About this episode
The big-city addresses that frequently prettify the office locations of esteemed accounting houses have continued to be a reliable draw for 20-something-year-old accounting grads eager to be counted among urban professionals. Thus we would not have been surprised to learn that back in the late 1980s, when recent grad Jim Caci was assigned to Arthur Andersen’s Roseland, New Jersey, office, he experienced what might have been called a “ho-hum” moment. Not so! Unlike the real estate occupied by his big-city peers, Caci notes, “Roseland” afforded him more access to Andersen partners, who were arguably more approachable outside the accounting house’s big-city confines. What’s more, the New Jersey site tended to operate in a more independent fashion than AA’s marquee offices, a cultural attribute that perhaps made it an ideal location from which to spearhead a pilot program to provide a unique menu of services to small technology companies. “The idea was that from among these small companies would ultimately come the next Microsoft, but we would have already begun working with them when they were at only $5 million in revenue,” explains Caci, who reports that Roseland became one of only a handful of AA offices to test the program. At the same time, the Roseland office had some plus-size neighbors, including AT&T Corp., whose headquarters at the time were a mere 25-minute drive away in Basking Ridge, New Jersey. Caci tells us that this is when his career benefited from both geography and timing. At the time, Arthur Andersen had been engaged by AT&T to help with the formidable task of splitting up the firm into its Baby Bell operating companies, per its historic agreement with the U.S. government. The multi-step nature of this undertaking and regular management updates that it demanded led Caci and other Roseland denizens to frequently commute to Basking Ridge. Says Caci: “Here I was at the beginning of my second year out of school, and I was being asked to help present to the senior leadership of AT&T.” –Jack Sweeney