Long before June, when Saslow, Lufkin & Buggy moved its office from Avon to Simsbury, its partners explored all options for a possible location including downtown Hartford, where the accounting and consulting firm got its start in 1993.
In the end, Saslow Lufkin & Buggy decided to stay in the suburbs, despite having significant business with large insurance and healthcare clients in downtown Hartford, said Glenn Saslow, audit partner and director of the firm’s insurance practice group.
The rationale? A bigger part of the company’s business comes from national clients and the firm felt the new office at 175 Powder Forest Drive in Simsbury provides easy enough access to Bradley International Airport. The location is also convenient for employees, many of whom live nearby.
“For employees, it’s easier parking [and] you have all the things you need in the suburbs … that you have in downtown Hartford, minus the traffic,” said Saslow, adding that the Simsbury location is also near restaurants and shopping, as well as running and bike trails.
City versus suburbs is a question many companies face at one point or another, but it’s particularly important for accounting firms, which often prefer a location near clients and the center of commercial activity.
CPA firms must weigh the relative ease or difficulty in visiting clients against the ability to get to the offices of other business services firms — for instance, attorneys with whom they often work — and balancing those considerations with employees’ commutes.
“Accounting firms are a little different than law firms,” said Frank Longobardi, regional managing partner for CohnReznick, which is consolidating its Farmington and Glastonbury offices and moving to downtown Hartford’s Metro Center by December. “With law firms, you find that most of the clients will come into the law firm for meetings. With accounting firms, because of the type of work that we do, much of our work is done at the client site … Obviously, being in the center of Hartford you can go in any direction.”
CohnReznick is investing $4.5 million to refurbish and make improvements to its new 350 Church St. offices, where it will house about 200 employees in 50,000 square feet.
Some academics have studied the subject of CPA office locations, including UConn’s Center for Real Estate and Urban Economic Studies, which identified rent, transportation, and building characteristics among the primary considerations in addition to client, employee and vendor access.
Meantime, in 70 percent of the cases studied last year by researchers at the University of Missouri, auditors had their office in the same city as the headquarters of the company contracting their services.
All Big Four auditing firms — Deloitte, PwC, Ernst & Young, and KPMG — have offices within a few blocks of each other in downtown Hartford. That’s not all that surprising because their client base rests heavily on large publicly traded companies that call Hartford home including Aetna, Travelers, The Hartford and United Technologies Corp., among others.
But of the 14 larger, regional firms in Greater Hartford, only Marcum LLP and Whittlesey & Hadley have city offices right now.
Whittlesey & Hadley, which moved multiple times within the Capital City over the past half-century-plus, recently sold its Charter Oak Avenue office building to occupy 25,500 square feet in 280 Trumbull St., a prime center-city location, across from the XL Center.
“We … thought about where we wanted to be, because we did have an open opportunity,” said Drew Andrews, Whittlesey & Hadley’s managing partner. “It was a unanimous decision by the partners to stay in Hartford. There are multiple reasons, but I think the key reason was we believe … the majority of our business contacts are located in the city.”
Downtown Hartford also provides relatively equal access for employees on all sides of Hartford’s commute, Andrews added. His own drive from Avon is about 35 minutes at peak hours.
“There’s nowhere that you have the concentration of potential business contacts that you do in downtown Hartford,” Andrews said. “When I go out to lunch today, on the street I’m going to bump into somebody. It almost happens every day, and it’s not the same person every day. A lot of times, if we’re not doing business with them it creates a reaction that maybe we should talk to each other about how we can help each other.”
Meantime, Saslow said his firm pays higher rent in Simsbury than it would in an equivalent office space in downtown Hartford. Still the allure of less traffic was hard to pass up.
“Businesses don’t have to be in skyscrapers to succeed,” Saslow said. “Sometimes an unconventional location encourages growth.”
