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A Message from Our PresidentPresident Joel S. Smith, CMA, CPA Our Mission: "To provide our membership with the education, network and tools to help them achieve their career goals and aspirations." THREE TIMES IS THE CHARM!! Welcome back from the summer recess. We are about to kick off the 2008-2009, and my third term as the President of the Chapter. We not only met our goals for last year, but had exceeded them by far, racking up a total of five awards , including three Gold Medals for our newsletter, our website, and for member acquisition. We once again won a banner for the chapter competition, but this year we moved up from 21 st place to 6 th place in the Stevenson Division, and we were awarded the Carter Award (for the most improvement in the division over the prior three year average) for the second year in row. We have gained incredible momentum over the last couple of years and intend to keep building on it this year. I want to outline our programs that we will be conducting and/or forming in the year ahead. If you see anything that inspires you, we always welcome your input and highly encourage you to get involved. Our programs are only limited by the amount of man power we can muster up to execute them. The more people we have pitching in, the more successful our programs will be. I promise you that you will get out of it what you put in to it. We are in the final stages of planning for our Excel Sessions again this year. We are really going all out this year. The Excel Masters Program that we helped to create in Palo Alto last year is being moved to the Oakland Robert Half Office in order to make it more centrally located to the San Francisco Chapter and the other chapters in the East Bay, and we are hoping to use it to help the Golden West Council revitalize the Oakland East Bay Chapter. We are still going to be conducting our Excel Certification Series . We hope to improve on it by running the Specialist and Expert Sessions in two different eight week blocks rather than having one session of each once a month. We hope this format will help people better prepare for the certification tests. One thing that is remaining the same is that we wish to ask that everyone who took one of our courses last year to please consider leading a session this year. It is a great way to give back to the chapter, and it will also help you come to understand the material better than you ever could merely as a student. Speaking of the test, we are still searching for a place to set up a testing center here in San Francisco. We do have a couple of avenues we are exploring. We just need to work out a few logistics. We will keep you posted. Our CMA study group is still humming along nicely. There seems to be a slight increase in price in the Lambers materials, and we will most likely make purchasing a disc of exam questions from Gleim a part of the program. The two together will be less than $150.00 per part. This is still by far the most economical way to prepare for this exam, and you get a chance to interact with others who are taking the exam. We have been holding these sessions on Tuesday and Thursday nights at Golden Gate University. Unfortunately, GGU has informed us that they will not be able to provide a room on Tuesday nights for the upcoming semester, so we will be dropping down to one night a week for now, until we find a place to have our Tuesday night sessions again. If you are interested in the program, or if you have any ideas of where we might be able to hold our Tuesday night sessions, please contact Harry Massouda at harry@resourceanddesign.com , or by phone at 415-777-0202, ext. 249. We know we have been promising to roll out an Ethics course to satisfy the 2 hour a year requirement for CMA’s/CFM’s for months now. I am happy to say that we have the course purchased, a pizza place located to hold the sessions, and someone willing to lead the sessions who has previous experience in holding these courses. We expect to get the final details worked out and to announce a date and time for this sometime over the next month. We are so happy with the success of our programs over the last couple of years that we are willing to take a stab at an old meeting format that we had given up on a few years back. We are very excited about the prospects of reinstituting the technical meeting format, consisting of a dinner meeting with a guest speaker, a good meal and a networking hour to get to know our fellow chapter members. Our first meeting is going to be a joint meeting with the San Francisco Chapter of the American Society of Women Accountants on August 20 th . The topic is going to be “Seeing the Big Picture in Your Career” . Be sure to look for the details in this newsletter. Realizing that this format was not a very big draw for our chapter in the past, we are hoping the lessons from our Excel programs can help turn this around. We intend to keep the focus very narrow, on a topic that everyone in the chapter should be able to relate to: Career Management. Since we all have careers in accounting, and obviously an interest in furthering our careers (why else would you belong this organization?), we thought that a series of lectures on various aspects of career enhancement would be something that everyone can get something from. Some of the topics considered for this include ensuring career advancement within your organization, developing leadership skills, securing that promotion, balancing work and home life, etc. We hope to get your feed back on this. Do you have any ideas on topics regarding career management you would like to see discussed? Please contact Tashia Flucas at mstashia@hotmail.com with your thoughts and ideas. We have another program in the early stages of discussion. A couple of years back the Silicon Valley Chapter came up with the idea of having a Controllership Class based on the PPC Controllership Guide. It was a very popular idea and there was a lot of energy surrounding it, but due to personnel issues, it never got off the ground. We here at the San Francisco Chapter liked the idea so much that we decided to revisit the concept and are currently working towards bringing this program into existence. Although we have heard of other Excel Courses, and other Ethics Courses, other ways of studying for the CMA exam, no one we have talked to has ever heard of a course on controllership. We would love to hear from all of you controllers out there to get your input on this. We also would like to hear from all of you that are striving for such a position to let us know that we are on the right track with this. Please contact Joel Smith at jsmith@lautze.com , with your thoughts, suggestions, ideas, contacts, or just to say keep me in mind for the class. Next on the agenda, we are taking steps to create student chapters at two local universities; San Francisco State University and Golden Gate University. We believe the key to the future of the organization is to make sure that students are aware of us and what we can mean for their careers. This chapter has been in existence for nearly 88 years now. We want to be sure that we are here for at least another 88. Finally, we are still very excited about the concept of having a Sister Chapter-Hood with the Turkey Chapter in Istanbul, Turkey. Things are going a little slower with this than we originally hoped for, but we have people on each side of the Atlantic dedicated to the idea. As we rev up for this New Year, I want to re-iterate what I have been saying all along. You will get out of this chapter what you put into it. Please feel free to get involved. If you think that certain things should be done differently or have ideas you would like to see explored, we are open to hearing them. Better yet, if you have an idea for a program that serves the purpose of promoting education, career enhancement or networking among the career accountant, we will give you the platform to try to bring your idea into reality if you are willing to put in the effort to make it happen. This is your organization. You pay money to be a part of it. This is your chapter. Make it work for you. Joel S. Smith - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
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