Unique CPA Rewind: On the Importance of Being a Trusted Advisor

Today, our guest is Richard Kopelman. Richard serves as CEO and managing partner of Aprio LLP, a nationally recognized CPA-led business advisory firm. He has twice been named the most admired CEO in Georgia, and Who’s Who in the Accounting Industry. Richard’s strategic foresight into the future of accounting—and future is a key thing I think we’ll talk about today—but his foresight into the future of accounting enables him to lead Aprio to its next generation of growth. At Aprio, de has established a diverse collaborative workforce where Aprio advisors thrive. In 2017, Richard championed an industry-leading rebrand that aligns the firm around a passion for guiding clients to what’s next. There’s that “future” and “what’s next portion”—again, we’ll talk about that. As a leader of the firm’s merger and acquisition activity, Richard has directed Aprio’s acquisitions into new markets and firm offerings. He has spearheaded the development of a new portfolio of services that enable Aprio team members to serve clients as true business advisors. Prior to his role as CEO and managing partner, Richard led Aprio’s  manufacturing and distribution group increasing revenue by 800% in 14 years. In 2010, Richard founded Next Generation Manufacturing, a business forum for Southeastern manufacturers to exchange best practices related to innovation, people, and processes to create the next generation of manufacturing. Richard, welcome to the show.

Thanks for having me, Randy. How are you?

I’m very good, you? Getting to be a busy time of year I guess in general for the firm, but you personally, it sounds like as well, huh?

This is a true—it definitely is, you know, busy season’s gearing up. In fact, you saw one of the young ladies that is in our affordable housing practice, she said they’re already full throttle. But this is a busy time of year for me right now, because we’ve got a couple of other M&A transactions in the pipeline, and, you know, just wrapping up, closing out the books for the year. 

Oh, yeah, for sure. You jumped ahead to me a little bit though, I do want to talk about M&A activity as we go forward, but it’ll take a second before we get there.

One question I do have for you: On that intro, anything I missed? Any accolades you want to highlight? Anything happening in the firm that I could have? highlighted a little more? Or are we good?

Nah, I’m always embarrassed when people read that stuff.

I know what you mean.

You know, there’s always a couple more things.

Well, let’s hear them! What do we got?

Oh, I was, they just pushed out—Atlanta Magazine just named the 500 most influential people in the city, and I was named in that for the second time.

Nice. I actually did see that I think I saw something online about that, so that’s nice. 

You saw it online? I didn’t.

And as a company, you guys were named, I think maybe it was last March, one of the best places to work in Atlanta, Georgia, for like three years in a row now?

So in Atlanta, we’ve made a big—well, we’ve made a big push firm-wide. And in Atlanta, we’ve been recognized as the best places to work for the last three years. When I took over as managing partner, one of my goals was to be a “Best Places to Work.” And I always said, “Hey, if the recognition comes as a result, that’s great.” We’re going after the culture piece of it, the recognition is a byproduct. So very proud of that—our team is as well.

Well, that’s great. So let’s go to that then. So you took over managing partner in 2012. Is that correct?

I think it’s 2013. I just finished my seventh year.

Okay, so maybe it was, you know, elected in ‘12. You start in ‘13. I don’t know. You should know math. Let’s go.

[laughs] Yes. Elected ‘12, started integrating into the role in ‘12, and then took over officially the beginning of ‘13.

Okay, that’s nice. And what I’d like to talk about with that a little bit is, I mean, you seem to have had significant growth in that seven year time frame. I think I read somewhere and this was a year or so ago, maybe your revenue had increased by 40%. And I’m guessing it’s even greater than that? Am I in the ballpark?

So we’re close. We’re more than double from the year before I took over. So I think the year before I took over we were 53 million. Last year, we tipped the scales at right around 110. And we’re forecasting this year in the 130 range.

Now that’s tremendous growth. And I didn’t mention in the intro, but you guys are around the top 50 largest firms in the country. Do you know that number?

We’ll have to see where the stats come out after we close the books for ‘19.

Okay, all right. But it’s around that number, I know.

It’s around that number.

Well, that’s obviously a significant size firm. So going from that where you were, and more than doubling in the last seven years, I’m assuming that just doesn’t happen by happenstance—that you had to have some kind of strategic plan going in that this is where we wanted to be, and this is what we want to do?

