking about right? it involves making the right hires, hiring the investing in the engines that are going to build and expand on a national basis. it’s about having a national footprint. so today we’re up and down the east coast. we’re on the west coast. we just announced texas at the, you know, in the middle of december of 2023 and we’re continuing to, you know, grow and expand, to fill in those those locations, to be able to serve our clients best. and it’s about having 24 hour capabilities on the team. so it’s about having people abroad, so that we can serve clients and increase the throughput and velocity of and speed in which we’re delivering our services.

rob brown 

well. delivery requires capacity. capacity requires people. i want to ask you about the hiring policy for firms that want to grow. you’re on the m&a trail. you’re acquiring assertively in the marketplace with good fit firms, which is a way of bringing in capacity. but tell us about your hiring policy. generally with recruitment,

richard kopelman 

it’s interesting, many people have shared with me that their m and a strategy has been about people. yeah, our m&a strategy has been about growth. we have solved the challenge the professions experiencing from a people perspective by doing a few things. one is, we’ve been flooding the bottom, we call it, so we’ve been over hiring, if you would, interns and new hires to make sure we’re growing our team through our system. we’ve been making a lot of lateral hires, but that’s really come because we’ve made investments in the culture, and we’ve been a people first firm. we’ve been able to grow fast, grow profitability, and we’ve maintained a four and a half or better out of five in glassdoor. and in 2022 we’re named by glassdoor as the best places to work in the us. we’re on a list of 50 companies, not 50 cpa firms, but just 50 companies. and i think culture and a growth mindset are critical to to attracting talent. it’s, you know, people are leaving the profession because they’re not having fun, and that’s fundamental. 31 at aprio. keep things fun.

rob brown 

i get the culture’s important. you look on a million accounting firm websites and they will say the same thing, we are a great place to work. we look after our people. we’ve got an amazing culture. we will develop you. they all say the same things. and for the talent out there, it’s difficult to discern what is real and what he’s hyped.

richard kopelman 

i think you are 100% correct. i sit and watch panels, and i read articles all the time, and i look at websites of accounting firms and people in all sorts of industries, and they all say, oh, we have an amazing culture. and as you’re describing, and i don’t talk about our culture that way. i talk in specific figures, like where we rank on glassdoor, and i talk about that we have a defined and practice culture, and i don’t meet many people. maybe you have and i’d love for you to share with me, but you don’t meet many people who can describe their culture as defined and ritualized and practiced every day.

rob brown 

only met one firm that does that, and the firm in north carolina who i happen to work for in so far as there are 200 person firm, 11 offices, a mid tier firm called bernard robinson and company. i’m happy to give them a shout out here. brc, what they’re very good at, richard is not just claiming to have a great culture, but they’re very good at getting their people to front up. come on video. come on interviews, go on social and talk about not just that they have a great culture, but why, and give examples. so as muhammad ali the boxer said, it ain’t bragging if you’ve done it and their own people are willing to be advocates of the brand and say, hey, this is real. here’s an example of how work, life balance plays out. here’s an example of how flexible we are. here’s an example of why it’s not all about chargeable hours. so you asked the question, and that is a big difference, but it’s demonstrating that culture in a way, that people feel that it’s real, and you’re obviously getting that right as well, because it’s not just the glass door awards, it’s it’s making it real for people outside.

richard kopelman 

it is, it is. and i, you know, on a regular basis, i go visit glassdoor and what’s the other one, fishbowl, to just see what people are writing. in fact, i’ve had friends of mine who have said, is this real? if he happens, you guys write this for them. and you know, as far as i know, we haven’t

rob brown 

well, richard, it’s been excellent discussion. i just want to ask you to end this show and we’ll get you on doing another show to talk a little bit more about you personally. but what excites you most for the future?

richard kopelman 

change. change. i like change. change is a constant, and you know, change, as they say, will never be slower than it is today. uh, from you know, from here forward, the pace of change is just going to increase. and the pace of change is is providing opportunity. i’ve had the chance to experience that over the last 30 plus years in the profession, and here at aprio, and that is going to what’s going to create opportunity for the next few generations. i’m excited for them to be able to experience that and be entrepreneurs in the accounting profession, in the financial services arena, and best serve our clients today and in the future.

rob brown 

inspirational.  richard kopelman, thank you.

richard kopelman 

thank you. pleasure to be here.