Issuing a Challenge

By Gayle M. Whittemore, CPA

Are any of you up for a challenge? Yes, I know it’s summer, and the smell of grilling steaks and the lure of mindless novels is compelling. But I bet that as we enjoy the songs of the Beach Boys, we can grow our ranks and expand our membership. I’ll be back to that in a moment.

Though it is vacation time, your chapter board is working hard on revisiting our initiatives with the goal of accomplishing our strategic plan. For those who don’t have the plan memorized (you will by the time I step down!), let me jog your memory:

To advocate for members on issues that affect our profession, to enhance and promote the visibility of the profession and CalCPA and attract, educate and support CPAs in their professional and personal development.

A key element to reaching our goals is the creation of sub-committees that will consider our 2010–11 objectives. We have identified initiatives that will take us to the next rung of the professional ladder. In my past messages, I referenced the work we are doing to support our young emerging professionals and the focus on the YEP Committee and its activities. We have some wonderful monthly meetings coming up in our “CPA … Now What” series, as well as continuing our emphasis on mentoring programs, student outreach at schools, the Emerging Leaders certificate program and chapter scholarships. In fact, for those of you who attended the event at Sportsman’s Lodge, which brought together YEPs, emerging insurance professionals and the Young Attorney’s Committee of The San Fernando Valley Bar Association, you know that this group is bright, motivated and very engaged. I feel strongly that we are on the right track when it comes to “our young ones.”

On the legislative front, we continue to advocate and bring to our members’ attention bills that will impact their lives. AB 117 is one such bill. The bill requires active/inactive license status disclosure. In essence, if you’re a CPA whose license is inactive, do you really want to have to make a point of bringing that to people’s attention? The CalCPA Education Foundation is aggressively adding courses relevant to business and industry folk who want to become active licensees again—and renew, or join for the first time, CalCPA. Perhaps it’s taken this legislation to make us realize that our CPA designation took a lot to earn, and it’s up to us to encourage those who have left public accounting to enter the private sector to reclaim their rightful “titles” and participate in our membership.

You may ask, “What’s in it for me?” You mean, other than the fact that there is strength in numbers when it comes to legislative and financial strength? How about the fact that I believe that “once a CPA, always a CPA” holds merit and there is great value in knowing as many smart people as you can. In fact, when CPAs leave public accounting for the private sector, they enter a world that needs practicing CPAs and technical expertise. They are our clients, our teachers and our potential colleagues—it’s time we made those who have fallen away feel like they are equal partners. So here is where you can help.

You know that we have excellent technical committees and discussion groups. Where we can and will improve is what we have to offer to B&I members and nonmembers. Our B&I initiative this year will focus on making our CPE and other networking events more relevant to B&I folk. While we already have the San Fernando Valley Business Managers and Business and Industry discussion groups, we want to do more and have identified banking and finance, entertainment and real estate as three sectors where we can come together to enhance business opportunities, technical expertise and good old-fashioned fun.

We are looking to you to help us identify clients, friends and colleagues who are in B&I and are CPAs to join in these specific groups. Here’s where we return to my opening question about a challenge. At The Hollywood Bowl recently, I enticed, hustled, snared and cajoled two guests—who are both inactive CPAs and CFOs in the real estate industry—to be part of the maiden voyage of our real estate group. And the good news is they both said yes. I have my sights set on others, and I believe that every one of us knows at least one person who wants to reactivate their license and be part of our great organization. Please call or e-mail me, chapter program director Maria Nazario or your chapter board members if you want to be a part or have people you want to recommend.

Are you up for it? I knew you were!

These are exciting times and I am looking forward to growing our organization in a way that really adds value to its members.

Enjoy your summer. We look forward to seeing more of you.

This entry was posted on Monday, July 26th, 2010 at 10:54 am and is filed under President's Message. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.