Andrew Jordan: 0:00

A lot of people don't want the conflict that comes of necessity of terminating someone or doing a performance improvement plan or that kind of thing. We fire people way more readily than a lot of CPA firms because we have to protect the team. If you get someone on the team and they don't have the technical skills that you think that they have, then you need to make a decision quick and give people chances and all those sort of things. But when it becomes apparent someone can't technically do the work, you can't keep them on the team and make everyone else suffer. Because that's the conflict with our values.

Porter: 0:32

Alrighty, folks, welcome back to Transacting Value, where we're encouraging dialogue from different perspectives to unite over shared values. Our theme for season four is intrinsic values, so what your character is doing when you look yourself in the mirror. Now, if you're new to the podcast, welcome, and if you're a continuing listener, welcome back. Today we're talking our August core values of perseverance, reliability and vitality. Now, what's cool also about this being August is it's also our third mini series of the season and it's called Incorporating Value. So what we're showcasing primarily in these conversations is how personal values are impacting or being reflected within businesses, brands, boardrooms, between co-workers and all things in that direction. So in this particular conversation, we're talking to the owners of Big Picture CPA, powered by Jordan CPA Services, andrew Jordan and Emma Ball out of Missouri. So it's going to be pretty cool and, folks, without further ado, I'm Porter, I'm your host and this is Transacting Value. Hey guys, how you doing? Good, how are you Good? Good, thanks, I appreciate it. And this is kind of cool too, because I don't think maybe one other conversation we've had on the show so far that's been with two people, and so you guys are actually the second and, if my math is right, somewhere around like the 95th, maybe 94th, 95th conversation, so like you're in the top two in your field, nice, yeah, so that's pretty cool, that's exciting, but yeah, so first off, let's just break this down right. So for everybody listening, andrew and Emma and I are talking on a video call, but since we're only recording the audio, I guess let's get a little bit of clarity. So who are you guys? You know, where are you from, what do you do, what sort of things have shaped your perspectives?

Andrew Jordan: 2:26

I'm a CPA and, let's see, I'm from a small town in Missouri, which is where we're still at, and so that's definitely been part of my perspective. I went to school and kind of stayed around and pretty close to where my family's from and here in Southwest Missouri Cool.

Emma Ball: 2:42

Okay, so Andrew's giving me a look, because mine's a little bit more complicated. I was born in El Salvador in Central America and my mom came to the US before me and then brought me over when I was four. So I was in El Salvador just my grandma for a couple of years. So I came up to California when I was four and then when I was a teen we moved to Northwest Arkansas, which is really close to here in Southwest Missouri. So yeah, the rest of it is so. I kind of came up here a little bit weird way and then here in the accounting firm. I wasn't looking to be an accountant but it just happened. It works good with my skills and now Andrew invited me to be his partner.

Andrew Jordan: 3:28

We talk a lot. We're kind of the inverse of each other in a lot of ways, like when I was in high school my dad's a doctor. He had me interview his lawyer and his CPA and different other people as a high schooler to figure out what career I might want to do, and so we then went on college visits. My junior year flew out to different places and so, like I've known, you know kind of this track of I'm going to be a partner and owner and a CPA firm, since I was like you know, 17, 18 kind of thing, and so that's all I am. And Emma, like she said, she's done a bunch of different things. I recruited her. We have a Fortune 500 that's headquartered near here and she was part of their accounting department. So I recruited her when I started my firm and we didn't really know each other at the time, five, six years ago. It's worked out really well. I'm also a lot taller than she is.

Porter: 4:13

That helps. Yeah, there's a lot of higher shelves too. There's something that you said that I think is pretty interesting. You said so you got into accounting because it complimented your other skills. Now, maybe I'm naive, maybe maybe I'm just ignorant, but when you're talking about accounting, what are complementary skills to accounting other than you're just already really good at accounting?

Emma Ball: 4:35

So I think traditional accounting I would have been done okay at as just you know, a job that I could do, because there are a lot of pretty much black and white rules and you want to have good attention to detail. No-transcript of okay, I'm going to spend five hours trying to figure out why this is off by five cents or being like you know what. It's only five cents, I'm not going to worry about it. Most accountants do the first option. They try and make things perfect. I am imperfect. I've gone to a lot of therapy and so and I'm a creative too, and so I'm a creative that can. I like spreadsheets and I it's like an organized chaos. I like being able to take things that are kind of messy and organize them, and so, because of the way Andrew works and his vision for our firm, I fit in perfectly here. I help organize the chaos and set a different tone, because I'm also really I lead with my heart, and so we want our clients to know that we're human and we want to treat each other like a good team, and so whenever our clients overstep a boundary you know, this week I had a client that I was I could hear yelling at one of my employees. I was like ah, give me the phone, you know. And so he's like I don't know why. I got transferred to you and I said because you were yelling at one of my employees and we are not going to be treated that way. You know, that's what kind of. I think that's our firm. Apart is us being able to work together Because Andrew cares that way, but he also is the nerd, nerd year one of us. We joke around that he's like the brain and I'm the heart, but we really compliment each other because I lead with my heart but definitely use my brain, you know. And then he's got the technical skills, the CPA, nerdiness and credentials, and so he's got that respect as well, but is so kind, and even when I worked for him instead of with him, he was like the best boss. So I love the place we're building.

