The 2022 Women Leaders In Technology: Kathy Ryan

Kathy Ryan is a founder and Chair of RoseRyan, a ZRG company, and a frequent advisor to boards. Launching RoseRyan, a finance and accounting advisory firm, in 1993, Ryan has been twice named to Accounting Today's national list of elite managing partners for leadership and innovation. Her firm solves companies' finance and accounting challenges, with its full-stack, on-demand services that unlock the potential of lifecycle stages. In 2017, Ryan started a second company that originated from within RoseRyan. Called Bizinta, the SaaS company is an integrated business management solution for consulting firms.

Ryan is known as a steady leader who values pragmatic innovation. She was recruited as a board member for several committees for Scott Valley Bank, which was acquired in 2018. Currently, she is an audit committee member with the Flora Family Foundation and a founding board member and secretary of the Finance and Accounting Consulting Alliance (FINACA). Her focus on technology and teams aided RoseRyan's pandemic pivot when the firm shifted to remote work during two weeks in March 2020. Since that time, the award-winning firm has surged ahead with growth, increasing revenues by 35% last year.

What has been the biggest factor in your success so far?

My favorite career achievement is having built a company that I'm proud of. Launched in 1993 to create a place that I wanted to work at, RoseRyan is a ZRG company with a year-over-year 35% growth rate in revenue. We guide companies to greatness through our consulting and advisory services in finance, and we've been hitting new highs during the last six quarters. What I'm most proud of about RoseRyan's growth, however, goes far beyond the numbers: it's our company culture, an initiative that's roughly 12 years strong. We adopted four cornerstone values that have fueled our success and made growth sustainable.

What advice would you offer to someone new to the consulting industry?

My best advice is to view consulting as an art: yes, one must be competent in the field, wielding a high degree of proficiency and mastery over the subject matter, but outstanding consulting is so much more than expertise. A great consultant listens, takes risks, builds rapport, delivers good and bad news and is authentic. Work on these soft skills just as much as the technical to succeed in consulting of any kind.

What do you enjoy most about your career in the consulting industry?

In addition to the opportunity to start and build my own successful company, I've loved consulting for its diverse experiences. There's never a dull moment, as the saying goes. Through consulting, I've benefited from varied work in a wide range of industries. And, I like the many interesting and changing roles that I get to play.

In addition to the above variety, the work itself is always changing, the challenges keep coming and the ups and downs keep it exciting. Some of my favorite clients are those that we helped grow from stage to stage: it's rewarding to point to a company that's now famous and say, "We were their first CFO!"

What's the best advice you've ever been given?

Early in my career, I was working as an employee in Quantum's accounting and finance area, when I heard a piece of advice from a VP of engineering that stuck: incremental progress over postponed perfection. It's one piece of advice that I've leaned in to again and again, in all sorts of business situations and economic cycles. In today's world, everyone is working in a river of change, making this adage more salient: Incremental steps make course corrections easier and they facilitate risk-taking. If you wait around for something to be perfect, you're not going to accomplish much. I don't look back that much but when I do, I see how all the smaller steps have yielded so much.

What does being honored as a Women Leader in Technology mean to you?

When I was rising through the ranks of a Big 4 accounting firm and working in public accounting, women were rarely found in leadership positions. I'm pleased that women in tech, and in many fields, are entering a better environment than I first encountered yet we know how much more work there is to be done.

At RoseRyan, we've been at the forefront of women leading in accounting and finance consulting for years – founded by women, our firm has enjoyed women in top leadership positions since 1993. In 2019, we were selected as one of the Best Firms for Technology by Accounting Today, and we continue to push the envelope on digital delivery, AI integration and the adoption of tech.

I'm not a fan of change for change's sake but I've never been one to sit idly by and let change happen to me and that's how I've led RoseRyan. We stay abreast of the trends affecting our work and prudently assess how to adapt. We experiment in many areas of the business, and we communicate with our workforce about what's afoot. We also do a lot of strategic planning. It paid off handsomely when Covid hit, allowing us to quickly move to remote work. This honor drives home how much we owe to RoseRyan's core values of team, trust, advocacy, and excellence because they ground us as we continue to lead, innovate and prosper.