Blue Collar Culture

Business Results the Old Fashioned Way

Jason Blumer | Integrators and Visionaries

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Jason Blumer is a CPA. But he and his partner have created more than just a standard accounting firm. 

As “entrepreneurial consultants,” they are passionate about giving business owners the tools and resources they need to grow their companies… while keeping the financials in order.

Along the way, he’s used many of the lessons he learned when growing his own business. A key element: finding the right partner that complemented his strengths – and kept him out of trouble.

Tune in to find out the strategies they’ve created for working together and with their employees, including…

  • The Strategic Calendar Work Blocking technique
  • The importance of having the right partner – who is your “opposite”
  • A unique method to keep your team accountable and productive
  • How a “clarity break” can make your business more profitable
  • And more

Listen now…

Mentioned in this episode:

 

Transcript

Ryan Englin: Hey, welcome back to another episode of the Blue Collar Culture Podcast. And I am here with Jeremy Macliver Say hi, Jeremy.

Jeremy Macliver: Hey, welcome back, everybody.

Ryan: I'm really excited to talk to our guest today. You know, Jason, he loves to dream and loves to play with matches, wears flip flops. I haven't heard him say dude, but he says he says dude a lot. So, we'll see if that comes up today.

Jason Blumer: Dude.

Ryan: He plays rock and roll way too loud, loves to bring clarity to creative people. I know he has a passion for creative people and says right here, he loves Jesus a lot. I resonate with that. So I, you know, just getting to know Jason a little bit, he's been busy a long time in the virtual space. Got a couple of podcasts, definitely an expert in what he does and has such a passion for serving his clients and helping them take their next, their business to the next level. So, I want you to welcome Jason Blumer of Blumer and Associates. He's the CEO over there, they are a CPA firm. And Jason, just welcome. You know, thank you for being on the podcast today.

Jason: Yeah, thank you guys for having me. I love what you guys do and stand for and say, and, you know, the message you put out, you know, to a lot of hard-working people that, you know, entrepreneurship's hard, right? But it can be a joy too and you can make it in this world. So I'm pumped to talk about that.

Ryan: Yeah. So let's just start a little bit with your background, your history, your journey. How did you get here? I heard you got like 15 years of podcasting experience, and I don't even think podcasts have been around that long. So tell us a little bit about that.

Jason’s Background as an Entrepreneur

Jason: Yeah, so tell us the story you told us. You know, so I've run, my partner and I run two different businesses, two online consultancies. And one is a firm, as we mentioned, and so I've been doing, I've been in the public accounting space for about 20 something years. And I guess been in my, you know, my career for almost 30 so I've been running the firm for about 20 years. My dad started it. I came, you know, almost 20 years ago, and started running that with him. And then started writing and speaking for the accounting space, the accounting firm space, and we started teaching more entrepreneurial concepts there.

And started my other consultancy about 10 years ago where we, it is a membership-based company that's, you know, we have 100 something members all over the US and Canada that run firms and we teach them entrepreneurial concepts. And my partner came in with me about 10 years ago, her name's Julie, and she runs both of those companies with me. And so it's combined experience of podcasting. So we've had a podcast in one company for about nine and a half years and then we've had a podcast and the other one for about six and a half. And of course, they've overlapped each other for a good portion of that time. So that's our story.

Jeremy: Sticking to it, huh?

Jason: Sticking to it.

Ryan: So in working with clients and having developed the businesses that you've got here, what are some of the things you've learned along the way?

Jason: You know, one thing we've learned, and you guys know, I'm an EOS follower and, you know, all those component books, Rocket Fuel, think as a visionary, I'm a solid off the charts visionary. Probably you guys are too. And That

Jeremy: You know, just so you know, Gino calls it a flaming visionary.

Jason: That's me.

Jeremy: Yeah, you resonate With that, right, and I'm not sure exactly where the term comes from other than it just means that they're just way off the charts. And I think if they're left to just mess with the business, they're going to burn it down or something.

Ryan: Oh, this is back to the match plan, right?

Trials of a Flaming Visionary

Jason: That's, yeah, that's the right word of flaming visionary. So well, and that's actually what happened. So I started running my own business, well, my dad's firm, and then I added this other company. And as a visionary, I'm just pitching ideas at the market. I mean, all kinds of stuff that I wanted to do. And I did almost burn it down. So yeah, it did burn the company down. So yeah, IRS debt, you know, all, everything happened. A depression, I mean, man, you name it, you know, all of that happened. Just a lot of fear in those things.

