Carving Your Own Path

Today, our guest is Jeremy Wells. Jeremy is a PhD, an EA, a CPA—lots of initials, which we’re going to talk about in second. But he’s also the owner of JWellsCFO, which is an accounting firm that specializes in helping owners of online businesses maximize their tax savings—which I think we’ll talk about that as well, and build better businesses—which we’ll also talk about. In addition, he hosts a couple shows, podcasts, the JWellsCFO Show, and co-hosts the CPA Advisory Show. Jeremy, welcome to The Unique CPA.

Thank you very much, Randy, for having me. Really appreciate it.

Yeah. I’m looking forward to this discussion. We can go a bunch of different directions, I’m sure, today, but the first direction I want to go is, what’s with all the initials?

So full disclosure: accounting is my second career. And I still struggle even though I’ve been in this field for over five years now, I still struggle thinking of myself as an accountant. But when I started off in undergrad, of course, you know, you get closer to graduation and you’ve gotta have an idea of what you’re going to do after you get the diploma. And so I was pretty dead set on law school. I had been for years, ever since middle school, I grew up watching Matlock with my dad and those kinds of things. And, yeah, I really wanted to be a litigator. And then I realized not so much the courtroom stuff, I wanted to do more of the the legalese and contracts and all those kinds of things, find those cool loopholes and, you know, close those loopholes up and all that kind of stuff—which ended up being a decent way of thinking about, you know, once I once I got into tax!

Right! 

Yeah. And then I majored in political science at the—I went to a smaller liberal arts college, and there wasn’t a bespoke pre-law program—so one of the things that was recommended to me was majoring in Poly Sci, which I did. And by the time I got done with that, I changed from wanting to go to law school to wanting to go to grad school. So I wound up going to LSU, Louisiana State University, and got a PhD in Political Science. Focused, actually, on international politics, so looking at why countries fight wars, why civil wars happen, why some countries develop economically and politically different from other countries, that kind of stuff. 

Did that in six years at LSU, and then got a job teaching at Texas State University and ended up being there for five years. And I found the more time I spent in higher ed, the more I was enjoying and getting personal value out of—and feeling like I was creating value—out of the one on one meetings that were happening during office hours. When we weren’t necessarily talking about things that I was lecturing on or things that I was researching, but rather we were talking about my students’ lives, and their goals, and their ambitions, and their plans, and those sorts of things. And at the same time, higher ed has always been in crisis, at least for the last couple of decades, between budget cuts and taking on too many graduate students and therefore not having enough jobs for them—the opposite situation that we have in the accounting field now, right? You know, we’ve got too many jobs and not enough people to fill those roles, in academia, it’s the exact opposite problem: Way too many Masters and PhD candidates and not nearly enough jobs for them.

And so I started looking for an alternative. I went back to, in undergrad when I started off and, you know, I was thinking about law school. Law school just felt like it was going to take way too long. But in the process of thinking about law school, I took a business law course, and I also took an accounting course, because I briefly flirted with the idea of minoring in business. And I remember taking that accounting course, and I thought, hey, you know, I actually didn’t mind that that accounting course—debits and credits, and T-accounts, and spreadsheets, and all that just seemed kinda natural when I was 19. Maybe, you know, at at 29, when I’m considering this career change, maybe it’ll still make sense. The university I was teaching at had a pretty decent accounting program regionally—like I said, it was Tech State University and a lot of the firms out of Austin and Dallas and San Antonio recruited from the university I was at, so I took courses for a couple semesters. I wound up starting a firm on the side after I found a really great mentor. And he sort of walked me through the steps of starting a business, finding and getting clients, doing accounting work, obviously, and all that kind of stuff. And it’s just kinda taken off from there. 

So, his one caveat was “I want you to go take these tests and get this license,” which I didn’t know what it was. I’d never heard of it. Ended up being, Enrolled Agent. And so late ’17, I took those tests, early ’18 I got the license, and ever since then, yeah, I’ve been trying to do this thing called accounting, and run my own firm.

Alright. So we got through the PhD, the EA—then you added CPA.

Yeah. Well, you know, I had a terminal degree, right? A PhD. And I kinda felt like, you know, now that I was making this career change, you know, and I do not wade into the credential wars. I don’t think one credential or license or anything like that is any better or worse than another. It’s all about, are you empowered to do the things that your clients need you to be able to do, right, and are you doing work that you want to do? 

