Embracing Transformation: Intentional Leadership with Jason Blumer

Jason Blumer, CEO of Blumer CPAs and Thriveal, joins John Randolph for part one of their conversation on Episode 38 of CPA Life. Discussing his journey of building a sustainable CPA firm and the importance of intentional leadership, Jason explains that he made a lot of mistakes and had a lot of wrong ideas about entrepreneurship, which informs his desire to guide entrepreneurs with intentionality so they don’t make those same mistakes. Jason stresses, and John agrees, that community-driven culture is a key to firm growth and employee satisfaction, the details of which they discuss at length, with a lead-in to part two, which airs May 22nd, 2024.

Transcript:

Hey everybody. We are back with another episode of the CPA Life podcast. It’s the podcast that shows you that, yes, you absolutely can have a career in public accounting and a life outside of the office. And we do that by doing exactly what it is that we’re doing today, and that is talking to firm owners, firm leaders, industry insiders, who are disrupting the norms of the industry, that are building amazing firms, that are growing and profitable, where people can make an impact on the firm, but they don’t have to sell their souls at the altar of their job to build that successful career that they are seeking to build. We’re back with another episode today talking to Jason Blumer, who is the CEO of Blumer and Associates, which is a remote virtual CPA firm. And you’re also, I want to make sure I get your title right—are you the CEO of Thriveal, the CPA network?

Yeah. Also, yeah, just throw in another job in there. I needed another job.

Well, I, we’re going to talk a lot about that, but I really liked the statement of your purpose on the front page of your about section on the Thriveal website. I want to read that real quick and it says, “Thriveal inspires counter-cultural firm owners to embrace their entrepreneurial creativity within the profession. We are a community of entrepreneurial leaders that seek to transform.” So with that, welcome to the show, Jason, and let’s talk about transformation for the next few minutes.

That’s awesome. I love it, John. Thanks for having me on the show. I’m pumped to be here, man.

You are more than welcome. I know that you have been, as much as possible, out in the public eye and ear trying to carry the banner of building a more modern-minded, future-focused CPA firm, something that’s sustainable not only for the people that are running those firms, but for the people that are looking to get into their careers. You’ve been doing this for a little while now—give us a little bit of a history, kind of where you’ve come from and, and how you’ve gotten to the point of where you are today with Thriveal and Blumer and Associates.

Yeah. So yeah, I’m a creative person by heart. I always wanted to be an entrepreneur. I was in rock bands in college, you know, I got into accounting cause my dad was an accountant, and I’m like, I had to pick a major. So I’m like, my dad’s paid the bills, so I guess I’ll pick accounting. I didn’t, that’s about how much went into the planning around my life back then. So then, just went into other firms and just didn’t like it, you know, and my dad had a firm. He started our firm in ’97. It was just a traditional, small, little bookkeeping CPA firm, in our town, Greenville, South Carolina. And I came and started leading that in May, 2003, and just, started trying a bunch of stuff, you know, that’s where I really just started trying things. I started, you know, speaking and writing for the profession.

Thriveal really started as a blog, you know, 15, 18 years ago, Thriveal.com was just a little blog I was writing on the side, and just started writing some ideas about how I thought firms should operate. And I didn’t know a lot about what I thought I was writing about. I was just a big mouth, I guess, at that time. So, you know, it went through a lot. At some point, Thriveal and the firm were operating together, and I’ve kind of, especially in front of our members, our Thriveal members, I’m always open about the journey of my entrepreneurship, and I really got in a lot of trouble, you know, got into some debt, almost shut the businesses down because I was by myself. I didn’t know really what to do or how to be a business owner, you know, how to lead with intention.

I got a partner. She really started teaching me how to do those things. She didn’t have the background in that either, but she really, her life is intentionally planned. And I just learned the hard way how to be an entrepreneur, you know, how to actually embrace your role, you know, because what we do is very valuable. It does change people’s lives. It’s changed mine. And I don’t think we should play around with it. I think we should be serious about what we’re doing, what we’re committed to. And this is one of the best professions in the world. I mean, people trust us just out of the gate with financial things, and so I want to honor that trust and then lean in and really challenge people, challenge clients and team when they need to grow.

