Our Impact

Enabling clients to succeed in the current environment while preparing for what’s next

Today’s successful middle market businesses must be nimble—addressing any concerns at hand while being able to pivot quickly to seize opportunities. Through our extensive experience and proven advice, we help our clients understand where they stand and where potential for improvements and growth may exist. These successful experiences help build strong relationships while enabling middle market businesses to thrive.

Addressing needs across industries
Enhancing audit delivery
First-choice tax advisors for the middle market
Addressing new consulting realities
Leading the middle market conversation

Addressing needs across industries

Driving value with our insights and perspectives

Fiscal 2022 brought more COVID-19 concerns with the onset of the delta and omicron variants. Companies hoped the measures they had taken to survive during the pandemic would be temporary. But what was normal before COVID-19 has changed, possibly for good.

Successfully addressing these changes means companies must be agile and ready to pivot their business model to one that will help them maintain their current workforce, attract top talent, minimize their cyber-risk and increase productivity.

Navigating the new normal

Meeting the needs of the new normal means new investments in technology; if that sounds repetitive, it’s because we’ve been talking more about the implementation of new technology in the last two years than ever before. Technology has always been an issue for businesses, but it has never been so crucial to the future success of companies than it is right now.

Regardless of the industry, or what challenge we’re discussing with our clients, technological innovation is typically at the core of the discussion. The common issues in the marketplace, such as labor shortages, supply chain management, changing consumer preferences and ESG, can all be addressed by helping companies rethink the way they operate. And thinking differently includes transformation through technology.

Looking ahead

In the coming year, RSM will be focused on helping our clients assess their current business models and looking for ways they can stay on top of the ever-changing environment. We look forward to having these conversations and finding solutions that will strengthen our clients’ business operations.

The RSM Industry Eminence Program

In May 2022, RSM welcomed the fifth class of industry senior analysts to our Industry Eminence Program. Eleven forward-thinking individuals have begun their journey to expand their industry and sector-based knowledge that they will use in interactions and engagements throughout their career. To date, the program has seen a total of 59 luminaries continue to make their mark across RSM and in the broader marketplace.

Through the Industry Eminence Program, senior analysts also create timely economic insights and perspectives that provide significant value for our clients. Working closely with Chief Economist Joe Brusuelas, Deputy Chief Economist Kevin Depew, and new economists Tuan Nguyen and Tu Nguyen in the United States and Canada respectively, our eminents help middle market companies anticipate and adapt to the rapidly changing dynamics in their specific industries.

Industry insights help Tillamook adapt to rapid change

Tillamook, a large consumer brand known for a wide variety of dairy products ranging from cheese to yogurt, has always considered technology as a core pillar to its success. With the company outgrowing its original infrastructure, placing a burden on both their systems and team, Tillamook embarked on a journey with RSM to implement Microsoft Dynamics 365 as its core systems platform.

RSM helped Tillamook implement a new technology foundation that enables the company to seamlessly adapt to rapid change.
RSM helped Tillamook implement a new technology foundation that enables the company to seamlessly adapt to rapid change.

Having gone through this transition pre-COVID-19, Tillamook was able to make quick adjustments when the pandemic hit. The Microsoft cloud platform allowed the company to transition to a remote workforce quickly and enabled it to transform key processes and keep up with the velocity of changing demands the food industry has seen over the past two years.

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Enhancing audit delivery

making A DIFFERENCE in OUR firm, OUR CLIENTS and THE World

As the middle market continued to experience an accelerated rate of change this past year, RSM has continued to transform our audit capabilities and first-choice advisor value proposition to deliver human insights powered by technology.

The results of our work can be summarized in one word: impact. Our work and continued progress have a tremendous impact on our people, clients and the world every year, and fiscal 2022 was no exception.

Impact on our people

Our talented audit professionals and their insights are vital to the success of RSM’s clients and our firm. Along with firm initiatives that strengthen our culture, our audit practice had an impact on the quality of our employees’ RSM experience in fiscal 2022 by: 

  • Accelerating the path to being a first-choice advisor and audit partner by realigning the roles/responsibilities of our senior managers with the industries and complexity of the clients we serve
  • Creating capacity to broaden skills through our rotation programs, first-choice advisor curriculum, Industry Eminence Program and other advanced development opportunities 
  • Balancing workloads and enhancing capacity for higher-value work by increasing hiring at all levels, including interns, campus hires, experienced hires and partners; expanding our capabilities in India; and pursuing other nontraditional resources to add depth and breadth to our capabilities
  • Implementing fast-track training and adoption of technology to increase the efficiency of our audits and our ability to deliver quality and value to our clients 
Impact on our clients