Yeah, we’re on our third strategic plan now. We just published, middle of last year, we published our 2025 plan. And prior to that, we’re working off the 2020 plan, and prior to that, nuts, I forget what we called it. But since I’ve been managing partner, we’re on our third strategic plan, and we’ve made a lot of intentional decisions around, you know, where we’re going, what we’re going to do, and how we’re going to get there.

Alright, is that going into this, you had this background of strategic planning already? I mean, I’m always interested with, you know, people that have this foresight of the future and how they want to get there, and how they want to do, and is this something you’ve been intentionally been part of your, I guess, education as a CPA growing up?

So I can’t say I ever had any formal strategic planning. And we, you know, have always had an annual partner summit or partner retreat. But about ten, eleven years ago, I joined a CEO peer group, and I’ve also been participating in a managing for results group, which we actually meet after the AICPA MFG meeting every year. And I just went last year to the Harvard Executive Program—that’s a week-long program for leading professional services firms. And just constantly, you know, studying and reading, and talking with others about how they’re doing it. There’s some great leaders in our profession, in many, many firms across the country, and I’ve had the pleasure of meeting them over the years and watching them and asking them questions, and, you know, everybody’s always willing to share.

So I don’t know, maybe the school of hard knocks? From that standpoint. And we bought a content company called CEO Tools in 2015. And we rewrote that book, and we relaunched the book, CEO Tools 2.0 by Aprio. And in that book, actually, there’s a whole bunch of operating methodology, including a one-page business plan. And so part of it, we also, are following the methodology and CEO tools.

Oh, that’s awesome! So I’m assuming you’ve heard feedback from people who have read that, that like the insights that they’re getting from, what did you call it again? CEO Tools?

CEO Tools. In fact, we just did an event for our clients, three, four weeks ago—an event for our clients. We had about 30 CEOs come in and meet with Jim Canfield, who’s our president of CEO Tools. And he presented to them and walked them through and I actually had a client call and ask if I could stop by and just see their one-page business plan they’ve developed as a result of going through that training session.

Oh, that’s great. That’s great. So do you think you have key philosophies that you try to live by within the firm? I think I saw somewhere that you have like, what’s it called, 30 fundamentals of behavior that you have within the firm? Is that what you would say your philosophies are or how’s that tie in?

So when we rebranded to Aprio three years ago, we wanted to operationalize the brand and not just throw a new name out there with some new colors. And so we developed the 30 Fundamentals of Behavior, which is how we operationalize the brand. I wouldn’t call those my—what did you refer to them as?

Management philosophies, maybe?

No, I wouldn’t call them my philosophies. I do have my philosophies. I don’t have them written down anywhere.

[bctt tweet=”Come to work every day, ready to play, and play hard, and play to win. I think that’s a big part of it. Tenacity is a big part.” username=”TriMerit”]

Well, we need to hear this then, you know. Pull them out of the hat here.

Yeah. You want to hear my philosophies of how we run the business… So one is, we got to come to work every day, ready to play, and play hard, and play to win. I think that’s a big part of it. Tenacity is a big part. Our partners take our clients’ service and our clients very personal. And that’s part of where the Aprio brand came from—head and heart—which is where Aprio comes from. And so when it comes to making sure our clients are taken care of, and their service properly, and we are helping them achieve their goals, we’re helping them achieve what’s next. Nothing will stop in the way of us making sure that happens. So I think tenacity is a big part of it.

We question our decisions. My CEO peer groups say this is—our peer group is a place where we go not to have our questions answered, but to have our answers questioned. And so we do challenge one another. We are, you know, looking to move fast, even at our current size. And we’re looking at not where the puck is, but where the puck is going. Isn’t there a famous hockey player—you’re from up north, you’re from the Midwest, so you know better about hockey than I do from down in the south. But you’re supposed to go where the puck is. And so, you know, we’re always looking for what’s three or four or five years out, in, you know, in technology, in outsourcing. And we’re working hard to make sure that, you know, we’re staying ahead of the curve.

Yeah. And that’s one thing I mentioned in the intro, that forward-thinking, future-thinking, what’s next. Those are things I seem to hear from when I read about the firm a lot, so you’re just trying to stay basically ahead of what’s next, so that you can bring your best service to the client.

