Success for All

Through his twelve years of coaching sports teams as his two sons grew up, Ted Rose witnessed some pretty exciting moments. There were times they won close games against tough rivals, and times they celebrated victory at championships. The best moments of all, however, were those times he knew the kids were rising to the next level. “There’s nothing like getting to the end of a season and receiving a letter from a player that says, in his own handwriting, that my belief in him is why he’s sticking with baseball,” Ted recounts today. “A letter that explains how none of his coaches wanted him, so he was assigned to my team, and it changed his life and made him love the sport again. That kid struck out a lot at the beginning of the season, but by the end, he hit a triple down the first base line that I’ll remember for the rest of my life. It was unbelievable.”

As a coach then, and now as the founder, President, and CEO of Rose Financial Services (RFS), Ted Rose believes in helping people bring the best out of themselves. “Rose Financial is built on this vision of success for all,” he explains. “We focus on the success of both our clients and our employees, and when those two things happen, our company can’t help but be successful.”

Ted launched RFS on October 1, 1994, and coined the term “Accounting Outsourcing” to describe how his firm took over these traditionally internal functions to allow companies to focus on their core competencies. And several months later, a Wall Street Journal article by Peter Drucker came out that changed the game for him. “At that time, I was still trying to convince organizations that the idea of Accounting Outsourcing was feasible,” Ted recalls. “The article predicted that it was the way of the future. It provided the fuel I needed to keep going, even when I was told by every CPA out there that the concept would never take hold.”

But take hold, it did. In the beginning, the firm worked primarily with companies in financial distress looking for innovative ways to improve. Ted’s success was tied to his clients’ success, and RFS was able to help them stabilize. “We helped some companies through Chapter 11, when not many were making it through,” he recounts. “Some of those companies are still around today.”

As the company grew, it began attracting growing companies, and Ted relished the unique challenges and successes of each client. “One company was given a stop-work order from its largest customer because it wasn’t financially compliant,” he recounts. “We were able to get them through several audits and help them come up with a plan to work their way out of the deficit and back to solid financial footing. They served 600 partially disabled individuals that didn’t have a clear path forward if the company failed, so success was paramount. While working with them over a five-year period, we were able to help them embrace change and move forward.”

The year of 2009 was a particularly pivotal year for RFS when it won a highly competitive accounts payable and expense management contract with Blackboard. Beating out eleven other firms globally, RFS committed to building a custom application using their workflow technology to save Blackboard over 30 percent while improving functionality. “That was the real pivot point for us,” Ted says. They built the application within ninety days of signing the agreement and included an extra accrual-based report that significantly reduced the amount of time the controller and assistant controller spent on payables and the month-end accrual. Over the years, as other companies expressed the need for a similar fix, RFS created RFSPayables, RFSPayments, RFSPurchasing, RFSCashreceipts, and RFSPayroll. The company’s solutions, now packaged as RFSWorkflow Suite, continue to evolve, so that today, it’s trademarking “Audit Ready All Year.”

Today, utilizing these innovative tools, RFS helps its clients succeed in their own missions by helping to improve their financial performance through financial clarity. The firm provides a cost-effective and scalable financial infrastructure that produces meaningful financial information and guidance that is timely and accurate while minimizing compliance-related risk. In essence, RFS is a shared service center for small- to mid-sized companies throughout the DC metropolitan area, with many clients nationwide and internationally as well. Half of these clients are government contractors, while 25 percent are commercial and 25 percent hail from the nonprofit sector. Now with over 40 employees, the firm has around 140 clients.

While the body of Ted’s work through RFS is numbers-based, its soul is all about people, and that begins with family. “I started off in this field, first and foremost, to provide for my family and the happiness of my two boys,” he says. “I wanted them to have everything they needed to live happy, productive lives and develop physically, mentally, emotionally, and spiritually.”

Ted’s eldest son is now a senior at Northwestern University, while his younger son is a freshman at Lehigh University. They earned places at the schools of their choice after twelve years of hard work—a work ethic passed down through generations of the Rose family. His grandmother, for instance, was a single mom raising her son in Manhattan, and always instilled in Ted the importance of work and discipline in life. It was the initial driver that later compelled him to dedicate his career to the idea of success for all.

From the time he was a young kid, Ted knew he wanted to do something great with his life. He wanted to push the envelope and be different—something that was perhaps inspired by the example set by his high-achieving parents. His father attended Columbia University for both undergraduate and graduate school, working under a professor who won the Nobel Prize for his theoretical work with masers, the forerunner to lasers. While calibrating a radio telescope amplified by a maser, he produced readings that showed a background radiation. Unfortunately, because they were recorded on military property, the military police seized the data for their link to national secrets. A few years later, a colleague reproduced those readings and was awarded the Nobel Prize for proving the Big Bang Theory. “My Dad was so close,” Ted says.

Ted’s mother was a trailblazer in her own right, going through medical school in the 1950s and 60s when women rarely did. “Watching both of them, I knew I wanted to do something that extended the capabilities of humankind in some way,” he recalls. “I had no idea what I’d focus on in life, but I knew I was going to do something.”

Ted was born in Boston while his father was an associate professor at MIT. His father, an astrophysicist, then got tenure at the University of Maryland College Park (UMCP) when Ted was three years old. Ted spent his formative years in Montgomery County, Maryland, with his older brother and younger sister. He did well in school until he began to lose interest, instead preferring to peruse the pages of the entrepreneur magazines his mother used to get. “I’d read them and get all these ideas,” he recalls. “I also loved playing golf with my dad, who was the most kindhearted person. And I liked working odd jobs, applying for my work permit when I was in sixth grade so I could get a job in a warehouse packing boxes. Once I was old enough, I always had a job.”

