Why a Virtual CFO May Be Just What You Need

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Jody Grunden – Anders CPA

 

Podcast Overview:

00:00 “Virtual Beginnings and Success”
03:57 “Next Year Finally Paid Off”
06:50 “Interactive Pricing Strategy Breakdown”
11:40 “Finding Success Beyond Accounting”
12:40 “Pivoting Amid Layoffs and Guilt”
18:45 “Educating for Success, Not Selling”
19:42 “Productizing Services with Subscriptions”
24:58 “Dynamic Forecasting Explained”
26:33 Truck Repair Business Insights
31:20 “Flexible Client Collaboration Process”
35:07 “Building Connections and Growth”
38:29 “Rethinking Strategy for Success”
42:01 “Thought Leadership Eased Hiring”
44:26 “Expanding Connections Beyond Remote Teams”
47:32 “Scaling Processes for Sustainability”

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Podcast Transcription:

Jody Grundon [00:00:00]:
I realized real quick that, you know, hey, I wasn’t an accountant, I was an entrepreneur and I just didn’t realize it. I didn’t enjoy accounting and I still don’t today. I don’t enjoy accounting, but I love the entrepreneur part of it and growing a business and seeing how successful I can get that business and then even more so helping other people be successful running their business, which is, which is even a bigger joy.

James Kademan [00:00:27]:
You have found Authentic Business Adventures, the business program that brings you the struggle stories and triumphant successes of business owners across the land. Downloadable audio episodes can be found in the podcast link found@drawincustomers.com we are locally interwritten by the bank of Sun Prairie Calls On Call Extraordinary Answering Service as well as the Bold Business Book and Live Switch. Today we are welcoming slash preparing to learn from Jody Grundon of Anders cpa. Which I feel like this is right about the time to start talking taxes. Jody, is that safe to say?

Jody Grundon [00:01:00]:
I. I guess so. But man, you don’t ask me to ask tax questions, that’s for sure.

James Kademan [00:01:04]:
No, so let’s just break it down. What is Andrew cpa?

Jody Grundon [00:01:09]:
Yeah, so Andrew cpa. They’re, they’re a, one of the largest CPA firms in the nation. They’re pretty large. They do a lot of different things, audit, tax. But the, the special that I run is on in what we call the Client Advisory Service Group, which is virtual CFO services. So that’s something that, that I founded way back when. It was about 20 some years ago. A lot of CPA firms now you use that type of a service.

Jody Grundon [00:01:31]:
I actually founded it back, you know, 20 plus years ago. So it’s been a great ride. Before it was, before it was even a thing. Yeah, it was one of those, one of those things that there was something called outsourced CFO or outsourced CPA service, which was outsourcing it to a foreign country type of thing. And I’m like, well, that’s not what I meant. So I’m trying to figure out how, what can I call it? And I, and so I did. I got the big, the thesaurus, if you remember one of those things. I got one of those things out.

Jody Grundon [00:01:55]:
I’m like, what could I, what could I name this thing? I thought virtual sounds kind of cool. And, and then my partner’s like, well, no one will think you’re real. And I’m like, ah, they will. It’ll catch on. And back then we had the yellow pages and so we, we did the yellow page Thing didn’t really get a whole lot of traction. And then we decided, hey, we’re going to go this, do this on the Internet. And so when we did on the Internet, it was kind of cool because nobody else was doing it. So it was one of those things that we are right away number one in the rankings.

Jody Grundon [00:02:21]:
No, yeah, we.

James Kademan [00:02:22]:
Back 20 years ago, man, that’s.

Jody Grundon [00:02:24]:
Yeah, yeah. And we have, we, we. We haven’t gone far from that. So we’re still number one in the rankings today, which is kind of cool.

James Kademan [00:02:31]:
Be interesting to go back and just visit if you had a time machine or something like that and just visit. What was the Internet like 20 years ago?

Jody Grundon [00:02:38]:
It was brutal.

James Kademan [00:02:39]:
No YouTube. I don’t even know if Google was around back then. I mean, yeah, totally different world.

Jody Grundon [00:02:45]:
It was. And it’s kind of funny because everybody thought, well, that was. That’s a big waste of money. Don’t put money in there. Because we, we got out of the yellow page. Yellow page is what accounting firms are always in. Accounting firms, law firms, you name it. You had these big ads, you spent tons of money, and then you just kind of hope people called you.

Jody Grundon [00:03:00]:
And I didn’t have the money back then, so it’s like I bootstrapped my own company. So it was one of those things that I just couldn’t compete with the big boys. And so the only, only thing we could do is try something different. I thought, hey, this Internet thing sounds great. Let’s try it. And yeah. And everybody thought, hey, you’re wasting your money. No one’s going to call.

Jody Grundon [00:03:19]:
And the funny part is, nobody called. It took a long time to actually get going and figure it out and get people to realize what virtual CFO even was. It took about, I’d say, probably five to 10 years, really, to. To get a lot of traction for it.

James Kademan [00:03:38]:
Stick with it for a while.

Jody Grundon [00:03:39]:
Oh, yeah. It wasn’t one of those things. Overnight successes. It was, hey, we started it. And they, they always say, you know, building the plane as it’s flying in the air type of thing. That’s exactly what we did. It was like, okay, what can we do to make this better? Improve this? And we were not profitable at all for probably eight, eight, nine, ten years of that. It was, it was one of those things.

Jody Grundon [00:03:57]:
My wife kept asking me, hey, when are we going to do something? You need to get a job? I’m like, no, no, no. Next year’s gonna be the perfect year. And then next year coming, there’d be all these obstacles that we we didn’t overcome. And then it’s like, oh, well, next year will be the best year. And then finally next year ended up being the right year, and it just, it just blew up from there and became super profitable, super high growth. And, you know, we grew it to Gez, probably 10 million bucks or so before we actually sold it to Anders and became part of the, the larger accounting firm.

James Kademan [00:04:25]:
Gotcha. The irony of the CFO not making money.

Jody Grundon [00:04:28]:
Right. Yeah, I know. I tell everybody that too. The other irony is I can’t, I can’t add in my head, oh, wow, you got a CFO that has to use a calculator. Yeah. Which is kind of funny. And, and, and the funny part about that was on my, the very first. So I, I, I speak at a lot of conferences, and the very first conference I was invited to, I was super unprepared.

Jody Grundon [00:04:47]:
You know, it was one of those things. I just didn’t know what to talk about. Here I’m supposed to talk about. Talk to 30 at that time, agency owners and, and teach them how to be profitable and all that kind of stuff. And the guy’s like, do not, whatever you do, do not bring a PowerPoint. I’m like, okay, okay, I won’t bring a PowerPoint. And I’m thinking, okay, now what do I do? What do I do? And, you know, the funny part about it was my luggage got stuck, got routed to the wrong airport. So I came in.

Jody Grundon [00:05:13]:
No, no, no luggage. I didn’t have anything really to wear other than I had a T shirt. I had shorts and, and, and, and gym. Gym shoes. And I was like, what do I do? And I went to the local mall, bought some stuff, and, and at the time, my credit cards kept getting denied. And I was like, what’s going on here? Why are my credit cards getting denied? This is weird. And, and so eventually, I, I, I, I looked across the mall. There was a Tommy Bahama store there.