Porter: 6:39

And I can only imagine what she says behind your back.

Andrew Jordan: 6:44

When we're hiring people one of the things that Emma does she's really good at, she's a great communicator, she cares a lot about people and connecting with people, and when we interviewed with people, when you talk to accounts, there's usually two answers as to why they went into accounting. So for me and for maybe half of the people I saw my dad as a doctor. I knew I didn't want to go into medicine, but I knew I wanted to do something technical to help people and accounting absolutely lets you do that, and so for a lot of people, that's why they go into it. And then you'll talk to other people and they say, oh, I'm just really good with numbers. Well, the funny thing about accounting is it's much more language than is about numbers. Like the hardest math we do is maybe division. You know it's really not a math centric field, it's numbers. You have to be comfortable with numbers, but it's a lot more about translating and communicating with other humans. And so people who have more of that mentality, people who really make it on our team.

Emma Ball: 7:31

Yeah, we say we're good teachers. Recently we have a lot of bookkeeping assistants that are learning and I think that I can look at these things. The only way I can understand accounting is by the way Andrew teaches it. He loves stories. He's started a club in high school. What was it?

Andrew Jordan: 7:49

I did start a token club in high school. I'm not sure why you're bringing that up, other than to make me look cool.

Emma Ball: 7:56

He's really good at the phone when I know why this journal entry moves this money from here. Here's the story. What we're doing is we're telling the accounting software basically what happened in real life. You took this money to the bank. You, you know, bought this. What was it for? And so us being able to turn it into that, when we're training the people that we have here understand what's going on, rather than just doing the same repetitive thing because they're told to.

Porter: 8:25

Yeah, it's interesting you bring that up. There was for everybody listening. We had a conversation, andrew and I, a couple of days ago, before we hit record today, and, andrew I'm pretty sure it was you One of the things you brought up is that you can't really have hard skills without soft skills. It's not that there's one any better than the other, and I feel like that's a lot of what you guys are describing right now, right, where the harder skills being more technical in the software and how to work those things, the numbers, so to speak. The softer skills, though, working with people, how to relate, how to explain, how to teach, how to lead, how to mentor those types of skill sets being softer for anybody listening. And so, guys, before we get, I guess, too much further into this, there's something that I'm curious about See when we're talking about, in any general sense or application, hard skills and soft skills. Let's just say, in the accounting industry, for right now, and you've got to work with people, it's frustrating for the clients and they only have to go through it once, right, but you guys go through all of your clients multiple times, whatever frustrations you run into, to top that off with software glitches and computer gremlins and you know things getting erased or, like you said, numbers not adding up, for example. So how do you do it? How do you balance out being able to work with people, keep your cool you're bearing your focus and obviously care for the clients and customer service, but also actually you need to rely on the hard skills and work through those frustrations too.

Andrew Jordan: 9:48

So I went to American Institute of CPAs. I had a big, big annual conference and I went to it a few weeks ago and one of the sessions was about empathy and how you, as an employer, can show more empathy. So this is just a room full of CPAs, mainly like firm owners and partners, and how you can develop different levels of empathy. And at the end of it there was this older guy and so this was mainly skewed younger in this particular class because it's like a leadership track. And there's this guy who's probably 20 years older than everyone else in the room and he asked a question. He said I think I might be in the wrong room. He kind of wandered into this class, I think dentally, but he said I love everything that you guys are saying, but I've been broken by public accounting and my generation like we were basically abused and what we know how to do. What works is abusing people and in talking with other people. More my generation I'm about 40, we know what's effective publicly shaming people. That's how I was brought up. That's how you get people to do the hard skills. How do you meet the deadlines? Because we've got a lot of hard deadlines, a lot of technical, it's right or wrong on a tax return and there's a lot of demand and a lot of pressure. And how do you meet that While at the same time being decent humans? And that's a real challenging balance.