Ted’s priorities realigned, however, when he received his class rank for the first time. It was his junior year, and he discovered that he was in the bottom half of the class. “I had always figured I was smart, but I realized I wasn’t doing the work I needed to be successful,” he reflects. “It was a wakeup call that I was squandering the gifts I had been given. I knew what I was capable of, and that I needed to get to work.”

Ted buckled down and put in real academic effort for the first time and also got involved with Distributed Education, a business education program that culminated in a state-wide competition. When he was a senior, his team succeeded in winning a slew of awards at the competition, boosting Ted’s confidence as an aspiring businessman. He also pulled up his GPA and did well enough on his SATs to land a spot at the University of Maryland, College Park (UMCP), the school he had set his mind on. He earned a degree in accounting and wanted to be the best he could be, so he surveyed what was then the Big 8 accounting firms and decided to focus on Price Waterhouse for its high caliber reputation and record of excellence. His hard work paid off, and he landed his first job out of college at Price Waterhouse.

Before long, Ted realized he wanted to extend his scope beyond just accounting, so he enrolled in the R.H. Smith School of Business MBA program. Shortly after starting the program, he left Price Waterhouse and took a job with one of its clients, a publicly traded biotech company. Two years later, as he approached completion of his degree, he knew that 1994 would be a defining year for him. “The biotech company had a clinical trial due out that year,” he remarks. “Depending on the results, I would either be the controller of a $100 million company, or I’d be looking for a job.” The trial turned up inconclusive, and the company had licensed away the rights of its first product and wanted to start development of their second product. Ted was asked to find a CPA firm to take over as he transitioned out.

“Back in 1994, there weren’t any CPA firms set up to do operational accounting, and bookkeepers were not sophisticated enough to handle our needs,” he recounts. “I realized there had to be more companies out there in need of sophisticated accounting support, but without the resources for a fully staffed internal department. That’s where I got the idea for RFS.”

The company’s success bloomed in tandem with the growth and development of its employees, especially a woman named Allison. She started at RFS’ front desk after working as a nanny, committed to pursuing a professional career. Ted recognized a drive in her, and after she had absorbed the nuances of the business for several years, the company’s HR manager left. “I wanted to give her the opportunity to take that next step, so I hired an HR consultant to work with her on a weekly basis,” Ted says. “Within a year, she had had enough coaching and training, and she had invested her time in getting her HR credentials. For the next two years, we worked very closely together to implement HR policies.”

Through that time, the firm converted from one focused on providing services, into one focused on providing solutions to clients. That meant integrating the organization’s electronic workflow and other technologies into its service offering, which in turn meant big changes for the staff. “That was probably the biggest period of change that we went through as an organization,” Ted reflects. “It helped so much to have her by my side through that because she really helped bring people along, coaching them in what they needed to do differently for the firm—and for them—to be successful. She was a strategic advisor on top of managing the tactical executions from an HR perspective.”

Allison was nominated for one of the largest HR industry awards in the DC area, and on the night she walked up to receive the award in front of hundreds of admiring professionals, Ted couldn’t have been more proud. “It really epitomized what drives me—helping people find their success,” he says. “When clients go through tough times, we’re there. We share a relationship that we build over time. Our staff know they were hired to go above and beyond in solving our clients’ problems and helping them succeed in their mission and business through improving their financial performance.”

The effectiveness of this philosophy has not gone unnoticed. In 2010, the Black Book of Outsourcing survey of global customer satisfaction reviewed 30,000 outsourcing engagements and rated RFS as the top finance and accounting outsource firm in the world. “DC was just starting to experience the Great Recession at that time,” he recalls. “It was a euphoric feeling quickly followed by a sense of stern purpose, because from that moment onward, I knew customers would be coming to us with the expectation of being served by the number one finance and accounting outsource firm in the world. It was a whole different ballgame. John Wooden said, ‘It takes talent to win a championship, but character to repeat.’ My focus now is on the character that maintains the excellence, and this past year, we were named the most innovative accountancy firm in the US by Acquisition International Magazine.”

When it comes to character, however, nothing comes above the love and pride he has for his sons, and the care he’s poured into their upbringing. He was there for their births and very first breaths; for countless recitals and games played by their baseball, basketball, and flag football teams. And he still remembers fondly that moment of euphoria when they got into their dream schools. “I love to relive those memories together and know that I did everything I could to help them develop,” he says.

In advising them and other young people entering the working world today, Ted emphasizes the importance of owning your own experience. “Professional development doesn’t happen between the hours of 9:00 AM and 5:00 PM,” he explains. “Most of the breakthroughs I’ve had professionally have happened when I’m putting in that extra effort after hours or on the weekends. It’s in those off-hours that I have the time to ask, how do we take things to the next level?”

To get to that next level, however, Ted always starts with the first step—a technique he honed as a coach on the baseball field all those years ago. “What’s the fundamental building block of success?” he asks. “It’s not about giving people what they want—it’s giving people what they really need. And what they really need, first and foremost, is self-confidence and knowing that their destiny is in their own hands. Once they understand that, they control where they go in life. And if they have the will and drive, they can be successful.”

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