On this week’s episode of the Go For Growth Podcast, we chat with Jason Blumer, entrepreneur, business owner, and overachiever. Jason began his career as an entrepreneur in 2003, leading Blumer CPAs, the firm started by his father, and went on to found the Thriveal CPA Network in 2010.

“It’s an unending drive for creativity, just lots of new ideas are really hard to keep inside of you, you kind of can’t help but produce those,” says Jason about being called a visionary entrepreneur.

We chat about Jason’s insights into owning multiple businesses and his tips for growth, as well as…

• Balancing being a visionary with a partner who is an integrator
• Applying structure to a business to facilitate growth
• Sharing the responsibilities of leadership
• How restraints can sometimes be freeing
• And more

Listen now…

Mentioned in this episode:

• Thriveal
• Blumer CPAs
• Connect with Jason on Twitter, LinkedIn

Transcript

Doug Hall: Hello, everybody. It’s Doug Hall and welcome to this really great podcast episode of Doug Hall’s Go for Growth. My guest today is Jason Blumer. Jason is an overachiever. I know him and I know he does, is an overachiever because he has not one but two businesses. And part of my questions for Jason today revolve around balancing the demands of two growing businesses in which he serves as a trusted advisor. And he serves other trusted advisors of trusted advisors to owners of businesses.

So we’re talking about an environment with small and medium business. We’re talking about an environment where Jason’s conceived of the business and grown it himself. And I’m delighted to have him on the podcast today to tell us about his business, some insights, some growth tips, and just talk a little bit. So Jason, welcome to Go for Growth.

Jason Blumer: All right, Doug. Thanks for having me on the show. This is gonna be a lot of fun. I love to talk about growth. So this is a perfect topic.

Doug: Yeah. So tell us where in the world you are today and how you got started in this business. And we’re, folks, we’re doing this at the time of the COVID-19 Coronavirus, which we’re all kind of tired of by now. But this is, right. So throw a little bit of that commentary in there too. But I want to make sure this podcast is both timely and timeless. So again, tell us where you’re from, a little bit about your business, how you got started, and then I tease everybody with the two businesses so you probably have to tell a second story too. So Jason, take it away

An Overview of Jason’s Entrepreneurial Journey

Jason: Okay. Yeah. Sounds good. So I became an entrepreneur in 2003 after having worked for other people and found out I was not a very good employee. So that’s all true and I came to work with my dad in his firm in 2003 and started leading that firm. And You know, in a

Doug: What kind of business was your dad in?

Jason: So that was the CPA firm that I lead now, Blumer CPAs. And so my dad used to be a partner of mine. And he’s 75. He’s retired now and retired years ago. So he let me run it the way I wanted. And I was in the throes of entrepreneurship and learned, you know, messed up so many things, that kind of story, lost money, blah, blah, blah. So as I was learning things, I was learning how to run a firm better, more innovatively, creatively how to grow it. So in 2010, started the second business which is Thrival.

And that’s the opposite of the word survival. So we made it up and the URL was available. So we did it. And then we went into teaching other firms the things I was learning on how to run their businesses better how to be better entrepreneurs as accounting firm owners. And so then around, when was it, 2012, we turned our firm virtual. So it used to be brick and mortar in Greenville, South Carolina.

And then we turned it virtual, around 2012. Thrival was already a virtual community at that point. It had started in 2010. And so we were off to the races with these things. And so I kind of dove into, in my firm, I was diving into consulting and teaching, helping clients grow as I struggled to even learn how to do that. And then dove into the leading this community and didn’t really know what leading a community would mean and how to teach other people to do it.

Dove right into teaching, set up some you know, podcasts back in 2010 that we still lead and run today and set up coaching courses. Just dove you know, headlong right into the deep end of teaching and being an educator, when at the same time struggling to even learn these concepts on my own. So that kind of messed with my head and actually led to a point where it did blow my life up, actually. So I did have kind of a breakdown moment, which I guess a lot of entrepreneurs do.

And really just, it was really scary. Went into a process of shutting some of these businesses down, telling everybody, I can’t handle it anymore. You know, and I think we’re going to talk about this later, but I learned there were some missing components to my business. I’m a visionary off the charts and so I’m just dumping ideas into this company about as fast as I can do it. Both companies. Man, no structure, no integration, no movement on the inside will blow your life to smithereens. So

Doug: Right, because you kept coming up with demands and your team wasn’t executing, right?

Jason: Oh, yeah. And I didn’t, you know, I was learning how to lead a team too at that time. So the, you know, started that process. Right about that time somebody named Julie who had been working with me, which I think, Doug, you probably met, to or saw at a conference. When we met you.

Doug: I did. Yes. I remember her.

Jason: Yeah. And so we, she was working for me at the time. And really, I mean, she was an obvious integrator, right? She could do all these structural things that I didn’t understand. She found EOS, the book Traction, years before that and said we’ve got to put this system into our two businesses. And at that time, I made her a partner. And that was about five years ago. And so went through the process of really putting structure into place those first few years. And, you know, fast forward to today, it worked. We’re doing a semblance of EOS. We kind of made it our own and then actually, we do so much consulting now.

