TO KNOW THE PEOPLE GET
TO KNOW THE PEOPLE GET OUR GLOBAL NETWORK BEHIND Guest Michael Obernberger Partner, Steuerberater Host Pascal Lowther Key Account Manager Hi Michael, great to have you as my interview partner. Let`s start! What are the biggest challenges you are facing in your daily business? Nowadays my partner and I are dealing with digital transformation. Mainly for 2 reasons: first of all to ensure high quality solutions in a timely manner to our clients and on the other hand to take care of our responsibilities we do have for our employees. From employee perspective we like to contribute to a well balanced work/life ratio. Our main slogan is “Close2you” – to our customers and to our employees. Your company has developed its own app - what were the reasons for this extra service? This is linked to question 1 – digital transformation. It is very important to be at the clients side (or on his / her phone via the app) to ensure seamless services wherever needed. We hopefully can make our clients life more convenient related to our services. What has been biggest challenge in the DACH region regarding taxes and constellations? Biggest challenge we are facing is that due to the pandemic countries tended to think more national instead of international, like for covid subsidies, handling of home offices as permanent establishments, etc. Who would you like to swap a day within your professional life? I would like to be minister of finance, because I would love to simplify and streamline tax law – but 1 day is for sure far too short. 24 convinus.com
How has the pandemic affected your business? From an entrepreneurial view we faced the same problems as our clients did: how will this affect our business, how can we take care of, what measures need to be taken. From our client relation point of view it was important to guide clients trough this exceptional situation. Together with our employees – together as ARTUS – put a lot of effort to ensure the lowest possible impact to our clients due to this pandemic. This ended up in many additional working hours, eg applying for so many different subsidies offered by public institution. What we learned from pandemic is that being flexible is the key. This relates with home office and usage of all the IT possibilities in terms of digitalization (zooms, teams etc.). This also have impact to our organization in a way of leading/managing people as well as how to create a common goal, considering that we all are not in the office on daily basis. Especially home office and flexibility regarding working hours will remain even pandemic is over. So we need to re-shape our organization. If your job was a colour - what colour would it be? It would be multicolour for sure, reflecting the variety of our daily business – besides different taxes and accounting issues we need to be more equipped with soft skills and somehow need to be a psychologist. Forms sports perspective, colour is purple (colour of my favourite soccer team). What has been the biggest AHA moment in your role as Partner at ARTUS Still everydays AHA is how different and complex people can be – and you need to have a solution in sense how to work best way – for every one of them; because they all deserve it! Where do you get the best ideas? Best ideas I get during sports, because than I am focused on completely different topics; unfortunately, I do not always have a phone with me to take notes…. What advice would you give to your 25-year-old ME from today's perspective? Be openminded and try to catch as many experiences as possible in a conscious way; especially for business it helps if you made different experiences and tried different jobs/branches. It is not that important (anymore) to be heading 100% always in this one direction at an early stage of ones career. Michael, thank you so much for this interview and enjoy reading our newsletter! convinus.com 25
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