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Atlanta Business Radio

Month: July 2013

Special Edition: Georgia Society of CPAs

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abr cpasToday’s episode focuses on Not For Profit Taxation and features guests who are members of the Georgia Society of CPAs.

Bill Harshman/Harshman Phillips & Company

Bill Harshman is a 30+ year CPA and co-founder of HPC. Prior to HPC, Bill spent 17 years rising through the ranks of a ‘Big 4’ firm, including 7 years as the Partner-In-Charge of the Atlanta Tax Department of Arthur Young & Company (‘AY’, predecessor to Ernst & Young). During his ‘Big 4’ tenure, he spent 2 years working directly under the AY US National Director of Tax, served on the AY National Tax Policy Group, and was an instructor for the AY Tax Management Training Program.

While at HPC, Bill has specialized in working with entrepreneurial and closely-held companies in the manufacturing, software, distribution, and food services industries. HPC clients have benefited from his expertise in tax planning, IRS representation, small business financing, and complex mergers and acquisition transactions.

Carlye Dooley/Windham Brannon, PC Linkedin

A principal with Windham Brannon’s tax division, Carlye specializes in complex multi-state service businesses, large not for profit organizations, and high net worth individual income tax planning and preparation. She performs and enjoys extensive projects on various accounting topics that require significant interpretation of tax law.

Specialization includes: Large Not-for-Profit Organizations; Complex Multi-State Tax Services; High Net Worth Individuals with Multi-State Returns.

Prior to joining Windham Brannon in 2002, Carlye gained valuable experience, including work with expatriates and international taxes while employed in the tax departments of the national firms of Arthur Andersen and Deloitte & Touche. She served as Vice Chair of the GSCPA Financial Literacy Committee in 2007 and 2008, and she assisted in the creationof Phi Sigma Pi Foundation, where she served as president, from 2005 to 2011.

Carlye earned a BBA in Accounting from Eastern Michigan University and a Masters in Taxation from Georgia State University.

Marc Azar/Smith & Howard, PC Linkedin

Marc is a Partner with Smith & Howard, an Atlanta accounting and advisory firm. He joined Smith & Howard 1995 after beginning his career with a Big 6 firm. He heads the tax side of the firm’s nonprofit practice, and spends a significant portion of his time in the nonprofit arena related to technical filing requirements of 990s and various tax matters facing nonprofits. In addition to his nonprofit focus, Marc has diverse experience providing income tax and business advisory services to a wide variety of businesses, individuals and estates.

Marc has been invited to make many presentations on the IRS Form 990 and other related nonprofit tax topics to groups. Marc is a Board and Audit and Compensation Committee member of Goodwill of North Georgia and Goodwill Industries of North Georgia. He serves on the Nonprofit Conference Committee of the Georgia Society of Certified Public Accountants, and was 2012 Chair of the Nonprofit Conference of the Georgia Society of Certified Public Accountants.

 

 

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Tom Brown with LexisNexis, Michael Mills with GolinHarris, Bob Trouteaud with Trouteaud Consulting Group, Derick Halliman with Mist H2O and Taube Ponce with Georgia Department of Economic Development

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Tom Brown/LexisNexis® Linkedin

Tom Brown is Senior Vice President, Financial Services, for the risk solutions business of LexisNexis®. He leads the development of product and market strategy for the financial services vertical, which includes solutions for anti-money laundering (AML), know your customer (KYC), fraud prevention, financial investigations, and first-party collections that are used by leading global banks and financial institutions. He joined LexisNexis in 2004

Brown has more than 20 years of experience in financial services, credit, and scoring. Before joining the organization, Brown was a principal at a New York City-area consulting firm, where he specialized in the development of profit-based analytics and strategies for the nation’s largest credit card issuers. Brown also has served as a Senior Vice President with First Data, where he managed scoring and credit risk products for First Data’s issuing clients. He began his career with First of America Bank Corporation, leading loan administration, loan review, and credit policy functions at both bank and holding company levels.

Brown graduated from Western Michigan University with a bachelor’s degree in finance and an MBA with a concentration in financial management. He has also pursued postgraduate study in economics.

