Tony Buzzelli is arguably one of L.A.’s most successful executives, yet he is barely even an Angeleno. The Pittsburgh native runs the local operations of Deloitte, which has a larger L.A. presence than any other accounting firm, and he serves on numerous community organization boards. But after eight years here he is eyeing the exit. A month away from his 62nd birthday, Buzzelli is running up against Deloitte’s mandatory retirement age and will soon head back to the East Coast, leaving the only job he has known for the past 40 years. He already has a luxurious home in the Virginia countryside – replete with a wood-burning pizza oven – and is finishing his stint here while living out of a downtown L.A. hotel. A dedicated family man, Buzzelli said he is looking forward to spending more time with his wife and pursuing one of his true passions: traveling. He has trips planned to the Amazon, Vietnam and Japan, among others. It doesn’t hurt that he can basically go for free since he’ll be joining the board of Semester at Sea, a program that takes college students on round-the-world voyages. Buzzelli recently sat down with the Business Journal in his downtown L.A. office to discuss his career, family and life after accounting.
Question: Forty years – your entire career – at one firm. How did you do it?
Answer: The intellectual curiosity is something that’s kept me here. I learn every day. The average age in our firm and this profession is very young, like 32. Being around young, vibrant people keeps you young and forces you to think and be engaged. Then I love to travel, so I take advantage of that.
I think of accountants being stuck behind their desks all the time. Did you get to travel much for this job?
One time I represented the U.S. firm at the Japanese partners meeting, so we went to Japan. We have some operations in India, so I visited India. One of the most interesting experiences I’ve had is we did a pro bono audit for a hospital in Haiti that was about 100 miles from Port-au-Prince.
You actually visited the hospital?
I made five trips there. Travel is important – there’s a huge difference between reading about it and smelling it. I heard the voodoo priests, went to markets – just an unbelievable experience. I’ll never forget, I had $150 in my pocket – this was like 1976 – and that was more than the per capita income of the people in Haiti, which at that time was $125.
That’s quite an experience. Any more?
I happened to be at Berlin the day the wall came down. I was doing a project for a client (in Germany) and I finished a day early. So that Friday, Nov. 9, 1989, I went to Berlin. I had a Fodor’s guide and landed at the airport and said take me to Europa Center. From there I walked to the wall and saw where the wall had been taken down and people were streaming across. It was unbelievable, being able to mark yourself in history.
You also spend quite a lot of time on community-related activities.
The community has always been a very important part of my professional career. And if I pick the right boards to be engaged with, our clients are there or our prospective clients are there. I get a lot of business done that is directly relevant to our firm while I attend board meetings.
But now you’re preparing to retire in a few months. Why?
We have a mandatory retirement at 62; it’s written into the partnership agreement.
Would you want to stay if you could?
I probably would. I never really addressed that question because of our mandatory retirement, it’s non-negotiable. It gives me the freedom of being forced to think about doing something different.
That’s one way to put it. What will you do next?
There’s an organization that I’m going to chair, a non-profit called Semester at Sea, that I’ll participate in. We own a ship that basically conducts three semesters of education, 700 college students from 250 different colleges on average. They go around the world in 104 days, take classes for four days and are in port for three days.
Will you get to participate?
As a member of the board, you have the opportunity to kind of jump on and jump off. I’ve already mapped it out and put on my calendar that sometime in late October we will go to Vietnam and then to Hong Kong and then to Kobe, Japan. Next Christmas there’s a trip to the Amazon. We leave Nassau in the Bahamas, go up through and into the Amazon, and back, with about six or seven stops.
Wish I could have done that in college myself.
Our daughter participated in one of the semesters and I observed the dramatic change that it caused in her, so I learned about it.
What else do you plan to do after retiring?
The other part I intend to focus on is to sit on company boards. Part of what you do on a board through the governance process is you oversee that inside a company. It’s a playground for really keeping current in my profession as well as business in general.
Did you always want to be an accountant?
I was always good at math, but I didn’t want to be an engineer. I just couldn’t see myself personality-wise being an engineer because of the reputations they have of kind of wearing their slide rules on their belts. I didn’t want to do that. But this (teacher) talked about accounting. He just talked about the school he went to, which was Dayton – they had a good accounting program. That’s how I got into accounting.
Most kids want to be astronauts or baseball players, but you wanted to be an accountant?
The summer before (college), they’d give you this aptitude test about whether you have chosen the right major. So I walked in, filled out the questions. On average, they said most kids change their major three or four times while in college. They looked at my aptitude (test) and said, “Got it right.”
Did you ever want to leave the firm after you got a job here?
I thought about leaving the firm once. I was making about $18,000 back in 1975 and I had an offer to become a controller of a company and my offer was for $30,000. We just had our first child and I couldn’t imagine what I could do with all that money.
Why didn’t you take it?
I felt guilty about having the interview without telling somebody inside Touche Ross. So I went to the managing partner. He said, “You need to do what you need to do. You’re really good at what you do, but you’re going to be alone there. You’re going to be the only controller, whereas here, if you have a problem, you walk down the hall.” It scared the heck out of me. It would have been great to have $12,000 more, but I declined the offer. I’ve thought about that forever.
Most successful people seem to recommend taking every opportunity that comes along. Do you disagree?
My dad drove a truck. The most money he ever made was $20,000 a year. I’ve always lived with that memory. My view was as long as I’m healthy and as long as we don’t forget what our roots are, (I’ll be OK). I never tried to step on the top rung of the 8-foot ladder because when you fall from the 8-foot ladder, you can get hurt and maybe even die. I took smart risks, so maybe I’d be on the third step of the ladder. Saying no was the key.
Were there any bumps in the road?
The firm came to me – I was 34 years old – and they asked me to take responsibility to be the office managing partner for Austin, Texas. I mean 34 – that was a big ego trip. But … I was there only two years, and really, that was a very bad experience. A great learning experience, professionally, developmentally and all that, but it was just a bad personal experience.
Why?
There were a lot of bad decisions that I inherited. We had partners that weren’t performing, so here I was this young buck that had to fire partners. That was very difficult. They were people 20 years senior of me. And it was my first time out of Pennsylvania, totally uprooted from family. The environment that I grew up in that was always about extended family, extended neighborhood. So it was tough.
How was your move to Los Angeles?
It’s easiest to integrate into a community through your children, and our kids were gone. Marta and I enjoy travel, but we don’t play golf together, we don’t play tennis. The kind of things that typically bring people together here are things that were not part of us. We always said we liked being in L.A., but it’s not where our heart is.
Is that why you will be relocating to Virginia?
We spent a lot of time thinking about that. It’s close enough to Pittsburgh so we can get home, but we love the vibrancy and the magic of D.C., in terms of the museums and we have friends there and all that. So we now have a place in the country where we have 85 acres in the woods and we have a co-op at the Watergate. We kind of run back and forth between the two.
I heard you have an authentic wood-burning pizza oven in your home.
We first heard about (the idea) through a partner who was retiring. He had a wood-burning oven and made pizzas in the oven. That always stuck in the back of our heads. We like to have friends over. We like to have dinner with our family. And with the heritage thing, it made sense. It’s been everything we’d hoped it would be.
That country lifestyle will be pretty different from Los Angeles.
The outside of our house (in Pasadena) was filmed for scenes from “Monster-in-Law” and it represented the son’s house. We had three days of experience with that, including J.Lo and Jane Fonda. It was a blast, shutting down the whole street.
You probably won’t run into J.Lo in Virginia.
(Laughs.) No, not at all.
Have you already moved in?
We moved everything back. Marta had moved back a couple years ago and came back periodically.
Where are you staying?
Tonight the Omni (Los Angeles Hotel).
Has it been tough?
