Making an Impact on Clients and the Community with Chris Johnson

Chris Johnson is the founder and CEO of CJ CPAs in San Antonio, Texas. With over a decade of experience in the world of accounting, he is dedicated to helping businesses in the construction industry and those requiring employee benefit plan audits to navigate their compliance needs in the effective and efficient way possible. With a focus on providing exceptional client service, fostering strong relationships, and utilizing innovative technology to deliver outstanding results, Chris is passionate about staying up-to-date with industry trends and embracing new technologies to create more efficient and effective solutions for his clients.

Transcript:

I actually do, when people are coming on, I tell them, “It’s my expectation that this will be the hardest thing that you ever do in your life. And if it’s not, I will see it as that I have failed you.” I want us to be better, to grow, to learn. And the hard part about it, of what we do out here, it has nothing to do with accounting, is that we hold up mirrors. We hold up mirrors and we truly reflect and look back at ourselves. And that’s hard. That is hard. And especially if you, you haven’t gone through any periods in your life where you’ve done that. Woo, man, that’s tough.

Well, when you hold yourself to that standard and you hold yourself to that level of accountability, it is tough. It is hard. And one of the things that—my wife and I are marriage mentors and marriage coaches—and one of the things that we’ll talk to couples about sometimes when we start talking about it, really issues with kids more than anything is, you know, sit down with your kids, you know, if you’re not getting the behavior You want for your kids and you’ve got to put that tougher line down kind of thing We also look sit down with them and first of all start off with saying “Hey, I owe you an apology because I’ve allowed this behavior. I’ve allowed you to think this is okay. And at the end of the day, that’s on me. That’s on me. And I need to make some changes. And because I’m going to make these changes, it’s going to affect you and it’s going to get tough. But I owe this to you.”

And I think as leaders, that’s the type of mentality that we have to have with our people is hey, if this is the performance level we expect, but we tolerate this and we’re upset about it, whether that’s a performance level or an attitude or a work product, or if it’s, you know, being able to tell “not quite truths” or you know, if you want to call the sin of omission—it’s not that I lied I just didn’t tell you—you know if as a leader, we’re gonna allow those things at the end of the day is it the person that we should be upset with or is it ourselves because we didn’t hold ourselves to a higher standard? And if we’re going to hold ourselves to that higher standard, then we need to manage expectations or people like you said, Hey, this is going to be one of the hardest things that you’re going to do, because I hold myself to this standard, and because I hold myself to this standard, there’s a performance level that’s going to be expected of you. And that’s not easy because like you said, at the end of the day, it’s holding that mirror up and saying it’s on me.

Yeah. That is super interesting because that was one of the lessons that I learned in this past year. I read Extreme Ownership by Jocko Willink, fantastic book. But in there, is this one point where he goes through and they’re trying to make a decision between a couple of folks on some managers on, “We need to terminate one of them.” And then he says, “Fire them both.” And that was the thing on my side that really spoke to me. I was like, no, but another fantastic quote is “Nothing will kill a great employee faster than you tolerate a bad one.” And that was something that we had dealt with it, we brought in somebody towards the end of last year, rockstar, super high standards for themselves, and with that. I personally, I had to reflect on it to say, “Oh man, the things that we’re tolerating here with this,” and it’s like to bring somebody into that environment, it really changed and put some perspective on, on me to say, “Oh man, we’ve got to hold ourselves to certain standards.” And with that, we had to let someone go from that standpoint as well.

And that’s not ever an easy thing to do. You know, one of the things that we talk to clients about on the talent advisory side of our business is really being tough on yourself as a leader, and as you’re saying, not accepting a bad attitude in the team that could affect everybody else, because I think it’s safe to say, if you build a team large enough, and I don’t know what that number is, Chris, but if you build a team large enough, you’re going to have performers on that team that rise or fall to the level of other people around them.

Yeah.