Jody Grundon [00:05:37]:
And I thought, oh, that’s kind of cool. That’s a little different. I’ll, I’ll, I’ll, I’ll get some Tommy Bahama stuff, because he, he said, do not be the traditional accountant. I’m like, okay, that’s kind of cool. And, but by the time I got, I got done, I was like, the only thing I had left was my debit card, because nothing was working. And so I went to this dinner after the fact and that. And you can imagine, here the finance guy comes in. You know, at that time, I was wearing an Italian Bahama shirt and like, hey, find this guy wearing Italian Bahama shirt.

Jody Grundon [00:06:03]:
I’m like, hey, I’ll get the hors d’ oeuvres for 30 business owners here. I’m thinking, this is kind of cool. And I go to pay with my debit card, and guess what? It got denied. I’m like, what the heck? And so I turned the guy next to me. I’m like, I know you don’t know me really well. I’m the finance guy. But my credit cards are getting all denied. Can you cover the hors d’ oeuvres and the meal for me? He goes.

Jody Grundon [00:06:20]:
He goes, you don’t travel much, do you? And I go, no, huh? Not at all. And he goes, well, you got fraud protection against your cards. I’m like, you just got to go back to the. Go back to the hotel tonight, call them up, and they’ll release all of it, and then everything will be fine. I’m like, oh, you gotta be kidding me. And that was. That’s kind of. That’s why I’m wearing Tommy right now.

Jody Grundon [00:06:36]:
Because it was one of those name or branding things. But I went into this presentation and. And then I told everybody that, you know, the experience. They’re like, they just start laughing. It was a great icebreaker type of thing. Then I had somebody say, you know, hey. I told him, hey. And again, I can’t calculate at all.

Jody Grundon [00:06:50]:
And so I had somebody be my calculator. And I got up on an easel board and just kind of broke it down. You know, hey, here’s one person, and here’s how many hours they’re working. Here’s what they should be. I just kind of drew a little stick, you know, diagram all the way through, asked everybody in the audience, how much do you think they could raise their prices and still not lose a client? And, you know, we, we, we. We settled like on a hundred dollars an hour or whatever it was. I go, hey, let’s just mark it down to $10. Just market something simple.

Jody Grundon [00:07:14]:
And so I went through that diagram, broke it out to like, here’s What a. A 20 person shop would make. And. And then there’s like 3 million bucks. I go, let’s just not. Okay, now let’s go ahead and see what that $10 change does. I went through that same thing, and it generated an extra $300,000 in cash. I’m like, there we go.

Jody Grundon [00:07:30]:
$300,000 in cash just for. Just for making that one small change. And. And then it was like, everybody’s like, oh, my gosh. And so at the same time that getting a calculator, the guy’s doing all the calculator and feed me the numbers. As we’re going through it was pretty cool. And. And they’re like, you know, hey, could you do this more often and speak more often? Like, yeah, we could.

Jody Grundon [00:07:47]:
We could definitely do this. And. And they said, but the only way you’re going to do this if you wear this Tommy Bahama shirt as your key. And so instead of a suit, if.

James Kademan [00:07:55]:
I have to suffer through it, right?

Jody Grundon [00:07:57]:
Oh, yeah. And it’s kind of funny because I. I got this innovation award in accounting in about 2017, and I had to go into. I had to go in front of the aicpa, which is the governing body for accounting firms, and, you know, everybody’s wearing suits and ties back then. And. And they said, hey, you won this innovation award. We’d love for you to come and talk and, you know, tell them what you’re doing with the CFO side. You know, what it’s all about.

Jody Grundon [00:08:17]:
What. What does that mean? And I’m like, well, I go, the only caveat is, is that I don’t have a suit. And they’re like, what do you mean you don’t have a suit? I go, I don’t wear suits. And they’re like, well, you. You really need to talk professional. I go, well, well, the only way I’m going to come is if I can wear my Tommy Bahamas shirts, my Hawaiian shirts. And they’re like, you got to be kidding me. And I’m like, no, this is what.

Jody Grundon [00:08:35]:
This is what I wear. And then they. Then the line went dead. Let me check. And about 10 minutes later, they came back. He goes, as long as it looks professional, we’ll allow you to wear. We’ll. It’s been kind of great.

Jody Grundon [00:08:47]:
I mean, I. I speak all across the. The actually many different nations, and I’ve spoken all across the United States, and I got the same. Same outfit, the Tommy Bahamas. Tommy, how are like super casual. They always ask, where you from? I originally from Indiana, and that just even blows their mind even more. And I live in Florida, but that’s more like more acceptable. But.

Jody Grundon [00:09:07]:
Yeah, it’s just kind of funny how branding, personal branding, really, really can help you out. How? You know, just a small thing like that is. It can be huge for your company. Yeah.

James Kademan [00:09:17]:
You know, it’s funny because I wear. There’s trade shows that I go through on the veterinary side.

Jody Grundon [00:09:22]:
Okay. Yep.

James Kademan [00:09:22]:
Can I wear a picture pink suit?

Jody Grundon [00:09:24]:
Yep.

James Kademan [00:09:24]:
Just because fun and stands out Yep. And. But I also. When I bought the pink suit, I also bought a blue one. And I don’t know if you know what DECA is. No, deca. I’m sure it stands for something cool, but it’s essentially students, high school and college.

Jody Grundon [00:09:38]:
Okay.

James Kademan [00:09:39]:
Entering. If they’re going to go into business, they get into deca and there’s competitions and stuff like this.

Jody Grundon [00:09:44]:
Okay, sure.

James Kademan [00:09:44]:
So I get asked to judge those. So I go to one of these DECA conferences, and I’m in this big room at some technical college or something like that, and this is before the students come in to get judged. I’m looking around, and all I see are blue suits.

Jody Grundon [00:09:59]:
Oh, my God.

James Kademan [00:10:00]:
And I’m in a blue suit. I was like, man, I should have wore that pink one, because I just feel like a number here.

Jody Grundon [00:10:05]:
Yeah, yeah.

James Kademan [00:10:07]:
So the. The branding, you’re totally right. You told it. You just got to stand out, peacock a little bit.

Jody Grundon [00:10:11]:
Yeah.

James Kademan [00:10:12]:
Otherwise, you’re just another blue suit.

Jody Grundon [00:10:14]:
Yeah. And that’s amazing because all these conferences I go to, there’s 4,000 people there, and people just come up. They know who exactly who I am without question, because the way, you know, the outfit I’m wearing, you know, because I’m wearing a cool Hawaiian shirt, looks a lot different than everybody else, and they can just pick me out in a crowd. And. And that’s really. That’s really helped out. You know, it’s helped the company. It’s helped me out.

Jody Grundon [00:10:34]:
It’s helped. It just. Like I said, it creates that personal brand that just people just don’t forget. And, you know, I can credit a lot of our high growth because of the personal brand part of it.

James Kademan [00:10:45]:
That is awesome. All because of a Hawaiian shirt.

Jody Grundon [00:10:48]:
I know, I know. Tommy Bahama owes me money.

