An Offbeat Path to Success
Vitale, Caturano & Company, an accounting, business advisory and technology consulting firm based in Boston, MA, is steadily rebuilding the reputation of its industry – an industry tarnished with misconduct by its role in scandals such as Enron and Tyco. And it is doing so one "offbeat" employee at a time.
The label stems from the second of the firm's 10 values, which states that it seeks to "Attract and retain exciting people – more than a few of whom are a little offbeat. All of whom have the desire to be the best."
"We don't want to have the stereotypical 'one personality' type accounting firm," says Richard Caturano, president of the company, which he co-founded in 1978. "It's important that our people feel comfortable thinking outside the box. And in terms of recruitment and retention, including the 'offbeat' reference in our values helps younger employees establish their personalities within the firm."
Garnering employees with unique personalities fits well with the type of clients with which the firm seeks to do business.
"You might also say that our client base is a little offbeat," says Vitale's VP of HR, Dave Clarkson. "We're in Boston, but our clients are not Fortune 100, large Boston establishments. They're all fascinating high- and low-tech entrepreneurs who've had these business ideas and want to be a success."
Vitale's clients are certainly not those of the current "Big Four" accountancy and professional services firms – namely, PricewaterhouseCoopers, Deloitte & Touche, Ernst & Young and KPMG. But that's OK because Vitale doesn't want to be like those firms. In fact, the firm has found reasonable success hiring employees dissatisfied with those and other very large accounting firms.
For instance, Clarkson came to Vitale five years ago along with a group of about 40 other former Arthur Andersen employees, which included everyone from partners and senior managers to administrative professionals.
"One of the challenges in going from a very large firm to a smaller firm is that sometimes you end up working with clients that aren't as exciting or 'out there' as they were in the large firm, but it's quite the opposite here," Clarkson says.
Marc Lamothe, a manager in Vitale's Tax Group, joined the firm three years ago after working for both Arthur Andersen and Deloitte & Touche. "It was tough leaving the Big Four because I had no idea what a regional firm would be like," Lamothe says. "I was worried that the learning experience would drop off because you're not dealing with a national firm. But shortly after coming I realized the learning opportunities here have been more than required to broaden my experience in dealing with a wider array of clients."
Lamothe's comments are justified; Vitale may be a small firm, but it takes a formalized approach to training and development. Beyond the 192 hours of training for first-year employees, and 135 hours for employees in their second and subsequent years, the company brings all 300-plus employees together at fun, off-site locations for twice-a-year "Firm Days."
According to John Nicolopoulos, a partner in the general practice who joined the firm six years ago, Firm Days – which are conducted in June and then again in September or October – serve as "a mechanism to deliver to the staff what our goals are, what our strategies are and where we are along that path."
"I think the real key to the success of Firm Days is that most organizations don't share that strategy with everybody in the organization from the partner level down to the person who's the valet down in the parking area," Nicolopoulos says.
This full-scale sharing of high-level information began three years ago at what employees still remember as a defining Firm Day – an all-staff excursion to Gillette Stadium, home of the New England Patriots, in Foxboro, MA. Caturano and the leadership decided on this approach after they realized they needed to give employees – some of whom, as previously mentioned, had come from Big Four firms – equal footing in understanding the firm's strategy and how best to execute it.
After a group photo under the stadium's scoreboard, all staff gathered in the clubhouse for a presentation of the strategy, which fell under six areas, or "pathways," defined through a balanced scorecard process, a practice Caturano picked up on after he attended a Harvard Business School program on managing professional service firms. As in a general election, staff used electronic voting machines to let the leadership know whether they understood the strategy and believed the firm was on the right track.
Focus groups were then assembled that allowed employees to provide input on whether pathways were on track or needed to be revised. Once set, the staff gathered again as a whole and the Firm Day executive committee made live changes to the pathways based on the feedback gathered in the focus groups. Then, once again, employees voted on the collective strategy and whether or not it would be successful.
At the end of that first Firm Day, Caturano notes, over 90 percent of employees said they understood and bought into the pathways making up the strategy. Today, after bi-annual Firm Days for the last three years and the balanced scorecard process that's conducted quarterly, he says that 95 percent of employees understand the firm's strategy as well as the pathways needed to get there, and how their tasks contribute to the initiatives that form the pathways of the strategy.
It is this level of regular communication with and dependence on all employees that keeps them motivated to make Vitale "their" firm, something far removed from the Big Four.
"Since I've been here we've hired about 60 people from Big Four firms in addition to the Andersen groups," Clarkson says, "and every one of them would say, 'I wish I had made that transition sooner.'"
Company: Vitale, Caturano & Company
Website: www.vitale.com
Industry: Accounting and business advisory services
Location: Boston, MA
Number of employees: 330
Sales: $52 million
