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Andrew Jordon is the CEO and Founder of Connect4, a meeting platform that enables structured and efficient client meetings. Apart from a successful business career, Andrew is also the youngest trustee and treasurer at Prison Fellowship, the world's largest Christian non-profit organization for prisoner and justice reform. In this episode, Andrew and Stuart talk about Andrew's early career, the story of finding Connect4 and where it's heading. They also discuss charity, and how Andrew's values in business align with values outside of work.
Join Stuart McLeod as he interviews the world's top accounting leaders to understand their story, how they operate, their goals, mission, and top advice to help you run your accounting firm.
Stuart McLeod 00:00:05.838 [music] Hi, I'm Stuart McLeod, CEO and Co-founder of Karbon. Welcome to the Accounting Leaders Podcast, the show where I go behind the scenes with the world's top accounting leaders. Today I'm joined by Andrew Jordan, the CEO and founder of Connect4, which is a client meeting platform that allows you to have structured and efficient client meetings. Andrew is a trained accountant in corporate tax and M&A. He opened the UK office for Fathom, which is a reporting software predominantly in the Zero ecosystem. During that period he also founded Advisable, an education platform for professional services. Andrew is also the youngest trustee and treasurer at Prison Fellowship, the world's largest Christian non-profit organization for prisoner and justice reform. He's delivered over 50 sessions in prisons in Australia and the UK, focusing on restorative justice. It's my pleasure to welcome to the Accounting Leaders podcast, Andrew Jordan.
Andrew Jordon 00:01:07.886 Thanks, Stuart. Good to be here.
Stuart McLeod 00:01:09.439 Good evening, Andrew, and appreciate your time today. That's perfect. That's wonderful. Whereabouts do I find you today?
Andrew Jordon 00:01:15.396 I am in WeWork in Cambridge. So yeah, north of London. About 45 minutes up on the train. Get off the train. And I'm just opposite the train station there.
Stuart McLeod 00:01:25.300 You were actually educated nearby, were you not?
Andrew Jordon 00:01:28.912 Well, yeah. I mean, I started there originally in London, South London. Then I went off to Bristol, so a bit further west, and then started off in accounting in London. At BDO in central London.
Stuart McLeod 00:01:41.641 And how long were you at BDO in amongst the timesheet set?
Andrew Jordon 00:01:46.329 Oh, yeah. Don't remind me. I'm still trying to [inaudible] my dump code clients. Anyway, I won't go into that. So I was there for three and a half years. As soon as I qualified, I was out the doors, to be honest. I was in tax, so I did my accounting qualifications and then my tax-specific stuff alongside each other. And then I moved on fairly soon after.
Stuart McLeod 00:02:07.901 And what was it about that in accounting world that perhaps didn't see you there for generations to come?
Andrew Jordon 00:02:17.152 I was in corporate tax, which I love the challenge of it. I did love the challenge of applying. I was kind of on the M&A side often as well. Corporate tax, M&A. I was always the last man into the room. And then I got completely ignored on any deal. And then I'd get two years down the line and I'd say, "I told you so. You weren't meant to do that." I would have no impact on the transaction, I think. I found that frustrating after a while. And I first made my way out of practice and into in-house finance, is kind of where I worked my way into.
Stuart McLeod 00:02:49.189 And in terms of industry finance, where was that after BDO.
Andrew Jordon 00:02:53.898 I was in your original neck of the woods. I went out to Australia, actually, so I was out in Brisbane, which I loved. I loved. It's pretty equally sunny today in Cambridge, actually, to be fair, but.
Stuart McLeod 00:03:04.010 There you go. Probably not as humid.
Andrew Jordon 00:03:06.981 No, true. And we don't get the downpour at 03:00 PM so that's good. Yeah. So I went out there and I ended up contracting as an FC, at a big mining company, which I did really enjoy, actually. That side was good fun. Got thrown right into the deep end, but a lot of fun, mainly around closing, winding up assets in Australia for a big mining company.
Stuart McLeod 00:03:26.728 I'm sure those assets have been redeployed and wound up more than once.