So, you know, Ryan, you asked one thing I learned and I think it was really this rocket fuel component where I really am deficient on my own and a lot of the gifts I have are immense and very, very valuable. And I know that now. I even struggled to use to say that out loud, but I know they are very valuable. But my partner, she's a flaming integrator.

Jeremy: So we refer to it just, you know, we refer to integrators is the missing puzzle piece. Oh, wow.

Jason: Oh wow. You can't emphasize that enough. So when she came in and started helping me, really, she came in and started just a lot of operational things, helped me catch up things that were lagging behind, obviously. And I'm like, wait, I think you're my partner. And so my wife and I took her and her husband out to dinner many years ago and said, I think I want you to be my partner. And so she dove into some of the hardest periods of turning these two businesses around at the same time. And they did turn around and they are growing now. You know, we've gone through, you know, ups and downs within team building.

Y'all know, that's one of the most intense difficult things in an especially creative services business. And so probably that's one of the biggest things is that how deficient I am on my own, but how with somebody else I am, you know, it is rocket fuel. Like I can almost do anything. It means because I'm not doing everything. The things we're choosing to do are the things we know that are going to succeed only because they've been vetted through this model. And so that's just, you know, that's life-changing. We went through some, we went through the dregs for a few years, and it was pretty painful. But it was worth it.

Jeremy: So, Jason, you know how horrible it is to get all the way to the end of a puzzle and there's that one missing piece.

Jason: Oh, man, yeah.

Jeremy: And you can't put the, you can't make the picture happen, right? It's It's frustrating. And when you find that you have the complete picture now. And so that's what that integrator does. And that is, it's interesting because it's a different puzzle piece for every visionary. So I would love to hear a little bit about what was it in her that you recognized that said, this needs to be my partner, my missing puzzle piece? What was that?

Jason: Well, I guess, I know, a visionary can have an integrator that's not their owner. It's not an owner or a partner. And I guess I knew myself and I had already gotten myself in trouble. So I said, if you do this, I need you to be an owner so that you can love this and care about the team the way I do and so that you can truly have the power to hold me accountable. Because some inner, some visionaries can still just run all over their integrator, right? If they don't have an adequate authority and I just needed her to be an owner.

And I think it was really, she just, I didn't know fully at the time, but she really just had the ability to do the operational pieces pretty easily. Integrating was not a difficult task at all. It's not a thing she had to learn. She integrated her life, you know, and homeschooled, you know, three kids for 20 years. And she integrated the heck out of them. So it wasn't, that stuff was it hard for her, but her drive and sacrifice and commitment, ultimately to the same thing I love, which is our mission and what we're called to and the people we're meant to serve.

She could love deeply those people just like I could. So and I didn't fully understand that but she does love pretty hard when she gets a group of people in front of her that we're meant to care for. And so that's what really, she loves it the way I loved it. Actually, when she started helping me, she started loving it more and loved it sometimes on behalf of me and will call me to love the things she knows I should love. But I was a little bit too dark and twisty to love it at the time. And she kind of helped call me back to the thing that I could love, which is pretty amazing. Pretty wonderful gift.

Jeremy: Yeah, that's great to hear. You know, we talked about integrators and visionaries, those working together. It's rocket fuel, right? That's the name of the book. Now, rocket fuel gets us to the moon, it gets us way out there, have a good time, or it blows up in our face and becomes deadly. So I'm sure along this journey, you've had both of those experiences. I would love for you to, you know, share with our listeners maybe a story of a time that the rocket ship wasn't pointed the right direction and kind of blew up. And then I'd love to hear a story about when the rocket ship was aligned.

Aligning the Rocket Ships

Jason: Yeah. Well, the rocket ships align now every day. But it's not magical. So we, in one of our companies, we lead some, a lot of live events and large conferences too that people travel from all over the world to come see Julie and I kind of teach them and instruct them. And so what, a lot of times what, I do all the teaching, because I'm the talker, and she's not at all as, you know, as you can imagine, that's how that works.

