Summary: Family is often defined as, “People who support and hopefully love you and the people you confide in and trust.” Denny discusses what makes us a CLA Family and asks us to embrace it, continuing to create a supportive environment where we create opportunities for our clients, our people and the communities we live in.<br> Narrator: Welcome to “Own The Promise,” a CLA podcast created to share what guides every decision we make and every relationship we cultivate.<br> [00:00:14]<br> Denny: Hello, CLA family. This is Denny coming to you in September in 2018, obviously at the end of our summer at CLA. I hope all of you enjoyed a wonderful Labor Day weekend, which did officially mark the end of summer. What I plan to do–hopefully, all of you have received an invitation for a live stream that we’re gonna be presenting to the firm on September 11th.<br> This is the first time we are trying to do this in a live session where I will have the opportunity to come to the entire CLA family and really give all of you an update on what I believe is the success of the summer at CLA as well as where we are at year-to-date and also where I think CLA is headed, not only for the rest of 2018, but into 2019.<br> I hope all of you can find the time, be it if you’re in an office, at a client, or at home, to join us for that live stream on September 11th. In over the last probably two months or so, I continuously have had this good feeling, and obviously a good feeling about what has happened within CLA. But I’ve tried to narrow it down a little bit more for myself–where is that good feeling coming from?<br> [00:01:34]<br> And the more I’ve thought about that, I really have come down to this idea of the CLA family. Just as I’ve addressed you today and I do on all of my podcasts, addressing you as the CLA family, I really wanted to dig into that a little bit further if I could. The reality of the CLA family and all of us–and I do believe it’s almost all of us referring to ourselves as the CLA family–it really started back at the end of 2016.<br> I very consciously decided to start calling us the CLA family, but I was a bit apprehensive, to be honest with all of you. I didn’t know if that would come off, somehow, disingenuous. I thought maybe some of you would look at that and say, “I have my own family, and CLA is not it.” I was worried about those types of reactions.<br> [0:02:35]<br> And I have been so incredibly impressed with how all of you have really embraced the true meaning of that family. I even went back and I looked–I always like doing this when I kinda wanna think through why things affect me the way they do, so I go back to some of the meanings, and I look up definitions. If you really just go to the basic meaning of a family, we all know that it can–and CLA is proving this–that it can go beyond blood relation.<br> It’s really defined as “family consists of the people who support and hopefully love you and the people you can confide in and trust.” Simple definition of family. And I think that relates so well to what is happening at CLA and how all of us are really treating one another. But with that family obviously comes certain values that a family has.<br> [00:03:35]<br> Again, if you were just to look this up, you would see things such as a family being honest and trustworthy with one another, being courageous, never giving up, adding value to the world, being patient, taking personal responsibility. And when I see these types of moral values, what I think about is that’s exactly what CLA’s promise is, although we use different language. We talk about being owners.<br> We talk about being leaders. We talk about being entrepreneurial people. We talk about being accountable, and we’ve all heard that definition of being accountable,
