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Few encapsulate the title of accounting leader more than this episode’s guest, Jason Blumer. Together, Jason and Stuart discuss the background and success of Thriveal, the network Jason founded to help other entrepreneurial CPA firm owners connect, learn and grow. They also discuss the trend of larger firms acquiring smaller firms, the challenges of growth, why you need to know your strengths and weaknesses, and how you can use that knowledge to define your purpose, lean into it, and help your own firm thrive.
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.
S1: 00:00:06.785 [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. [music] Today, my guest is Jason Blumer. Not many people in this industry encapsulate the title of a accounting leader more than Jason. He is the founder and CEO of Thriveal, a Network to help entrepreneurial CPA firm owners connect, learn, and grow by providing them with a community, coaching, consulting, events, and more. Jason is also the CEO of Blumer & Associates, co-hosts two podcasts of his own, speaks and writes frequently for the financial and creative industries, and was recently named by Accounting Today as one of the top 100 most influential people in accounting. It is my pleasure to welcome to the Accounting Leaders Podcast, Jason Blumer. Jason Blumer, welcome. It is a great honor and great privilege to welcome to the Accounting Leaders Podcast, Jason Blumer.
S2: 00:01:13.227 The applause.
S1: 00:01:15.253 They can put in the music later.
S2: 00:01:17.322 Okay, okay. They won't do it. Will they for me [laughter]? I'm pumped to be on the show, man. To hang out with you, Stuart, and all the Karbon stuff you guys are doing. Y'all been doing this for a long time, man. Building companies, man.
S1: 00:01:39.174 Building companies for accountants. And you've got me today. Usually, we lump you with Ian, right.
S2: 00:01:45.202 That's right. Right. Now I get to hang out with you. Heck with Ian.
S1: 00:01:49.206 That's right. We send him on the planes in person, right.
S2: 00:01:54.796 That's right, yeah. So yeah, he's coming to see us at Deeper Weekend soon, which is going to be really awesome.
S1: 00:01:59.676 Yeah. And I think you might be getting a dose of a triathlon coach that's coming with him too.
S2: 00:02:03.993 Oh, come on. Jay. Oh, Jay was Ian's triathlon coach, right?
S1: 00:02:09.695 Yes. Well, mine before. Ian probably claims him now. That's so Ian.
S2: 00:02:13.466 "Oh look, I got a triathlon coach [laughter]." Well, I'm not going to do anything a triathlete coach tells me to do, so.
S1: 00:02:23.909 Nobody in the history of this world has got worse DNA for triathlon than Ian [laughter].
S2: 00:02:28.742 Oh, poor Ian. Thankfully, he will never hear this show. So he won't know--
S1: 00:02:33.142 No, no, he doesn't listen. He doesn't listen.
S2: 00:02:34.638 Yeah, he doesn't listen. He won't know we're trashing him [laughter]. Poor Ian.
S1: 00:02:40.400 He did ski racing as a college kid. Did you know that?
S2: 00:02:43.119 I didn't know that.
S1: 00:02:44.256 And he's got much better DNA for that because he just gets into a ball and just goes straight down the hill [laughter].
S2: 00:02:51.694 Sometimes on your face, right [laughter]?
S1: 00:02:53.014 Yeah, that's [inaudible] [laughter].
S2: 00:02:54.145 It just depends. If you trip, you're in trouble. You're going to keep going.
S1: 00:02:56.494 Yeah, yeah, yeah. All right. We should stop trashing-- I should stop trashing him, shouldn't I. We love him dearly [laughter].
S2: 00:03:03.512 Yeah. We want to build him up.
S1: 00:03:07.125 Yes. No, we should. Because he needs the validation [laughter].
S2: 00:03:10.921 That's it. Oh, we're still trashing Ian [laughter]. Funny.
S1: 00:03:17.312 Hey, Jason, I've-- my team, I should say. I give credit where it's due because I'm a bit lazy. You know that. But my team tells me that you founded Thriveal. I didn't know it was going for as long as it has. In 2010.
S2: 00:03:32.598 Yeah. So Thriveal's a decade old.
S1: 00:03:34.256 Yeah, there you go. I think you might know a thing or two about how to help accountants by now, right?
S2: 00:03:40.848 Yeah, for sure. So I'm that serial entrepreneur, where I've-- so my dad started our firm almost 25 years ago.
S1: 00:03:47.486 Oh, did he?
S2: 00:03:48.445 Yeah. So I've been leading it for 20.
S1: 00:03:50.861 You're a father, son team.
S2: 00:03:52.160 That's right. Well, man, he retired years ago. So I've been leading the firm for 20 years, Thriveal for 10 years. And there was another company that I started with another partner that racked up the debt, [went out?] and flushed it down the toilet.
S1: 00:04:05.649 Oh yeah. That's easy to do, isn't it?
S2: 00:04:09.686 Especially when you're scaling on debt, right. The spreadsheet of the sales was going straight up into the millions when I built that spreadsheet. It just didn't work out the spreadsheet says.
S1: 00:04:21.186 It's more fun to blow it up and [break?] it though, rather than [laughter]--
S2: 00:04:24.640 Yeah, probably. Yeah. And I tried to actually build something [that did?] work out.
S1: 00:04:29.469 What business was that?
S2: 00:04:31.122 Oh, it was a digital marketing signage company.
S1: 00:04:36.351 Digital marketing signage company. So electronic billboards?
S2: 00:04:41.171 Yeah. 15 years ago, we started doing that in local malls. And we would build the motion design ads and download them to a server to run at certain times. And just way ahead of our time.
S1: 00:04:54.041 [A bit?], but yes, good idea. A bit early.