My partner and I, we’ve had to build our own growth structural models to teach people how to run and lead services-based companies, creative services-based companies which applied to both of our companies, Blumer, CPAs, Creative Digital Design Agencies and Creative Accounting Firms, they’re really both services companies that right sell their knowledge, so to speak. So, you know, so there’s structure required for those kind of creative services company. So, here we are today. Now we’ve got it all in order and now, and then now we run into the pandemic.

Doug: Yes, we do.

Jason: So here we are. I don’t know, Doug, if you’ll make keep going. But so now we’re into a pandemic. So

Doug: Yeah, so hold that thought there, Jason, because you went through over a decade, you know, well over a decade getting close to two decades of growth and struggle and learning and lessons learned and opportunities exploited and opportunities missed. So when you think back about sort of the, one of the powerful things you said that I want to tease out a little bit is you characterize yourself as a visionary. Tell me a little bit more about that so listeners can hear that and maybe self-identify. How did you come to that realization and what does it mean to you?

What Being a Visionary Means to Jason

Jason: Yeah, well, it, you know, it’s a label I didn’t know I had. You know, basically what Traction and these books like Rocket Fuel, some of the component books that Gino Whitman has written give you a label so that kind of helps you. So I didn’t realize that I was what would be called a visionary and that’s what Gino Whitman calls it. Other people may call it something different, but it really was, it’s an unending drive for creativity. Just lots of new ideas are really hard to keep inside of you. You kind of can’t help but produce those.

You know, there’s a lot of struggles with those people too. So they really are polar people. They can be really emotional, they can get out of balance in their life super fast. All these things are true about me. They can really, some of the emotional struggles of getting out of balance really can weigh heavy. It can crush them, they can get depressed, you know, they struggle with a lot of those things in life. There’s, you know, just like all of life, there’s a counterbalance to that. And it’s what Gina Whitman, as you know, calls an integrator.

And that person is extremely the opposite of a visionary and loves the other parts of, they don’t love necessarily all of the ideas are producing them, they love putting them in order and rolling them inside into a company. So that label just helped me know, oh, that’s what I am. And even the first year into our partnership, mine and Julie’s partnership, you know, we struggled as partners, which a lot of people do.

And what we struggled with was the extreme difference that we are together and the tension that creates, right? It creates tension, it actually you learn it’s a healthy tension. And then we read Rocket Fuel, which was a year into our partnership, and we went, Oh, now we know why we’re like running into each other all the time. And so then you learn how to stay in your lane and you start practicing some healthy behaviors, basically, when you figure that out. And Rocket Fuel is really what tipped us into it as we had already been doing Traction. So

Doug: Yes, yes, yes. Well, that’s a, you know, a few people trip across Rocket Fuel before Fraction, but I think you guys got it in the right order. And so once you and Julie started to click, what did that do for you? Where did your feelings and your peace of mind go? And what did Julie feel? Because I think, you know, it’s a, you use the word partnership. I think that’s a pretty fair way to characterize this, a visionary as a partner and, but you’re the owner, you’re the boss. So tell us a little bit about how it made you feel as that worked, and how to Julie feel and how does it work today?

Jason: Yeah, well, Doug, you consult on this so you know that’s the right question to ask. It’s like, so we didn’t skip off into lala land, right? When we figured out our lane.

Doug: No. It was a little bit painful, right?

Jason: Right. So it’s like you find out who you are now and then the real work, actually the effective work can begin. You can start doing the things are going to work so, and so she, yeah, we there’s still a lot we didn’t know. Now, as you know, Doug, sometimes visionaries are owners, an integrator doesn’t have to be an owner but I needed Julie to be an owner. So  I asked her to be an owner with me in both businesses because I needed somebody that committed and in love with the same things I love.

And she definitely was that already. So, I needed an owner with the teeth of helping me be what we were meant to be. You know, a visionary can really easily trump an integrator that works for him. That might be an issue. Maybe not for everybody. It may be for me, probably would be for me. So making her an owner was really a good move. And so yeah, the, you know, the main things we struggled with, as a visionary, one thing I really struggled with was the structure that needed to be put in place to run two businesses.

And it’s an extreme structure. We have a really, really extreme structure that we operate under. It’s a whole calendaring system we actually had to create to get it all done. It all comes out of Julie’s mind. And it’s a brilliant system. We use it to teach people that are scaling fast. It really provides a lot of structure. So fitting me within that structure really messed with my head. It really scared me at first, and one way you want to scare a visionary is start saying I’m going to take away your freedom. If you say that they’ll flip out. They’re just gonna go bonkers.

Doug: That did not feel good, did it?

Jason: No, it’s like that’s the thing you do not want to say. Well, Julie wasn’t trying to do that. She was like, I want to do, you’re telling me you want to run these companies and grow them, Do you want to? Yes. Okay, let’s do it. And so she didn’t know. But we were applying extreme structure which actually get, what that does is it gives a visionary the guardrails to drive within. And so then they can drive fast and not wreck and kill themselves, you know? So it’s, guardrails are really good. There’s, you know, there’s restraint to creativity. And if you place, you know, restraint, appropriate restraint within creativity, it really helps you grow and do better things.

