The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – Roger Knecht, President of Universal Accounting Center On Making Accountants Better & Entreprenuers More Successful

Episode Date: June 22, 2023

Roger Knecht, President of Universal Accounting Center On Making Accountants Better & Entreprenuers More Successful Universalaccounting.com Since 1979, Universal Accounting Center has helped accounting professionals build the premier accounting firm in their area. Universal provides in-depth instruction on how to optimize profit at your firm, as well as tools to offer CFO advisory services that can take your business to new heights.

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There you go. There's going to be a test show. Should we do a test show like in December 31st? We're going to be like, what did you learn this year, boys and girls? It's like South Park. Anyway, we have an amazing gentleman on the show. He's written multiple books. And he's got an incredible experiential resume that we're going to get into,

and it's going to help you run your business better and do everything better when it comes down to it, at least in the accounting field, for that matter. Robert Kinect is on the show with us today. He is the president of Universal Accounting Center, a post-secondary school for accounting professionals. With over 20 years of marketing sales and HR operations experience, he has helped thousands of business owners work on their business to increase revenue, improve profits, and build value. His strong work ethic and collaborative style delivers reliable, quality results for business owners rogers

podcast building the premier accounting firm that was our second choice when we made the chris fosh show uh keeps uh accounting professionals on the cutting edge of the industry offering quality bookkeeping accounting and tax services he hosts discussions with some of the accounting world's best minds and shares actual insights for firms. He's the author of Your Strategic Accountant and Your Profit and Growth Expert, each written to help business owners understand what they can expect from the accounting profession. Universal Accounting provides accounting professionals with the training,

certifications, and coaching and support they need to become profit growth experts for their clients. So there you go. Welcome to the show, Roger. How are you? Excellent, Chris. It's an honor to be here. I appreciate this.

It's an honor to have you as well. Give us your dot coms, wherever you want people to find you on the interwebs, please. Universalaccounting.com. There you go. So give us an overview of, you you know i kind of teased a little bit of this out but give us an overview of of uh the the 30,000 overview of everything you do there oh certainly yeah so back in 1979 we started as an accounting school helping individuals address the needs of small business accounting uh type situations small businesses themselves and over

the years we've developed ourselves to be very profound in the bookkeeping accounting tax training space. We're basically helping individuals start and build successful accounting businesses, offering what we refer to as the premier accounting services. And in doing so, they're taking care of the small and medium sized businesses in our economy. And at that same time, they're doing so with a great deal of confidence because of the training and support we provide them. So I was watching a TikTok the other day, and this guy basically said,

you know, he's interviewing an entrepreneur, and he goes, hey, man, what are your numbers on your business? What's your profit? What's your loss? You know, what does it cost for you to do your business? And yada, yada, yada. The guy's like, I don't know.

I don't know what my numbers are. Like, seriously. And the financial advisor goes, wait, you've been in business for like a year or two, and you don't know your numbers? Like, you don't know what you're making? You don't even know if you're making a profit? So this seems like a dumb question to ask you, but I'm going to lay a foundation for the layman out there.

Why isn't accounting important to running a business? Well, I'm going to put it in a few perspectives. One, obviously, Uncle Sam in the United States expects us to do an accounting of our business because it would like us to determine our tax liability. So there's your easy answer as to why accounting is so essential, but that's not why we do business. That's not why the business owner does it. That's why Uncle Sam wants us to do it. What we want to do is look at return on investment. We want to know what the cashflow of the company is. We want to know if we're spending money, are we making money? And at the end of the day, the business owner, the one that really cares, they're building an asset that ultimately they can sell at some point for some net gain.

And so that's what we're trying to do here. And as an accounting profession, we're trying to help the business communicate to the business owner. Accounting is the language of business. It's trying to communicate. It's trying to tell us things. I like this. Do that more. Stop doing that. I hate that. And as it's communicating this information, the accounting professional is the interpreter. We're translating that information into useful information that the business owner can use to make well-informed business decisions for that stewardship they have over the company. I love that analogy you just used. That's like we're putting that on TikTok. The whole thing about how the business is communicating.

You know, my business is always trying to communicate with me, but I block their calls. And that probably might have been part of the problem. So, and their emails too. I was like, why is this person stalking me? And they're like, we're trying to help you do better in business. So tell us a little bit about your company there, what you guys do and how you do it and develop it.