Emma Ball: 11:03

So I think that the way that we can do that is you don't want to go so far. The other way, right, you don't want to be shaming someone and then all of a sudden, just like, keep your eye out, like head down, don't tell them when they do anything wrong, just fix it. So whenever people sign up, I tell them that we're a little bit more touchy-feely than most, especially most accounting firms. So we start every meeting everything that's a group with going off camera, taking a couple deep breaths, and then we come back here ready to be all there present, and then we go through our vision. So our vision and our values, which we use our values to get us to our vision, those are the things that I think help us be able to give feedback from not a place of shame, but also not a place of like it's okay, you know, it's holding people accountable. So our values really lead us in that, if we let someone go, we go through our values and kind of break them or grade them. On that. We call each other back on our values. Recently we talked about something we disagreed on, but based on our values, it doesn't matter which one of us is right we're going to do this, so I really think that that really helps us be able to balance that.

Andrew Jordan: 12:15

One thing that's interesting about us as a CPA firm is a lot of CPA firms, a lot of CPAs, are sort of more conflict-averse and so they'll keep an employee who's doing a bad job a lot longer, in many cases years. This is another thing. They talk about the conference because it's just like a known thing in our profession. A lot of people don't want the conflict that comes of necessity of terminating someone or doing a performance improvement plan or that kind of thing, and we fire people way more readily than a lot of CPA firms because we have to protect the team. If you get someone on the team and they don't have the technical skills that you think that they have, then you need to make a decision quick and give people chances and all those sort of things. But when it becomes apparent someone can't technically do the work, you can't keep them on the team and make everyone else suffer, because that's the conflict with our values.

Emma Ball: 13:00

A friend of ours calls that the moldy strawberries. Once you have one, then it kind of keeps spreading out, so we don't want to keep that on the team for that long. We want them to see that we care about them, that we care about the vision. If someone's not meeting or performing within our values, then they're not helping us get there.

Andrew Jordan: 13:20

So the listeners can't see your shirt, but your shirt that says humankind be votes. We had someone on our team that we hired and it was a parent a couple months in. This person just didn't have the skillset to really thrive in public accounting but they really did well, we think, where they were at before in private accounting. So we had a transparent because transparency is one of our core values. Transparent talk with her Just in the end. We talk with her really candidly. Here's what we're seeing, here's specific examples and here's how you're taking way longer on these things and making these mistakes and you have very specific examples. We said it really kindly and we followed it up by saying but we don't doubt that you really thrived where you were before in places like that and we started, we moved into career coaching kind of situation where we said we will write you a letter of recommendation and talk to your strengths because we think you're really good at these things and we will be references for you and we will give you a period of time two or three months where you're still working for us and you're looking for a position. That would be a place you would really thrive. That's in line with our values and her response has been she's worked amazingly hard, she's doing better than she ever has before. Like it's still not the right place for her, but like when you're working with ethical and like moral people, that's a reasonable response. It doesn't always work out that way, but anywhere else I would have worked. That would have just terminated someone right away, no notice and you're out on the street and I don't think that's treated with kindness in many cases and you don't have to do it that way just because that's how a lot of places do it.

Porter: 14:49

No, no, certainly not. I mean, there's opportunities picking industry, but where you can sort of define and qualify your own. I don't want to call them standards, because there are certain standards you've got to meet, but qualifiers, you know, based on your values and things to that effect, like you brought up. And so I'm curious. This is a segment of the show called developing character. And I'm going to ask this to both of you, to either of you. You can both answer. One of you answers it's entirely up to you. But for anybody new to the show, this is two questions, right. As willing and vulnerable as you want to be in your answers is totally okay. And if that means I'm not sure I haven't thought about it, well, that's cool too. This first question, right. What were some of your values then growing up? You mentioned a few now, but what got you here? And that's for either of you.

Emma Ball: 15:35

So I think that the same values that we have for our company. Really it's almost like I found a, you know, when you read a poem and you're like that's how I've been feeling it. I feel like, and Andrew had kind of put these together and he and I I was with him when, shortly after he started Jordan CPA services and he had those there, and then even now, whenever we brought them to our new team, we changed one of them, and now even more so do I feel like it fits me. And one of them is transparency. I remember from the youngest age if I felt like someone lied to me or they, you know, were keeping something from me. Do not surprise me with the birthday party, please. Like I love some surprises, like I just I just kept really upset, like no, how can I trust you or how could we have a relationship if we're not honest and transparent with each other? I want to be, if they know and leave it at that or say no, I'm tired and that'd be okay, you know. So that's always been super important to me.