Now, we don’t do all of my ideas because Julie knows we can’t push them all through the structure of a company and a team, right? It has to do that. And so now I have guardrails. But putting that structure in really scared me. I was like taking away my freedom. And she, we fought over that for a number of years. And we pretty much have that down now and I’m pretty good at a lot of that structure, though I still get tripped up on it periodically So that was the hard thing. And she felt, she probably didn’t understand.

She’d never been an entrepreneur. You know, she had come out of homeschooling her kids for 20 years. And so she was coming out of thinking, you know, should I be doing this? Am I the best one for this? Why do you want me to be your partner? You know, all the while she’s this, like one of these extreme brilliant people that like, none of this is hard for her. None of this structure stuff. And so she didn’t realize what she was asking me to do. She thought, Man, this structure is great. Isn’t this fun?

Doug: And it was scaring you to death.

Jason: Yeah. She’d always run her life that way, which means she had a very effective, efficient life. And her and her husband, her husband’s an engineer, she’s like the same, so they’re just so good at that in their home. And bring that to me and I’m like, man, it blew me up out of the sky. And so she probably felt a lot of confusion as to why is this so hard on you? Why am I struggling so bad? Isn’t this what you wanted? And we had to go through that for a couple years just to vet out why I was even struggling. So that’s probably what she was feeling and maybe even more extreme things than that.

Doug:  So, have you gotten through to a different kind of freedom now as an entrepreneur?

Jason: Yeah.

Doug: Tell us about that because the notion of guardrails and restraints and constraints sounds negative, but it sounds like it, in a way, freed you up or channel you to be more free. Okay. So go with that for a minute. How’s that work?

How Restraints Can Create Freedom

Jason: Yeah, for sure. Well, and you know, EOS is that. It’s like, here’s this structure. To crazy visionaries, it’s actually the thing you’ve been missing, right? And so, that’s what it is. So yeah, the freedom now is that now when we teach, we teach those stories, right? We’re like, we restraint to me and it freaked me out. Here’s what I thought it was, here’s what I know it is now. We actually teach the stories of restraint is actually the structure you need to grow your company. And so now I’m good at the structure. I’m better at it. I’m not as, you know, it’s not innate within me, but it is

Doug: No, it’s not natural.

Jason: No, but I had to learn it. You know, and Julie had to teach me. She really had to teach me. And probably, and she was always this way, but she had to learn to trust the visionary mind, which a lot of times can be it’s a very, it can be a gut-driven thing. It’s like, you know, visionaries are really good at seeing their market, knowing their market, seeing what’s coming, changes, like you know what, I think we need to start turning in this direction. I’m feeling in a year or two, we’re going to need to be ahead of the curve here.

And she had to learn to see, to trust that because she needs things that are documented and known. Well, that kind of visionary language and pushing and, you know, changing with markets is, there’s really not a lot of science to that. I mean, you can get analytics and science. But small businesses don’t really have access to a lot of that. So you get the gut of the visionary going, I want to move over here.

There’s more value there and I want to kind of stop doing this. So she had to learn to trust that while at the same time, and, you know, that’s the structure of, that they talk about in Rocket Fuel is she vetted all of my ideas. She had to learn to vet properly, which was listen, challenge, but say, Alright, I’m scared and I don’t understand like a visionary, but let’s go. I’ll go, let’s go do that together. She had to let go and learn to do that, which she’s very good at now. But probably that was very fearful for her.

Doug: Was Julie the first leader that you hired? Tell us about how your leadership management has evolved because you got two businesses so I imagine there’s a little difference between, you know, go down that path. Because I think this essential interaction between you as owner and leader, and her as a co-owner, and, you know, not founder. So she’s second in line. You found a way to respect each other and you’re both leading the business, but you’re doing different things.

Jason: Yeah, yeah. So yeah, for sure. She was the first, yeah, the first-ever attempt I had made into the foray of sharing some of the responsibilities of leadership with any other person. And now, Julie and I have a leadership team of three in addition to ourselves in the firm. Three others plugging in. Yeah, so us five really, and of course, we’re just visionary integrator.

And I’m, my title is CEO, her’s is COO. So because she oversees all operations, processes and team. And I do, you know, the things visionaries do. Selling market identification, I do all the teaching and speaking and things like that. And ideas, visions, things like that. And so we have three other people that we’ve added to our leadership team that we needed to do. In the past few years, we’ve done that.

And, you know, those, you know, that was a process, you know, and it just came about because we’re like, even Julie and I can’t do all of this as we’re growing. You get to a point where you outgrow the visionary integrator as far as the, how many hands you need to get it all done. And so we reach that point, you know, a few years ago and started the process of implementing a leadership team and learning how to do that.

Doug: So what was the biggest challenge of starting that leadership team and kind of getting it to this level?

Jason: Well, it’s a very iterative process. So, you know, probably the hardest part is just getting started. And going, I’m going to share the responsibility with somebody else and let them go talk to a client and say stuff and decide things. And that’s just weird, you know, when you get to a point because when you put in a leadership team in place, you’re probably at some transitionary period in your company where you kind of need them sometimes, but not like, totally.

So you put them in place, you want them to start practicing making decisions, when a lot of those you could have gone ahead and just made. Even, you may still have time to do a lot of that. But a leadership team is an investment now for some hope of a future scaling that you hope to make. And so there’s some, and that’s really what growth is about. It’s an investment of time and cash or resources now for the hope of what it could be later.