S2: 00:04:56.989 Because then the teenagers would go cut it off in the mall and we'd have to go over there after I was doing tax returns and reboot the machine. And stuff like that, you're like, "I don't think this is scalable if we got more than two of these in this one mall [laughter]." I look back at it like, "How stupid?" Now you got companies rolling out thousands of [screens?] across the United States. And I was like, "Hey. We got two up and running in one location [laughter]." So that didn't work out.
S1: 00:05:26.489 Well, business can be-- well, like a lot of things in life, all about timing, right?
S2: 00:05:30.995 For sure.
S1: 00:05:32.076 Too early is, unfortunately, still wrong.
S2: 00:05:34.847 You are so right. And [it?] means you don't always know when you're too early or too late.
S1: 00:05:40.811 No, we don't. We don't. And sometimes I think this is very relevant for Karbon. And maybe you can comment on how this has been for you guys. But I think perseverance and resilience out of everything else been our most successful-- or the traits that have made us most successful. You just got to be patient and keep going, keep going, and keep going.
S2: 00:06:00.843 That is key. Actually, you'll hear people like Mark Cuban say things like that. It's like, "I can outwork anybody. So if I can outwork you for 20 years, then I'm just going to probably smoke you in business." And that's what it takes. You just have to work hard and do it longer than the next person.
S1: 00:06:17.859 Have you heard of the podcast that is about the NBA referees?
S2: 00:06:22.476 No.
S1: 00:06:23.316 Let me look up the name. One sec. NBA referees. You know how Mark Cuban constantly-- Whistleblower, it's called. It's about Tim Donaghy because he was a NBA referee in 2007, and he was betting on games that he was refereeing [laughter]. What a genius. What a genius, right.
S2: 00:06:45.498 That is genius [laughter]. That's great.
S1: 00:06:49.379 The idiot. Anyway, so it's quite an interesting podcast, but there's a real clinger in there. That was Mark Cuban knew for all his ownership years of the Mavericks, right - and it still goes on, I think - that the referees were NBA employees to ensure that, particularly, in the finals, that the team that would bring the most revenue can progress. And he had the opportunity, Mark, in the podcast to finally air all these grievances that he's been banging on and on and constantly gets fined for and all this, but he never actually comes out and says what he really thinks because he knows that the NBA will just drown the Mavericks with shit referees forever and a day if he directly accuses them of cheating.
S2: 00:07:53.887 That is wild. So there's a particular person running this podcast?
S1: 00:07:58.184 Yes.
S2: 00:07:58.770 What was that person's name?
S1: 00:08:00.121 What's it called? Whistleblower Podcast. Whistleblower Podcast. It's one of those companies-- what is it? Tenderfoot Media, which has done some others, right. And it's really well done. It's really well done. It's quite interesting.
S2: 00:08:16.748 Cool. Okay. That sounds interesting. That sounds very interesting.
S1: 00:08:20.337 Because basketball's one of those few-- NFL referees, you can sort of-- you can ruin the game, but I don't know whether you can really sort of control without the obvious methodologies that NBA does. I mean, the referees can just completely change the complexion of that last two minutes. I mean, at an NBA game, it's only got two minutes of interesting basketball anyway out of [inaudible] [laughter].
S2: 00:08:50.557 So the refs have a lot of power.
S1: 00:08:53.257 Exactly, exactly. There you go. So anyway, Mark Cuban should [persist it?] with his criticisms, but anyway. So, Jason Blumer, over the last 10 years of Thriveal, what do you think the biggest changes are in the accounting spectrum landscape? It doesn't have to be technology. It can be country agnostic, whatever you like. Run.
S2: 00:09:19.870 Yeah. Wow, there's a lot to that. So that's big. Yeah. Maybe we've gotten used to the cloud. So is that behind us?
S1: 00:09:29.609 Yes.
S2: 00:09:29.628 Probably not for everybody, but--
S1: 00:09:32.477 I think there's still some servers in some closets Don't [crosstalk]--
S2: 00:09:34.348 Okay, okay. I imagine there are. So maybe that's behind us. So technology is just a pretty basic, stable part of how we operate. It's interesting what we did see in that past 10 years is really how-- I'm always interested in the conference circuit, right. There's an educational part to the accounting profession. Thriveal is part of that. We do entrepreneurial education, and so we do more and more of that. And that's kind of a trajectory we're headed in to continue to do more complex theoretical teaching about growth for service-based companies. And so we watched independent conferences happen early. And then we saw the software companies building those conferences because they had the funding to build larger ones. And then the pandemic saw those shrink. So it's just interesting to watch who is providing the education.
S1: 00:10:29.609 You reckon there's a canary in the education in the industry.
S2: 00:10:33.589 Yeah, it's just interesting. And so Deeper Weekend, our conference, has been around for 10 years too. And it's very small. We do go very deep into the education. And so it is technology agnostic. Though, there are technologies we use, like Karbon. So it's just interesting to watch where the education came from. And when I started my career almost 30 years ago, the education was just live, local CPE. And it was amazing how bad it was. It was just really horrendous. I mean, I remember being in a room with 200 people, which was really common 20, 25 years ago, listening to forestry tax-related education.
S1: 00:11:17.961 Forestry tax?
S2: 00:11:19.462 Forestry. Right. How to tax [crosstalk]--
S1: 00:11:21.500 How do trees pay tax [laughter]?
S2: 00:11:24.430 Right. No, no. It's the inventory--
S1: 00:11:26.827 So [crosstalk] tax.
S2: 00:11:28.535 And I'm sitting in this room going, "Am I here?" Because I don't do this, but that's the class that was available and it was local. So you just go down the street to this big boring hotel and you kind of get what they give you.
S1: 00:11:43.788 Yeah. So the Four Points. Sheraton. Not the Four Seasons, the Four Points.
