Intentionality can bring freedom and joy.
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The Disruptors
With Liz Farr
When Jason Blumer and Julie Shipp joined forces to build Blumer CPAs more than a decade ago, they eschewed the traditional partnership structure, where decision-making power depends on ownership percentage. Instead, Blumer says, “We figured out the ownership is a legal reflection of the companies, but they do not reflect anything we do together in our roles.”
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Together, they also formed Thriveal, a support community for accounting firm owners. Blumer is the CEO and visionary for the firm and Shipp is the COO and integrator. This separation of ownership from roles allows them both to be, as Shipp says, “100% in my role and have 100% the authority of my role.”
In their first year of working together, Shipp says, “We were crossing in and out of each other’s lanes” as visionary and integrator, which, she explained, “diluted the work we could do together.” They found that becoming clear on their roles allows them to leverage their best gifts and abilities.
This approach requires a lot of trust to “set ownership at the door,” Blumer says, and to listen, honor and respect the other person. While this may not work for everyone, “Julie and I have agreed it’s going to work for us, or we’re not going to do it,” he explained.
The secret sauce for Blumer CPAs is their emphasis on intentionality, which Blumer says “is pretty much the lifeblood of everything we do.” This intentionality covers the clients they serve, their pricing, hiring, and onboarding, and is a big part of how they lead their team. “Intentionality takes huge amounts of work and time,” Blumer says, and “It means we can’t be a fast firm.” But the reward for that is that they have a strong team that’s willing to pull hard together. Shipp says she sees it as “a privilege that people would align themselves and say, ‘Yeah, I want to do that work with you. I want to shoulder to shoulder with you and serve this group of business owners.’”
This intentionality requires all new hires to go through three to six months of training on the Blumer financial principles and core values. Once they have completed that training, Blumer has new team members critique him on how well he followed those principles, which, he says, is an odd place to be. “You’re a new team member and you’re critiquing your boss and the partner in the firm. But we want that vulnerability too.” Shipp says the learning goes both ways.
Creating a sticky culture in a remote world – which they have operated in for a decade – requires intention. They do this with annual team retreats and core value callouts at their weekly team meetings, where, as Shipp explained, “Every team member comes to the meeting having caught someone else in some way exhibiting the core values, and we call it out in the meeting.”
14 More Takeaways from Blumer CPAs
- Intentionality requires a big investment to teach team members not only what to do, but the how and the why of their work. It pays off and comes out through client service and how the team works together.
- Before you make any strategic changes, Shipp says to ask yourselves as a firm, “Are the things we’re doing right now and the decisions we’re making right now leading us to the place we’re wanting to go?”
- Firms have been underpricing for so long that raising prices may only bring the price up to the value of what you are giving to business owners and individuals.
- Getting the pricing right for a new service is an iterative, learning process. Maybe the first time you will charge $5,000, but the next time you’ll charge $10,000.
- In a virtual culture, communication is 10 times as necessary, 10 times as often.
- Don’t be a slave to time. Leverage it appropriately so time becomes a thing you use, plan, and control.
- Move leaders out of client service and put that in the hands of capable team members. This frees leaders up to do the work they are gifted to do and keeps them from being a bottleneck so others can do their best work.
- Invest in leadership education for your team so they know how to be leaders. Teach them how to answer “Why are we doing it that way?” without being frustrated. Do this even before you install leadership.
- Leaders have the power to encourage people, to call them back into their lane, and to work efficiently with a purpose and a mission.
- Work-life balance is better seen as work-life integration, not a balance on a scale.
- The intentional use of your time, your value, and your effort produces the freedom and the joy you’re looking for.
- When you set a goal or a vision for yourself, ask yourself, Do I want what that vision and goal means? Do I want all the iterative steps between here and there?
- Entrepreneurship has four phases: tilling, sowing, growing, and reaping. You need patience to get through all four phases of the journey. Find the joy in staying on the path and fighting through the hard parts of the journey.
- You never reap in the season you sow, so find the joy in that every day.
More About Jason Blumer
Jason Blumer serves as Thriveal’s CEO, leading the strategy of which structures help Thriveal grow, and how to approach the profession with transformative education. Jason got his Bachelors in Accounting from Wofford College in Spartanburg, SC. His near 30 year career has been so varied, he’s performed every function in a firm and many other companies he has worked in. He has been a CPA since 1998. Jason shows genuine care as a leader of the Thriveal team, and is deeply thankful for the opportunity to lead alongside other people who do their work from the heart. Jason is a sought after international speaker, educator, coach, consultant, and friend to firm entrepreneurs all over the globe.
More About Julie Shipp
Julie Shipp is the Partner and Integrator/COO of Thriveal. She leads all strategic initiatives and teaches and develops the educational content of Thriveal with Jason.