Andrew Jordan: 16:41

So these guys actually came. I was CFO of a company and we were working in a really short story, right, I was CFO, discovered that my boss was committing fraud and was the whistleblower and so he's in prison for another decade or more and there's a $20 million restitution order or something like that. And so in the aftermath of that, our equity group that owned us made me in charge of the company and said, hey, try and turn this thing around, because, as it turned out we were. It was a big financial statement fraud, so a lot of like fake clients and like fake revenue and shuffling of that kind of stuff. And so one of the things I knew is we've never had a set of values as a company and we needed a set of values. But I also knew that a lot of companies go and they just pick pretty words and they put them up on a wall and then they don't ever go anywhere with them. They never mean anything. And so I was really trying to avoid that and trying to wrestle with how do we come up with these values? And there was someone on the team at the time. It was kind of new to the team and I remember he came into my office and he said look, I know we've only been here two or three weeks, but you guys have been really wrestling with what the values for this company should be. But I've just been listening to what you guys talk about over and over and over again. It's the same four or five things. So I just wrote them down. Here's what I think your values are. And it was really neat because it was just a reflection of what our values were. And so you say, like, what were our personal values that got us here? And so, like Emma, it's kind of these same values. And so, as a kid yeah, transparency is important to her was to me as well. Being humble, which is one of our values, and not having that ego. Excellence we both were driven to perform and achieve and we're really good students in school and all those kind of things. Ownership we care, you know, we lead with our hearts and we care a lot about what we do. And then our last values grow and we both are people who are interested in growing, even as we're kids. How can we get better and learn new things? And so the fun thing about having your own companies you can do whatever you want, and so you just take your personal values and make those accompany values and then go looking for people who have similar values, and that's kind of what we've done.

Emma Ball: 18:37

Yeah.

Porter: 18:38

All right, folks, stay tight. We'll be right back on Transacting Value. Did you know that children who do chores to earn their allowance have more respect for finance and more of a drive for financial independence? Did you know that families who complete tasks together have stronger bonds? Did you know that cognition, sense of self and anxiety all improve if people have regular interactions with nature? Imagine what instilling self-esteem, resilience, family teamwork and an authorized sense of self could do for the growth of each generation. No matter the temptation At Hoofen-Kluck or Farm, that's just another Tuesday. Want to learn how to homestead or just more effectively develop your character for an unknown future? Follow our direct message on Instagram at hoofen-kluck or farm. Watch it happen in real time. A wise man learns from the mistakes of others. A foolish man learns from his own.

Andrew Jordan: 19:33

The fun thing about having your own company is you can do whatever you want, and so you can just take what are essentially your personal values and make those the company values and then go looking for people who have similar values.

Porter: 19:43

That's kind of what we've done. So how do you identify those people? I mean, you can't just walk around, I'll tell you firsthand. You can't just walk around and say hey, these are my values, you know? Like what do you?

Andrew Jordan: 19:52

do so. We have a series of interviews that we try to get at some of these questions. Like we have a technical interview process that addresses excellence. Right, do they have the technical skills? And we don't get it right 100% of the time, of course, but at least we try and get a feel for do they have excellence? And we're paying attention to asking some specific questions in the interviews to get at transparency and humility and how are they approaching things and what do they do. We even throw some curveballs sometimes. See how do they approach when they're in a stressful situation like an interview, and they get asked something that they don't know the answer to. You know some of those kind of things. Just see how people are reacting. Ask them to tell stories about given situations. We also talk pretty openly about how much growth matters to us and we bring up Brenda Brown a lot because like she's like a gateway drug to a lot of growth and the stuff right, and so we bring her up in the interview and we're like hey, just so you know, like you don't have to like Brenda Brown, but like we'll talk about her. Emma did a training on braving how many companies, especially serious real companies, like CPA firms like we're pretty much as far from Brenda Brown as you can get, as uncolorful in general as you can be and serious right, but we talk about in the initial interview because we want to drive away people who are like not into that and only attract the people who are. So we kind of approach the interviews as authentically ourselves and candidly ourselves as we can in the hopes of repelling people or to the right fit.

Porter: 21:11

Yeah, authenticity goes a long way. For sure, it's hard, though.

Emma Ball: 21:15

And sometimes you know when it depends on if there's technical difficulties and like if someone can't get into teams. We kind of watch how they behave in that time. If you know, we just had an interview and she said I have interviews all next week, so I probably will not get back to you guys until after the state. Great transparency, great ownership, thinking ahead, that's excellent, perfect, like that already checks off a few things and it wasn't something that we set up. It's us. We like people and he reenergizes by being around friends a lot. I do too, but I also like being by myself, but we like making connections and so when we see something like that, we can read people fairly well and bounce it off each other. If any alarms go off on either side, you know we trust each other enough to talk about it and decide whether it's a big deal or not.