Michael Mills/GolinHarris Twitter

Bob Trouteaud/Trouteaud Consulting Group LinkedinTwitter

For the past 25 years, Bob Trouteaud and his team of associates have delivered consulting services and customized training programs for major corporations, small businesses, and nonprofit agencies.

Today they’re helping companies meet the challenges of the changing face of today’s workforce and new economic realities. Their practical experience, sense of humor, and relaxed style provide the ideal consulting and learning environment for individuals and organizations who are serious about their performance success.

Derick Halliman/Lucid Enterprises/Mist H2O FacebookLinkedinTwitter

Taube Ponce/Georgia Department of Economic Development

With more than 10 years experience as an exporter, 10 years experience as an international business transactions paralegal, and six years experience with GDEcD, Taube Ponce has a wide variety of experience in the international trade arena to help her understand and work with Georgia companies on the exporting market.

Ms. Ponce’s international trade experience included positions as export manager at Zep Manufacturing, a specialty chemical manufacturer, and as Director of International Operations for Shop’n Chek, a company in the mystery shopping branch of market research.

As part of GDEcD’s International Trade team, Ms. Ponce helps Georgia companies expand and grow by marketing products or services overseas. She works with companies in the metro Atlanta region, as well as with chemical companies throughout the state.

Ms. Ponce was an integral part of the state’s efforts that netted Georgia federal State Trade and Export Promotion (STEP) Grants for 2012 and 2013 to help small businesses in the state expand their products and services internationally, and is the STEP Program Director in Georgia. Offered by the U.S. Small Business Administration, the STEP grant is a part of the National Export Initiative, which calls for doubling U.S. exports in five years.

Ms. Ponce holds a Bachelor’s degree from the State University of New York at Buffalo and a Master’s degree from Columbia University.

 

 

 

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Special Edition: TiE Atlanta Featuring TYE (TiE Young Entrepreneurs)

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Preet Shah

Rajan Bedi

Divya Chawla

Kishore Masand/Thundrlizard Kishore LinkedinKishore Twitter

Kishore Masand is an Entrepreneur and Technology expert. Currently, Kishore is a co-founder at Thundrlizard. Thundrlizard is part of the GA Tech Flashpoint accelerator program, building a next-generation tool for sales coaching and predictive analytics.

Kishore is a Charter member at TiE Atlanta and co-chair for TYE program. He is actively involved in community events promoting entrepreneurship.

 

 

 

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Ken Robbins with Response Mine Interactive, Steve Kapaun with TrainingPros, Perry Bell with Solar Energy USA and Brian Simon with Unishippers

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Ken Robbins/Response Mine Interactive (RMI) Ken Linkedin

Ken Robbins is the founder and president of Response Mine Interactive (RMI), an award-winning digital agency that helps clients acquire more customers using direct response digital marketing. RMI was founded in 2001 with the goal of taking hard-core direct response techniques and media optimization to Internet marketing.

For the past decade, Ken and his team have generated billions of dollars in revenue for leading brands in the B2B, healthcare, travel and home services channels. RMI is also a leader in acquiring boomers and seniors for clients. Some of the companies his agency has worked with include The Home Depot, Rooms To Go, Carter’s/Osh Kosh B’gosh, Liberty Medical, The Scooter Store, Education First Educational Tours, Maid Brigade, Terminix and formerly Staples, Travelzoo and Hallmark.

With more than 26 years of combined sales and marketing experience, Ken is a well-respected marketing guru and business strategist who has spoken at a variety of tradeshows, conferences and events.

Ken is also a sought-after marketing resource for a variety of leading industry publications. He is a contributor to the book, The Digital Media Innovation Playbook, that hit shelves in August 2011 and was featured on the cover of USA Today’s Money Section in the first article written using only Twitter. He was also quoted in the 2009 book, Socialnomics: How Social Media Transforms the Way We Live and Do Business and is a guest marketing and business lecturer at Emory University and The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania.