James Kademan [00:10:52]:
Or vice versa, Right?

Jody Grundon [00:10:54]:
Yeah, exactly. No, we’re not going to talk. We’re not going to go that direction.

James Kademan [00:10:57]:
No, no, no. Tell me. So, Jody, when you. What were you doing before you started your business then?

Jody Grundon [00:11:05]:
Yeah, so I. I was an orphaned accountant. And what I mean by that is that when I graduated from college, I thought, you know, hey, I want to be. I want to one over one of these big CPA firms. And. And I got an opportunity to work for Crow, which is a really nice CPA firm. I. I decided pretty quickly that, hey, auditing wasn’t something I enjoyed.

Jody Grundon [00:11:23]:
It was like, this is not. Not for me. But they had this thing called tax. I thought, oh, this is going to be great. And so I started doing the tax stuff, and it Was a lot funner. I liked it, enjoyed it a lot more. And it just happened that I, I, I, we lived far from my parents, my, from my wife’s parents. She’s like, hey, let’s move back home.

Jody Grundon [00:11:40]:
I’m like, okay, great. And so then I worked for even a larger accounting firm there and, and they as the tax department. After a while I was like, man, I just don’t like tax. And I actually got fired and was told that I would never be successful in accounting. And I was like, you know, like, wow, the managing partner is like, okay, that, that’s a big shocker when you’re right out of college and the managing partner of a large accounting firm says, this isn’t for you. And I was like, okay, what do I do? So I went to work for a, a manufacturing company as a $250 million manufacturing company. And with that, I loved it. That first year, man, it was great.

Jody Grundon [00:12:17]:
It was new as exciting, it was challenging. I was doing a lot of cool stuff. I was automating everything and I was working probably 45, 50 hours a week. But time flew, you know, it was awesome. About year two or three, I was working like 20 hours a week trying to figure out what to do because I automated everything. And I was like, oh my gosh, this is horrible. You know, I found myself surfing the Internet. I was like, I can’t do this, this is not good.

Jody Grundon [00:12:40]:
And so I, and the company at that time was going through their first layoffs they’ve ever had, ever. And I was part of the committee, you know, which made it even worse. The guilt was like, oh my gosh, here I’m hardly working and I’m laying people off that have been here for 40 years or 30 years or 20, whatever that might be. And so I asked the CFO like, you know, hey, I think I’ve got to bow out, you know, and I think I’m going to go ahead and start my own firm. Is that okay? And like, that’s okay as long as you take us as your first client. I’m like, well, I’ll do that. And so I was like, well, that’s great. And at that time it was like a thirty thousand dollar tax return.

Jody Grundon [00:13:13]:
I thought, this is great seed money, I can do that. And from there it just really kind of helped me, you know, get out of that, you get out of that mode because, you know, I realized real quick that, you know, hey, I wasn’t an accountant, I was an entrepreneur. And I just didn’t realize it, you know, I. I didn’t enjoy accounting, and I still don’t today. I don’t enjoy accounting, but. But I love the entrepreneur part of it, and growing a business and. And seeing how successful I can get that business, and then even more so helping other people be successful, running their business, which is. Which is a hu.

Jody Grundon [00:13:44]:
Even a bigger joy. You know, it’s kind of. Kind of funny because all the way through, you’re like, you know, my. My business partner at the time, Adam, he’s like, you know, hey, why is it that all of our clients make more money than us? It’s like, we will get there. Don’t worry. We’ll. We’ll get there. The more we can help them grow in, the faster.

Jody Grundon [00:14:00]:
Then we will then in turn reap a reward afterwards. And we did. It took a while, but like I said, as an entrepreneur, that’s. That was my. My passion.

James Kademan [00:14:09]:
That’s fair. That’s totally fair. I mean, in the end, I imagine your industry and mine are similar where our client success will lead to our success. That’s exactly. They’re not successful. We got a rougher day. You got another employee barking back there?

Jody Grundon [00:14:27]:
Yeah, I’ve got three. Three employees barking back here? Yeah, little munchkins. I wouldn’t recommend three of them. I thought one was perfect. Two was like, okay. Three was like, oh, no. So, yeah, for sure. But, yeah, you know, you’re right.

Jody Grundon [00:14:43]:
100. Right. You know, the. The idea is that if you can make your employees successful, if you can make your clients successful, you too will then become successful. I think it’s a natural thing, but it’s hard. It’s hard to have that all three work. It’s hard to have a profitable company, to have a high revenue company that’s growing. Clients are happy, client satisfaction, and then also your employee satisfaction.

Jody Grundon [00:15:08]:
And I was very fortunate to actually have that. And I had two of the three pillars there for about 10 years. That one was the profit side. And then eventually that profit side came in there, and, man, that’s when I just saw everything blow up, and I blew up in a great way. Revenue even skyrocketed. Even more. Profits, you know, went really high. I mean, you know, we are growing at about 30, 35%, 40% clip a year in revenue growth with a 25% bottom line.

Jody Grundon [00:15:35]:
And we had. When we got to that $10 million mark, we had a million bucks in cash just sitting in the bank. And you think about that million dollars in cash in the bank, no risk. Right? All the risks there. No debt, which is Great. And then we got to that point where that 25 bottom line, which means our partner, My partner and I were splitting basically two and a half million dollars a year. And it was like. And we had everything really just going.

Jody Grundon [00:15:58]:
And the cool part about it is we build it so that. Again, I hate accounting. I told you that. So that we. I wasn’t actually doing any of the work. I was actually running the business. And that. And that, that, that is when we really, really start seeing things really just know, really, you know, blow up in that part when I got out of the.

Jody Grundon [00:16:14]:
Helping other clients teach people how to do it and then. And just. And just really, you know, focus on growth.

James Kademan [00:16:20]:
That is super cool. So help me understand this, Jody. When you start your. You start your business, you got to educate people. Just let them know that you exist, let alone if they want to use you or not.

Jody Grundon [00:16:33]:
Y.

James Kademan [00:16:33]:
Which is very difficult when you have to rely on education first. Instead of just like, hey, we sell pizza. Buy my pizza. Instead of their pizza, you got to say, hey, we sell this entirely new service that you’ve never heard of, but I know you need. Right. So tell me what you did for marketing to get people to understand what you actually offered.

Jody Grundon [00:16:51]:
Yeah, that’s a great thing because, you know, if I were to pick another profession to go into, it’d be marketing. I loved marketing. Marketing was like something that. It just clicked for me, which, which was kind of funny because that was kind of our first. Our first vertical we went into as marketing agencies. I was like, oh, these guys are awesome. Like, I can do this. You know, this is something that I really enjoy talking to.

Jody Grundon [00:17:10]:
I can really help these people, these folks out. So marketing is a big part of it. And so, but marketing, what really helped us out was the thought leadership part. And so thought leadership at that point really didn’t even exist. But I had to figure out how to. How to do exactly you’re talking about. Because not only did clients not understand us, how do you hire people all across the nation? Because we were fully remote. We had.

Jody Grundon [00:17:34]:
We. We. We’ve been fully remote for. Since 2000, probably 12, 2013. So without an office. So how do you even.

James Kademan [00:17:40]:
You’re talking slow Internet days.

Jody Grundon [00:17:42]:
Yeah, slow Internet. You know, basically, you know, there’s nobody out there that even understands what virtual CFO is. And who in California is going to come work for a firm in Indiana without moving, you know, that, that, that. That was the, the tricky part. So we had to really become that thought leadership. And what thought leadership, to me is when we went to these conferences, we didn’t sell. We educated, we taught, we taught everybody in there how to be successful with the idea that, you know, what, 10 to 15% of them are going to figure it out because we helped them out. Another 15 to 20%, you know, may end up figuring it out down the road, but there’s going to be a lot of them that eventually knock on our door and say, you know, hey, we’d love to get your help if you can.

Jody Grundon [00:18:23]:
And that’s what really, that’s what really picked things up. Because thought leadership, it was really the key to all success. So we would go to conferences and we would speak. We did a lot of digital marketing. You know, again, keep in mind, our SEO is number one. And so we were marketing like crazy. We blogged at least once a day for about 10 years, which is a lot of blogging, that’s for sure. Tons of blogging.

Jody Grundon [00:18:45]:
And we’re writing articles, wrote books, we did webinars, we did tons of things just to get us out there. But again, the idea was not to sell, it was to educate. And it’s kind of cool because when we go to all these different conferences, we’ll have, we’ll have folks that I’ve never even met before come up and say, hey, you know, hey, you know, because of you, I’m, I’m doing, I’m super successful. I’m like. And it’s because they, they read a book that I had, they heard me on a video, they, they did whatever and they learned how to, basically, they, they were able to mimic me and it was great, but mimic me in a way that they put their own flavor to it, which was even better. And, and because of that, that’s where the growth, you know, blew up. You know, we, because we did it not only in the creative agency space, the digital marketing space, the SEO, the ppc, all the different marketing agency space, but we also did it in the accounting space. You know, we would go into the accounting space and say, you know, hey, here’s how we’re doing subscription based billing, something we created back in 2004.

Jody Grundon [00:19:42]:
We’ve never invoiced, you know, we’ve always just simply hit their bank account every Monday, which is kind of cool. We did a month, a Monday, a weekly subscription. And you know, with that, you know, what does that mean? It’s like, well, we had to figure out how to productize a service, which was something that nobody did back then. Now it’s becoming more and more popular, right? And you Know, with that. The cool thing about that was, is that once we productize it and once we did the subscription, so, you know, hey, it’s going to be X amount of dollars a week. Clients loved it because they weren’t getting invoices anymore. When we met with clients to go through cash flow, it was never an issue because, you know, it was just an automatic thing coming out of their bank account or their credit card, however, however that payment was going to be made. It was just those types of things that we were teaching other folks how to do.

Jody Grundon [00:20:28]:
Whether it was a marketing agency or accounting firm that it’s like, wow. And then when we became virtual, you know, everybody’s like, what do you mean virtual? We were the first, according to Forbes, we were one. We were the first financial firm to ever be virtual, you know, and it wasn’t one of those things that I just made up and thought, hey, one day I’m just going to go virtual. It happened to be a client of ours that was one of the, one of the first 25 firms that ever in the world. In the world to ever be virtual. And we just hadn’t pick them up as a client. They lived there in Rhode island, we were in Indiana. And I’m like, man, this thing really is pretty cool.

Jody Grundon [00:20:59]:
I was watching how they did it. I was part of their meetings because I was their cfo. So as part of their meetings like this. I think we could do this in the accounting industry, you know, I think this could be a great thing for us. I think, I think, man, we could really grow if we could figure out how to become virtual. And that time we called it distributed, you know, because we didn’t have an office. And you know, I, I went back and told my partner, we’re going to do this. We had stand up meetings back then, just make them quick, you know, to the point and all that kind of stuff.

Jody Grundon [00:21:25]:
And I always started meeting out with a joke, you know, it’s just kind of one of those things, you know, kind of getting the flavor of things. And I started off, hey guys, we’re going to go virtual. And, and I thought, everybody’s gonna be so excited. The room was super quiet.

James Kademan [00:21:37]:
It was like, what does that mean?

Jody Grundon [00:21:38]:
Are you talking about going virtual? I’m like, we’re, we’re virtual for our clients. Why can’t we be virtual for ourselves? And I heard all the different reasons why, you know, oh, because of the Internet, blah, blah, blah. No, you have to handshake people. People don’t want all that kind of stuff. And it was like, you know, you know, pandemic solved that issue for a lot of people because they figured it out. They had to. They’re forced to. But we did it beforehand, and we went through and figured out all those issues.

Jody Grundon [00:22:00]:
And so that was just like, one thing, you know, now. Now we can teach other people how to do it, you know, and with the. With the accounting world today, you know, the accounting world, there. There’s tons of accounting firms out there, which is great, that are completely virtual. And it’s like, wow, this is kind of neat, you know, And, and, and of course, I didn’t do. I didn’t create. I didn’t. It wasn’t my.

Jody Grundon [00:22:18]:
It wasn’t my fault that that person was. But I think it was my. I think I can take some credit a little bit for the. The industry starting to work that way, because seeing how we did it and how successful we are, the fact we promoted it and showed people how to do it, it just kind of caught on. Now, not every. Not everybody did it well, that’s for sure. Not everybody did it right. And some people.

James Kademan [00:22:36]:
Some people still don’t.

Jody Grundon [00:22:37]:
Yeah, they still fail at it. And they say, oh, you can’t do it. It’s like, well, you can. Here’s how you do it. You know, and they always talk about, oh, the culture is not great. Like, our culture is awesome. Our employees don’t leave, which is nice. You know, they.

Jody Grundon [00:22:50]:
You know, our churn rates may be maybe 7, 8% tops, you know, a year. And, and they. They love to come to work. You know, they love to work. They love that flexibility, that autonomy. You know, all the stuff that people think, oh, you need to have somebody and we need to look over their shoulders. No, if you give them the autonomy and you create the. The process and the system for it, you know, people will thrive in it.

Jody Grundon [00:23:10]:
Not everybody. Most people will thrive. You know, people will thrive in it there. And that. And that was key. And, and just teaching folks how to do that, you know. So you ask you, how do you do that? Well, you. You teach, you educate, you take risk.

Jody Grundon [00:23:21]:
You try to figure out what can, you know, how can I benefit you? And let’s figure out a way to make that better. That. That’s what. That’s what we did. You know, that’s thought leadership in a nutshell. You know, it wasn’t going out, knocking on doors. It wasn’t, you know, ringing, you know, ringing the bell, you know, calling people up. It was just education.

Jody Grundon [00:23:40]:
And it, like I said, it Wasn’t an overnight thing by any means. It took a long time to really kind of build that credibility to, to where they are now. I can go to really any event and I, you know, there’s people. Yeah, it’s pretty, pretty amazing. It’s pretty cool actually. People come up and ask me questions, how do you do this, how do you do that? And, and just being open with it, which is also something weird too. Accountants are never, you know, you know, they’re very, they’re guarded with their secrets and it’s like, and you know, why are you telling people all this stuff? It’s like, why not? You know, it’s a big, it’s a big world out there, you know, it’s a blue ocean, they call it. And why not? You know, it’s like, it’s only going to help everybody if we can all learn how to get better and faster.