After attending Auburn University and receiving a Bachelors in Accounting, she worked in large corporations’ accounting departments early in her career. Then she transitioned into being deeply immersed in caring for her family, educating kids, and learning more through that process than she could imagine, and certainly learning more than she was ever teaching anyone else. This has been true also for the past 10 years as she has learned more than she ever thought possible while building and growing the Blumer firm and the Thriveal CPA Network.
Transcript
(Transcripts are made available as soon as possible. They are not fully edited for grammar or spelling.)
Liz Farr
Welcome to accounting disrupter Conversations. I’m your host, Liz Farr from CPA trendlines. And today we’re doing something a little different. I am going to be talking to people who are doing things a little different from your father’s or maybe your grandfather’s CPA firm. And my guest today are Julie Shipp and Jason Blumer. Leaders of Blumer CPAs and the Thriveal CPA Network. How are you guys today? Doing good? Yeah. Glad to be.
Jason Blumer
Yeah. Thank you for having us. We appreciate it.
Liz Farr
Well, it’s a real treat to have you too on here. Because as I was saying to Jason, before we started recording, thrive cast is always just been a, a beacon of hope and light for me, the CPA profession.
Jason Blumer
That’s awesome. I hope it is for for other people, too. That’s, that’s part of our purpose and mission. To help firm entrepreneurs, they need a lot of help like me, so
Liz Farr
I hope. Yeah, well, first, why don’t you tell the listeners a little bit about your firm? Like, where you’re located, what you do kind of clients, that kind of stuff?
Jason Blumer
Yeah. Yeah. So I’ve been leading the my dad started our firm in 97. I’ve been leading the firm for 20 years. Julie’s been with me for 10 are well, longer than that. Right, Julie? Good grief, going on? 11. Now go to 11. Yeah, okay. So. So we’ve, we’ve been together that long. And we we serve exclusively agencies, creative agencies, larger agencies. And then also we’re adding in a nonprofit niche. So we’re always playing with a new focus client focus in a market. So those are the things we do. We, we only serve businesses, so we only serve entrepreneurs, we don’t have a 1040 a tax 1040, you know, model of a firm, we kind of got rid of that. Eight, eight or so years ago, we don’t have a location, we don’t exist in an office. So we’re a virtual firm. And we’ve been doing that for a decade. So we’ve learned a lot about being virtual how to do that in a real structured way. And we have team all over the country, too. And also, the people behind me are loud in the next office. So if you hear him I’m sorry, on the podcast, so they’re always yelling on the phone. So there we go. Okay, so But Julie, what did I leave anything off about our client base or, or anything?
Julie Shipp
No, I mean, we’ve been virtual that full the full time I’ve been here. And that’s been a journey started. When there was no such thing to now. It’s the thing and so yeah, no, I think you hit it all. Okay, cool.
Liz Farr
Now, how is your firm structured? What roles do the two of you leave? Because, yeah, because it’s a little different from most CPA firms.
Jason Blumer
Yeah, I’ll let Julie answer that one she she helped me learn how to structure. Yeah, well,
Julie Shipp
We just decided together really to take more of a corporate structure and entrepreneurial organization where we leave ownership at the door ownerships not part of our structure, our decision making structure. And so we take on roles. Jason, CEO, and visionary of the firm, and I’m the COO, and what we call the integrator, the operations person, I’m not a technical partner, he’s our technical partner. And then together, we lead a three person leadership team, and they lead the larger team of our CPAs our accountants, and then we have an operations team as well, that support the function of the firm and Thriveal together. Yeah.
Jason Blumer
Yeah. So I think, you know, well, there’s, you’ve been in firms. So the, the, most of the time traditional firms operate with a partner group, so to speak. So everybody, everybody’s, I don’t know. I don’t anyway, that that that consensus structure sometimes doesn’t work. So So Julie and I have taken on very specific roles. And I guess early on, Julie, we figured out the the ownership is a legal reflection of the companies, but they do not reflect anything we do together in our roles. And that’s that’s really helped us because we we wrestle through staying on the same page about decisions, but nobody can I pull the trump card and go Well, I own more, I’m going to decide this and we’re moving on. That’s, that’s just not one of our possibilities. So we don’t do it and we never have. Now that means we have to stay in a room and wrestle through things. And sometimes we flat out disagree and go, Well, we’re gonna have to call it and move on. But I guess Julie, when we call it and move on, we’re both on the page.
Julie Shipp
It’s 100 100. I think that’s how we refer to it. You know, we have our owner percentages, that’s all good and well, but in the firm in our roles, I mean, if we were, whatever we if we were 60 – 40 owners, I’m not showing up 40% on showing up 100%. So I should be able to be 100% In my role, and have 100% the authority of my role, likewise, yourself. And so I think that was sort of the philosophy of why we chose to walk down that road. So you’re 100 100 Same page, and that way we move forward together?
