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Firm Management

Firm Management – Feb. 2017

Feb. 17, 2017

MarksNelson Managing Partner Mark Radetic 1 MB 5890c4e194d31

Mark Radetic, CPA, CGMA, managing partner, MarksNelson

MarksNelson is Innovative!

When you look at innovation and where we’re at you have to go back to where it changed. Five to six years ago we had a number of partners, including some of our rainmakers, getting towards retirement. We wanted to remain independent (not merge with another firm). We had a very good firm even back then, but the route we were following would be unsustainable with the number of partners edging toward. We needed a culture shift.

  • We redid our operating agreement, the succession plan; we made several acquisitions and several strategic hires; we set strategic objectives and goals for the next one, five, and ten years; we started providing different services and specializations and some enhanced skills to our clients – all of this changed our culture and some of the different services that go beyond foundational services (what we all grew up with: audit, tax, accounting services).
  • We offered enhanced niches with site location work in economic development, modeling, enterprise resource solutions. Providing public and large private companies with some of our talent allows us to do special projects for these companies, to step in and become their talent where they can’t hire talent permanently – it’s a growth area for us.
  • We just went through the lean process to enhance our audient process, provide more efficiencies and more time to do the audit, to spend more time with our clients, to become their trusted business advisor.
  • We built out our human resources team to include the development of MarksNelson University – a program to hopefully attract top talent. We work with each staff member, give them the tools needed to develop, put together success proposals on every one, develop learning tracks designed to help them master technology competencies and soft skills.
  • We assigned mentors and career coaches to deliver real time and ongoing feedback. evaluations were redesigned from semi-annual to constant feedback based on the goals that were set at the beginning of year.
  • We’ve enhanced our recruiting. We recruit at six or seven colleges around the Kansas City metro area, and some state schools around us.
  • We offer a leadership program during summer for students that hopefully turn into our interns.

These are all new things we’ve done over the last five to six years. We’ve been very fortunate that we’ve seen some phenomenal growth from these thing we’ve done. As much as we had a really good firm before, I think we have a great firm now.