James Bourke - Remote Work Was Inevitable & Keeping Your Career Fresh

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:00) Hello, my friends. Today, Joel is talking to James, the Director of Firm Technology at Withum. And they discuss how incredibly important relationships are in your professional life, tips for keeping things fresh in your career, and how remote work has always been inevitable. All of this right here, right now on the Modern CTO Podcast.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:25) Here we go. This is the Modern CTO Podcast. Alright, so why don't you tell me a little bit about you and then how you got into technology and what you're doing currently?

(James (Jim) at 00:00:43) Yeah, sure. So today I'm Managing Director for Advisory Services here at Withum. Right? Withum being a large regional CPA firm.

(James (Jim) at 00:00:50) So technology is in our wheelhouse. And my fatal attraction to technology, I often said if I wasn't—didn't go down the CPA path to become a CPA—I probably would have been a programmer because I remember in high school just writing code. I remember in high school writing games, right? Just stupid games, you know, like the Battleship type games, right? All those, the pawn games, right? All the easy things that we probably all wrote together back during that time. And so just had this fatal attraction to technology. I remember years ago putting in—implementing—the first email system in the firm, putting the first wide area network, connecting two offices together. I mean, basic stuff that we take for granted today, just being fatally attracted to that over the years. And just really built that into really, how does that work within a CPA firm? I work with so many tech companies today. We help guide them down the path of their exit. You know, you've been part of that whole process, helping young entrepreneurs trying to figure out exactly, you know, what do I need to do to get ready for that exit? What should I be doing today if I want to exit three years, five years, stuff like that? And helping them navigate all the complicated financing, tax, advisory opportunities that they come across today. So that's pretty much my involvement. I, you know, at the firm I was our technology niche practice leader, which means all I worked on pretty much were technology companies, helping them in audit, tax, advisory—just getting in their heads, being by their side, being there for whatever the entrepreneurs that are running these tech companies needed. That's what we do today.

(Joel Beasley at 00:02:26) That's pretty cool. I was checking out the website, looking at the different services. Do you guys have any products, though?

(James (Jim) at 00:02:31) Yeah, so we don't have physical products that we sell. So we're not selling widgets or physical products. We sell ourselves, right? Our time. So in every situation, whether it's, you know—I guess you could consider an audit report a product, a tax return a product, you know—but those are commodities today. You know? What we really prefer to sell is pretty much our time. And so, again, it's our time, it's our knowledge, it's our wealth of experience that we have in helping prior tech entrepreneurs down a path to exit. And that's where we add tremendous value—trying to just avoid as many of the roadblocks, as many of the hurdles that other people have hit before them. So that's pretty much what we do today.

(Joel Beasley at 00:03:12) So if I was going to sell the podcast, this media company, and I was like, hey, I want to sell it in the next three years, you guys would walk me down that path of how to do that?

(James (Jim) at 00:03:22) Absolutely. We tell you, you know, here's what you need to be doing today. Get your house in order, right, and prepare for that. Make sure you have a good management team, a good team in place. Make sure you, you know, check all the boxes and all those things that have helped prior entrepreneurs increase value for the entities that they have been associated with. Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:03:42) Can I talk to you a little bit about some leadership and discipline stuff? So I was curious. You're very—you're a physically fit person. I train like an athlete. I'm very into nutrition. And I'm curious, was that something you've always done since you were younger? Is that something you picked up? And how has that impacted your professional life?

(James (Jim) at 00:04:02) I'll tell you, so I have not been doing it forever. I've probably been doing it for the last fifteen years, and I started—to me it frees my mind. So I do CrossFit every day, and I mean almost every single day. And I do Warrior events. I do all kinds of events like that where you just stress your whole body out. And to me it just helps me because it helps me to think through my day. It helps get me ready. I often say that's the hardest part of my day is that morning routine that I drag myself out of bed. I'm the only one that I inconvenience besides if I wake somebody else up. And then I go, I do it, and, you know, that release of energy, every day it's different. You know? So that's what drives me every single day. If I don't do it, I have this guilty thing all day long. If I'm traveling on the road, I'm flying, you know, I'll drop out of a plane in London and I'll go for a run on the river or something like that. I'll hit up a CrossFit that's there or something because I just have to do it. And that really helps me to focus on getting through the rest of my day.

(Joel Beasley at 00:05:09) Yes. I continuously put myself through exercises of things I don't want to do because life's difficult, and that just makes it easier. If I know I'm going to get up and I'm going to crush it, like my 6 a.m. run or 5 a.m. run, then I'm just like, after that I won the day.

(James (Jim) at 00:05:23) Yes. Oh yes.

(Joel Beasley at 00:05:24) So I have to ask about your Twitter. Dude, you post like a thousand times a day. Is that a bot?