Steve Kapaun/TrainingPros Steve LinkedinTrainingPros Twitter

Steve Kapaun is the Founder and President of TrainingPros. They specialize in providing learning and development consulting talent to companies when they do not have the internal expertise or capacity to design, develop and deliver training solutions that improve the performance of their employees, the organization and the business. TrainingPros unique serves local markets through local relationship managers who are, themselves, learning and development practitioners having spent 15 – 20 years in the L&D industry managing the design, development and delivery of L&D programs.

Perry Bell/Solar Energy USA Solar FacebookSolar Twitter

Perry Bell is President and CEO of Atlanta-based Solar Energy USA. His previous career saw him as Co-President of one of the nation’s largest replacement window companies. Recognizing an opportunity in home energy efficiency and savings via the popular ENERGY STAR window offering, Perry made a transition and started an energy focused company. Now, as the head of two energy related companies, Perry is taking the experiences learned in the home improvement world and radically changing the way home and business owners look at paying for power. Solar Energy USA, his first renewable energy venture, is a national provider of Affordable Solar Solutions and the largest residential solar company in Georgia. Net Zero USA, the most recent undertaking, exists to help others understand how energy reduction and energy production can have dramatic effects on a power bill. The term “net zero” refers to a home or building that has zero net energy consumption, or produces 100% of its own energy needs, and Net Zero USA is showing the world how great it is to be energy independent.

Brian Simon/Unishippers

 

 

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Special Edition: Atlanta Tech Village

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Karen Houghton/Atlanta Tech Village 

The Atlanta Tech Village, established in 2012, is a community of innovation powered by a 103,000 square foot building located in Buckhead. The ATV is designed to service technology and technology-related companies that have a unique set of needs in their quest to change the world. Physical space should provide much more than just a desk and a place to hang your hat — it should bring the community together, promote serendipitous interactions, and be a powerful tool for recruiting the best talent.

Their mission is to support and inspire entrepreneurs to achieve success through a community that promotes faster connections between talent, ideas and capital. Together, they will fuel Atlanta’s rise to a top five tech startup center in the U.S.

Craig Hyde/Rigor 

Craig Hyde is responsible for product management, marketing, sales, and operations with Rigor. Craig was previously a Solution Consultant for Compuware/Gomez where he designed and implemented application performance solutions for the Fortune 100. Before that, he provided the Fortune 1000 and government agencies with systems to test and manage their networks as Regional Sales Manager for Network Orange. Craig is active in the Advanced Technology Development Center at Georgia Tech and can be found on the pitch with Atlanta Old White Rugby Football Club.

A native of Atlanta, Georgia, Craig earned a Bachelor of Science in Computer Engineering from the Georgia Institute of Technology.

Kevin Sandlin/deductmor, LLC 

Kevin Sandlin with deductmor, LLC has been in the Atlanta high-tech market for 20 years through 7 startups, 2 acquisitions, one IPO and 3 failures. He lives in Roswell with his wife and 2 kids, and loves to play golf.

Sandra Anderson and Melissa Davis/elev8 Hire Solutions 

Sandra Anderson was recruited to work for one of the top IT staffing and consulting firms in Atlanta. At MDI Group, she found her true passion-connecting top talent to the workplace. At MDI, she placed over 200 IT candidates in contract, permanent placement and project solutions initiatives.

Sandra believes the common thread for profitable, successful companies is hiring great employees and putting people first. Sandra created alliances and teamed up with some of the most respected, high producing recruiters to form elev8 Hire Solutions.

Melissa Davis began her thriving career at one of the industry’s premier Information Technology staffing and services providers, landing a promotion within her first year on staff at Matrix. Additionally, she earned the Employee of the Year in Operations award during her first year on the job. She was recruited to join Visionaire Partners where she achieved Top Performer distinction for the next four consecutive years. Melissa has placed approximately 240 candidates throughout her five-year career.

In summer of 2012, Melissa joined forces with Sandra Anderson, to build out elev8 Hire Solutions. Melissa brings her leadership and strength as a Top Recruiter to source developers, quality assurance, information systems, Data Warehouse, Business Intelligence, and Engineers.