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Thursday, Mar 28, 2024

Recruiting, Retention Factor Into Choice of Location

By THOM SENZEE Contributing Reporter The reasons companies choose their physical locations in the age of the Internet and ever-increasing traffic often has less to do with customers and more to do with employees. Such is the case for many accounting firms in the San Fernando, Conejo and Santa Clarita Valleys, which either have branch offices in the region, or have their headquarters here. “We had been talking about opening a San Fernando Valley office for a long time,” said Holthouse Carlin & Van Trigt partner Norm Tamkin. Tamkin heads the firm’s almost two-year-old Encino location. The Los Angeles-based firm opened the doors at its Encino location largely for recruiting purposes, said Tamkin. He is the Encino office’s only on-site partner. “We have a large number of people who just don’t want to go over the hill,” he said. “Having the option to stay in the Valley, where many of them live, makes the difference on so many different levels.” Then there is Cal State University, Northridge, located just five miles from Encino. Tamkin said the advantage of his office’s proximity to CSUN could not be overestimated. “I’m heavily involved in recruiting at CSUN, and the university is a shining example of recruiting done right,” he said. “You would be surprised at how many students I get who are interested in us partly because we have the Encino office. They want to work in the Valley.” Holthouse Carlin & Van Trigt also has an office in Westlake Village, which serves local clients and those far beyond the Conejo Valley. Its location is extremely popular with employees because so many who work there also live in nearby neighborhoods. Other partners at accounting firms with a strong presence in the Valleys share Tamkin’s opinion about why being in the region makes sense for them. “We’ve been here since 1990,” said Singer Burke & Co. managing partner, Matthew Burke. “Being here means a better commute for our people and lower costs for the firm.” That is because rents are decidedly lower on Balboa Boulevard (and in most places north of the Santa Monica Mountains) than on Wilshire Boulevard and the Westside where Singer Burke was located before moving to an Orange Line-adjacent office complex across the street from Birmingham High School. Most of Singer Burke & Co.’s clients are actually located on the other side of the hill, while a majority of employees live on this side. “We are a pretty tech-savvy firm,” he said. “It gets less important from a service standpoint where we’re located year after year. We have people who work from home, and we’ve even considered letting people continue to work for us even as they were moving out of state.” Burke does not even rule out the prospect of having employees doing their jobs from other countries, although the firm has no plans to do so any time soon. “Anything is worth considering,” he said. “By the way, we didn’t end up having the out-of-state situation materialize. The point is physical location is not all that important to doing the job of accounting. It is important, however, to keep employees happy. Spending less time in traffic does make people happier.” Furthermore, Singer Burke uses the traffic equation to its advantage by strategically scheduling field appointments to place employees on roads and freeways during times they are less impacted by congestion. Tapping into the business market in the local valleys is the goal. “For us at Grant Thornton, the Valley is a great place to be in accounting because there are so many companies in our target market here,” said Sandy Kadekian, a tax partner at international accountancy Grant Thornton LLP’s Woodland Hills office. “Our business model is to set ourselves apart from the other large, global accounting organizations by targeting mid-sized companies rather than Fortune 500 type companies.” Kadekian said because mid-sized companies “are the norm in this area,” Grant Thornton sees a lot of low-hanging fruit locally. “There are many prospective clients for us here,” she said. Grant Thornton opened its office in Woodland Hills in 2005, and has seen nonstop growth in its local business ever since. But, say Tamkin, Burke and Kadekian, there are a few downsides to being in the Valley. “For our office the challenge is having just one partner myself to keep 25 people busy,” Holthouse Carlin & Van Trigt’s Tamkin said. “That’s kind of hard, but we’ve only been here for two years. That, and the heat in summer.” Matthew Burke agrees that the summer heat is a downside. “But it doesn’t outweigh the upside of less traffic,” he said. “It can now take more than an hour just to get from Santa Monica to Westwood. The Valley is still not nearly that bad.” For Grant Thornton’s Kadekian, there is no “downside” per se to being in Woodland Hills. Yet there are some geographic challenges. “I wouldn’t say that there is a downside in terms of the quality or energy of business here,” she said. “But of course, a service company like ours includes the Valley in a much larger geographic area. We serve clients from the Valley all the way up to Santa Barbara and beyond out of our Woodland Hills office. Where our partners in the Los Angeles office, for example, will mostly serve clients within a few miles of the downtown office, I tend to put in a lot more driving time.” Kadekian said companies in this area tend to be less densely clustered. “And that means longer drives between clients,” she said.

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