It’s really a bet on the future is what an investment is. That’s what growth is. And that’s, you’re always making bets. And that’s really hard. Especially when you bet on a person with a name. And you kind of put them in place you start letting them practice. Well then you have to learn well, what are the things I should be telling them, or what did I not tell them?

Because you’re never going to get it right. And then you start rolling that leadership team into all of these processes of traction. They have to buy in and know it and understand it too. And sometimes they struggle with going why don’t want to, Okay, is this what leadership meant? Because I don’t want to do this. I thought it was something different. So you’re teaching them how to be leaders. And so you go through this process of now teaching another human how to love and care about the things you’ve always cared about. And that’s a process.

Doug: So did you fail? In any, I mean, listen, you’re really, you’re good and you’re lucky because most of the stories I’ve heard of visionaries takes them two or three attempts to find their integrator. Like they failed two or three times before. So you found Julie pretty much right off. So kudos to you and Julie. That’s awesome. How about the other leaders?

Every Successful Visionary Needs an Integrator

Jason: Well, you know what I would say about Julie is probably some of the things we’ve been through, people would have given up for sure.

Doug: Wow. Okay, so you guys stuck it out, you stuck it out.

Jason: Yeah. So it, see, and that’s a little bit of a belief. I think I like to challenge people on this. Finding your integrator is, I don’t know, there’s some balance to finding somebody that you want but finding the person that is right for you, which may not be fully what you want. And Julie and I both battled with, there is a lot about you that I don’t like. And we stuck it out. We stuck it out. And so now what did Julie and I have?

We have a history together, a past. And so we have a depth to our relationship that you don’t get if you just keep trying different people because no integrator is going to be what you think an integrator is going to be. There’s going to be tension and sometimes you embrace it. Sometimes you, I’m not saying you don’t need an integrator. Sometimes you need to get rid of an integrator.

Doug: And sometimes it’s the wrong person in that seat.

Jason: That’s right. That’s right. Yeah. So it’s, but that’s hard. It’s hard to identify, is this the wrong person? Or am I making a wrong choice by removing this integrator.

Doug: Is it me or is it them? Well, it’s always both, but is it more me or is it more them?

Jason: Right. And that’s hard. Now what I did, right, is I made her an owner. So I kinda, it was it would have been a little bit,

Doug: You slapped handcuffs on a little bit.

Jason: Right. I handcuff myself to her. Which, looking back was the right thing for me to do. Now, but of course, looking back if she was not the right integrator, that would have been devastating.

Doug: Right. It would have been a mess. Well, and you’re in a professional services environment. So, and you had gone virtual already. So some of the risks and some of the things you were encountering would be different than if you had a 50 person manufacturing company and a lot of brick and mortar. And okay, so I’m not diminishing it, but

Jason: No no, That’s, listen I don’t, yeah, if we added property and buildings and equipment, yeah, that just, none of those difficulties were there for us thankfully.

Doug: Mm-hmm. That doesn’t diminish the challenge though, because I think you’re saying what I’ve heard other visionaries say which is, this was not an easy thing to delegate this and elevate and get myself, in the book we call, Gino calls it letting go of the vine, so your ability to trust, let go and trust.

Jason: Yeah, well, it’s Yeah. And then that whole letting go of the vine is if you’ll let go, you’re actually gonna get the thing you want by letting go which is, that’s so counterintuitive to a visionary. They go after stuff and grab things. \

Doug: And hold tight.

Jason: And hold tight, right? So you’re telling the visionary, no, let go. And, you know, things don’t always go perfectly but things do have to kind of fit into their own model. They have to fit into a model of operation that an integrator design, not the visionary. And so you have to let go of your business and in a sense, it’s got to become its own person, you know? It’s like that shooting bolts through Frankenstein and Frankenstein now is its own person and you have to serve that business in the way that it needs you to serve it in the role you have.

Doug: Yeah, that’s a big transition. I don’t know that every owner can make that or want to make that transition where the business becomes its own thing.

Jason: Well, and that’s why they don’t grow, right? Because it, I mean, think about, you know, an extreme example, Apple. Well, Apple became its own thing. It used I mean, really used to be Steve Jobs in his garage. Him and Steve Wozniak. It was those two, it was really those two people in a garage. Well, I don’t know at what magic point or date it became Apple.

But there was a mind shift for sure in the minds of these people where that company now was its own thing. Heck, it became its own thing and fired the founder. It fired Steve Jobs. So of course, it was its own thing. It was making its own decisions now. And so businesses have to go through that cycle. If you want a bigger business that scales, that business will become a thing unto itself.

You will become a title position that serves the business the way that it needs a CEO to serve it. Not, it won’t solely be your desires anymore. It’ll be what the market requires of this company to produce its value and the role it needs in a CEO, COO. And you’ve got to take on the job or not. You have to hire yourself or fire yourself kind of thing. Or you just, there’s some point you don’t get to grow. You can’t go big enough if you just don’t do that.

Doug: Right. Makes sense. You become the self-limiting factor.