So I had to grow up, I had to take it seriously and go, I’m, you know, I’m not playing around anymore. I have a family to take care of. And now, you know, almost 20 people—you have to be serious if you want to do this well. And I had to grow up a lot. So our members know a lot of that story. They know the deeper, darker parts of it, but that’s kind of what I went through and here we are.

And you’ve kind of transformed into, into where things are today. Now in your role as the CEO of both firms, do you kind of straddle that fence and spend equal amounts of time, or is your time spent in one more than the other at this stage of your career?

Yeah. So a lot of people ask that. Probably what we’re doing more at these later stages in our career, because I have been in my career now for 30 years, as of last year, I was in 30 years. And so about that time, you get to start, hopefully, you can choose a little bit what you’re going to do next. And so we probably what Julie and I, ’cause she coaches and consults with me—we do a lot of consulting with our clients and our firm and a lot of firms in Thriveal, because that’s a firm related community. So we do a lot of consulting, so both Blumer and Thriveal are just intertwined each day. So each day we’re just keeping them both moving. They can’t really be, you know, structured in a way where they’re just one’s on Tuesday, one’s on Thursday, at least the way we do it, you know. It’s all intertwined. So, you know, that’s how we do it.

But now we’re moving out, you know, we’ve not been in a lot of the technical services for a long time. And so we do provide a lot more of what Thriveal needs, which is education, programs, conferences, webinars, teaching, coaching, consulting. That’s a lot more of what we do now with our time. So we have other leaders and technicians that lead the technical team.

Got it. So, let’s talk a little bit about the Blumer CPA side of the business. I know that you guys, from a structure standpoint, aren’t your stereotypical public accounting partnership structure, where one guy is sitting at the table with 51 percent of the ownership and can, you know, pull the, I would call it the dad card, you know?

Totally, yeah. That’s not going to work with us.

Talk a little bit about the structure and why you guys chose that path. And it’s a structure that I’m starting to see a little bit more of in the industry.

Yeah. So a while back we did choose just a corporate structure, right? So you know, we took on roles of CEO and Julie, my partner, COO. And so we don’t have books of business. Nobody has a book of business. You know, the firm is a company, and it serves clients, right? The clients are clients of the firm, and then different team are assigned to serve their groups of clients. So it’s really just structured like any for-profit business, it’s structured like a lot of our clients are, and those models are how you set up a company. If you want to grow a company, if you want to scale it, you set it up like that. Not like these consensus-driven partnerships that are just, those are weird.

Yeah.

And you know, we’ve all worked for those, probably. And we found a lot of those got in the way. We found that out through a lot of consulting. So one thing Julie and I do is when we teach people, because that’s a lot of what our consulting is—we’re restructuring older firms now, that are becoming corporate based firms. That’s a big part of what they want to do and change, because they want to scale and grow and they want younger people to own the company. And the thing we’re all dealing with is that younger professionals are like, no way am I going to buy your book of business. All your clients stink, right? I don’t want to buy your clients. They’re terrible. So we’re finding the models never worked. And so we’re trying to let younger people into the profession and own and things like that, and they’re just not interested.

So corporate structures are what allow them to get a percentage of the stock of the corporation and things like that. So, and then one other thing Julie and I do is we’re different ownership percentages. But what we do is when we step into our roles, we leave ownership at the door. So ownership has nothing to do with our company—at all. We’re both a hundred / a hundred. That’s what we say. We’re a hundred / a hundred. She’s a hundred percent and I’m a hundred percent. And what we are is we’re a hundred percent in our role. And so I never have a right to have some percentage and trump her, and she doesn’t have a right to be a certain percentage and trump me. So an ownership percentage does not bring any weight to the decisions being made in the company. So what brings weight into the company are the roles. And so like we go into leadership team meetings. I’m on mute listening and Julie leads those because she’s the COO—I’m one of the managers on her team.

Mmm hmm.

And then when we go into marketing, and I’m in a podcast studio, I’m leading that. Sometimes she’s guiding me a little bit about questions to say, but I’m the one leading that. I take that where I want to go because that’s in my role. So our roles are what drive the clarity, of a business and how it grows.

So ownership is something we just wish people could leave at the door because they do dysfunctionally try to trump people because they have a whim and they want to do something they want. You’re going to really be valuable when you’re forced to be collaborative with other smart people that care about you. And that’s a key. If you’re with other smart people who care about you and your best interest, and you both do that, you are going to blow it out of the water. You’re going to win way more than trumping somebody with something you just want to do. So ownership doesn’t matter—at all.