(James (Jim) at 00:05:31) So it's a combination of a couple things. I obsess over a couple things. You could tell by my Twitter the things that drive me. It's the profession, it's technology. I try to stay on top of everything that's happening in our space, all the cyberattacks. You know, that's one thing that's driving our business today—it's awareness around cybersecurity, cyberattacks. But my Twitter is me. I'll often be on a plane, I'll tweet something. Last week I was on the 737—the 737 MAX jet, the ones that are now back in service—and I was standing by the engine of the aircraft. Got a picture. So I'm constantly tweeting stuff about me, where I'm traveling, what's happening, as well as, you know, the business side of me, which is technology and advisory services, the profession, and stuff like that. So again, it's a combination of bot and me actually doing stuff. But I'll tell you, I look at every single tweet that I send out. Every single one. Not when I send it out, but I take a look at everything that I'm sending out, the content I'm sending out. So I'm familiar, because people are always asking me, "Hey Jim, you just tweeted this. What—you know, tell us more about it."

(Joel Beasley at 00:06:47) I like it. It's like assistive technology.

(James (Jim) at 00:06:50) Yes. Yes, exactly. Exactly. It keeps me out there. It keeps me, first and foremost, out there. And again, traveling the world, you know, as a thought leader around technology, the profession, about advisory, stuff like that. So I just try to grab as much content and put it in my brain and put it out there as humanly possible.

(Joel Beasley at 00:07:07) Well, I've got a newsletter for you. It's called TLDR. It's like the best newsletter I've ever found in my entire life. I interviewed the—I tracked down the person who makes the newsletter and I interviewed them because I was just blown away. But it's TLDR. Yeah. And I can have our team forward it to you. But man, this guy gathers like the most interesting links on technology and it's like a daily newsletter. And honestly, for me, I found it and I said, this is my favorite thing to wake up to.

(James (Jim) at 00:07:41) I love it, man. I love digging in, finding out, being the first to find out about something, being the first to tweet about something, being the first to put it out there. And then not just putting it out there or being the first, but then learning more about it and how it impacts our clients, our prospects, and stuff like that.

(Joel Beasley at 00:07:59) So have you been with Withum for thirty-five years?

(James (Jim) at 00:08:04) Yeah. You have to repeat that, man. So yeah, I have been with Withum for thirty-five years. I started right when I was graduating college, and yeah, I've been here ever since. So I've seen big change, big growth, huge expansion of the firm. We started as a small little firm in Milltown, New Jersey, and now our practice today is a global practice. We have boots on the ground throughout the world through our HLB International affiliation, which I head up advisory and technology for HLB in London as well. But yeah, so thirty-five years, seen a lot of change, especially in technology, man. Technology is probably one of the things that has outpaced everything else as far as change goes.

(Joel Beasley at 00:08:46) So what are some of the big moments that you remember in those thirty-five years? Like huge, huge moments in technology that, you know, specifically impacted Withum?

(James (Jim) at 00:08:55) Huge moments, man. I'll tell you, the day I got my first car phone. Yeah. My car phone. Not even a cell phone, right? So the day I had—the day I had to give up my Palm Pilot, you know, that was my thing. My Palm Pilot, I had everything in there. My schedule, it synchronized with my PC. It was amazing, man. So that—my car phone that was literally bolted into my car, and the reason why—so the firm had a policy: only partners got car phones, right? Only certain partners got car phones. I was a kid. I wasn't even a partner at the time. And they said, "Jim, we've got to give you a car phone because you know about all this technology that we're putting in. If something happens with the technology, we need to be able to reach you in case you're in your car." So I was one of the few non-partners that actually got a car phone mounted in my car. It was crazy. So that—I mean, then seeing the migration of early spreadsheet days, right? It was WYSIWYG. It was Symphony. It was, you know, stuff like that. Now today we're all on Excel—going from Symphony to Lotus to, you know, the whole progression and looking how that type of technology totally rocked our profession. I remember coming into my firm, right—we do depreciation schedules, right? We depreciate assets, and accountants would take this thirteen-column paper. It was all rolled up and taped together. Every year they would add thirteen more columns, right? And so I started—you know, I said, "You know what? Why don't we put this on Lotus?" They're like, "Wow, what a concept. Let's put that on Lotus." And I remember spreading all this stuff out. It was crazy, man. So huge revelations as a result of technology in our profession.

(Joel Beasley at 00:10:36) So what services did you offer right at the beginning of those thirty-five years, and then what are the most popular services you offer today?

(James (Jim) at 00:10:45) Yeah. So thirty-five years ago, I was doing a lot of bookkeeping. Clients didn't have—like today they have QuickBooks Online. You got all these products, right? They didn't have that. They didn't exist because PCs didn't exist like they exist today, right? So that was an accountant's primary role. I'd go out, I'd drag a—I had this Compaq in a box, this Compaq computer in a box. I'd drag it out, set it up at the client's. Everybody—the clients were super impressed. "Wow, that is like state-of-the-art," this little green screen on it, you know, the flip-down keyboard. And I'd carry this massive dot matrix printer out. I'd set it up, put the paper in that's, you know, has the holes on the side, and I'd generate financial statements for the clients. On-site. They were blown away. So we went from that to the explosion of PCs. And so what happened is clients took back the ownership of their financial statements. They all started to implement accounting systems, right? Things like QuickBooks, and they were priced really low. The problem is they entered a ton of crap in there, and they basically got out what they put in, and they got financial statements that made no sense. So we went from generating the financials to basically helping our clients fix the financials and, you know, make them to the point where they can understand them a little bit better. Now fast forward so many years, now many of our clients have grown up. They've grown into other systems, very intelligent systems. So now we collaborate with our clients with technology. We have an outsourced accounting group that actually takes all of that off the hands of our clients. So today an entrepreneur, what do they want to see? They basically want to see one screen. They don't want to see balance sheets and income statements and cash flows, right? They're like, that's irrelevant to them. They want to know, what's my cash balance? What's out there? What do I owe? What do people owe me, right? Give me charts and graphs and just on one screen let me see everything in a snapshot that I can see my business. Today it's Power BI. It's visualization of data. It's no longer, you know, generating massive amounts of paper to say what you did thirty days ago. It's what am I doing right now, real-time financial metrics. So that is what it has come to today. It's a real-time pulse on a company's financial position. So that's what a lot of our team members are doing—helping our clients, collaborating with our clients, using a lot of collaborative technologies out there to ensure that our entrepreneur clients totally understand all the metrics that are driving their business today.

(Joel Beasley at 00:13:24) Are you going to provide any sort of software services around that, or do you find partners that have these, you know, dashboards? Or how do you do that?

(James (Jim) at 00:13:33) Yeah, so we're very big at finding—look, we're big at finding the best-of-breed technologies that are out there, right? So I travel the globe. I look at best-of-breed technologies. We see a lot of great technologies coming out of the EU or out of the UK. So we bring those, we introduce those technologies to our clients. We partner with those technology companies. They're all collaborative-type technologies. We partner with companies here in the US that have bots, right? They have a process that automatically goes out and grabs all the transactions that we used to key in manually. They then get intelligent over time through machine learning, and they know telephone expense. If you do it enough times, it goes to telephone. They know, you know, the basic stuff like that. So if we can put our—take ourselves out of those manual tasks, let bots do those manual tasks, and put us more in a position of advising our clients on how to interpret financials, that's a better position for us to be in as CPAs today. So leveraging best-of-breed technology to do all the manual tasks, and then really, you know, utilize us as CPAs to do what we went to school for, to do what we've trained for for so long. You know, we didn't train on how to take, for example, how to take numbers off a W-2—you know, you're in tax, W-2—keyed into software to generate a tax return. You know, technology could do that today. Bots can do that step today. Let us try to figure out how do we maximize someone's tax savings? How do we create the biggest refund by taking advantage of all the tax rules that are out there today? Not where to take this data, where to put it into this input screen to press a button to generate a tax return. Getting more intelligent today.

(Joel Beasley at 00:15:14) It's really smart, especially with your foot in the door as CPA or accounting, and then you can offer other consulting services and sort of expand that relationship and maximize the customer value. That's a really smart move.

(James (Jim) at 00:15:27) Yeah. So I'll tell you, to that point, I'm a traditional CPA. My license—I even had it on my license years ago before. So I'm from Jersey, right? If we drive around with license plates like that with CPA, we get razzed. Right? I mean, we're like, hey, you're a CPA going down the highway. So now I just have it as a memory of my first car after I got my CPA license, my license plate. But, you know, we do all these audits and we do all these tax returns. So we started asking our clients, you know, what else could we be doing for you if you knew that we provided those services? Right? So all kinds of things started to pop up and we weren't in before. Cybersecurity was probably the lowest hanging fruit. You know, Jim, if you touch cybersecurity, we'd love to see you help us with some of our cybersecurity needs. Whether it's assisting with incidents response, whether it's training, whether it's pen testing, whatever it may be. So that literally gave us an opportunity to go out and acquire a cybersecurity company. We brought it in, and today, we branded as Withum Cyber, and it is one of the fastest growing verticals in my world today, our cybersecurity consulting group.

(Joel Beasley at 00:16:39) That is really cool. Is that the only type of, like, acquisitions that you've done to grow?

(James (Jim) at 00:16:45) No, man. So we have a philosophy here at Withum. So we believe what's really key to our growth is looking for companies that are out there that are really experts in doing what they do, even outside of accounting and tax. And if it's something that we feel our clients will benefit from, we'll go after it. So our philosophy has been our growth—about 40% of our growth comes through strategic acquisitions like that, and about 60% of our growth comes organically by just treating our clients good, going out there, being thought leaders, speaking at conferences, and people say, hey, I want you to be my CPA. I want you to be my adviser.

(Joel Beasley at 00:17:22) So I'm actually kinda interested in you guys now. So tell me about the size. How many people, dollars? How do you talk about your size?

(James (Jim) at 00:17:31) Yeah. So we talk about size. It's interesting because we are a very big player here in the US. We consider ourselves a regional firm because we started in, let's say, the Northeast. We've quickly expanded to have a national footprint—offices from California to New York and Jersey, north up to Massachusetts, south down to Florida. And so it gave us really the map of the US as our playing ground. We have clients throughout the entire country. Then I mentioned earlier, we're part of an organization called HLB International. That's our international association of firms. I have two roles there. I head up technology and advisory in London. But what that allows us to do, it allows a firm like Withum, who many people may never have heard of Withum—I think sometimes we're the best kept secret—but it allows us to compete with the big four firms that have boots on the ground around the world. So now we have a US presence coast to coast. We have the ability to help our clients if they say, hey, Jim, I wanna do business in Dublin, in London, in Madrid. We have the ability to literally pick the phone up to email our partners in our firms that all apply the same level of standards. We know them extremely well to allow our clients to conduct business globally around the world. So it's amazing what we have the power to do through our network.

