This past week we began our Professional Issues Updates / town hall tour with two special business and industry editions and almost 300 CFOs, controllers and CPAs working in business and industry, not-for-profits, and government. Using Conferences.io, we were able to engage the group and get lots of feedback about the biggest issues facing them, their economic outlook, and other key questions. 

The group average was 21 years as CPAs, yet we had all four generations in the workplace represented.

The top five challenges facing CFOs and controllers was a chance to validate our earlier ThinkTank session with a smaller group in November 2013 (see our post here). Here are the results of the vote from both town halls:

1. Doing more with less.
2. Being reactive versus proactive.
3. Keeping up.
4. Information overload.
5. Work / life balance.

Yet despite these challenges, many were actively working on new initiatives like moving their organizations to the cloud (16 percent already there and 59 percent thinking about it or on the way) and implementing business intelligence and analytic systems (29 percent already have them and 26 percent are working on it). The other insights is the group is overall optimistic around their businesses and the Maryland economy (40 percent very optimistic and optimistic versus 22 percent pessimistic) and slightly over 50 percent were forecasting hiring this year.

CGMA – 33% of the attendees were already CGMA members. For more information about the CGMA follow this link. Ash Noah, CPA, CGMA, was a guest speaker at our first townhall and offered these links to CGMA reports referenced in his presentation below (CGMA Members only):

• Managing Innovation
• Inside Track
• Insight to Impact – Big Data
• Talent Pipeline

Here is our presentation: