The Leading Edge Alliance lost a founding member and one of its biggest supporters last fall with the unexpected death of Bruce M. Carlin, managing partner at Carlin, Charron & Rosen, L.L.P, the cornerstone of the CCR Advisory Group.

"He was a visionary. He was where the profession was going," says Harold Shapiro, a partner at the Massachusetts-based CCR Advisory Group.

Carlin was at the forefront of developing CCR's business to serve clients in areas beyond accounting. From financial to technology services, Carlin created a firm that offered a full range of services.

"Bruce understood cross-selling better than anyone I ever met," Shapiro says.

Carlin died in October at the age 58. He had spent nearly 35 years in the industry and guided the CCR Advisory Group, a network of seven affiliated businesses with 240 team members, to rank as one of the Top 50 accounting firms in the country.

Five years ago, Carlin was instrumental in the formation of The Leading Edge Alliance, an association of accounting firms that today consists of 47 leading businesses.

"We could always count on his full support in everything we did," says Gary Shamis, Leading Edge founder and managing partner of SS&G Financial Services. "He was key in making the Leading Edge Alliance one of the largest and premier associations in the country. He stood behind the Alliance and helped identify other prestigious firms to join.

"You knew you could count on Bruce to give significant effort in whatever he did," Shamis says.

Bob Charron, who took over as managing partner of CCR, met Carlin in 1997 when their two firms merged. "He was the right person at the right time," Charron says. "CCR has grown 400 percent since 1997. As the company's first quarterback, Bruce was intense, but he had to be."

Upon Bruce's death CCR's governing body, the Executive Committee, unanimously approved of Bob Charron's appointment as the new managing partner. "We had been very close, both personally and professionally. Through airline flights, lunches and other conversations, he shared a lot with me that a typical managing partner wouldn't," Charron says.

"The training and mentoring to become CCR's next managing partner was informal, but he taught me well," Charron says.

Kevin Corey, another CCR partner, says Carlin was very focused and multi-dimensional. "If he had his mindset determined, no one could get in the way," he notes.

He illustrates the sentiment by telling how Carlin's leadership was instrumental in creating the paperless office that CCR is today. "He pushed us hard. Sometimes it didn't make sense to me. But looking back, it did. To get the paperless system to work, we needed to keep moving forward," he says.

Today, one of the biggest benefits is that document retrieval is easy and nothing is misfiled, forcing someone to send out the obligatory "FIRM ALL" e-mails asking, "Has anyone seen Mr. Jones' file?"

Besides his never-ending business focus, Carlin had a generous charitable side. About 10 years ago, he announced that the firm was going to create the Alan S. Goff Foundation and raise $1 million for charity over the next decade. Goff, whose firm had merged with Carlin's in 1990, died at age 51 leaving Carlin to assume the managing partner role. The foundation, now the CCR Charitable Foundation, Inc., has raised $1.5 million for cancer and heart disease research in the last eight years.

"Bruce always wanted to be the best. He wanted the best firm, not necessarily the biggest. He wanted to do things the right way," Shapiro says.

Carlin always wanted the firm's employees to do things honorably, particularly with the client. That meant owning up to mistakes when they happened, he says.

His partners say Carlin loved to do deals, as well as the fundamentals of the business—working with clients and accounting. Corey says, "Despite leading CCR, Bruce still had time to do individual tax returns for his original clients. For someone in a position such as his, to take time out and do the taxes for his first few clients, is virtually unheard of. It showed how dedicated he was to them."

Gary Shamis says he thinks an appropriate tribute to Carlin is to continue making the Leading Edge Alliance as successful as possible. "A way to honor him is to continue to position the Alliance on the cutting edge and as a visionary in the industry," he says. e