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Redefining What Accounting Success Means with Chris Johnson
Continuing the momentum of the new Season 3 of CPA Life is this special two part conversation between John Randolph and Chris Johnson, CEO of CJ CPAs in San Antonio, Texas. Chris started his career in a way typical of many accounting professionals, with a spell in the Big Four and with a local firm before being presented with an unusual opportunity that ultimately led to him founding CJ CPAs. And although many firms claim to value their employees, be committed to work-life balance and innovative practices, and so forth, Chris has proven they mean what they say, with an offered 50K sign-on bonus (the highest publicly known bonus in American accounting history) being one such indicator that they do things a little bit differently. Tune in for part one of this conversation with insights on the value of real honesty, data-driven decisions, and building a culture that nurtures personal and professional growth.
Important Links:
About the Guest:
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 our clients.
Transcript:
Hey folks, we are back with a new season of the CPA Life Podcast, and we are looking forward to bringing you some more engaging conversations with today’s firm leaders and industry insiders who are really passionate about building a more people-centric accounting world. And today we are joined by somebody who’s doing just that: Chris Johnson is the CEO of CJ CPAs, which is a public accounting firm based in San Antonio, Texas, that specializes in assurance services for the construction industry and performing employee benefit plan audits. So Chris, welcome to the show today.
Thank you so much for having me. I want to say, I just love what you’re doing, the community, the content that’s put out there, I absolutely love that, and it’s just fantastic that we have these resources available to people who want to know a little bit more about what’s going on and get an inside look.
And there definitely is a lot going on. So we’re going to dig into some of those things. I’ll go ahead and fire a shot over the bow of some of the things that I really am looking forward to talking to you about: Learning more about the fact that you’ve pretty much been recording almost all your interactions in life over the last year or two and kind of what drove that decision and what you’ve learned from that. We’re going to talk a little bit about a line that I saw—I don’t remember if it was on your LinkedIn profile or on your website—but it said, “We believe that our success is built through valuing our employees and treating them with the utmost respect,” which is a great thing to say, I think a lot of firms say that. It’s one of those wonderful placeholders to put on a website, but it’s really about putting it into practice. Some things that you guys are doing are putting those things into practice.
I want to learn more about Pick to Print. Looks like a really cool endeavor that you’ve got going on. And then of course, we’re going to talk about the big thing, which is the elephant in the room—the 50K sign-on bonus that you had out in the public marketplace for a while, which I’m sure that you’ve had a lot of conversations surrounding that, so I want to dig into that a little bit. So before we get into all of that, one of the things that we like to do is kind of understand your history, your journey about where you’ve been to get to where you are today. So kind of walk us through your journey, your path coming out of college. You had kind of a traditional career trajectory coming out of college, correct?
Yes I did. So right out of the gate, followed the standard path, like many accountants and CPAs, of just seeing a well-structured, safe career path. And everything was standard, up until it wasn’t. So, did an internship towards the end of my college career with BKD and then went on full-time with them. After that, there was a local firm in San Antonio called Padgett Stratemann. It was the largest firm in San Antonio, which for a major city, it’s just not common that a local firm with about 100, 150 people would be the largest one in a top 10 city in terms of population size in the country. But I had heard that they had figured out how to do this public accounting thing without burning people out and said, “You know what, let’s check it out.” So went over and it was fantastic. If they were still around, I could see myself still being there. But they were subsequently acquired by RSM and then there are a lot of the similar things that happened when trying to manage 10,000 people that come along with that.
So, while there, I met my wife, who is also a CPA, and after our first child, I was looking to leave to go the traditional route, take a position with a construction company, controller to CFO, follow the well-beaten path. And then a friend of mine from BKD reached out and said, “Hey, I’m at this well-established tax firm. We don’t have an audit practice. They want to talk to you, the partners of the firm,” and I was 90 percent certain that I was going to go to another construction company, well-beaten path. And I went to Perry’s and they got me a pork chop. And I got there, and they said, “You’re our guy. We want you to do it.” And in my head, I’m like, “No, no, no, no. You don’t realize I don’t know anything about starting an audit practice, what to do there. Like, y’all don’t want that.” And they said, “No, no, no, no. We’re about finding the right people and everything else will fall in line. We have faith in you that you’ll do it.”
Wow.