Porter: 22:04

Yeah, Trust is huge. And then trying to make sure that you've got, in whatever degree, equitable buy-in for people's opinions and, like you said, humility on top of it, right? Like to a point that you made, Andrew, when you said that it's more about language than it is about numbers. That surprised me. I mean it makes sense now that you explained it, but it surprised me at the time to be able to say that working with people is about working with people as people, not working with people as numbers. I think goes a long way. And to whoever this dude was that gave you the sheet of paper with five lines, I mean it doesn't really seem like you're going out of your way to craft an image. If anything, it seems like you're going out of your way to accommodate everybody as genuinely as you can through your image, through your brand, right? So when we're talking about, I guess, any CPA firm, I have no baseline to know how difficult or demanding that could be, but when it comes to Jordan CPA or Big Picture CPA, I mean you rooted your brand in family and in community, right? At least that's what I saw on your website.

Andrew Jordan: 23:10

Well, the way we explain it is we have a vision. Our vision is two parts and that's like the direction we're sailing our ship and, as long as we keep our five values, that will help make sure we're heading in the right direction. And part of the vision for the company is to be the best place to work for good professionals. Now, that also means the worst place to work for bad professionals. Again, we can't have bad people on the team who are dragging everyone else down. That's not a great place to work Like. We've all worked at a place where you had to carry more than your share of the weight because someone else carried less than theirs. Like that's not a good team environment. So part of our commitment as owners is like we will rectify the situation when it comes up. But yeah, that's one of our things that's really important to us. Community family, however you want to call it. Cpas traditionally are working 60, 70, 80 hours Most I ever hit. I did have a 90 hour week one week during a tactic and working for someone else, and that's pretty common. 60, 70, for sure, is all the rest of the time. There was a firm I worked for that at their Christmas party, they would halfway jokingly say thank you to all of these spouses who are here for the sacrifices you're going to make for the next four months. We know you won't really see your spouse for four months and we thank you for your sacrifice. That's terrible. You don't have to do it that way, so we've chosen not to Well, so how do you not then, if that's sort of the norm? One of the ways that that's the norm is CPAs tend to undercharge non-enforced boundaries. And let me say this real quick Like history of accounting is not that long ago, 50 years ago, say, the skills you needed for accounting quiet, diligent, pay attention to detail and you're doing by hand a lot of writing up numbers consistently and accurately and adding up long list of numbers by hand Right, that wasn't that long ago. Computers have started to change that and things like artificial intelligence are really accelerating that. But the profession, the perspective people have on the profession or the impression they have of it, is still a lot of like being counters, number crunchers, right?

Porter: 25:10

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Andrew Jordan: 26:13

Computers have started to change that and things like artificial intelligence are really accelerating that. But the perspective people have on the profession, or the impression they have of it, is still a lot of bean counters, number crunchers, right, so it still tends to attract people who are risk adverse. I have the cheapest life insurance ever because it's through the American Institute of CPAs. Cpas were super low risk and that's starting to change, because it used to be people skills weren't important. So it's been a really intentional push in the industry to try and make those important, because 50 years ago they truly weren't nearly as important as being able to add up numbers by hand quickly and accurately. We use it tenkey, quickly and accurately, yeah, so it's been a big shift.

Porter: 26:57

Well, you don't look like accountants from especially 50 years ago.

Emma Ball: 27:03

So I think that you know so with our values. I was trying not to get stuck with that, because when tax time comes and we've had a rough couple of years for a minute there I thought we were cursed for a little while. It was kind of nuts, and so we did work a lot. But we decided that instead of having people on salary we're going to do hourly and that helps us. You know, if we want them to work the 50, 60, 70 hours, then we have to pay them what that's worth you know, and one of the things that Andrew says is that a lot of the because he came from that. I did not. The last job where I worked before working with Andrew was the closest I think I got to that, but even then it felt like an okay place to work. It was just kind of corporatey and I wanted something that was in between. I want to be professional without being stuffy. That's kind of our go-to. And then in big picture, we work with a lot of creatives. One of my best friends is one of our clients, and so it keeps us kind of chill. You know, we have to be able to explain what an S corporation is versus a schedule C for your business to a photographer, to where they understand it, and I think that, with both of us being really good teachers, we want to make this a place that we enjoy working. We want this to be a place that I'm leaving all next week, like a week and a half. Basically, we want to be able to do that. We want our employees to be able to do that as well. So with our values, we can kind of make this the place that we've always wanted to work, and I think that's what helps us get there.

Andrew Jordan: 28:41

I think at this point, like one of the things we did is this last tax season we asked one employee to work overtime and he hit maybe 50 hours and it was just because we had major unanticipated health issues with multiple members of the team all at the same time during tax season Otherwise we wouldn't even. And CPA firms are set up. They pay you a little salary so they can just squeeze them for as many hours as they possibly can and then kind of throw them away. That's kind of the model. That's how you make your money. If people ironically stop and calculate how much they're making per hour in most CPA firms, it's a lot less than they think because they're working so many hours. So just the simple thing of us paying everyone hourly. So if anyone ever did work overtime which has to be approved and it's pretty rare here we have to pay time and a half because that's fair right and so disincentivizes us to squeeze people for more hours. And we set up that way from the beginning. And so it's sort of a check on ourselves to make sure we never fall into that, because the trap's really easy to fall into, just like there's a easy trap of doing a bunch of individual tax returns and if you don't enforce your boundaries as a CPA, you let people walk all over you, which means people walk all over your staff and they're getting calls on their cell phones at nine o'clock at night and they're still at the office at 10 o'clock and you're jumping all around and instead of being clear and setting healthy boundaries for you and for your team because it's hard to set boundaries it's hard to enforce boundaries.

Emma Ball: 30:03

Most firms like ours. I guess, if we were traditional, would take anyone at tax time. You know, because of our vision we say we will serve small businesses. If someone comes to us and they're just an individual, even if they're my friend, sorry, we only work with small businesses. That's how we can make sure that what we're doing fits into our values and that we don't overwork ourselves or our employees.

Andrew Jordan: 30:27

Can we get more official. We can deliver more value in less time for our clients because we specialize. But again, like if you know any business that's decided to say no to some things, it's scary at first. It's really a leap of that in yourself. They're like okay, we're going to and like we don't work with non-profit for tax returns, we don't do trust tax returns, we don't do foreign stuff, because a lot of stuff we've intentionally said no to that most firms will say yes to and we're actually in the process of niching down further so we can even specialize more by industry and some of those kind of things, big picture being kind of our dabbling into that.

Porter: 30:59

Yeah, that's what I want to ask you about. Is this big picture like the ultimate vision or like that's a large picture? What does that mean?

Andrew Jordan: 31:07

So it's kind of a plan of words, right, because we work, in big picture, exclusively with photographers, and so what's fun is we have now done more than 200 free consults with photographers, and so we know the industry better than pretty much anyone out there. We work with a lot of photographers and so we know, like I can tell you off the top of my head, that if someone isn't charging at least $3,500 on average for a wedding, like they're going to have a really tough time, and that most wedding photographers do about 25 weddings a year Like that's pretty max out for most people. And we know the industry, we know these things so we can more quickly and more efficiently deliver value, capture value, not have to overwork our team.

Porter: 31:48

All right, folks, stay tight. We'll be right back on Transacting Value. Alrighty folks, here at Transacting Value, we write and produce all the material for our podcast in-house game perspective alongside you, our listeners, and exchange vulnerability and dialogue with our contributors every Monday morning. But for distribution, buzzsprout's a platform to use. You want to know how popular you are in Europe or how Apple is a preferred platform to stream your interviews? Buzzsprout can do that. You want to stream on multiple players through an RSS or custom feed, or even have references and resources to take your podcast's professionalism, authenticity and presence to a wider audience. Buzzsprout can do that too. Here's how. Start with some gear that you already have in a quiet space. If you want to upgrade, buzzsprout has tons of guides to help you find the right equipment at the right price. Buzzsprout gets your show listed in every major podcast platform. You'll get a great looking podcast website, audio players that you can drop into other websites, detailed analytics to see how people are listening, tools to promote your episodes and more. Podcasting isn't hard when you have the right partners. The team at Buzzsprout is passionate about helping you succeed. Join over 100,000 podcasters already using Buzzsprout to get their message out to the world Plus following the link in the show notes lets Buzzsprout know we sent you. Gets you a $20 credit if you sign up for a paid plan and helps support our show. You want more value for your values. Buzzsprout can do that too.

Andrew Jordan: 33:20

We know the industry. We know these things. We can more quickly and more efficiently deliver value, capture value, not have to overwork our team.

Porter: 33:28

You said small businesses, though, so not just photographers.

Andrew Jordan: 33:32

Yes, A big picture works exclusively with photographers. In the case of services, our main brand works only with small businesses. That means not individuals. Most CPA firms load up on individual tax returns during tax season, which works fine because it's basically free labor. If I haven't worked 82 hours this week instead of 70 hours, it doesn't cost me as the owner anymore. So whatever I can make from doing individual returns and squeeze out, it's a win for me as the owner. That's a really unhealthy model, I think, for a company.

Porter: 34:01

Yeah, I'd say so. It doesn't really take into account any welfare for your people either, or at least it doesn't sound like it.

Emma Ball: 34:07

Jordan CP Services is our main brand. Andrew, I think you read on our website for Big Picture CPA that he had a photographer friend and then realized you know what. They really need some help. So Andrew, he is the accountant, but he has this creative brain. He has really good taste most of the time. This is the only time I'm going to say that he has a good eye, I guess Whenever we started working together. I also am more creative. I do all the articles and craft things. I used to run a indie craft fair here for a few years and that's kind of how my interest and I met was through a nonprofit here, and so when we started Big Picture, it kind of fits both of us His accounting side, my creative side. So we call me the translator nerd to creative translator and he, you know, the tax guy, the one that knows all the rules and everything. But he can tell it to you without you as someone that's just like I just want to take beautiful photos having to learn about accounting. Andrew can tell you it without you feeling like you're an idiot. We have so many photographers come up to us and say you are not who I want to talk to, but you are who I need to talk to, or when I do a call with them, they're like I'm so nervous about this, I'm the worst you've ever seen. They're always coming to us with this shame, and so we try and help alleviate that. We want to help people, we want to just build a good culture for our team, and so being able to niche down like that with Big Picture has really really helped the volumes there. It's to the point where, like it's running really like a well-oiled machine. Jordan CPA Services is going through some transitions and we're wanting it to niche down a little bit as well, because it will allow us to get more to where we want to be as a company.

Porter: 35:57

Oh yeah, I mean you say you say any small business. There's dozens of industries now that you've got to contend with, right, and they even include the ones that are exclusively digital, at least right now in my example and so you factor in I don't know the small business that only exists on Shopify, for example, and then whatever other costs there might be for that, from utilities to material costs to whatever else designers, freelancers, all these things that, as far as I'm aware, even a decade ago didn't even exist, let alone have any impact when it came to tax season. So, yeah, there's a lot of different changes. I imagine being able to specialize is going to be well a benefit. Frankly, we call it a force multiplier in the Marine Corps, but essentially just something that's going to be a value added characteristic. Then it will be a hindrance.

Emma Ball: 36:44

We're also very techy. Andrew kind of wanted to make sure our tech stack was really good, and a lot of CPA firms still have paper everywhere. You know where paper lists things online. We have a good project management system instead of just like here's your stack of things.

Andrew Jordan: 37:01

And the thing that with values is when you write them down and you tell them to your team and we talk about during the interview process what our values are. That's what people will be signing up with if they work with us. We go through them at the beginning of every meeting and we say you know, may our decisions we make and may the conclusions we come to in this meeting be in line with these values. Right, and we do really check-ins with our team and the feedback we give them. Every piece of it ties back to a company value and so when you do that, it really ratchets up the well. Now you kind of have to do it. You know what I mean. Like everyone on the team knows it, and you're either going to be a total fraud or you're going to actually make decisions based on this, and one of those things is to be the best place to work for good professionals. Imagine if you had a caseload of 50 clients and you had five restaurants and five manufacturers and five retail stores and five doctors offices and just spread across all the industries and, like you said, there's some that are just coming out now that you've never even heard of. And how hard would that be? How challenging would that be? How many hours of overtime would you maybe have to work to facilitate that? Versus if you had 50 clients and every one of them was a doctor's office or everyone was a dentist, or everyone was a manufacturer whatever it is, it makes it a whole lot. There's so much in common with them and we've sort of proved this out with big picture you can really get. I mean, one photographer has a lot of the same problems as the next one, so you can deliver a lot more value without working the crazy overtime hours. But it takes a lot of courage to be able to do that and say no to other variables.

Porter: 38:33

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Andrew Jordan: 39:54

One photographer has a lot of the same problems as the next one, so you can deliver a lot more value without working the crazy overtime hours. But it takes a lot of courage to be able to do that and say no to other levels.

Porter: 40:06

Yeah, I mean it's extra income on top of potential business or people just telling other people, hey, that's CPA from only works with photographers, for example, but saying that for people to be able to make their own decisions on all of these topics and how you guys run your firm and the values that you guys bring to the table transparency and ownership, among others how do people find out more about Big Picture in or out of the tax season? But just your company, your methods, your services, any and all the above. Where do people go? How do they do it?