(Joel Beasley at 00:18:52) I love it. I love it. But can you just give me an idea of, like, how many employees you guys have?

(James (Jim) at 00:18:56) Yeah. Yeah. No problem. So Withum, we have about 1,900 employees here in the US. We also have an office in Bengaluru, India, which is one of our fastest growing offices today. And we're getting tremendous activity on—you know, as we grow, it's a Withum office. There are people that wear our shirts. You see on branding today, they're all branding the Withum style, the Withum culture. They participate in all of our—so they're our employees. And so we're leveraging resources and labor markets outside of the US to also help us to grow the firm as well because we know we have a global presence. Our clients are spread around the globe, so a huge appreciation for that. Here in the US, we got over 24 offices. I mentioned in multiple states. We have offices that focus on tax. We focus on audit. We focus on all types of advisory activities, whether it's cybersecurity, whether it's issuing SOC audits, SOC 1, SOC 2, SOC 3 audits. We do a lot of transaction advisory work—buy side, sell side, due diligence, quality of earnings type work. We have industry experts doing advisory in auto advisory and health care advisory. We just kicked off on July 1 a law firm advisory—a national law firm advisory group that is going out, helping law firms to really take their firms to the next level, deal with compensation issues, deal with mergers and acquisitions, and deep, deep niches that we help advise our clients, whether it's technology companies, whether it's construction companies, whether it's pharmaceutical. So many experts within the firm that live in that space and only in that space every single day.

(Joel Beasley at 00:20:35) And where do you sit within the company?

(James (Jim) at 00:20:38) Yeah. So where I sit—so you can see on my shirt, it says Withum. It says advisory, tax, and audit. So we changed our tagline a few years ago. You know, we were a traditional firm. Pretty much Withum, traditional CPA firm, doing the audit and tax. We said, you know what? We wanna lead with advisory. So we put it first and foremost. Every place that we go, we lead with advisory. So my role at the firm, we have three managing directors. I'm managing director for advisory. We got the same thing—managing director for audit, managing director for tax. We report right up to the CEO. So my world is everything other than audit and tax. So all those things that I was telling you about earlier that when we ask our clients what else could we be doing for you guys that we're not currently doing, you know, bring it on. What do you want us to do? You want us to do cybersecurity work? You want us to do outsource accounting? You want us to do transaction advisory? Whatever it is, nothing's off limits. Entertaining all offers is the—whatever else we could be doing for you. And you know what? If the people don't exist today at Withum, that's where we go out and we look for companies. We look for individuals. We look at strategic hires to bring those people with that expertise in.

(Joel Beasley at 00:21:47) That's actually really interesting. I like your energy and style. Tell me about the culture. Are people similar to you at Withum? I wanna know.

(James (Jim) at 00:21:55) Yeah. So we have a great culture. I would say, are they similar to me? Do they have a haircut like me? No. Absolutely not. I think I'm like the only one like this, right? So do they have as much energy? I think some people have as much energy, but that's what makes us different. Right? You go around our offices. You know, we look different. We have massive amount of diversity. The super talented people. You walk into most firms, man, it's like all CPAs. Let's say like me, CPA, finance background, accounting grad. You walk in at Withum. We got engineers. We got software developers. We got people that bring so many different backgrounds to the table because what we realize is if we're growing this advisory thing, you know, CPAs may be good at finance and maybe a couple other things, but you know what? You need a lot of different talent to be able to offer these services. So we've actually—we've gone out of the box. We have actually reached out. We have people at Withum today that I call my partners that are not CPAs. And it, I'll tell you, years ago, to become a partner in a CPA firm, you have to be a CPA. You have to go up that CPA track. So, you know, we're setting the example for other firms to follow, I believe. We're setting the example for younger professionals that may not be finance grads to say, you know what? I can come into this CPA firm, and I have the ability to be an owner of this place. I have the ability to be a partner in this firm. So that was unheard of years ago in our profession.

(Joel Beasley at 00:23:23) How does that look? I'm an entrepreneur. I'm a professional. Like, what does a partner look like?

(James (Jim) at 00:23:29) A partner looks just like you, man. So let's suppose you say, you know what? This podcast thing, you know, Jim's talking about, you know, Jim's talking about they're gonna do anything. If my client said, Jim, we want you guys to be in a podcast. We want you guys to do podcast. I'd go out there. I'd research who are the companies, who are the best individuals that have literally been super successful with podcasts. Your name would pop up, obviously. I talked to you and said, Joel, how about heading up a vertical around podcast? Because this is something that our clients wanna see. And so there's no like, hey, what's the partner look like? How do they act? A partner is someone that takes something, they own it, and they take it to the next level in the firm. So I always tell—I coach so many young professionals here at the firm. I often tell young professionals that, look. You wanna differentiate yourself? You wanna be partners someday? I don't care who's in front of you. I don't care this guy's been here thirty years. This guy's been here ten years. This woman's—it doesn't matter. Differentiate yourself, and it will happen for you. Do it, own it, and take it to the next level, whatever it might be.

(Joel Beasley at 00:24:35) How do you systematically or continuously get yourself in front of the next generation of leaders at your company?

(James (Jim) at 00:24:41) Oh, we do it, man. So I go around. I speak at a lot of universities and colleges around the country. I talk about how exciting this profession is because most people think, oh, accounting firm. It's like this. They're advisors, and they don't even—they don't have many personalities. So, you know, I'll go out and talk at a college university. You're a CPA? You do accounting? This is what? Or accountants—like, no. They're all like me, but a lot of them are like me. So we engage. We find out what's on their mind, what drives them. And I'll tell you, our firm is totally different today than it was five years ago, and it's that continuing feed of that next generation that forces us to change. It literally is forcing us to change. And, you know, I look back at the whole pandemic, right? So we've been preaching about remote computing for freaking ever, right? We had Teams and Zoom. And if I told you how few people use that technology when we first bought it, they would just rather meet. They'd rather fly someplace from New York to California, and I was in that mix. I'd fly California for a meeting then fly back on a Red Eye back and be at work the next day. So but it took a pandemic to get my own firm—as I know, it took many companies a pandemic to get everyone to embrace the technology. But I think about it. That next generation that I was talking about, this is how they've done—this is how they communicated. You know, they use these devices. I use it to call people. Go figure that, right? They're using these devices to text people, to FaceTime people, to use video technology to do that. So the pandemic, it really resonated for, let's say, the last generation that maybe this next generation is right about utilizing this technology to make our lives more efficient. I'll give an example. My wife, she goes, Jim, you head up technology at your firm. I go, yeah. She goes, why do you hop on a plane for a lunch meeting in LA? Why don't you use, like, video technology? I'm like, Jody, that's not happening. People wanted me. They wanna get together. Well, you know what? I was dead wrong, man, because the last year and a half, I basically didn't hop on a plane to go to California. I didn't hop on a plane to go to London. I did this. And it, you know what? It worked.

(Joel Beasley at 00:26:48) Yeah. When I first started my company and was raising money and going through that whole process, all the investors were so surprised that, like—they said you don't have any travel expenses. And I said we do all of our meetings over Zoom. And they're like, wait. You meet a client, get a client, and sign a client over Zoom? And I say, yeah. We don't—like, what are you talking about? That's how everybody just wants the result. You want the outcome, right?

(James (Jim) at 00:27:13) Yes. But you know what? Here's the problem, man. So we've all been doing this, us, too long, right? The meetings, the face to face, and we just took it as commonplace. We didn't think out of the box. So even though we've had Zoom—we were using Skype before Skype for Business, before it became Teams. And, you know, we had all of that stuff, but we never leveraged it until we were forced to leverage it. You were leveraging it all along. So that's the thing. It's getting like that next generation being open to that to continue growing the firm. And to me, it's a cultural thing. You know, we, unlike a lot of firms, we force the senior guys out. We have mandatory retirement at age 65. That's actually a really good thing because if I'm a young professional in a firm, I see that the older guys are getting forced out of the firm. That's creating a seat. That's creating an opportunity for me knowing that people aren't gonna, like, stay here forever. I think that's a home run. So that's the other thing that differentiates our culture is opportunities for that next generation are, like, continually being created.

(Joel Beasley at 00:28:19) Yeah. So tell me a little bit about Air4droid. What's that?

(James (Jim) at 00:28:23) So Air4droid. So what we've done—you asked me earlier if we have any, if we have any products or anything like that. I said no because we don't focus on products, right? We don't focus on certain things. So but what we have done within our cybersecurity group, we've come up with different technologies. We've come up with technologies and introduced these technologies to our clients that will benefit them. So Air4droid is just a something that we've branded, something that we've come up with that allows our clients to securely store data. I mean, it's basic stuff. Encrypted drives. We put our logo on it. Our name is first and foremost there with our clients. But it's just an easy way for us to introduce basic concepts around cybersecurity, cyber best practices to our clients. That's all that is.

(Joel Beasley at 00:29:10) Alright. Help me understand this. And so I'm excited to know as a business professional. So you have a CPA client. Maybe you're doing, let's just say, outsource accounting for them. How do you educate the account manager, whoever holds that relationship, to then inquire and then figure out that they need cybersecurity and then hand off cybersecurity? How does that whole expansion process happen?

(James (Jim) at 00:29:34) Wow. I'll tell you, man. That is, like, the challenge of my life. So understand a little bit about accountants, right, CPAs. Accountants love to do checklists, okay? When you do an audit, an auditor goes into a client with a checklist, and they gotta ask lots of freaking questions, you know, to make sure they cover everything, right? So they go in with checklists. So we came up with this concept. Actually, our CEO, Bill, he came up with this concept. I give him credit for this one. Is that Bill said, you know what? How about we give every single auditor a cybersecurity checklist, right?

(James (Jim) at 00:30:07) A two-page basic cybersecurity checklist. So we said, alright, let's come up with two pages of basic stuff. When I say basic stuff, you know, do you use multifactor authentication? Do you force password changes?

