When Charles Allen took the wheel of Crowe Horwath LLP in 2007, he didn’t need to change direction or make repairs. His company — still called Crowe Chizek and Co. LLC at the time — was a well-oiled machine, far from broken.
In fact, it was one of the largest regional accounting and consulting firms in the country. But that didn’t mean the new CEO couldn’t rev the engine.
“It wasn’t necessarily a business that needed to be fixed,” Allen says. “It was one that needed to be positioned to get to the next level.”
That much was obvious, at least to a man who had spent his entire career at the firm — plenty of time to recognize potential for additional growth. He had been watching the client base expand geographically across all 50 states and even internationally. He decided it was time to catch up.
“Many clients had operations that were located outside of our footprint,” Allen says. “What was happening was we were a regional firm but we were really doing business nationally from our regional locations. So we believed it was in the best interest of those clients and our people to expand nationally in order to manage the travel requirements and the stress on our people but to also better serve the clients in the localities that they were in.”
So he set out to reposition the regional Crowe Chizek as a national firm that would be known globally as Crowe Horwath after garnering the support of Horwath International, which became Crowe Horwath International.
The previous CEO focused on daily operations for the last nine months of his term while Allen took over big-picture items.
“I had a chance to sit and contemplate what needed to be done and then spent time with others, both inside and outside the firm, better understanding the profession, the market and where we needed to go before I started to put together the vision and the priorities,” Allen says.
During the gradual takeover, he heard clients talking about their need for national support and employees about the national travels they took to accommodate. That led him to the vision of catapulting the firm from regional to national status.
But to vet that vision and drive the change through the company, he’d need to engage all of the other stakeholders.
“What we’re trying to do is to move an organization of 2,500 people — and an international network that’s even much broader than that — in one direction,” Allen says. “It’s taking investments and taking risks to support this effort … to really invest in our future.”