Andrew Jordon 00:03:31.050 I think so. I think it was, yeah, Vale, a big Brazilian mining company were exiting from Australia. Well, they were changing, to be more precise, a way out of coal. And we were selling up their assets on the East Coast to mainly to Chinese JVs. Yeah, it was good fun. It was good. It was stimulating. I've ended up in a completely different field again. Now here I am in software, but it was fun while it lasted.
Stuart McLeod 00:03:52.711 Brisbane can be a-- did you get out into the mines very much or mostly head office?
Andrew Jordon 00:03:57.416 No, I was in head office. It was first-year GPFS as well, so I had all sorts of fun. So that was the first year in general purpose financial statements in Australia and there was all sorts of fun to unpack with previous years and whatnot. So I was head down in the office.
Stuart McLeod 00:04:16.043 Yeah. And how long were you in [Bris-Vegas?] for?
Andrew Jordon 00:04:19.882 Well, it was a fairly short stint. It was about a year we were out there. So I went out with my now wife, She's a doctor. And we thought we'd go out there see if we liked it. We did like it, but we essentially came back, partly for her job, but partly just to be closer to family back in the UK.
Stuart McLeod 00:04:35.307 Yes.
Andrew Jordon 00:04:35.931 It's got appeals, the UK, its seasons and whatnot, and yeah, closer to family. So we came back after a year.
Stuart McLeod 00:04:42.374 Yeah. And settled in Cambridge and then-- so when you came back, did you go straight into Connect4? What happened upon your return?
Andrew Jordon 00:04:49.916 No, there's another little chapter there. So I found the Fathom guys. And Fathom are a management reporting application in App World for the last - what? - dozen years now. Well, they happened upon me more specifically. I thought I was going to come back to Cambridge and do an MBA. But I think it was on Angel List. I have my details on there for something or another. So a [inaudible] [Top?] site. And Dan, one of the founders there, came across me and we started chatting for about my last month in Australia. I got on really well with them. So my wife came back to the UK and I stayed out there a bit longer. Essentially, I came on as a consultant for them to help with their accounting channel. And then I went-- I essentially joined Fathom to set up their UK and EMEA operations. Spent a bit of time in Seattle in their US office. Yeah. So initially I was setting up Fathom's EMEA operations.
Stuart McLeod 00:05:38.451 I mean, there was a well-established product by then. And Zero is a very well-established company in the UK. Was it a natural channel to be able to-- or was the accounting channel relatively easy to penetrate with Fathom or just the education piece was just as important and still early on?
Andrew Jordon 00:06:00.651 I think being a downstream ecosystem application - so something pulling data from a general ledger software like Zero - you kind of ride the tide a little bit. So Fandom was always going to do well. Of course, it was all down to me. Of course it was all down to me and my brilliant strategy. No, I think there was a sense that this was the way the industry was going with reporting. So all the reporting applications were doing well. But that said, there was a big challenge around, "How on Earth do I do-- what do I do with these management reports as an adviser," or these dashboards or whatever the jazzy new word might be for kind of a few years? So I think there was a real challenge in the industry that I felt I saw a lot of, "Great. Now I've got these insights, we're doing something with the transactional data, but how do I provide value to my clients with this diagram or this chart?" So it was a real challenge with that.
Stuart McLeod 00:06:52.385 What's the Fathom office in the UK? Are they well-established now?
Andrew Jordon 00:06:56.231 I think it's about a dozen of them. [The way it was?] I left, I think there was 8, and now they're up to 12. So they're growing; nice, steady growth. I think the landscape is going to change a little bit this week. I mean, Future Leads just been acquired by Sage, so that was one of the competitors in the reporting space. So that came out at the end of last week. And then there's a lot of challenge. For example, Sift is a South African reporting tool which is doing quite well. So yeah, on the whole they're growing, doing well.
Stuart McLeod 00:07:22.866 There's certainly a halo effect from the success of Zero and other online general ledgers. And so what was the impetus for Connect4 then?