(James (Jim) at 00:30:21) So basic stuff like that that everyone should be doing. So there's maybe about 20 questions on this checklist. So what happens is we said, every auditor, you must ask your clients these questions when you're out there on the audit. We forced it on everyone, right?

(James (Jim) at 00:30:36) So you say, how do you get them to do it? Well, one is you have to force them, right? So we forced our professionals in audit to do it. I will tell you, man, about 95% of those checklists that came back, there was a "no" answer someplace on that checklist.

(James (Jim) at 00:30:50) A "no" answer—that is opportunity to get my cyber group in front of the client just to talk about, hey, you don't use multifactor authentication? Let's talk about the importance of technologies out there like Duo and all these other things that help protect passwords, help protect the keys to the kingdom. So I will tell you, 95% of the time, we got our cyber group in front of the client. And what we love to do is we love to go to concept of land and expand.

(James (Jim) at 00:31:18) Right? We love going in. All we gotta do is get me in the door. Just get me in front of the client, the existing client, and I will convince them to trust us on a small little engagement, and then we can end up blowing up the engagement to be a big engagement. So they're like, CPAs, cybersecurity?

(James (Jim) at 00:31:36) We don't know. Give me a chance. Get us in there. Get us in the door. We know a hell of a lot more about cybersecurity than you could possibly imagine.

(James (Jim) at 00:31:43) So that's how we educate our professional staff. We take that concept. Besides, I'm always doing it. I'm always talking to my partners. I'm always talking to my managers, senior managers.

(James (Jim) at 00:31:53) We collaborate with them. I have today about 150 people on my advisory team, and we sprinkle them out throughout the entire firm. We get them to go to the offices. We get them to go have lunch with staff, have dinners with staff. So being that they're around all of our people, all we talk about are all the things we do.

(James (Jim) at 00:32:14) My data scientist down at Bethesda, they talk about visualization of data and doing all kinds of stuff like that. So they're mixing in with my professional staff. So we just keep talking about it, and the more we talk about it, the more they need to understand. They don't need to understand what I do, the specifics of what I do. All they need to understand is how to identify opportunities when a client's looking for that type of service.

(Joel Beasley at 00:32:39) You know, I think you'll be good to answer this type of question here. So let's say that we've got, you know, an engineer or a technology leader that's been doing something for a while and they're kind of getting, you know, maybe a little bored, maybe a little monotonous. How do you keep it fresh if it's getting monotonous within your role in your career?

(James (Jim) at 00:33:00) So how do you keep it fresh? You gotta keep changing, right? You gotta change. You can't—to me, if I did the same thing every freaking day, like, I used to do audit.

(James (Jim) at 00:33:11) I used to do tax. If I was still doing audit every day, I mean, look, a lot of people love doing that stuff. My partners love doing that stuff, and so be it. I gotta keep changing, right? I gotta keep challenging myself. I gotta keep—you're talking about my Twitter. It's like, dude, like, what are you doing with Twitter? It's like you're all over the place.

(James (Jim) at 00:33:25) Yeah, I know, because I gotta keep listening. I gotta keep learning. And to me, life is all about learning every single day. I learn how to do something.

(James (Jim) at 00:33:34) Maybe one day it's learning how to push press kettlebells. The next day, I'm learning how to write code, you know? So you gotta keep challenging yourself with doing so many different things.

(Joel Beasley at 00:33:44) Man, I learned that Turkish get up. That took me days.

(James (Jim) at 00:33:49) There you go. That is tough, man. That is tough.

(Joel Beasley at 00:33:52) That is tough. People should Google that. And I mean—that is tough. My trainer was like, oh, you're one of those smart computer people. And I was like, sure.

(Joel Beasley at 00:34:01) And he's like, you'll probably like to do this because it's difficult and it'll take you a while to learn. And it—right, yeah, right. What other topics do we need to cover? I wanna make sure we get everything. Are you guys hiring? We tend to—just so you know, we tend to do really well at people listening to you, liking your culture, liking your energy, and then wanting to come work for you. Do you have any openings?

(James (Jim) at 00:34:22) Yeah, absolutely. Look, to me, it's more about are we hiring? To me, we're always hiring, right? If the right person comes along that, you know, is expert in their field, that we feel we can collaborate with, that we feel would add tremendous value to our team, I'm open to opportunities all the time. And I always say that. So I never say we're not hiring. I don't think in my entire career we have ever said point blank we are not hiring.

(James (Jim) at 00:34:50) Every single year, we have a new class of hires. We go out to the universities. We go out to the colleges. We call it our Empower class. And the Empower class used to be just a bunch of accounting grads that would focus on accounting attacks. Today, technology people, programmers, cybersecurity experts, every area—data scientists, people that understand robotics, RPA, AI, man.

(James (Jim) at 00:35:15) They're all—I'm looking for all of that talent today because that is what's gonna drive our profession. It's not what, you know, the partners before me, the revenue streams that drove them, which was accounting and tax, it's going to be, I'm convinced, all the stuff that we're doing today. And technology is the driving force behind that. So to me, the more technologists that I can surround myself with, the better, man.