But they want to know what she thinks because they know she is an amazing part of what we do. Now, a lot of people mistake those things as magical, right? They're like, if I could find a partner like Julie, or if I could find a partner like Jason, but what they don't understand that rocket fuel, when you step into a rocket fuel relationship, you've actually just added a layer to your business, which is the relationship with another person, and you have to work on that, focus on that care about that relationship. Sometimes you're setting the business aside, right?

You're doing same page you're going what are you so messed up in your head about? What is going on right now? And it's, you know, it's a spouse, it's a kid. And so I think a lot of people get into a visionary integrator relationship, and they go, now the business is going to take off. But what they, I don't think have realized is that you've just gotten into a relationship and you're going to now care for that relationship in one of the layers, and then the layer of that healthy relationship is what does all of its amazing work to the business, which is the more outward view of what they do.

So we do take same page seriously. We spend about 16 hours a week in same page slash strategy type sessions is what we call it. And it's, that's what keeps us healthy. So the business just hums. What hums meaning it has all the hiccups and blow-ups that every business has. So when I say hums does not mean there's no problems.

So there are times, yeah, we get in fights all the time. So the blow-ups happen weekly. And we get in a room, it's like, what are you doing? What is going on? And we deal with that. We're kind of setting the business aside. It's like, Alright, you know, heck with the clients right now, we're going to get through this issue that we're fighting about. And so we deal with a relationship and then come back to the business and keep running it on the page again. So we cannot operate off the page and we don't, or really, it really doesn't work for Julie and I at all. So I don't know if that helps.

Jeremy: No, you're, I mean, I, we get to see this all the time. And they find that perfect puzzle piece. They're so excited about it. But that piece is exactly opposite of them. That's why it's going to work. But it's exactly the opposite. And so they look at it from like a total different way and you're like, You gotta be kidding me. There's no way. And but that's really, you know, we love things that move and, you know, the word traction is, you know, the consistent ability to drive those things forward.

But that comes with friction. We don't like that part of it. And so I love the amount of investment I heard you spending between the two of you on building that relationship because that's what's propelling it. When you started into this, you know, obviously you recognize that we're, hey, we have some differences. What was it that made you get on a rhythm, and then ultimately get to where you're so committed to 16 hours a week of same page working together?

Getting Consistent With a Rhythm

Jason: Yeah. Well, that was Julie. She,

Jeremy: I figured. That does not sound like a visionary that excited to have another meeting.

Jason: Yeah. You're like, duh, Jason. Teach us something we don't know, right? So well, what we did is she, we approached our calendar and said alright, if we're gonna win if we're going to do this, the calendar is a, it's kind of a visible display of our life, right? And all the time we have available to commit to all the things in our lives. So let's tackle this from the strategy of tackling our calendar, winning at our calendar. And so to run two businesses that are growing with a team of about 18 between the two, we had to figure out our own model and operational structure, what we call strategic calendar work blocking.

We actually made up a 12-step process to lay out a calendar and we teach other people this model to fit all of this into. And actually, now our team is required to work block. They work block their work and their calendars. Now, we don't call what they do strategic calendar work blocking because they're not necessarily strategic decisions, but they're still work blocking their transactional work. But what Julie and I do is strategic calendar work blocking. And so I mean, it's pretty long, but basically, we plan our whole calendar year in advance.

The whole thing You know, when we tell people that, of course, they have a lot of questions, because that actually is not possible. But we do it. And so there's so many reasons why that works. And so it, we grew into that. It took us about five years to grow into fully blocking a calendar one whole year in advance. And there's a lot of strategies and principles we've used to create that process. But we did grow to it over time. You know, so it takes time to get to something like that. So when we teach some courses, some 12-month courses that help people do EOS.

And the first thing we say is to be in this, you have to get a two-hour recurring block on your calendar called strategy and planning. So that's the first thing you have to do. And it has to grow to four hours, at least by the end of the year. And that's just, what it's starting to do is this starting to wedge into their life, into their work life. The thing we know that needs to be there, that they, that's not there for them, which is the place to do growth, right? Because they're busy heads down doing, you know, the transactional work or whatever the technician stuff that got them in this business in the first place.

And we're hard wedging things into their life, their calendar, that are going to allow them to be successful because we're going to give them homework and we're gonna say, where does that go? It goes in your strategy and planning block. So the first thing we got to do is get them into that rhythm, that habitual rhythm of placing a, you know, something on their calendar, that's going to allow them to be successful. So we grew into this model over time, and it just, you know, took a long time to figure it out. And now it really helps us be very strategic and own and manage a lot of that.

