Industry Forward – Jeff Vrieze and Cory Rutledge Talk Career Journey
The CLA Promise offers many opportunities to the CLA family. One such opportunity is Deep Industry Specialization but it doesn’t happen overnight. Hear how one CLA veteran became an expert in an industry that wasn’t part of his original plan and why he encourages all of us to explore unique opportunities in our path to specialization.
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Transcript
The CLA Promise offers many opportunities to the CLA family. One such opportunity is Deep Industry Specialization but it doesn’t happen overnight. Hear how one CLA veteran became an expert in an industry that wasn’t part of his original plan and why he encourages all of us to explore unique opportunities in our path to specialization.
[00:00:04]
Jeff: Welcome, CLA Family, to our Industry Forward podcast designed to tell the industry stories behind the CLA Promise. Many of you are on the path of specialization. Others are just getting started. At CLA, we exist to create opportunities. However, these opportunities may not always be aligned with your current specialization path. Today, we’ll be talking with Cory Rutledge, the MPI of our Senior Living practice.
Cory’s 16 years at CLA have not always been spent focused on Senior Living. Listen to Cory’s career journey, including how he evaluated his various opportunities presented to him from an emotional and career perspective and what he did to become specialized along the journey. Cory, welcome to Industry Forward. Could you share some of your highlights of your career journey at CLA?
[00:00:59]
Cory: Yeah, I’d be happy to. Thanks, Jeff. So I started as a traditional CPA here at CLA about 16 years ago. I started actually doing hospital work. I dabbled in kind of little jobs here and there, but really started my career path in terms of industry specialization in our hospital group, and I spent probably the first seven years of my career serving hospital clients throughout the country and then actually was asked by you, of all people, to change my career path and my industry focus and move to our Senior Living practice which was probably about eight or nine years ago.
[00:01:37]
Jeff: A lot of information in there, Cory. I want to unpack a few of those comments here as we go today. First of all, I’m just interested. As you think about specialization, you think about whether it’s hospitals or Senior Living or any of the other, but why healthcare? Why did you get involved in healthcare when you started 16 years ago?
[00:01:54]
Cory: I feel like some people, you know, when they start in an industry, they feel as though they have to have a passion for that industry day one, and I know that there’re some people in our practice that do. You know, I think of some people that I’ve talked to in our manufacturing group that grew up in a manufacturing household, and so they’re drawn to that industry. That is not the case for me. I started in healthcare literally because I was a job fair. I wanted a job that paid me money, and someone said, “Do you want to be in healthcare?” And so my answer was, “Yes.” So I did not have any kind of intrinsic draw to healthcare. I basically just wanted a job with a paycheck.
[00:02:29]
Jeff: I think many people probably at CLA can resonate around the fact that, “Give me an opportunity. Give me a job, and we can make a great career out of it.” So maybe let’s just dig a little bit deeper in sort of expanding your industry, getting knowledgeable. You spent the first seven years, I believe you mentioned, in the hospital industry, and what were some of the key things you did to drive sort of that industry specialization, the knowledge, the expertise, that as you were early in your career, you know, years one through seven? What were those pieces that you got excited about and drove your knowledge in that industry sector?
[00:03:02]
Cory: I had spent the early part of my career doing almost exclusively audit work, and one thing that the hospital group does exceptionally well is that when that group goes out into the field to conduct an audit, at the end of our time there, we’ve always done an exit discussion. So we get around a table with key leaders, whether that be CEO, CFO, and we have a conversation about the audit, about their business, you know, some industry trends, some things that are going on.
[00:03:33]
And when I think about what drove my knowledge in healthcare, and at that time my knowledge of the hospital industry, it was really my experiences in those exit discussions, and I want to differentiate “experiences” versus “experience.” So “experience” is more about how long you’ve been doing something. The “experiences” are these momentary, you know, these points in time where you’re sitting around the table and you’re having a different kind of conversation that’s something other than just an audit-related discussion.