S2: 00:11:48.988 Four Points, right. Whatever. The hacked-off bad version of the Seasons. Yeah. So education is really interesting how it's changed. Of course, now, it can be fully digital. It can be really good. Some provide really great deep education. So we can choose to be very narrow in what we provide. And so what Thriveal does is we don't do any accounting-, tax-, payroll-, audit-related CPE. It is entrepreneurial growth-related for firm owners ready to scale. So it's been interesting to consume that education and watch who's provided it, and now who doesn't. And it's really interesting.
S1: 00:12:28.607 Yeah. So you reckon the education market is a window into the world of the evolution of accounting.
S2: 00:12:36.477 For sure. Yeah, a lot of patterns in markets reflect the overall general beliefs of the participants in that part of the market. And it's just interesting to watch those big global changes. And I think we've been going through some-- also, we've been going through some merger, acquisition type things. People are acquiring firms.
S1: 00:13:02.580 In your client base, you mean, that you're being sort of--
S2: 00:13:04.420 No, no. Firms. No, accounting firms. So we're seeing larger firms really kind of-- there seems to be a pattern of a pick up of they're really consuming and taking up smaller firms. Which is not good or bad. It's just interesting to watch why. And of course, during the pandemic, everybody just sat still, didn't do anything. So there's reasons why all of that happens. It's interesting to know why, but we don't always know.
S1: 00:13:30.850 No. So I have a theory about-- well, you go first. What's your theory about why larger firms are acquiring the smaller ones, apart from all the normal stuff, right?
S2: 00:13:41.098 Right, right. Well, probably it goes back a little bit, maybe a decade, when I thought the baby boomers-- and so I'm a Gen X, so [crosstalk]--
S1: 00:13:49.742 Yeah, you and me both.
S2: 00:13:50.845 Yeah. So I thought the baby boomers were going to be gone by now.
S1: 00:13:54.412 Yeah. That they're all on the golf course.
S2: 00:13:56.488 Right. Yeah. And so they didn't actually leave when we thought. I think the recession, 2008, kind of kept them around, and so I don't know. They seem to still be here. And maybe they're building up their firms to kind of finally exit, maybe, in a few years. They're just like, they're not going to do it anymore. I don't know.
S1: 00:14:14.134 But who's going to pay more than 1X for a firm that is not well operationalized and not advancing its technology? And I mean, a 1X, they might be lucky. Were I've seen down to half X and [crosstalk]--
S2: 00:14:26.865 Well, probably what I think is larger firms are acquiring smaller firms. And the smaller firms don't care about one times the revenue as a sell or even less than that. They're trying to get out.
S1: 00:14:38.683 They just need to buy their golf course membership [inaudible].
S2: 00:14:41.025 Yeah, yeah. And they need to-- maybe a lot of them are switching professions, right. They're just going, "I don't want to do this anymore." So I don't know if they're even selling for money purposes. They're just kind of moving out and they get some cash. You get a little bit of cash too. So these firms are kind of at a discount now. And the bigger firms may know that, and so they're trying to bulk up pretty quick so they can maybe be acquired. So maybe the larger is getting larger really fast. And just like it's true, I think, in a lot of professions, right, you're going to still have tons of really small solopreneurs, and you can have a big [inaudible], right, of the economy and you're going have these big, big, big ones. And it's hard to be in the middle because, as you know, scaling a company, it's tough to hang out in the middle when you're like, "We're not big enough to kind of bear through the risks, but we also don't have the cash to go add five people to our team to kind of protect us from that." I don't know. It's just a weird place to be.
S1: 00:15:38.941 Yeah. No, I agree. And if you can-- and there's a couple of examples of this slightly. But if you've got a solid, strong, good cloud-first firm, there is a lot of advantages into selling up into a-- well, I don't know about a lot, but there are considerable strong advantages of selling up into a firm that offers a wider array of services, right. It just makes sense to be able to bring your technology-forward client base into a larger firm that can do audit, they can do, tax, that can do advisory, that can do family office stuff. And that makes perfect sense to me because then you are part of a bigger beast and you're going to have to eat some of that ego as you go up. But that makes sense to me. That's my theory as to why you're sort of seeing some of the consolidation of the good firms. The good firms can see sort of 3-, 4-, 5X, right. Like, multiples that have never been seen in accounting before. The difference between a good firm and a shit one is millions and millions of dollars of forward revenue.
S2: 00:16:48.670 That's right. And it's hard to build and scale a good firm. It takes a lot of maintenance. Because when you get-- our team is 13. We may add more over the next year or two. And at that size, there's a lot of caregiving you've got to do with the team. You have layers of leaders, seniors, team that need care at different salary levels. There's different levels of technology know-how. Some teams you're hands-off. Some you're not. So it takes a lot of work. And then if you really standardize your strong with a lot of foundational processes and you're pumping it through a tool like Karbon, you got to keep them using it and monitoring it.
S2: 00:17:31.489 I think one flaw that we [inaudible] mainly with service-based companies-- not just in Thriveal with firms, but in our firm with digital marketing agencies. So service-based is really an expertise we have in scaling. One flaw we see is owners who think I'm just going to get some people in there and I'm going to go away and let it hum. That does not work, by the way. And so I don't know if anybody's-- and maybe technology companies are the same way, but human-based service companies don't work that way. Especially if you're virtual-- especially virtual, here's why, and it's probably obvious, but when you're in an office, you have your eyes on everybody. There's that nuance of being bound to the culture in the office. When you're virtual, people just disappear over lunch and don't come back. And you're like, "Where did you go?" So you're always pulling them back to the fact that, actually, you have a job. I know you just left to go hang out with your spouse and partner, but you actually were-- you were at work and you couldn't leave work, but it feels like you could. And so you did. And so you got-- and you got to have a conversation, "Hey, don't do that again." They're like, "Don't tell me what to do in my house." It's like, "No, I actually get to tell you what to do in your house because you're at work." And so you got that layer and you don't realize-- and that's the thing about virtual, it's tricky to lead a team through virtual. Though, it's really cool now. And it became cool over the past few years. And the pandemic then forced it upon people. We've been virtual for eight years, and we really have gone through the ups and downs of building a culture that is considerate, consistent, intentional. And how much work that takes is just wild. Harder than I thought.
