Identical? Yes, but twins share only so much.

FEI doesn't keep official records of such things, but Mark A. Biddinger and Matthew L. Biddinger may well be the only identical twins in the membership.

The Biddingers, 36, sound a lot alike and obviously look alike, and they have tales of the coincidences that twin lore is filled with: both their families have three boys and a girl each, both drive Chevy Suburbans--and both cars hit 100,000 miles on the same day.

But in a joint phone interview, they point out that their differences are at least as great as the similarities. Born 11 minutes apart, they say that growing up in Brighton, Mich., they really didn't get along that well and weren't each other's best friends, as identical twins often are. Indeed, they took varying paths into accounting and finance, and have jobs in different kinds of companies.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

Mark is director of finance in Cedarville, Ohio, for Project Management Solutions, a private management consulting, training and research firm that operates internationally, while Matt is division controller at Hunter Fan Co. in Memphis, a far larger maker of fans and electric housewares that is also private.

Mark has been a member of the Dayton Chapter since 2000 and is in line to be chapter president in 2006-7. Matt, on the other hand, officially joined FEI just last November. That's when his boss, who was the FEI member at the company, neared retirement and elected to open his membership to Matt, who's now a member of the Memphis Chapter.

The Biddingers say they've become best friends in the years since college, when both started families and their finance careers. Now, they say, they call each other two or three times a week and use each other as sounding boards on business or professional issues they may be wrestling with. For instance, Mark says he sent a series of resumes to Matt when he was looking to hire people and was taken aback by the insights Matt offered, based on Matt's own hiring and staffing experiences.

"I come from a large company audit environment. I've been in general and cost accounting, and have a wide range of experiences," says Matt. "I've learned skills that Mark didn't." Indeed, their different company histories are echoed in their college backgrounds. Mark says he entered Cedarville University to study orthodontics, while Matt went to Eastern Michigan University for computer information. Matt transferred to Cedarville his sophomore year, but somewhat reluctantly switched to accounting, which Mark had already done.

Yet they didn't room together, even though they were in the same dormitory, and Mark was married by his senior year; Matt married the following year. Mark never left Cedarville, starting his career in 1991 with AdCare Health Systems as a financial analyst; he joined PM Solutions in 1998.

Matt, on the other hand, took a job in Michigan with Masco Corp. as an internal auditor, then transferred to a Los Angeles office for a year before moving to Olive Branch, Miss. He joined Hunter Fan in 2001 and now lives not far away, in Hernando, Miss., a Memphis suburb. The twins say they try to get together a couple of times a year, as business and family issues allow.

Mark says he joined FEI when he started looking for benchmarking and metrics around the finance issues he was dealing with. "I got hooked on FEI," he adds, "and I've found great value in making relationships through the chapter and hiring through Robert Half." Matt allows that he's only been to two Memphis meetings so far but knows a number of members through professional contacts.

"When you don't have someone as close as a twin, it can be hard to find someone" to really talk about professional issues with, says Mark. "I don't think I could have survived as well as I have without a source that I could go to about hiring or accounting issues."