Clients rely on our professionals to help them understand and respond to business challenges. They also rely on the quality and depth of our audit reports to obtain financing, support dividend and distribution payments, and perform many other analyses that enable their businesses to operate and thrive. We continued to make a significant impact on our clients by:

  • Delivering thousands of insightful, data-driven audits adapted to our clients’ industries and unique business circumstances
  • Doubling the number and dollar value of the capital market transactions we support by servicing a range of transactions, including initial public offerings, shelf registration statements and multifaceted transactions for special purpose acquisition companies
  • Leveraging our deep understanding of our clients and their businesses, industries and unique challenges, and applying the right technologies scaled to our clients’ specific circumstances 
  • Continuously expanding our innovative ecosystem of technology relationships and advanced digital tools to further streamline our methodology, improve our audit quality and uncover new information
  • Completing multiple technology pilots that allow us to quickly explore, test and deploy new technologies and tools as part of our focus on audit innovation and continuous improvement
Impact on the middle market

Our work contributed to thousands of clients moving forward and thriving in a rapidly changing world—fueling economies and capital markets, job creation, and the production and delivery of vital products and services around the world.

Every year, our audit practice evolves to increase our relevance and value as first-choice advisors to middle market leaders globally. We are proud of the significant difference RSM’s audit practice has made in fiscal 2022 and look forward to continuing to make an impact in the years ahead.

Delivering value with industry experience, agility and digital velocity

In an ever-changing marketplace, it is vital for middle market companies to work with professionals who understand the complex array of industry, business, financial and accounting challenges they face. RSM’s audit practice recently gained the business of a large real estate investment trust (REIT) because of our reputation as the leader in serving middle market companies, and the quality of RSM’s engagement team and REIT-focused specialists. In addition, the client valued our curiosity to understand the unique aspects of their business, our thoughtful discussion of REITs and other issues that could affect the audit, and our ability to tailor our approach to their unique circumstances. RSM has provided extensive value to the client through a high-quality data-driven audit, customized approaches and value-added industry insights.

© 2022 RSM US LLP. All rights reserved.
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First-choice tax advisors for the middle market

Meeting client expectations with Experience and TeCHNOLOGY Leads to Growth

RSM tax professionals focused on supporting clients and addressing their evolving needs throughout last year. We continue to build trusted relationships with clients based on our understanding of the challenges they are facing and provide highly relevant and tailored solutions to meet their specific needs. It’s our unrivaled first-choice advisor culture combined with industry and technical knowledge and focus on serving dynamic, growth-oriented companies that have secured our place as the middle market leader for audit, tax and consulting services.

We have positioned ourselves to meet and exceed client expectations by expanding growth, enhancing the RSM experience and energizing services through digital transformation. Whether actively engaging clients with the latest tax policy insights, advancing a tax software solution or investing in our people, RSM remains ready to provide effective tax guidance and services. 

Growth

Our knowledgeable and technologically savvy tax professionals are first-choice advisors with industry-specific experience and advice. They listen to their clients to understand their needs, thereby providing solutions that enable consistent, high-quality deliverables and lower client risk. Through collaboration across teams, service lines, industries and lines of business, our team brings insights, service and opportunities for growth. Some examples from the past year include:

  • Listening to a family-owned construction prospect’s concerns about family transition led to the inclusion of the firm’s business and transition advisory services team in a proposal. Providing this differentiated experience met their needs and led to a new client for the firm.
  • Collaborating with Washington National Tax, a tax functional lead and his team brought added value to an engagement through technical skill and insight that resulted in significant IRS tax penalty savings for the client.
  • Leveraging our India team’s co-sourcing tax compliance experience not only reduced work time on a holding company client’s engagement by up to 400 hours but also provided added capacity for the engagement lead to consult with its internal tax team, leading to an amended tax return that yielded millions in savings.
Demonstrating the RSM Experience

An enhanced RSM Experience consists of two dependent parts: our people and our clients. To be a first-choice advisor to the middle market, we remain committed to an inclusive work environment and balanced workday for our people; these create opportunities to learn new skills, grow their professional knowledge and develop fulfilling careers. Our people-focused approach empowers our tax professionals to build strong relationships and provide a differentiated client experience. To help reach this goal, we:

  • Optimized work through collaboration with our colleagues in India; implementation of consistent, firm-wide procedures; and adoption of technology and sophisticated digital tools
  • Developed our people to become tax functional leaders, aligned through industry and technical knowledge
  • Supported enterprise culture, diversity and inclusion efforts by appointing a national leader and forming a tax inclusion committee that, along with our top 100 tax leaders, participated in a diversity assessment to clarify attitudes and reveal areas of opportunity for future development  
  • Offered RSM tax rotational programs to develop our senior associates and supervisors and help them grow into future leaders of the practice
  • Drove thought leadership through our Washington National Tax practice to keep clients informed of emerging tax issues relevant to their business 
  • Engaged Capitol Hill policymakers on legislative matters important to clients and addressed the potential impact of both proposed (e.g., Build Back Better) and final (e.g., The Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act) tax legislation on middle market business operations
  • Highlighted ideas and insights that help clients move their businesses forward through the RSM Tax Summit—Tax in Motion
Digital transformation

From pencil and paper tax returns to global, virtual meetings, we’ve seen significant changes over the last century in how we work independently and together, and we know the future landscape will have an ever-increasing technology component. In a world where data can be seen as currency, RSM’s technology suite is uniquely positioned to help organizations capitalize on the value of data, shifting the focus from data collation to value-added analytics. To take advantage of innovation, we’ve:

  • Launched the Center for Advanced Tax Technology (CATT) to solve complex problems by developing technologies, providing platforms and creating automation to improve data consistency and tax processes
  • Introduced PartnerSight, FamilySight and TRaDE—proprietary, game-changing technologies to deliver tax and other data to our clients in real time
  • Pursued ways to unlock the value of data, an often-under-utilized asset within an organization

Client service excellence

For tax, Vision 100 ... Powered by our culture means improving the lives of our people and adding value for our clients. We’re committed to developing our people to be first-choice advisors and our clients are noticing. For example, a panel of three clients joined RSM’s midyear tax leader meeting to give perspective on how we’re delivering the RSM client experience. They stressed that RSM tax professionals are not only technically astute but also understand the importance of truly knowing their clients’ businesses and industries and bringing our 5 C’s, particularly caring, to foster deep relationships.

In one particular 2021 engagement, RSM gained the business and trust of Cypress Creek Partners, where it was clear that our industry knowledge, tax technology capabilities and client service reputation solidified the relationship.

RSM leveraged the innovative PartnerSight platform to help simplify tax compliance for Cypress Creek Partners.
RSM Partner Sight
© 2022 RSM US LLP. All rights reserved.
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Addressing new consulting realities

Creating compelling consulting experiences 

Fiscal 2022 saw RSM’s consulting line of business surpass $1 billion in annual revenues as it continued to evolve to create value for clients and employees in a changing environment. 

“Collaboration and enterprise perspective are keys to continued growth and addressing new realities,” said Brian Becker, RSM managing partner and CEO-elect. “Now, more than ever before, we need to adapt to our talent and clients’ needs to be compelling.”

Compelling client experiences

In an environment of continued uncertainty—from rapid technological change, a tight labor market and a changing workforce, to new business risks posed by the war in Ukraine and persistent inflation—clients are turning to RSM to help them thrive and evolve their businesses for the future.

While some clients want a laser focus on their specific needs, many want a holistic approach to solving their problems. RSM provides both through an experience tailored to the client.

In fiscal 2022, we expanded our ability to provide holistic service by embracing industry and collaborating across functions and solution sets to increase our relevance and harness the full power of RSM to benefit our clients. We also continued to build our enterprise account leader program to provide clients with broad needs across multiple consulting functions and RSM lines of business with dedicated leaders to enable seamless client service and growth.

Clients who want holistic solutions are increasingly turning to RSM’s managed services for their technology, risk, finance and other business needs. This approach enables access to best-in-class tools and experienced resources to navigate today’s changing business environment, enabling clients to maintain sound operations in times of uncertainty.

“The number of managed services client engagements in fiscal 2022 alone is a testament to how adaptive we have been already,” said Pat Vance, RSM consulting leader. “We made significant progress in this vast landscape of opportunity and we’re only getting started. If we can incorporate managed services into our client deliveries, it will help us deepen those relationships and bring significant value while simultaneously growing the consulting practice.”

In fiscal 2022, consulting also enhanced its service offerings both organically and through two acquisitions that expanded our ability to provide nonprofit technology solutions and digital transformation through ServiceNow.

Compelling talent experiences

In an environment of virtual work, remote meetings, hybrid schedules and expanded global collaboration, RSM’s consulting teams adapted to new ways of working. We have invested heavily in recruiting, onboarding and talent development strategies to enhance the experiences for our people and help them serve our clients effectively, which has resulted in retention rates above the market trend.

In fiscal 2022, we continued to evolve our learning and development approaches to bolster the execution of our strategy. From immersive technical boot camps to industry knowledge to project management and first-choice advisor skills, we are building the skills of our professionals to meet our clients’ changing needs while enhancing the career paths of our people.