Well, we're a post-secondary school for accounting professionals. So the way I would actually define it is we're trying to empower the accounting professional to have a voice with their clients that as they find employment or work with businesses, they actually have information that they can take and provide to these clients so that they can run their businesses more efficiently. Too often I work with accounting professionals that believe that what they do is I speak only when spoken to. So I will give information as it's asked of me, but they don't volunteer and provide a lot of perspectives and insights that they learn. And they just don't have that voice. So at Universal Accounting, we're trying to empower them to really take a proactive stance with the business context they have.

There you go. You know, I had that issue with different accountants that we interview over the years or try and work with over the years is they would just you know just want to take the books and you know type in on the numbers and we're like hey how much can we save some money on taxes somehow the deductions what can we do here i don't know uh you know and i mean i'm there's and then we found good ones that they knew what the hell they were doing when you say you're a secondary is that mean uh you guys aren't like a college uh you know, there's college for learning financing. Can anyone go to your school, maybe say like I, like I kind of know accounting, but I don't really know accounting. I never went to college for accounting.

So can I go to your school and if I decide I want to be an accountant or maybe a tax professional and learn there? Yeah, so post-secondary is meant to mean that it's after college. So we have a lot of people that are, say, 35 to 55 or older of really getting into the accounting profession. They would just like to understand accounting at a basic level. So we have some courses to help in that. We have about a third of our students, let's call them students. They happen to be people that have 10, 15 years of experience, but also have their degrees. They're literally, you know, four-year, six-year degree accounting professionals, but they want to get out of the corporate world and they want to get into that small business space. And that's a little different and that transition is what we help with. But the last is a group of individuals that are CPAs, enrolled agents. They're eager to really dive into the small business space and own their own

businesses, operate their own companies, and we're helping people start and build successful firms. If I'm someone out there in the audience who's like, you know, you're looking for a career change or, you know, wants to do something different. There's a lot of layoffs going on. Yeah. And, of course, right now is a time where even those who are quote unquote recession, pick your numbers. I think we're just going to talk about it for several years and somewhere it's going to be a soft landing. We just want to know where it is till later. Yeah.

But, you know, this is the time that people start a lot of businesses there's a lot of innovation that happens now even vc start lining up right now after you know they did the same thing in 2008 they were like hey we know that this is where all the great ideas come out of because people people want to have the work they get pretty inventive so uh if i'm someone out there in the audience that I'm like, hey, I was thinking about being an accountant, I kind of like numbers and thinking about doing it. This might be a way to facilitate that. Exactly. This is exactly what they would want to do.

So we help individuals actually transition into the accounting space. We've got a bookkeeping program that's specific to help them really go out and offer quality accounting services really from they're just coming into the profession. You don't need a degree necessarily to start with this. So as you're describing it, you're very much right on. A lot of people during a recession find that they do need to supplement their income and bring in some additional revenue. And to learn accounting, I jokingly say it's the second oldest profession. It's not going anywhere. It's always going to be around. And so what's going to take place is you start to realize that anybody and everybody needs their taxes filed, every business.

In fact, dead people pay taxes. So what we've got to do is just recognize the opportunity and the potential. And if you're willing to embrace that as a career change, we're happy to teach you all the various things that you need to be confident and competent providing those services there you go it's the second oldest profession do they create the second oldest profession of accounting to keep track of the finance of the first profession whatever that we'll leave that joke there you go there you go uh now do you also train like one of the things i used to like to do because uh because uh i don't know how to pull this joke off, but it has to do with multiple books. But do you train business owners on how to do their own accounting and maybe understand how things are working better? Yeah, because we're in that small business space, we have a lot of business owners that, interestingly enough,

they want to be able to communicate with their accounting professionals that are contracted to do the work, but they don't want to do it. But how do I have that conversation? And for those that want to employ, hire people inside, how do I hire someone to do a job that I don't even understand how to do? So there's a familiarity that they're needing and we help them acquire that understanding so that they can at least oversee and manage. They know what to ask for and expect.

And so we are helping business owners in that space as well. And it's so important. Like I said, I saw this, I saw this guy on TikTok who's a financial advisor asking a business owner, you know, what are your numbers? And I've done that before with people. I've said, so, you know, what are your numbers? We used to offer to loan money and take over companies and keep them from going into bankruptcy.

And, you know, I'd sit down with people and be like, so what are your numbers? And they have no idea. Like, I don't know what you know something costed me you're like well this is the reason we're having this discussion and so number these the numbers are so important and i remember you know sitting down to my uh numbers my accounting and understand what was going on revenue wise which which different departments were doing what, what stuff was costing, you know, really helps you problem solve. You know, there are times where, you know, you build a perfect model and your business is sailing on nicely and you're like, yeah, this is really nice.