S1: 00:19:22.711 And what do you do to sort of counterbalance that? Do you have your in-person once a year or what do you do to bring the team together?
S2: 00:19:30.810 Yeah. Well, that's one thing you can do, but that's not the biggest. Probably, the biggest is service companies-- and this is a foundational part of our growth model, which we teach at Depper Week. And we have a growth model called the Thriveal's prototype components model for growth. That's our model we've created for service companies. And a big part of the model is rhythm. So human-based service companies need service rhythms. And so what we do is we pull teams into a weekly team meeting. Every firm should have a weekly team meeting at a minimum. We have more. When you have a bigger team, we have project management huddle-related meetings that are more technical client focused. But the weekly all-team meeting is a culture-based meeting, and that rhythm is the reminder of I'm part of a team-- I'm part of a team, I'm part of a culture. And it [inaudible] in the collaborative behavior they all have to have together so that you can pull off big projects. And they have to feel like we're locked into something with other people so that we can throw a project in there that four of them have to do, and they're used to coming together in a Zoom meeting and just working through it because they have this rhythm of participating in some form of a life in a firm. And so rhythms in a virtual place are what really establish culture. And it's places where leaders really participate in leadership. That's where you're saying visionary things. You're congratulating publicly. You're calling them to things. You're saying hard things as reminders to the whole team, which is kind of-- it's a continual correction of remember what we do here and you don't get to do everything is what we say. And so come into this vision. And then quarterly, my partner and I meet just every quarter with our team privately to say, "How are you doing? How is your capacity? How are you feeling about your work? Are you distracted? Where do you struggling with? What are your successes?" And just that, it takes that continual work to lead. You lead in a rhythm. Cadences. Leadership is done in cadences.
S1: 00:21:36.771 Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. I [inaudible] find myself, if you don't break up the year in blocks-- I work better in waves. You say cadence is probably a better word for it. But I can sort of run hard for sort of 8, 10 weeks and then feel like, "Okay. I'm sort of all right. I need something else to look forward to now." And whether it be a break or do something different or go skiing or whatever it is, right.
S2: 00:22:02.675 Yeah, yeah, yeah. And yeah, you need those breaks, yeah, too. That's part of the cadence, is breaks is the thing.
S1: 00:22:10.502 What about doing all the soft things and making sure your team is good and bringing up that leadership base and all those kinds of things, but at the end of the day, you can't live on love alone [laughter].
S2: 00:22:25.731 That is true. That only goes so far, right.
S1: 00:22:29.580 That's right. So how do you view equity, and more than compensate-- I mean, compensation is compensation. But how do you view equity in the firms or the organizations that you run? Because I think this is a bit rhetorical, but gone are the days where you sort of come out of college at a big firm and sort of in there 30 years later, right.
S2: 00:22:53.815 Yeah. Nobody is going to do that anymore. That's pretty rare. I think probably the equity piece I've only run into right now is a partnership equity piece. And that alone is a big enough jump. That's massive. But it is true in a service-based company, there are limitations. There are limitations you can only get so far a lot of times fully by yourself in ownership. And so when I added my partner, Julie, who really is that COO, operational, detailed side, I just don't have that side. When I added her, probably, 8 years ago-- she's been with me for 10 years, but probably 8 years ago or close to 8 years as a partner, that was something to get used to. Because you go into that-- if it's your first time-- and I had another partner before, but that business-- we got along fine as we ran the company in the toilet. We still like each other, right. But when it's a business that lasts a long time, then you realize, "Wait. I don't only have a legal partner running a business. I have a relationship that you have to work through and go, oh, I pissed you off. You got to stop and work through the fact that I pissed you off. Or I'm annoying in certain ways you don't like. And guess what? I'm not going to change. And so you got to learn to deal with that. And I got to stop being an asshole, maybe, sometimes too." [crosstalk]--
S1: 00:24:12.556 People have said that to me more than once [laughter].
S2: 00:24:16.338 Well, what does Ian know, right [laughter]. He's a skier, he doesn't know-- he's a skier, right. So what does that mean? So adding a partner-- but that is what did it. That's what allowed us to scale. Because you find that as you get bigger, you do need to focus on what you do best, right. I mean, you know that. You're in a bigger company where you kind of don't need to be coding the software, Stuart.
S1: 00:24:40.577 Well, I'd prefer not to be. But some days, especially if shit breaks, well, usually it's broke it in the first place.
S2: 00:24:48.611 You were in there fixing something, right.
S1: 00:24:51.232 Yeah, yeah, yeah. And then the whole fucking thing falls apart, that's right. Now, hopefully, we've moved on from that, but--
S2: 00:24:57.390 Yeah. So your road narrows as you grow, basically [crosstalk]--
S1: 00:25:00.096 That's right. But one thing I've learned over the last few years-- I wonder if you agree that the greatest misnomer of partnership and equity is because you both have shareholding that your interests are aligned.
S2: 00:25:12.083 Yeah. No, no, no. Nope. No. Owning and then being on the same page are two different things.
S1: 00:25:19.028 Yeah, yeah, yeah. We're all motivated by different things, though, too, right. Just because we have-- doesn't matter shareholding, we're in it for different reasons. You can be in it for personal satisfaction, emotional growth, money, because you like working with team or those clients. There's all kinds of reasons that we become owners in companies.