Andrew Jordon 00:07:33.718 Glad you asked. Yes. [inaudible] they-- like I say, with the product that Fathom was offering, so a reporting tool, I did a lot of work actually interviewing accountants. And I went into all sorts of reasons as to why they were struggling utilizing this management reporting tool. Was it they didn't know how to price their new services? They didn't know what these service lines should be. They didn't know how to market them. They didn't have to educate their staff. They didn't have the technology. It was all these different reasons. And I spent about 18 months creating something called Advisable, where I spent ages interviewing accountants and doing all sorts of questionnaires and did get a lot of data from that. But what I really found was the thing that really defined whether a firm was doing well in this space was if they talked to their clients; that was the common denominator. Funny that. So that seemed pretty obvious to me. But then I realized there wasn't actually much in the way of support around utilizing how best to talk to clients. So kind of this was where CRMs are one-sided, practice management maybe slightly not. Though they are internally orientated, how can you create something two-sided? How can you create a process of best practice to help an advisor? And so that's where Connect4 was really born from, that frustration of us not having an easy way to communicate well with clients or customers.
Stuart McLeod 00:08:54.958 So if client communication and education was the issue, what's the solution?
Andrew Jordon 00:09:01.867 Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Well, so there's a few barriers if we take that bit further, for example-- there's a lot we can unpack with that. And with communication, there's obviously transactional communication and there's more relational. And I'm more interested in the proactive relational side with our product. And there's also challenges with smaller firms. A lot of the communication is done by those at the top of the firm. So what we started to build was actually a framework. So we have this prepare-meet-act framework. We've focused initially on meetings, for example. And with that framework and basically enable best practice for that communication, whether it's for a firm owner or whether it's for engaging the whole team to be client managers and actually have that touch point with the client. So practically speaking--
Stuart McLeod 00:09:43.839 That seems to make sense. Yeah.
Andrew Jordon 00:09:45.885 Yeah. Practically speaking, that means having a library of agendas, sending them out by automated ways before meetings. It means keeping track of meeting minutes from previous meetings with the client. It means having a branded web-based video tool. It means taking actions whilst in meetings. It means having documents there and then. It means embedding things like Loom videos into meeting spaces. And so that's what it practically looks like for us.
Stuart McLeod 00:10:10.175 And what about-- it's fine to sort of describe the problem and identify the problem, and perhaps even propose solutions. How do you see-- is this embraced by the industry? Do you think that we've come as far as we need to have come in order to sort of be able to have the industry get on board with this kind of proactive communication and proactive client education? Are we seeing a significant enough change in this area?
Andrew Jordon 00:10:42.030 I think we are. I was on a panel at Acountex in London last week and we were talking a little bit about this. I mean, firstly, there's two kind of spheres. There's the incoming communication from clients and then outgoing. So there's kind of the proactive and the reactive. I think that there is a space now for firms to do the proactive on a regular cadence. So a firm as part of their service level agreement, as part of their ethos, they talk to clients once a quarter and the client helps out. But it's part of the-- [they will?]. But then you can-- the client can never leave you saying, "You never spoke to us. You never offered to talk," because you've flipped the whole thing. I gave the anecdote last week in a talk around-- the legislation around [transplants'?] changed in the UK, for example, in 2020 from opt-out-- so opt-in to opt-out, basically. And the impact of that was huge. If we could do the same thing with clients like your firm, the standard protocol is we talk to you once a quarter and they can opt out of that. The difference would be massive. And I'm seeing some firms do this kind of really well.
Stuart McLeod 00:11:46.154 And what about the client base? Are they happy to be educated and informed and brought along for the journey?
Andrew Jordon 00:11:51.919 I hope so, yeah. No, I think they are. I mean, the latest kind of data, I think, is out of-- Zero report, for example, state of the nation in Australia is probably the latest stuff that's come out. And I think the there the biggest kind of difference they've seen over COVID. I think 49% of firms had said that they'd seen their client's attitude towards technology change or their attitude towards that. And I think there is now an increase that clients are willing to use new bits of technology to communicate, to get advice, to get legislative changes more frequently. So I think maybe the role of the accountant has been brought back into the limelight with the near-death experiences of many startups and small businesses over the last couple of years.
