Partner POV

Harvey L. Johnson, CPA, CGMA, CISA

Partner, Chief Executive Officer, PBMares

How often is PBMares’ strategic plan revisited and revised?

We just started our new strategic plan in January of 2023. Previously, we were on a three-year cycle, but there’s so much packed into those plans we felt that stretching it to the five-year plan was the right approach. Strategic planning used to take us 15 to 18 months. We would be halfway through the last plan and have to start planning for the next one. We brought in an outside consultant to help us facilitate the current plan, which shortened prep time from 15 months to four. The other significant change we made was to bring some of the operations folks to the table, including our CIO, the director of marketing and the director of HR. We felt it was important to have their perspective and subject matter expertise, but also we needed to understand what operational projects were on their plates and how we could create space for them to work on new strategic initiatives. Our new strategic plan has a lot more flexibility and agility in it. We set what we called a “strategic destination;” we know where we want to go, but how we get there is going to evolve over the next five years.

What are the top issues that firms deal with in their strategic planning today?

Two things we’re really struggling with right now are change management and project management. Change management because the pace of change is so fast and the amount of change is overwhelming to our partner group and staff.

Project management is an important issue. As we developed our strategic plan and the initiatives around client experience, employee experience and technology experience, these fall back on the same groups: HR, marketing, IT and our practice leaders. These groups already have pretty heavy day jobs and there is a lot of cross-collaboration required. We recognize it can be difficult if we don’t have a project management background or function to support and streamline collaboration.

Like most firms today, we’re struggling with talent and technology, as well as mergers and acquisitions. Every merger or acquisition is going to require the same resources; you’re going to need IT, HR and marketing, so those M&A opportunities can put a real strain on the organization and shift focus from our strategic initiatives.

How does your firm build nontraditional service development opportunities into your strategic planning process?

If you look at what’s happening in the market space and particularly with the larger firms, almost all those firms have nontraditional CPA services. They are acquiring cybersecurity firms, data analytics companies, companies that do cloud computing, network hosting, outsourced HR, etc. It is definitely part of our strategy. We are looking for cybersecurity companies and all of those other types of consulting services.

What is your marketing department's role in formulating

[Marketing] plays a huge role in redefining our client experience. They’ve been instrumental in helping shape the vision of how are we going to redefine “the PBMares’ Way,” and “the PBMares experience” for our clients.

Marketing has been profoundly important in understanding both our CRM needs and our digital online experience. Marketing is pushing us to be more digital, to consider the digital experience, identify how we find new clients and what social media platforms are they on — all things accountants would typically ignore. They show us the data to help answer those questions. Marketing plays a huge part in helping us plan and transform the client experience.

Interview by Katie Funderburk