Incredible. So over this lunch, then one of the things they actually told me was, “If you have a little bit of entrepreneurial spirit about you, you can come over here, start this, the check’s going to clear and you can get some of that.” So I thought it was just too crazy of an opportunity not to pass up. And so much of my career has just been the next logical step. It seems like maybe a lot of risk to some folks, but it is, if you’re right there with the life experiences, it is the next logical step. So I came over, started the audit practice for them, came in day one. I said, “Okay, wait, so how do you build an audit practice?” Like, “No, no, no, no, no. Literally. We don’t know.” But we can figure it out. So I just started picking up the phone and I was calling people in the city, and if I didn’t find the answer in the city, I called people in the state. If I didn’t find the answer in the state, I called people in the country and then the world, and just kept on. I did that for two-and-a-half to three years.
Wow. Wow. And probably a great learning experience.
Absolutely. I’m massively grateful for that opportunity. But it was that situation of, I mean, I’m not going to let these folks down. So we went in and were able to get the practice started and then, like pushing a boulder over a hill, when that thing got to the top, it started picking up. And then as we were picking up speed, the partners actually said, “Oh, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. We don’t want to do audit anymore. We’re starting to now realize all the other things that come along with the different independence and all these other items. But you know what? You have built this practice. Take it.”
Wow.
And so we went and I was able to break off the practice I had built over the couple of years, I was able to dive in and started CJ CPAs, which is assurance only. We don’t do any tax, we can hardly spell it, but we lean into amazing relationships with other folks to do that so that we can just stay in our lane and truly be on this route to be the best in the world at what we do.
Isn’t it amazing sometimes how you look back on the past and how those opportunities come about and you realize, like you said, had this not stacked on this and this not stacked on that, I would probably go out on a limb and say, coming out of where you were in your career at RSM, I gotta believe—again, stereotypical mindset of an accountant and behaviors of an accountant—would you have one day at this age stepped out on your own, started your own firm, thrown caution to the wind, let’s see what happens here? But leaving under an umbrella, building it, those guys saying, “Hey, this isn’t us anymore. Take it and run with it.”
Well, outside looking in, I can see how other folks might look at some of the things that we do saying, “Oh my goodness, there’s so much risk here,” and I’m like, “I am a risk-averse accountant.” I am that. But the way that I go through and get comfort with what is perceived to be risk is information and understanding. The gap between what I knew at the time of leaving RSM, to starting a firm, was too big to do that. But then just slowly, day by day, getting comfort with it. But even when it was presented to me, I said, “Oh man, that’s terrifying,” and I stayed up till two in the morning many, many nights reading the Texas State Board of Accountancy Act to say, what are all the things? What do I not know? I reached out to a lawyer who has worked with many accounting firms in San Antonio, and I said, “Can I just get a couple of hours of your time just to pick your brain?” And every step that I took in that just gave me more confidence and realized that the perceived risk that I had was just ignorance.
Yep, I think that’s a great saying that I think more of us need to embrace and understand is that it’s a perceived risk, and the reality is it’s just ignorance and it can be overcome with information, research, data, and being able to bridge that gap just a little bit.
I love it. And yeah, along those lines, one thing that I always say is the guy with all the money under his mattress thinks that he’s the least risky person out there. He’s like, “What are y’all talking about? Put your money in the bank. I got my money under the mattress.” But with a little bit more information, you realize that is the riskiest thing you can do because inflation is eating away at that, turning that to zero.
Absolutely. Absolutely. It’s getting the data to support the decisions that you’re making. And it’s very apparent, you know, looking at what you guys have done, looking at what you’re doing, looking at the way that you’re approaching a lot of the things that you guys are doing at CJ CPAs, there’s a lot of data-driven decisions being made. It’s not just flying by the seat of your pants and, you know, throwing caution to the wind: “Hey, let’s try this.” Which brings us to really, you know, kind of the big thing that connected you and I on, you know, was the flashing light that got my attention was, 50K sign-on bonus. And honestly, and we haven’t talked about this, but one of the reasons why that caught my attention is because one of the conversations a lot of times that I’ll have with our potential clients on the recruiting side of our business is, “Have you thought outside of the box and done some of these things that you may look at on the surface and go, ‘Man, that just doesn’t make sense?’ But the flip side of this is if you hire me to do this for you, you’re going to cut me a check. That’s not a ton less than that.”
I think that in terms of the information side, I think most people don’t realize that.