S2: 00:25:42.554 Yeah. And so with my partner, I approached her and sold it to her. She was not looking for ownership. She was doing her job. And I was like, "I think I actually need you to legally own the place, so you act like you own it, which you will. And if you act like you own it, you'll be as committed to it as I am." And I think I need somebody that's as committed as I am that will stay up at night and care enough--
S1: 00:26:10.587 When necessary. When necessary.
S2: 00:26:12.679 When necessary.
S1: 00:26:12.679 Don't encourage is 60-hour weeks.
S2: 00:26:15.092 No, no. When necessary. And it can be necessary when you're scaling. But that's really the equity piece we've run into. And that's led to a lot of success for us to be able to run two companies. I'm the CEO of two companies, right. And that's tough. That's pretty tough. It's hard to do, really. And so you can't do that by yourself. [There's?] just no way. You've got to have other people that do things better than you. And so getting there is hard. So we have approached equity with any team yet. And so that might be the future, and so--
S1: 00:26:46.940 There you go. Monday morning team meeting.
S2: 00:26:49.404 [crosstalk]. I'll do that Monday. I'll map that [crosstalk]--
S1: 00:26:52.223 You're all square.
S2: 00:26:52.852 Right. And I'll let you know on Monday [crosstalk]--
S1: 00:26:56.052 [crosstalk]. I'll send you the deck if you want.
S2: 00:26:59.008 Yeah. Yeah, send me a slide deck if you've got one [laughter].
S1: 00:27:02.735 And there we just sorted your next five years of growth issues. Well done.
S2: 00:27:08.429 Thank you.
S1: 00:27:08.429 I'll send you the bill. I'll email. I'll email. The [inaudible] 2%. Well, okay. Well, the people that have attended your Deeper Weekend conferences come away from it enlightened, more informed, and sing your praises and the praises of the group that they join from the rooftop. So congratulations, firstly, on those efforts. Because I think it's obvious to me, given that you started that so long ago, that it was the anti-accounting conference, right. It was not doing forestry tax [laughter].
S2: 00:27:52.437 We dropped that [laughter]. We dropped that breakout class [called?] forestry taxation [laughter].
S1: 00:28:00.816 More likely go and plant some trees if I know you well enough [laughter].
S2: 00:28:05.207 True, yeah. All right. Now, we're all going to go plant seedlings [crosstalk] conference.
S1: 00:28:09.873 [crosstalk] 10 years ago [inaudible]. You'd be looking at--
S2: 00:28:12.422 That would've been--
S1: 00:28:13.413 There you go.
S2: 00:28:13.413 I'd be looking at inventory I could have harvested.
S1: 00:28:16.826 That's right. Get taxed [laughter]. What are some of the greatest success stories that have come out of that? What are you most proud of?
S2: 00:28:24.854 Well, I think, really, it does challenge people to think about growth, really, from a principled theoretical view in ways they've never thought before. So we do have ways we teach-- [in?] some principle, [the?] things we teach that are just not anywhere else. And I'm not claiming anything about that. I'm just saying it is things you haven't heard before, and each year is like that. So we'll always try to bring something that's just really not attainable at another accounting conference. Because most accounting conferences will want to bring an accountant to speak. And we've had digital agency experts come lead the conference, right. And they're talking about positioning with firms. And it's a whole new world. Attendees step into a whole new world of teaching because the instructor only knows how to teach agency positioning around brand or whatever they're teaching, and everybody's absorbing it just from a totally different perspective. And that's what we want to do. We want to shake up things. We want to bring in thoughts from other people, other professions. And we just think that continues to strengthen firms. And now, since 2018, we've been launching-- well, 2019 was the first conference, but we built our growth model, which is a structured way to visibly see the makeup of a firm and its foundational components. So that's really allowed us to talk very deeply about a lot of these components and teach them in different ways. And this year is another one where we're going way deep into one part of this model to teach about capacity. Capacity management is so hard and complex to deal with, and nobody's got that figured out. It's just pretty tough with these creative people doing this knowledge work. So we're going to dive into it and learn it. And I think it's something people just don't hear in other places. So it's really, really good stuff. We enjoy it.
S1: 00:30:24.288 Out of the years that you've been doing the conference, what's the greatest success story that comes to mind?
S2: 00:30:29.675 Yeah. There's so many. Probably, what we find is-- probably, there's a lot of small ones. So we teach growth in a way that we want entrepreneurs to know what it means when they're signing up to grow and scale their firm. And we actually have some events where people say no and they bow out, and say, "Now I know. Thank you very much. This is not for me." And so, effectively, we've changed the trajectory of people's lives. Now, moneywise, we weren't trying to get members to go away, but [crosstalk]--
S1: 00:31:05.486 Yeah, sure, sure. But that's just as important, right. If you want to do it, don't pretend to be something that you're not.
S2: 00:31:14.237 Right. If you're pretending, and you don't know-- meaning, you think you want to grow a company and then you find out what it really takes. We want to teach the structure, the models, the commitment it takes. And they go, "Thank you for showing me very obviously what it takes. And I decide that, no, I don't want to do it." But of course, just as many have gone in deeper and they're like, "Yes, I'm going to kill it now. Now I'm going to go in to commit to what my firm will take from me to do this work well."
S1: 00:31:43.390 Don't name names but pick out somebody that you've been working with for a while that really sort of stands out. That you have seen, "Okay. Well, what I, Jason Blumer, have been able to impart in this little world has influenced and changed this person's life." Have you got some examples?
S2: 00:31:59.242 Yeah. We have examples of a partner group that had six partners. They went down to one in the matter of two or three years, so [laughter].
S1: 00:32:09.569 I hope you didn't kill them off, did you?
S2: 00:32:11.301 Well--
S1: 00:32:13.589 [So you?] didn't kneecap them at the back of the car park?