Jason Blumer
Yeah, it just takes a lot of, you know, it takes a lot of trust to do that with another person to kind of set ownership at the door and go that actually has no bearing on the operations, you have to really trust the other person. And Julie, and I do so will, we’re going to if we’re gonna bring it up, we’re going to talk about transparently and openly, you know, in confidentially about our strategic decisions, where if we disagree, we don’t hide that there’s no passive aggressive type way we operate where like, I disagree with that, and here’s why. And the other person stops and listens to there’s just a lot of honor and respect that come from that kind of trust. I don’t guess it would work with everybody. But Julie and I have agreed it’s going to work for us, or we’re not going to do it. So
Liz Farr
well, that’s that’s great. I mean, there are so many firms, I was at where there was some managing partner. Oh, just 51%. Right. Yeah. And they could make the final decisions and right. Didn’t always work that way.
Jason Blumer
No, it didn’t work. It doesn’t work well.
Liz Farr
Now, now now, what would you guys see is the secret sauce of Blumer CPAs? What makes your firm so different? Well,
Jason Blumer
So probably probably a lot of things. I think we we have we have the word proactive in our purpose statement. And I think a lot a lot of us in firms want to call ourselves proactive, but really intentionality is pretty much the lifeblood of everything we do. There really, there are stated principles and purposes behind behind everything the market, we’ve chosen to serve the way we price, who we work with, who we won’t work with, how we hire, how we create hiring processes, how we onboard team, the way we serve clients, it all has a very stated intention and purpose. And a lot of times we’re teaching our team a lot of those things. From our purpose, I think, practically, I guess, Julie, we see a lot of that come out in our planning. We we plan. I mean, we plan everything. And you know, just the philosophy of the way we serve. So I don’t know, Julie, do you have any other thoughts about our intentionality that’s in planning, that’s, that’s huge for us, I think
Julie Shipp
Those are key pieces, definitely, of how we move things forward. And then it’s, it’s, um, it’s a big time investment to to then impart that to a team, as opposed to only teaching them what they’re working on, but the how and the why, the the all of the things that are behind what they’re doing everyday purpose is it’s it’s a fairly large time investment, but it pays off and comes out through client service and then also through the way the team work together, which is how we’re structured.
Jason Blumer
Yeah, I think Liz, regards to another question you have that she wanted to ask us the that this intentionality has has a lot to do with how we hire which Julie you mentioned, but as an example, well, there’s a you know, when we hire team, they step into this orientation training process with our firm that takes months to go through and in some of the team are not, they’re not really always used to it. And that’s that’s fine, some, some some come from a great firm location, some coming from a firm that was not intentional at all, but we have to walk them through and continually, you know, convince them that this intentionality is going to pay off huge benefit It’s later on, cuz sometimes they’re like, Wow, is this is a lot of training. And it’s training in how we say things, how we do things, how we present our brand, how consistent we are among the team, you know, how we, how we, you know, sort things and store things in our our box, filing cabinet online, these, everything has a purpose so that we can serve in a very intentional, high advisory way. And it just takes so much work. intentionality takes huge amounts of work and time. So we find our secret sauce has been intentional, but it means we can’t be a fast firm, you can’t be quick, you have to be methodical. I don’t know, Julie, if that’s the right thing, we were fast in a lot of things, maybe. But
Julie Shipp
I think depth is a big piece of it. And it’s really fun developing the team in that way and then seeing it come back. One thing we do in that orientation and training period Jason mentioned is we’ve developed a document and the team helped us do it. And, and Jason did it as well. But the Blumer financial principles that we use in our advisement, and when a new team comes on, and they’re in their first advisory meeting, they’ll go to the meeting with Jason, but Jason will lead the meeting the first time, and the new team member takes those principles and critiques him, which is an odd place to be you’re a new team member, and you’re critiquing your boss and the partner in the firm. But we want that vulnerability too I mean, we hire smart people, they are professionals, they have so much knowledge that we need to learn and grow from as well as them learning and growing in the firm. And so it puts them in a little odd place initially, but they watch it be modeled and they critique Jason against our framework. And then the next time they give it a go, and he critiques them. And it’s really wonderful to watch a team member grow in that way, and then to see how they help us grow by what they bring uniquely to that situation. Oh,
Liz Farr
That’s a lot of fun. That’s, that’s just so amazing. Because at a firm where I spent 11 years, the best we had was this, this pretty little document that was framed on our break room wall. And, and that that’s about as far as it went.
Jason Blumer
Well, you know that that stuff doesn’t really motivate people really to pour their life into the mission and purpose of a firm. So it’s, you know, we, I mean, Julie, and I have to display all this way more than anybody if our team want to commit to our purpose, we have to talk a lot about our purpose and why we do things. And sometimes there’s correction related to that. It’s like, hey, we don’t reply to clients that way. We talked about that in orientation. Remember, here’s why we’re displaying and portraying a different thing to our market. So it just takes, you know, we all get busy, we’re like, I don’t want to say something to that person. I’m going to finish my tax returns and leave for the day. And sometimes you’re writing a lot about the purpose and mission over and over and over to your team. But it does pay off long term. When you do that.