Yeah! Yeah, I mean, I don’t think that most people really grasp that and look at it that way. Now, a lot of it does come down sometimes to, you know, “Well, I don’t have the time. I don’t have the energy. I don’t have the effort. I don’t have the bandwidth.” Okay. I get that. Completely understand that. But in the grand scheme of things, when you start looking at the economics of what it is that you guys are doing with the 50K sign-on bonus, it is not as wild and out there as it looks on the surface. So let’s talk a little bit about that. Let’s talk about kind of how that came up, and where it is sitting today and what kind of—and I know that you’re probably still measuring the results of some of that—but kind of what that’s been able to do for you guys.
Absolutely. One thing that’s pretty cool about it is we had also touched on that we’re recording all of our interactions. So we have the actual moment where we’re on a call, you know, just in a few moments of desperation of “Oh man, what are we doing here?” and where it popped and it was like, “Oh, duh!” So we’ll have to go through and get that, because then just the excitement and the enthusiasm that we had in that moment of the realization of “Oh, this makes complete sense to do this, and wait, hold on, wait, why isn’t anybody else doing this?”
Yeah, exactly. That would be interesting to go back and look at that.
And to let you know, what it all stems from is a mindset of “It’s my fault.” We do this and we say it in a few different ways—we maintain the “how have I failed you” mentality, extreme ownership, “Hey, it’s my fault” in there because as soon as you start saying, “Hey, it is my fault,” it gives you the chance to do something about it. If I’m continuously pointing at a recruiter for not getting me somebody or pointing over here or pointing at the entire job market, then I’ve got to wait for them to change or for them to get better. Whereas we said, “Hey, you know what? No, it’s my fault, so if it truly is my fault, what do I have to do?”
And then how do I fix it?
Yeah. And to let you know, during 2024, we did use some recruiters to bring some people in and we paid over $20,000 to get some folks on that weren’t with the firm by the end of the year. Actual dollars expended from those. And then in addition, we pay really good bonuses, so we already were spending this money. So if we would’ve made, just from a numbers sense, if we would’ve made this same decision a year earlier, we likely would have someone who is probably going to want to be more encouraged to be a part of the journey—bottom line, it would be higher, and then the actual retention of some folks to come along too. So, it just logically made sense from that standpoint. Now, the other side of it is we also get the claim of the largest signing bonus in public accounting history being offered—excuse me, publicly offered signing bonus in public accounting. Let me make sure I get the right words in there.
And you know, when you talk about the retention piece of it, I mean, let’s just be real for just a minute here. I know, speaking for myself, if I rewind the clock 20 years ago, and I’m sitting as an employee, a middle manager in the recruiting industry, working for a couple of large firms—there’s a lot of change going on, there’s a lot of chaos going on, there are days that I wasn’t happy in the job, but in the midst of that, a commission check comes in. In the midst of that, a quarterly bonus check comes in. And I remember specifically saying to some of my counterparts, because I think we all sit around in the midst of the day-to-day grind, talking to our buddies about, “Man, there’s got to be a better way. Man, this sucks. Man, this doesn’t work.” And then that check comes in, and you go, “You know, for that kind of money, I could put up with that crap for a little bit longer.” I mean, that’s just the reality of it.
Yeah, absolutely.
I think that when you have a carrot that’s that size, some of those things that we nitpick and complain about as human beings, they’re not as big as we make them out to be. Now, obviously, there’s a difference between just horrible culture, toxic culture, that’s not what I’m talking about. I’m just talking about, you know, the mindset that we all have at times, “This sucks. Does it really suck? Nah, it really doesn’t.” I just didn’t get my way, so I’m not happy about something. They tend to roll with it a little bit more. So, when did you guys put that out there? Three months ago, something like that?
Yeah, so that would have been in December, and we knew that the timing of it was not the best, because we had been going through a lot of traditional routes to say—and started to even hear from some of the recruiters that we had been working with that man, December is just not a time where anybody’s moving. Now that being said, we had some interesting experiences through putting that out as you can probably imagine and there is a part of “protect the innocent” with one to put out there, but it’s impressive some of the things and interactions that we had through that experience.
Well, and I’ve got to believe also that the marketing that comes out of that, and I say marketing because at the end of the day, recruiting is marketing. It’s getting your brand out there, it’s creating noise that people start to talk. And when you’re able to do that, if the splash is big enough, if the noise is loud enough, there are people that may not be looking today, but they’re curious.
