Strategic Growth for Professional Services Firms - Gale Crosley

Strategic growth is about more than just growth for growth’s sake. It’s about identifying the most efficient path for profitability and sustainability and then pursuing it. Our guest today, Gale Crosley, is a Strategic Growth and Innovation Consultant who has helped countless growth-oriented CPA and Accounting firms overcome barriers and achieve high-performing strategic growth. Crosley started her career as a CPA with Arthur Andersen before transitioning to technology sales. After the dot-com bust, she started her own growth consultancy to help CPA firms grow strategically. 

We discuss strategic growth within the CPA and broader professional services profession, including what firms can learn from traditional corporate enterprises and how technological innovations like AI are changing the industry. Gale explains that strategic growth is not just top-line growth but also about the bottom line. It's not growth for growth's sake; rather, it's about growing profitability. She also breaks down the biggest impediments to strategic growth, like unprecedented staffing shortages and adapting to revenue cycles.

Finally, Gale notes that firms must shift their strategy as the market changes. Firms need to specialize and innovate to stay relevant. Gale believes private equity and technology are disrupters to the CPA profession that will accelerate the need to evolve current business strategies. Gale advises managing partners to focus on strategic growth and specialization instead of riding the rollercoaster of market conditions. By being forward-thinking and focusing on strategic growth, firms can achieve the most profit and the fastest growth.

Key Points From This Episode: 

• Get to know Gale, her deep experience, and her work as a Strategic Growth Consultant.
• Why she pivoted from accounting early in her career.
• How she partners with CPA firms to transform them into high-growth environments.
• The concept of strategic growth and how it is accomplished.
• How strategic growth is the most profitable and fastest growth and why it is not growth for growth's sake. 
• Broadening geographic reach and its impact on opportunity and competition.
• An overview of the unprecedented disruption within the CPA profession and how private equity is changing the landscape so radically.
• Why strategic growth is the movement from an individual contribution, book of business, tactical generalist to a leader-driven and strategic specialist.
• The impediments to strategic growth that Gale has observed. 
• What firms should be doing with increased revenue levels to optimize for strategic growth.
• How leadership and organizational structure can foster (or impede) strategic growth.
• The differences between what drives corporate America, private equity firms, and CPA firms.
• Combining the best parts of corporate America with the best parts of the CPA profession.
• Advice for firms on approaching industry changes and the role of private equity.
• Gale’s predictions for what the industry will look like in ten years.

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