Lauren McCall Fitch

MCCALL MCCALL CHIEF OPERATING OFFICER, HANNIS T. BOURGEOIS LAUREN FITCH LAUREN FITCH BIO

Hometown: Baton Rouge Age: 38 Family: Spouse, Derek, and three children, Beckett (10), Rivers (8) and Adley (4) Years with company: 2 years MILESTONES

2009: Graduates magna cum laude from Southern University Law Center and passes the Louisiana Bar exam. 2010: Focusing on downtown revitalization, works on two complex tax credit-funded development projects while serving as general counsel to an organization with stimulus funding administered by Louisiana Housing Corporation. 2012: Becomes a local accounting firm’s first chief operating officer at age 29. 2014: Opens Jolie Pearl Oyster Bar with husband and partners in downtown Baton Rouge. 2016: Earns Forty under 40 award from the Baton Rouge Business Report. 2019: Serves on the national board of directors for the Certified Public Accounting Firm Management Association. 2020: Becomes chief operating officer of Hannis T. Bourgeois, a nearly 100-year-old public accounting firm with offices in Baton Rouge, Denham Springs, New Orleans and Hammond.

Q&A

First experience as a leader

I’ve played sports my whole life. As a setter on the volleyball team, the job is to direct the passers to send the ball over so that I could then call the play and set the ball up for the attack or spike. Always gravitating toward the shot-caller positions, I was also the pitcher on the softball team and the point guard for basketball. In each of those jobs you are under pressure to perform. Sports are a great way to prepare you for the real world as no one works completely alone; you must rely upon others to get the job done.

Lesson for young people

You must be resilient in your career and don’t leave too quick. Sometimes your work will need correcting and sometimes you will face a negative person in the workplace. Sometimes you must miss special moments to meet a deadline. Some people “peak” later in life and take longer to get the promotion. It’s not one isolated event or person that should direct your attention to make a rash change. Look for patterns and be patient. Follow your gut and be strategic when you are seeking out a change.

“I’m a tenacious person. Don’t tell me, ‘It can’t be done,’ because I will find a way.”

If Lauren Fitch ever tells you the story of how she got to be chief operating officer at Hannis T. Bourgeois LLP, a regional CPA firm with offices across southeast Louisiana, one thing quickly becomes clear: If she knows what she wants to do, she will find a way to make it happen.

That attitude is obvious even from the time before she got into law school at LSU—because she didn’t get accepted at first.

“My dream was to go to law school,” she says. “Unfortunately, I’m not very good at standardized tests.”

When the rejection came in, Fitch says, she scheduled a meeting with the chancellor and made her intentions known: “I said, I’m going to apply until I get in, so you might as well let me in.”

And soon enough, Fitch was starting her first day of classes.

“That failure of not getting in drove me to lengths I never would have done,” Fitch says. “I was an average student (in college) and I ended up graduating magna cum laude. … That failure drove me more than I think anything else would.”

It turns out, it was also a good lesson in dusting herself off and getting back up, something Fitch had to do soon after graduating from law school in 2009, when most firms were laying people off in the face of the economic recession.

“I ended up going to an organization and I basically told them, I’m going to be your attorney,” Fitch laughs.

That organization was the Center for Planning Excellence, and what followed was a threeyear stint working for nonprofit organizations, which ended rather abruptly.

“I had to lay off the entire staff and then myself,” Fitch says. “I was like—I think I’m done with nonprofits. That was not easy, and I was very young. It was another failure.”

That’s when she got an email from a friend suggesting she consider a position as COO of a CPA firm—something for which Fitch says she didn’t feel qualified to take on at the time—but she went for it anyway.

“I’ve been through so many things, you can throw any fire at me and I can handle it,” Fitch says. She got the job, and for the next eight years she served as COO for Faulk & Winkler before eventually landing at Hannis T. Bourgeois, a larger firm where she’s been on the leadership team since 2020.

“I’m a tenacious person. Don’t tell me, ‘It can’t be done,’ because I will find a way, which is why a COO position is where I needed to be,” Fitch says. “You’re constantly making decisions and those decisions affect the entire organization and people under you.”

That’s perhaps why, Fitch says, when she considers the most impactful moments of her career, it all comes back to her first chapter when she was running into brick walls.

“Even if I didn’t realize it at the time, the failure and the fact that I realized very quickly that it didn’t matter what you knew, but who you knew, and not just who you knew, but what they thought of you—that’s the most important thing,” Fitch says. “Be likable, make people smile, and be a positive person.”

—Chelsea Brasted

Visionary leadership

AT&T salutes the women who lead the way by always seeing beyond tomorrow — in leadership and in life.

Congratulations to Commissioner of Higher Education Dr. Kim Hunter Reed for being named one of the “most influential women in business” by the Baton Rouge Business Report.

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