You’re absolutely right. Nailed it. So with this, we’re not looking for “a” person. We’re looking for “the” person, someone who comes on. We ask them that we read books together, we put it together, we hold each other accountable for what we’re doing, we hold each other to a different standard and truly look to CJ CPAs itself is just a vehicle. We just happen to be doing accounting. We’re doing some revolutionary things and doing amazing things, but it’s just a vehicle to be the best husbands that we can be, to be the best wives, the best fathers and mothers, and members of our community, and just doing amazing things that are out there and really putting a lot of the other excuses behind us and saying, “Ah, you know what? No, I’m just going to get better every day,” and surround ourselves in a pool of greatness. When you hop into the pool, it’s hard to not get wet.
So with it, we’re building a pipeline as well. We tell that explicitly, that today we have our round one needs where we say, “Hey, your immediate expertise in exactly what we are doing is important, and we’re finding the most perfect fit.” Literally, every day that passes—which yesterday OpenAI released Agents, which has been starting to drop that bar very quickly—but every day that passes your prior knowledge to our specialization and what our needs become less important and it becomes more important about your mindset, which we do have a high bar for mindset to start with. But if we meet some folks that don’t have the next, we put them into categories. They don’t have round one, then we say, “Hey, this is round two or round three, and we want to stay in contact with you for when we’re ready.”
So we’re looking to use this as the start of a way to build a pipeline for years to come. We have ways for us to stay engaged with these folks. One of the things is to say, “Hey, come read with us. We have a channel where hey, this is what we are reading. This is what we’re doing. Come on, if you want to be on a path with us, even though you’re not with us, come along and let’s check it out and just learn and grow.”
You know, I think so many times, Chris, as leaders, we get blinders on and we get so myopically focused on my problems, my issues, my challenges right now today, and we don’t think about kind of what you’re talking about, which is “this too shall pass.” You know, “Right now, today, at this juncture of who we are as CJ CPAs, we absolutely, positively need to have somebody that understands this piece of audit. They can have these other things, and that’s great, but we really need somebody to hit the ground running right now that knows this.” You may talk to somebody that doesn’t have that today, but they have all these other things. Two years from now, you may need that person. And what an amazing opportunity to have a conversation, not a cold call, not a cold conversation, but an engaging conversation with someone that you’ve been in community with, that you can pick the phone up and call or shoot a text message and say, “Hey, you got time for a cup of coffee? I want to run something by you. I want to put this on the table.”
When you—I call it connective tissue—when you break bread with people over a period of time, you begin to create that connective tissue that is deeper than just, “Hey, do you have experience doing 401K audits?” You start to understand who they are at the core, and that begins to create those conversations two years from now of, “Hey, we need somebody with these values, and we think that you could be that person. Have you ever thought about potentially being a part of who we are?” That’s a much easier and more fun conversation than, “Hey, let’s walk through your resume because I don’t know who you are.”
You know, something that it makes me think of is that I’ve listened to the Joe Rogan podcast for years, for over a decade since I was in college. One of the things that I heard him say one time was that, “Hey, I have these very long-form podcasts. It’s hard to keep up the act for three hours. It’s hard for three hours. Like maybe you start to see it, but as we get into it, it breaks down, and then it’s like, okay, hey, here’s this thing that happens.” And in the same way, we got to see it through our experiences, and we evaluated some people, I mean, 20-plus hours of evaluation into some of the folks that we had come along, and then got to see as it went farther along things that would come out. But in the same way, even if it’s just a touchpoint and it doesn’t happen, we’ve established that contact. So then over time, over months, a year, years where we go through, it will allow for the true self to also present itself.
There’s also the cases that can happen where if somebody’s not maybe 100 percent even on from a cultural fit right now, but we really like the person and they’re growing just as we’re growing, then you could move from what we would consider you as in a round three to a two, to maybe a one, where it’s, “Oh yeah, we just need to get this person in right now.”
Yep. And I think that, you know, something you said a minute ago is really—t does come down to culture, it does come down to people, it does come down to who’s at the heart of this, not just the technical piece of what this person’s title is on a resume. It’s not limiting or belittling what you do, but this is just what we do; it’s not who we are. This is going to help us become the best dad, the best husband, the best wife, the best kid, the best parent—whatever it is that we’re striving to be—these things help us do that. Sometimes that means that, “Hey, I don’t love what I do, but I’m good at what I do. And because I’m good at what I do, it helps me be overall better at being the person that I’ve been created to be.” When you surround yourself, I think, with people that have that same mindset, as you said, you can’t help but get wet when you’re in the pool with people just like that. So, we chatted a little bit about this before we hit the record button. So, how many people have you brought on so far this year, or in the last 30 to 45 days?
