Driving clients’ success in business and in life is the foundation on which ScrogginsGrear is built, and the firm, known for its consulting and CPA services, continues to grow and evolve following its 2019 merger with consulting firm Pathway Guidance.
Today, more than two-thirds of ScrogginsGrear’s business consists of its comprehensive consulting and organizational development services, with the remainder falling under the umbrella of traditional compliance services such as tax, audit and accounting.
“In the area of our organizational development consulting, we cover leadership team development, operational management and strategy, and corporate culture,” says Rob Scroggins, principal. “These offerings provide our clients with advisory services that are important drivers of future bottom line results.
“We provide a full range of compliance services, and they are important, but — alone — not as compelling as when they are combined with consulting services that are focused on maximizing the people component of getting work done effectively and collaboratively,” Scroggins adds. “When people and teams are working well together, it is reflected in profit.”
ScrogginsGrear has, in fact, merged four firms in six years, notes principal Terry Grear. The goals in doing so were to provide diversity of industries served and to offer additional non-CPA services, including culture scans and culture coaching, leadership development assessments and coaching, strategy and various training classes on communication, building trust and handling difficult situations.
What is the key to ScrogginsGrear successfully maintaining its traditional tax, audit and accounting services while offering comprehensive consulting and culture coaching capabilities?
“First of all, if people will trust you with their CPA services, they will trust you with the consulting services that we offer, and vice versa,” says Grear. “The key to all of this for us is that we want to positively impact the lives of the people we serve. We want to enable business owners to truly function as business owners, doctors to be able to be doctors, etc., and fulfill their callings. We want parents to be able to be the kind of parents they want to be. We believe we can best do that by providing our comprehensive range of services. It would be difficult to find a firm that offers the depth of services that we bring together to help our clients accomplish their business, retirement and family goals.”
Heart, Talent and Services
Imagine living 25 years of your life working toward a goal only to find out when you reach that goal, it isn’t worth the sacrifices made or prices paid along the way. The ScrogginsGrear Organizational Development team doesn’t tell clients what their goals are, but they want to give them the opportunity to fulfill their dreams and visions by providing the heart, the talent and the services to assist them in doing just that.
The team provides three areas of expertise: Leadership, which involves hiring and development assessments for a “best fit” as well as executive coaching and team development; Organizational Culture, which includes assessments, consulting, conflict mediation, training classes and coaching; and Strategy.
“Leadership development, for me, is really leader self-development,” says Tom Hattersley, a ScrogginsGrear organizational development consultant. “That is, you can’t lead others if you can’t lead yourself. Thus, who you are matters.”
Fellow consultant Bob Scallan maintains that leadership development and strategy development have been proven to be inherently linked. “Our formula is helping organizations determine where they want to go, identifying the strategy to get them there, and evaluating whether they have the right talent and systems to achieve success.”
ScrogginsGrear has harnessed the power of the OutMatch Assessment, a versatile candidate selection platform with deep predictive capabilities. Behavioral assessments are highly predictive of candidate or incumbent potential in a role, and OutMatch gives hiring organizations the ability to provide objective data to the hiring manager before subjective biases take over, eliminating the intuition-based decisions individuals or organizations make. The other benefit of adding data to the hiring process is that it enables organizations to create a structured, scalable and repeatable model. Without the data, it is difficult to manage substantial business improvement, ScrogginsGrear officials’ note.
OutMatch creates both top and bottom line benefits, regardless of an organization’s goal — be it reducing turnover, improving quality of hire, increasing customer satisfaction, creating efficiency of process or building bench strength — establishing a standard to aid in the decision-making process. Each OutMatch assessment includes both a selection and development report. The selection report includes an interview guide customized to the position and the candidate. The development report can be used by hiring managers and new hires as an onboarding guide to get up to speed in generating value for the organization faster. For current employees, the development report provides insight for further employee growth.
Igniting Unstoppable Momentum
Developing cultures where people work well together to achieve outstanding business results begins with improving the quality of the thousands of one-on-one interactions that occur in an organization day after day, says Jill Grear Canady, a ScrogginsGrear consultant focused on organizational culture.
“Imagine what it would be like to interact with co-workers among whom there is mutual respect and trust, with whom false assumptions are replaced with truth, with whom there is freedom to speak up about issues, and between whom conflicts are effectively resolved. In an environment like that, where the friction has been reduced, there’s almost no stopping an organization’s momentum!”
The good news, according to Canady, is that when that type of culture doesn’t exist, it’s rarely due to a lack of desire. “It’s simply a lack of skill. That’s why we teach skills for relating to each other in a healthy manner. It’s not just about being ‘nice.’ It’s about creating an environment where everyone can bring their best to work. And that pays off when it comes to the bottom line.”
ScrogginsGrear training classes cover integral skills such as listening and understanding, getting and making real commitments, replacing distortions with the truth, giving feedback, confronting, and resolving conflicts.
Training classes aren’t the only approach the team uses, however. “We believe that to truly serve our clients, a one-size-fits-all approach is not going to work. After all, different organizations have different needs,” Canady continues. That’s why the ScrogginsGrear Culture Scan is so useful. “It’s a quick, anonymous survey containing questions about the most critical elements of a healthy culture.”
Although the culture scan is only 13 questions, the questions are deliberately designed to address the issues research has shown are most critical so the organizational development consultants can glean an incredible amount of information about a team’s collective thoughts and perceptions, the overall health of the organization, and areas for growth and/or improvement. When the culture scan process is complete, team leaders receive four to five pages of information regarding their organization’s culture, and an hour-long consultation complete with next-step recommendations.
Other useful assessments ScrogginsGrear offers include a COVID-19 employee survey; a culture audit, an organizational health assessment and a communication survey.
ScrogginsGrear’s goal is to foster environments where all people can bring their full potential to the workplace, and the firm knows much of that is driven by an organization’s leaders.
“Though it is certainly true that everyone on the organizational chart has an important role to play in driving the culture where we work, it’s also true that culture starts at the top. After all, it’s the way leaders approach their people, their clients, and their work that inevitably influences everyone else,” Canady says. “That’s why we aim to work with leaders who have the courage to look at themselves first, who are willing to make necessary changes personally and then implement them throughout the organization. Our core client is an organization with a caring leader who has the guts to grow.”
ScrogginsGrear is located at 200 Northland Blvd., Cincinnati, OH 45246. For more information, visit scrogginsgrear.com or call 513.771.7070.