Off to a ‘Smooth Start’
BY DANIEL HOOD
Sensiba San Filippo takes onboarding to new heights
each with its own requirements and milestones. But the heart of it is the first step that
experienced new hires take at the firm — a
step backward.
AT A GLANCE
Firm:
Sensiba San Filippo
Headquarters:
Pleasanton, Calif.
Managing partner:
John Sensiba
No. of staff/partners: 87/13
No. of offices:
4
2010 revenue: $15.88M
Year founded: 1975 (called
Ireland San Filippo until 2009)
Selected services:
Assurance, advisory and review;
tax planning and compliance;
business consulting and corporate compliance; employee benefit plan and 401(k) audits; SOX
compliance; estate and trust plan
design, planning and compliance;
IT and security services; wealth
management
Selected client areas:
Agribusiness; manufacturing
and distribution; privately held
businesses; real estate and construction; venture capital firms.
Before joining Sensiba San Filippo as a partner in the firm’s Manufac- turing and Distribution Group in 2007, Karen Burns had joined two
other accounting firms as an experienced
hire, and neither of them had much in the
way of an onboarding process.
The first was a local firm, with no process
at all; the second was a Big Four firm, which
had no formal process and offered little be-
yond a day of orientation, Burns recalled: “A
senior associate sat down with me for two
hours to show me the software, and then said,
‘Let’s go.’”
While it’s common for firms to spend a
great deal of effort onboarding entry-level
staff — nurturing them through internships,
partner lunches, extensive training, and the
like — most expect experienced hires like
Burns to hit the ground running, or at best
provide a minimum of informal and unstruc-
tured orientation. Given that they’re more ex-
pensive, and that they’re often hired to boost
critical practice areas or even lead entirely
new ones, it seems strange to pay so little at-
tention to making sure experienced newcom-
ers successfully adapt to their new firm.
From left to right: SSF’s John Sensiba, Karen Burns, Ernie Rossi and Jerry Krause
It’s not a mistake that SSF makes.
“When the market was still pretty hot, we
were adding people from large international
firms and the Big Four and regional firms, so
we said, ‘Let’s get better at this, because we’re
doing it more frequently, and to fail at it is ex-
tremely painful,’” said managing partner John
Sensiba. “It’s very expensive to fail.”
SSF, which has 100 staff and partners at
four offices in the Bay Area, concentrates
primarily on audit, tax and consulting work
for small and midsized businesses, with a
number of specific industry focuses. It also
audits a fair number of benefit plans, and a
few years back brought on a consulting group
that focuses on public company services, in-
cluding SAS 70 and Sarbanes-Oxley work.
“We’ve seen some expansion just over the
past six months,” Sensiba said, “and we ex-
pect that to continue.”
And should the firm need to hire upper-
level staff to meet that expansion, it has a
process in place to make sure they don’t turn
out to be expensive failures. Called Smooth
Start, it is a structured, yet flexible, 180-day
program in which two mentors guide new
hires through a series of three 60-day phases,
BACK TO GO FORWARD
In Phase One, experienced hires operate one
level below the one they were hired for: New
managers work as seniors, for instance, and
new partners as managers.
The point is for new hires to get used to the
way the firm operates, and to learn its work
processes. “We give them non-technically
challenging work, so they can get used to the
culture and process — letting them experi-
ence the firm,” Sensiba said. “They may know
things that we want them to un-know.”
That often involves doing hands-on work
in the field, though it’s not a question of test-
ing the person’s skills. “When you’re Smooth
Starting, it’s not because the technical experi-
ence you’ve had isn’t relevant,” said Burns,
who was the first new hire to go through the
program when it was formalized in 2007.
“Coming into any new organization, it has it’s
own culture, the way things are done via pro-
cesses, the people you’re working with, the
clients you’re working with. There’s a lot to be
learned about the culture of an organization,
not just do I know a debit from a credit.”
Having an early period where expectations
aren’t high gives the new hire room to learn
the ropes. “They’re not getting frustrated, be-
cause not everything they’re submitting is
getting kicked back because it’s not how we
expected it to be,” explained Ernie Rossi, the
firm’s partner-in-charge of audit, who formal-
ized the Smooth Start process and was one of
Burns’ mentors. “Some of our systems may
not be as intuitive, if you used a different tax
or accounting or T&B system. If you’re strug-
gling to get the work done because you’re
used to left to right and we do it right to left,
those little things can be frustrating.”
“We just want you to learn and absorb the
firm and the firm’s procedures,” said Jerry
Krause, an audit partner who helped Rossi
inaugurate the Smooth Start program, and
served as Burns’ other mentor. “We want to
create an environment where you can just
learn, without the pressure of, ‘I’ve got to