And then like market changes happen, product costs happen, product failures happen, different, you know, mechanisms in the, in the whole process of gearing that you have for your business. You know, something goes out of whack and starts, you know, I've had stuff where everything's working fine one day and then all of a sudden some sort of mechanism or system started bleeding like tons of money. And you're like, if we don't fix this leak, we're going to sink the boat. And we're, you know, we're all running around trying to figure out how to, how to plug the

hole. And this is really important because you can't just wait until you're sitting in front of bankruptcy court to go, maybe we should have fixed a few of these things. Oh, yeah. So one of the things that I think would be very relevant today is inflation. You've got a lot of companies out there that work on very small margins. And so as the economy changes, the cost of goods goes up. It becomes more and more expensive for them to provide that product or service. And so they're having to figure out how do we adapt our deliverables so that we can actually meet the needs of our customers and do so affordably, profitably. And what we're doing here as

accounting professionals is we're giving the information to say, look, cost of goods have increased over the last six months, this percent. You either need to cut expenses or more importantly, raise your prices to offset that. Otherwise, your margins are shrinking. You're going to have less money in the bank. You're not going to be able to make payroll. You're not going to be able to pay your vendors. And that's where that crunch starts to come in and that's cashflow. And so, yeah, you've got a lot of these variables that are in place. And when you were talking about numbers a moment ago, there are very important principles that small business owners need to understand as they relate to key performance indicators, numbers they should be watching there. also what is called dashboarding,

and then lastly, leading and lagging indicators. These are numbers that precede the accounting, but they're very much telltale signs of whether or not you're going to have profit or money in the bank. Yeah, and we've seen that with recent COVID and supply chain issues where costs have gone through the roof.

And sometimes you have to sit and go, do we pass this along to the consumer? How's this going to work? You know, and there's all sorts of, I mean, with globalization, international supply chains, there's all sorts of things that we find out there in the wheels that you're just like, wow, we didn't see that one coming. Of course, no one saw COVID coming. So that's it.

You know, Matthew's chiming in here, one of our audience members, it's important to find an accountant you can speak with. And it's probably important to be able to speak accountant speak. Like one of the things I learned as a business owner was what was going on with my accountant and my accounting so that I could understand what he was doing and what it meant and what the numbers were. And, and also to work with them at how we could do things better. You know, how can we get, you know, have tax deductions, what sort of loopholes there are for taxes, you know, whatever. There's millions of, of, of deductions, different things you can do with the IRS. You know, you, you want to try and take advantage of all that stuff. And so, you know, trying to find a good accountant that can, you know, you want a guy

who's going to be savvy. You don't want a guy who's going to get you in jail. Like I think there was an actor years ago, I can't remember his name. He was in a blade movie, I think. And, you know, he had some accountants. I don't know if they're official accounts, but, you know, they're like, Hey, this is some ways to cheat the IRS. And then, you know, he went to jail. So you don't want those accounts. But how important is it to find an accountant that can balance you and keep you out of jail, but also get you some good deductions? Of course. Yeah. It's basically going back to that thing I was describing earlier, being that translator interpreter. Well, if I'm taking something that's in Spanish and I'm

translating it to you in French, but you speak English, I mean, what use does it do? So I've got to provide a medium by which I can communicate to you the numbers in a way that you find them helpful and useful. Some people are visual and they want graphs and bars and charts and they want that information in a visual context. Others, they want data. They want to see the information

and they want to be able to look at it. Others, they're just looking for bottom line, just top tier numbers. You know, did I make money? Did I have a profit? Is there money in the bank? You need to understand what the client is expecting and in that conversation, meet their needs. And the thing I would actually add to this is there is a course that we offer called Color Accounting that is intended to actually help the non-accountant understand accounting in a non-accounting way, which is forget the debits,

the credits, the vocabulary, just what's going on with the concepts of accounting. What are we trying to accomplish as an accounting model? And many business owners that basically don't have an accounting background love it because they want to stay in their wheelhouse. They're great at business. They don't want to learn accounting, but this is great little bridge for that. It's also used quite often in management roles because obviously managers in variety of levels, they're running the company, but they're not necessarily accounting professionals, but they do ultimately need to know those numbers.

