HATTIE: (Voiceover) With just over 70 employees in the mother firm and with offices in Houston, Dallas and Mexico City, Mir, Fox, Rodriguez is inventing the new ways to work. Auditors work in the open.
GASPER: We were able to have our managers on the inside, giving the open space for our staffing on the outside, with the windows, etc. And, you know, one of the status symbols has always been--for offices is to have the window space.
HATTIE: Oh, so you flipped it.
GASPER: But it does provide a better environment--more open-air environment for the staff when they come in to work. Anybody can come in, hook up. I mean, they rove around.
Unidentified Woman: Every morning you come in and you can log on to the phone, and the phone knows where you are, and the receptionist, she just transfers your calls and it automatically knows which phone to ring.
HATTIE: OK. But a lot of your auditors are out on--at the client.
GASPER: We like our auditors to be out at our clients, working. But again, they have the capabilities now, with our technology platform, to be here and still be linked up with their client offices and being able to do things remotely.
HATTIE: (Voiceover) The firm is helping its clients go paperless, so they have to set the example.
CAROLYNE: It took a big commitment and it took a big investment. It was a team effort. It took five years. And in March of 1999 we made our final big push to be ready by January 2000. We had a big team meeting and we said, `If we're going to finish this, we're going to need to go outside--hire some developers, get some programs written--and it'll mean that there will be no bonuses this year.' `We'll take our profits and we'll reinvest them in ourselves.' We had 100 percent buy-in. And it's been great ever since.
HATTIE: Did you have a big binder burning?
CAROLYNE: We did. We didn't have a binder burning, but we had a binder trashing party. We sure did.
HATTIE: Oh, that's great. `Get rid of the paper.'
CAROLYNE: And we really didn't trash them. We put them in a big box and then we gave them to one of our non-profit clients, who still works in a paper environment.
HATTIE: Well, there you go. There you go.
CAROLYNE: So we were able to recycle them. But we don't use them anymore.