At Aronson & Co., Lisa Cines says technology is reshaping workflows, roles, responsibilities, and how CPAs form and maintain professional relationships.
by Rick Telberg
If you’re looking for clues to the future, ask Lisa Cines.
Until last June, Lisa Cines was chief executive at Aronson & Company, a top 100 firm. But then she turned over day-to-day duties to a chief operating officer and took on the role of officer in charge of corporate and business development. To her, the job gives her license to pursue the big, strategic opportunities that are opening for a firm like hers. She is, in a nutshell, working to build her version of the firm of the future.
Cines is grappling with a handful of tectonic shifts in the world and in the profession.
First, she says, “What’s shifting is how we communicate. We’ve gone from mail and telephone to fax and email,” Cines says. “But in the future — even now — it’s becoming more about communities. Relationships will always be at the core of what we do as a firm. But how we form and maintain those relationships is shifting, largely due to the impact of technology.”
Cines will be appearing at the Winning is Everything practice management conference at the Manadalay Bay Resport in Las Vegas, Jan. 19-21, 2011.
Instead of drumming up new business at the Chamber of Commerce dinner, today Aronson’s professionals work LinkedIn and Facebook. Aronson was a pioneer when they started blogging about three years ago. And she was early to deploy sales professionals.
Cines says firms shouldn’t be afraid of social media. “I bet when phones first started showing up in offices, supervisors were saying, ‘I can’t believe how many personal phone calls those people are making.’ Then it was, ‘I can’t believe how they’re instant messaging all the time.’ Now, we’ve gotten over that. People will be people. They will socialize. But that’s part of who we are.” It’s also how a CPA firm gets and keeps business … and how a CPA manages a career.
“A few years ago everyone had more work than we knew what to do with,” Cines recalls. But, defying conventional wisdom, Cines started hiring professional sales people. The payoff became apparent during busy season. “When other firms were locked away in their offices working on client deliverables,” she says, “we were out in the marketplace and our competitors weren’t. We were visible and they weren’t.”
Today Cines focuses on “making sure the business developers have the tools they need,” such as the right technical experts on staff, informational webinars and seminars, white papers and informative blogs.
Going forward, Cines will be working to “do more small mergers,” sell more consulting work and continue to build a portfolio of new capabilities.
For career-minded CPAs, Cines envisions a day when software, which already handles ticking and tying, will also handle routine processes from start to finish. The CPA of the future, she says, will have to be “a real thinker” and a “sub-specialist.” In audit, it may mean mastering process analysis and non-financial risk assessment. In tax, it may mean acquiring deep analytical and planning skills.
For the firm of the future, it may mean a radical transformation in workflows that redefine the roles and relationships of partners and staff. “The changes in workflow,” she says, “are already creating a mind shift. We’re re-thinking the way we do things.”
If they’re re-thinking the way they do things at Aronson & Company, then shouldn’t you be doing a little re-thinking too?
2 Responses to “Building the Firm of the Future with Lisa Cines”
Jason M Blumer, CPA
Dude, there is a lot of good stuff in this article. Lisa is a woman after my own heart.
Technology and automation is ALREADY replacing so many tasks in the typical business process. And when you move those processes to the clouds, well you have entered into a new world of shared automation with your clients (I call it “disrupted business processes”) and the transparency with your clients goes through the roof.
Excellent client service is the ultimate result.
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