So I knew, just the way I am, that the Enrolled Agent license was great for what I wanted to do, and what I was doing, and what my clients needed me to do. I primarily have, as long as I’ve been in this field a little over five years now, I’ve primarily worked with individuals and small businesses, helping them with taxes and basic accounting, you know, so doing bookkeeping, doing payroll. And so being able to represent them in front of the IRS and in front of their, you know, state revenue agencies, that sort of stuff, the EA covers all that. I didn’t need anything else. In fact, I had other EAs and CPA’s telling me, you’re good. You can have a long, you know, fulfilling career, with just that license. 

I knew that there would probably always be part of me, you know, looking back 20, 30, 40 years from now, wondering, would it have made a difference, right? And at the same time, you know, I got a PhD. I’m pretty decent at the college thing. I’m pretty decent at classes. I’m pretty decent at passing exams, all that kind of stuff. And so I said, what the heck? I’ll go for it. I signed up for UNC’s online master of accountancy program. I just had to go on campus for a two day, sort of orientation, but the rest of the program, which, you know, is included in the fees and all that. 

So the rest of the program was entirely online. It’s all night courses. So, you know, it’d work all day, we’d put our kid to bed, and I’d come into my office here, shut the door, and sit and watch lectures for a couple hours or, you know, be in class discussions and have meetings with other students for group projects, and all that sort of normal, you know, business school stuff. I just did it 100% online. 

I finished that up fairly quickly and then start sitting for the exams. And got through the exams just fine, all except for audit. I to had take audit 3 times, but on the third time I passed it, but, you know, I’m not an auditor, and I don’t intend to be doing any audit work. So I think that’s reasonable. 

So, March of last year, so just over a year ago, actually on my birthday last year, I got the email from the Florida Department of Regulation, Business Regulation and Licensing, or whatever it’s called, saying that I got the license. And so yeah, the the only issue with getting that license was the state board thought I hadn’t taken enough business courses. And so the 150 hour rule, that that didn’t apply to me at all. 

No, of course.

I mean, I had almost double that, you know, before I even switched over into accounting. But, yeah, as far as the specific courses, you know, I didn’t really have much in the way of business and accounting. So you know, it was actually fun, because I had been teaching for almost a decade in higher education at that point, and I had to go back and be on the other side of that. In fact, when I was taking courses at Texas State University, I was still teaching there. I even had some students of mine that were students in my class that I was teaching—and then I would run over to the business school to sit in a class and some of my students were my classmates in those classes. 

Wow.

So that was an interesting experience. But, yeah, I just, just sort of ground it out, and, yeah, so now, EA and CPA. I’m keeping both licenses active, you know, for the foreseeable future. I don’t have any reason to drop one or the other. You know, one empowers me to do certain things within the state of Florida, the other thing empowers me to do things nationally, and, you know, I like having both licenses.

So do courses count towards both continuing education requirements?

Yeah, so that’s an interesting point. You know, before I got the CPA license, I was always a little miffed that, you know, so for an EA, your continuing education, It’s all approved by IRS. And it’s it’s strictly national tax, you know, issues, right? And I just, I saw the, you know, I would get the emails, or I would get the brochures about all of the fun, what looked like at the time, fun CPE that was available to CPAs. They could take CPE on, you know, Excel and spreadsheets and bookkeeping software and practice management, and, you know, all these sorts of fun topics that just aren’t available through the IRS continuing education. So now that I’m at CPA, I get to take a lot more fun, CPE courses; on the other hand, I gotta take a lot more of it.

Right.

So, for an EA, you need a minimum of 16 hours plus an ethics course every year. And then, State of Florida for CPA, I believe it’s 80 hours every 2 years, right? So I gotta take a little bit more, but on the flip side, there’s a lot more, variety and a lot more availability on the CPA side.

Yeah. I guess I didn’t even think about that EA would be strictly tax, which makes sense. I didn’t even think about that. I think—I think—that we are approved—I’m not positive of this—to give continuing education to EAs, but that only must be tax topics.