And that does not make them bad people. They may be some really good people. But if you surround them with just one bad apple, if you surround them with one person that just sucks the life out of the place, that’s what they’re going to ascend or descend to. And I’ve experienced that, I’ve done that as a leader and made that mistake, and, you know, literally when I woke up one day, realized, hey, this is not good, and ended up letting go four fifths of a staff that I had in an office, because I had one guy that was an exceptional performer, but he performed at the level of those around him. And it was amazing getting rid of four people out of five, keeping him, what that did to skyrocket his attitude, and then building around him in the future.

If you hold your people to a higher standard and you tell them, “Hey, we’re not going to tolerate anything less than this,” I think that again, when it goes back to holding that mirror up to yourself, your people see that. Your people will work harder. Your people will work to deliver more, because they understand that not only are you not putting it up with it for anybody else, you’re not putting up with it from yourself either because sometimes we’re the people that are that person in the environment and we think it’s okay.

Do as I say, not as I do?

Yeah, we’re good at that as parents.

Look at this incredible policy I just made for you.

So, you know, along those lines, I had an employee that worked for me once, young lady, hired her right out of college. She was a very black-and-white person and I hired her, first female on our team, I had three other guys—very stereotypical, you know, right-brain guys—and we had an eight o’clock meeting every morning. That eight o’clock meeting started at 8:05, 7:50, 8:15. And after about two weeks of being on the job, the meeting ended, and she said, “Hey, can I talk to you for a minute?” And again, keep in mind, this is a two-year, she’s got a couple years out of college, 26-year-old kid. “Can I talk to you a minute?” I said, yeah, sure. She said, “Can we close the door?” So we closed the conference room door, and she said, “I have a question. Do we have a meeting every day at eight o’clock or not?” I said, yeah, why? And she said, “Well, I’m only asking because I’ve been here two weeks and I’m the only person that’s here every day at eight o’clock. So that tells me that either we don’t have a meeting at eight o’clock or you guys think your time is more valuable than mine.”

She ended up working for me for four years, was probably one of my best employees. Now the conversation we had after that was, “Hey, you’re spot on. You are spot on, okay? Your packaging sucks—we’ll talk about that, we’ll work on that—but you’re spot on.” And I think that as leaders, we have to have that grace when we do get called out sometimes by our people that, hey, here’s the standard and you’re not at that standard. So it can be tough at times.

One of the things that I wanted to ask you about. And again, going back to culture, going back to what you guys are building: One of your, I think it’s a core value for your firm is a “spark of joy.” I want to talk a little bit about that because I don’t think that’s something that you as a leader or any leader that would have something like that in their culture just takes lightly. Looked at it, watched the video from your predecessor firm that kind of gave you the vision of doing that. I think it was you that paid off the school lunch debt for several hundred kids with your thousand dollars? Talk a little bit about that because I think that is really something cool that you guys are doing.

Yeah, absolutely. As I was saying in there, we do our auditing, but it’s just a vehicle to make some impacts in our lives and make some impacts in other lives. My previous firm had done this event, and they were actually inspired by another company in San Antonio that had previously done this, and in those same ways, we want to continue to inspire others to do this as well. And actually this year we will be making some more promotional content around it to help get that out.

So tell us specifically what that is.

Yeah, absolutely. So our Spark of Joy event is where we give every employee and some vendors and sometimes some of our customers a thousand dollars cash to go out into our community and make the biggest impact that you can in any way that you see fit. It’s very simple: cash, go out, make an incredible impact. I feel that sometimes if you want to go out and help, in some instances, you might not always know, and there can be some cloudy feelings around the generosity that might be out there and where dollars or impacts are truly going. But if it’s in your hand and you get the decision to make it, you get to see some incredible things and to experience that firsthand, it’s absolutely amazing. We do it every year and this will be the fifth year, fifth or sixth year, that I’ve done it, and every time it’s just so incredibly special and so grateful that now I get to be a part of other people’s experience for them to go out and experience it as well. I highly recommend checking out the videos from a previous firm, SPR. You can look that up on YouTube, look up “Giving Legacy SPR”.

We’ll make sure and put that in the show notes link so people can see that. ’Cause I think that’s a pretty cool thing.