Jody Grundon [00:24:20]:
And, and, and I’ve always taken that approach. And that’s why, that’s why I have a lot of agencies working for us. A lot of law firms, a lot, you know, a lot. All these different companies that, you know, buy into that system process and it just works out really well.

James Kademan [00:24:35]:
Tell me a story about the technology side because you’re talking, 20 years ago, bandwidth wasn’t anywhere near what we’re at now. Zoom was a, probably not even a pipe dream.

Jody Grundon [00:24:44]:
No, it was web accident.

James Kademan [00:24:46]:
You couldn’t have been doing video meetings.

Jody Grundon [00:24:48]:
We were. So we were doing, initially, we were doing telephone. So initially it was over the phone. Super difficult doing things over the phone there.

James Kademan [00:24:57]:
Conference calls.

Jody Grundon [00:24:58]:
Yeah, exactly. And you had to, and try to try to go over financials and forecasting all that stuff when talking with somebody, which in a way it really kind of helped us out because it helped us learn how to tell a story versus read numbers off of a financial statement, which, you know, every business owner looking at that really doesn’t know it real well, doesn’t understand it. When an accountant’s talking about it, usually they’re talking over their head, you know, all that kind of stuff. And what we, what we came up with is, hey, we’ve got to be able to communicate this in a way that you, the business owner, can improve your business without worrying about the numbers. And what we did is we created what we call dynamic forecasting. And we’ve been doing it for, boy, for 20, 20 plus years. And what dynamic forecasting is, is that we’ll take a 12 month Runway and we’ll break it out by month and then we’ll take Non financial indicators and build that in there things that the business owner can control and show them how those levers actually increase and decrease revenue and profit, but also how they increase cash. And that’s the key cash.

Jody Grundon [00:26:07]:
Because when we go in and tell people that hey, you got to have 10% of your revenue in the bank at all times. So if you’re a million dollar company, you should have $100,000 in the bank available anytime where you can pay bills. You know, you don’t have that. You don’t have to worry about the AR mess or AR delays or all that kind of stuff. But that’s how you run the business. 10%. And they look at me like, well that’s great, how do I do that? Well, let’s show you how to do that. And you build that non financial, you build that dynamic forecast the diamond.

Jody Grundon [00:26:33]:
And I use this example a lot where one of our first companies and we still actually have them as a client was a truck repair company, big semi truck repair company. You know, semis would get in Iraq, they’d go pick the truck up, they’d fix it up and then they would sell it or, or they, or they would just, or they get, or they would, they would sell it for, you know, to the open market or they would fix it up and sell it back to the company that, that they belong to type of thing. And you know, with that, the, the owners, you can kind of imagine the ownership. They’re not great with numbers, awesome mechanics, phenomenal with what they did. And so when I, when I’m talking to those folks, I’m not talking about, hey, you’ve got to have a 10 increase next, next month. And here’s what that’s going to be. I’m talking about you got five trucks coming in. What’s your average price for those trucks? $80,000.

Jody Grundon [00:27:18]:
Okay, how many, how many are you going to be able to get, get completed next month? Okay, five. Okay, great. But what do you think the next month? Well, you know, it’s going to be icy, so I expect a little bit more. Let’s move it to 10. And so we’re talking trucks coming through, right? And so something that they again can control. How much do you have in your inventory that you’ve got, you know, you’re behind on that you haven’t even started on yet. Oh, we got 15 of those. Okay, great.

Jody Grundon [00:27:40]:
And so when we talked about it, we built that, we built that up. And based on that we’re saying, you know, hey, here’s what your bottom line is going to be at the end of the year. Here’s your tax positions are going to be like at the end of the year because we can predict it now based on what they’re doing. And then, oh, by the way, here’s what cash looks like. You got 10 on your line of credit right now. You should be able to pay that off by November or you know, hitting your, hitting your numbers there. And then we meet the next month. You know, we’re high fiving, hey, that sounds like a great plan.

Jody Grundon [00:28:04]:
Meeting the next month. And then all of a sudden it’s like you didn’t hit your numbers, you know, because you only had three trucks come through. Is that, you know what, what happened there? And so, oh, we had all this issues, blah, blah, blah. Okay, is that going to be a reoccurring thing or is that a one timer? Oh, that’s a one timer. Okay, so let’s keep the forecast as it is, the way it is. You still got a lot of inventory. And but here’s what your cash looks like now instead of having it paid off by, by November, you’re not, maybe it’s December, it won’t be paid off. And so then the next month comes by, same thing happens, three trucks come through.

Jody Grundon [00:28:37]:
What’s going on? You know, you said, you said you had all things fixed. You’re like, yeah, it was slow. I go, hey, let’s just adjust the forecast down because I don’t think we’re going to be hitting it the way that we thought and we would adjust it down in the future months. Okay. It looks like maybe next quarter, quarter we’re going to be it. But here’s what we need to do. You’re like, well, we can’t do that. I, I got to have that paid by the bank by the end of the year.

Jody Grundon [00:28:57]:
Well, let’s figure out what we can do now to make that. So now you’ve got to either increase your price. We’ve got to figure out, we have too many employees. We’re figuring out the margins there and we’re really helping them really grow their business. And you know, lo and hold. It’s kind of funny once we do all that and figure that out the next month, like, okay, well, we now we have four trucks coming in because we figured out some efficiency issues. Five trucks because we did that, and they’re back in line where they’re. Okay, let’s bring it now.

Jody Grundon [00:29:21]:
It looks like you’re going to have that line of credit paid off by November again. And so Again, that’s the conversations that you could easily have over the phone without having any numbers in front of them. Right. And that’s what we had to learn. We had to learn how to tell a story.

James Kademan [00:29:35]:
So that’s cool. I love it. Helping them figure out what they need to do to grow without actually saying, here’s the chart or here’s the spreadsheet. Yeah, something evil like that?

Jody Grundon [00:29:45]:
Yeah, yeah, believe me, it’s evil.

James Kademan [00:29:47]:
Tell me, your clients, were they. Once they got on board with you or you got on board with them, was this a hey, you’re there forever, or is this a hey, let me teach you how to fish kind of thing? And after a while, they would go off on their own.

Jody Grundon [00:30:00]:
I’d say both. Yeah, both. The idea is we’d love to have a client forever. I mean, that’s great. We do have clients for 20 years. We also have clients for two or three years. You know, our average client stays with us for about four and a half years is what we. What we typically find.

Jody Grundon [00:30:13]:
And that four and a half years typically is because when we. When we onboard a client, the first thing our onboarding team asks is, hey, what’s your end goal? You know, is your end goal to sell the company? You want to grow it to $100 million? You know, what. What is. What’s your. And what’s your offering up here? And so, you know, a client might say, hey, I’d like to sell it for $5 million buy in three years. Okay, great. Let’s figure out how we can make that happen. And so that’s.

