Partner POV

Jay Weinstein, CPA, MBA, MST

Vice Chair of Industries and Markets
Eisner Advisory Group, LLC

Jay is the vice chair of industries and markets of Eisner Advisory Group LLC, as well as a member of the firm’s Board of Directors and Executive Committee. He is responsible for executing business strategies for existing markets, identifying emerging opportunities and leading the firm’s innovation and technology initiatives. Jay was named to the NJBIZ 2022 Accounting Power list of 50 leaders who guide every facet of an organization’s operations.

You are a technology champion, both internally and for clients. What was the impetus?

The impetus came from seeing how progressive companies, not just accounting firms, were viewing themselves. We learned to look at technology as an investment that enhances the way we deliver our service. Technologies have also become a bigger part of our offerings that translate into new products and services such as our firm’s newly launched SAFER hospital safety technology platform, which we couple with our safety analytics service.

How do you help partners, professional staff and clients see the value in technology?

We communicate the value proposition, not just the features. Working alongside our service delivery people, our IT and marketing departments take leading roles in researching, integrating and rolling out digital tech capabilities internally and to our clients. IT leads the technical functionality piece and marketing leads the applications communications. The internal message is to get smart fast, and the external message is to provide solutions and constantly evolve.

How have tech tools affected marketing and business development?

Marketing automation software like HubSpot and survey programs like Get Feedback and Qualtrics have enhanced our marketing team’s ability to better target and focus the message, to zero in on specific clients and personas and dive deeper into the industries we serve. This translates into messaging that is more focused yet can be delivered through far more channels. It is about getting targeted valuable information to clients in a user friendly fashion.

On the business development and sales side of the tech equation, qualified lists and key data KPIs are easier and much faster to get than ever before. Naturally we put a lot of emphasis on our own data within CRM, which is NetSuite, but there are many other tools and information sources we use as supplements. They run the gamut from newer AI-based resources to industry stalwarts like Audit Analytics.

How have you used technology to address client needs?

A good example is our proprietary cloud-based tax partnership platform called Global Partnership Solution (GPS). Partnership tax reporting is highly complex particularly in the private equity, hedge fund and fund of fund space, as well as in the real estate and family office markets. Clients want the ability to run complex tax, aggregation and allocation calculations. Our in-house software enables us to produce partnership returns quickly and accurately with deal-by-deal tax allocation, multi-partner and tiering capabilities, future modeling capabilities and automated K-1 generation, just to name a few.

What is your take on AI?

Everyone is talking about AI. Our marketing partner, Michael Mattia, attended the recent Major Firms Group meeting of growth leaders and said the opinions on AI ran the gamut. For example, some firms are embracing ChatGPT as a tool that will fundamentally change our business for the better and some are not allowing its use until more stringent guardrails are in place. We are looking closely at AI implementation and how we best adopt the tools that add value to our clients. There will be rules of the road, oversight and accountability. Our goal is to use AI smartly, correctly and with the best of intent. And yet I like to believe that there will always be a human factor that AI will never be able replace.

Interview by Dick Shippee