Yeah. And just amazing, amazing impact. Firsthand, some of the things that we’ve done, our first year doing it, we paid off the school lunch debt for multiple schools for middle schoolers and high schoolers that were carrying debt as children, and we also were able to set up some funds at those schools. I had myself in it and another person who teamed up together, so that they could even go into those as well. And then another year we said, you know what we want to experience just some random acts of kindness. So we gave a massive $300 tip to someone and also had gone in, and if you’re familiar with baby food, you go into the baby food at the store to see baby powder, you’ll see that there are just so many tiny containers. There’s just so many more tiny containers than there are large containers. If you’ve had a baby, you’re going to need that large container and the fact that—and they’re expensive—but the fact that there’s so many folks out there that need to go through and use those small containers with it that it creates the demand for the smaller containers just shows that people are in need in that way. So I had gone in and I picked up the lid and just stuck a hundred dollar bills inside those small containers. So somebody going in and you could go through there and getting blessed in that way just a couple of things we’ve done there.

I think those are the things that again, going back to what you said a little while ago, “This is what we do, it’s not who we are,” and if through your organization, you can show people, you can make an impact, and you don’t have to be a millionaire, you don’t have to be some amazing philanthropic giver, it’s the little things that you can do to make a difference. Yeah, I loved in the video I was watching, I don’t know if it was a group of people, or if it was just one person I don’t know if it was multiple dollars or all thousand, but going to a restaurant that you guys ate lunch at a lot and blessing the servers with a thank you and letting people know, “Hey, I appreciate what you do.” I think that’s a gift and I don’t mean financial gift. I mean it’s a gift from someone’s ability to do that. And as a leader, I commend you for that, having that gift and passing that on to your people, because that’s something that I think you can’t put a price tag on. You don’t put it in an employee manual and say, hey—you can put it in their in verbs and say “this is what we do,” but until somebody lives it, touches it, feels it, has their heart experience it, I don’t think they realize the value of it because it’s not the thousand dollars, it’s the value.

Yeah. Last year, my wife, and actually, she had been called to do it since the prior year. She was wanting to have her spark of joy and to give some money to our garbage man. She’d just been feeling called to do that. She left a note, a nice note with the money out there. He came up to the door and was knocking on the door and spoke to her just in tears. And he said, “My mom just passed. I know this is my mom communicating to me through you through this act.” And on her side, just being called to it and then having something that was impactful and there, there was need there, but also just being able to help out.

I think so many times in our lives, we want to be that blessing to somebody, we just don’t know how. We also sometimes get so, as I mentioned earlier, myopically focused on the things that I’m dealing with and, you know, it’s tough enough for me to make things stretch from point A to point B, sometimes financially, working with an organization like yours that shows your people, “Hey, yes, it’s a sacrifice.” I mean, you’ve got 4, 8, 10, 12, 15 employees or, you know, you grow to larger, now you’re looking at significant dollars. but the message I think that you’re sending to your people is, “Hey, there’s some things that are bigger than us that we can impact,” and I commend you for that.

I want to touch on a couple of things before we shut down. One, what started you recording all of your interactions? And, so what started that and kind of what’s come out of that?

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. So, in October of 2022, my previous firm had let me know, they said, we don’t want to do audit anymore, we think that you should go and start your own audit practice. And I was in a little bit of the research with that as I was going through and starting to gain some comfort. And then right at the beginning of December, 2022, ChatGPT was released, and it clicked for me immediately. And for so long, it was a situation—I mean, I went to the person running the firm at the time and I showed this text where I put in and I said, it was just text conversation, I said, I want you to act as Donald Trump talking about why Whataburger is better than In-N-Out, but he keeps on interrupting himself to talk about how big his hands are. Oh, it was hilarious. It was hilarious. And it was so funny, but in the way that I was looking at it, I would say, oh man, look at this: “Isn’t this crazy that we’re going to have flying cars?” And everybody’s like, “What in the world? No, this is just a funny thing about burgers.” Like, “I’ve got to have Whataburger burgers, because I just have these gigantic hands that they can only fit around.” Hilarious. But at that time, that was, I think it just clicked from it. And I even went through about a 10-day existential crisis right at the end of the year where I was like, man, do I even not even start the firm and just chase this AI thing and just go after it?