And this is that transition. And we put our accountants through that same course so as to make their conversation a little bit more layman, a little bit more understandable, a little bit more simplistic so that the information isn't overwhelming or intimidating. What we're trying to do is exactly like your comment was earlier. We're trying to help the communication flow between the business owner and the accounting

professional so that the information is useful. Yeah. Cause I, you know, sometimes I, and I'm an old dude. I mean, I was 11 when your company started. But sometimes, you know, dealing with people who do numbers, they're not that, you know, they're not that good at the, you know, they're good at the technical talk and speaking, as you mentioned, the language. But sometimes, you know, getting the, okay, what does that mean to me exactly? But it makes all the difference in the world. I can tell you you just knowing what uh tell my audience what what uh my numbers are in my business uh let's get to some of your books i know that i see some here that are offered on your website i think these can all exclusively be gotten through

your website correct all right let's start with uh red to black or from red to black i think it's called um uh what was this book uh a cover and what's it about and how people get these books too by the way are they free do you need to buy them very simple you can go to universalaccounting.com and on the navigation it actually says free resources and the free resources are the books uh you can get them in an ebook fashion or the hard copy if you didn't be interested uh the book itself and I'm just going to be very simplistic, in the accounting terms, being in the red is meant to mean that you're in the deficit, you're not making money. In the black is to imply that you're making money. So this is meant to

represent that you're going from being at a loss to being positive. And that's what we're trying to do with this book. And it's literally a how-tos guide for accounting professionals to help their clients move from a cash negative situation to a cash positive situation. And this how-to guide is literally something that I've given to business owners to say, here, take this to your accountant and use this over the next 30 to 90 days to take your company and turn around that cashflow situation that you're experiencing. And it is literally just that a how-to guide. For the accounting professional, it's basically the step-by-step process you'd take to your clients. There you go. It's, it's important to know where you bleed out because, you know,

if the other thing about knowing your numbers is if you know your numbers, you know, where you start bleeding out, you're like, Hey, that number just went through the roof. Like what the hell and why? And, uh, we got to fix that fix that thing you know it just leaks in the boat if you will uh your book in the black um nine principles to make your business profitable let's get a tease out for that please you bet this is essentially i'm going to be very bold here it is the new edition of what i would refer to michael gerber's e-myth book i'm going to be so bold as to say this is the 2023 Small Business Guide to Being Successful in Business. It is a compliment to that book. I think a lot of the principles

have been updated as we see them and how they apply to small businesses today. And literally, it's nine principles to make your business profitable. So once you've moved from being in the red to now being in the black, how do you stay there? And these nine principles focus on short-term, mid-term, and long-term goals, objectives that every business owner needs to be considering as they're running their company. And it literally goes through who, what, why, where, and it's a step-by-step process for every business owner to literally empower them to work on their business. There you go.

Short-term marketing, mid, long-term marketing, accounting, production, all the different things that are there, uh, really important. I mean, it,

it used to be amazing to me. We used to do, we used to do a thing when we were successful. We had a little empire of companies. Um, we would offer, uh, in the paper is how old I am.

We were all brick and mortar back then. Uh, they were, they were just discovering the internet. And we would offer to loan out money to companies that were struggling or needed money or going out of business, etc. And so they would send us all their stuff, which is really funny

because you normally would ask business people for their P&Ls and their books. And they'd be like, yeah, you're a funny guy. And I would go interview them. We we give them first right of fusils uh to buy them out uh we give them offers you know many times we could roll them into our companies and it would be a asset acquisition you know they were cash they're acid rich cash poor sort of situations but it was it was stunning to me how many people I would talk to that didn't have any clue what they were doing. Like, you know, and I would go and I'd be like, Oh, your mom works here

and your family works here. Okay. That's, that might be one reason why you're losing money. And, you know, you, you know, fortunately I can look over a balance sheet and a P and L and start, you know, figuring out where the bleed out is nine times out of 10, it was the guy, you know, or the gal. And so I'd have to say to them, look, we're going to buy your business out and take it over, but you're broke. You're three months, four months, six months from bankruptcy. You're bleeding out hard. I'm going to have to come in. We're going to have to bring in capital. We're going to give you a little bit of walking money, but the family can't stay here. You can't

stay here. Y'all gotall gotta go and it's because they didn't understand the basic principles like you mentioned here the nine principles of a profitable business like some people some a lot of times they just had some money like they just had like i don't know 100 i've seen 200 grand laying around and they just burn through it in like six months to a year and and they they don't they don't uh they don And they just don't get it. It just doesn't ever hit. And it's always funny. They stick with the same model through the whole thing.