Yeah, but we’ve been married 40 years. It’s a she’ll-be-there-when-I-get-back type of thing. And I’ve made the effort to get back. There were a lot of times when there were things I could have done here that I skipped and I went back. One time we were at some event and somebody said, “Tony’s out quite a lot, is he ever home?” Marta’s answer was, “Enough.” (Laughs.)
You talk a lot about your family. Have you been able to devote as much attention to them as you would like?
One of the concerns a lot of people have in our profession, or any profession where there’s intense commitment to your profession, is can you be a good parent? I’ve observed a lot of people who are bad parents in our profession. Life is filled with choices and my choice, when I have that choice, is always biased toward the family.
How so?
(One time), the managing partner of our whole firm came to Pittsburgh to meet with me. I was supposed to meet him at 2. At 3 I was leaving to go home to pick up my son, Joe, for our first trip to spring training. (The managing partner) comes in 20 minutes late. I said, “Ed, I know you’re here to see me and you had a lot of things going on and I know you’re late, but I’m leaving at 3 because I’m taking my son to spring training. Next Tuesday, you won’t remember that you even spoke to me, but 20 years from now, if I don’t show up on time, my son will remember that I missed spring training.”
And you kept your job?
We started talking and at about 20 minutes to 3, he said, “Get out of here. I’m not going to be responsible for you being late.” One time I ducked out of a training to fly back from Dallas to take the kids trick-or-treating. Family has always been important.
And baseball, I take it, too.
My son and I have gone to baseball spring training 17 of the last 19 years, both in Arizona and predominantly in Florida. Now my brother and his sons, who are really good friends with our son – the six of us go. We usually go either the second or third weekend of March and just travel around and watch baseball games, watch the NCAA Tournament and just be together. It’s a guys-only event.
How many kids do you have?
We have three children. Anna’s our oldest. She has a master’s in nutrition. She lives in Seattle. Susan’s a journalism major and got a master’s in German studies at Georgetown, had a Fulbright and did all kinds of traveling. She’s getting married this summer. And our son, Joe, is a jazz studies major and is working as a business analyst at Deloitte in our federal practice.
Do you think your Italian heritage plays a role in your dedication to family?
It is largely because of the heritage. My father was 7 when he came over.
Have you ever met your relatives in Italy.
Marta and I decided on our 25th anniversary that we were going to go to Italy and try to find out where my dad was born. My dad said, “Well you can go see my aunt.” My dad was 77 at the time.
She was still alive?
I said, “She’s dead.” Well, she wasn’t dead. This was ’96. Marta had an envelope that was dated 1975 with an address on it. My grandmother had corresponded with her. So we showed it to the innkeeper (in Italy) where we stayed and he said, “I know that address.” The guy said, “I’ll take you to your great aunt.” I said, “Yeah, this is the deal, (she’ll ask me for money), I’ll whip off a couple hundred bucks and she’ll be all happy and split it with the guy.”
So you thought it was a scam, but that’s not how it worked out?
She comes down, she hugs me, she hugs Marta, we go up and I figured pretty soon I’ll be whipping out the bucks. She gets up about a half-hour after getting there and comes back with two plastic bags of pictures – my high school graduation, our wedding, my first communion. My grandmother had sent her pictures. So it really was the aunt.
And it was the local innkeeper who led you there!
It was an amazing experience.
Tony Buzzelli
TITLE: Regional managing partner
COMPANY: Deloitte
BORN: Pittsburgh; 1949.
EDUCATION: B.S., accounting, Pennsylvania State University.
CAREER TURNING POINT: Becoming a partner in 1980.
MOST INFLUENTIAL PEOPLE: Touche Ross partners Mike Joyce and Harry Witt.
PERSONAL: Lived in Pasadena with his wife, Marta; in the process of moving to Charlottesville, Va. Has three adult children.
ACTIVITIES: Traveling, golfing, attending sporting events.
