Want to be CEO of a CAS practice?

Nina Chmura, CPA, a partner at the firm Withum, was a co-presenter with two other CPAs at Digital CPA in Denver on the topic of firms growing their client advisory services (CAS) offerings. The title of the session: “How to Be the CEO of Your CAS Practice.”

Speaking from the conference site, Chmura detailed some of the keys to CAS success in this Journal of Accountancy podcast episode.

Chmura also reflected on her career journey. She is a 2012 graduate of the AICPA Leadership Academy, calling the experience “life-changing.” Chmura also found value in being part of a panel of guest editors for the May 2017 issue of the JofA.

What you’ll learn from this episode:

• The focus on metrics — identification and evaluation of effectiveness.
• How the CAS advice and themes apply to her role at Withum.
• The link between satisfied advisory clients and happy employees.
• Identifying which KPIs are truly key to success.
• Chmura’s surprise about being asked to be a JofA guest editor in 2017.
• More on her advice about identifying personal KPIs.

Play the episode below or read the edited transcript:

— To comment on this episode or to suggest an idea for another episode, contact Neil Amato at Neil.Amato@aicpa-cima.com.

Transcript

Neil Amato: Welcome back to the Journal of Accountancy podcast. This is Neil Amato with the JofA. I’m recording from Digital CPA in Denver. Nina Chmura is my guest on this episode. Nina is a CPA with the firm Withum. She’s an AICPA Leadership Academy graduate, a Digital CPA speaker, and we’re going to touch on some of those topics today. Nina, thank you for being on the podcast.

Nina Chmura: Thank you so much for having me. I can’t wait to participate.

Amato: Great. You and Gabby Luoma and Missy Thompson have a session at Digital CPA with the title,
“How to Be the CEO of Your CAS Practice.” I mean, sounds pretty easy, right? No, but what are some of the key points you’re hoping the attendees will learn from that session?

Chmura: The session is really a deep dive into different metrics that you can use to evaluate your progress. I think it’s a lofty title of being the CEO of your practice, but I think it’s important to understand that it’s not just the leaders of the practice that it applies to, but it’s everyone that’s part of the practice. Anyone that has that book of business and that recurring work these can apply to, and talking about how you manage them and what levers you can pull when things seem to be going sideways or going great.

Amato: Do you want to talk anymore about some of those individual points? I mean, first, identify the key metrics, then evaluate the metric effectiveness, then develop metric strategies.

Chmura: Yeah, for sure. I think there’s three big buckets of metrics that we look into. It’s some that are growth- and sales-oriented, some that are specific employee and production, and others that are more about the project profitability. I think when you dive into those, not every metric is going to work for every practice. It really depends on how you’re built, what your structure is, what your revenue cycle is. But identifying the ones that matter to you and then tracking them closely is what’s important and making sure that you’re taking the directional cues.

They’re not always going to be perfect, and I think sometimes us accountants really want accuracy, and you need to take away that accuracy lens sometimes and just really say, “Hey, I don’t know if this person’s a full-time equivalent [FTE] or a 0.5 equivalent, but if I keep them the same and they’re working the same, then I’m directionally accurate and able to move through that.”

I think some of the metrics that are most important to me when I’m thinking about the team is, on the sales side, all of that is really important for growth. But individually, how are each of our clients doing and how our employees are doing is really impactful. Is it dollars managed per person or revenue per FTE or margin by client? Those are the types of things that really tell me how things are going and what to dig into and what to keep moving forward.

Amato: I haven’t asked, but the tenets of this session — how do they relate to your job at Withum?

Chmura: That’s a great question. These are things that I think about every day. As the leader of the team, I have about 90 people. It’s impossible for me to be involved in every single thing, and I need to have ways to identify where our successes are happening and where our issues are happening. Being able to look at these metrics, on individual all the way to overall team ideas, is really important to know where I should be spending my time and how I should be moving the team forward strategically.