And sometimes they just be like, no, if you see value in it, I'm going to stick it out. I'm like, don't call me, Dave, we before bankruptcy. Don't call me. Here's the first right of refusal. Call me when you're ready, but it needs to be really soon because you got to get saved. And son of a a gun they would just still drive that model right into the ground man they would just they just keep on doing whatever they're doing and then they call

me week before bankruptcy of course yeah so these these principles are important to know yeah one of the things that we emphasize in the book in the black is what we refer to as the universal business model and it's got an element called mapping the business. And it's really helping the business owner who's wearing so many hats, all these different responsibilities, and help them organize and prioritize what is it that needs to be done now. And it's regarding growing the business, marketing and selling. It's the numbers, understanding what numbers they need to be looking at in the business and paying attention to what is going to drive the success of the business. And then the production, actually fulfilling those client or customer orders that you've got efficiently and profitably.

And if you can take all the things that are going on in the company and organize them and then prioritize them and when possible, delegate them, all of a sudden you start to create a system that's workable, that can actually be financially profitable. And that's what we're talking about in the book. Definitely. I mean, it makes all the difference. The next book that you have on deck is, let's see, we try and get that up, pulled up your strategic accountant. What every business owner should expect from their accountant. I love this because like I said, sometimes I have an accountant and I'm like, what should we do? And they're like, I don't know.

Yep. So this book was specifically written by me because of the interactions I've had with business owners doing business coaching for a number of years. I found that they either didn't know what to ask and therefore they didn't ask or they were intimidated. And one of the things that I wanted to do is educate the business owner in a very simplistic way to understand what they should expect from their accounting professional. And really what I'm trying to do is help educate them so that they can hold to task the accounting professional that

they're paying. You're paying for the service. You're actually paying for a certain level of performance. And so often I find that the accounting professionals lack to deliver and in failing to do so they're being paid for work that they're not performing. And at the same time, I wrote the book so as to raise the bar of the accounting profession as to what should be going on as we work with our clients. And so I'm very proud of this book. I think it's something that every business owner should read. And in doing so, they'll learn what they should be asking of their accounting professional and get what they're paying for. There you go. You know, I hear this misnomer and I think there's some basic smartness in it that you

don't need to know everything that's going in your business. You can just hire people to do it, but you really kind of need to know what's going on in your business. You need to be a jack of all trades. You need to understand, I mean, especially the accounting part. I mean, if you don't understand the numbers, you know, it doesn't matter how nice you are to your employees, you pat them on the back and give them bonuses. And, and, uh, I don't know, you make sure that that sign out front looks really fricking good. And your, your business cards, uh, I don't know,

it looks great, you know, whatever, uh, knowing what your numbers are is like everything because it matters whether you're making a profit, whether're losing money i i distinctly remember having interviews with accountants that were you just feel like hey can i do this hey can i do that well i don't know i have to go look it up you know and and what can i do is there a way we can get around this how can i how can i do this better how can i lower our exposure here to this that or the other and uh they're just like i don't know i just i just put the numbers in the computer. And so that's really important. I'm glad you're raising the bar on that.

Well, one story I'd like to add here is there was a conversation that I was overhearing. It was a panel discussion. I was in the audience. And they were talking about a congressional committee that was discussing business. And it was regarding the economy. And it was fascinating to learn that there were individuals that were sitting up on the stand who are congressmen and women, and they were struggling to understand how a business could be profitable, but not have money.

So here we are, it's kind of the difference between accrual accounting and cash accounting. And it's this idea that business owners were running businesses that are profitable, but we just don't have the money to pay the bills. How is that possible? Why is that happening? And what we're trying to do is really educate business owners and accounting professionals on how to avoid this situation, which is the most common thing that business owners struggle with and leads to many business failings. If we can just address that, we can further improve our economy. There you go. Your next book, Your Profit and Growth Expert, What Every Business Owner Should Know to Keep the Money You Make. I mean, that's a real important

point when it comes to taxation, write-offs, deductions, all sorts of stuff that you can take advantage of in today's world. Making sure that you keep the money you're making so that you can use it to fund more revenue growth, profit, business growth, et cetera, et cetera. Yeah. So one of the things that I think is very important to the accounting profession is for years, we've been told by various people within the industry that we need to be delivering more value to the clients that we serve as more value add. And what's been very difficult for the accounting profession to understand is what does that value add look like? We can provide the financial reports. We can be compliant. We can file the tax returns for our clients. There's a lot of technical stuff

that for generations we've been doing, and it's just about the numbers. But what business owners need today is this very important question answered. Therefore, what? Here's the numbers, here's all the information, therefore what? And so I'm encouraging the accounting profession to embrace opportunities to move into the CFO and advisory space more aggressively, being more of an advisor or coach to their clients. And I feel that as accounting professionals with our access to the numbers, we can easily facilitate this for our clients and give them greater perspectives and understanding of what's going on in the business.