Liz Farr
Yeah. Yeah, I can I can really see that and, and that that kind of segues into my next question about talent. Because it, I can tell that you really do invest a lot in your talent, which has been a huge challenge for accounting firms. Now, besides that intensive onboarding process, what are some of the other things that you do to make it better for your team members?
Julie Shipp
You mean, once they’re on the team,
Liz Farr
Once they’re on the team, find them?
Julie Shipp
Yeah, we, the operations team and I have we call them rhythms but they are patterns of investment in new team touches. I like to say in a in a virtual culture versus an in person Culture Communication is probably 10 times as necessary 10 times as often. And I think the same way about creating a sticky culture. It might occur naturally in an environment where I’m in an office and I can look over and see you live and know you know, I can talk to you and I can we have have had to develop a lot of ways to create engagement from this very simplest things have in our chat system, we have a water cooler room, I’m sure a lot of people do that. And but the leadership team have a rhythm. And it’s, it’s a task that hits our dashboards to go and post something in water cooler to get some engagement, not just so we don’t get busy and forget, and that gets gets pushed away. We’re always trying to create that kind of engagement with them. We do team wide retreats together, one year, there’ll be virtual another, they’ll be in person so that we can meet face to face as often as possible. That’s challenging. It’s expensive. can’t always do it. But we try. Our weekly team meeting for us is it’s an hour on noon every Wednesday. And it’s not optional. Everyone’s required to be there. But it’s also not client focused if back that’s a no, no, we can’t, we can’t talk about clients or work in that meeting. And the team lead it, it rotates through the team and they bring their own flavor. One of the components we use there, we take our core values, and we do what we call core value call outs. And in those you come to the meeting, every team member comes to the meeting, having caught someone else in some way exhibiting the core values, and we call it out in the meeting aquas, I saw you doing this in this way with this client collaboration leads to strength, you know, high value high service. And so we’re watching that cultural core value through our team on a weekly basis. And they’re pushing it back out to one another in forms of praise and encouragement. Those are just some little simple things that we do, that we really enjoy doing with the team.
Jason Blumer
Yeah, I didn’t, I didn’t, I didn’t add that stuff when I first started leading the firm. So the cultural stuff was things I didn’t focus on as much. And I just, when we went virtual, I thought, this is going to be awesome. We’re all virtual go work at home. And that didn’t work out really well. Because people go do their own thing, we had people disappear, they would come distracted, and they’re not efficient. And so all the things Julie just talked about our thing, she really has a heart for are brought into the firm, even things I didn’t understand. And now it just we watch this over the team every week. And they’re they’re just, they’re just starting to do the work of culture building, they they build each other up. But even more practically, to get the right people in, you know, when we hire, we have to go through buckets of resumes, we have to go, you know, Julie, Julie goes through the first step of you know, culling hundreds of resumes, then I do a technical review. And then we go through a five or six step process in our hiring, to come down to hopefully two to three choices. And then we make a choice to somebody. And then they enter into orientation for the first week. And then they go into a training program for three to six months. So it is so massive, the investment we make in our team. And when it’s the right people, the smart people become just so much stronger bonded together inside of our firms processes. It’s it creates a lot of strength, I guess for us, Julie, and then we’re able to, to kind of pull off then we can go do harder growth moves because we got this strong team that’s like, where are we going, we’re in the boat, we’re going in the same direction. Just point us in the right direction, we’re gonna go kill it, we all go do it together. But you have to do a lot of intentional investment upfront to actually ask them to go do those things with you. They have to know we actually care about them. And so we tell our team we love them a lot because we we actually was grateful for them. And so we do love them. So we tell them that so I don’t know Julie anymore. That’s a huge thing,
Julie Shipp
The talent an hour about that. It’s it’s our our team are our biggest assets and our greatest joy. I mean, they make possible the work we do and they’re engaged in doing meaningful work with us. I mean, that’s a privilege that people would align themselves and say, Yeah, I want to do that work with with you. I want to shoulder to shoulder with you and serve this group of business owners and so it’s it’s an honor to get to work alongside our team.
Liz Farr
Yeah, in a firm like that, it’s more than just a job. But it’s a way to bring your own internal purpose and your own internal vision to Do what you do. Yeah. Yeah,
Jason Blumer
It’s a lot of fun. And I had to move now I got a halo the sun’s coming into my window. Does this every it does this every four 430 every every day. So. So if I have a halo, maybe it’s because I’m an angel.
Liz Farr
Because you’re such a such an angelic leader.
Jason Blumer
That’s right. That’s, it’s got to be that, Liz. Thank you. Yes.