Amato: In addition to moving a team forward strategically, looking at metrics, thinking about accuracy, all those things, there is also the people management aspect of it. We’ll touch on some of those. Well, we’ll touch on that topic now, actually. What’s the importance of good people management in being a good CAS CEO?

Chmura: Sure, I think that we are a professional service firm through and through, and it is a relationship business. And you get good relationships and you have good people when they’re happy and they can perform at their best. Making sure that our team has the right amount of work and they’re not overloaded or under-challenged is really important, and some of the employee metrics can really show you that.

For instance, dollars managed per FTE on an individual basis can tell you, wait a second, someone’s upside down here. Maybe they need a little bit of help, maybe they have too few clients and they need something to really get them engaged.

Amato: You’re a 2012 graduate of the AICPA Leadership Academy.

Chmura: Very proud to be.

Amato: What do you recall about that experience?

Chmura: That experience was really life-changing for me as far as my career trajectory. It was a wonderful experience. I have lifelong friends from it. But in addition to that, it really opened my eyes to the opportunities at the AICPA and got me involved in going to conferences and speaking. That is one of the tipping points that I found personally in how I went from being an auditor to a leader of a CAS group. And without it, I don’t think I’d be where I am today.

Amato: Again, CAS [is] client advisory services, and that’s one of the highlights of your session. I didn’t actually say that full definition before. Leadership Academy, obviously, you’re going to get great knowledge, some mentoring. Now, as a partner in a firm, how do you view your role in helping mentor others?

Chmura: It’s actually one of the most rewarding parts of my job. When I started the CAS group, I really thought, I love impacting clients’ businesses and being part of the decision-making, and that’s what got me into client accounting services.

But what has kept me here is watching the team grow and seeing that the work that we do allows us to have additional people on the team, give them opportunities, give them opportunities to impact our clients’ businesses and create growth amongst the firm and our client base.

I think and hope that I mentor well and bring the team together. I try to share personal experiences when I can. I try to push individuals to learn the way that they need to and to hear from all different types of leaders to get the leadership style that they really want to embed in their lives.

Amato: That’s great. I’m going to ask you another thing in your past. In 2017, do you remember being a guest editor for the Journal of Accountancy?

Chmura: I do. I had a great time, had some great co-editors, had never done anything like that. I wasn’t part of school paper or anything like that. I don’t consider myself the best writer, so I was a little shocked to get that opportunity to begin with, but it was a lot of fun, and I think it is one of those things that can be a trigger point in your career of changing the way that you see things. At the time, we talked a lot about culture and our teams. I think that still resonates today even all these years later. I mean, like I said, we are a relationship business and our people are key.

Amato: I was going to ask you about that, and we will include a link [in] the show notes of that 2017 edition in which Nina was one of the guest editors. In some ways, I guess you were prophetic. You truly picked as the issue theme “culture and retention,” and so you’ve highlighted something that I think has only grown in important since then.

Chmura: For sure. Particularly in client accounting, but I think in all professional service firms, change of staff can be really impactful to the client experience, and really what we’re trying to provide is an amazing client experience for all of our clients.

And being able to retain team members and not only retain them, but watch them thrive and watch them succeed and grow is continually important, particularly in advisory groups where we don’t have the history. Most of our advisory groups are maybe 10 to 15 years old. There’s not that years and years of how it’s going to move forward that you can look back to. I think it’s important that we continue to focus on the quality of the experience that we give our team members in order to keep them with us.

Amato: Anything you’d like to say as a closing thought? This has been great.

Chmura: Closing thought: I think, thank you so much. I’m grateful to be here, grateful to be with the [Digital CPA] community and around cpa.com and the AICPA. I think this group and this conference is incredible. It certainly brings a whole lot of energy to myself, and I get to bring that back to the team, and that’s great. I think, for those of you that are leading practices or becoming a leader yourself, take a look at what things are important to you, identify those personal success KPIs, and make sure you’re tracking them on a regular basis to see how you’re doing.

Amato: Nina Chmura, thank you very much.

Chmura: Thank you.