Create Opportunities With Nexia
While attending the North American and Central American Nexia Conference, Denny sits down with a few of the influencers in Nexia to help us better understand how we can use our relationships within that organization to create opportunities for our clients and our CLA family.
Podcast: Play in new window | Download
Transcript
While attending the North American and Central American Nexia Conference, Denny sits down with a few of the influencers in Nexia to help us better understand how we can use our relationships within that organization to create opportunities for our clients and our CLA family.
Narrator: Welcome to “Own the Promise,” a CLA podcast created to share what guides every decision we make and every relationship we cultivate.
[00:00:16]
Denny: Hello, CLA family, coming to you this time, actually, from a different part of the world, from Panama. I have a great opportunity this week to be at our North American and Central American Nexia conference, and I’m here today with Jen Leary, all of you know Jen, and Jen actually sits on the board of Nexia representing CLA in that capacity. I also have Kevin Arnold, who’s the CEO, actually, of Nexia International that’s with us today. So appreciate, Kevin, you taking the time to be with us.
[00:00:50]
Kevin: You’re welcome.
[00:00:51]
Denny: And I also have Markus Emmrich, who’s actually from Ebner Stolz out of Germany. Markus is actually the chairperson of Nexia, so we have quite a bit of the board of Nexia and the brainpower behind Nexia here with us today, and I just wanted to take the opportunity for the CLA family to really expose you further to what’s happening within Nexia. What is Nexia? Great opportunity, because we have the leaders, really the influencers, of Nexia with us today.
And ultimately, what I’d like all of us to do is to understand better how Nexia not only benefits CLA, but it can benefit all the member firms by ways of working together better as we go forward. So, Kevin, if I could first ask you, just from a CEO perspective, when you look at Nexia related to CLA, where do you see the benefit of not only CLA’s participation in Nexia but also Nexia’s benefit from having CLA involved with this organization?
[00:01:57]
Kevin: I suppose dealing first with CLA’s benefit for being in Nexia, I mean, clearly, the obvious point is that it supports your international business needs. I mean, our proposition is that we have firms around the world who can deliver support to your clients to the same quality that you provide yourself, so I think there’s the business need that drives the whole raison d’etre of the network. And then in terms of the benefit of Nexia International from CLA, well, I mean, there are a number of — there are so many things.
I mean, the first point is the sheer scale and size of CLA. CLA is the largest firm in Nexia International. And I regard it in the sense that, I think, a responsibility to act as the big brother to all of the firm. Because leading on from that, Nexia is an organization that is driven by its member firms. We meet the needs of our member firms. And we need the guidance of all our major partners, and certainly in CLA, and I know many of your guys will know this already, but we have a number of committees and boards.
[00:03:04]
And CLA participate very actively in all of those committees. So in a sense, you directly help shape the strategy of Nexia as well, so there’s benefit both ways, I think.
[00:03:15]
Denny: Thank you, Kevin. And Markus, for you, you know, you represent a very large firm, obviously, in the Germany area. And so you deal with the same types of issues — the benefit to not only provide to Nexia, but the benefit that your firm receives from participating in Nexia. Maybe some viewpoints from the Ebner Stolz perspective — where is the greatest benefit that you see from participating in Nexia?
[00:03:41]
Markus: Thank you. I think that, as all firms, we’re driven by our clients and the needs of our clients. And there may be particularity with the German economy that we’ve got a lot of large and mid-sized German market leaders in the international market who are very international and have a lot of international subsidiaries. And to serve those large German, mid-sized clients, we need strongly international network.
Sometimes I think that we’re the most dependent firm within the network in that regard, that the network works and makes our clients happy, because otherwise, we couldn’t simply serve those clients and their international subsidiaries.
[00:04:36]
Denny: You know, one of the things, even since I’ve been involved and more exposed to Nexia, I realized that one of maybe the differences and the advantages of Nexia over other international networks is the relationships we form with our member firms. And Markus, I know with your firm and all the other individuals from your firm, it’s a great relationship and we thank you for that. Jen, you obviously know, ’cause you participate a lot in our global strategy, the world is changing.
It gets smaller, and this is becoming a larger portion of our firm. Maybe just in the last year or two, what are some of the things that have evolved related to CLA and how Nexia has played a role in helping us evolve as a firm?
[00:05:18]
Jen: Sure, thanks, Denny. So as it relates to the last two years, I can tell you that there’s such an activity and excitement around global business, and that would be both from our clients’ perspective as well as our people’s perspective. So let’s talk about what that means for the client perspective. As everyone in the CLA family has been exposed to, we track certain megatrends for the firm. There’s four of them, one of which is the globalization trends.
And so a lot of our clients are seeing the need, as Markus had said, for international support. And these aren’t just the large blue chip companies. These are emerging growth companies of all sizes. So within Nexia, we really need these relationships, and we work hard to make sure that we’re developing these relationships to serve our existing clients. The other thing that has transpired in the last two years are opportunities for our people. So also, back to Ebner, also we have examples in Australia as well as the UK.
We’ve been able to have secondment opportunities for our people to go outside of the country for a certain number of months, as well as some individuals from those member firms to join us within CLA. And each of them has very big impact to our local offices and our teams.
[00:06:30]
Denny: And one of the discussions I was involved in yesterday at a breakout session was, as a firm–and this is a large reason for coming to you today, CLA family–is to probably step up our game and understanding that we do have great relationships with our Nexia-related firms. And be that in the United States or across the world, when we have referral opportunities, when we’re conflicted in some type of an engagement, what I would encourage all of us to do is, first and foremost, think of our relationships within Nexia.