Still letting the business owner run their companies, but being that business coach or advisor that I feel many of us ought to be with the years of experience in accounting that we have. There you go. Proactive more than reactive. Yes. Yeah. I mean, I love the concept of having an accountant coach.

Plus, I needed somebody to yell at me like, you need to quit buying all donuts. It's running at the bill, man. So there you go. In fact, it reminds what's what's that famous scene with the wolf of wall street where uh uh oh the the gentleman from uh the archie bunker show comes in the dad he's yelling about the expenses do you remember that scene i don't actually it's a funny scene but you know they paid like thirty30,000 for some dinner, and he's freaking out about what it costs.

But you need an account like that to go, what's going on? Why are we spending $30,000 on everything? So with your accounting center firm and schooling people, are all the courses the same length? What are some of the different lengths and time that it takes to invest to learn this stuff? Great question. Some of our curriculum is literally less than a day.

I mean, it's an hour. We have one course that's an hour. We have another that's four hours. We have another that's eight hours. So not much on those ends. We have most of our curriculum that are programs running between four to six weeks. That's how they're intended to be completed.

And so most people take a month or two or three to go through the curriculum and that's totally fine. And all we're asking for is probably no more than an hour a day for them to actually go through the curriculum. And so replacing that hour binge on Netflix with this can be a lot more educational and beneficial, especially when running a business

or offering these quality services. So it's through that that we offer the training, but also provide certifications. Being a post-secondary school, we're able to test and certify individuals to have certain skill sets. And then lastly, we do actually offer with all of our programs support. So as you're learning the curriculum, any questions you have, tutoring, that's available. And then real world experience for the business owners, the accounting professionals, as they're actually trying to apply these principles in their lives, they can actually reach out to us and speak with the various coaches that they have access to, to really find out what's the real-world application

of the principles they've been taught. There you go. Now, do people have to fly out there, or can they do this over the internet? It's all online. We used to, this is years ago, we used to have 22 campuses around the United States. Now everything is online. Everything is done remotely. You can do it at your own pace. The beauty of it is, is it's both video instruction with reading, also assignments and applications, testing. And so all of the components that you would expect to really build your confidence in

the concepts that you're learning. Do you have a course on how to yell at stupid business owners like me who won't listen to their accountant? Actually, yes, I do. I actually do. Because here's the thing, and I'm going to dive into this. The problem is you've got a number of business owners that really are lonely at the top.

We've all heard that phrase, it's lonely at the top. But who is that person that they're going to lean on most? And very often, it's the accounting professional. The accounting professional oftentimes knows more than the spouse, knows more than every employee in the company as to what's going on with the business as it relates to cash, capital, as to its ability to acquire capital. All of those things are going on and whom else does the business owner have to lean on, speak to, and talk through things than the accounting professional. And so, yes, sometimes it really does come down to two elements.

Our ability as accounting professionals asking the right questions and holding our customers and clients accountable. You told me it's important that you take care of this. You told me you'd do it this week. You told me if you didn't take care of this, it's going to cost you another thousand, ten thousand dollars. It's been a week. What did you do?

And tell me that you organized your sock drawer doesn't count yeah quit buying those donuts chris donuts again donuts yeah i mean you can look at me i've had tell me it's at least a maple bar uh yeah yeah usually it's dipped in powdered sugar and uh i don't know and then some coke on top of it whatever i'm getting hungry what's going on with this show? It must be past my food time. So one thing I wanted to ask you, if people are out there and they're looking for a new career, can you help them if they're not CPAs get trained and qualify for CPA? I don't even know what it takes to become an official licensed CPA. I know there's something you have to do with the IRS too, if you want to get official with them or something, I think.

So technically not help them become a CPA. For that, you need a master's degree. And in most states, you also have to work for a CPA under their tutelage. What we do help them become are bookkeepers, accountants, tax preparers. We can help them also find employment. So it doesn't have to be, I want to start a business. We have a phenomenal job placement assistance program. And with that, I actually have, and it's part of the free resources that I mentioned earlier. If you go to universal accounting, free resources,

there's a job placement course there that is for free. It's meant for anyone that you don't have to be an accounting professional to go through this. It helps basically young adults, adults, anybody that's in transition, find the job that they're looking for next. There you go. And, you know, the other thing I want to confirm here for is knowing what's going on with your business financial-wise

is so important between not only what your accounts are doing, but what your partners might be doing. And, you know, one of my companies, you know, I turn it over blindly to my business partner. He's my best friend for 22 years. He's my friend for 13. And I expected that he would run the business like I had and because he could see how I behaved and did things. And one of the most interesting things was, is over 10 years, he started i was sorry a word he started uh budding