(Joel Beasley at 00:35:41) That's interesting. I'm curious to know. I had a banker approach me that had listened to the podcast and through one of the people—he did some research for one of the companies that was on the podcast, so he listened to the episode. And then he reached out to me and he asked if we've ever done work with investor relations firms, like IR firms.

(Joel Beasley at 00:36:02) And I was like, well, why? He goes, well, often when I'm doing research, the reason why I'm doing research is because they're going on a big raise or they're going through an acquisition. And so I tend to interact with a lot of these companies that are at the moment of needing large media coverage. And so he was trying to figure out if there was a business model over here. And I was curious because you guys do advisory on companies that are going to grow and sell off, do you partner with any investor relations companies that say, hey, this customer is actually gonna be going through a capital raise, and so they're gonna need lots of publicity?

(James (Jim) at 00:36:38) Oh, absolutely. And, you know, it's more than just publicity. It's all those other things. So yes. So when we're helping our clients down the path towards a capital raise, towards a round, whatever round it may be, we try to surround them with others.

(James (Jim) at 00:36:53) So I'll work with the other entrepreneurial clients that already had their A rounds, their B rounds, their—you know, and have had their total exits. And, you know, who have they partnered with? Who have they found that have been able to take them to the next level, and what has been important to them? Has it been press? Has it been publicity?

(James (Jim) at 00:37:10) Has it been dealing with other issues and, you know, strategic acquisitions of companies? What have they done? So I love nothing more than taking entrepreneurs that, you know, we've helped down a path that are seasoned entrepreneurs, right? Put them in front of younger entrepreneurs or guys that are just about ready to do their first round, guys that are in their first venture.

(James (Jim) at 00:37:32) And I'll tell you, man, they learn so much by being around those other individuals. It's priceless stuff. And they really like us because what do we do? We facilitated it. We brought it together.

(James (Jim) at 00:37:43) We knew them. We helped them down this path, and so they thank us for being able to surround themselves with the right people, the right teams.

(Joel Beasley at 00:37:50) Relationships are everything. It's a recurring theme. Tell me about how do you maintain your relationships? What do you expect? How do you go about that?

(Joel Beasley at 00:37:59) Do you have time in your calendar to specifically set aside?

(James (Jim) at 00:38:03) Always. Always, man. Always. So you're right. Relationships, number one priority.

(James (Jim) at 00:38:08) I could probably tell you, I have a boatload of revenue that I generate on an annual basis, and I could literally trace it back to relationships that I started to develop 30 years ago, 35 years ago when I was this little skinny kid out of school that just started with the firm, right? That I knew nobody. I didn't have any clients. I couldn't bring in business.

(James (Jim) at 00:38:32) I started talking to people, and some of those people that I met 30-plus years ago that could do nothing for me then—they knew I could do nothing for them—but it was about the relationships we developed. I'll tell you today, some of them are my best sources of business today. They love it. I have clients that bring me around to every single venture they do. Every single company they go into, they said, hold, hands down, I'm not going in unless I can bring Jim from Withum into the relationship because they know audit, they know tax, they know advisory. I leverage the knowledge that they bring to the table. So it's about meeting people, man.

(James (Jim) at 00:39:12) In fact, earlier today, I had a call with one of our young staff, and she said to me—her name is Connor—and Connor said to me, you know, what can I be doing to develop the relationships? She goes, I don't really know anybody right now. I said, look, think about this. Some of my best clients come from existing clients.

(James (Jim) at 00:39:24) The one thing that we have the ability to do is respond quickly to our clients. The client texts you. The client emails you. You know what? Respond quickly.

(James (Jim) at 00:39:33) Be there for them. Be out there because you never know if they're gonna appreciate that instantaneous type of response. That's how it's just treating people the right way. Because quite frankly, you know, our clients aren't at Withum because we're a firm. No.

(James (Jim) at 00:39:47) They're at Withum because of the people that run their account at Withum. And if they trust them, if they appreciate them, and if we're always there for them, that's the reason why they stay at Withum as clients.

(Joel Beasley at 00:39:58) That's something I'm learning. So I'm younger. I'm 33, but I've been, you know, building companies or attempting to since, yeah, like, age 13. And one of the things that I've found as I've progressed over these past 20 years is, you know, it's not about necessarily, you know, age, experience—that is a component.

(Joel Beasley at 00:40:16) But something I didn't see that's becoming real to me now is this network I've accumulated. So I have so many engineering relationships. So if I needed it, I know exactly the two or three people I'm gonna call. They're gonna get it right. They're gonna get it the first time. We're gonna, you know, walk hip hip, join together, stepping together, and it'll be quick and easy and simple, and we'll just knock it out. And then—

(James (Jim) at 00:40:41) It's about that, man. It's about leveraging all of those people that you met. Two weeks ago, I was in Chicago, right? I know a ton of people in Chicago. I reached out to one of my friends that I've known. Hey, what is the best deep-dish pan pizza place in Chicago? I wanna take my son there. We wanna do it. I mean, basic stuff like that, but also tremendous amount of opportunities to grow business by meeting people, man.

(James (Jim) at 00:41:05) Absolutely.

