Who Is RSM McGladrey? In the middle of the Roaring Twenties in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, an ambitious…

Who Is RSM McGladrey?

In the middle of the Roaring Twenties in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, an ambitious young accountant named Ira B. McGladrey started his own firm by buying out his employers’ seven-person operation and adding a couple of one person branch offices around the state. Ten years later, after pulling through the Great Depression, the company added two new partners—George Hansen and Keith Dunn—and began a decades-long period of growth and expansion. Company founder McGladrey remained an active partner in the firm and a leader in the accounting profession until his death in the 1950s.
By the 1970s McGladrey, Hansen, Dunn & Company, as it was by then called, had 29 offices in eight states and had added consulting services to its client offerings. Two big mergers in ten years helped the company more than double in size, adding 12 more states to its range of operations and extending its offices from the East Coast to the West Coast and from Minnesota to Florida. In 1987 the company changed its name to McGladrey & Pullen, and since 1999 it has operated as two separate and independent business partners, RSM McGladrey and McGladrey & Pullen LLP.
RSM McGladrey offers financial accounting, tax, and business consulting. Some of its services are assisting with bankruptcy and reorganization, assisting with payroll fulfillment, setting up retirement plans, performing business valuation, assisting with mergers and acquisitions, e-accounting, making financial projections and modeling, and reviewing operations for efficiency and productivity. McGladrey & Pullen LLP is a partner-owned CPA firm that offers tailored and industry-specific auditing services.
Together, the two firms make up the country’s fifthlargest provider of accounting, tax, and business consulting services and employ more than 8,000 professionals and associates in 120 offices around the United States.
They also hire several hundred interns and entry-level employees every year. The partner firms specialize in working with medium-sized companies in industries ranging from construction to real estate, financial services, health care, auto dealerships, and manufacturing. Other clients include not-for-profits and government agencies.
Both firms are members of RSM International, a worldwide affiliation of accounting and consulting firms operating in 70 countries. Thus, they are able to help clients with all sorts of international accounting questions, whether customers are simply looking for best practices from around the world to use or getting ready to take the big step and expand their operations overseas.
RSM McGladrey also operates the RSM McGladrey Institute, which supports accounting research, holds public forums on accounting and auditing concerns, and provides professional research and educational materials to students and the media about accounting, auditing, and the stock market. The firm recently began distributing to its clients the results of its annual survey of almost 1,000 U.S. CEOs and CFOs representing different-sized companies in various industries. The survey explores current business conditions and global opportunities and includes a jobs forecast.

1. What historical and economic factors do you think might have contributed to the growth and expansion of the accounting industry, and Ira McGladrey’s firm, from the Great Depression to the present day?

2. Do you think it’s a good idea for RSM McGladrey and McGladrey & Pullen LLP to operate as separate firms? Why or why not? How might the arrangement benefit the two firms’ clients?