I mean, when you think about that future, and where it’s going, how do you try to stay ahead of that for your clients? Oh, and one way, I think is that I mentioned this, but you did have an acquisition of a cloud accounting firm, a year and a half ago or something. And is that part of that process?

So Aprio Cloud certainly is a great example. So four years ago, we decided that we wanted to be a top 100 firm, top 50 firm, that was in that cloud space. And running that business, we found out, is very, very different than how you run an accounting firm. Very different how you run a firm that has both compliance and advisory services. And how you staff that is different, how you operate it, how you price it, Everything about it is different. And so I like to say we got into the space, we learned a lot.

We didn’t do terribly well at it—our clients were served. I could say that we served our clients well, but we didn’t necessarily serve ourselves internally very well. And I had known Bruce Phillips for quite a while, and I’d been watching his career at HPC. And so met with Bruce, told him what we were doing, learned about what he was doing. And today that practice is not just cloud accounting, it’s also got tax inside of it. But more importantly, actually, we’ve launched a sales tax outsourcing business. And today that practice is nearing ten million in revenue.

That’s significant!

And we did another tuck in with an organization called Administrivia, led by Adam Rimes. And we brought that in, in October of last year—a little bit earlier than October of last year. But we brought that in last year, and have now merged that in as well, and continue to expand and grow the cloud offerings.

As long as we’re talking about M&A activity, you have been very active in that it seems. You had those couple, I know you had one just recently announced in December. I’m assuming that that is not you are not looking to stop it at that. In fact, I saw, oh, I think it was maybe on your LinkedIn, you actually list a list of cities that you’d like to expand in. Obviously, there’s a strategic side of, I’m assuming, those cities that you’re looking to go to?

Yeah, we’ve looked across the I would say really the eastern part of the United States and where we are, where we have client concentrations, and where we’re really good. And we have matched those up with certain cities—major economic centers on the eastern side of the US—and we’ve identified where we want to go. And I’m glad that someone’s reading my LinkedIn, because I haven’t had any firms email me and say, I see you’re looking at you know, so and so cities, so glad to talk with you.

Well, maybe our Unique CPA—I think are one or two listeners—well, hopefully we have more! Maybe one of our listeners will hear this, then go on your LinkedIn, and see if they fit the bill for what you’re looking to do.

Strategic: I keep using that word “strategic.” But for some reason, in my mind, I think of that when I think of you and Aprio as a firm. You mentioned the cities. You’ve also mentioned already with Bruce Philips, you’ve strategically done M&A work based on the service offerings. That seems like that was a key area that when you’re looking at adding in, you’re not looking—I’m assuming, I don’t want to put words in your mouth—you’re not looking just to add a firm to add a firm, but you’re looking at the firm that fits either the geographic or the firm offerings you’re looking to get into or expand.

That’s correct. And we’re also looking for a certain genetic makeup of the firms that are joining us. We’re truly—especially outside of Atlanta, outside of where our core markets are, which are now in Birmingham and Charlotte—outside of those three markets, where we go to a new market in particular, we’re looking for a certain genetic makeup of the partner group, and we’re looking for a merger, not an acquisition when we go to new locations. Two important distinctions.

Yep. No, I agree. I have seen maybe some firms do that not with that in mind, and I’ve seen where things have just not worked out. There’s a few I saw last year where there was actually some “de-mergers.” And obviously, that just wasn’t planned out well enough, unfortunately. But you never know how that happens.

So I’m gonna veer a little bit, because I think we’re going longer in the area than my producers want us to, but I want to kind of transition a little bit, and just the firm philosophy when it comes to employees and all that. Because I have read and this might be on your LinkedIn, but it’s also on your website, where you have a quote saying, “We invest in our client success by investing in our own.” And so I’m assuming that’s firm wide, but that’s employee wide, as much as anything, is that right?

It is. We’ve built a nice size learning and development function within the firm. We estimate based on the surveys we get that we’re spending about 70% more, on average in learning and development, than other firms our size. And we’ve launched a lot of different programs around turning our people into advisors. And we’re gonna launch one later this year around technology upscaling, and just continue to make our people better.