S2: 00:32:16.854 It's like, "Let's go out in the back and let's have a conversation. It's a strategy conversation." And so I had a black car pull up, right, and talk to them in the back, and then [crosstalk]--
S1: 00:32:26.678 That's a Tonya Harding-style way of--
S2: 00:32:29.346 That's right, yeah. No. So one partner died, the managing partner, so leaving the other partners that really were more technical focused than really operationally running the firm. And then two retired. These were older partners. Two retired kind of within the same two or three years. One left and sued them all.
S1: 00:32:50.288 Of course, yeah. Obviously [laughter].
S2: 00:32:53.032 Yeah. So you got all this-- and we [were?] kind of with them through a couple of years of this journey. And so, really, it did change their life. The way they became leaders. They actually approached their team differently. They led their team differently. The team felt more confident with their leadership. With all that chaos-- can you imagine that chaos of people dying, suing, retiring?
S1: 00:33:14.393 Particularly, [inaudible]. That's not easy.
S2: 00:33:16.849 Yeah. I mean, right. So the ones remaining were the ones committed. They were like, "I'm not going anywhere. I'm going to keep doing this." But what they did is they really looked to us and trusted us to be with them through it, right, and watch them change and grow. And that was pretty rewarding to be able to be with them. They listened to you when you talk. And then they go [crosstalk]--
S1: 00:33:38.529 As opposed to your kids.
S2: 00:33:40.240 Right, right, right. As opposed to your kids going, "You're my Dad. What do you know?"
S1: 00:33:44.565 Yeah, "Fuck off, Dad."
S2: 00:33:46.943 "What do you know?"
S1: 00:33:48.771 That's exactly right there. That's what my kids [laughter]--
S2: 00:33:52.159 That's your kid?
S1: 00:33:52.970 Yeah. The three-year-old. He's an early learner.
S2: 00:33:57.288 Well, three-year-olds, they're horrible [laughter]. I mean, why would anybody want to have a three-year-old? Of course, somebody's listening going, "I don't know what's wrong with y'all, but my three-year-old loves me and is wonderful."
S1: 00:34:10.218 Yeah. Because his older sisters teach him all the bad habit.
S2: 00:34:13.737 Okay. Say this to dad. It pisses him off. And then he throws a 20 at you and makes you go away.
S1: 00:34:17.568 That's right. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. He just puts 20 bucks on your Apple Pay these days, right.
S2: 00:34:23.878 That's right, yeah. If I Venmo you, will you leave me alone while I'm watching TV?
S1: 00:34:27.431 Yeah, that's right [laughter]. Zelle's changed the world of parenting, yeah.
S2: 00:34:33.066 That's right, yeah. I zelled you some money, now hit it.
S1: 00:34:36.024 That's right. Go and play [in?] the road. No, no. I love you, kids. I love you. They'll never fucking listen to crap on our podcast anyway.
S2: 00:34:44.714 That's right. [inaudible]. Yeah. That's the thing, they'll never listen. I try to talk to them about being an accountant. They're like, "You need to stop asking me that. Because let me tell you what's not happening, that."
S1: 00:35:01.530 "[Go?] find some other prick to see if they're [inaudible] [laughter]."
S2: 00:35:05.713 Yeah. And see, I'm trying to build up to sell this thing to some sucker and [crosstalk]--
S1: 00:35:11.839 "Why have you got 10 kids?" "Well, [the?] 1 through 9 didn't want to buy the accounting [inaudible] [laughter].
S2: 00:35:18.131 Right. And I've got to offload this thing within the next few years.
S1: 00:35:22.764 Yeah. How else am I going to afford my condo in Florida, right?
S2: 00:35:29.690 So--
S1: 00:35:30.333 How did we get onto all that? The--
S2: 00:35:32.213 I don't know. How did we? Who does your podcast editing? That's what I want to know.
S1: 00:35:36.815 Well, they got their work cut out, right.
S2: 00:35:38.652 They're like, "Oh." I hope they're a contractor [laughter]. [inaudible] you doing this to any of your team members. You probably are.
S1: 00:35:47.965 Yeah. No, my team's real solid these days. They've done a great job. But it's important to talk about that because I know the work that you've done. I hear the work from many, many people, the work that you've done over the years at Deeper Weekend and through Thriveal, that it does change people's lives. And it's important to celebrate that because you come [out?] it with a great deal of depth of thought. And the one thing that I love about it is it's quality over quantity, right. You've never tried to make it bigger than Ben-Hur because it loses its message and it meaning.
S2: 00:36:23.941 Yeah. It's typically about 100-- yeah, we kind of cap it at 100 entrepreneurs. That's because we take them through hour-and-a-half-long workshop exercises. We push them together in some of the workshops. So there's a community aspect too where we want-- we know the speakers are not the only smart ones, right. They're all speakers, right. So they need to be speaking to each other at the table, and the speaker needs to stop talking. And so the workshop [crosstalk]--
S1: 00:36:51.158 No wonder you don't have Ian up on stage then.
S2: 00:36:53.607 That's right [laughter]. Right. See, that's why. He'll go on and on about--
S1: 00:36:59.972 Capacity. That's what he would go on and on about.
S2: 00:37:02.149 He would, yeah. Oh man, he could probably talk for hours on that.
S1: 00:37:06.579 Hours and hours and hours and hours if you let him.
S2: 00:37:08.562 Hours [laughter]. That's why you don't let him, huh?
S1: 00:37:12.604 Yeah. Well, no, no, we put him in a corner and give him a webinar every now and again [laughter].
S2: 00:37:20.119 Go tell them on the webinar [laughter].
S1: 00:37:23.777 That's right. And so what's next for Jason Blumer? Tell me.
S2: 00:37:28.016 That's a good question. Oh, I thought you were going to tell me.
S1: 00:37:30.595 No, no, no, no. You tell me. You tell me. Don't fucking listen to my shit [laughter].
