Hi, my name is Lydia Chen, and I’m an assistant controller consultant here at Attivo. As an assistant controller, I work with clients to close their books on a monthly basis, and I give them accurate and reliable information so that they can make the optimal decisions for their business.

Why did you join Attivo?

I really like working with startups because it’s great to watch them pave a path and evolve. Every startup company has such a unique and creative and amazing idea that brought them to this business to begin with. Learning about their entire journey, getting there, and the steps that they know they have to take to get to the next level, and just being able to be involved in their entire story, and help them succeed, is something that I really enjoy working with startups for.

What is it like to work at Attivo?

One of the reasons that I really like working at Attivo is that we all know that one person might not know everything accounting-wise. Collectively though, at Attivo we have a great mix of team members and CFOs with a wide breadth of knowledge that are willing to share templates, experiences or resources to provide the best solution for our teams and our clients.

What does a client team look like?

Typically, on a client’s account, we are assigned with a CFO who oversees the entire account, the entire relationship aspects, and oversees the team’s productivity, accuracy, well-being, and making sure that all the tasks are delivered. Below that we typically have another controller or accounting manager, depending on the size of the client. And, then we have a staff accountant that can additionally be added depending on the size of the client. And so there’s usually at least two or three people, or more, from Attivo assigned to a client. So, no staff accountant or accounting managers are left alone with a client and not having that guidance that they need.

Tell us about the mentor program?

Everybody here at Attivo is assigned a mentor, and that mentor could be a CFO or assistant controller such as myself. And the mentors and the mentees, we meet every two weeks or so and we discuss everything in relation to the work performance or any questions around clients or accounting tasks that the mentees are not very familiar with. We’ll provide guidance in those areas. We’ll also carve out some career development goals. We revisit that and kind of come up with new goals every six months or so and track progress on making sure that there is, not only a progression, but also guidance on how to achieve those goals from the mentors.

How do you connect with your team while working remotely?

We really make the effort to make our accounting jobs and our accounting roles fun here. And one of the ways that we do is every Monday, we’ll have our collaboration Zoom calls. It’s a Zoom call where everyone goes on mute and everyone just turns on Zoom. All of our team members, we’re still doing our work on one monitor, but we have faces on the other side of the monitor. So it almost feels like we’re working in a single office together. And we’re all doing our own thing, but it really makes me feel like during this remote pandemic world that we’re still working together at the same time. One of the fun things that we like to do here at Attivo is game night. It’s every Thursday. When we play those, it’s always great because we get to collaborate with our fellow team members in a totally different way, and we get to see how competitive everybody is because everybody gets super competitive, including myself. I’m not going to boast or anything but most of the games I do win. And so, a lot of the team members get really excited when they’re paired with me because we’ll win for sure.