up to the vendors okay and the vendors could see that they were friends with them and they're like well this is cost let's send them some bigger invoices bigger bills and suddenly you know i come along and and things are in trouble and i'm like what's going on with the business what's going on you know i never i never looked at the books you know when I should have and I'm like why are we paying five thousand dollars per car we used to pay like 300 oh you know this guy's a friend of mine he wouldn't screw us around I'm like I just went on the internet and I can get it for 500 bucks like what what the hell is going on and turned out all of his vendors he turned into his buddies and as soon as they knew we were his friends and I don't think there was any sort of deal to rip us off he was just it was just chummy and so it was killing uh

what we were doing in our companies and when i went in i pulled us back from the brink of bankruptcy within a week which is a story that's in my book um and it was extraordinary what he was burning money on because he was all friendly you know on he wasn't embezzling the company, but there are times where I've known a lot of people too, because they weren't watching their partners, because they weren't watching the money in the accounting. Their partners were embezzling money out from them and they weren't noticing the bleed out. And, you know, so these are real important things. As a business owner, you just cannot be going, well, I don't know, there's an accountant over there and he does the accountant department stuff. You got to know what the fuck is going on.

Yeah, it's referred to as, I'm going to call it trust and verify. You have to trust because obviously at the end of the day, they are your partner. They are somebody that's been given responsibility. You've definitely given them a good deal of autonomy. So let's trust them. You don't want that trust to be lost and they need to operate in that space of autonomy. So let's trust them. You don't want that trust to be lost and they need to operate in that space of trust, but you have to verify. And in verifying, you have to show an interest in your business. You just can't abdicate it. And I can't stress

enough as a business owner, there's not this I'm done with and why you got to walk away from. You've got capital there. You've got an investment there. You've got an ownership there. And I dare say you still have a liability there because of your name. So you need to actually still show a vested interest in it. And the moment you start to become disinterested, you need to sell that asset. You need to get out of it and move on.

Simply because you're either a positive energy to the company and you're going to energize what's happening in the business or you're going to draw from it. And if're drawing from it get away from it you're not helping anything there you go i my my dad told me once to this guy who had me a lot of money and successful businesses but he's like yeah that guy has like seven accounts i'm like seven accounts what does seven accounts do and he goes the first six are the accountants and then there's the seventh accountant who checks all the other six and i'm like wow that's that's uh that's a lot of people checking numbers but you know it's

important to it's important to have because there's i mean there's so much theft that can happen in business i remember one time i had a employee tramps into my office one time and we were a corporation a c corp we had multiple offices and he goes uh hey i found a way to get uh cool stuff you can take home like what and he goes yeah yeah yeah you can get like if you want to furnish an office at home i found a way to do it i'm like really and he goes uh yeah he goes there's this room the storeroom that's here and they got like uh uh staplers and tape and print stuff and tape you know all this stuff and i'm just sitting there just don't i'm like are we really having this conversation is am i on candy cameras is a bit and he was seriously he'd been stealing from our uh our our room for

stock and stuff for the office and then he'd been telling the employees and i guess he just thought he'd tell it to me and i sat there looking at him as the 51 owner of a corporation and my partner was 49 and i said uh i said do you realize you're stealing from me he goes oh no you're a corporation it's you're not stealing from anyone you know this is some big company back east like we're not a company back east you moron this is my company and he still would not get it like it was the funniest shit in the world it would have been a great movie bit and uh but he'd been stealing from us uh i had another time where we couldn't figure out where we were losing money and are buying the person we put in charge of buying office supplies she just decided that she was going

to order about 20 or 30 thousand dollars worth of shit from our office depot uh credit accounts and uh she literally bought like two years worth of supplies this is back in the old days when you had like those laser printer cartridges that were oh yeah 10 million bucks and shit you know and so we had this inventory of office supplies that, you know, you wouldn't use for another two years. And I'm like, why did the credit card bills go through the roof from Office Depot and, you know, those home office places? And so you've got to know what the hell's going on. Because, you know, you get these idiots that, you know, they'll go spend a bunch of your money one day and you won't figure it out unless you're on top of it. Trust but verify. Yeah, I think one of the things that you're

really indicating there is the fact that some people do feel entitled. And unfortunately, that entitlement causes them to make very poor decisions. And I don't mean to overgeneralize this. But the thing that's really interesting, as you look in the psychology of it all, is once an employee feels that they've been somehow taken advantage of themselves, they then take the disgruntlement and start kind of mooching off the company oftentimes. And what we want to do is definitely try and discourage that. You need happy employees, otherwise they can turn on you. Wait, happy employees? I'm supposed to do that too? Yeah, you do need to do that.