Jason: That’s right. Yeah. Which is why Gino wrote this book, right? That probably happened to him. And I don’t know.

Doug: He probably, or he observed it. So tell us how you, because you mentioned you got a leadership team of five now and you worked your way towards that. How do you and Julie split that up? How does it work? Not that it’s a prototype for everybody else. But just how did you migrate to five and how do you split it? And how do people report so that folks can get an idea?

Jason: Yeah, yeah, I think what, I think you don’t add three at one time. You might add one or two and you start seeing, you start to see sections or departments or silos in your business that really are huge drivers of the value. And so, you know, the accountability chart, it’s the visionary, the integrator’s under the visionary and they, all things flow through the integrator. So Julie really oversees all processes team.

She has all guidance and foresight into that, I do too, but it’s never without her because it goes the other way too. Every team movement process change goes through the integrator to the visionary. And that’s how this model works and anything where a team goes directly to me, that’s called an in run. And that

Doug: What do you do with those?

Jason: Well, most of the time I’m the one causing them and that’s true

Doug: You intervene or mess around somewhere.

Jason: Yeah, I go, Oh, my God. That’s a great idea. I post it in our own chat system. Go team. And they’re like super confused. They’re like, this is not how we do it. Julie always is the one guiding us and leading us. Jason’s normally with him. We know it was probably his idea, but she’s the one leading and guiding. And so where’s Julie? In the right setup, they’re asking where is my integrator.

Now, if you haven’t made those systems clear to your team, which you do, if you put traction in place, you have to tell your team. And they have books for teams to read, called, What the Heck is EOS? That’s the name of the book. For the team it’s like, you know, first-grade elementary book to teach them, hey, this company is working within a system and we’re following a system. And so if the team knows there’s a system in place, they’re going to note an in run from me.

And our team would go to Julie and go, what is Jason doing? That’s what happened to our team, and that does happen. I don’t do it that much because I know it devastates us and I don’t want what it comes with. So I do that stuff. So I pump everything through Julie, which is hard because I see how heavy the burden is on an integrator and if an integrator is listening, they know their job is super difficult.

It’s a lot of heavy burdens, a lot of heavy thoughts. They carry the weight of the world. They feel like the no person, right? They’re the vetters. You’re like I don’t think that’s right visionary. And all the visionary wants us a yes. So, the integrator carries a pretty heavy load on trying to, you know, trying to do their job. So it’s the structure that you, the team, so our team understands the structure and knew it before they became a leadership team.

So we started adding pieces. We added an operational piece first. Team, a leadership team member, and that was only because the burden on Julie was just way too much. You know, we needed to peel off the finances, we need to peel off the operations and the process tracking and documentation. We had to peel that off into another person. We started with a project manager is how we started. And then kind of pulled that person into a leadership team formally.

And then another big part of our firm is the technical piece. In an accounting firm, there’s a technical piece, right? The reviewer. And so we brought that person into a leadership team that’s just, you know, really good at tax and accounting and reviewing all that. So that person became a manager, leader. And then the last move was last year where we added a client services manager.

Now, this is one of our team that’s been with us for 12 years. And she just knows how our firm runs. She knows how to do it the way our firm does it. And so she starts teaching team how to serve in the way that we do. She’s the, she gets the philosophy of how our firm operates. And so she onboards clients, she teaches new team when they’re hired, she leads in reviews and still talks to them about, you know, well I would say it this way, here’s how to lead a meeting. That kind of stuff. So that was the third leg of the leadership team we needed. There’s an operational leg, a technical leg and then a service base leg.

Doug: And they all report through Julie.

Jason: Yes.

Doug: Right. How does that square with an open door policy? Do you have an open-door policy?

Jason: Yes.

Doug: That’s sort of a, that’s a classic management kind of thing that, you know, we weave in and out of leadership and management. You can comment on that too. What’s the difference? But do people feel like they work for you or do they feel like they work for Julie or both? Or how does that work?

Jason: Yeah, they would probably all say they work for both of us because we’re always together. So, there’s, okay, there are some, okay, when decisions have been made by Julie and I, then they roll out to the team. Julie is leading the team. Her and the team are together a lot. She was in a meeting hour and a half today, the weekly download of operations to the operational manager person. I wasn’t in that meeting because she and I had already made all those decisions.

So she’s just pushing them through the team. And she’s better at that anyway than I am. So, but if there’s any kind of leadership thing happening, a leadership team meeting, you know, we have that meeting every week. It’s Julie and I are leading our other three team, leadership team. So they, you know, and the open, you know, the open-door policy is what we call quarterly conversations, and that’s, you know, I think of Gino’s component book, How to Be a Great Boss.

Doug: Yes, another really good book, right?

Jason: Yeah, that’s a really, it’s a basic book, but it’s really, really good. That is a really good book about how to be a boss. I mean, everybody should read that. There’s something called quarterly conversation. So every quarter, we meet with a team member and that’s open door. It’s like this is the free for all meeting. You get to say anything you want to Julie and I with no ramifications for what you’re saying. What are you struggling with? How can we help you? What are we doing that you’re assuming we’re not telling the team? How can we divulge information?