Jody Grundon [00:30:37]:
That’s where it all comes from. You know, we have to identify really what the on ramp is. Maybe the on ramp is, I would like to get so big that we can then have a cfo, you know, have a full C suite, you have a board of directors or whatever. Okay, great. Let’s figure that out, and then we’ll posture it in there. You know, we had one client that we. We. We had for a long time, and they started about $3 million.

Jody Grundon [00:30:59]:
They end up selling it at $100 million. So really nice growth pattern there. And I’d say about the 60 or 70 million dollars mark. You’re like, you know what I think we need? Because all these government contracts we have, I think we need to go ahead and have somebody on staff like, we agree with you. Let’s figure out how we can manage that. And so we actually help them actually find this person. Just coincidentally, within our. You know, we don’t.

Jody Grundon [00:31:20]:
That’s not what we typically do, but we end up finding help. Find this person, vet that person out, and then we sat alongside that person. We were their FP and a person for that whole time until they eventually sold. So it’s kind of one of those things that, you know, hey, sometimes it’s a short term thing and sometimes a longer term thing, but because it’s subscription based, the client always has control over that. Right? So, you know, six months in, they’re like, you know, hey, you guys said this. You guys aren’t doing this. We’re going to terminate services. That’s fine.

Jody Grundon [00:31:48]:
They terminate that day, and then they’re off and going. Or they can continue on, you know, for three, five, six, seven, eight years, whatever. And we hold that on us. And that was a big part of it, you know, because we, you know, we were offering a service that didn’t exist. You can’t lock somebody into that service when it. It doesn’t exist. Right. But anywhere else.

Jody Grundon [00:32:06]:
And so we had to figure out, hey, how can we make this very risk adverse for the, you know, for the new client coming in to test it out, try it out. And that’s how the subscription based model just kind of, you know, came about. It wasn’t one of these genius things, you know, it was one of those things we had to figure out how to make, you know, in order for us to grow, in order for us to bring these clients, and how can we make it easy for the easy entry point for the client. Nice.

James Kademan [00:32:28]:
Tell me a story about you selling to Anders. Did Anders come to you?

Jody Grundon [00:32:34]:
Yeah.

James Kademan [00:32:34]:
Come to them and say, hey, yeah, great point.

Jody Grundon [00:32:38]:
So again, thought leadership was a big part of it. We, we wrote many. We wrote many articles. We were in books, we spoke at different events, and we had no intention of selling zero. But we built the company in a position that if we did sell, we’d always have a strong, you know, three year look back so we wouldn’t have to apologize for what happened last year or explain away why we had this big dip or, or whatever that might be. We want to always have that. That three year Runway or three year look back. That was.

Jody Grundon [00:33:09]:
That was solid. Of course we want to have the. The Runway going forward and making it look great too. And it just happened that when we were speaking at one of the events, one of the. And one of the partners came up and said, you know, hey, would you guys ever be interested in selling? And. And we got that all the time, you know, and the funny part about that is that we got it all the time where people would come up and we’d say, hey, here’s our 10 requirements or five requirements. Basically five requirements. And they’re like, well, we can’t.

Jody Grundon [00:33:35]:
Can’t do that. And the autonomy dollar amount or was. No, no, there’s like a.

James Kademan [00:33:40]:
Take care of our clients.

Jody Grundon [00:33:42]:
Yeah, no, it was like, you know, we, we stay as a unit. We’ve got our autonomy. We don’t just get parsed out. You know, this is not a aqua hire type of thing. We had to. Our. With the way we pay our employees is a lot different than most firms. We have a salary, then we have a monthly incentive based on the book of business they have that fluctuates and it’s pretty cool.

Jody Grundon [00:34:05]:
Clients love it. But again, for accounting firms, that’s different. We didn’t bill by the hour, and so we weren’t going to change that. So there’s a lot of things that were really different and we had to have buy it. And also we had to have buy in from all of our directors. And so that was another thing. We had five directors. They all have to say yes and you know, so unanimously.

Jody Grundon [00:34:21]:
Unanimously, yeah. And their structure was also paid differently. They got. Got bonuses based on growth and, you know, things that we really wanted to incentivize and profit margin and that sort of thing. And so, you know, it was one of those things that, you know, at some point everybody would say, we can’t do that one. Sorry, we can’t do this one. No, can’t do that. And finally one of them said, we can do that.

Jody Grundon [00:34:44]:
I was like, what? You can do that?

James Kademan [00:34:50]:
When you hear, yeah, yeah.

Jody Grundon [00:34:51]:
It was like, okay, what to do, let’s take a look at it and see what it is. And super skeptical, of course. And we went through the vetting process and I was like, wow, this firm is pretty cool actually. And I never heard of them before. You know, they were, they’re out of St. Louis. We were based out of Indiana. And our team is spread all across the United States.

Jody Grundon [00:35:07]:
We have folks in Hawaii, folks in Texas. They’re all over the place. And you know, with that it was like, this is interesting. And talking to the managing partner, Robert Minkler, and Dave Hartley, the advisory partner that actually oversee our, our division, I was like, these guys are pretty cool. And I went through everything with them. We managed the team, we brought the director team out. They hung out with their people. And it was like, wow, this is a, this is a firm that we could actually one help grow and one that we could Actually, you know, be a big part of.

Jody Grundon [00:35:37]:
And we did the deal within six months. So from start to finish, six months, we were part of them and have been autonomous, you know, been. Are basically, we are their virtual CFO service line. So we continued on with that. Just a name change over time to Anders virtual cfo, but that everything worked out really well. And I’m not gonna say it was perfect, because it wasn’t. There were times that I hated myself and times I loved it, and it was great. And.

Jody Grundon [00:36:05]:
And now we’ve got to a point that this is. This has been one of the best, best moves we could have done for not only myself, but the team also.

James Kademan [00:36:13]:
How long ago did this happen?

Jody Grundon [00:36:15]:
Four years ago.

James Kademan [00:36:16]:
Oh, it’s been a little while.

Jody Grundon [00:36:17]:
Okay. Yeah. Yeah. Right out of the Pandemic. So it was about 2020. Gosh. Was it 2021, 2022? Yeah, right in there. Yeah.

Jody Grundon [00:36:27]:
So we’re. We’re going into our fifth year of, you know, being part of Anders. And like I said, we’ve grown now. I think we’re. Right now we should hit about 18 million in 2026. So we’ve almost doubled our size again. And, you know, we’re on track. You know, it’s just.

Jody Grundon [00:36:43]:
Everything is just going really well. Our employees love everything. Client satisfaction, super high. And then our profit margin went from that 20, 25% close to 30% right now. So again, everything is just really going to where it’s a win. Win for both of us.

James Kademan [00:36:58]:
That’s incredible. Do you think the pandemic had any drive in Anders, looking at you guys from.

Jody Grundon [00:37:07]:
I think so. I think so because we were the only CPA firm out there of our size that. That was virtual, you know, there you had the one and two person shops, you know. Yeah, I guess they’re virtual. They’re working from home or working from, you know, whatever. But I. I didn’t really consider. I consider that as.

Jody Grundon [00:37:22]:
As, you know, basically doing the same thing we’re doing, you know, trying to get the culture for a 2030, you know, person firm. So they looked at that and they thought, you know, hey, this is kind of cool if, you know, we. We as anders are a St. Louis based firm and we’ve grown to. I don’t. They were like $50 million when. When we came aboard. We’ve grown to $50 million.