And I think that one of the things that, if you truly are an entrepreneurial, spirit minded person, you tend to have a little bit more of a right-brain focus, which is a great thing when it comes to vision.

Right.

Which is a great thing when it comes to, you know, charting a path of where we want to go. But that right brain can get you into a lot of trouble sometimes if you don’t have enough left brain people around you. And I ’m speaking from experience here, because I don’t know about you, but as a leader, one of my challenges, and especially for people that aren’t like me, and maybe like you, I think out loud.

Yeah, sure. Oh yeah.

You start to say things and as they roll off your tongue, you may go, nah, that’s not gonna work. That’s, I can’t even believe I said that. And if you don’t have enough people around you that maybe sometimes are the voice to go, no, Jason.

No, don’t say that. Stop saying that! Yeah, well that’s right. And that’s what I got into that because I thought entrepreneurship, the vision, the ideas was all that it took to grow. And obviously everybody knows that’s not true. It’s all of this has to turn into processes, you got, I was coming up with programs, brand new, you know, events and they were all awesome. But then I couldn’t get sponsors or anybody to sign up and I was calling people at night and it just didn’t work.

So, you know, you have to have such a strong operational team to scale a business. And so there’s a lot to an entrepreneur like me and you, John, where there’s gotta be some kind of inhibition to go, I don’t get everything I want, and I need to be held accountable. I needed accountability way earlier than I had it.

Yeah.

When I added a partner, I got it kind of already built in. But I needed it. I got in trouble because I didn’t have it. And, but as entrepreneurs, we fight that. We’re like, we want, and we hear a lot of our clients say, I’m addicted to freedom, right. And so they’ve got this wrong view of freedom. And the view they have of freedom is do whatever I want. And we tell our Thriveal members—who are all entrepreneurs—we say, you cannot do whatever you want. And we just counter that myth. It’s like, that’s a lie you’re telling yourself. You want that, but nobody in life has that amount of freedom. And so we’re successful when we’re in collaboration with other people who truly care about our best interests, then we can really conquer anything, and it means you’re only going to do what’s really doable and your bad ideas are going to fall away because those people are going to help you get rid of those, and that’s what you need.

Yep. Having that voice of reason or those voices of reason are significant to help keep you on track. So in the role that you’re in, and with the business that you have with Thriveal, you guys have a very unique seat looking at the industry because it’s not a myopic, “our firm,” and reading some articles of things that we might need to do. You guys are running your firm, but you’re also, daily, interacting—I say daily, it may not be daily, but I would assume it probably is.

It is daily. A community requires daily care, yeah.

Yeah. You are interacting daily with the firm owner in Jacksonville, Florida that has five people that that bought, you know, a 65-year-old guy’s book of business and he’s trying to figure out what to do with it because everything is, yeah, he’s running CCH Axcess, but all of his files are in a box on the floor. And then you’ve got, you know, some other young kid who’s, you know, 28 to 32 years old that went out and started his own firm, and now he’s got some clients and is trying to figure out how do I do this? I want to hire somebody, but I don’t want them to work like I did at EY. How do I build this thing? But I’m sure you’ve also got the guy that’s, you know, your age and my age, been doing this for 30 years, you know, the epiphany has finally hit him or her that, hey, if I want to continue building this thing, I’m going to have to do some things different.

So you get it, you have a unique seat where you’re looking at all this. What are some of the common things that you see that leadership is struggling with right now in the industry, and what are some things that you guys are doing to help them get their head around that?

Wow. Those are big questions.

Yeah.

A lot of what we do in Thriveal, we are really an entrepreneurial care organization. So, we’re, you know, it comes out of the heart of who I am and who I was. I needed so much care and leadership. I needed the realities of somebody telling me, you know, stop making up so many things like that’s not your path to win. And so Julie and I have enough experience now, we can lean into a lot of that coach role. And so a lot of it is fear, you know? We all own our own business. All of our Thriveal members own their own business, and we tell them, yeah, they know we’re doing what they’re doing every day. We’re selling clients, firing people, you know, hiring people that were doing what they’re doing. And so we know what they’re going through.