And what that does is it creates this really depths of safety for the team. They know they always get their quarterly conversation. Or they can meet with Julie anytime they need this. But we’re, you know, to build a leadership team and to have it grow a company, you also push them through their leadership team. You say no, that goes through the leadership team because now the leadership team is under Julie. And now the leadership team leads and cares for the team. They go to the leadership team now, which is how you offload the responsibilities and spread it around so you can keep growing.

Doug: Yeah, so if they come to you with something that would be an open door concern, your reaction might be to say, Hey, I’m glad to hear this from you but you need to roll that back through your manager, to Julie, and I support you in that. Is that sort of how you handle it?

Jason: Yeah, it depends on what it is. Yeah, if it certainly is revenue-generating type issues and problems, we’ll always want that going through the leadership team. However, it may be something really bad’s happened. And with the client, we’re going to lose a client because of some mistake we make. Julie and I are just going to be fully involved in that process.

Doug:  Right, you’re going to both jump on that right away. Yeah, right.

Jason: That’s right. Yeah. Now, so we’ll always be listening to the team. And if they’re going, I’m struggling with working here. I don’t like it here anymore. Well, we’re going to have them come to Julie and I own that. Because our leadership team does not do any HR-related, anything. Hiring, firing, those are things we did not give to them. And it’s because we’re a team of 11. We’re small and so Julie and I kept on our plate. We don’t have to offload that yet because it’s such an intimate move. We just, that, you know, that’s, that’s a next step if we kept growing. And that’d be another thing we’d have to learn.

Doug: Do you think that when you get to 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, somewhere in there in headcount, is that when HR starts to become something you peel off as the next thing or you outsource part of it?

Jason: I think it, yeah, I think it’s a little bit bigger a lot of times in the structures. And you’re right, Doug, there are team ranges. You can start seeing things, you know, eight to 10. You’re going to need, the owners aren’t going to be able to pull off the care of that kind of team or maybe even smaller, you know, six to eight, you’re going to start needing to offload some leadership movement responsibilities to other people. You start getting 10 to 12, that’s when you’re offloading, you know, your operations.

You know, you’re getting up into 20. That’s when you might need a more formal HR person because there’s so many team you just cannot address all of the HR needs of that team. And I think business development and sales is even later than that. It’s, you’re even getting much larger. So I’ll keep that on my plate for quite a while. That’s an issue Julie and I have talked a lot about, you know, me wanting to get help with business development and sales. And she’s like, nobody can sell like you. So that ain’t happening.

Doug: And I observe that in most of the visionaries I work with. They really are the best salesperson for the company.

Jason: They are. Yep, that’s true.

Doug: Right. It’s because it’s your heart and soul. And usually are a natural communicator in your industry. And you know, that’s just the way it is. So, yeah. So let’s go down that path for a few minutes. Growing your CPA client base and growing your Thrival community of other CPAs that you can help influence. What’s working, what’s been working? What do you think could work during crisis? And what do you think it’s going to look like after crisis? What kind of yeah strategies and thoughts are in your mind?

Jason: Yeah. Wow. So we’re kind of just into this, you know, this crisis so it’s hard to say what’s working. You know, the general thing if a market is a trusting market, it’s a pretty normal market, you know, there’s no pandemic layer on top of it freaking everybody out. You can do marketing stuff. You can post on social media. You can do, you know, you can create videos and content. We have podcasts too.

You can leverage those for marketing. When you take a market and you freak them out and you scare them by putting a pandemic in it, things kind of flip around and go backwards a little bit. So we’re kind of in the middle of learning how to help our clients figure out how to do this now and we’re kind of learning it too. And so, we’re seeing, you know, some of the strategies right now or just to safely come out of this pandemic with your business intact. Probably your best team still with you.

You may not have your whole team. But this is, it’s less of growth strategy right now. And it’s more of sustainability and staying in business, which means if that’s the positioning, so it’s a little less of market value, penetrating a market, blah, blah, blah, all those things you want to do in growth periods. Now it’s stay in business. You know, learn how to cut costs without killing your company. Stay around. You may have some hard decisions, you may lose clients and lose team.

Those are things you need to consider doing. And your services are no longer going to represent some of your strongest value pitches. It’s really going to be what produces cash. You need to produce cash to stay in business. And so what this is going to do and the struggle for a lot of people coming out of the pandemic, to survive, you’ve got to do things you normally wouldn’t. So you’re going to have some bad habits and have taught team and clients wrong ways to serve and you’re gonna have to deal with those later. You may have to fire a bunch of clients who took just for cash flow.

And so we’re just in a survival mode. So just, we’re just telling people be aware going into this, you’re going to have to do some things and move outside of what you’d normally would call your super valuable services. Try to produce cash, but you’re going to probably create some wrong behaviors, you’re going to take some wrong clients. That’s okay for now. Stay in business. But you’ll have to do that work of undoing some of those wrong things later, probably. It’s kind of what we’re thinking.

Doug: That resonates with me. And a lot of other services, myself and others, we’re emphasizing help first, just help people, help the clients, right?

Jason: You got it. That’s right. That’s exactly right.

Doug: And if you’re helpful, and if everybody gets through, okay, they may turn into a paying client on the other side.