Liz Farr
Yeah. Now, what are some things that you do at your firm that you wish other firm owners would do? Well,
Jason Blumer
It’s funny question, because we probably feel like we struggle with so much right. And probably every firm leaders, all firm leaders can see a lot of their mistakes. So. So we don’t always get it right. But I think we have, we do have a heart for the profession. And our profession is just incredibly valuable to people’s lives to entrepreneurs, small businesses, it really is, we are the engines that help run our economy. So so we love what our profession does, but I think they really miss the mark on pricing for their value. They, they really, something we call, they’re already value like and by already value, we mean, your price is already low, it’s not even that you need to raise your price, it’s already a price that’s way lower than the value you’re already given, giving, you know, to the market, so. So even if you raise your price, a lot of times, you’re just bringing it up to the value of what you are already giving to entrepreneurs and business owners and individuals. So I think I don’t know why we really shy away from that. It can have something to do with some practical things like our pricing models or billing models, you know, there’s a, there’s been a lot of change in the past 10 or 15 years of value pricing. You know, that’s a huge conversation in our profession. We, we believe in those things, we value priced, you know, solely for the past decade, we did billing by the hour before that. But we came to believe it was not right. And, and now we see we see our ability to price all of our services up front before we fully deliver them. And we’ve seen being able to get a lot of our value out of that price exchange it for the value we’re delivering. We so I would say that we also find a lot of value in pricing, new services. So anytime we price, a brand new service, something we’ve not delivered before, but we still technically know how to really do it, we’ll package and create new services that always gives us gives us an opportunity to learn a lot, we learned so much about how we could have priced better, because we don’t always get it right the first time, right, you know, but we’ll create a new service price it for five grand the next time, we’ll do it for 10. Because we’ll go away, we’re like, wow, we spent like three months on that thing. We should have charged a lot more. So we’ll double it the next time ago, that was about right. And we learned so much and are you know, we’re just pricing based upon the value we’re deliver. And so I would say that’s probably one of our biggest things we wish firms would do better that we still struggle with and probably always will.
Liz Farr
Yeah, pricing is is a biggie and yeah. And that, that I think I see discussions on Twitter and Facebook about that every day about pricing.
Jason Blumer
Yeah, it’s Yeah, I think it’s, it’s one of those things that it’s, it’s not difficult, but it is hard to do. It’s, it’s pretty simple. You it is as simple as going, I want to do this for you, and I want you to pay me this much money to do it. Right. It really is as simple as going, I’m not going to do tax returns for less than $2,000 apiece, I’m just not. So that’s as simple as it can be. But then you got to pitch it to people you got to you know, convince clients of your value. So it can be a long difficult process that puts you in uncomfortable situations that I think allow us to grow so I wish firms would would take on some of those some of that work in pricing. It really would help them grow make more money and just be a greater value to their clients I think
Liz Farr
I agree completely. now what are some things that you to stop doing that made a difference? Are there things you stop doing as a firm or as individual?
Jason Blumer
Well, let Julie take that one thing I’ll let you have that was
Julie Shipp
Probably early on, one thing we stopped doing was getting in each other’s lanes. As really as part in our partnership and our ownership and the roles we feel as visionary integrator, we were we were crossing in and out of each other’s lanes. And it really diluted the work we could do together, if we were both leveraging our best gifts and abilities and purpose in our roles. And so that’s something we really came to define really after the first year. Jason, that’s right. And then for sure, beyond that, we really hit how we function best together as partners, and then as as CEO, and visionary. I mean, as visionary and integrator. And so that’s been one of the big things that we’ve changed. As partners and individuals, I think, probably another one for us, was really learning to leverage time appropriately, and not be a slave to time. But that time became a thing we use and planning control. So that we are getting the most out of, I mean, where we spend our working days is often usually the largest part of our time. And so using that uber intentionally, every moment of the day that we’re that we’re working has is that’s one of the things that’s really driven us forward in the team too, we all do something together called calendar work blocking. And it’s just that visual representation of how we’re spending our professional hours each day, where we’re intersecting, collaborating together, how we’re serving clients, and making that the most intentional use of time, that’s been a big one, I think for us, and that’s something we started as a firm. When we stopped as a firm, probably pacing was moving you out of technical service over time, and putting that work in the hands of an accomplished smart team that love that work and do it very well. That’s, that’s where they want to thrive and grow. And I think that was a big important step for us to make for the firm was to stop having you in client service as much. And then same for me and operations to I was in the internal finance area in the firm, and then driving a lot of the operations myself for the firm for Blumer and Thriveal. And so moving away from that, and having that in the capable hands of some of our leadership team has just made us better and has freed us up to do some of the work where we’re we thrive and are more more appropriately gifted to do.