Andrew Jordan: 40:39

So Big Picture CPA is CPA4photographerscom, and it's either the number four or F-O-R. We both go to the same place. So CPA4photographerscom is for Big Picture, or if there's a small business that's curious or there's an accountant who's curious about a different place to work, just JordanCPAservicescom is our main website and has all that information there.

Porter: 41:00

So big city, all right and for everybody listening, depending on whatever streaming platform you're playing on. If you click see more or show more for the description to this conversation, those will both be linked in the show notes so you'll be able to see that there and get to those websites as well. In the event, you're currently driving listening to this and you're not able to write it down, so you can find it there as well. Guys, I appreciate the opportunity to really just listen to you guys talk. I didn't really have too much to input, but the model that you guys are bringing to the table as a business model I mean not an economic model as a business model that you guys are bringing to the table from a leadership perspective, from a small business perspective, from a team oriented perspective, from a almost a servitude type perspective I think you're onto something to whatever that does for you whatever credibility. I've got to make that statement. Yeah, I think you're onto something. I think it's now everybody I mean you look at it on social media too, but everybody trying to broaden out and make themselves, make their brands, make their whatever applies more appealing on Instagram to fit the algorithms, on Facebook to make sure it works on TikTok, to make sure people are engaged on LinkedIn or whatever, and diversify, diversify, diversify as opposed to refine your focus and specialize. Refine your focus and mature and ultimately, obviously, bringing your team through that process to help with cohesion, to help with coherence and competence. I think is great. I appreciate the opportunity for you guys to come in and talk about that, especially this particular mini series, for incorporating value, your willingness and your vulnerability to bring CPA as an essentially an industry but ultimately big picture, and Jordan services into the spotlight a little bit. So thanks, both of you, thanks for having us. Definitely Folks. For everybody else who listened into this conversation as well, thank you for tuning in and listening to our August core values of perseverance, reliability and vitality and, like I said, this mini series for incorporating value as well. Also, I want to thank the American CPA conference. Andrew, I'm going to do that too. All right, I want to thank your team. I want to thank Emma everybody that you know what your grandmother I want to thank her too and everybody that contributed to your guys' perspective that you brought to the table, because it's not just accounting. I mean, what you guys are doing is building a community around accounting, and I think it's great, I think it's awesome. So I want to thank all of those influences as well. And Brené Brown, you know what? Thank you, too.

Emma Ball: 43:28

My grandma passed away last November, so that was no, no, no. I like love that, because one of the things that we've been talking about recently is how here, when we show up, we don't I don't have to be a CPA and accountant, because that's something I struggle with, because I wasn't wanting to necessarily be in this field, it wasn't something I was looking for. But he tells me you know, you don't have to, people don't have to hear from Emma the accountant, the CPA, the this it's. You need to hear from Emma Ball. And when you said grandmother, like one of the things I've been realizing is that all that just kind of you know is in here, right, so I get to live from her values.

Porter: 44:06

Yeah, I'm glad you turned that away from where I thought that might have been going. I was starting to feel pretty bad. But I mean you make a great point too, right, not not necessarily to belabor it, but a hundred percent. I agree with you. Right, it's we. I think we as people are just products of all the good and the bad and the every influence that we come across and we absorb as we go through life. And it doesn't necessarily matter who stays around as long as we're alive or who dies before we do, or what influences we appreciate having or would prefer not to relive, but all of them, I think, carry a certain amount of gravity or a certain amount of levity that we can decide how to apply those lessons and values and applications. And I think it's that uniqueness that we each individually bring to whatever collective, built and designed family that we find ourselves in and a sphere of influence, and I mean that's what brings strength and unity and I guess you could say increases vitality. Over time it's a little bit more enduring. So I'm glad you brought that up Again. I was a little concerned, but I'm glad it went better, I'm glad it went well and genuinely I am thankful for our experiences, and in this case, specifically the ones you guys have had, because this conversation was a little bit less me and a lot more you guys, but I think it was necessary to hear that there's a little bit more life and a little bit more humanity in harder sciences, and it's okay to balance the two. And for all the millennials or Gen Zers going through school now trying to figure out where you want to work, it doesn't have to narrow your focus just because you're stuck in a textbook. You can still be a human too, and that's powerful but not to belabor this conversation for the sake of time. I do appreciate the opportunity, though, and to our show partners, keystone Farmers, market Hoof and Clucker Farms obviously Buzzsprout thank you for your distribution as well. Folks, if you're interested in joining in our other conversations or merchandise or any other number of things from our website, check out transactingvaluepodcastcom and you can discover all of our other interviews there as well. Please follow along on social media, and we'll continue to stream new interviews every Monday at 9am Eastern Standard Time on all your favorite podcasting platforms. So until next time, that was Transacting Value.