And eventually got to the point and said, “Oh, you know what, this is the vehicle that we can use to do a lot of amazing, incredible things”—lots of learning, lots of growth in it. But then, so in March 2023, that’s when I started recording myself. And with that, seeing the progression and knowing how rapidly things were going to improve, knowing that I could take data and point a large language model at it to analyze it in so many ways that I could actually take that information and just point it in, but the thing that I needed was the information, was the data. So then just started recording a lot of myself.

Now from that, we can talk about the actual use cases that we have right now. And so today, what we can do, from this call and this conversation, it gets analyzed and automatically flows right into my to-do list. If there were any to-dos on this call, those have popped up and they show up on my Microsoft To-Do. And then we can have it assigned to the team. So just from oral communication, asking somebody, “Oh, hey, I need you to go take the dog for a walk,” that shows up on our to-do list for us to go through review and making sure that going back to being authentic and honest—am I doing what I said I was going to do today? And sometimes you can do it so easy. These words just can slip out of our mouths.

Yep. And I think that’s such a cool thing because you’re right. We do get to talking so much about things I need to do, things I need to take care of, key points of interest that come up, and in our attention economy, those things are fleeting. They disappear so quickly. The ability to document that, the ability to go back, the ability to take that and through, whether it’s ChatGPT or some other AI tool, to be able to condense that and put it into a usable format, to me has got to be really breathtaking because those things that are slipping through the cracks, stop slipping through the cracks.

Yeah, absolutely. Where you come back through and have a full plate and then you can just see it, it’s just right there. Whereas like, “Hey, here’s the 30 things that you said that you were going to do today,” and it’s like, “Ooh, this one’s still hanging out, whoops. Need to move that over.”

Now, in the process of all of that, is that how Pic2Print came about?

On the Pic2Print side, what that was, was something that I knew that in the future we were going to need to start creating things, making stuff. Pic2Print was a lowest level I could logically see how easy it would be to do it, and it was a very easy process, it didn’t take too much time, but also achieved some goals and did something fun with it. To explain what that is, there are these large language models that create images, one such as Midjourney. My journey on that actually started with I said, “Hey ChatGPT, here’s an idea that I have.” This is in that same time of Q2 of 2023, Q1, Q2 of 2023. I said, “Okay, so I want to make a company that takes text, turns it into an image, and then automatically feeds that over to a wholesaler that prints it on a canvas, and then it shows up to your door.” So, you see we got, we got one here where, that guy right there is, this is one that we got that I had typed in, “Something beautiful.” It’s beautiful. And that was AI’s interpretation of that. We have a handful over on the sidewall over here as well.

But through that, when I asked ChatGPT about that, it said, “Oh, here’s what you need to do.” And I said, “That’s Chinese. I do not understand the words that you are saying. Can you break it down?” And it was trying to explain it to me. I said, “Okay, okay, wait, is there an easier way?” It said, “Oh, well, you could reach out, go on this website called Upwork. You can get connected.” So I said, “What do I need to say? How do I find it?” And it walked me through step by step to find someone. And I was just honest with it and just copied those words, pasted them as I was talking back and forth with these people, until I got to—I found someone incredible who, I was asking, I was like, how did it go? And then I could have really honest conversations with that. I was like, so how’d it go? He’s like, “That was amazing. What the heck are you doing right now?”

And so, through that, being able to give them the firsthand real world experience of someone who has the understanding. Then there was education and learning that we would have over that time while accomplishing our other goals. Through that, learned so much about creating things but in a really low-risk way. In our industry, we have lots of very risky things. You don’t have as many things that you can do that you can take big risks on and try to figure it out because of our compliance requirements and because of what we do. So in this way, it was an ability for me to be a little more risky in terms of the things that we’re learning, and being able to go through, do it that way in a controlled environment and then take those lessons, learned back into the accounting world and audit world.