[00:04:01]
So in short, what really drove my industry knowledge and my expertise was I spent the first several years listening, you know, listening to really smart people in the industry. I think of people like Matt Claeys and Rob Sheeley, Dan Frein, Darryn McGarvey, Cory Beltzer. Those people really, you know, raised me, and as I listen to how they interacted with clients, and probably even more importantly I listened to clients and the things that were on their mind, that’s really how I became knowledgeable in the industry is simply because I listened to folks that were talking about the industry and talking about what was important to them and their business.
[00:04:36]
Jeff: Cory, a couple things through that. It sounds like, number one, your initial service was really in the audit world, but you spent a lot of time listening which provided you experiences and insights that were able to do more than just the audit.
[00:04:52]
As you think about that audit platform and you think about all the different services that we have at CLA today, is there anything other–any other advice that you would share with any of your CLA family members that would cause you to say, “It’s just not the audit as well, but you could do this in any of our service offerings.” Is there any advice, other than the listening aspect, you would encourage your family members to do to dig in and really become specialized?
[00:05:16]
Cory: Yeah. You know, as I think about particularly our CPAs–I’m gonna be a little bit hard on our CPAs here at CLA, and I can do that because I am one, right? So I think CPAs are generally built to want to know the answer, and when we don’t have the answer, some times we’re afraid to have the conversation.
[00:05:34]
We have to be 100% right and know how every “i” is dotted and every “t” is crossed before we’re willing to have a conversation, and to me, that is a big barrier that we need to get through. So I think it’s really important that–You know, one piece of advice that I would give is that we don’t have to have the answer in order to have a conversation. And in fact, I would argue that it’s even more important to ask the question as opposed to have the answer.
[00:05:59]
I think as we are interacting with clients, if we’re transparent and we are interested in what they have to say, and we seek to understand and we have an intellectual curiosity, that is really what’s gonna drive our industry knowledge. Pretending that we know all the answers all the time does not–One, people don’t want to talk to us, and two, people aren’t gonna share some of their vulnerabilities, so I think that having that curiosity is really what creates a more well-rounded industry professional.
[00:06:26]
Jeff: So thanks, Cory. Let me shift gears on to one of the other experiences, opportunities that you were mentioned at the onset here, and that was sort of this changing your career path. You mentioned the first seven years you were focused in the hospital, and then all of a sudden there was probably a few disruptions that came along the way that made you begin to scratch your head and say, “Is this the right path for me?” I want to just dig a little bit deeper with that, and as you think about creating these opportunities, you know, and specifically for our people, I know you’ve been afforded more than just, “Would you be willing to change from hospital to Senior Living?”
[00:07:01]
But there’s been some geography questions as well. Can you just share some of the thoughts and maybe challenges, emotions, that went through your head as you were afforded opportunities, and maybe just share a little bit about what they might’ve been and how you came to the decisions that you came to?
[00:07:17]
Cory: Yeah. So I’ll start with actually–So before I switched from hospitals to Senior Living, I was actually asked to move to our Philadelphia office probably in 2006 to start a hospital practice there of all things, and I looked really hard at that opportunity.
[00:07:30]
And at that point in time, Denny Schleper was a key person in that particular office. And so when I went out and met with the office and looked at houses and things like that, I was interacting with Denny in this, and I decided ultimately that it was not the right move for me, and I have to be honest. I was scared that that would be a giant black mark on my career. I thought that might be a career-limiting move taking a hard look at a geographic relocation and ultimately saying “no” to it. But as I look in the rearview mirror, it was the best thing I could’ve done.
[00:07:59]
I don’t think I was emotionally ready. I don’t think I was professionally ready. I just don’t think it would’ve been the right move for me. So that was probably the–That’s the first thing that comes to mind. And the second one, which you know, obviously we eluded to, is switching from our hospital group, and I’ll pause and say a group to which I have a ton of loyalty. So I loved my time in the hospital group. I have great relationships to this day with some of our hospital leaders, so it’s not as though I was looking to get out of a not-great situation. I loved working for hospitals.
