Our Story > [Philosophy]
Cotton & Company is not a typical CPA firm. Our specialized practice focus sets us apart. Our professional philosophy makes us unique.
Philosophies
We believe that the foundation upon which the CPA profession built its “most-trusted professional” reputation is independence. Cotton & Company does not just strive to maintain independence, we insist on being fiercely independent. We do not take on consulting engagements for any audit clients. We do not do any audit work for consulting clients. We will walk away from any client who tries to compromise our objectivity and independence. Two other guiding philosophies that have contributed to our success are the views that
- Work should be fun, and
- A healthy work-life balance must be maintained.
Armed with the knowledge that (due to our experience and expertise) we can win more than our share of competitive engagements, we specifically seek out and pursue engagements that offer intellectual challenge, exciting travel opportunities, and just plain fun. We look for jobs that we think our employees will find stimulating, attention absorbing, and knowledge-enhancing.
Many CPA firms demand that employees work long hours and achieve high chargeable hour goals, and many accountants and auditors believe that long hours are simply to be expected when working at a CPA firm. Cotton & Company believes that employees should strike an optimum balance between challenging and rewarding work and a healthy family and social life. Most Cotton & Company employees find their work sufficiently challenging to make their workdays intense, stimulating, and productive. We also encourage employees to participate in extracurricular activities, from professional association involvement and community service, to the company softball team and the occasional happy-hour gathering.
In a fast-paced professional services firm, there will, of course, be times during the year when engagement events or milestones require extra hours and effort. Our continued success has also brought us complex and challenging engagements that are more demanding in terms of time commitments than others. So, some of our team members will put in longer hours than others. Our professionals meet these challenges. In addition, we have employees who seek out extra assignments and sometimes work longer-than-average hours. On balance, however, we want employees to work reasonable hours. The breakdown of average total hours per week by staff level over the past few years is as follows:
| 2014 | 2015 | 2016 | |
| Staff | 41.14 | 41.63 | 41.50 |
| Senior | 41.01 | 42.37 | 41.84 |
| Supervisory Senior | 41.67 | 42.62 | 42.45 |
| Manager | 41.63 | 43.44 | 44.57 |
| Senior Manager | 43.01 | 44.25 | 43.71 |
We want Cotton & Company to be a challenging, rewarding, and fun place to build a professional career. We have never, and will never, set chargeable hour “goals” or “quotas.”
