Karen: This is PKF Texas, Entrepreneur’s Playbook. I’m Karen Love, hosting co-founder. Today I’m here with Scott Soles, an audit director at PKF Texas and we’d like to welcome Scott back to the Playbook. Welcome back Scott.
Scott: It’s always nice to be here Karen.
Karen: Thank you. Well you know we broached on the topic of enterprise risk management which is your guru-ness if you’ll allow me to say that. So I’d like to know about what the process is, a little bit more of the particular set of skills it takes to do that because I think that if I were in the audience I would not know what that means. So I need you to kind of elucidate for us, please.
Scott: Okay. Depending on who you might get to answer that question they’d say no skill is required which is the greatest way to keep it simple. There are some aptitudes that are mostly soft. A lot of the skill actually comes from within the organization itself. My skill and the way that I add value is that I help improve the conversation with people that are involved from the company which is a necessity for it to be successful and I help them provide sort of a framework to do that. I mean some of the tools with enterprise risk management would include in the risk assessment, first, establishing what’s important for the organization, the goals and objectives and the criteria. What do you want to accomplish? It could be anything even in your personal life.
Karen: So you use them to come up with the answers?
Scott: That’s right. They have to have that. That’s not mine.
Karen: Okay, got it.
Scott: I don’t come in there and tell them what to do as a company. They tell me.
Karen: And entrepreneurs would like that.
Scott: Yeah, it’s great. Well I can give the ideas also but yeah, it’s first and foremost. It’s important to understand what your objectives are. Then you set sort of criterias and measures around things that are important, materiality levels and so forth. What would impact that goal or that objective that’s important to you? Just a few things.
Karen: Fantastic.
Scott: Then you start by identifying lists of scenarios or issues that could come up that would either prevent you from accomplishing those goals or be a risk to achieving those goals in some way and you evaluate those in a number of ways. It can get very involved or simple.
Karen: It seems like it’s a very in-depth process that comes very naturally to you because your particular set of skills. So what we’d like to do is have you back and delve into that a little bit more and maybe even talk about the industries that you can help with that.
Scott: You bet. I’d love to do that.
Karen: Okay. Well thank you. Look forward to that. Well this has been another Thought Leader Production brought to you by PKF Texas, Entrepreneur’s Playbook. So tune in next week for another chapter.