And where could we perhaps refer that work from a conflict perspective, or what’s ever prohibiting us, or if it’s even partnering with them. I don’t–I know we do not do that enough within the firm, and I would really encourage that we do that. Kevin, broad scale with Nexia as it relates to other international associations. Obviously, those in the family, you know of an RSM, you know of maybe Baker Tilly and so forth. But from Nexia, could you give our people just a sense of where does Nexia stack up against the other international organizations?
[00:07:37]
Kevin: Well, we’re much better, Denny, of course. No, I spent a lot of my time conducting competitor analysis on an informal and a formal basis. On an informal basis, I have very close relationships with most of the CEOs of the mid-tier networks. I tend not to spend too much time comparing what we do with the Big Four and maybe BTO because we’re a different model completely. So I have a pretty good understanding of what they offer their member firms and what they charge their member firms.
[00:08:09]
You know, we’re all keen to get value for what we pay. And I am pretty confident when I say that in terms of the benefits we deliver, however you might want to define that, we are way above the other mid-tier networks. I include the organization like Crowe and even RSM in that. And I could talk about the detail of this, but I look at this in terms of what our committees produce. You know, what do our committees deliver that all of your employees can say, “Well, this is a very tangible benefit”?
You know, whether it be attendance at courses, webinars, or any number of activities. So, I mean, I knew there’s probably gonna be a feeling that I would say this anyway. But I do seriously believe that we are the leader in terms of value for money for what we do. And I could go on, but that is a pretty sincere answer, I think.
[00:09:04]
Denny: Thank you, Kevin. And Markus, from a board perspective and chairing this organization, I’m sure you have a vision in the next two years or so of some of the major issues that you would like Nexia to tackle and the member firms to get behind. Could you just briefly give us an update, maybe, on what some of those items may be?
[00:09:25]
Markus: The main initiative we’re currently following is the professionalization of Nexia. That is important because in the past, we very much relied on what the members contributed themselves. So, always regarded this as a second budget of Nexia. There was an official budget funded by the membership fees, but then in addition to that, and a huge addition, there were members contributing to Nexia. But to achieve our strategic aims now, that is not enough.
And the issue is, we can’t make people who are delivering time on their own for free, for nothing, accountable for what they deliver. But to achieve our strategic aims in a fast-moving time, we have to change, and we need more professional resources. Like, we just recruit an IT officer. We recruited people who are active in the regions as regional directors. And those regional directors will be in the future directly responsible to Kevin and work on our strategic agenda.
[00:10:36]
And IT is a very important area which we need to cover in future, also, because all firms need to heavily invest in IT, and even for the larger firms, like our firms, like obviously, CLA, which much larger than Ebner Stolz. The IT costs will be a huge burden, and therefore we have to look at the IT investments and see whether there are possibilities to come to a burden-sharing and to be as competitive as we eventually can with regard to our global competitors.
[00:11:15]
Denny: Thank you, Markus. And as we wrap this up, Jen, just for our people to really bring this home, if there’s one example of kind of a big win, very selfishly from a CLA perspective, that has come from not only the organization of Nexia but the member firms, is there one good example you could share with the family?
[00:11:33]
Jen: Oh, there’s so many great examples. I’ll give you one, and I think you heard a lot throughout our discussion here. You heard words like “sharing” and “relationship,” and that’s really what this is about. I mean, I think the beauty of Nexia is that not only are these member firms that we can find on the Nexia website and get connected through our global leadership team, but there are people that we know personally and we can call them on their cellphone.
So when we have those types of relationships, we can really resonate in a unique way with our client base. So I’ll share one. We have a company in North Carolina in particular where they were doing a lot of outsourcing of IT and internal audit to, I think, 13 different countries across the globe. Over the years, we’ve been working one by one by one with the team, and now we have ten of those countries covered with Nexia relationships. And we did that without going out to an RFP.
[00:12:26]
We did that slowly and intentionally by meeting with the leadership teams of the client and understanding where they were operating internationally, what were some of the pain points they had, and then how can we, in the due course, introduce Nexia member firms. And it has been great. We do web calls, we do conference calls, and really, the client reflects back to us and says, “It’s hard to see where CLA ends and where the other firms begin.” And to us, that’s a huge success.
So, Denny, maybe just to summarize, if those that are listening today have not had exposure to Nexia, if you have a client and they have a global operation, and they may or may not need an audit or whatever that is, just ask them about how business is going in that particular region. And consider reaching out to anybody on our global leadership team. That would be Jeff Kvilhaug, Amy Moore, Matt Barnette, Dave Springsteen, me, Denny, anyone else that you see on Yammer or myCLA.
We would be really happy to help, and I think you’d be impressed by the resources that Nexia can bring.
[00:13:34]
Denny: Thank you, Kevin, Markus, Jen. Very much appreciate your time for the CLA family. I will just wrap this up as a quick update that as we work our way through May, we continue to exceed top-line revenue, bottom-line income, because of all of your efforts. We’re off to a very good year. As I’ve been describing to our leaders, we have a very nice tailwind behind the firm right now. We need to continue to take advantage of that, continue to stay accountable to one another, and make sure, again, that we do what we said we were gonna do on time, without having to be reminded.
And if we can continue that through the summer months and into the fall, at the same time, having time to relax, enjoy ourselves, get breathers for those of you that have been through a busy time. Those of you that are preparing for your busy time, we wish you the best. 2018 is shaping out to be a tremendous year of creating opportunities for our people, our clients, and our communities. Thank you all. Have a wonderful day.
Denny is the chief executive officer of CLA. As he goes about his duties related to the oversight of CLA’s direction, operations, expansion, and strategy, he is also an enthusiastic ambassador for the CLA Promise. He is fully committed to the firm’s position as a professional services firm that delivers integrated wealth advisory, outsourcing, and audit, tax, and consulting capabilities to help our clients succeed professionally and personally.
Comments are closed.