3
OPINION
The power of showing up
T his past summer, I found myself in ballrooms, breakout rooms, and bustling receptions across several different industry conferences. After hours of sitting through presentations (and more than a few awkward “networking” moments), I walked away with something I couldn’t have picked up from a webinar or a white paper: the power of showing up. From fees to client care, lessons learned from a season of conferences highlight growth, adaptability, and connection.
Shirley Che
Being in the room with others who are in the same shoes – asking questions that resonated, wrestling with the same challenges – hits differently than logging into a virtual session. I didn’t just hear ideas, I felt the collective curiosity in the air. And more often than not, the most valuable takeaways were the ones I didn’t even know I needed. Here are a few highlights that stuck with me: ■ Instead of just highlighting private equity and consolidation (which everyone’s already buzzing about), Will Swearingen of Zweig Group reminded us that profitability is not just a metric – it’s what enables you to invest in people, systems, and growth. Young professionals in Florida saw almost a 7% salary increase in the past year – far above the national average of 2.2%. There are so
many parts to the story of fees and profitability – fee setting, recruiting, retention, succession – and all of it ties back to understanding your cost structure and ensuring profitability. It’s not just about chasing bigger projects or higher billings; it’s about making sure your firm is healthy enough to reinvest in its future. Rosa Sheng and her co-presenters gave a solemn reminder that inequity has health, environmental, and generational consequences. Their framing powerfully tied redlining, sacrificial zones, and environmental injustice directly to the disparities we see today. It shifted DEI from being about HR policies to something much broader: who bears the cost of our built environment decisions, generation after generation.
■
See SHIRLEY CHE, page 4
THE ZWEIG LETTER AUGUST 25, 2025, ISSUE 1599
Made with FlippingBook flipbook maker