And so helping an owner be confident in who they are and not being fearful, helping them lean into, which our purpose statement says, lean into the creativity of really who they are as people, just knowing everybody is creative. They, you know, that’s not something that accountants aren’t, right? We’re all just creative people. We’re made with that. There’s a beauty in that.

So, but also helping them understand how to navigate an entrepreneurial journey, which is faltering. You do need to try stuff and fall down and get back up. Life is like that, right? When you get older, when you get to be our age, you’ve gone through some hard things, you know, at this age, I find, wow, there’s some been some personal things that have been really difficult in my life and, you know, you really get a lot of distance when you move away from those and you look back and you go, man, I grew through that. I mean, I thought I was going to go crazy, but I grew through that. And so just, we’re helping them as they falter. It’s like, get back up. Like you’re in a community. We just, I fell down too yesterday, so I need you to get back up.

And, you know, challenging and, you know, helping them believe something about themselves. Sometimes when you can’t believe it. On your own. You need somebody to believe in you more than you can even believe in yourself sometimes. And that’s common in life. And so just just helping them embrace what a community can be valuable, you know, to you. But, you know, practically, we’re all just building businesses. We’re helping them hire people, fire people, go, stop doing that. You know, here’s what project management means, you know, stop buying new software, use what you got, you know, there’s a lot of practical advice too, going on, but it’s tons of leadership, coaching, and care through a community based, system, really.

I want to touch on something that I think kind of dovetails into what it is that we’re talking about. I’ve heard you talk about it on a couple of other podcasts, and I’ve read a couple of things that you’ve written about it as well, but, it’s a word that we talked about before we started recording: Intentional. Intentionality. I was listening to a podcast with you and Julie recently and you were talking about your onboarding process. How many people are a part of Blumer CPA?

That’s 15 over there.

Okay, so 15 people, which I would venture a guess and I’m just gonna throw a number out I mean, I don’t know if it’s right or wrong. I would venture a guess that that is a pretty common number in the CPA firm world, 15 to 20 employees, 10 to 20 employees. So we’re not talking 500 employees, 100 employees where you’ve got this big corporate structure where you’ve got things, you know, outlined that people are going to do. You’ve got 15 people, but your onboarding and assimilation process for people, talk a little bit about that, because one of the things that we see from the recruiting world is we’ll place somebody in a job or somebody will accept a job on their own somewhere and we’ll typically follow up with people first week, first day. Hey, how’s it going? And I always joke with people and say, look, did they at least show you where the coffee pot is and the bathroom? Because those are the two most important things.

Yeah.

But you’d be surprised at how much, and maybe you won’t be because of the people you deal with. But the onboarding literally is here’s your computer. Here’s your login. Here’s some tax returns. Get at it.

Yeah.

And God bless you. I hope you succeed.

Well, that’s the way I was trained. That’s the way you were trained, right?

Yeah, pretty much!

That’s right! I remember, I had an office, which was really cool. I was like, I got an office and they’re like, there’s a stack of some audit files from last year and you’re going to do this audit this year. So just start flipping through those. I didn’t know what an audit was. So, but, you know, it’s funny, we did this on a retreat with our team. And I think we have a pretty strong culture. A lot of people want that. And a lot of people say, man, this is like a, it’s like a family. We’re like family.

And so we changed the word. We said, we don’t want to call ourselves a family anymore. And they’re like, oh man, we want to be a family. It’s like, well, not everybody has a happy—that doesn’t mean the same thing to everybody. So, families are things you’re stuck in, you can’t get out of. Some families are awesome, some are really dysfunctional and hurtful. And I said, what we really are is a community. And we’re community first.

And so now that that’s the language we use, hey, welcome to the community, which is basically saying, every day you get up and come into this community, it’s a choice you made. And you don’t have to stay here. And so you’re not forced here. You’re not dysfunctionally, you’re not going to eat with the weird uncle, at Thanksgiving dinner. You get to, if this is not a place you’re supposed to be growing, you get to leave and we’re not going to hold you here and we’re not going to be mad at you if you leave either. But also, if you’re not participating in the community and the role you’ve been given, then you can’t stay. You also can’t stay here too. So this is a community where we all make our commitments to be here. And we all have to make a commitment.

