From left: Christopher Gati, Kimberly Wilkinson, Michael Kroll, Caitlin Macaluso, Alexander J. Narcise, Eliezer Gross and James Jenco are part of Wiss’ growing real estate and construction services team. Photo by Aaron Houston for Real Estate NJ
By Joshua Burd
The wall of stacked abacuses behind the reception desk may be something of a tell, but there’s little else about Wiss’ office in Florham Park that says you’ve arrived at an accounting firm.
That’s exactly what Alex Narcise wants to hear, given the company’s focus on creating a vibrant, contemporary environment when it moved to the space more than five years ago — all with the goals of attracting talent and conveying that its business is as much about helping clients leverage automation and technology as it is about audits and tax returns.
“We’re really trying to become a tech company, basically, because it’s just at the center of everything now,” said Narcise, partner-in-charge of Wiss’ real estate and construction services group. “We hire probably 30 or 40 people out of school every year and they’re 22 years old … they grew up on technology, so they expect when they come into the workforce that there’s technology available.
“We don’t want that look and feel of an accounting firm. I want to stand out and be different.”
Wiss has done exactly that with its move to and subsequent expansion in Florham Park, at 100 Campus Drive, which has largely coincided with its own growth in recent years. The firm, which serves many of New Jersey’s best-known developers, has more than doubled its physical footprint from its former longtime home in Livingston, now occupying 70,000 square feet across two floors, while its headcount now totals about 325, up from 200 when it moved in early 2020.
Much of that growth stems from Wiss’ commercial real estate practice as well as several key service lines that Narcise says have become additive to many of those same clients, including wealth management, estate planning and others outside traditional accounting. There’s also the firm’s increasingly important, fast-growing advisory business, whose offerings include outsourced bookkeeping, recruiting and consulting on how to streamline and automate a company’s internal accounting functions.
“We ask clients, ‘Is there a project that takes you eight hours that we can make into 30 minutes?’” Narcise said. “And they love that all day long because that’s the value.
“The accounting and the tax … all come with it. That’s our annuitized business, but it’s (about) ‘How else can we help make things easier for you?’ — and then just training them.”
Founded in 1969, Wiss is a key player in New Jersey’s commercial real estate sector, serving a long list of family-owned firms in an industry that accounts for roughly 20 percent of its overall revenue. The real estate and construction team is its largest practice group with some 30 dedicated professionals, Narcise said, although as many as 100 people at the firm can touch a real estate account.
Its move to Florham Park followed 37 years in Livingston, at 354 Eisenhower Parkway, where the firm had reached capacity on the single floor that it occupied, Narcise said. And while it could have expanded to the floor above and stayed at a location that was comfortable for “us old-timers,” its leadership recognized “it was time to look around.”
“We really needed something that was going to be a wow factor,” said Narcise, who spearheaded the search for a new office alongside Cushman & Wakefield’s Marc Rosenberg and Jon Williams (now with CBRE). That led Wiss to 100 Campus Drive, where it leased 41,000 square feet for a space that was more than 40 percent larger than its former home.
Designed by Studio 1200, the new office has a light-filled, open layout with a full complement of phone, huddle and meeting rooms as well as lounge-style furniture, a coffee bar and a spacious “town hall” with a kitchen, multiple seating options and games such as ping pong and shuffleboard. And, aside from the abacus wall in the lobby, the space also has custom wallcoverings with antique letterpress numbers to reflect Wiss’ roots in accounting.
Narcise calls the space “a differentiator for attracting talent,” especially in an industry that has grappled with dwindling interest among students and a dearth of professionals under 40.
“In the other place, we said all the right words, but the space didn’t match where we were headed as a firm,” Narcise said. “So the move couldn’t have happened at a better time.”
That’s despite the fact that Wiss moved in roughly eight weeks before the COVID-19 pandemic took hold in the U.S. and upended the commercial office sector. While the firm was forced to navigate remote and hybrid work arrangements, it continued to grow new business lines that had a high revenue trajectory.
Among them was the advisory practice, whose professionals serve as a sort of third-party chief financial officer for clients that wish to outsource the role or simply can’t find accounting talent for internal positions. The offering has filled “a huge need” with services that also include consulting, recruiting and others, growing from a single team member just a few years ago to what Narcise says is now roughly 100.
It also went hand in hand with Wiss’ most recent expansion, in early 2024, when it added another 29,000 square feet on the floor below its main office. It punctuated that move with the recent debut of a majestic, interconnecting staircase with a large digital screen, adding to a space that Narcise says is an important marketing tool for the practice.
“It’s been a game changer,” he said. “We want as many clients as we can to get here, because you could tell them the story about what we’re about — and they feel it — but when you get them here, it kind of ties it all in to what we’re saying.”
Wiss has increasingly pitched its advisory group to its commercial real estate clients, including many of the high-net-worth families that have anchored the industry in New Jersey for decades. The team is also helping developers and property owners implement technology to automate day-to-day bookkeeping and other tasks, including artificial intelligence, in the interest of streamlining and providing real-time data on their businesses, rather than simply reviewing financial statements at the end of every year.
The service has been especially attractive to second- and third-generation executives who want to “propel the business forward” and focus on new projects, Narcise said, rather than worrying about internal finance.
“A lot of times we’ll get into different projects with clients and help them structure their accounting departments, make sure they’re implementing all their technologies and they understand the latest and greatest that’s going on that applies to a real estate family,” he said. “So that’s been a fun part of it.”
That’s not to mention wealth management, another growing business for Wiss that can appeal to real estate owners and other entrepreneurs whose businesses span multiple generations. The practice has roughly $1 billion in assets under management after launching in 2018, he said, citing the importance of a holistic platform and arguing that “there’s really nothing in the client’s lifecycle that we can’t really address at this point.”
“This firm has been around a long time,” Narcise said. “The nice part about it is that we had a good foundation of clients. But I would say, probably in the last 10 years, these other services have really taken off. The market has really changed.”
Wiss expects to continue growing, he said. He noted that accounting firms have become increasingly attractive to private equity, meaning there’s an opportunity to recruit professionals who may become disillusioned or simply want more control over their future.
“Culture means something,” Narcise said. “And culture’s an overused term, but it certainly means something that people want to go to work where they have friends and feel like they’re comfortable and they can be themselves.”
He added: “People still really want that. So we’re getting a lot of recruiting opportunities from people that are coming out of these big firms that are being acquired and (saying) ‘I don’t really want that. I want a place where I feel like it’s home.’”
