Feature: Visualizing Your Company’s Future

VISUALIZING GROWTH IN A STRATEGIC PLAN

EXPONENTIAL GROWTH STARTS SMALL

BY MACKEY SMITH

It has been a pleasure serving the UACPA this last year in the creation of a new five-year strategic plan. This plan is the culmination of hundreds of hours of work from many engaged members.

The Purpose

Before we jump into the strategic plan, I want to share what the plan is not. It’s not meant to articulate the business as usual of the organization, nor map every single thing the organization will work on over the next five years. The plan is meant to articulate the priorities of the organization, and to provide structure for what the organization will work on to address the emerging (and already emerged) trends facing the profession.

The Process

Organizational leadership and the board wanted to include as many stakeholders from the profession as possible to ensure that the strategic plan reflects the priorities of its members. To lead stakeholder engagement, the board appointed a committee of dedicated volunteers to serve as the Strategic Planning Advisory Committee. This committee engaged the various segments of the profession, conducting focus groups with CPAs in public practice at large and midsized firms, sole proprietors, CPAs in industry and nonprofits, local chapters from counties along the Wasatch Front and southern and rural Utah, and current accounting students who will soon enter the profession.

The feedback received was used to identify opportunities and to inform strategic priorities. Participants in the process were open in sharing challenges they see, as well as opportunities to address emerging trends in the profession. A few major trends that emerged include the increased competition in recruiting students into the profession, the need to diversify the talent pool in Utah to reflect additional backgrounds and perspectives, the desire to continue supplying quality CPE trainings and policy support and advocacy, and the overall increasing expectations that clients have from their CPAs.

The Plan

After several facilitated meetings reviewing the feedback, the strategic plan was finalized and presented to the board, who ultimately adopted the plan. The strategic plan reflects the feedback received, focusing on the following areas:

1. Advocacy – Be recognized as the most trusted voice for Utah’s accounting professionals through quality advocacy efforts. 2. Membership Development – Develop a strong membership base through increased partnership with other organizations to provide expanded CPE and networking opportunities. 3. Member Engagement – Foster engagement by establishing the UACPA as the professional home and key networking resource for accountants in Utah. 4. CPA Pipeline – Partner with educational institutions and employers to attract bright, capable, highintegrity students to accounting and encourage them to become CPAs. we have given. It’s at this stage that you need to continue working, knowing that once that critical mass has been accumulated, your growth and success will not only meet but exceed your expectations. Take the water example: At 45 minutes, the stadium is still only 7% full. But in four short minutes, the stadium begins to overflow.

In the strategic plan, these focus areas include specific initiatives that will drive success, and ways to measure success to remain accountable to you, the UACPA members.

What Comes Next?

Imagine we were to take LaVell Edwards Stadium (or Rice Eccles for you Ute fans) and place a drop of water in the middle of the field, and then double the amount of water placed every minute (2 drops, then 4, 8, 16, etc.). How long would it take to fill up the entire stadium with water? A month? A week? A couple of days? It turns out that it fills up in 49 minutes. 1

I share this example whenever an organization concludes its strategic planning process to highlight the fact that we as human beings are incapable of fully comprehending the concept of exponential growth. We expect growth to occur linearly. We expect that going to the gym every day will make you that much stronger until eventually you have the abs that make your significant other blush. However, growth often occurs on an exponential curve, starting slow in the beginning, until momentum has been gained and you begin to accelerate. A difficult step is to overcome our own expectations with growth in the beginning stages, when the results we see don’t match up with the efforts we feel We often overestimate what we can get done in a year, and severely underestimate what we can get done in five years.

The first year of this strategic plan will include setting the groundwork for growth and success over the next five years and beyond, with subsequent years driving implementation of the plan and needed alterations as new trends emerge. Knowing the quality team and board that will implement the plan, I am excited to see all the good the UACPA will accomplish in the future. n source: 1https://modernsurvivalblog.com/pandemic/ mindblowing-exponential-growth-of-a-pandemic/

Mackey Smith is the head of strategy consulting & planning at Tanner LLC and worked with the UACPA on its strategic planning committee. He graduated from Brigham Young University with a bachelor’s degree in strategic management, summa cum laude.