Stuart McLeod 00:12:34.759 Yeah. And so you founded Connect4 and off the back of this research and program framework that you developed. And what's that experience been like so far?
Andrew Jordon 00:12:46.734 A roller coaster. It's been a lot of fun. I think building a product, an impactful product, takes a lot of iteration, a lot of work with-- even if you really understand a problem well or thought you did, I think there's still a lot more iteration and a lot of engagement with people who are feeling the pain each day. So I think that has been incredibly-- it's been a lot of fun, to be honest. I've just literally come off a whole afternoon pretty much talking to a Karbon user in the UK who trying to understand the way her different service lines fit into meetings. Just her way of doing work, basically. And I do it every day and I've done it every day for the last sort of three years; and it's fascinating. And I think I do really get my kicks out of that. So I enjoy that part of it. There's certain parts of a small business and startup that are less fun, I think. The way I, for example, raise finance for the business, I'm really keen on humans helping humans. So the way I've raised finances through Angels, and that's been a lot of fun, but it also means it's time-intensive. So there are different things that have been fun and challenging in equal measure, as I'm sure you could sympathize with.
Stuart McLeod 00:13:54.528 Oh, yes. Yes, yes. I do. I do considerably. And so you've been going two or three years now. And the product, I mean if I can paraphrase, enabling accountants primarily to better educate, better work with their clients. How's that?
Andrew Jordon 00:14:13.746 That's good. You could get a sales role, I'm sure.
Stuart McLeod 00:14:15.112 And what's the feedback like so far from sort of trying to productize this framework that you sort of came up with?
Andrew Jordon 00:14:23.643 Yeah, I think there's a few things that are working really well. One is when you have a meeting with a client, the previous meeting history, be they minutes actions, documents, meeting recordings, they're all stored in what we call a pod. So you have the context of the previous meeting, so it kind of becomes a bit of an order [inaudible] of value, but it also means you don't repeat yourself from the previous meeting. And you don't have to be in the meeting. So you can invite colleagues into a pod to kind of view the outcomes without being there. So I think that's been an area we knew would be valuable, but we've had a lot of confirmation of that that builds over time as you journey with the client. And then another area that we have seen is sort of standardizing onboarding. It's not an area that I really-- so if you can build template, agendas and template pods that are branded with your company branded, and you invite your client into this place to onboard, and your junior team members now can follow this process. So a joint customer of ours and yours, actually, Peter, who runs a firm called PJCO, most of the people who do the client onboarding are probably 21, 22, 23. And he's just defined the process in Connect4 and in Karbon, and it's enabled them to run with it who are quite junior. They follow the process of [inaudible]. So yeah, those two areas have kind of been positively received.
Stuart McLeod 00:15:38.561 And it's obviously relevant to start in accounting. It's your background. It's the area that you did the most research in. Have you had interest from other areas, perhaps accountants using it with clients that they think, "Oh, this might be useful,"?
Andrew Jordon 00:15:53.788 Yeah. I'm pretty passionate about impacting the accounting space. I think, like you say, I think there's a lot of work to do here, and I think we're just at the beginning of it [inaudible] we increase automation. And there will be firms that distinguish themselves by how they interact with their clients. So I think there's a lot of potential here. That said, we have all sorts of types of companies using us. We're not targeting them as such to sell to, but business coaches, for example, seem to really like our platform. Software companies that do quite a bit of a sales process because they can keep the continuity. They can bring in-- go from sales rep, to onboarding specialist, to account manager. The client and customer or customers stay in their pod. You bring the relevant person to them. So there's this kind of continuity, or if someone leaves, you've still got the whole continuity. So yeah, we are seeing interest from all sorts of types of business, which is exciting. But I am pretty focused on the account-- the small accounting firm at the moment.
Stuart McLeod 00:16:50.697 That makes sense. And so how many staff now and what do you see in the future for Connect4? Are you building this up for sale or what's the plan?