S2: 00:37:35.461 Okay. Don't listen to my podcast, right [laughter]. Okay. So headed into my-- so I'm in my early 50s. So [at?] that point, you start thinking, okay, I kind of know what I'm doing. You know what you know and you know what you don't know, like that, right. You start to go--
S1: 00:37:55.666 Know yourself well enough to know your strengths and your weaknesses.
S2: 00:37:58.676 Yeah. So at that point, you kind of know your strengths and weaknesses, which is a pretty cool place to be, right. Because then you can press into those places. Now, you're not confused. When you're 25, going, "Should I be an accountant or in a rock band? Which one?
S1: 00:38:13.531 Yeah, or both. Or both.
S2: 00:38:14.861 Or both, right. And you're not deciding stupid stuff like that.
S1: 00:38:20.231 Like calling your band debits and credits or something.
S2: 00:38:23.421 Right. That's right, yeah. So you kind of know, "All right. This is what I do. This is what I'm good at." You can kind of go into it and lean into it. So probably, for the rest of our careers, just kind of leaning into that place very deeply [and?] narrowly that we're very good at. And so that's just some of the stuff my partner and I are starting to get into, right, with our coach is, what is that future. And at this point, you get to choose. It doesn't mean you'll be rich or whatever. It just means you get to pick a direction, and you probably get to walk in that direction because you have that leverage, that know-how. You know enough people. You can kind of start to make those calls and move in a very decisive direction that starts to reflect a life that you know you want to live when you get older, and that really leverages your greatest strengths. So I am really made to create education, teach, write, speak. And just those are the things that I'll probably be doing. I can do those forever.
S1: 00:39:25.574 Yeah, yeah. I like that. I like that.
S2: 00:39:26.472 Those are fun. I like those. Yeah.
S1: 00:39:28.584 Yeah, I like that.
S2: 00:39:29.465 Just thinking about those things--
S1: 00:39:31.018 Very comfortable with what you enjoy and the success for others that that brings, the joy of helping others be successful, right.
S2: 00:39:39.692 Yeah. Yeah, that's a lot of fun. We took one of our younger team members on a coaching call the other day just so he could listen how do we coach clients. How do we walk them through the process of self-fulfillment and discovery about their own business. And it's just so cool for that younger team member to go, "Wow. Wow, that's amazing that you did-- there was a purpose behind that. It sounded like a conversation, but we went through steps, through four, and I didn't even know you had a-- you had sections to that conversation you were walking that client through." And you get to teach that. And they go, "Cool." And then watch them practice and employ that. In the next 15 years, they're going to change and grow. That is super cool. I love that.
S1: 00:40:22.619 Seeing the human growth through the lens of helping others, and hopefully, there's a bit of money at the end of the day, but--
S2: 00:40:30.570 Oh yeah, yeah.
S1: 00:40:31.681 I mean, you talk a lot about the why, right. I mean [crosstalk]--
S2: 00:40:35.716 Oh yeah. Yeah. Oh yeah, every firm, they need their purpose. They need their purpose, their core values, and things like that.
S1: 00:40:44.024 Have you ever seen somebody go, "Oh, well, fuck it. This isn't for me. I don't know what my why is. Why the fuck am I running an accounting firm?"
S2: 00:40:51.074 Yeah, yeah. But there's another pattern we're seeing now--
S1: 00:40:55.613 What's that?
S2: 00:40:55.613 --coming out of the pandemic is, accounting firm owners, we call them firm entrepreneurs, these people are made to run a firm, and they've been doing it a long time, but they're losing their why temporarily. And it's flipping them out. And so what we're teaching in a lot of the webinars we're doing-- we're doing a lot of webinars on hiring in the labor market, which is all f'd up. It's just all really freaking people out. And so what's happening is, these firm entrepreneurs are struggling. They go, "Why the heck am I doing this?" And we tell them, "You know what? You're going to go through life where you have doubts and you struggle with your purpose and you'll lose your why for a time. And it will come back if you want it to if you're in the right place. And you do have to stay committed through those harder times. And sometimes you need help from other people, therapists, counselors, partners, whatever. You do need to get help when you need help." But it freaks people out, and we're saying, "Don't let it flip you out so bad. You're going to lose your purpose and you're going to go, 'This sucks.' Every day, 'This sucks bad. Why am I doing this to myself?'" And it's like, "It does suck sometimes. That's okay. So just hang in there."
S1: 00:42:09.597 Yeah, completely. I mean, there's a lot of people that have sort of had this never-ending tax season for the last two years or longer, right. The pandemic has no doubt hit the industry, well--
S2: 00:42:25.924 Very hard.
S1: 00:42:25.924 --very hard. And notwithstanding that these people aren't running restaurants or tourism-based businesses.
S2: 00:42:31.103 Oh yeah. Tough. Yeah, it's tough for everybody.
S1: 00:42:34.802 It is tough for everybody. And accountants have had their own unique difficulties. Globally, they've been the vehicle by which governments have distributed resources [crosstalk] helping funds and [inaudible] that kind of thing. And that puts an owner and owners and a burden on the industry that it was already struggling to sort of overcome in the first place. So there is a lot of burnout. And whether you're virtual or in-person firm, you're all of a sudden virtual, whether you like it or not. And people need that human interaction, that human contact. And all that's gone-- or up until recently, depending on which country you're in, right. So there are a lot of firms that are struggling. So I've no doubt why your conference is successful this year, more so than any other. I'm sure [it's?] because people are craving that reconnection.
