Better aim.
Better execution.
At scale.
Can any part of your firm depend on any other part? Most multi-office CPA firms cannot answer that, because nothing in a standard reporting package measures it. It is the variable that decides whether the decisions your executive committee makes ever reach the sixth office.
Your firm measures a great deal. Revenue, realization, utilization, margin, capacity, retention, pipeline. All of it reported monthly, reviewed by the executive committee, presented to the board.
Every one of those numbers is an outcome. Each is produced by a set of organizational conditions that the same firm almost certainly does not measure: whether decision rights are settled, whether the executive committee genuinely agrees on what matters, whether one office can rely on another, whether managers across the firm are equally effective.
So when realization falls two points, the number tells leadership that something happened, and nothing in the reporting explains what. The firm responds to the outcome. A realization initiative. A pricing review. A utilization target. Pressure applied to a symptom, two layers below the cause.
Firms instrument the last layer and manage the first two by instinct.
Conditions produce behavior. Behavior produces numbers.
Which means the work is upstream of the reporting. Pressure applied to an outcome produces a temporary improvement that decays, a behavior that games the measure, or a quiet redistribution of the problem into a metric nobody is watching this quarter.
The measure your reporting package does not contain
Sull, Homkes and Sull, Why Strategy Execution Unravels and What to Do About It, Harvard Business Review, March 2015
The authors put it more bluntly than we would. Commitments made across units are typically no more reliable than promises from an outside vendor.
Vertical alignment is largely a solved problem. Firms have spent three decades building processes that connect activity up and down the hierarchy. Objectives cascades, review cycles, bonus linkage. On the whole those processes work.
The failure is sideways. And a multi-office firm running several service lines does nearly all of its real work sideways: the tax partner who needs the specialist in another office, the audit team depending on a shared resource pool, the advisory practice that requires referrals from compliance partners compensated on their own books.
Now consider what your firm actually measures. Partner P&L. Office P&L. Individual utilization and realization. Book of business. Chargeable hours. Every one of them runs vertically. The instrument panel is pointed down the axis that is not broken.
We call the missing measure lateral reliability. It asks whether any part of your firm can depend on any other part. It is the highest leverage unmeasured variable in a multi-office firm, no standard reporting package in this profession contains it, and every firm we have worked with already had the data to produce it.
Aim
Where the firm should be pointed, what genuinely matters, what should be measured, and where leadership attention belongs.
Most firms have a strategic plan. Fewer have agreement. Research across 124 organizations found that only 28 percent of the executives and middle managers responsible for executing strategy could name three of their own firm’s top strategic priorities, and that in the typical organization only just over half of the senior executives converged on the same list of objectives.
Sull, Turconi, Sull and Yoder, No One Knows Your Strategy, Not Even Your Top Leaders, MIT Sloan Management Review, 2018
Not middle management. The executive committee.
Aim is not the plan document. It is whether the people who run the firm are pointed at the same thing, and whether the firm is measuring the conditions that will determine the result rather than only the result itself.
Execution
Whether intent becomes coordinated behavior across people, offices, service lines, systems and leadership layers.
Not effort, and not commitment. Both are usually abundant in the firms we work with. Execution is a structural capacity: decision rights that hold when tested, standards that survive the boundary cases, capacity designed rather than accumulated, and incentives that ask for the behavior the strategy requires rather than the behavior it was built to replace.
At scale
A firm of forty people executes through proximity. The people who need to coordinate can see each other.
Informal coordination substitutes for design, and it substitutes well. That substitution fails somewhere between the third and the fifth office, and it fails quietly. Nothing announces it. The firm simply finds that decisions take longer, that standards diverge, that acquisitions do not integrate, and that the same initiative produces different results in different places.
At scale, execution is not effort. It is architecture.
What separates this from the two things you have already tried
Most firms serving this profession work on one side of the problem or the other. Operational consultants improve process and leave the organizational conditions untouched, which is why the improvement decays. Leadership advisors work on the conditions and never connect them to a number anyone is accountable for, which is why the engagement ends without a result the executive committee can point to.
We do not treat these as separate disciplines, because in practice they are one problem observed at two points in a chain. A decline in realization is a financial fact with an organizational cause. Advisory revenue that will not move is a compensation design problem presenting itself as a market problem. A firm that underperforms after an acquisition has an integration architecture problem arriving as a margin problem.
We measure both ends, and we show you the connection between them.
Why the last four improvement programs did not compound
Each of them was probably sound. They were bought at the wrong layer of a structure nobody had examined as a structure, so each one was quietly undone by something above it. That accumulated cost has a name in this practice. We call it structural debt: the cost of structural decisions that were correct when they were made and have never been revisited. It appears on no statement your firm produces, and it compounds.
Firms rarely fail from one bad decision. They accumulate a hundred good ones that were never retired.
Decisions are not the constraint
Large firms are not short of good decisions. They are short of the structural capacity to convert a decision into sustained behavior across every office, and then to know whether it worked.
Most firms are strong at the first two links and treat everything after them as follow through. The evidence points the other way. The decision is the easy part.
Adoption is where change fails, and it fails for structural reasons rather than cultural ones. Nobody had the authority to direct an office to adopt the decision. The compensation plan continued to reward what the decision was meant to replace. The initiative was one of fourteen running concurrently against a year that contains roughly eleven usable months. No adoption measure was agreed in advance, so nobody could say whether it had happened. And the firm had no mechanism for stopping a failing initiative, so capacity stayed committed to it indefinitely.
None of that is resistance to change. It is the absence of a structure that would have made change hold.
Who we work with
Multi-office CPA firms between 20 million and 300 million dollars in revenue, with more than one service line. Regional firms integrating a recent acquisition. National firms operating across a dozen offices and four service lines. Firms evaluating capital structure, and firms living with the consequences of a decision already made.
The work is the same across that range. The stakes are not. At the lower end, structure determines whether the firm can scale. At the upper end it determines what the firm is worth, whether it survives its current partner generation, and whether it integrates the next three acquisitions or merely acquires them.
We work with the executive committee, and engagements are directed by the Managing Partner. This work cannot be delegated to a function, because the decisions it requires cannot be made by one. Firms below this band are better served by our sister practice, FY Growth Partners, which does the same kind of work at a scale where the structure is still simple enough to change quickly.
Most of our work is with CPA firms in the United States, where consolidation and the restructuring of the licensure pipeline are moving fastest. The method is not jurisdictional. It applies without modification to Chartered Accountancy and equivalent firms internationally, where partnership governance, hour denominated economics and multi-office drift behave identically.
Who is telling you this
FY Enterprise is the enterprise practice of FY Group. We have worked inside the business of accounting firms since 1988, not as observers of the profession but as participants in it. FY began as Fernandez Young, Chartered Professional Accountants. It expanded internationally as FY International, now a network of independent accounting, consulting and legal firms across 38 countries, which means that when a firm needs capability it does not have, that capability already exists inside the network. The methods described here have been put into more than a thousand accounting firms through FY USA and FY Growth Partners, in the United States and internationally.
Start with twenty minutes
One structural question, examined with the person who would lead the work. The one your executive committee keeps returning to and not resolving.
You will get a direct view on whether that question is your constraining layer or a symptom of one above it, and an equally direct view on whether we are the right firm for it. Both are useful whatever you decide next.
No charge. No preparation. Nothing to send in advance.