Jason Blumer
Yeah, yeah. And I think practically, you’ll see us fulfill roles in in different ways. Like people have perceptions of a CEO and COO. And in as the CEO, you’re leading everything, right, you lead everything. But a CEOs role is very defined. It’s a very, it’s meant to be a visionary role. It’s very what we call market focused its market. It’s focused on the value of the market we’re meant to portray, it has a lot of service and selling components, leadership and mission. But internally, when we’re leading leadership team meetings, you’ll find Julie leads those and I’m on mute a lot. Because that’s it. She’s the COO of the operations, really. So it’s the even the titles can be missed misnomers sometimes, and I’m on mute, because the meetings are going so fast. Sometimes I can’t even keep up. But that’s what but that’s the thing. Operations moves very quickly to create efficient movement and Department of a firm. And people don’t necessarily know that. So Julie’s told our team and me those things. And so I’m there supporting operations in some of those leadership meetings. I don’t lead them. She brings the agenda, she crafts it, but just those little particulars are things I guess Julie, we had to learn over years and years of going will What do I do in the lane when I’m pitching a new contract or what do I do in my lane when I’m in an ops meeting with you? Or what do you do when we’re in coaching and consulting together all of those lanes, you just have to define over time, and you just get better and better, you know, at those things, so those are some examples.
Julie Shipp
That’s true and and the the work to getting away from technical work really freed our team up to do their best work and kept you from being a bottleneck to their work, because you were needing to do so many other things as an owner, you you were slowing down the very good work that they could do not intentionally, but just, you know, because you couldn’t get to things that you needed to do to help them. So that also was a very big change for us, and that they like, Oh, yeah.
Jason Blumer
And that was our goal, you know, to try to move you know, Julie, you and I had that goal a long time ago, it’s to move me out of technical services, and it took years to pull that off. Now we have team that are smarter technically, than me. And it’s like, it’s like, Hey, will you build a budget for this client, you’re like, oh, wow, I never would have built the budget that way. That’s pretty crazy and very, very technical and very specific. So you get a lot of value when you actually get in your lane, and try to perform that lane for the value of the company. So what we try to do,
Liz Farr
That’s, it’s such a different way of being a leader to offer an I ever experienced where the the owners had their fingers in every single piece of the organization. And then they couldn’t figure out why they were so exhausted all the time. Well, I don’t know. Yeah, now, now on the Thrivecast, Jason, you you talk sometimes about blowing things up in in your firm? Which, and I love that phrase. Yeah. Now, what is the most valuable mistake that you made? Wow, can be either review or both?
Jason Blumer
Well, there’s a lot of those. Yeah, there’s bad there’s a there’s a lot of mistakes. I think we probably I don’t know how many years ago, we really set out intentionally, this was very purposeful to build a leadership team. We knew that was the, that was the next thing we needed to do. Because Julian and I are overwhelmed. Right? CEO and COO means also everything else, right? You know, take the trash out, and all those kinds of things. So when you get large enough, you have to start adding people that are a little bit closer to the owners and the leaders and say you’re gonna be really defacto leaders. A lot of times when we say they are, they are leaders, they are a proxy leader to us, which means we invite a leadership team to be on, you know, to be on the leadership team with us. But we say we want you to lead the way we would lead. So now I can’t be with 15 people. But we can be with three people. So we lead this five person leadership team, which includes Julian, and now they can go lead a larger group of people. That’s how you leverage the strengths of multiple people as a firm grows. And we, you know, we just just like anything, we had to learn how to lead leaders in you know, Julie and I were leading, but then when we invited people to be leaders with us, we found out oh, they’re not exactly doing what we would want to do. And they’re coming to us transparently going, I don’t know what to tell this person, they keep asking me stuff and I keep telling them this purpose y’all told me and and I don’t know what else to say. And so we probably probably a big mistake is we didn’t realize we needed to invest a lot in our in leadership education, in really teaching them how to be leaders, not technically they can do the CPA stuff, and the operational leadership stuff, but they need to know how to lead people you know, when people push back because smart team push back they go wow, why are we doing it that way? And, and we love that and we invite that into our culture. So you got to know how to answer a lot of why questions sometimes and not get frustrated by you know, cuz I want to go just do it because I said do it. And that’s not a great leadership move at all. No. So you know, so I think not investing in our leaders, teaching them training them was was that’s probably heard us in a, you know, with there’s some very specific ways that we’ve probably been hurt by that. But I don’t know Julie, would you add anything to investing in leaders?
Julie Shipp
We just should have done it earlier. We should develop Leadership much earlier, even before we installed leadership, we should have been really more focused on it, you know, but it’s the tyranny of the urgent not making an excuse to saying that that I mean, it was a tyranny of the urgent at the time, and it didn’t feel like there was time to do that. But we should have created the time to do that and been more intentional, instead of having to play catch up. When when we did get it installed, we’re seeing the fruits of that now. But three or four years ago, we should have started probably two or three years before that. And we’re just now really seeing the fruits of the development and the investment there.
Liz Farr
That is such a key skill to teach. And, and I applaud you for recognizing that. Yeah, yeah, I teach. Yeah. And I think I’m mostly intrigued by leadership skills, because I experienced so many really terrible leaders in my career. So, you know, we know what bad leadership is. Because we so rarely see really great leaders.
