Anders + Summit: A Merger Story

Transitioning the Summit Virtual CFO team and the Anders Outsourced Accounting Services team into one is a huge undertaking. It can’t just happen naturally. IT MUST BE FOSTERED INTENTIONALLY. SUMMIT VCFO + JAMIE NAU An Unprecedented Integration

Now here’s a look into what our departments are up to, in their own words...

Director of Accounting at Anders, Scott Hoffmann, has told me that he plans to use Summit’s experience moving through the roadblocks of things he has wanted to implement. The new OAS division will be one place where we plan on leveraging our expertise with technology to create efficiencies, some- thing Anders OAS has struggled with in the past: As the OAS group continued to grow with new hires and new clients, implementing new technologies some- times took a backseat. But now Summit can provide a lot of the technology and processes that they were looking for. We knew the integration would be more challenging than it looked like on paper, and when it came time to dig in, we decided the best approach would be to do an in-person, off-site retreat. Retreats have been a part of Summit culture for a long time. We do an all- team retreat as a way to bring the fully distributed team together physically on an annual basis. We also have annual departmental retreats, including one for our director team. The director retreat is designed to allow us to regroup, reflect

on the past year, and plot out what the next five years are going to look like. We do about four hours of meetings a day over a weekend, so we have total focus—no interruptions, no phone calls. We always leave the meeting refreshed, excited about where we’re going, with good direction on what’s going on, going forward. When we looked at what it was going to take to bring together OAS and VCFO after the merger was signed, it was clear we needed everyone to get together, focus, and talk out the new org chart until it was done. No distractions, no competing obligations. We gave our HR director and retreat facilitator, Zach Montroy, the marching orders that we needed to walk away from the director retreat as one integrated company, not two teams that are loosely associated. He had everyone who was attending the retreat do homework to get them thinking about what we would need to do to continue to scale rapidly, especially in terms of troubleshooting potential

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