S2: 00:43:31.838 They are. We're walking people through the safety COVID precautions and things, trying to protect everybody [crosstalk] whatever perspective they come from, and that's all so varied. But they are. They're craving to be live and in-person and safe. We have all those things in place. And so they're craving to be together. And I think that's good because in a community, you can be inspired and reminded as to why you did this and why you did love it at some point. And this pandemic really has messed with our head. Because if you're going through a difficult tax season, and then you go home and go through a difficult tax season, your visual field has just changed a little bit. You're like, "I want to go play with that little kid over there, and I can't." And it just messes with your head. Or, "I want to get those chores done, so they're not on my mind." And so a lot of that stuff, it didn't used to be on our heads if we worked somewhere else. And so all that stuff just plays into a lot of different things. So I think what a lot of firm owners are doing-- they're really struggling going through what they're going through, but I do see a pattern where they're also blaming their work. And I don't fully agree with that. What I think is, I think a lot of people are selling out-- selling their firms, not selling out. Selling their firms, and some are going to wander a little while. And I wish they would stay. I wish they would stay in it and commit to it because it's not always going to be like this. And I sound like an old man, but I can look back and see that, yeah, I went through hard times, but I stayed. Now I get to say, "Well, I've been doing this for 30 years. I know a lot of stuff." And if you kind of-- if you sell it and you ditch it after five years, and then you wander around and travel for five years, [then?] you come back and you need a job. Well, I've got 20 years on you. And you've only got 5, and so you got to start over. And yeah, I don't know that that's how you build careers. But anyway, I sound like an old man now, right, talking my kids. Everybody's like, "You don't [crosstalk]--
S1: 00:45:28.300 No. We'll have to force them to listen [laughter]. Going to hold them-- going to hold them down and them this, right [laughter].
S2: 00:45:35.579 We'll Venmo them some money. We'll Venmo them $20 to listen to the podcast.
S1: 00:45:41.449 "Here's 50 bucks but to listen to the podcast."
S2: 00:45:44.238 "Listen to the podcast and quit whining." No, that's more. That's 60 bucks.
S1: 00:45:49.700 No.
S2: 00:45:50.512 I'll pay it. Yeah. No. So what I'm saying is it is hard. But I'm saying the hard is not forever, and I'm asking some people-- and I don't know if anybody's-- maybe nobody listens to the podcast, but--
S1: 00:46:03.215 No, both of them do. I promise.
S2: 00:46:05.804 Okay. Your mom and my mom, I guess, maybe. But if there's one that's listening, it's like, "If you'll just stay in and give it a couple of more years, let's see what happens. Because this is not normal, and it's going to go away. Though, it's also going to change forever." So the cultural shift is happening. Anthropologists will be writing about this. It is changing the mindsets of people and cultures, probably, forever in some way. We just don't know. I'm saying, "Stay in it so you can ride the wave when it comes back in whatever way it comes back. I don't know."
S1: 00:46:39.463 Yeah, yeah. No, I hear you. And that doesn't just apply to accounting firms, but--
S2: 00:46:46.291 No, right, [crosstalk] everybody.
S1: 00:46:47.994 --different people, different businesses all over, right.
S2: 00:46:51.068 Everybody. Everybody. Everybody, so.
S1: 00:46:53.717 Yeah. Well, we better plug the Thriveal weekend. Just give us the quick one-liner.
S2: 00:46:57.424 Yeah. So just go to dw.thriveal.com. dw.thriveal.com. And Thriveal's the word thrive, T-H-R-I-V-E-A-L dot com. dw.thriveal.om. But it's happening, actually, in about three weeks, so I don't even know if people will-- it might be over.
S1: 00:47:15.085 There you go. Probably is.
S2: 00:47:16.575 By the time you--
S1: 00:47:17.603 So I fucking plugged it for no reason [laughter].
S2: 00:47:20.943 So come in 2022. How about that?
S1: 00:47:23.704 Yeah. Yeah, there you go. There you go. We're getting in early.
S2: 00:47:25.858 Right. Just getting it in early.
S1: 00:47:27.346 Advertising discount of 320 days notice [laughter].
S2: 00:47:33.837 You better get it on your calendar. So no, it's going to be-- yeah, it's going to be a lot of fun. We have just amazing parties. Karbon is going to be there. Kind of Karbon's leading our wrap party, which is going to be a lot of fun. So it's going to be [crosstalk]--
S1: 00:47:49.552 The cordial will be flowing [laughter].
S2: 00:47:52.399 Yep. Yeah, we're on the floor of the venue with a big old bar, so you got to have that.
S1: 00:47:57.661 Yeah, yeah. That sounds good. I'm sure the marketing guys are well and truly all over wrapping the bar. Don't worry [laughter].
S2: 00:48:04.897 That's right. Oh yeah, they are for sure.
S1: 00:48:07.836 Yeah, yeah, yeah. You know where to find us. It's either one side of the bar or the other [laughter].
S2: 00:48:16.134 Very cool.
S1: 00:48:16.134 Jason, it's been an absolute pleasure.
S2: 00:48:17.981 Thank you for having me.
S1: 00:48:18.903 I look forward to seeing you in person, in 3D.
S2: 00:48:21.776 Okay. I can't wait.
S1: 00:48:24.026 Just as soon as possible and give you a big vaccinated bear hug. And then--
S2: 00:48:27.978 That's right. Vaccinate it up.
S1: 00:48:30.794 Let's do this again. Let's do this again soon.
S2: 00:48:32.733 Okay. Cool. Thanks, Stuart, for having me. We appreciate you guys committing to the profession, man.
S1: 00:48:37.715 No, we love it.
S2: 00:48:37.914 All right. [inaudible]. Cool.
S1: 00:48:39.513 Have a great day.
S2: 00:48:39.924 All right. You too. Thanks so much.
S1: 00:48:40.890 Bye.
S2: 00:48:40.890 We'll see you. Bye-bye.
S1: 00:48:48.536 [music] 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 liked this session. 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 in the next episode of the Accounting Leaders Podcast.