It wouldn’t seem as if a fish market in Seattle could offer any lessons to the largest accounting firm in Rhode Island.
When it comes to the benefits of keeping employees – and, by extension, customers – happy, however, they’re the same whether the latter are looking for the freshest salmon or a cost-segregation study, said Alan H. Litwin, a managing director of Kahn, Litwin, Renza & Co. Ltd., an independent, private company of certified public accountants and business consultants with offices in Providence and Newport. The firm has been chosen one of Rhode Island’s “Best Places to Work” for the third year in a row by The Providence Business News in a competition based in large part on employee responses to detailed surveys.
“Our employees are the firm,” Litwin said. “We have great people.”
Founded in 1975 by Lawrence I. Kahn, who is president and a managing director of the company, the firm has grown from four to 125 employees, the 11th-largest accounting firm in New England. KLR offers a full range of services for businesses and individuals, from audits, tax preparations and estate planning to advice on mergers and acquisitions. Specific services are offered in such industries as health care, auto dealers, nonprofits, restaurants, construction, retail, manufacturing and real estate.
Once people are hired at KLR, they tend to stay. Litwin and June L. Landry, marketing manager, noted during a recent interview that KLR has an exceptionally low employee turnover rate of 6 percent to 7 percent, compared with an industry average of 20 percent. No one has ever left to join another accounting firm, Litwin maintained, “and there’s a high demand for accounting people today.”
Employees don’t contribute a penny to their health care coverage because, he said, “we feel very strongly that we want to be the best, we want to pay at the top of the market and we want to offer our employees the best benefits.”
A major benefit is a continual training program, dubbed “KLR University,” that offers workshops and classes, in-house and on company time, open to all employees. And, according to Litwin and Landry, every employee takes advantage of this program.
“We always sent people out for technical training,” Litwin explained, “but what we found is that they weren’t being trained the KLR way,” so the firm began its own classes two years ago. Classes range from one to two hours each.
The employees at KLR are expected to learn and have fun too. Litwin and Landry laughed as they talked about a recent “dress-up day” when employees could dress as members of their favorite teams, with an iPod going to the best costume winner.
“It’s a little stress reliever,” Landry said, since dress-up day was held on a Saturday in March, the busiest season for any accounting firm because it’s tax preparation time. During the busy season from Jan. 1 through April 15, Litwin said, KLR offers employees catered dinners once a week and lunch every Saturday.
At the holidays, the company holds a formal dinner at a country club for employees and their spouses and, in summer, there are family outings that have included PawSox games, boat rides and trivia contests. “We want this to be a fun place to work,” Litwin said, “because, when it is, you generally have better client service.”
Every month, a surprise award that includes a plaque and a gift certificate is presented to a deserving employee “for doing something extraordinary,” Landry said. One day each year in the fall, KLR offices close so all employees can take part in an off-site, full-day business retreat to develop the firm’s strategic plan for the next year. “We want our people to feel like they are all part of what we do,” Litwin said.
In addition to taking good care of employees, KLR is exceptionally responsive to customers, creating separate divisions within the firm in direct response to client demand.
For instance, clients could see that KLR’s computers and other high-tech equipment were always in top-notch shape, so they began asking the firm for advice with their own systems, leading to the creation of Envision Technology Advisors LLC. Envision’s 19 staffers do no accounting, but specialize in e-commerce and Web site development. The division helps attract new customers, Litwin noted, and keeps KLR on the cutting edge of the latest technological advances.
In the same vein, “clients came to us seeking help to find CEO’s and other executives,” Litwin said. “Who could do that better than us? We know the company already.” So, KLR Executive Search Group LLC was born, specializing in the recruitment of top-level business leaders.
The growing cost of health care insurance was a “huge problem for almost all our clients,” Litwin said, so KLR Healthcare Services Group was formed to offer assistance. “You can imagine the reception we get when we call clients and say we can save them at least 15 percent in health insurance costs,” Litwin said. “They’re just ecstatic.”
As ecstatic, perhaps, as the gourmet chef who finds the freshest salmon possible at that fish market?
Pike Place Fish Market in Seattle – billed on its Web site as a famous place where “fishmongers throw fish and visitors have fun!” – has become a legend in business circles, Litwin recounted. The owners “have taken a mundane business and turned it into an exciting place,” he said, where employees have fun engaging their customers in the wonders of fresh fish. Business experts and professors studied the techniques used at the fish market and came up with the “Fish” employee-morale initiative, emphasizing worker satisfaction and customer service. The KLR firm began adopting the Fish principles about six months ago and they’ve been an ideal match. “This is how we live,” Litwin said of the Fish plan. •
