The Seven Building Blocks of a Great Partnership

Maybe you can name them. Can you live them?

By August J. Aquila
What Makes a Great Partnership

Great partnerships are like great love affairs. There needs to be chemistry.

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After more than 36 years of consulting with large and small professional services firms, I’ve seen all sorts of chemistry. Some partnerships were almost toxic, most were tolerable and a few were really great. Let me share with you my observations about great partnerships and how they got that way.

Posted on December 23, 2022

August J. Aquila

About the Author

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August J. Aquila is an internationally known speaker, consultant and author and has held leading positions in the accounting profession for more than 25 years. He is CEO of AQUILA Global Advisors, a full-service consulting firm to accounting and other professional service firms in the US, Canada UK and India. August focuses his consulting on designing compensation plans, resolving organizational and partner issues, transition planning and developing strategic plans.

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Before starting AQUILA Global Advisors, he held several executive leadership positions with American Express Tax and Business Services, Inc. He was also a partner in a top-50 firm and regional marketing director for Coopers & Lybrand (now PWC) in Chicago. In 2003 he was elected into the Association for Accounting Marketing’s Hall of Fame and has been selected as one of the “Top 100 Most Influential People in The Accounting Profession” by Accounting Today for several years.

He is the author of hundreds of articles and several books on practice management; mergers and acquisitions and compensation plan designs. Recent books include The CA Firm of the Future (Bombay CA Society, 2013), Performance is Everything (AICPA 2012), Compensation as a Strategic Asset (AICPA 2007) and Client at the Core (John Wiley & Sons 2004). August is also a co-author, with Robert J. Lees and Derek Klyhn, of Leadership at its Strongest: What Successful Managing Partners Do (Bay Street Group LLC, 2013), the ground-breaking research on how managing partners drive improvements in their firm’s competitive and financial performance

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