Well, you, I will give people a little bit of a cheat sheet if they’re not connected with you already on LinkedIn, go connect with you, and then after they connect with you, just go stalking through your feed because you’ve got some amazing AI prompts that you’ve built, that you’ve created, that you make available to people that I’ve used some, and it’s amazing the data that can come out of that. Because I think that one of the things that I know, speaking for myself, gets stuck with is, Hey, where do I start? Where do I even start? And there’s so many things that you’ve created already, I think, that give people a little bit of at least a jumping-off point to begin to build from.

Yeah, absolutely. And that’s getting into the skill of prompt engineering. For the past two years, I have had on my wrist here, “What would GPT do?” I went in, I went in, I got receipts. So I got it back from early 2023 of having that, having the CJ CPAs. And just to throw it in there too, whenever we get excited about stuff, we can go flip it over and, let’s freaking go! So, that is something that we’ll go, “let’s freaking go!”

It’s the constant reminder, right?

It is. To every day, work on the skill of prompt engineering. And in the same way, any interaction with a large language model, through making a picture or something, that’s a rep—that’s a rep of thinking about how am I putting in and what I’m getting back. And all of that is a feedback loop. So it’s things that are out there where it’s like, hey, what’s the lowest barrier to entry to get us getting into that feedback loop with these just because there’s so much learning that needs to happen.

What I’ve learned over time with it is that it’s framing your questions in the right way. And I know exactly what you mean. Because that was the thing where, when I first started looking at it, just seeing it as a black box, that all the answers of the universe are inside of there, and if I can’t get what I want out of it, it’s because of my ability to effectively communicate. Then what can I do to keep on working on those skills and now being able to generate some really good prompts on the front end that then shape the large language model to make it really tailored for your specific task, and then get in there and let it shoot back some incredibly just mind-blowing, mind-blowing information.

Well, and I think that there’s a lot of people out there that probably, you know, are like you used to be, like I have been and am growing out of, “Okay, where do I even start?” Once I can get that momentum and get it going, there’s a lot that can come out of that. But it’s, you know, where do I even start? And I think that you’ve done a pretty good job with the things that you’ve made available to people, to at least, again, hey, here’s a jumping-off point. Start here and then let your creative mind flow from this. Creative mind and also logical mind. Because if this is step one, then this is probably step two, step three, step four, step five, step six. There’s a lot of people that, where does step one even start?

Oh, that’s so incredible that you say it in that way, because I’ve talked about where in the AI journey, I’m at K, and there’s things that it just wouldn’t even make sense to have a conversation about, but I’m in some way stuck over here, but most people are over here at C, and I need to bring them along through it because you’re exactly right, that it does make logical sense as you start making your way through them, I’m grateful for a handful of people that I get to have that conversation. When I start to hear it, it’s like, “Ooh, you’re right here.” I also know that I’m way behind other people too, in the journey. So I’m always out there looking for folks. But it is one of those things that it’s always exciting when you see somebody who’s farther along. It’s like, “Okay, what do you do about this part?”

Yeah, being able to pick that person’s brain. And I think that in the world that we’re in today, you’ve got so many collaborative people that you can lean on and pick their brain and get some ideas from. Chris, I gotta tell you, I’ve really enjoyed talking to you today. You’re authentic. Go ahead.

Yeah. Apologies. Yeah, so sorry about that. I didn’t want to say to explicitly answer the question when you were saying, “Hey, where to start?” in this. I do want to say that I have some great advice for that one. That is what I consider the lowest barrier—you can get the ChatGPT app on your phone, you can pop that open, and if you do that, they have a button down here on that one right there, and you can talk directly with ChatGPT, and when that pops up, you can just start talking and have a conversation. Well, you can actually talk four times faster than you can type. And there’s also the piece of when you’re typing something out, “Oh, I don’t want to be wrong. I don’t want to mess up.” So it can even slow your process of starting that feedback loop. One thing that I recommend if anybody who’s blessed enough to have a commute these days, take 10 minutes a day on your commute and just talk to it. You can just start talking. If you put 10 minutes a day into it, you’re just going to figure some stuff out through that. It can even be the first thing you say of like, “Hey, I just want to get better at this. What do I do?” Then all of a sudden you start the conversation, or start off with a, “Hey, can you ask me ten questions that will help you better understand me to help me on my journey of learning what to do here?” You can just have that, kick it back to the larger language model to help teach you, train you on things.