Andrew Jordon 00:17:00.349 Well, I think we're a lean team. At the moment we're four, so we're super lean which is, yeah, it puts a burden on but also keeps us laser-focused, and that's the real benefit of it. We will grow the team, but I do plan to keep it lean. So we will always be a lean team. I hope at some point we will have a no-hands kind of sale process where we can really kind of bring people, other than the big firms, people can onboard onto our platform and there's this [product-like?] growth approach of people loving our platform and signing up to it. So that's the end goal. In terms of where we want to take the product, for the next two years it's about building a product people love. I think over time, the practice management space, at the moment like the proposal space, if you want to call it that, engagement space, will think that we're quite similar to them, so there might be [roads?] there. But for now, we've got to build a product that people love otherwise it's worth nothing to no one.
Stuart McLeod 00:17:56.268 Yeah. No, that makes sense. And you've got quite an interesting extra curriculum activity that you participate in. And do you want to tell us a little bit about that?
Andrew Jordon 00:18:07.970 Got my CV there [with you Stuart?].
Stuart McLeod 00:18:11.020 We do our research occasionally
Andrew Jordon 00:18:13.523 [inaudible]. Private investigators. Yeah, I do all sort of-- I'm into a sport. I'm certainly into that. Doing a triathlon on Saturday, so hopefully that goes well. I've--
Stuart McLeod 00:18:22.568 Oh, which one?
Andrew Jordon 00:18:23.611 There's one, it's in Eaton, which is sort of West London. It's an Olympic Triathlon there.
Stuart McLeod 00:18:29.314 Oh, [inaudible] Olympic one. That'll be fun.
Andrew Jordon 00:18:31.293 Yeah. I was talking to Ian last week. He says you're both competitive with your Tria's.
Stuart McLeod 00:18:35.785 Oh, yeah. His DNA is not as useful as mine in triathlon, that's for sure.
Andrew Jordon 00:18:40.321 And then I'm also pretty involved outside of sport and doing quite a lot in prison and rehabilitation. So I spend a lot of my time actually being a trustee for a charity and a treasurer for a charity that focuses on bringing victims into prisons and running courses around kind of what we call restorative justice. So a lot of our justice system's based around those in prison getting sentenced based on the law, how can we actually try and enact change by making them aware of the impact they have on other people? So yeah, that's something I do alongside.
Stuart McLeod 00:19:14.264 And how did you get involved with that?
Andrew Jordon 00:19:15.596 I've been doing it for about ten years. I think initially I realized, "Oh, I like to make a difference in whatever I do with software, whatever I do with charity work." I did quite a lot with homeless charities previously, and I mentored some young offenders. And I realized prison was one of the biggest opportunities to enact change in behavior and it was being under-utilized in the UK 44% of people leaving prison are back there within 12 months. So probably one of the biggest state failures. So I realized there was a real kind of opportunity to make a change and I got involved. At that point. I just started going into prisons, helping on these courses and yeah, went from there really. I did it for about ten years, been in prisons all over the UK and Australia, running these courses. And now I'm a bit busier, I help with the strategy side.
Stuart McLeod 00:20:01.397 And you would have seen some things in your visits and in your journey. Is there anything that sticks out as perhaps something that you're able to affect great change or something that really struck you as considerable in that journey?
Andrew Jordon 00:20:16.213 Yeah. I mean, there's been so many because it's a short course, but one of the things we do is bring someone who's been impacted by crime. So someone who's had a family member murdered, for example, would very-- as part of potentially as their healing process or grieving process, they will come into this group of 20 guys who've all committed quite serious crimes and tell their story and the impact that's had on offenders. I've seen, particularly in Australia, a lot of biker guys who are in for - I don't know - killing a policeman, for example, in the '80s or crime where they get sentenced very heavily, completely break down in tears. The recounting of a story by a victim of a crime, it's pretty powerful, pretty powerful stuff.
Stuart McLeod 00:20:57.917 Yeah. Do you think that-- is their ways to expand those services or where do you see sort of charities like that being able to operate in a post-COVID world? Are they able to expand their reach and expand their impact?