Jeremy: Yeah, yeah, no, I always love it when we're teaching clarity breaks. You know, and that's that really, is that strategic time. Every person has their own cadence to that clarity break. It's really, it's an art. At first, I remember when I first started taking clarity breaks, our business was at a point that it was making money, but not a lot. You know what I'm talking about. We've all been there, right? And I said, I've got to do this. And so I picked my place and it was a Jamba Juice, like a smoothie place here in Phoenix, and I would go there and, you know, you almost feel irresponsible.

Jason: Oh yeah. Guilty. Yeah, man.

Jeremy: Like, I'm getting ready to sit down for an hour, hour and a half and just, I got a blank piece of paper. And I'm just going to think. Like, I got calls to make. I don't have the seven bucks to spend on a Jamba Juice. You know, like, all of this stuff, guilty feelings, and I just remember all that rushing through my mind. But I will tell you that I have made more money sitting in that Jamba Juice, coming up with new ideas that my assistant, my integrator, she's learned to not like my clarity breaks as well as I have found them to be.

But, you know, you come up that's when you break up for air you come up, you're like, What on earth are we doing? Let's change this. Let's move this. Let's grow this. And that's where we break free. So I love it. Sometimes when we're in the trenches, it's hard to see that, so.

Jason: Oh, yeah, no, yeah, stepping away is a great success for any business owner.

Jeremy: I would love it if we could have Julie on the call because I would love to hear how she talked a visionary into this work blocking because that's not a normal thing for a visionary. Let's be clear.

Jason: Oh, no, no and it, yeah, we man, we duke it out bad. When she started introducing some of that structure into my life, we had a lot of problems, a lot of relational problems for sure. And but I'm so good at it. I'm so good at structure traction and I still get to do all the vision stuff. I've learned now, but man, we thought about it at first. Wow.

Jeremy: So, you know, for the listeners here, I'd love for you to share some of your fears, and how she was able to overcome some of that. Because I'm a firm believer, as a visionary, that structure frees creativity. It's in that structure that we're able to be free to explore and free to have that creativity versus just being loosey-goosey kind of all over the place. What were your fears? And how did she ultimately through disgust, debate, argue, overcome that?

Unbounded Freedom is Almost Universally Bad for People

Jason: Yeah. Well, so a lot, of this is commonly true with a lot of visionaries we work with too that are struggling in their business is that having full, having the full ability to 100% control all of their time is the thing that they think they need and the thing that they want, right? So a lot of their life is pushed, a visionary is pushing to gain and grab more freedom, what they call freedom. And freedom misplaced is such a dangerous thing for a visionary person. It is really super bad for them, their minds, their personalities, all of what they are is great. But unbounded freedom, really for any human, is not a healthy thing.

Unchecked unaccountable freedom. And I, but here's the thing when you own your own business, you automatically get that and nobody can tell you otherwise. And so I was using it all wrong. I was doing, I was prioritizing things for me. I was not prioritizing the sacrifice and the commitment and sometimes the emotional drain and the, you know, the energy being sucked out of me that's required in creative human service to other people for their betterment instead of my own.

So that's been some of the hardest things. This freedom, this word freedom is, I can't stand that word. Sometimes people just seek it out and that unbounded freedom is their worst enemy. And it, you can't convince them that it's true. And so I don't know that Julie knew that at first, but when she started applying structure, what she was trying to do is just get all this stuff done. She's like, I want to get all this stuff done you want to get done. Well, it started hemming me in and started putting structure around me. It started placing guardrails into my life.

And, you know, we all have, we all sometimes act in our own tendencies. Mine is to run away and hide, you know, when I'm struggling. So I would just disappear and hide. And Julie's not in for that. So just particularly as a person, if you go into something and you're deeply committed and you disappear on her, it's not gonna go well if she has a right to a relationship. So it went just super bad a number of times. And it blew me up that she got so blown up too. So we just had to just collide into each other extremely hard and deal with it, right?

And so we both have always said we're leaving this relationship in a body bag. So that's how we're going to be done. That's how we're gonna do it. We're not gonna sell. We're not selling these businesses, we're gonna do these till we're old. And we're not dying, we're not stopping, we're never going to stop. So with that commitment, right, you just, you have to face it. And I had to face some of the things I really struggled with. And it was losing my freedom, losing my time. And I thought she was taking all of that away from me, and that was hard on me.