I look back on my career—there were a lot of things that I learned, which is not unusual. I joined the firm when we were 10 million in revenue. It’s not unusual for firms of that size to kind of throw people in the deep end and see if they can swim. And you have to learn things through the school of hard knocks. And so my philosophy is, “How do we remove that barrier, and remove that mindset, and put a mindset into being intentional with learning and development, and get our people—have our people be smarter, faster and more nimble than we were at the same level, or same age in their careers?” And that can only be better for our clients. And if we take care of our people, they’ll take very good care of our clients every day.

Well, I know that I’ve run into people from your firm at events. In fact, last week, I was at an event with—I think there was five people from your firm—and I asked them all to come up and give me some dirt on Richard, and nobody could say anything but nice. So I don’t understand what’s going on there, but yeah!

[bctt tweet=”It’s not unusual for {small firms} to kind of throw people in the deep end and see if they can swim. And you have to learn things through the school of hard knocks.” username=”TriMerit”]

Maybe they were afraid you were a spy! To tell you the truth, ‘cause I get plenty of flack internally!

Well, they—none of them did. The only thing that they did come up, they said that Richard has a saying, “It’s all good,” that goes around the firm. And there’s a cart that goes around the firm, the “all good” cart that has snacks on it and all that. And then at the end of tax season, there’s an “all better” cart that might have something additional besides snacks on it, maybe a little celebration. So yeah, everybody seemed to be very happy with working at that firm, which is great.

And by the way, those carts were developed by our HR team and Jan Whalen, I think in particular, and nothing to do with me. They just used—that is my favorite saying—I actually have a metal sign in my office that’s about four feet long, that says “It’s all good.”

So I did get it correct. I wrote it down.

You have to have a positive attitude in this world!

Oh, I agree completely.

It’s all about attitude.

Yep. So we’ve got the “all good” cart, we’ve got the “nobody has dirt on you.” Oh, and they were at this—so the event that we were talking about was basically just helping them you know, learn, and grow in that only in that specific like, you know, tax or anything like that, but just firm culture and how to, you know, be better at serving your clients. And so that type of stuff, I can see that you guys are specifically investing in that.

Just as an example by the way—we have to plug a friend of mine. We have sent all of our partners through speaking training at a company called Speakeasy, which is a three-day intensive speaking program. And continually, partners say it’s the best training they’ve ever gotten. So these soft skills are important. It’s how they interact with people and clients every day.

Right. So that’s what that teaches?

It’s how we interact with our clients and employees every day.

So that’s what that teaches, Just communication styles, I guess?

Communication styles, everything from tone, to body language, to pace, to public speaking, and how to craft your message—how to get your message across—that how to have the recipients of your message, do the things that you want them to do, or the thing you want them to do when you’re done speaking. How do you want them to act or feel afterwards?

Right, right.

It’s a big dea.!

No, I think that makes a lot of sense.

I really did want to get into niches and the practice areas that you’re in. Unfortunately, I don’t think we’re gonna have enough time to go into that, because you have—maybe we will—you have like five or six practices or heads of practices? Do I have that correct?

Yeah, we have six different niches; we just added dental, as a separate niche, post this North Carolina merger that we just did.

Okay.

And we have over a dozen specialty services today.

Okay, and I’m assuming the niches—and I’ve talked to other people about this in the past. In fact, I’ve talked a couple times on the podcast about this—but niches just allows you to dig so deep in the knowledge base of that specific industry that, you know, clients know you’re the go-to firm for those services. Is that the reason?

[bctt tweet=”We want them to know that we want our clients and prospects and the business community abroad to know that we are CPAs, and we are at the core of the business.” username=”TriMerit”]

That’s correct. You’re showing up as an expert, the fabric of that segment or niche.

And speaking of that, then, is that one reason that you call yourselves the “CPA-led business advisory firm,” rather than—I mean, obviously, there’s a reason for that, rather than, you know, “tax and accounting firm” or “CPA firm.”

Yeah, the name is intentional. We want them to know that we want our clients and prospects and the business community abroad to know that we are CPAs, and we are at the core of the business—that the base of how and what we’ve built, and underneath, you know, the core bedrock, or the foundation of the business is the CPA knowledge and expertise and capabilities. 

Right.

And then above that, we’ve built all of this other capability,

And all this knowledge base. So does that go—and I did want to talk about this—does that go to the whole name change then? Is that so you’re looked at as something more than, you know, a reporter of taxes? You know, you want to be the advisor to help lead companies? Did the name change have anything to do with that?