Andrew Jordon 00:21:12.048 Yeah, definitely. I mean, I've been talking a lot about the strategy. We've just been going through the process of hiring a new chairperson. We've just gone through about 350 people over the last six months. We've just appointed someone yesterday who's got a real vision for what we're doing. And I think one of the most fulfilling things you can do, I think, as a human, is helping another human. And I think this goes for Connect4 product as well as it does what we do in prisons. But I think humans impacting other humans in change has a lot of potential, and I think we're doing that more and more with the charity work going back into prisons all over the UK, in 140 prisons in the UK. I think there's a lot more we can do to just impact change through humans telling their stories to other humans. And that's central to what I'm about, really. It's kind of human-to-human impact. So yeah, there's a lot more potential for this charity prison fellowship.
Stuart McLeod 00:22:00.668 It sounds like you're very busy. What's on the plate for the remainder of the year? You've got summer coming up in the UK where everybody just goes drinking for 12 weeks. It sounds like you're going to keep your triathlons and make sure that don't turn Into a bowling ball. So we appreciate that. And I'm sure your wife and your health does, too. So well done on that. As you go into summer and look out towards the end of the year, what's plans for you and your family? I understand that there's another great change on its way.
Andrew Jordon 00:22:31.327 Yeah. So first child on the way in a few weeks' time. So that's probably a big plan for the summer. So that's pretty exciting. My wife and I, with the little one, we're toying with going out to South Africa and working from Cape Town for a month or two in October time. So we'll see how that all goes. It might be a bit ambitious. So that will be on the plan. And then business-wise, there's a huge amount we're doing. So there's a lot around working with other platforms at the moment, that we're doing a big push on, particularly some of the-- doing a lot of work with Google and Microsoft, which is slow progress, as you can imagine. Deeping our integration with Karbon.
Stuart McLeod 00:23:08.274 Wonderful.
Andrew Jordon 00:23:09.332 Yeah. Every time we give Jay or Ian a kick around the API, [we're pushing things along?]. So yeah, we've got a lot happening there, which is great. So yeah, those are kind of the big things probably going on in my life for the next six months. We're also building a whole content area out in our platform around expert agendas, which is quite [inaudible]. So that piece is keeping me on my toes, too.
Stuart McLeod 00:23:29.845 That certainly makes sense from a connection perspective. Well, I won't give you any parenting tips. I don't think-- you've got this well under control. Good luck to you and your wife, Louise, for first-born. I'm sure you've got the nursery all well and truly sorted out and ready to go. I think it's a very exciting time for you and your family. And congratulations on the success of Connect4 so far. I know that many of our joint customers are thrilled with the results and the way that they can bring about change with their clients. And as you point out, that's the reason that-- a lot of the reason we do what we do is bringing about change, enabling accountants to be better with the clients that they serve and go on their clients journey of success. I mean, it means a lot to them and it means a lot to us to enable that. So we love working with you guys and the team at Connect4, and I'm sure we'll continue to see a lot of success as we go forward.
Andrew Jordon 00:24:29.379 Yeah. Thank you, Stuart. No, I appreciate it. We love working with Karbon, too. I think that external meeting tied up with the internal workflows of Karbon, it does work really well, and we will continue to improve it.
Stuart McLeod 00:24:40.419 Makes a lot of sense. Andrew Jordon, thank you for your time today. I appreciate you being on the Accounting Leaders podcast.
Andrew Jordon 00:24:46.328 Appreciate it. And I'll get that parenting tips later.
Stuart McLeod 00:24:49.104 No worries. Cheers. Thanks for listening to this episode. If you found this discussion interesting, fun, you'll find lots more to help you run a successful accounting firm at Karbon magazine. There are more than a thousand free resources there including guides, articles, templates, webinars and more. Just head to karbonhq.com/resources. I'd also love it if you could leave us a five-star review wherever you listen to this podcast. Let us know you like this session and we'll be able to keep bringing you more guests for you to learn from and get inspired by. Thanks for joining and see you on the next episode of the Accounting Leaders podcast.