Tending to Company Culture is Vital to Navigating Uncertainty, with Sean Taylor, Smith & Howard
Sean Taylor: [00:00:00] Culturally, really everything. And the last thing we want to do is potentially damage our culture. When I took over the responsibility in January of 2019, one of the first things we looked at doing was refreshing just what we have been doing for 48 years. We definitely weren’t broken. I didn’t inherit an institution that was, in any way, struggling. In fact, it’s thriving. So, we really wanted to focus on how can we, maybe, just refresh what we’re doing and make our communications a little bit better, our processes a little bit better. And in doing so, it actually led to the development of a 10-year vision that we ultimately started undertaking in January 2020, just three months before the pandemic hit.
Sean Taylor: [00:00:48] I say all that to lead into one of the pillars of that 10-year vision is culture. And we, in no way, want to impact negatively the culture that we’ve spent nearly 50 years developing. And we look and measure culture. You can actually measure it. And we do that with our people. We measure things like our agility, work/life balance, reward systems, other things that all feed into what your culture is. And in doing so, we get a pretty good idea of how our culture measures up versus some of our friendly competitors across the nation and, really, with the businesses that we hope to serve.
Sean Taylor: [00:01:35] So, one of the things about having that culture in place was when this happened, we were prepared. Look, no one went into this pandemic in March and early April without fears and concerns, but that’s really kind of the way we started by addressing. I prepared weekly video messages for everyone in the firm. And the first few messages were, “Hey, I know that you’re scared. We’re all a little bit scared. Let’s talk if you’re scared. If you have personal needs, your family have needs, what can we do to make sure that you’re taken care of?” We were doing that with our people, making personal phone calls to every person in the firm, and follow-up was really critical.
Sean Taylor: [00:02:18] And that really, I think, speaks to our culture. It’s always focused on serving our clients, and growing and developing our people, and that’s really the mainstay of what we’re going to focus on over the next 10 years and beyond.
Sean C. Taylor, Managing Partner, Smith & Howard
Sean Taylor became Managing Partner of Smith & Howard in January 2019 after 25 years of leadership progression in the Assurance Services group. He joined Smith & Howard as an intern and was ultimately named Partner in charge of the Assurance Service group in 2010, a role he held until becoming Managing Partner in 2019. Sean will drive the vision, innovation and growth of the firm and its people through the next stage of the firm’s life.
Sean was named an Atlanta 2020 Most Admired CEO by the Atlanta Business Chronicle in recognition of his leadership. Sean is called on to present to many for-profit and nonprofit businesses, lenders, and other professional service providers. He has both served on and moderated numerous workshop and conference panels, has presented on the effects of healthcare reform, presented at Smith & Howard’s “Blueprint for Understanding Contractors” workshop to construction companies and commercial lenders, and has presented on several complex accounting principles to local and national audiences. As an Assurance professional, he has spent a career providing advisory, audit, review, attestation, and other assurance services for privately-held businesses and nonprofit organizations.
Sean co-founded and led the firm’s nonprofit practice with Marc Azar and is still an active member of the nonprofit group at Smith & Howard. Sean has been – and remains – an active participant and advocate at Smith & Howard for our mentoring program, personally mentoring many of our professional and administrative staff through career progression and advancement. Sean graduated from the University of Georgia with a B.B.A. in Accounting. He is a member of the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants and the Georgia Society of Certified Public Accountants, where he served on the inaugural Georgia Society of Certified Public Accountants Leadership Academy.
Sean is actively involved as a multi-year member of various committees at Dunwoody United Methodist Church (DUMC), including Finance, Staff Parish Relations, Leadership Roundtable, Organ and Evangelism. Sean was also selected to chair the Strategic Planning Task Force for DUMC in developing the church’s current five-year strategic plan. He recently completed service as co-chairman of DUMC’s $5.6 million Moving Forward Together Capital Campaign. Sean served seven years on the Council on Finance and Administration at the North Georgia Conference of the United Methodist Church, including time as the Vice Chair and Chair. He also serves on the Finance Committee for Wesleyan School, a private K-12 college preparatory school and began a five year term on the school’s Board of Trustees in September 2019.
With his personal time, Sean is an active volunteer in the community. He was the recipient of the Georgia Society of Certified Public Accountants’ 2020 Public Service Award, the organization’s annual Public Service Award that recognizes a member who has distinguished himself or herself in public service activities at the local, state, regional or national level. In 2012, Sean co-founded FoodStock, an annual food packaging event in Dunwoody, Georgia where over 1,000 community members come together annually to package over 300,000 meals in one day for children in school feeding programs around the globe. This is the largest single day food packaging event of its kind in Georgia and, to date, this event and other food packaging events in the Dunwoody community associated with FoodStock have packaged over 2.4 million meals. Additionally, Sean serves as a mentor to 13 teenage boys through a group he founded called Fit 4 Life, meeting weekly to discuss various aspects of faith and life for these 13 young men.
Listen to the full interview with Sean on North Fulton Business Radio here.
The “One Minute Interview” series is produced by John Ray and in the North Fulton studio of Business RadioX® in Alpharetta. You can find the full archive of shows by following this link.
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