Comstock's magazine 1018 - October 2018 | Page 41

EXPAND
on Your Success.
BEYOND FAMILY
That decision earned them loyalty, but
it meant a harder path: managing a
transition to second-generation lead-
ership. By 2013, Myles Brown, then 65,
was inching closer to retirement —
he’d been the firm’s managing partner
since the company’s inception.
So at a strategy meeting at the Sut-
ter Club in Sacramento that year, the
partners discussed a successor. Fam-
ily connections were to have no bear-
ing on the choice, Brown says of their
planning. “When we decided to look
for my replacement, it was not a ques-
tion of, well, ‘Ben and Nate because
they’re family members.’ It was, ‘Who
of the partners is best suited to be
the manager?’” As they went around
the circle, it became clear that the
consensus pick was Ben Brown — by
then a senior manager and partner at
the company.
With family ties off the table as
a decision factor, there was never a
threat of an interfamily war of succes-
sion. Everyone wanted what was best
for the business. Nathan Boyce’s father
David Boyce says that Ben Brown was
the logical choice for leadership. “All
this administrative stuff — not that
Ben loves it, but he’s extraordinari-
ly capable of doing it well,” he says.
Nathan Boyce wasn’t a partner at the
time, so he wasn’t privy to those dis-
cussions, and David Boyce was careful
not to share with him partner-level in-
formation merely because he was his
son, according to Nathan Boyce. So
even though Nathan didn’t know the
announcement was coming, “There
was no question from anyone, includ-
ing me, that he was the right person for
that job,” he says.
BFBA’s focus on company health
over family ties has another compo-
nent that many executives don’t often
consider: a work culture that attracts
talent. The founders started the com-
pany in part because of the environ-
ment they wanted — warm, collegial
and loyal. The company has twice
received best-place-to-work awards
from The Sacramento Business Jour-
nal. Employees get frequent training,
mentors and as much job security as is
possible in a cyclical economy. BFBA
has never had a mass layoff, opting in-
stead to ride out downturns through
pay cuts, including on themselves.
That aesthetic, plus size — being
large enough to offer advancement
opportunities to promising staff —
has let them land young, talented
partner-track accountants who will
be future firm leaders, says David
Boyce. At a time when only about one-
third of partners in accounting firms
are younger than age 50, five of the 13
BFBA partners are 45 or under.
RESPECT THE ROLE
When the partners asked him to step
in as managing partner, Ben Brown
was willing but concerned. In work-
ing with family firms over the years,
he and the other partners had run up
against their share of business casu-
alties resulting from a founder leaving
the company to a second generation
but retaining effective control, some-
times in secret.
So Ben Brown wanted a long glide
path to move into his new role. In early
2014, he started shadowing his father,
Myles, on the job. He didn’t formally
take over as managing partner until
January 2016.
That was the moment the firm’s
disciplined adherence to its transi-
tion plan made a difference. As Myles
Brown was the only managing partner
in the firm’s history, some staff con-
tinued directing questions to him.
But he didn’t let himself get swept
into the current. “Myles did a won-
derful job of [saying] ‘You need to talk
to Ben about that,’” says Ben Brown.
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October
2018
| comstocksmag.com
41