Trust and verify. That's the new tattoo I'm getting, folks, ladies and gentlemen. I probably should have gotten it a million years ago. I probably should have came and seen you guys when I was 11 when you started. Yeah, it's a Reaganism, so I'm not going to take credit for it. I don't know, just steal it. I don't think he's going to call you and bother you.

No, no, no, he's long gone, so that's okay. Let's semi-check. He was asleep for most of the years anyway. I'm just kidding. Ronald Reagan was a half-nice guy, but I'm still waiting for a trickle-down economic check. Anything more you want to tease out on who you guys are and what you do and how you do it? Yeah, let me tease out this. Accounting is an amazing profession.

I think there's a lot of opportunity. Some people just think it's dry simply because it's numbers-based. I really want to kind of encourage people to recognize the creativity that is there. You have creativity in the accounting side, not to the sense of two books and all this other stuff, but the creativity of you can actually find different ways to really help business owners become profitable and really take this dream that they have and help them realize it. The other thing is with taxes, taxes, there's a lot of different creative things that you can do there again, legally and morally. And then lastly, within the

CFO and advisory space, it does give us a chance to really get involved with our clients as accounting professionals and really help them as businesses achieve success like they don't even realize is possible simply because we're able to introduce them to business principles that are tried and proven. And as an accounting profession, I really feel make a monumental difference in the economy, just empowering all these business owners with what they're doing. So I love the accounting profession. I think it's an amazing thing. I think too often it's become dry with a lot of the people just thinking, like I said earlier,

you don't speak unless spoken to, and we want to definitely change that narrative. And each of these books that we were discussing today are intended to accomplish that there you go well i have one question this is a good this is a good question the uh you know you know how you know back in the day you could always i think you can still do it you you if you take a client to a restaurant and you you know you have some food you can write it off right and uh you know suppose, or a portion of it, I think it is, or something like that. I don't remember. You're the counter.

The tax laws have changed, but go on with your story. There you go. Has it really changed that you can't do anymore? Yeah. Well, damn it. Damn it. I should have eaten out more. Clearly, I did, though, already.

You should have just eaten out more. I'm already wearing like 300 pounds or whatever. So, but I just had this idea as we're sitting here talking i'm like i should order like a whole buffet of food on every podcast and then send some to the guests uh and then write that all off because we're eating as we're doing the podcast it could be like that wings podcast where those guys eat the wings where they're doing the podcast but maybe that's not gonna work, you can do things like that. I mean, there are business expenses that you can incur and those business expenses are part of your business model.

So as long as you can justify the uniqueness of what you're doing, obviously you can then, you know, for lack of a better term, write it off. And so what we're trying to suggest here is find things that you find are integral to your business model and things that you like and enjoy and kind of meld them together. And lo and behold, you've got a unique business. There you go. We're turning into a pizza podcast, damn it. Can we get a sponsor for that?

I think we can, actually. This might be a good idea. Well, thank you very much, Roger, for coming on. I really appreciate it. Give us your.com so people can find you on the interwebs. You betcha. It's universalaccounting.com. And it's always, if it's about accounting, it's universal. There you go. If it's accounting, it's universal. The second oldest profession. I

gotta remember that joke. There you go. So thank you, Roger, for coming on. Thanks for our amazing audience for being here. And if you didn't learn anything today, well, you're just dumber for it. I don't know. I'm not going to shame you and be mean, but I just did. Please, know your numbers. I could tell you a million stories about all the different ways that I could have saved a few bucks. I probably could have saved a few million dollars, actually, when it came to a partner. But there's just so many things that can go wrong. And knowing what's going on with your business is really important.

Give us which page they can go to and order up your books and get them for free and find out more. Easy. In the navigation, go to free resources. Right at the top, you're going to find e-books. There you go. Red to black, in the black, nine principles to make your business profitable. I really recommend being in the black.

Your strategic accountant and your profit and growth expert. Thanks so much for tuning in. Go to goodreads.com, 4chesschrisfoss, youtube.com, 4chesschrisfoss, tiktok.com, 4chesschrisfoss1,

and the Chris Foss Show podcast is over there. And then I think I missed one. Did I do LinkedIn, YouTube, Goodreads? For more information on what the show is always doing, go to chrisfoss.info. Oh,

and check out, we're going to have CNN's Jake Tapper on the show next always doing, go to chrisfoss.info. Oh, and check out. We're going to have CNN's Jake Tapper on the show next month. That should be pretty fun. Thanks for tuning in. Be good to each other. Stay safe. And we'll see you guys next time.