Face to Face
Tax returns and financial statements are not the only things keeping us busy at Marcum these days. We are also in the midst of our annual planning season for the ever-expanding calendar of Marcum events. If you are a client or friend of the Firm, you most likely have received an invitation to at least one of these, whether it was a Margarita/Mojito/Martini/(name your favorite “M” cocktail) with Marcum, a First Friday breakfast, a seminar, or an industry forum. Increasingly, these have become a focal point of how we stay in touch with our marketplace, keeping us face-to-face with the people and industries we do business with.
In our technology-driven world, engaging person-to-person with our clients and those who support them remains the foundation of our service model. It’s the way we built our business from a local, one office regional firm into a national firm doing business coast-to-coast and overseas. Email is great, and teleconferencing definitely has its place, but there’s never been an acceptable substitute for face-to-face human contact, and there never will be.
We owe it to our clients to spend enough time with them that they can tell us what they need, what their issues are, what’s keeping them up at night, and what they see in their future, so that we can determine the best ways to help them. Otherwise, our best advice is just prognosis without diagnosis, and as someone very smart once said, that is a formula for malpractice. Listen and learn also fits well here (OK, enough truisms).
Anyway, we like events, because they not only give us an opportunity to stay close to our clients, our friends and our industry, in many cases to teach, but also to learn. We put a real budget against most of these and engage excellent speakers and panelists to discuss topics that are very relevant to our clients’ businesses and to business in general. That’s a formula for meaningful dialog, and increasingly, it is another way we create value for our clients.
Events like the Marcum Construction Summit, the Marcum Long-Term Care Symposium, and the new Marcum Women’s Forum (which featured Erin Brockovich last year) are all being expanded into new markets from East to West. Others, like the Marcum Real Estate Forum and the Marcum Alternative Investment Managers Forum, are gearing up for repeat performances in New York City later this year after a great reception in 2016. Next month we’re introducing the first Marcum Retail Symposium in Los Angeles. The Marcum Governmental Symposium (Florida), the Marcum Innovator Awards (Philadelphia), and the Marcum Tech Top 40 (Connecticut) are well-established regional events and will punctuate our fall calendar again in 2017. The Marcum Workplace Challenge, a run-walk for charity, has been an annual highlight in our Long Island, New York, region for 11 years and is unique in its social/civic design among all of our events – although our Philadelphia office has plans for a corporate challenge of its own.
And then there is the annual Marcum MicroCap Conference in New York City, a national event that has become a highlight on the annual investment calendar. Last year we were honored to have former U.S. Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich and former SEC Chairman Harvey Pitt as our keynoters at the microcap conference. The year before, we had Dick Fuld, the former chairman of Lehman Brothers, and the year before that, we had former NYC mayor Rudy Giuliani. Our speakers for this year’s conference, coming up on June 15-16, haven’t been announced yet, but trust me when I tell you they will not disappoint!
Our investment in these events is an investment in our clients. We have built our Firm on the principle of client service first, and our growing event line up is an expression of that commitment. We hope to see you at one or more of our events in 2017. To see what’s coming up in your area and for registration details, visit our events website at www.marcumevents.com.
Bon weekend, everybody.
