The trend in the accounting industry is increasingly toward full-service businesses, as evidenced by last year’s creation of a five-firm, umbrella organization called Bentley Group. The group includes Warwick-based accounting firm DiSanto, Priest & Co., itself formed through a merger in 2003.
“If you look around the country, this design is pretty common now,” said John Brough, director of business development and a partner with DiSanto, Priest & Co. “You have an accounting firm but you also start to lay out different divisions or different affiliates. And you have to be competitive and comprehensive.”
But creating a structure that allows the organization to offer varying services can require some high fences between affiliated firms, he said. That’s one of the reasons that the firms’ new offices – they were expected to complete their move on June 9 – have been specially designed, he said.
The move isn’t very far – just around the corner, from 301 to 117 Metro Center Blvd. in Warwick – but it allowed for a chance to further evolve Bentley’s structure.
At the current location, the affiliated firms are spread throughout the building. But the new 25,000-square-foot space has been designed by Michael Integlia & Co. and Vision 3 Architects to connect the five firms, at least physically. “We wanted a facility that would allow us to provide all our different services on one floor,” Brough said. “And [to] do so in an efficient manner.”
In designing the new space, however, they’ve had to take into account that “there are certain SEC rules and regulatory rules that require a separation” between services that each firm provides, Brough said. He said, for example, “If we’re doing a financial audit for a group, we can’t manage their financial assets, because there’s a conflict of interest.”
“The change is really in the way that those firms are laid out,” he said. Although the firms will be managed separately, clients that choose to use one or more will be able to come and meet with each firm individually, but just steps away.
The limits of that connection extend to digital separation. Some computer files, such as those of the financial planning firm Bentley Wealth Advisors LLC, have to be separated and locked, Brough said. But still, having the firms on one floor will create a more fluid one-stop shop, Brough said.
“We’re able to communicate internally through e-mail with everybody, but they have their own Web sites, their own internet domains, their own storage service,” Brough said.
Even in the Bentley Group’s former location, clients have praised the ease of having five affiliated businesses – with expertise ranging from auditors to employee benefits to tax coordination – close together, Brough said. One client sat down one-by-one with managers of each recently, he added.
“So this very large client came in and we met, on four different [business] levels over about a two-hour period,” said Brough, “and the executive, who was a CPA, turned to me on the way out and said, ‘My God, it would have taken me weeks to get half this stuff done.’”
The independent affiliates – Bentley Wealth Advisors LLC, Bentley Employee Benefits Group LLC, Bentley Consulting Group LLC and the Bentley Foundation – employ a total of about 100 employees, including those from DiSanto, Priest & Co.
The creation of the Bentley Group was preceded by the 2003 merger of accounting firms Priest, Kortick, DeMerchant & Brough Ltd. and Finkel, DiSanto, Forsythe, Sciuto & Martin Inc. That firm in 2007 merged with two others firms, Gessman & Co. and Pirolli, Deller & Conaty, forming the Bentley Group.
Those mergers were fueled by the “landscape of accounting firms, which has changed dramatically over the last decade or so,” Brough said. “And clients have been looking to their CPA firm, their most trusted adviser, for a whole array of assistance in different areas.”
In the new office, there will be a central training room for staff and offices with movable partitions for growth. And Bentley’s internal IT team, which works for the firms under the umbrella, will be centrally located.
As one of the state’s larger accounting firms – ranked sixth in the 2008 Providence Business News Book of Lists – DiSanto, Priest & Co. is also in competition for well-trained employees, many of whom could make their way to Boston-based firms. That’s another reason why “we need to provide our staff with a very modern and highly efficient office space,” Brough said.
And although federal regulations will limit the interaction between the Bentley Group affiliates, it’s for the best, Brough said. “We’re very cognizant of conflicts of interest because it’s all for the clients’ well-being, that’s what comes first,” he said. “We’re able to provide different services, but if any independence is going to be conflicted or compromised, we don’t move into that type of program.” •
