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Strategic Growth Associate

Remote - US

About the Company
Ascend empowers entrepreneurial CPAs to reach their goals with an innovative growth model that brings their firms into the new age. Backed by private equity from people-focused Alpine Investors, Ascend is building a modern platform for regional accounting firms that enables them to stay independent while accessing the resources of a large CPA firm to help them grow. Ascend provides access to growth capital, robust talent acquisition, best-of-breed technology, a catalytic leadership system, shared back-office services, and modernized equity incentives so that firms can surmount today’s industry challenges and reach their full potential. Founded in January 2023, the company attained revenues sufficient to qualify it as a Top 100 U.S. accounting firm within six months of operation. For more information, visit ascendtogether.com.


About Alpine Investors
Alpine Investors is a people-driven private equity firm that is committed to building great companies by working with, learning from, and developing exceptional people. Alpine prides itself on fostering cultures where people value empowerment, diversity, fairness, integrity, and intellectual honesty. Founded in 2001, Alpine specializes in investments in companies in the software and services industries. Alpine has over $15 billion in AUM and has offices in San Francisco, New York, and Salt Lake City.


For more information on the firm, visit www.alpineinvestors.com 

Position Summary
The Strategic Growth team at Ascend is tasked with implementing the Ascend Growth Model at our partner firms. They ensure cross-functional alignment of goals and execution, utilizing various growth levers: pricing, service line expansion, offshore operations and new business deal and demand generation to drive organic growth at our partner firms. Reporting to the Vice President of Strategic Growth, the Strategic Growth Associate will be a force multiplier to the strategic growth team, helping establish an ecosystem of repeatable analysis, content and training programs that drives organic EBITDA growth at the acquired firms. This role represents a unique opportunity for an individual to join a startup Company with ambitious goals, yet one that has the sophistication, resources, and leadership caliber of a much larger firm. The Strategic Growth Associate will work in an exciting, fast-paced, and entrepreneurial environment, and will help promote a team-oriented culture that values treating people well! 

Key Relationships
•Reports to: Vice President, Strategic Growth
•Relationships with key stakeholders: Ascend Regional Presidents, Partner firm CGOs and CEOs, Ascend Offshore Team.

Key Responsibilities:

Working with the Vice President of Strategic Growth, the Strategic Growth Associate will be responsible for the following: Assisting VP, Strategic Growth with Organic Growth Lever Development and Deployment including:

•Deeply understanding the value proposition, the “why”, the “what” and the “how” of each element of the Ascend Growth Model (“AGM”)
•Leading the creation of all AGM content & collateral; tell clear and compelling stories with PowerPoint and data analysis in Excel
•Pricing: Assisting with pricing due diligence, analysis & storytelling.
•Pricing: Project manage the development of future state pricing models and working directly with CPAs to design new pricing models that solves their problems.
•Offshore: Assisting our offshore team’s deployment across Ascend’s Partner Firms. This will entail creating clear collateral, analyzing and acting on operating KPIs, and ensuring Partner Firms arefollowing our offshore firm’s “make it easy” playbook.
•Offshore: Digging into the financial and operational KPI reporting coming from our offshore firm to improve the reporting and identify areas to improve performance.
•New Business/Demand Generation: Partnering with VP, Strategic Growth to develop & deploy playbook that unlocks stellar new business results.
•New Service Lines: Partner with VP, Strategic Growth to develop & deploy new service lines.
Assisting the Strategic Growth team with other ad hoc priorities including:
•Supporting the Regional Presidents, and, occasionally, the CGOs in high visibility growth-related projects.
•Assisting the VP, Strategic Growth with event design, content creation and planning for key growth-related events.
•Growth planning for tuck-in M&A deals.
•Supporting growth-related technology research, listening tours, strategy-setting and deployment.
•Assisting in the preparation of presentations for Ascend’s investors, Board and executive team.
•Directly manage outside consultants to develop playbook content and collateral.
•Own the development & reporting of the core growth related metrics across the organization.
•Live-Out Ascend’s Values (specifically, “Own It” and “Be Excellent”) while contributing in the following ways across all domains of growth: data analysis, financial modeling, Research, Collateral creation, deployment resource creation, thought partnerships, and presentation preparation.

Education and Experience
•Bachelor’s degree is required.
•2-5 years of experience in management consulting, sales operations, business strategy, investment banking, venture capital, private equity, or similar strategic and operational roles.


Knowledge, Skills, and Abilities
•Accomplished professional with unquestionable integrity, strong work ethic, and demonstrated success implementing and improving processes.
•A ‘can-do’, solution-oriented individual and initiative-taking problem solver; intellectually curious, analytical, and committed to self-improvement.
•Exceptional organizational and time management skills, including the ability to prioritize tasks in a demanding environment. Able to initiate, manage, and execute projects with minimal supervision.
•Adept at generating insights that drive business decisions from Excel-based data analysis.
•Structured problem-solving skills, combined with insatiable curiosity.
•Excellent communication and presentation skills with the ability to take complex, ambiguous topics and turn them into compelling narratives for different audiences.

What You Can Count on at Ascend

We live by our values:
•Own it. We seize growth opportunities with the passion, speed, and accountability of an entrepreneur.
•Serve wholeheartedly. We love our people and serve them with positivity and kindness.
•Be excellent. We set a high bar because our mission matters.
•Win together. We stay in sync, achieve as a team, and celebrate each other.
•Bring the sunshine. We have fun and bring enthusiasm to make the journey joyful.

Compensation and Other
•Highly competitive compensation package, including attractive benefits.
•Start date is as soon as practicable.

 At Ascend, we provide a fair and equal employment opportunity for all candidates regardless of race, color, religion, national origin, gender, pregnancy, sexual orientation, gender identity/expression, age, marital status, disability, or any other legally protected characteristic. Ascend hires and promotes individuals solely based on qualifications for the position to be filled and business needs. (Can we add our benefits here?)

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