Jason: That’s, well and that’s, you know, firms, accounting firms right now having to deal with this PPP, Paycheck Protection Program money that came out of the Cures Act. And really, you know, we lead a whole community of firms. They’re not really able to charge for this stuff. It’s definitely out of scope with their contracts with their clients, but we’re just all having to help people and, you know, and I guess as a suppose it thought leader, what we’re having to do is we’re doing a lot of webinars for, I mean, the Singapore market, South Africa, Estonia, Canada, US, UK, I mean, we’re doing, and all of this is really not stuff we’re making money on.

We’re trying to help and show ourselves as the helpers. Really like, here’s some advice to help you. We want everybody to stay in business so that later we can all do business together is I guess, how we’re approaching it. And it’s just taken a lot of our time that we just don’t have and so we’re having to give it to people to care for them.

Doug: Is that affecting billings?

Jason: It is making, so at our size, and the reason you do a leadership team is that the revenue production moves away from the owners down to the team, hopefully. That’s the goal. So the team is producing the revenue. So it really doesn’t create an immediate revenue hit. What it does is it hits the sales pipeline,  because that is all me and Julie. She kind of orchestrates a lot of that to order behind the work and the selling I’m doing. So our pipeline is slower and smaller. And that, a smaller pipeline now means you’re going to struggle later. So we’re trying to correct that. But here we are trying to correct it in a market that’s not buying stuff.

Doug: Yeah, I know.

Jason: And so what it does affect is the pipeline and the selling and the leads for sure. And that’s hard.

Doug: Well, we just have to hope for the best on that, right/

Jason: That’s, what else can you do? Just keep trying and reaching out. And so we have the availability to do things like webinars. So we’re just trying to do as many webinars for as many people as we can so people can see us and hear about us. And that just has to be some sense of marketing for us right now.

Doug: Do you think that’s something that a lot of folks listening to this could pick up on? I mean, could they start using webinars now? Because everybody’s used to being on Zoom or Teams or go to meeting or whatever?

Jason: Yeah. Well, it just depends. A webinar, you know, a webinar is really not going to be valuable unless a bunch of people will come. We can do that. And we have,

Doug: You’ve got a community, right? You can reach out to that community.

Jason: Yeah. And we’ve been niched in the firm in the creative digital design and marketing agency for over a decade there too, so people know who we are there. So we can reach out to design communities and lead webinars for the design community and then they bring their community to the webinar. So, but if people won’t come to a webinar, if they don’t know who you are, that might not be a thing everybody could do, really.

Doug: I was thinking of it more of in client or customer care. like if there was, you know, something you could share of value to more than one person, you can create a roundtable or, you know, whatever, a digital roundtable and help spread that information.

Jason: Well, you know, that’s a great, that’s actually, you know, for our community, so this is the Thrival community of firms who have joined our community, we are doing exactly what you said, Doug. We’re doing roundtables for that community. You know, and so they are coming to round table, now those are not for the public. They’re only internal for our community. And so yeah, we’re, and that’s a webinar type setup. And, you know, 40 or 50 people will come and we’ll just like hang out and go What are y’all struggling with?

Doug: Right. Issue solving with them. Perfect. come back around to sort of the bigger thoughts. You, and you’ve told us about your journey with Julia, which is, I think very valuable for people to hear. If you could boil it down to sort of, and avoid this crisis now, just pull back to the big picture. If you could suggest one most important tip to a business owner that’s at that sort of 8, 10 employees looking at a leadership team, you know, heading forward, what, if you could go back and have a do over what tips would you give them? One or two top things as they are on the verge of building their leadership team?

Do You Want What Growth Means?

Jason: Yeah. The thing I’m about to say anybody who’s been through some events that Julie and I lead, they’ve always wanted this on T-shirts or mugs, but it was years ago something Julie said to me that flipped me out, really upset me. When she first became a partner she said do you want to grow? And I did want to grow. And she said, Do you want what that means? And even recently, she’s been asking me that because we’re, you know, we’re in the middle of a very stressful time. She’s like do you want what this means? And the defining that, I didn’t know what she meant at first.

And when I found out what it meant it was really scary because what it faced me with was a decision point. And that decision point was wanting growth is not the same thing as achieving growth. If you want to grow, that’s going to mean things. It means certain sacrifices, it means giving up things, it means getting things. Do you want whatever it means in your life to do this thing? And so that was a decision point for me and it’s still a hard thing that I go through when we bump into hard things is do you want what this means?

That basically to me means you’re gonna have to give up this dream of utopia or some hope that you thought this was going to be that. It’s certainly not going to be. And are you ready to make that commitment now for the rest of your life? And that’s some big stuff man to say to somebody. And so I think visionaries need to be faced with that. It’s a mental heart struggle. Now you, what’s on the other side of that is a really, it’s a beautiful thing, but you’ll kind of go through a little bit of struggle, maybe a lot of struggle to realize that.

It’s not gonna be what you wanted it to be. You do get growth, but you don’t really get to define it if you want what you’re telling me you want. And so that’s the thing I would always, and we ask people this all the time in the events we lead. We’re like, and they’re saying, I’m gonna do this. We’re like, do you want what that means? And they’re like, What do you mean? Well, here’s five things that’s probably going to ask of you, your family, your time, your thoughts.