Jason Blumer
Yeah. And it’s, and it’s so it’s so sad, you know, Liz, for you to say, I’ve just really have been with some very poor leaders. And, and you want to say to those people do you know, the power you had to be or the encouragement you had with Liz, like you had her with you. And, and we we can, you know, squander a lot of that time, we have such an impactful investment that we can make, as leaders, we really do we impact our teams, a lot, sometimes for bad sometimes for good. And it’s just, every single day, we have such a power to really encourage people, or really to call them very transparently back into their lane, challenge them to work efficiently, work with a purpose work with a mission. And, and you know, not to shy away from the confrontation that that takes some times, it helps us all grow in, you know, they say leadership is lonely at the top it is because it’s like, who to do it that for us? Well, and that’s the value of you know, Julie and I being partners together, we get to do that for each other, you know, at the level of owners, we get to go. Now, that’s not how our relationships gonna work. That’s not how we have agreed to do it. And it just makes us better. When we get into those very trusted real relationships. That’s the power of leadership. And it you know, it stinks that it’s been squandered. I think in our profession a lot of times, unfortunately.
Liz Farr
Yeah. It really is. Now, Blumer CPAs isn’t the only business that you to lead. Can you tell us a little bit about the Thriveal CPA Network?
Jason Blumer
Yes, yeah, that is that has a lot of our heart and purpose tied up in it. So a lot of what we do in Blumer, we learn a lot of things in our firm, right? Because we’re running a virtual firm that’s focused on a market with pricing and hiring very intentional ways. We do things. And we teach a lot of that to our Thriveal members. So and Thriveal started probably two, I was writing the blog, I was writing a thriveal.com blog on like a Blogspot site probably 15 years ago, I think, something like that so long ago. So it started as my thoughts and ideas about running a profession. And I think about 15 years ago, what I knew, and my Oh, so embarrassing to think about what I was trying to tell people, but I couldn’t help it. I wanted to, I wanted to talk but it quickly turned into a community when I was learning to lead a firm and consult and do some of the things that I wanted to try. And so I started meeting people on Twitter, you know, other firm owners around 2008. And just and we started calling each other. And then we started meeting and say, Oh, God, this community of people that help each other, and like don’t charge each other. It was wild, you know, so I launched a community and said, I want to formalize us actually being together. And it didn’t have a price when we did that because I just wanted to have people around me that were smart to help. But now it’s grown into, oh my gosh, we have. We have two programs. We lead curriculum based programs. We lead in our growth model that run from July to January every year, our foundations and our scaling programs. We have three different membership levels. They all go into community groups monthly. We have a An annual conference Deeper weekend that Julie and I lead that a lot of people know about. We write and produce content for. We have courses online, we produce a lot of content. So there are so many things we do in thriveal it you know, we have a whole team that runs it that, you know, that organization is run just as intentionally with a purpose and mission. And that that is Julie, I guess that’s to help entrepreneurs, firm entrepreneurs, that’s what we’re about, you know, mission. That’s, yeah. Yeah. So they it’s a, we’re an entrepreneurial care and support organization is really what we’re for entrepreneurs in the firm, and in thrival, because we know, we know the struggles entrepreneurs have, it’s a it’s not the easiest life you choose to run. And you need a lot of people around you, because you can kind of feel crazy sometimes being on your own. But we’re all about building community, having other people transparently supporting coaching, consulting, guiding, leading, you know, create mistakes in front of each other, that stuff just makes us all better. And thriveal is a safe place to do that inside of some private, confidential places. And firms owners open up, they talk about their struggles, and we try to work through it together in a private place. So it’s so valuable.
Liz Farr
Yeah, I wish more firm leaders would take advantage of the many communities that we have. Yeah.
Jason Blumer
Yeah. And there’s more communities popping up, right, because of the intense value to this world. People are seeing that now. And I guess the pandemic really brought that about, it’s like, we were alone. And it’s like, you don’t need to be alone, but humans do not need to be by themselves.
Liz Farr
Right. Now, what advice do you to have for firm owners in firm leaders who want to create better firms?
Jason Blumer
That’s a big question. I’ll give that to Julie.
Liz Farr
Yeah, I know, I don’t know, questions, you could, you could talk for an hour either.