Yeah, so this month, we have hired four people. Now, to be fair, that was going with some offshoring. That was a piece because we were looking to fill this role, had gotten very close, very deep into the process, had made some offers, and then said we have some immediate needs. So we said, “Alright, here we go.” We had been actually holding out on the offshoring option and said, “Okay, if we’re going to go through, we’re going to be the best at offshoring, and we’re going to dive deep.” So we made four hires, still evaluating, and doing things along those lines, making it happen.
When you look at your client base, is your client base predominantly in the San Antonio area or is it geographic agnostic?
So we have two sides of our business. We service the construction industry by doing assurance services—audits, reviews, compilations—and then we have 401(k) audits that we do. On the construction side, primarily focused locally as we’re getting a lot of structure there, building a lot of really good structure that actually is very close to starting to look to potentially open that up nationally with the way the technology is and our structure inside of that, we will be able to allow us to provide the same level of service and reach our standards for client service without the same need for physical proximity for some of those products. The 401(k) side, we are able to do those nationally.
Okay. So, when I look at your firm, when I look at some of the things that you’ve talked about on LinkedIn, one of the things that really jumps out at me is even just talking to you today and the overall mindset of, “Hey, we’re going to be transparent, we’re going to lay cards on the table.” You know, a lot of what you write about, a lot about what you talk about is authenticity. And I think that we live in a world still where people are a little bit afraid to put all the cards out there on the table. I think, to quote one of your posts from a couple of weeks ago, “Honesty can be hard in the short term, but easier over the longer term. Plus, it’s better for the soul.” Talk to me about kind of how that type of mindset has shaped not only the 50K offer, but just how you’ve gone about building the business, how you go about leading people and building a firm where people can be their best selves that they can possibly be and not just, “Hey, I’m a good auditor.”
Yeah. There’s a lot to that. That’s quite the onion there with it. I do have a big core value for me: honesty and just being so truly authentic with this life, with this experience, with everything that we get. And it’s just years of being in situations of feeling the pressure to maybe withhold the truth or something, and just can see it where it’s like, I would be better off if I lie in this situation. And so maybe, “Well, then maybe I won’t actually lie, but I won’t say it. I won’t go out there to do that,” and being incentivized by lots of things around me through the job that I picked or the people that I’m hanging out with or whatever that may be, environments that I put myself in to encourage that.
So then getting into a spot where I get to really shape the environment of saying, “Let’s have a safe place.” I told this to my brother when he was in middle school and I was in high school: I overheard him telling this small lie to my parents and I went to him. I didn’t call him out in front of them too, but I took him aside and I said, “Hey, as soon as you step outside of the doors of our house, you have to put a filter up for the lies and the deceit and everything that the world is going to be coming at you with. When you get to walk in, you can be in a place where you don’t have that. You don’t have to have that and you can be truly honest with your family and everybody that you have here. And if you’re going to do these small little lies like that, then we’re going to have to put the filter up when we’re talking with you, and we don’t want to have that.”
In that same way, in terms of the same way of thinking, that’s what I want to do with what we have here. And to say, when people come in and come to join us, we have to also manage our expectations as a management team, knowing that people are not used to that. And then to have almost an incubator period where we’re like, “I expect you to lie to me for a little bit as you get through this, and I will continually just be honest with you,” and most people don’t even realize it. You just started asking yourself a bunch of questions when people are truly being very authentic and honest in their dealings. It’s not normal. It’s really not normal. We truly do—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.” The hard part about what we do out here has nothing to do with accounting. It’s that we hold up mirrors. We hold up mirrors and we truly look back at ourselves and that’s hard. That is hard. And especially if you haven’t gone through any periods in your life where you’ve done that, woo! Man, that’s tough.
Thanks for joining us for part one of John Randolph’s conversation with Chris Johnson of CJ CPAs. Part two will air February 12th. Be sure to subscribe on your favorite podcasting app, and check CPALifePodcast.com for show notes and more. We’ll see you next time on CPA Life!