The Best Laid Plans

This Sunday afternoon at 3pm, all of Marcum’s 200 or so partners will gather in South Florida for our annual strategic planning retreat. We will spend just about 3 full days, until noon on Wednesday, in meetings and team-building sessions with the goal of rolling out our vision and strategy for Marcum’s future to our leadership team. And this is not the first time we’re doing it.

I became Marcum’s managing partner in 1990, when we were known as Marcum & Kliegman and were less than 30 people. Beginning that year and every year since, our leadership group has taken the time to break away from the office and away from the daily grind of “getting it done” to plan for our company’s future. As my friend Jay Nisberg likes to say, “There’s nothing like seeing a good plan come together.”

And plan we did. We planned to be SEC experts and build one of the best middle market SEC practices, and we did. We planned to start a private equity and hedge fund practice, and today we have one of the middle market’s best in the industry. We planned to be nationally recognized for our real estate practice, and we are. We planned to go from a regionally based New York firm and become a national firm serving the middle market, and today we have 22 offices throughout the country and are ranked as the 16th largest firm in the U.S.

I hope this doesn’t come across as bragging, but rather, it’s intended to show the results of what happens when you actually go about planning your future. This is how we run Marcum and how we try to help our clients run their companies, too.

So over the next few days, if your phone calls and emails aren’t returned as quickly as normal, know that we’re busy at work planning our future, which, at the end of the day, is also about helping you build yours. Our goal is totally focused on building our firm to service our clients as best we can and to exceed your expectations. Thank you for allowing us the opportunity to make sure we are doing that the best way we know how.