The headlines of a recent WSJ article say it all, “Small Firms Shift Toward Cloud-Based Software.” The article goes onto say that eighty-five percent of small business are planning to increase their spending on software in the next five years. The reason is better data to manage their businesses, mobile applications, and new ways to engage and serve their customers. The only question is whether CPAs will be helping them as their most trusted advisors?

On May 4th, we had Daniel Burrus, the NYT best-selling author and world renowned futurist in Maryland helping CPAs think about this fast future and the majority of opportunities identified by the group involved cloud and mobile applications. Dozens of them in fact.

That is why you need to make time for the CPA Summit on June 23rd at Martin’s West (and llive via webcast).

[plugin:quote]”In times of disruption, the bridge builders win.” -Nicholas Carr[/plugin]

This annual event brings the leading accounting and tax technology companies to Maryland in an atmosphere of innovation to give you access to the tools and people to help you take advantage of these opportunities. There is Sage, Xero, CCH, Citrix Sharefile, Avalara, BB&T, TriBridge, CPA.COM and more. In addition the sessions are designed ot help you navigate the winds of change and take advantage of these opportunities. Think of it as your bridge to the future.

And don’t miss the keynote by Ari Balogh of Google who will talk about “The CPA’s Role in Today’s World of Disruption, Innovation, & Shift Change.” Your people and your technology must be ready for the change if you are going to harness this opportunity to improve your work, improve your margin, and improve your client experience. No one knows more about how work culture and technology are essential to business than Google. We are pleased to host Google VP Ari Balogh as he brings his insider knowledge to the CPA Summit. Learn the reasons and the methods to implement a people-focused, business-savvy technology strategy and how it can be a tool to improve your company culture.

Of course you can’t rapidly innovate without radical and continuous learning and we have that covered as well as we feature new learning technologies we are working with like PLIYP and OpenBadges, conferences.io, and ThinkTank.

Tom Peters once said “the hard is soft and the soft is hard”, we have the hard stuff with the technology companies and the soft stuff around people, change leadership and culture, all we need is you!

And of course teaching your team to be future ready by learning the skill of anticpation, we have that covered as well – www.blionline.org/ao.

Hope you can join us on June 23rd live or via webcast. Registration and details are here.