Yeah, the name really was intentional on three fronts: One is that we’re a CPA-led advisory firm. Second is that we were a single office firm, four years ago in Atlanta. We were the largest single office firm outside of New York. And we were going to grow on a national level. And we wanted to make sure that when we showed up, that there was no question about what the name of the firm was going to be. When you have a trademark name, name is off the table. And the third piece is, is we’re global. 25% of our people speak 30 different languages at Aprio. And we do business in and out of 45 countries on a regular basis. And we wanted something that was global in nature and didn’t sound like your old run-of-the-mill, alphabet soup accounting firm.

So more looking to the future as well. We’re growing, things are changing, and we don’t need to be “ABC CPA firm.” We need the name out there. 

I did hear that there’s a story around the name, that head and heart story. Am I getting that correct?

Yeah. So when we were looking at potential name changes, Aprio was presented, and it’s a derivative from the word “cap,” and the Italian song of the hearts “Aria,” and, you know, obviously changed the letters and dropped off the C, and that’s how we got to Aprio. So it comes from head and heart, which is what we were hearing from our clients, what our branding firm was hearing from our clients—that we bring our technical expertise to the table, we bring our heads to the table—but we also bring our hearts to the table. And we care about our clients. I just had a client text me today, actually, that they have a very ill family member and he wanted me to know because we’ve been, you know, very close and spent a lot of time together as families over the last 20 years.

All of this stuff again—future looking, passionate for what’s next, all this stuff—and just having your firm at the center and your clients at the center at the same time, have a growth in the clients, have a growth in your employees, have the growth in the firm, and everything working together, and everybody’s all happy.

The one thing—and I don’t ever look at this, almost ever—but when I was doing research to get ready for this, Glassdoor pops up. Are you familiar with Glassdoor? It’s where employees can go on—

Very, very familiar with Glassdoor, yes. We have a very high Glassdoor rating.

You have a very high Glassdoor rating, which you know, I don’t think is manufactured obviously. So that shows that whatever you’re doing, I feel like it’s going in the right direction, so congratulations on that.

Thank you!

Yeah, I don’t, like I said—I try not to, I’m not a big, you know, “What does someone else review something” fan. But when I saw that, that stuck out and stood out. 

It’s high, and we have a lot of reviews. We have over 125 reviews.

Yes! That’s what I was gonna say—it wasn’t like two reviews. There was a lot. So congratulations on your high rating!

Thank you.

Okay. With that, I think we need to start to wrap up. I could do this all day long, and people may not want to listen to it all day long, but I definitely wouldn’t want to listen to it all day long. So I appreciate you being part of this. But what I do want to do before we wrap up, I try to end with some fun facts. I found a few on you online that maybe we could talk about, but some things that just talking to you in the past—I know you’re big into traveling and skiing if you want to expand any of that. But I did see on there you have a bucket list item, which is Morocco. Have you hit your bucket list item and gone to Morocco yet?

I went to Morocco this past year with a group of friends, with—my wife and I were with a group of friends, yeah.

Was it worth putting that on your bucket list?

Yeah, it was a fun trip. Very interesting place. I do recommend you go to Morocco.

Yeah?

Go for about a week. Make sure you go to the desert, and make sure you go with a group of people. I think it’d be more fun with a group.

All right. Well, I’ll put that on my list one of these days. I’m very fortunate I get to travel a lot. I haven’t been to Morocco. I got close one day—I’m going to look like I’m geographically challenged right now, but is Morocco just south of Spain, or am I off on that?

I believe it’s—I can’t remember if it’s south or north, but it is right next to Spain. It sits between Europe and the Middle East.

Yeah. So we were close—we thought about jumping over and doing that. But we just didn’t do it. So next time I’m anywhere near there, I’ll have to do that.

Well, I really appreciate you being on. Is there any place that people can get ahold of you, or social media for the firm, or anything you’d like to plug before we close?

Yeah, I can be reached at Richard.Kopelman@Aprio.com. You can certainly find me on Aprio.com and all of our social media: Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook and Instagram.

I had a feeling you were probably everywhere with the technology end of things! Well again, thanks for being here.

Thank you for having me!