There are three primary factors that influence the company's current strategic, tactical, operational and contingency planning. The first factor is the increase in competitiveness within the industry in general. The rise in private and small scale CPA practices within the United States now makes almost all of Anderson's clients institutional in nature. Although this is sustainable at the current level, the concern is that Anderson will not be able to grow its organization at a grassroots level. The implication is that if small to midsized companies are now employing private companies and individual CPAs rather than large accounting corporations, then Anderson must compete exclusively with the other four major corporations for large-cap companies. This is a strategy concern that has influenced Anderson's current tactical decision making. As a result, it has jettisoned many subsidiary operations in order to focus on its core auditing and financial services offerings. This was represented by the spin-off of Anderson Consulting in 2000 into Accenture, and the slow increase in focus on its core business development.
Another major factor that has influenced the company has been the increased complexity of financial legislation. This can be evidenced in several areas; the most prominent is the recent...
This act was passed in the wake of Enron in order to create greater accountability for public companies. As a result, it means that it is harder than ever to become public in the United States. This means that there is much more business for the major accounting companies, and Anderson has begun positioning itself as one of the key industry leaders in helping companies become public entities.
The final factor has been the increasing competitiveness for top notch financial talent on a global scale. The globalization market has changed significantly the market for accounting and financial services, the opening up of China have especially been important to the new reality of the global market. As a result, Anderson had changed its tactical decision to including the expansion into a transnational corporation; the only way to fully account for this change is to understand exactly what is necessary in order to develop strong international relationships with emerging talent. Anderson has already taken major steps in these endeavors as it changed its global outreach initiative by pushing for a more universal agenda towards rewarding clients from all sectors of its business development equally. Overall Anderson has engaged in many different processes that impacts its global outreach.