[00:08:31]
But I was offered an opportunity to join our Senior Living team, and so you know, maybe part of your question was, “Why did I make that decision and what was going through my head?” Ultimately I–I knew early in my career that I wanted to be a principal. When I think about the things that I’m good at, growing business and developing client relationships, that’s something that I thrive on and something that I enjoy, and so I knew that I wanted to get to that place. I didn’t necessarily care where I did it. Again, I had a lot of loyalties to the hospital group, not because of hospitals, but because of the people that worked in the hospital group.
[00:09:04]
And so when I was asked to join the Senior Living team, frankly the first thing that went through my head was, “Well, Senior Living is not sexy. Like, I don’t know that I want to be joining that group. That is not a group that I’m that excited about joining.” But as, you know, we unpacked the opportunity, I knew that it would get me to where I wanted to be faster, and so I decided to take the plunge and go ahead and join our Senior Living group.
[00:09:26]
Jeff: So Cory, I can remember us, frankly, driving probably between Minneapolis and Des Moines, and for those of you that are a little geographically challenged like myself, that’s about a three-and-a-half to four-hour drive one way. I think we had a day. We were going down there to–I can’t remember.–to talk to a client or prospect, and I think we got in to this conversation a little deeper, and I can remember even you saying, “I don’t think that’s for me,” for the right reasons that you probably just said, and this maybe’s faster, but share a little more about just how did you get over this fact that, “Well, I don’t know as many people.”
[00:10:01]
“Therefore I might not trust as many people. All my friends are doing hospital work, so I have great relationships,” and you’re taking a plunge into maybe the dark unknown, and as you said, it wasn’t sexy. What other emotions–I mean, what ultimately got you to say, “Let me do this,” because I know, ’cause we talked a number of times back then about, “This isn’t right for me, and I really don’t think I should do this,” and I had to kind of push a little harder–I admit that.–but ultimately here you are today, and your career is, you know, going fabulously from a lot of people’s perspective, and just what ultimately really got you to say, “I’m gonna take this leap of faith?”
[00:10:40]
Cory: I think if I boil it down, it was conversations with other leaders in our healthcare practice and a recognition that this wasn’t just one person asking me to do something because they wanted me to do something. It was broader than that, so there was a strategy behind it that people, you know, frankly in our Senior Living group and our hospital group and other parts of our practice had discussed.
[00:11:06]
So it wasn’t just a, “Hey, you want to do this.” It was a well thought-out, you know, concept. And because the leadership of the industry had thought about it and thought of me as somebody who might be able to make a difference in it, that gave me a lot of confidence that even if I didn’t think I was the right person, clearly somebody saw something that told them that I was the right person.
[00:11:32]
And because I trusted our leadership, and ultimately I trusted the firm, I gained confidence that if this didn’t work, that doesn’t mean that it’s the end of Cory at CLA. I guess I had trust that people had my back, and ultimately whether it’s in hospitals or Senior Living or trash companies for all I care, as long as I know that I have a team that has my back and there’s trust, I’m up for pretty well anything.
[00:11:55]
Jeff: So maybe one additional question for you, Cory. As you think about the sub-industry change, and you had seven years of knowledge and insight that you’d worked really hard. Now you’re in a new sub-industry niche. You’re, you know, late in your year seven, maybe early year eight, and you know, you’ve been the MPI of our Senior Living practice for probably two to three years now. What was just those two or three things that cause you to go deep and learn a sub-industry in a pretty short period of time to be as impactful as you became and to be offered the opportunity to become the managing principal of this industry?
[00:12:31]
Cory: What I’m gonna share isn’t necessarily the path for everybody. In fact, I’m sure it’s not the path for everybody, but for me, it was speaking. So speaking at state association meetings to start, and then on national stages, for me that was the area where, like, I had to know my stuff, so it forced me to learn things in a lot greater depth than I would naturally. What I think I am decent at is sharing information and presenting ideas and concepts and getting audiences to think about things in a little different manner.
