A big change ushered Randy Myeroff into his position as president and CEO of Cohen & Co. But that was just the beginning. It unleashed a domino effect of other transformations that he had to steer the firm through to find success.
Until five years ago, the accounting firm’s 18 or so owners served as the board, voting on decisions like naming partners and acquiring other firms. The owners were also responsible for electing a five-person executive committee that ran the firm.
Initially, Myeroff was the managing partner over this committee, a position that — despite the title — didn’t really give him much authority over the group. Plus, he didn’t get to choose the team he worked with, and big decisions had to move on to a board vote anyway.
“It’s a great way to be inclusive, but a bad way to move quickly,” Myeroff says of the old structure. “We acknowledged that we had too many owners to have them vote on recurring things.”
The firm assessed its structure by looking to the future, questioning if the status quo would hold up through time and growth. Before the decision-making process got too cumbersome, it moved pro-actively to make sure it never would.
“Our governance system wasn’t failing,” Myeroff says. “But we had to project forward. As we get larger and get more owners, a system that requires everyone to contribute to every decision is going to get bogged down.”
So the firm, which posted 2008 revenue of $31 million, streamlined to make the firm more nimble. The owners elected Myeroff as president and CEO and named a sleeker six-person board for him to work with. They also gave him the freedom to choose his own four-person leadership team.
That restructuring positioned the company for growth, setting off a chain of changes. In just the past two years, Cohen & Co. has hired about 60 new employees, acquired three other firms and opened a new office in Columbus.
Through it all, Myeroff has learned to stay adaptable and instill unchanging values in his 300 employees to guide them through the future more smoothly.
Here are a few leadership lessons Myeroff learned from the string of changes that have reshaped Cohen & Co. in the past few years.
