Manager, Technology Integration

About Ascend

Ascend empowers entrepreneurial CPAs to reach their goals with an innovative growth model that brings their firms into the new age. Backed by private equity from people-focused Alpine Investors, Ascend is building a modern platform for regional accounting firms that enables them to stay independent while accessing the resources of a large CPA firm to help them grow. Ascend provides access to growth capital, robust talent acquisition, best-of-breed technology, a catalytic leadership system, shared back-office services, and modernized equity incentives so that firms can surmount today’s industry challenges and reach their full potential. Founded in January 2023, the company attained revenues sufficient to qualify it as a Top 100 U.S. accounting firm within six months of operations.

For more information, visit ascendtogether.com.

About Alpine Investors

Alpine Investors is a people-driven private equity firm that is committed to building great companies by working with, learning from, and developing exceptional people. Alpine prides itself on fostering cultures where people value empowerment, diversity, fairness, integrity, and intellectual honesty. Founded in 2001, Alpine specializes in investments in companies in the software and services industries. Alpine has over $15 billion in AUM and has offices in San Francisco, New York, and Salt Lake City.

For more information on the firm, visit www.alpineinvestors.com

Position Summary

Reporting to the Chief Information Officer, the Manager of Technology Integration will own the end-to-end execution of the IT portions of integrating new Partner Firms into the Ascend tech ecosystem. To make this happen, they will work with a variety of internal and external stakeholders as well as vendors and have exceptional communication skills to deliver a "red carpet" experience to new partner firms as they join the Ascend family.

This role offers the opportunity to work fully remote.

Key Responsibilities

Working with the Chief Information Officer, the Manager of Technology Integration will be responsible for the following:

• Building a technology onboarding playbook for partner firms to enable a trouble-free onboarding process, this would require:
• Providing a clear due diligence checklist to gather the required information about the partner firms’ technology stack.
• Creating a scalable and repeatable 60-day migration plan for partner firms that includes infrastructure stack, security, Workday, Salesforce, CCH and other standard components.
• Creating communication channels that ensure the current state of implementation is clearly reported to key stakeholders.
• Serving as the liaison between Ascend, partner firms and vendors, overseeing:
• Effectively managing vendor relationships by identifying and onboarding vendors to incorporate into Ascend’s Integration project planning and execution platform.
• Working to establish a preferred network of field technicians to ensure repeatable high-quality outcomes.
• Establishing vendor performance scorecards to measure vendors on quality and cost benchmarks.
• Executing Partner Firm Integration Actions:
• Building a continuous feedback mechanism to ensure onboarding experience by Partner Firms retains the “Red Carpet” experience Ascend aims to deliver.
• Setting up a formal retrospective process to ensure feedback is incorporated into future projects to ensure continuous improvement.
• Developing an NPS reporting methodology with a goal of achieving a 70+ NPS score in Year 1 with quarterly reporting to Senior Management.
• Other responsibilities include:
• Creating a templatized Bill of Materials to deliver to hardware vendors so that all the right products are prepared, imaged and delivered to the partner firm offices.
• Building a set of Statements of Work to engage pre-selected vendors to perform the requisite installs/implementations.
• Creating a completion checklist to validate that all aspects of transition have been completed effectively.
• Communicating with all stakeholders involved in the partner firm integrations, ensuring that all parties are well coordinated and understand expectations and timelines.
• Fostering deep partnerships with the Ascend M&A team to ensure that there is a smooth handoff post-LOI as well as ensuring a clear indication of the acquisition pipeline for resource planning.
  

Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree in information technology; Master’s a plus.
  
  

Knowledge, Skills, And Abilities

• Accomplished professional with unquestionable integrity, a strong work ethic, and demonstrated success implementing and improving reporting processes.
• A ‘can-do’, solution-oriented individual and initiative-taking problem solver; intellectually curious, analytical, and committed to self-improvement.
• Exceptional organizational and time management skills, including the ability to prioritize tasks in a demanding environment. Able to initiate, manage, and execute projects with minimal supervision.
• Excellent verbal and written communication skills to maintain strong relationships with vendors and other integration stakeholders.
• Expertise in setting, monitoring, and achieving integration milestones and deliverables.
• Expertise in various infrastructure stacks (cloud, on-premises, hybrid) and their components.
• Familiarity with cybersecurity principles, data protection laws, and compliance requirements while evaluating current security measures and protocols at partner firms.
• In-depth knowledge of data conversion across enterprise applications such as Practice Management, ERP, CRM etc.
• Ability to engage and communicate effectively with key stakeholders, including executives, IT teams, and partner firm representatives.
• Ability to create comprehensive due diligence checklists to gather information about partner firms’ technology stacks and demonstrated ability to develop scalable and repeatable processes for IT integration.
• Ability to create detailed documentation for each step of the migration process including existing hardware, software and other network configurations.
• Ability to research, evaluate, and select vendors that align with the company’s integration needs and expertise in developing and implementing their onboarding processes to ensure a smooth start to the partnership.
• Skilled in negotiating terms and conditions to ensure favorable agreements.
• Familiarity with survey tools to create structured processes for gathering, analyzing, and responding to feedback and ability to implement and manage processes that ensure ongoing improvements based on feedback.At Ascend, we provide a fair and equal employment opportunity for all candidates regardless of race, color, religion, national origin, gender, pregnancy, sexual orientation, gender identity/expression, age, marital status, disability, or any other legally protected characteristic. Ascend hires and promotes individuals solely based on qualifications for the position to be filled and business needs.