Jeremy: So now that you have no freedom, you're in bondage. Life's miserable and you're working on a calendar and work blocking. How would you assess your life and your productivity as a company now?

Jason: Well, so yeah, so we've doubled in size, doubled in revenue. The programs I've always wanted to teach and launch, we've doubled those. You know, the firm is more the advisory type firm that I've always wanted it to be. I don't, I mean, I run a CPA firm, and I don't do taxes and accounting and payroll. And I don't want to.

Jeremy: Yeah, I get you.

Jason: Right. So, I mean, sign me up for that, right? And so, and she's like, what did it get you? You know, she'll make me say it sometimes, right? Because that hemming in creativity within constraints is what we like to tell our creative digital agency clients who don't like to hear that. The creativity within the constraints actually bought you all of the things you wanted. It didn't take them away because before you weren't getting any of them, so now I get all of the things that I want to do. But I don't get to do everything I want to do. And that's the thing, right? And we like to tell people, you can't be good at everything, and you can't do everything.

So one's a skill and once a time constraint. And it's just true. So, you know, the greatest strategic decisions you make are the ones you say no to. The nos are the greatest places that you win rather than the yeses. The yeses blow people up, but the nos, man if you get those right, and that's what strategic calendar work blocking is about. Saying, what are all the millions of things we're going to say no to? That's basically what that operation takes us through. And then what's left is the gold. It's the gold sitting at the top. And we get, we do it, we get it done. And yeah, so I get all of the things I've wanted.

Jeremy: So now that your calendar is structured and you follow that and you're in this jail cell called a calendar, you have a company that's doubling in growth, it's delivering what you always dreamed of. If you're servicing the clients in the way that you expected. You're getting to teach what you want to teach. It doesn't sound too bad.

Jason: No, it's not. It's not too bad. And she and I work hard too. We work pretty hard to run two growing businesses. You know, we put in a good 60 hours a week each of us easy, you know? So we have to fight other things, right? We have to fight balance and things like that. But that's the job of an entrepreneur. Entrepreneurs, they suck at balance.

Oh my gosh, they are terrible at balance in their life. So that's the thing we're always looking to do and get better at is to balance our life. And so we'll always probably have to work on that. Because now we get to really do a lot of the fun stuff, the good stuff, a lot of that stuff works now. And so we could just do it all the time it's so amazing and fun. But you have to be balanced for your family and growing family and things like that. So, you know, so we're all fighting that balance.

Jeremy: Absolutely. Well, Jason, I cannot believe that we are already to this time. I had so much fun exploring a visionary doing some calendar or work blocking. And I'm going to make sure that my assistant, Katie, listens to this because she has the same struggles that Julie's gone through. So I've had so much fun with it. Definitely, it's been a great time. And so glad that we could share this with everybody here.

Jason: I love it. Thank you guys for having me. It was a lot of fun.

Ryan: Jason real quick. Before we go, you don't do the taxes and accounting and everything else, but you got a firm that does. And it sounds like you've got some great insight into how to grow and scale a business. How do people get ahold of you? How do they find out more information if they want that?

Jason: So, they can go to blumercpas.com, BLUMERCPAS.com. They can go to jasonblumer.com. You can find me there and that'll just link it all the things I've written and our companies and yeah, and we're on both companies. Thriveal is one company, Thriveal and the other one Blumer CPAs. Both of them are on all for the major platforms. We put out a few hours of content a week, and so you can watch a lot of videos about me and a lot of, read a lot of articles that I've written. Just google Jason Blumer and you'll find me a lot.

Ryan: So it's easy to find you online is what I heard.

Jason: Oh yeah, super easy.

Ryan: Just gotta go looking. Awesome. Awesome. Well, hey, thank you. Thanks again, Jason. Enjoyed it. Enjoy listening to you and Jeremy. He gets so passionate about this visionary integrator thing. Learned a little bit there too. So thanks again.

Jeremy: Jason. This has been a blast. I really appreciate it.

Jason: Yeah. Thank you guys for having me. And I'm glad Steve hooked this up. It's, yeah, he's a great guy. And this has, it's been a lot of fun. It's a joy. Thanks for having me on the show, guys.

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