SBF Partner Steve Bunch: “I feel like a good portion of my job is making sure that people matter most at SBF”

SBF partner Steve Bunch has always known his career would be in accounting or taxes, but he didn’t realize that perhaps the biggest part of his job would be creating a culture among other tax professionals.

Right out of school, he worked for a large, international firm. He learned a lot about management, culture, and, of course, accounting. He also learned how important it is to like your job and the people you work with. “No matter how much money you make or how much notoriety you get, you won’t truly find happiness at work until you have what we have at SBF — a great culture of people who genuinely care about each other,” Steve said.

In his role as a partner at SBF, Steve takes the lessons he’s learned throughout his career and puts them into action each day. “One of the values at SBF is ‘people matter most.’ I see all of us at SBF as caretakers of that standard, but as a partner I realize that I need to set an example for others,” Steve said. “I really believe that happy people are more satisfied at work, care more about their co-workers and clients, work harder, are more engaged, and care about their development.”

Making sure people are happy is not as simple as buying lunch for them occasionally or congratulating people when they reach anniversary milestones. It’s about truly encouraging a culture where people not only work well together but also care about one another.

Five years ago, SBF was born from a merger of two other firms. When that merger happened, this culture was a distant vision, not yet a reality. “We had a lot of expectations about how the transition and integration of the two firms would go, and, frankly, it did not go nearly as well as planned,” Steve said.

As the partners tried to create the firm they wanted with the culture they believed in, they made a lot of mistakes along the way. But they didn’t give up. “I don’t ever remember a time during that first year when we wondered if this was really a great idea,” he said. “It’s almost as if we were not paying attention to all the headwinds in front of us. I guess when you are so focused on trying to achieve what you want, sometimes that can make you myopic in a good way.”

It took that sort of singular focus from all three partners to create the culture SBF enjoys now — a culture where team members are committed to mentoring one another, learning new things, serving their community, and coming together during a crisis.

Steve doesn’t take the culture for granted.

“When you’ve experienced a broken culture where people don’t care for one another or encourage each other, and then you come work at SBF and all those things are there every day, you’ll never go back,” Steve said.

The culture at SBF is great for employees, but part of the reason it’s so important to all three partners is that it’s also great for clients. For instance, when an SBF outsourced accounting client was selling his business, SBF stepped up to ensure he got the selling price they deserved.

“When the buyer came in to perform due diligence on our client’s financials, the company brought in a high-powered firm that made an adjustment that significantly lowered our client’s stated net income and thereby significantly lowered the offering price for the business,” Steve said.

This put the sale in jeopardy, but Steve told his team not to panic, to take the weekend to relax and to come in on Monday ready to tackle the problem.

When Steve came in on Monday, his team let him know that they hadn’t taken his advice. Instead, they’d worked over the weekend to prove that their original assessment was correct, and that the original selling price was valid. Steve was floored. The deal went through.

“Defending our work successfully resulted in a swing in purchase price of several million dollars,” Steve said. “But the best part is our people take so much pride in their work, I didn’t have to ask them to work late and put in the hours — they did it on their own accord because they cared about that client truly getting what he deserved.”