Jody Grundon [00:37:42]:
And all of our clients are based out of St. Louis or they have a St. Louis connection. We might have a client in California, but they have a St. Louis connection in some way. How can we grow our. Our accounting firm without doing the normal thing? Which accounting firms would just buy another firm in another state, and now all of a sudden they’ve got another branch there. And, you know, eventually they’ve got 10 different, you know, they can say they’re a national firm because they bought 10 different little accounting firms.

Jody Grundon [00:38:04]:
They didn’t want to do that. And they thought, you know, hey, you know, if we can figure out how Summit is doing this, maybe we can. Maybe we can, you know, do it nationally as well. And that’s what they did. And so they, they bought us with the idea that, you know, hey, these guys are innovators. You know, they’re changing the way that people thought about accounting in the regard that, hey, how can we expand? The other thing they thought about is, you know, hey, we. We’re a traditional hourly bill, you know, company. We bill everything by the hour.

Jody Grundon [00:38:29]:
These guys are profitable, and they’re doing it in a different way. Can we change the way that we do things and at a. A scale like that and, you know, make it even better for our team, our employees, our profit margins? And, and that’s something that we’re working on right now. And so, you know, there’s a lot of little things that we did that Anders did better, and there’s a lot of things that we did that we did better. And Anders, we, as a partner group, now, I’m a partner in the partner group, are trying to make it so that the entire firm can, you know, really excel in these ages and, and be not only a. A high growth firm, but a high client satisfaction, high employee satisfaction firm.

James Kademan [00:39:09]:
Gotcha. That’s interesting that it’d be a big, A very big decision to decide to essentially sell to a company regardless of.

Jody Grundon [00:39:17]:
Who you’re selling to. It was huge.

James Kademan [00:39:19]:
No longer your own boss.

Jody Grundon [00:39:21]:
Yeah, it was huge. No pain points at all. That was the bad thing. It’s like, it wasn’t like, you know, it wasn’t like we were starving for cash. We’re making more money we’ve ever made in our lives. It wasn’t like our clients hated us. It wasn’t like, Cliff, you know, we had some major issues. We had zero pain points.

Jody Grundon [00:39:36]:
And that’s when they came to us. It’s like, you know, wow, why are we doing this? What are we doing? You know, and we thought, you know, hey, this seems like it’s the right, right thing. You know, let’s. Let’s do it. But you’re right. Once I, once I was told no. Oh, my God, it was like, the world’s coming to an end. It was like, I haven’t been told no in 20 years.

Jody Grundon [00:39:57]:
It’s like, yeah, um, you know, and I’m being funny with that. You know, my team told me no all the time, but I was always the, you know, the final, like, final saying when I wasn’t. That. That was tough. And be honest with you, it still is tough as an entrepreneur, you know, that. That’s not going to leave you, Harley, at all. But they’ve. They made it where the.

Jody Grundon [00:40:16]:
Our department has a lot of the autonomy that you really need in order to. To be, you know, to basically satisfy what I. What I. What I encourage. And we did the same thing with our employees. You know, our employees, like I mentioned, they get. They get paid a salary based on national wages, and then they get an incentive based on how the book of business are managing. And so our employees have got to figure out how to utilize their team and how to, you know, basically how to delegate instead of abdicate.

Jody Grundon [00:40:40]:
And really, the more that they do themselves, the less they can grow unless they can, you know, you know, build their revenue or build their. Their income. And we’ve done this. We’ve done it within the company. So we created an entrepreneurial type company within our company. And that was. Anders, to their credit, has allowed us to maintain that. And.

Jody Grundon [00:40:58]:
And that’s. That’s. That’s what it. That’s what it’s all about. And. And when I saw we had our entire director team, which consists of about five people, they all made partner this year. And that was probably one of the coolest things I could say that, you know, really ever happened, you know, through the journey. It was like, wow, you know, seeing these folks become partners at a large accounting firm was like, pretty.

Jody Grundon [00:41:21]:
I thought was pretty unreal, pretty cool. And. And probably one. It’s my. One of my biggest feathers. I can put my. My cap, if you want to say that, or biggest accomplishments I think we’ve had outside of the money and all that kind of stuff. That was probably the number one fair.

James Kademan [00:41:35]:
Jody, we don’t have a ton of time left, but I do want to ask you something about employees and hiring.

Jody Grundon [00:41:40]:
Sure.

James Kademan [00:41:41]:
Because remote employees, the culture, all that kind of stuff sounds like it’s a very big deal for you. You. I got the same situation. Very big deal for me.

Jody Grundon [00:41:48]:
Y.

James Kademan [00:41:48]:
But that does not mean it’s easy. So what has been your secret to success as far as finding people, keeping people, and just maintaining letting them know what the culture is of the business, even though you’re remote.

Jody Grundon [00:42:01]:
Yeah. So finding people, we found it be fairly easy once thought leadership happened within our industry. So being a thought leader in the accounting industry is huge. We had podcasts with young CPAs talking about it. We had, you know, the conferences that we spoke at. You know, it really drew attention to us on a national basis where it wasn’t really, it wasn’t really hard for us to find employees. You know, we would just reach out to our, our sources and we could find individuals to fill spots, which was great. And then tapping into the colleges, you know, for the, for the entry level folks was, you know, worked out well too.

Jody Grundon [00:42:36]:
So that, that, that was the big key, just being the thought leader within our industry. So it attracted people to want to work for us. It’s a lot easier saying no to somebody than trying to talk somebody into it. You know, it’s. And that’s how we always looked at it once we got them. It was really important that the culture was strong and, and we do that many different ways. The incentive plan for employees, we have regular fun meetings every Monday where it starts with, with a joke and someone’s telling a joke. And you know, you can imagine 50 accountants in there and somebody starts out with a joke and then they have a fun fact and we start sharing stuff.

Jody Grundon [00:43:12]:
And so it’s just more of a, a get to know you culture type meeting. And, and you know, you know, some people think, ah, what a waste of time. It’s like, oh, that’s great. You know, our, our team loves it. And then we have, you know, in addition to that, we have quarterlies where we take our leadership team off site and we work through the quarterly rocks on an EOS type structure. And that keeps our team really bonded. And, and we love it. And then we have two entire team retreats.

Jody Grundon [00:43:38]:
You know, once every six months we take the entire team off site, off site because nobody, there’s no such thing as on site. But we’ll take them to Vegas for basically a four days, about five days in Vegas in which we. Everything is super structured and super. It’s designed not to, you know, the retreats are designed, we stay at a nice hotel on the strip, all that kind of cool stuff. But the idea is, hey, let’s, let’s work on the soft skills. Let’s work on, you know, how to handle rejection. Let’s work on all this, all the cool stuff. So we’ll bring in guest speakers to help with that.

Jody Grundon [00:44:08]:
It’s never, hey, what’s the new tax Code, let’s walk through it. Never that and which is the cool thing. So it’s always designed to really where the team just loves it. And we do that once in Vegas, then we do it once in St. Louis. In St. Louis because that’s where the, the mothership’s at now. And we, we used to do it in two different locations.