Do you want it? Are you ready for all of that? And so do you want what it means is a better question then do you want that? That’s the first question, do you want what it means, because it’s not always what you signed up for. But you do get it, but it’s gonna be what it is, not necessarily how you design it to be. So that’s a door I think everybody needs to walk through. It’s really a decision of growth. Okay, I’m ready. I’m gonna walk through the door, and I’m going to close it behind me and I’m going to lock the door. And that’s scary for people. It is was for me.

Doug: That’s powerful stuff. Yeah. And thanks for telling us. I mean, it sounds like you’re on a journey. And this journey is going to continue, right? Powerful stuff. So

Jason: I mean, well, I mean, even to make that commitment even deeper, we publicly tell people often, Julie and I, we say Julie and I are going to do this forever, so if you need us, we’re going to be here because we’re going to keep doing this. And so, you know, and even people struggle hearing that. They’re like, you can’t say that forever.

And yeah, we can and we’re going to say it out loud. It’s kind of, it’s putting our feet in concrete when we say it, right? It’s helping us keep our commitments. But we are. We’re going to do this forever. So we’ll be around way after a lot of people have failed because we’re going to keep doing it and whatever, since we’re going to do it. So

Doug: Tell us again, a little bit more about your ideal client profile for Blumer CPAs. What does that look like? Who do you guys serve?

Jason: Yeah. So we serve a created digital marketing agency group. And it started as smaller, maybe freelancers or just smaller agencies, but we’ve built a kind of team structure that serves a certain value of the market which is people who need kind of an outsource controller and trusted advisor. But we just have a handful of clients, right, in the 20s. It needs to be in the 30s. So you know, eight to 10 more is what you need this year, really, which that’s what we’re working on. But basically, they come in, outsource all of that accounting, tax, payroll, everything to our team, and they get a three-person team in return.

They get a customer ally, which is that technical person that leads the relationship. And they get an accounting specialist, and then a project manager type person, which is our operations manager. They’re always there. So it’s really three people leading that client service. And it, that’s because we’re doing so many things. We had to split up who’s doing what and kind of offload some of those responsibilities and share those responsibilities among that team. And so what you have to find is a client that needs a high-value relationship like that.

And then often Julie and I will be coaching and consulting the owners to help them grow. And sometimes put in leadership teams. And so you need people that are going to make a pretty heavy financial commitment to you, a time commitment, they have to designate really somebody on their end that’s our lead person that we’ll meet with on a weekly basis. And not all of our clients are like this, but that’s a pretty strong high-value sweet spot for us that we’ll serve.

Doug: So if people self-identify, where can they find information about that?

Jason: Yeah. So yeah, just go to Blumer, CPAs BLUMER CPAS dot com. And there’s a place to, you know, become a client. And they can just fill out that form and it’ll walk them through a process.

Doug: And you could serve somebody nationwide. No physical limit, right?

Jason: That’s right. Yeah, we’re fully virtual. So we have clients, you know, all over the US.

Doug: Perfect. So switch to Thrival community talk about who that serves.

Jason: Yeah. So we serve an entrepreneurially minded accounting firm owner. And those members can be, you know, I have some in South Africa, the US, Canada, so they can be really all over the world. Now we don’t have an

Doug: Kind of the English speaking world.

Jason: Yep, you got it. Yeah. Now, we, most everybody is in Canada and the US so we don’t have too many struggles with time zones. But we are starting to have timezone issues. So this is really an entrepreneurial CPA firm owner, or not necessarily even a CPA firm owner, just an accounting firm owner, that is a visionary type person. They don’t have to be. A lot of them are integrators, but they want to grow.

They want to figure out how to do this and they want to be led and they want to go through education and go through events where they’re, you know, they’re asked to do things and participate in leading or, you know, participate in educational type functions. We have groups that meet online every month for a year going through particular components to help them grow. And, you know, there are some basic groups and advanced groups they go through.

And then they meet together internally inside of our community in teams of eight or 10 every month led by one of our coaches, John Lokhorst, who does kind of a mastermind type monthly group and leads them through an agenda. And that’s to keep everybody close. So it’s really people who want to grow and know they kind of need help. And they want to be with a creative, innovative community that can inspire them and, you know, spurring them on to greater things.

Doug: Excellent. And where to folks find out about that?

Jason: They can go to thriveal.com and then slash apply, and you can apply to be a member. And then we walk them through the process over there.

Doug: Excellent. Well, good. Folks, check it out. Jason’s got and his team has some great stuff going. And Jason, I want to thank you for being an amazing guest today. You shared insights that I believe folks can really leverage. So thanks for that. And I wish you the best as we come through COVID-19 and come out on the other side.

Jason: Yeah, well, thank you so much, Doug, for having me and for putting out this content. It’s so valuable for people. And it’s weird being on the other side of a microphone when you just have no clue who’s hearing you and listening to you. You’re just in your bedroom or your room going, I mean, I’m staring at a computer screen. Is anybody out there? And, you know, people do hear and do listen. So thank you for committing the time for this knowledge.

Doug: Thanks for your time, and thanks for paying it forward. And I trust people will get value and I look forward to staying in touch with you.

Jason: Okay, well, thank you so much, Doug. Thanks for having me on your podcast.