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Bill O
P R O F I L E
Conference call: Bill Overturf President of Ross & Baruzzini (Hot Firm #57 for 2017), a 270-person international design and consulting company based in St. Louis.
By LIISA ANDREASSEN Correspondent “W e’ve offloaded some of our IT functions to the cloud and continue to improve re- siliency and disaster recovery features,” says Over- turf, referring to recent IT upgrades. A CONVERSATION WITH BILL OVERTURF. The Zweig Letter: What’s your philosophy on fee/ billing and accounts receivable? How do you col- lect fees from a difficult client? Bill Overturf: Our firm is growing and with that comes the need to manage our aged AR. After our accounting department has done its due dili- gence, we ask the project manager on the account to reach out to the client. Often we find that the project manager can move the process along within their own accounting group, or can clarify if there’s
a problem that requires action on our part. In the end, it typically falls back to the strength of the re- lationship to resolve a problem. “We encourage people to pursue opportunity that they see with few constraints, but have no formal process in place.” TZL: What’s the recipe for creating an effective board? BO: We have an internal board made up of key lead- ers who represent the larger business sectors we are involved in, and most interestingly, we’ve add- ed someone via a recent acquisition who did not come up through the traditional engineering ranks but rather came up through business development.
Bill Overturf, President, Ross & Baruzzini
THE ZWEIG LETTER Aug
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