Jody Grundon [00:44:26]:
Now St. Louis is one of the thing where they can get a chance to, to meet other folks within the firm. Knowing that hey, the firm isn’t just the small, I say small 60 person, you know, division that’s doing 18 million, it’s a 400 person firm that’s doing, you know, close to 100 million. And it really kind of gets them out there because the, the key to the doing all of that is that when you are remote, you’re only as big of a company as the people you work with. And what I mean by that is that, you know, James, if I’m working with you all the time and I work with Sandy and Bob and Jeremy, it’s a four person team. It’s a four person company. I don’t care how many people you have, you only know four people that I can ask questions, rely on because you don’t know anybody else out there, right? And when you bring in the, when you do the different events like that, now I’m hanging out with you know, two other people, Sally and Mark or whatever. It’s like, oh, these are cool people.

Jody Grundon [00:45:19]:
And so if I have a question, I bum it off about a question off of them and get to know them a little bit better. And every time we do that they get to know even more people. Because the number one reason why people stay at work is they develop that friendship. And that friendship is the key there. And so that’s what the retreats are designed for. They’re not designed to like a normal retreat where you’re like I can’t wait to get out of here at 5:00. And I’m out. You know when, when 5:00 clock hits, they’re like, what are we doing now guys? Let’s figure out and hang out.

Jody Grundon [00:45:44]:
And then they, and then they’ll be out till like 1 o’ clock in the morning a lot of times. And the purpose of their treat, we Never start until 10 o’ clock the next day because we want them to have fun, enjoy things. Plus if they have client things, they can do it before the meeting so they have full attention during the meeting. And so it’s designed really to really build that camaraderie that you’re talking about and that culture you’re talking about. And so that’s, that’s why the team, you know, stays together. That’s why they’re there, and that’s why the remote works. But it’s, you have to be very intentional with it. You can’t.

Jody Grundon [00:46:14]:
It’s just not going to happen just by happening. You’ve got to be intentional with it. You guys spend the money. Keep in mind, 4% of your money, your revenue is going to go to brick and mortar type building anyways. Why not take that 4% and put it towards your treats and things like that to bond your team. Right?

James Kademan [00:46:29]:
Fair. I love it. Jody, where can people find you?

Jody Grundon [00:46:33]:
Well, you can actually Google me. I’m all over the Internet. You know, that’s, that’s one thing. But if you want to reach directly out to me, I reach out to Jay Grunden, j G-R-U-N-E n@anderscpa.com and, you know, with that, be happy to respond. And for anybody on the podcast, if you want to set up a, an hour meeting just to chat, bounce ideas off, I’m very, I’m very open to that. Not no cost or anything like that. And then feel free, I’ll send you a calendar invite and we kind of go from there.

James Kademan [00:47:01]:
Nice. Tell me, you mentioned some books. Do you have any of those top of mind or that you can remember if it was way back when?

Jody Grundon [00:47:07]:
Yeah, the, the, the book that we actually found our company on was E Myth. E Myth Revisited. It was one of the, the coolest books that I, I’ve ever read. I, I read it. I thought, wow, this is cool. And it’s basically Michael Gerber’s talking about how to process everything so that you can, you know, step out of the business. And it was kind of funny because, you know, he showed McDonald’s is a perfect example. Any McDonald’s you go into, you’ve got the same stuff, same flavor, all that kind of stuff.

Jody Grundon [00:47:32]:
And so it was like, well, when I, when we designed the practice, it was like, well, how do I scale this? You know, I’m the, I’m the best CFO in the world. If, if I get out of here and everybody’s gonna leave, it’s like, no, you got to figure out processes so that if, you know, James comes in, he. You can take that over and you can figure that out and you can move right into my shoes and, and then I can build another one. And, you know, that sort of thing. And. And that’s what we really founded upon. It was just one of those things I read many, many times. I told my partner this when we first started.

Jody Grundon [00:48:00]:
He goes, what does this mean? You’re not going to work? You know, I’m going to be the one doing all the work. I go, no, no, no, no. We’re going to build processes so that we can. I built this system.

James Kademan [00:48:07]:
It says you do everything. Right.

Jody Grundon [00:48:09]:
Exactly, exactly. It’s like, no, no, no. That’s how it works. But I’d say email three business is by far the one thing that really kind of helped me. And it may or may not be for you, but I would. I would find that one book or that one idea that, you know, hey, can really motivate and really kind of help you into that next level. But. And that one was definitely the one for me.

James Kademan [00:48:28]:
Yeah. You know, it’s funny. I started my business way back when. Maybe not as way back when as you. 2006.

Jody Grundon [00:48:35]:
Whatever.

James Kademan [00:48:35]:
And I remember I had a client that suggested I read that book.

Jody Grundon [00:48:39]:
Oh, you did? Okay.

James Kademan [00:48:40]:
And I thought, this is one of those judge a book by its cover kind of thing. I thought it was going to tell me not to start a business.

Jody Grundon [00:48:47]:
Oh, okay.

James Kademan [00:48:48]:
So I’m like, Like, this is the entrepreneurial myth. I don’t know. I’m running with this. I’m starting this business.

Jody Grundon [00:48:54]:
This. Okay.

James Kademan [00:48:55]:
Anyways, it was later that someone’s like, no, it’s about systems. And then I checked it out and I was like, oh, well, that was. I don’t know, it was probably a decade after it was recommended to me.

Jody Grundon [00:49:05]:
Oh, no way. Seriously? Oh, that’s hilarious.

James Kademan [00:49:07]:
Could have used this a while ago.

Jody Grundon [00:49:09]:
So, great book. Great book.

James Kademan [00:49:12]:
Systematize everything.

Jody Grundon [00:49:13]:
Yep.

James Kademan [00:49:14]:
Yeah, I love it. Well, Jody, thank you so much for being on the show.

Jody Grundon [00:49:17]:
Yeah, James, it’s been a pleasure, man.

James Kademan [00:49:20]:
This has been Authentic Business Adventures, the business program that brings you the struggle stories and triumphant successes of business owners across the land. What do we got here? My name is James Kidman and Authentic Business Adventures is brought to you by Calls On Call, offering call answering and reception of services for service businesses across the country on the web at https://callsoncall.com. And of course, the Bold Business Book, A book for the entrepreneur and all of us. We’re available wherever fine books are sold. And what else we got here? If you’re listening or watching this on the web, if you could do us a huge favor, give it a big old thumbs up, subscribe and of course, share it with your entrepreneurial friends, especially those friends that are interested in growing their business, which you better hope that’s everybody that’s got a business, because otherwise it’s grow or die, right? We’d like to thank you, our wonderful listeners, as well as our guest Jody Grunden of Anders CPA. Jody, can you tell us that email address?

Jody Grundon [00:50:13]:
100 more time dash your can. It’s J Grunden G R U N D E N cpa.com I love it.

James Kademan [00:50:21]:
Past episodes can be found morning, noon tonight at the podcast link found at drawincustomers.com thank you for joining us. We will see you next week. I want you to stay awesome and if you do nothing else, enjoy your business.