Julie Shipp
That’s great. And I’m not sure we’re qualified to give that advice. Maybe we are, we were battling through it every day ourselves. And, you know, grabbing for joy sometimes. And sometimes it’s just there. And I think we take a holistic view of that, you know, work is life is work is life, it’s it’s a work life integration, it’s one thing, not A, not a balance on a scale. And so learning to to fit all of those things together into that one life, it’s a challenge to get to do. But it’s a privilege to to be able to run your own firm. That’s a privilege that I think we can forget in every day. Probably if I had to, I had to boil it down, I would think just harkening back to something we said earlier than the becoming a master of time not mastered by time. And the intentional use of time is really a key. And it’s a hard one for entrepreneurs, Jason can tell you, because it feels like a restriction of freedom. But it’s not. It’s one of those ironies where the intentional use of your time and your value and your effort produces something and it produces the freedom and the joy, that that you’re looking for. So we’ll ask ourselves a couple of questions quite often any strategic decision or change we want to make or anything that we’ll ask ourselves, you know, are the things we’re doing right now? And the decisions we’re making right now? Are they leading us to the place for wanting to go? Or? So we’ll ask, we’ll ask that question. And then, you know, we’ll ask also of each other. And I asked Jason this years ago, when he was really at a crossroads of what do I want Thriveal and Blumer, typically was when I worked for him and kind of laid out his vision and the question and we still ask each other this question now is will do you want what that means? Do you want what that meant? That goal means all the iterative steps between here and there that we’re going to take on the path is that what you want because that’s what’s between you wanting to filter things like that? Because you never reap in the season you so never, and so it may take some time to get to the iteration and the joy of something you’re looking at. So finding the joy in that every day is no No, I want what that means I have a purpose and know what I’m doing it’s intention or I’m moving forward one day at a time to that place, I want to be down the road. So that’s getting a little philosophical but no, escaping. What would you add to that? I don’t know.
Jason Blumer
Well, it’s, it’s just part of the principles we teach about entrepreneurship. You know, Julie was referencing really some pretty deeper principles in I mean, things like, we’d like to tell our Thriveal members, these four phases, we tell them, there’s a tilling, there’s a sowing, there’s a reaping, and there’s a growing, and it’s, so it’s to help the entrepreneur who entrepreneurs want it now, that’s man, that’s me, I’m describing myself, it’s like, start a business and it blows up. It’s awesome. And you’re like, Woohoo, I’m ruling the world. And it doesn’t actually work that way. Now that I know, but, but you find the joy is in the journey of you realizing patiently that there’s a phase of tilling, you know, it’s breaking up the ground. And you know, it’s that can be trying to let your market know you exist. And you know, marketing sometimes takes a couple years just to let that market now uses and then it’s sowing is starting to plant seeds. And those just grow up later, they come up later, when you finally get to eat the fruit of what you’ve created. And that patience is so tough for entrepreneurs. So we remind them, that the work you’re doing now, that’s the part that’s joyful joy is often it’s a hard fought journey. Often we want it to be automatic and fluffy and fun. Joy comes from staying on the path and fighting through some of the hard things because it does come later. But it’s an investment now, for a future payoff, oftentimes for entrepreneurs. And they don’t like it. So the cool stories we hear online are, you know, people who say my firm’s awesome is, you know, it’s, you know, grown 400%. And we’re all like, why can’t I do that. And it’s just an anomaly. It’s just not always or mostly true. Life is, is does play out differently. And we think better the joy is in a hard fought journey. In the day to day, that’s when you find your value. That’s when you’re in a trench with somebody working hard. And you’re going, Wow, that person beside me is digging ditches with me. And they’re pretty awesome. Wow, I can’t believe they’re down here with me. They didn’t leave and go home early. They stayed with me. That’s when you go, wow, this is awesome. I never would have met that person in that way. Had we not gone through this together? So I think those are some of the things we’ve learned. Now we’re getting philosophical with. Well, that’s on the ship.
Liz Farr
That’s, that’s okay. It’s okay. I like I like the philosophy. But, but I want to be conscious of our time, because I know you, too, are on a tight schedule. Yeah. So I think that’s a perfect note to end our conversation on. Now, if listeners want to connect with you, what’s the best way to find you?
Jason Blumer
Yeah, there’s so we people who follow me know that I produce a lot of content. That’s part of my job and my role, which probably is one of my favorite parts of my role. Not everybody knows that. But I love to produce content. So a lot of fun for me. So Thriveal.com has a lot of stuff on it. So just reading through the kinds of programs we have, the kinds of membership levels you can join, and the big long list of things that you get as a member of Thriveal the programs you can join in July, the conferences, you can come to the registration pages. And then I would say our YouTube channel, the Thriveal YouTube channel, if you just look up Thriveal on YouTube, there’s I think there might be an old channel on there, but the newest channel and we got to make sure we merge those. The newest channel has tons of just video snippets I do every week in studios, has a lot of has a few years worth of our podcast. Our podcast is in its 13th year. So it doesn’t have all of the episodes but as the past few years, I think. And then if you need anything else, just info@thriveal.com Julie and I do coaching and we do firm consulting, we lead firms through transformation, one and two year transformational event. So that’s it, Julie, anything else where to find that she didn’t pick up? Nope. That’s it. Cool. Awesome.
Liz Farr
Well, it’s been just amazing and a great honor to have you on here. And thank you so much for sharing your intellectual capital with the listeners.
