Anders + Summit Merger Story
People have a lot of different possible directions to develop, career-wise, and now they can lean into their skill set. Since the roll out, I’ve had conversations with every single senior accountant to see which role they want to take, and they’re all really excited about this direction and about how we’re going to move forward.
obstacles we see from the lens of our own jobs, our own departments, our own teams.
one team working to accomplish what Jim Collins would call the big hairy audacious goal? How do we get from where we are now to $50 million?” Zach worked to guide the conversation to get the best answers out of the team for questions like: How do we integrate the teams? What things are going to get us from here to there? We talked about acting on lead measures, looking at the most important verticals. We looked at accountability. What do jobs look like? What do depart- ments look like? What is the structure of the team going to look like? We had those hard conversations. And they delivered. It probably didn’t hurt that Jody told us we weren’t leaving until we got answers. But whatever the reason, we got our answers. “There were a lot of difficult rumbles that were a part of those conversations that we had to have, but having everyone in the room, having everyone focused on the same goal—there was a lot of synergy in getting to where we got, because we were able to do all of that together.” -ZACH MONTROY (SUMMIT)
In August, Adam, Scott and I presented the results, a “Choose Your Own Adventure” path for Summit and Anders accountants to determine their career focus. We asked everyone to decide, “Where can you have the greatest impact and where do you want to spend your time? What is your role going to be?” That flexibility is the hallmark of what we always try to do with our people, empower them to decide whether they feel better suited on the more consulting side or on technical accounting. We want the merger to give our people more autonomy; the number one reason people leave accounting firms is because they lose autonomy. Decisions are typically made for them. This new org chart structure allows them to figure out which route they want to take, so they can have different experiences in their time at Anders. If they decide they want to take a different route, they don’t have to leave the firm to do that.
The prework—conversations between Adam, Scott, and me—was so important to the decision-making process. When you’ve got two very successful organi- zations who have different approaches, it’s important for both sides to give and receive input to make sure they truly understand and appreciate the other company’s approach. It’s how you make the best informed decision about how to move forward. Once we got all the key players together with Zach, we had a chance to step back, look at where we were and really focus on the issues that needed to be resolved. We didn’t give the team the specific steps to get from A to Z. If we had, it would have been a really quick meeting. We could’ve handed out high-fives, but we wouldn’t have had everybody’s true buy-in, because they weren’t part of that decision-making.
I’ll be the first to admit I definitely underestimated this process. I thought that, you know,
putting two great teams
together that offered similar services would be a pretty easy task. As they say, ‘The devil is in the details,’ and there are definitely a lot of details.”
-ADAM HALE (SUMMIT)
So instead, we built the agenda with the end in mind: “How do we walk away as
P. 33
Made with FlippingBook - professional solution for displaying marketing and sales documents online