About

The organization was formed in the early 1980’s during the consulting engineering industry insurance crisis. At that time many firms were having significant difficulty obtaining E & O insurance at a reasonable price or even at all.  In addition, IRS was making a serious challenge to the use of cash basis for tax purposes that would affect a large number of firms.  A number of the senior financial officers of the larger firms decided to meet together to determine alternative approaches to address theses issues.

There are now approximately 40 member firms. A loose membership criterion has been established to have member firms with 750 + employees although for a variety of reasons, not every current member firm reaches that threshold. Most of the member firms are privately held although there are a few publicly traded member firms.  About half to two thirds of the members will attend any given meeting.  The attendees are typically the CFO, Corporate Controller or similar position titles in order to keep the discussions at a strategic or senior management level.

The Cutler Group does the meeting planning and prepares the agenda. The agenda topics are member driven.  Members decide each meeting on a list of topics of general interest.  From that we find “experts” in the field of interest and set the agenda based on availability of expert resources.  We ask the “experts” to prepare a brief presentation on the topic and then spend the majority of the time in roundtable discussion with the members.

Members benefit from the ability to regularly discuss with peers important issues facing the industry and to determine best practices.  The limited membership allows meetings to average about 35 participants which enables more roundtable discussions than is typically possible in larger seminar type settings. The meetings provide the opportunity for face to face discussion as well as individual networking.  Members get to know one another making individual contact between meetings to discuss specific issues more meaningful.

Meetings are held twice a year, one in the spring and one in the fall. The meetings start at 1:00 PM on Monday generally covering two discussion topics until 5:00 PM.  Then there is a reception and dinner on Monday evening providing networking opportunities for the members attending.  On Tuesday there is breakfast followed by a business meeting to set the next meeting time, place and agenda and then discussion on two or three topics of interested according to the agenda.  The meeting is adjourned at 12:00 pm.