So I think that’s the first thing we do, is onboard our team into a community. So, you know, we go through a four or five step hiring process just to make sure they’re the right person. We make sure other people are interviewing this, you know, prospective employee, other than Julie and I, because we know we’re deficient in making the final decision, right? We don’t know everything. We can’t read people. That’s hard. And so you need just a bunch of people helping you, and then when they come in, we walk them through a three to six month strong training program. They’ll get a training group of clients. They have senior leaders. We have a, Project manager and trainer. She’s amazing. She’s been here forever. And she walks through with them and helps them do things like here’s how we do calendar, work blocking is required. Here’s why we do it. Here’s how you prioritize your work. You know, here’s how you be intentional about calendars and your skills, things that that’s what we really need to learn, right?

The technical part, a lot of times they’re going to have that if they, if they have, you know, worked in the profession, but what they need to do is how do you work in this community? You know, you’ve got to respond to posts. You always email clients back 24 hours. That’s the longest we’re going to go. And you have all the support you need. So ask us, and when you ask, you’ve got to write it in the chat system and you’ve got to give us context. Here’s how we write, so let us review some of your emails. Like all of this stuff, it makes them feel what we say, the weight of the role. We want everybody to feel a weight to their role and it’s because their role is valuable is what we tell them.

So yeah, it’s going to be hard, and you’re going to do your work, and you’re going to stay up late and you might work on the weekends too, if you have to, but you can do that, but you can also pick up your kids, because you took time off to do that in the middle of the afternoon. And that’s awesome. But you’re going to do your job too, and we’re expecting you to do that. So the levels of expectation can be high, the accountability that we invite them in can be high. We tell them you’re in a community. You will always be respected and honored. And that’s required in this firm by everybody. And so you can call Julie and I out on when we’re not fulfilling, you know, living by our core values.

So I think we were thrown into a technical job. We’re trying to bring people into a community first and go, we have got your back. So go ahead and make some mistakes, because we don’t care about that. It’s you we care about, and you really need to be good at your job because we need you. All that together.

You know, I think when you create an environment that people are not afraid to step out on a limb, I’ve told my staff for years, hey, short of cussing at a client, there’s probably nothing I can’t fix.

Right. There you go!

So step out there. Take a risk. You know, I had an employee once that was, he thought he was being hard on people when he was on the phone with him at times, and I told him, I said look, I want you to be the biggest jerk on planet earth. Just be the biggest. And I pulled a hundred dollar bill out, and I’m like, I’ll give you a hundred dollars—just be a jerk to somebody today. And at the end of the day, he’s like, I didn’t do it. I’m like no, and that’s my point. Regardless of how hard you try, you can’t.

You can’t! So don’t worry about it!

It’s okay to ask tough—I’m like, you’re not going to, you’re not going to have anybody yell at you. You’re not going to have anybody cuss at you. You’re not going to have anybody just, but sometimes you’ve got to ask tough questions, and it’s okay to ask those questions because Warren, you’re not, you can’t be a jerk, even when you try to be a jerk, you can’t be a jerk.

That’s awesome.

And I think when you create an environment where people understand, first and foremost, leadership has my back, and secondly, I’m going to make mistakes.

Totally.

And when I make mistakes, they’re going to pick me up. They’re going to dust me off. We’re going to talk about what I did. We’re going to talk about what I could do better, what I learned from it. And let’s move on down the road. I had a mentor years ago, uh, put it real simply, and I thought, there’s a lot of truth to it. He said, you know, people don’t roll out of bed every morning and put their feet on the floor and, you know, their elbow on their knee and say, “Okay, how can I screw my job up today?”

Right.

They just don’t do that. People don’t do things at work that you want them to do because either one, they don’t know or they don’t care. And, and he said, number one, Is okay, right? I don’t know. We’ll teach them. That’s our job. We absolutely have to teach them but if it continues on and we’ve taught them, then they may not just care.

That’s true.

And again, do they not care because we didn’t show them how important this was, let’s give them the benefit of the doubt, but if it ultimately gets to the point of the fact that they just don’t understand, like you said, the weight of the responsibility of what it is they do, then change has to be made. But we’re going to create an environment to let them learn from that and grow from that.

Thanks for joining us for part one of John Randolph’s conversation with Jason Blumer of Thriveal. Part two will air May 22nd. Be sure to subscribe on your favorite podcasting app, and learn more about the show at CPALifePodcast.com. We’ll see you next time on CPA Life.