In the face of a tight labor market in the United States and the need for new skill sets, we also greatly expanded our talent in India and El Salvador. This provides our teams with highly skilled resources that bring new insights and capabilities while enabling work to be done seamlessly over a 24-hour day. Our global teams are learning to operate collaboratively, improving both client and talent experiences.

We are also accelerating our efforts to provide an inclusive culture and talent experience to attract and retain the best, the brightest and the most diverse workforce. We continue to provide support, flexibility and enriching experiences so that our people are compelled to bring their best to our clients and to each other while building successful long-term careers. Our people tell us that when they join our firm, the cultural experience is exactly what we said it would be during the interview process—they think it’s something special and so do we.

Winning with industry, agility and digital velocity

RSM’s technical accounting consulting team harnessed the power of RSM to help a hospitality client form a real estate investment trust and consolidate the financial statements of 77 properties while converting them from a tax basis to GAAP. This 10,000-hour project involved 102 team members from across various RSM lines of business and our office in India. RSM’s audit team brought insight into the real estate industry, the TAC team delivered technical accounting knowledge, and the team in India helped to analyze and review massive amounts of data. Together, the U.S. and India teams worked 24 hours a day to meet the project’s aggressive deadline and deliver economic and business value to the client.

Winning with industry, agility and digital velocity:

10,000

Hours

102

team members

77

properties

24

hour workday

© 2022 RSM US LLP. All rights reserved.
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Leading the middle market conversation

Delivering timely, trusted insights into critical business issues

As the COVID-19 pandemic unfolded, RSM unpacked the complex impact of the virus on middle market businesses with a steady cadence of thought leadership around issues ranging from supply chain to inflation, price volatility and labor.

This year marked the fifth anniversary of the RSM US Middle Market Business Index, providing critical insight into business conditions in the middle market.

The proprietary RSM US Middle Market Business Index, which measures business sentiment at midsize companies, celebrated its five-year anniversary in May 2021. In addition to the regular MMBI quarterly report featuring perspectives from Chief Economist Joe Brusuelas, RSM rolled out MMBI special reports on cybersecurity, environmental, social and governance issues, infrastructure and the changing workplace, all topics gaining focus in the business community. Plans to launch a U.K. version of the MMBI in 2022 were solidified; its inaugural March issue helped to cement the firm’s growing global influence on middle market issues.

Read the full reports here:

RSM Cybersecurity RSM ESG RSM Infrastructure RSM Industry Outlook RSM MMBI Cover 2022 Q1

Economists Tuan Nguyen (United States) and Tu Nguyen (Canada) joined the firm’s economics team in 2021, boosting coverage in The Real Economy, RSM’s monthly economic publication, and The Real Economy Blog, which provides a steady stream of daily insights on market-driven trends. Their efforts, along with an expanding cohort of trained economic analysts in the Industry Eminence Program led by Deputy Chief Economist Kevin Depew, led to higher engagement with clients, media and other middle market stakeholders. The announcement of 11 new senior analysts from the United States, U.K. and Canada in RSM's Industry Eminence Program in early 2022 marked the program’s fifth year, bringing the total number of analysts trained to 59.

The analyst’s data-driven perspectives were featured in the firm’s quarterly Real Economy Industry Outlook reports, in media coverage and in the growing inventory of articles under their bylines in third-party publications, boosting awareness with internal stakeholders, clients and prospects as they helped shape the firm’s position on key issues affecting their industries.

Throughout 2021, as the Biden administration and Washington lawmakers debated a host of legislative and regulatory issues, RSM’s public policy team brought middle market perspective to the virtual halls of Congress and the policymaking community. Direct engagement by the firm’s leaders with lawmakers on emerging legislation around infrastructure, COVID-19 relief and tax reform, as well as important issues such as health care and cybersecurity, fostered improved understanding in Washington of the distinct challenges facing midsize businesses. RSM also shared these insights internally and with clients through several channels, including thought leadership, webcasts, the firm’s RSM Power platform and other timely communications. 

In addition, the firm’s long-term partnership with the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, underscored by its joint publication of the MMBI, was strengthened by an ongoing series of quarterly webcasts on the middle market economy that featured Joe Brusuelas and Neal Bradley, the chamber’s executive vice president and chief policy officer.

Joe frequently appears in the business media, including CNN, The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal, where he serves on the publication’s economic forecasting panel. He was also recently named a member of the forecast board of advisors at the UCLA Anderson School of Management.

In the background, the firm’s robust new website platform was being developed throughout the year. Its March launch greatly improved RSM’s ability to enhance middle market storytelling with a fresh look and greater interactivity.

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