Culture Matters: Building the Wise Firm

Being a good performance advisor is hard work. It can be time consuming, it takes vulnerability and real collaboration, and at times, it requires difficult, uncomfortable conversations. We all have overflowing plates between client service, other firm initiatives and our personal lives. Who really wants to add something else on top of that? Shouldn’t team members be responsible for finding their own potential and direction anyway?  

I’ll never forget the team-wide meeting in 2011 when Executive Partner Joey Havens committed to all of us that he would make culture our number one priority. We’ve made great progress and great mistakes, too, learning many things along the way. And while new strategies have emerged and new team members joined our journey, our vision has not changed. We are definitely still on our journey, and while we are making lots of forward progress, it’s important to take time to gauge the progress anytime you’re working on something of such importance.

I was raised with deep faith, tradition, and intentional communication as core family values. As one of 12 children—six boys and six girls—I grew up celebrating holidays with untold numbers of relatives, going to church and staying long afterwards just to fellowship and communicate with others, and staying up late Friday nights to celebrate the end of a school week. Some of my fondest memories, then and now, are of multiple generations of women in the house having a cup of coffee or tea and long conversations at the kitchen table. 

My family’s personal Fearless Unrivaled Flexibility (FUF) journey officially began about a year and a half ago. For the last 13 years, we’d been a family of three (or five if you count the dogs). During that time, the idea of expanding our family has been sporadically discussed. Commitments to our son, his sports, our relationship, our careers, and our family and friends were always excuses not to expand our family, but the thought always lingered in the back of our minds.

I will never forget my first internship during the last semester of undergrad, sitting in the board room of a publicly traded bank starry eyed and amazed. I thought everyone was a genius and there was no way I could ever learn all that they knew. I left there sad to return to school, but excited and anxious to start back as an associate at HORNE. Fast forward three short years later (one year of grad school and two years of professional experience) and I’ve found myself on the other side of the prior situation. I am now the person that interns are looking at and thinking I have it all together and know everything. While I still have lots to learn and I by no means know everything, every year when we get a new group of interns I stop and reflect on how far I’ve come from the time I was in their shoes.

At HORNE, we have been working with clients for some time to move our pricing away from the billable hour to an outcome-based performance model. Outcome-based contracts and pricing shift the risk of contract nonperformance from our clients, whether they be state governments or private entities, and moves the risk to us.   

Recently, I participated in a couple trail races at Bogue Chitto State Park in Franklinton, LA. We were warned that there would be a stream crossing on the 10 mile course, and two crossings on the 13 mile course. Photos of said crossings, a log placed from bank to bank, had been posted in advance. The photos didn’t do justice to the way it looked in my mind's eye. We were alerted far enough in advance for me to obsess about how much I dislike narrow bridges and about how little trust I have in my balance. I also thought about how much time I would waste trying to talk myself across and about everything that could possibly go wrong.

2017 came on strong. You set new goals, discussed them with your team for input and maybe even captured them somewhere to help keep you accountable. So there you are, full of energy and ready to shoot for the stars.

HORNE was recently certified as a Great Place to Work®, with a 91 percent approval rating. One of the open-ended questions asked team members to describe one unique thing that makes HORNE such a great place to work. As I reviewed those comments, culture was the repeated theme throughout the list. More specifically, our flexibility philosophy was at the top of the list.