(Joel Beasley at 00:41:06) Okay. So I wanna make sure that we hit all the points. We talked about recruiting. We talked about the services. Was there anything else that we didn't get to that we wanna get to today?

(James (Jim) at 00:41:16) No. I mean, I think it's like when you think of a CPA firm, you gotta think beyond—you know, with them, you can't just think audit. You can't just think tax. You gotta think about what else could we be doing for you, and we are open for business. We are open to suggestions.

(James (Jim) at 00:41:31) We are our client's trusted adviser. That's how I go out in the market. I'm your trusted adviser. Trust me to take you down the path, whatever it may be. Trust me with technology implementations, if you have technology struggles, if you're deep diving on data and you just don't understand the stories that are embedded in the data, well, you know what?

(James (Jim) at 00:41:52) Get us involved. We'll visualize that data, make sense of it, and help you to understand better how your operations are doing. So there's so many different areas that we are touching. Even, you know, something as simple as a SOC 2 audit. A SOC 2 audit—technology companies are continually getting SOC 2 audits, right? That's a space that we own. We know that space, I'll tell you, better than any firm that's out there in the space. We're CPAs. We're exercising best practices in the SOC 2 space.

(James (Jim) at 00:42:20) So, again, so many different things that we do today besides traditional audit and tax work.

(Joel Beasley at 00:42:27) I love it. And then one question we did have in our prep meeting was for—how do you say this? Is it Elevaco or—how do you say this nonprofit you're a part of?

(James (Jim) at 00:42:37) So it's Elevaco. Elevaco. So Elevaco is a company—is a nonprofit that started in Australia, right? So it started in Australia, and so it's run by female entrepreneurs that said, you know what?

(James (Jim) at 00:42:51) We wanna differentiate. So I sit on the board of Elevaco, and they brought their nonprofit over to the US. They said, you know what? Women-owned businesses were struggling for basic stuff like financing and capital and equity. And they said, how can we differentiate female-owned businesses from other businesses out there?

(James (Jim) at 00:43:15) Let's form a group. Let's focus on the interest. Let's find out other, let's say, female-owned bankers, equity groups that have an understanding of what makes these businesses tick. And I'll tell you, they're able to take their businesses to the next level. They're not distracted by—you know, it's like, you know, male versus female.

(James (Jim) at 00:43:35) Issues that may distract the male are not issues that distract the female in growing a business. So it's very focused on female-owned businesses and entrepreneurs. So I sit on the board. I help to guide them. I help plug them into the right sources from equity to capital and things like that.

(James (Jim) at 00:43:51) So it's spreading the word throughout. They have location here in New York, and they also have location in San Francisco to help educate members of the group about what differentiates a female-owned business from other businesses out there. And they focus almost entirely on the tech space.

(Joel Beasley at 00:44:07) I love it. One of my first business mentors is Debbie Summers. She owns one of the large furniture rental companies out in Las Vegas for when they do conventions. And she knew my parents for, you know, 30-plus years, and so she was really close to our family, but she was one of my early inspirations for going into business.

(James (Jim) at 00:44:26) So, yeah, I'll tell you. So one of my great experiences, one of our meetings, I actually met Siri, right? I met the Australian Siri. So I'm literally in the meeting, and you hear Siri, you hear Siri talking. Siri is a real person, man. It's just—and I'm like, oh my god, you're Siri. So she literally sits on a board.

(James (Jim) at 00:44:47) She goes around. She—I mean, she's female-owned business entrepreneur, right? She's the Australian version of Siri, man. You put on Siri, you turn it to Australia, and it's like, oh my god.

(James (Jim) at 00:44:57) It's crazy.

(Joel Beasley at 00:44:59) That is such a cool story. All right, so what's the call to action? How do we get people to actually reach out to Witham?

(James (Jim) at 00:45:06) So they can reach out to Witham anyway. I mean, we're open. You can find us on the internet at www.witham.com, right? So whether individuals are looking for opportunities for employment, don't have to be a CPA, don't have to be a finance major. If you bring talent, skill sets to the table, technology, anything, engineers, we're open for business. We're always looking for opportunities and ways to service our clients that we haven't before. If you're a company out there that you're totally dissatisfied with the type of service, if you're with a traditional firm, I'd say, you know what? Look beyond your traditional CPA firm.

(James (Jim) at 00:45:42) Does your firm offer all types of advisory services? When was the last time your CPA said to you, what else could we be doing for you besides the audit and tax? Too many, all too often, CPAs are too embedded and they live in that space. And to me, I think they're doing a disservice for their clients, right?

(James (Jim) at 00:46:00) To me, I take a back step, sit down with our clients, have lunch with our clients, have dinner with our clients. What else could we be doing for you? So that's what I would say. If your CPA is not going above and beyond, just doing the traditional stuff, time for a new CPA, man.

(Joel Beasley at 00:46:16) Thank you so much for listening. And if you found this episode useful, please share it with a friend or colleague who you think would get value from it. And if you have topics that you'd like to hear discussed on the podcast, either add me on LinkedIn or send me an email, [email protected]. Every time I get an email or LinkedIn message, it absolutely makes my day and inspires me to keep going.