TechTimes CPAConnections
News From Your Association Leaders
Fall 2019
Former CPAConnect member makes the jump to CPAmerica coin and has a unique perspective on the process In February 2019, member firm Grooms & Harkins, P.C. (Grooms & Harkins), of Casper, Wyoming, officially joined the ranks of CPAmerica. However, the firm is rather unique. You will likely remember t hem as a longter m member of CPACon nec t . We spoke to Managing Nicholas Grooms Pa r t ner, Nicholas Grooms, of Grooms & Harkins to find out more about the move. We asked Grooms if he could tell us about his firm’s transition from CPAConnect to becoming a member of CPAmerica. Groom started, “It’s been an interesting transition for us because we felt so comfortable in CPAConnect. But at the same time, because of the relationship that exists between the two different organizations, the transition was seamless. Knowing Alan Deichler, Grace Horvath and D’Yan Davis at CPAmerica made it very easy for us during this time to go from one group to the next. So in some ways it felt the same, other
than that there were different people at the meetings. The way the transition happened was another reason we were so happy with our membership in CPAConnect.
there were some metrics (revenue, size of firm, that sort of thing) for membership in CPAmerica. When we first joined CPAConnect, we set those metrics as lofty goals that we wanted to achieve, all with the caveat that we were very happy in CPAConnect. We wanted to reach those goals and we didn’t know if that would mean we would like moving to CPAmerica, but we liked being eligible to join. Alan started talking to us and said that CPAmerica saw some things in our firm that he thought might be mutually beneficial to both CPAmerica and our firm and asked if we would give the idea of joining CPAmerica some thought.”
“When the founders of our firm, Ted Grooms and Chuck Harkins, started with CPAConnect, we can go back and see a distinct point on the timeline of our firm when things started to change for us for the better, whether it was growth or positive changes in the way that we did business. It was always something that the founders felt was an investment that we got a lot of return on and because of that, we actively participated in CPAConnect. As we continued through our membership and time passed, Alan Deichler started to notice that we were a firm that was growing fairly well, in the context of being a firm in Casper, Wyoming.”
His firm pondered this point. Grooms went on to say, “But we were happy with CPAConnect. Then we talked again at the next CPAConnect Roundtable and we were invited to come to the CPAmerica Leading Partners Retreat. The thing we found there that made us decide to go ahead and apply for membership was seeing a larger group of firms that were similar to ours in the sense of growth and transitions within their firms.”
Although Grooms said his firm was always aware of CPAmerica, they did not have a real relationship with any firm in CPAmerica. “Being isolated here in Wyoming was a big part of that,” said Grooms, “But back in the day, we knew
“We are going through unique changes; See Grooms & Harkins, continued on page 2
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