[00:13:03]
And so I spent the first several years in Senior Living just speaking. So I’d go to state associations and national trade associations and speak because it kind of told the audience that I knew what I was talking about even if I didn’t, and it gained confidence within myself that, “Hey, Cory, you’re gonna be on stage. You better learn this, and it’s gonna make you smart.” And for me, that gained me credibility, and it gained a lot of confidence in me.
[00:13:26]
Jeff: That’s very interesting, Cory. I think about a lot of our people that we’ve run across in our industry lives of speaking as a substantial fear, and I’m just interested as you think about, you know, a lot of people won’t–You said it earlier. You got to be 100% right, and I got to know all the answers. Obviously, you got on the stage. You started doing presentations. You probably didn’t have all the answers. What got you though that fear, right? The question’s gonna come in the audience that, “Oh, my goodness. I’m new to this industry. I don’t know.” What got you through that fear? ‘Cause there might be some nugget there for others as they think about just taking the leap and doing a presentation or writing an article?
[00:14:04]
Cory: I guess one is the size of the
stage I started on, right? So I wouldn’t have come out with, you know, guns
blazing on a national stage. That would not be wise. So I would start with, you
know, a smaller stage, say a state trade association, or you know, I don’t know
all the industries what that stage would be, but if you get to a topic where
you’ve done some research, you create some interesting stories around it, and
you bring a different perspective–So I think just kind of creating your story
that’s yours and having it something that is relevant to the audience, you
don’t necessarily have to know everything, and in fact, I think it’s great in
presentations when you don’t know everything to bring the audience into it.
[00:14:38]
That gets audience participation which makes it a more compelling story to begin with. So at some point you just have to get out and do it, right, and you have to recognize that, “Hey, this might not go 100% as planned, but I’m out here. I’m trying my best,” and I think that people have some respect for people that do that.
[00:14:56]
Jeff: So Cory, in closing here, you’ve been presented opportunities over your career, and because of your hard work and your energy and your effort, but you’ve also said “no,” and I think that’s a key thing for our family members to understand. It’s okay to say “no,” and it’s not gonna penalize your career because obviously you’ve had a great career thus far, and you’ve got a bright future. As you think about advice to your family at CLA, is there things you know today that you wish you would’ve known eight years ago, 15 years ago, that you would just leave with your family members the couple nuggets of advice as they think about specializing in industry at CLA?
[00:15:35]
Cory: Two things come to mind. First, there are a lot of good accountants in the country, but having industry specialization truly is what sets CLA apart. I’ll speak for our Senior Living practice. We don’t get work because we’re good CPAs. We get work because we know the industry. And so for those, I guess, in our family who haven’t had the depth of industry expertise or the opportunity to dive deep into an industry, first my recommendation is get into an industry.
[00:16:02]
It’s wildly important and a huge driver or growth in our practice. The second piece is just related to kind of the posture of how we enter into an industry. Having a posture of curiosity and openness and not knowing all the answers but also not being scared of the answers you don’t know I think is pretty powerful. So the way that I look at it, and I try to explain this to some of our new people when they start, the Senior Living business or the healthcare business or fill-in-the-blank, manufacturing, construction, whatever the industry is, it is a complicated multi-faceted, multidimensional puzzle, and it can be very overwhelming to start, but I think as–
[00:16:42]
If we’re mindful of putting those pieces together, starting somewhere just to put two pieces together, and then have those two pieces come up with, you know, another chunk of the puzzle, over the course of time, you build a lot of industry knowledge and expertise without even really recognizing it. So it’s all about having experiences with leaders in our practice and having experiences with clients that help to put those pieces together where we can ultimately make an impact on our clients and on the industry in total.
[00:17:12]
Jeff: Industry specialization connects us to our clients in a deeper more meaningful way. Thank you, Cory, for telling your story, and thank you to CLA for listening.
Jeff Vrieze is a health care principal with CLA, and is focused on senior services organizations. Jeff has more than 25 years of experience devoted to the health care industry in the areas of auditing, feasibility studies, reimbursement, strategy, capital planning, and other advisory services.
Thanks for sharing your story. Great example of how everyone can create their own career journey and the support they can receive along the way.