You know, it’s interesting you talk about that being a starting point because again, three weeks ago, four weeks ago, I didn’t even know that was there. Three weeks ago, four weeks ago, I found it and have been doing some of the things that you’re talking about. It’s interesting. Now I will also tell people it’s okay when you start, to forget that you’re having a conversation and you’re not dictating. So you’re probably going to say things like, “comma, exclamation point,” in the middle of doing that. And that’s okay, but you’ll get used to it, but you’re right. It’s amazing how it’s just like anything else, when you start habit stacking and you do a little here and a little here and a little here and a little here, those things start to build up on each other.

Yeah. One thing that I’ll do, whenever I’m riding in an Uber, I’ll always go through and look to test different things out with whatever it may be. One of those things, I was in New York last year, and as I’m riding in there, was a gentleman from Haiti and I was like, “Hey, you ever use this thing?” He was like, “No, no clue what you’re talking about.” And so I was like, “So what are you passionate about?” Well, actually, first one of the things I was like, “Hey, can you tell him a joke in Haitian?” and I couldn’t understand it, and he was just cracking up, laughing, and he’s like, “What in the world is going on?”

And I was like, “Hey, what are you passionate about? Just something that you’re passionate about.” He said, “You know, I’m really passionate about helping victims of sex trafficking. I’m really involved in my church with that.” So I was saying, “Okay, so what are some of the things you do there?” And then live in front of him, we were able to come up with an action plan and different things to go through, educational material, all these things, just through a natural language communication. He was just mind blown. And he said, “I am literally driving to my church right now.” He’s like, “This gives me so many ideas and things that we can do, we’ve been wanting to do this and you just made an educational thing in the backseat of a cab. I mean, what in the world?”

Isn’t that amazing?

Yeah, incredible!

In the world that we live in today, the fact that we don’t grab a hold of those opportunities is shocking. I mean, yes, there’s the argument to be made that we needed to disconnect more, but then there’s the flipside argument to be made that, hey, the tool is only as good as the person using it, and we can use these tools to make us all better when we use them appropriately.

As I was saying a minute ago, I mean, I have, I’ve enjoyed talking to you, your authenticity, you’re committed to making some amazing changes, not just in public accounting and in the space that you’re building your business in, but really in the world that you touch directly and indirectly. I’m really honored to have spent some time talking to you about those things today. If there are folks out there that are interested in learning more about your firm, your endeavors they want to learn from, hey, what has this guy done right? Hey, I’ve got some questions about ChatGPT, whatever it may be. What are some of the best ways for people to connect with you, learn from you, engage with you?

We’re very active on LinkedIn. That’s our primary place that we communicate, and a great starting point to get in contact with us for sure.

Perfect. And I’ll make sure that in the show notes we have a link to your website, a link to that video that we talked about sparking joy from your previous firm, as well as some contact information for people to follow what it is that you’re doing, learn a little bit more about your journey, and get in touch with any questions that they may have. Again, Chris, I can’t thank you enough for joining us today. I’ve really enjoyed talking to you.

Absolutely. Likewise. And thank you again for getting out there and making this available for people to get a better understanding. I think that information and understanding and being able to feel back behind the hood is a fantastic thing that we can help lift us all up, so thank you so much.

Yeah. It’s a wonderful thing that if we can get the tide to rise, we all rise with it. And that’s kind of the mentality that we’ve had through this process. So, for folks that have taken some time to hang out with us today, I want to thank you for investing a little bit of your life here with Chris and me today. We’re really excited about the conversations that we have lined up over the next few weeks, and we hope that you guys will join us as we look forward to just a little bit more of a glimpse of CPA Life. Until next time.

We hope you enjoyed today’s episode. Be sure to subscribe on your favorite podcasting app, leave a five star rating and visit our website for links and show notes at CPALifePodcast.com. We’ll see you next time on CPA Life.

Making an Impact on Clients and the Community with Chris Johnson

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