All accounting firm leaders have felt the pressures of the last year, but for RoseRyan CEO Dave Roberson, 2020’s challenges were compounded by starting his chief executive tenure on the first of the year. Fortunately, Roberson reports, the amount of advanced strategizing between him and firm founder Kathy Ryan, who he officially succeeded on Jan. 1, 2020, set the Silicon Valley-based firm up for success in a few key areas.
Most of Roberson and Ryan’s planning was conducted in frequent conversations between the two, who function as co-leaders, with Ryan still serving as chair and heading external business while Roberson focuses on internal operations. Additionally, Roberson serves as chief executive of RoseRyan cannabis subsidiary Kukuza Associates, and Ryan is director of Bizinta, a SaaS company spun out of RoseRyan.
The first spark of an idea to transition into this new leadership model arose during an early series of in-depth discussions between the two, after Roberson began working as a RoseRyan consultant in early 2019. For nine to 10 months of the previous year, he had led the largest single project in the firm’s history as a contractor, but when he decided to return to an employee position after a decade of consulting, Ryan jumped at the opportunity to hire him. Six months later, she approached him with a larger plan. “When he became an employee at RoseRyan, I saw the potential then,” she explained. “I saw a lot of his talents related to how he could help me and help RoseRyan. He might not have been thinking about it until June, but I had it on day one — someone to co-lead and take on the operational side so I could devote my time to the external, which I’ve very much enjoyed the last year.”
“I started January 2019 as a consultant. I like to tell people it was the fastest advancement of all time — by the end of the year I was CEO,” Roberson laughed, while explaining that the timeline belies the thoughtful planning that went into the transition. “It was gradual — I brought one project into the firm with me, added more and more, and by June and July it was, ‘Why don’t you become CEO?’ I wasn’t that reluctant to do it. We had long conversations over several weeks of her expectations, what I’m going to do, what she’s going to do, and how do we communicate this, and successfully transition.”
Ultimately, Ryan and Roberson adopted a “two-in-a-box” leadership style popularized by many tech companies that relies on them maintaining a high level of collaboration and communication, running every major decision by each other.
“When we announced it, it was the best prepared I’d ever been in my life for a new role,” shared Roberson, who had thought he didn’t want to be in a CEO position again after a stint leading Hitachi Data Systems in the mid-2000s. “We both knew exactly what we were doing. I’m happy in this role, and happier working for Kathy.”
Crisis leadership
No amount of preparation between the seasoned technology executive and Ryan, who founded RoseRyan back in 1993, could have readied the firm for what transpired just a few months later as the COVID-19 pandemic took hold. So the duo depended heavily on the framework they had built over the previous months, which included a two-page document that quickly became more ceremonial.
“We never looked at it again,” Roberson shared, explaining that it contained “what she’s going to do, what I’m going to do, in a lot of detail. But the principles behind it, how we work together — we didn’t have to look back … . We help each other; things I know or she doesn’t know, and vice versa. How many people running a company have someone they can go to like a Kathy, and for Kathy, like me — not the same skills and same experience, but the same goals. It’s not, ‘I’m going to look stupid if I ask her;’ no, I’m going to look stupid if I don’t. It’s humble leadership to support the organization to succeed.”
Roberson also credits the firm Ryan built over the past 28 years as already being well-equipped to weather the pandemic’s uncertainty, with a virtual workforce model in place since conception and a culture of transparency. Still, the firm had to act fast in closing its office doors within a week of the first shutdown. Roberson and Ryan also swiftly made two cost-cutting decisions in slightly reducing the workforce, and reducing pay for every employee, including the leadership team.
Both leading up to and in the beginning phases of the pandemic, Ryan and Roberson made several investments that paid off in 2020. One of those was expanding the sales team, adding a vice president and two other members to their sales force over the past 12 months.
The other moves were driven by Roberson’s philosophy of “thinking different: What do I know, what don’t I know, and if I don’t know, get someone else to do it.”
“Early in the year I said, what’s working and what’s not,” he continued. “We decided we needed two changes. In IT, we are not experts, so get someone to do that, and outsource all IT operations, which was not super-complicated as we are all on the cloud. The other choice, to find someone else, was in marketing. I thought we were really ahead of the game in marketing. We did an assessment, had two [marketing] firms assess us, and they said, ‘You’re behind the times — a lot.’ We hired one of those firms and totally revamped.”
This overhaul continued to challenge Roberson’s perception of the firm’s reach. “I thought we had a digital presence — we did not ... We hired them in May, and they have expanded our presence. We advertised outside the U.S. for the first time, and got clients outside of the U.S.”
These overseas wins contributed to an expansion in overall clients in 2020, with Roberson reporting 45 percent more clients than in 2019. “In a pandemic year, that many new clients is really good. We added one in Australia, one in Japan, one in Canada, and a number in the States. We have had some offshore business before, but not the size of these projects.”
The firm also recorded growth in profits over the previous year, though revenues were steady. RoseRyan worked with roughly 10 percent of its clients, especially those in more heavily impacted industries like retail or those awaiting investor funding delayed by coronavirus concerns, on reducing rates or deferring payments. Roberson reports they haven’t lost any clients due to the pandemic.
“Revenues were flat year-on-year; 98 percent,” he shared. “Flat is the new growth for the service business. In 2020, over 2019, I felt pretty proud of it. It was not our plan in the beginning of the year, but the team executed quite well. From my perspective, it’s a year I’m proud of, to set up for success.”
