CliftonLarsonAllen CEO Jen Leary has been focusing on expanding the firm’s appeal, especially to young accountants, as CLA grows its international network.
In 2022, it formed a
“We’re always looking for great firms to join us,” said Leary. “Now, we have an opportunity to connect with the Engine B talent in ways that we’ve already been doing. They were a partner of ours for three years, so they’re not new to CLA. We welcome them in terms of how we will help our clients and then also help our service delivery model.”
CLA is in conversation with other firms about potential mergers. “The M&A market just continues to be quite active in many different spaces,” said Leary.
Leary spoke with Accounting Today from inside CLA’s ultramodern-looking New York offices across the street from Grand Central Terminal. The firm refers to it as Gateway 1, while it’s building a Gateway 2 facility in London for the global network. Gateway 2 will be a multifunctional office space, much like New York, and will include Engine B. It will also host the global office of CLA Global, which is currently housed in Evelyn Partners’ offices in London.
“We imagine that the first office will likely be fairly small, because we’re fairly small in London today,” said Leary. “But we hope that it will grow into something that is useful like this, so companies can just come in and dream about where they want to be in terms of whether it’s the London market or Europe overall. We will build relationships with universities like we’ve done here, so it’s going to be fun for us to expand into that new market. It’s the first time we’ve done it outside the U.S.”
Within the U.S., CLA is also building three connection centers across the country as part of a $500 million investment in learning and development. The connection centers are located in North Carolina, Minnesota and Arizona. The Minnesota center will likely attract some football fans when it opens next spring, thanks to its proximity to the Minnesota Vikings.
“We took a lot of notes from our university clients on what’s the best in class and how people learn, and we designed a facility that will be on the Minnesota Vikings Lakes campus practice field,” said Leary. “It has this, in my opinion, cool factor.”
The North Carolina connection center is expected to open next July, followed by the Phoenix center.
“In order to learn you have to be surrounded by things that are interesting,” said Leary. “It’s not just about being in a classroom. What are the elements around you?”
CLA hopes to invite members of the local state CPA society to use the facility as well as clients.
The firm also aims to bring more young accountants into the profession, offering internships, for example, to high school students.
“We see our investment in universities shifting,” said Leary. “We have welcomed professors into CLA with externships, so they could spend time with us in the summer when they’re not teaching classes and get some of the experience that we have with client work. They utilize that skill set when they’re back teaching classes. Another piece of it is the high school program. We’re in the second year of the high school internship program.”
There are opportunities based on both skills and degrees to attract people from different educational backgrounds. The firm introduced CLA Academy, an apprenticeship program, in its Winston-Salem, North Carolina office this year.
“We had this dream that if you found someone that was a good person, a hardworking person, someone who had grit because they had been through so much in their life, we dreamt up a structure whereby we would take great people, and we would develop a paid training program outside of anything we had seen in colleges or community colleges,” said Leary. “We’re going to develop our own, and we’re going to pay people to take our classes, and we’re going to make them so focused on what would get them job ready, that we could hire them into a job immediately after the class.”
In Winston-Salem, CLA gathered a group of 11 people for training. “We developed an eight-week curriculum,” said Leary. “We flew one of our learning and development people from Minnesota who relocated for three months to teach this class. And they’ve developed really strong bonds and helped each other through the eight-week program. Ultimately, we had the ability to give everybody full-time jobs. That is likely one step in the journey that they could take.”
CLA has also been partnering with groups like the
Another important area of development is artificial intelligence technology, leveraging Microsoft Copilot and an inhouse version of ChatGPT known as CLA GPT.
“We have a great relationship with Microsoft, and we built a relationship to deploy licenses to Microsoft Copilot for all 8,600 people at CLA,” said Leary. “What is interesting about putting Microsoft Copilot in the hands of all of our employees is that it gives access to AI to everyone to play with it and see how it can positively impact the time they spend serving clients, the quality of the work that we do, answering questions. Time will tell how effective it is. But we are very excited about the fact that we’ve done a full firmwide launch.”
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