To all our stakeholders,
When our 2021 fiscal year (FY21) began in August of 2020, prospects for the coming year were uncertain. We were six months into the COVID-19 pandemic and experiencing the virus’s second major wave. The economy had contracted sharply in response to the pandemic, and no one knew when vaccines would be available to slow the spread of the virus and create an opportunity for the economy to bounce back and begin to recover.
At Grant Thornton, our purpose is to make business personal and build trust into every result, so we adopted three clear priorities for our firm at the outbreak of the pandemic:
- To take care of our people;
- To be there for our clients; and,
- To keep our business strong.
We were succeeding on each front, and many of our teammates and clients were still working on adapting to the new fully remote work environment. We began the fiscal year in a state of almost constant change and innovation, as we brainstormed new programs and initiatives to keep focus on what we deliver as well as how we work to go beyond expectations for all our stakeholders.
Twelve months later, at the end of our fiscal year in July 2021, we had achieved some remarkable results. Our net revenue for the year was $1.97 billion, more than ever before. Our client satisfaction scores hit five-year highs. We brought numerous new innovative solutions to market. Our latest quality inspection results once again put us among the leaders in our profession. In May, we began offering integrated environmental, social and governance (ESG) services to our clients, for which we see great client demand in the coming years. In our own firm, we doubled our ESG scores as evaluated by an independent assessment. We reported diversity, equity and inclusion (DE&I) data publicly for the first time, and significantly increased our commitment to DE&I progress within our firm and our profession.
These would be remarkable achievements in any year – and FY21 was certainly not just any year. We faced the professional challenge of our lives and delivered the best performance of our careers on many fronts.
In this letter, I will share some of our key areas of focus over the past year, the challenges we took on and the results we achieved. Each topic will include links to more detailed information on our website, www.grantthornton.com, if you would like to learn more. I appreciate your interest in our firm and invite you to read on.
Taking care of our people
Being there for our clients
We’re collaborators – obsessed with quality and ready for anything – who understand the value of strong relationships and going beyond expectations for our clients. We challenge the expectations of business. And we help our clients do the same through a variety of services and capabilities – including our three primary service lines, Audit, Tax and Advisory Services. Being there for clients throughout the pandemic has been of paramount importance.
Our focus on providing distinctive client service through the pandemic led to client satisfaction scores that rose on all five of our key performance indicators (KPIs). We built on our historically strong performance through a client experience initiative focused on aligning colleagues’ client service behaviors to our firm’s culture, values and purpose. Remarkably, our overall client satisfaction score in FY21 was our highest in more than five years.
As a professional services firm, our most important metric in the service we deliver to clients is quality. The Public Company Accounting Oversight Board’s annual inspection reports have consistently placed our audit quality measures among the leaders in the industry. This year’s audits were made more challenging by several external events – the pandemic and the Texas winter storms, for example – but our team adapted quickly to new remote audit processes and delivered excellent results.
We released two new technology-based business solutions that will help enhance quality results for all our services in the future, not just audits. Engage is an enterprise engagement delivery tool that provides a common and easy-to-use document collaboration platform for client engagements. Convene is a document workflow tool to help our engagement teams increase efficiency in the document management process, streamline requests, and reduce email traffic.
For more information about all our quality programs and results, please see our latest firmwide Audit Quality and Transparency Report.
Keeping our business strong
Supporting our communities
In addition to the three core goals we put in place at the onset of the pandemic related to our people, clients and firm, we also made support of our communities a major focus of our efforts in FY21. We believe strongly that businesses should operate in ways that are sustainable for our communities and our environment, and have increased our efforts on ESG initiatives over the past year.
One goal we put in place last summer I am very pleased to report: We have committed to reducing our firmwide carbon emissions by 55% by 2030. This is an ambitious but achievable goal that will help contribute to a cleaner environment for all of us in the future. You can learn more about all our ESG work in our annual Sustainability Report, which provides an in-depth analysis of our progress on ESG topics and initiatives we have in flight to accelerate our progress.
Our firm believes in underdogs – everyday heroes that enrich our lives, address human need and embrace tough challenges. Throughout FY21, we continued to support everyday heroes and the emerging non-profits they lead through our national Purple Paladin program.
Through this program we provide early stage nonprofits with funding, business and volunteer support, while using our platform to raise awareness of their organizations. Our Purple Paladins use innovative solutions to address important, diverse issues including inequality, inclusiveness, mental health and wellness and more. We invite anyone to nominate a Purple Paladin for consideration and are committed to helping these organizations go from start-up to unstoppable.
Learn more about our Purple Paladins here:
Looking ahead
Earlier this fall, our firm made an important decision about the future leadership of our firm that I believe bodes extremely well for a prosperous and vibrant future. Our Partnership Board named Seth Siegel, our South Florida managing partner and a 25-year colleague on our team, as our next CEO. Seth will take over next August, after I reach my mandatory retirement date at the end of July. He will be eligible to serve two four-year terms as CEO.
Seth is a visionary leader who cares deeply for our clients, colleagues and communities. He will lead our firm by empowering individuals to go beyond expectations by putting an emphasis on collaboration, readiness and maintaining valuable relationships with our colleagues, clients and communities. I could not be more pleased that we have chosen him to lead our firm in the future.
As we look ahead to next year and the years to come, there is so much that gives me great confidence about our future. We are a firm with a unique culture that provides a distinctive experience and industry-leading quality results to our clients that go beyond their expectations. Our business is growing, our brand recognition has never been higher, and our teams are developing a steady stream of innovative new products and solutions to address our clients’ most challenging business problems.
We are ready – ready to build strong relationships with our clients; ready to help solve problems and deliver value and quality; and ready to go beyond expectations to make business more personal and build confidence into every result for all those we serve.
I appreciate your interest in our firm and welcome your feedback.
Sincerely,
Bradley J. Preber
CEO
