Perspectives: Professional

Perspectives: Professional services

Stu Brown

Office Managing Director – Tampa Bay, Accenture It’s hard to call COVID an opportunity but the big one was around driving the digital transformation of clients. You’re going to have to do more with less and you’re going to have to do it flexibly. If you can do that, you’re going to come out of this growing. Helping clients transform toward a cloud-based ecosystem has really accelerated innovation.

Ronald Christaldi

Tampa Managing Partner/President & CEO – Shumaker/Shumaker Advisors Florida, LLC My focus is truly threefold; our clients, our workforce, and our community. What I want to be able to do is solve any problem that comes up for a business in our community. If you need something done, either on the legal side or on the policy side, Shumaker is a one-stop shop. We have an extraordinary team that we are continuing to grow.

Matt Crum

President – FrankCrum People are getting increasingly comfortable with technology and are expecting more, wanting to do more self-service and leveraging technology. The partnership with EverythingBenefits streamlines our benefits election process for our customers and allows both our employees and our customers’ employees to manage their benefits easily through a cloud-based technology platform.

David Maddux

CEO & CIO – Brightwater Advisory, LLC Regardless of the environment, more people are wanting to engage in financial planning, which is a core piece of what we do. You have more and more tools available to the individual consumer, as well as for financial advisers to be giving better advice. So I think that regardless of the economic environment over the next 18 months, it should be favorable for the financial services area

John Wilson

CEO – WilsonHCG Because we’ve always had a large percentage of virtual workers, we understand the importance of engagement and embed it into our culture. There is so much an employer can do to influence this and it starts with showing people that the company cares – from addressing mental health concerns to over-communicating with everyone in the business.

Accountants and CPAs were key in providing advisory and guidance during the quick roll out of government sponsored support programs.

accounting firms. Among the issues surrounding PPP loans was the fact that the law came out so fast, and neither businesses nor the government were quite sure how it would work in practice. Furthermore, both the state of Florida and the federal government extended the tax deadline to provide businesses with some respite from the difficulties of the pandemic year.

Accountants are also integral in helping businesses exploit the many incentives proffered by the city of Tampa and the state of Florida. Some of these incentives include the Capital Investment Tax Credit to grow capital-intensive industries in the state; the Community Contribution Tax Credit Program, which grants a credit of 50% of a private sector donation to community redevelopment projects; and the Qualified Target Industry Tax Refund, which refunds corporate income sales tax for companies that create high-wage jobs in high-value industries.

But accountancy is also a field in flux, and many of these changes are due to upend the industry in the coming years. The most obvious is directly related to the pandemic: the move to remote work. Accountants were among the jobs that could most seamlessly make the transition from in-office to at-home work. Companies such as PwC, which even before the pandemic had ( )