You know, it’s interesting because, you mentioned the podcast, CPA Advisory Show that I co-host with Chris Hervochon, another CPA in South Carolina. We had Blake Oliver on our show—Blake runs Earmark, an application and podcast network for CPE. And he actually, you know, I asked him about this. I said, you know, what, was it easier to get registered for IRS continuing education than it was for the CPA CPE through NASBA, but he actually said IRS was a lot easier. 

Really!

You know, which I found pretty interesting, right? Yeah. So I don’t know what the difference is. I try to find as much CPE that is available to both—a lot of those tax topics are approved by both IRS and NASBA. And so I try to sign up for as much of that as possible. And I’m also a member of the National Association of Tax Professionals, NATP, as well as the National Association of Enrolled Agents, in NAEA. So I do a lot of, you know, continuing education through those. A lot of the NATP stuff is eligible for both, and, obviously, a lot of the NAEA stuff is only for the EA side. But I’m also a member of the AICPA. At some point, I should probably drop at least one of these memberships. It’s one of the problems with having both licenses. But, yeah, and then obviously a lot of the AICPA stuff is is only, CPA CPE. So, I just cobble together—and so I wind up, for last year with a folder on my desktop that is you know, 50, 60 different PDFs, all 1-2 hour CPE for different licenses. 

Alright. Well, I think you’re not going to drop those memberships. You seem to be a joiner and a learner, and so we shall see. Alright, we should probably move on. I’m intrigued by all this, which is just amazing to me, what you’ve done. And I think at some point, we want to talk about the podcast as well.

But let’s talk about this journey then from—you know, you said you were advising students, and that’s where you’re really enjoying, the one-on-one, and you were telling them to probably pursue their dreams and their passions, and you’d finally decide, okay, well, if I’m telling everybody this, this is what I should do. Did you start the firm? Were you working for someone else beforehand? I mean, you mentioned this one individual. Or is it pretty much, hey, you stopped being Professor Jeremy, and you started being, you know, Tax Advisor Jeremy.

Right.

On your own.

Yeah. No. I started teaching at Texas State in the fall of 2013. After a couple years there, I saw the glass ceiling that I was bumping my head up against, and, I was never on what in higher education, you call the 10 year track. In, you know, the accountant world, it’s similar to the partnership track, right? Like, it’s the carrot at the end of the right, that you’re constantly trying to to work your way towards. And for some people, that stick is, for some reason, you know, or group of reasons, that stick is a little bit shorter for some people, and it’s a little bit longer for other people. And I felt like that stick was a little bit too long than what I wanted to deal with. 

So by 2017, and in summer of 2017, this was also a factor in all of that, but in summer of 2017, our daughter was born. And so a couple different, you know, considerations went into that. We were living in Texas—we had no family in that area. My family’s in Kentucky, my wife’s family is in Georgia and Florida. And so we knew we wanted to be closer to family, especially having our daughter on the way. And so I started looking into alternatives—anything that would get us closer to family and give me a little bit more independence, in terms of, you know, my career and my income, especially those sorts of things. 

And so yeah, early 2017, I started reaching out to anybody and everybody, in the accounting industry that I could find, local to us. Now, like I say, I started reaching out in early 2017, like February, March. And I really wasn’t getting much of a response, and I couldn’t figure out why. Now of course I know, right? It was right in the middle of tax season. And here I’m emailing local CPAs, “Hey, can I meet with you for half an hour or an hour? Like, I’m thinking about being a CPA!” And, yeah, so now I know, 5, 6 years later, I’m like, yeah, I would have ignored that email too. 

Yep.

But, I was also reaching out online. I did meet with a few that were actually working in government. And since I was coming out of you know, I was in higher ed, I had that public service mentality, I almost went that direction. I almost was thinking, like, I could be, you know, city finance director, or a county finance director someday, those sorts of things, right? And then I reached out to a CPA online through Twitter, actually. And what started off as a direct message turned into a 90 minute phone call. And in the middle of that phone call, when I was explaining, you know, I’ve met with a few different CPA’s, most of them are in government, I’m in higher ed, I’m thinking about staying on the public service track, he said, “Look, I do tax. I don’t do, you know, nonprofit, I don’t do government accounting. I don’t do any of that. If that’s what you want to do, we just need to end this call right now. But if not, if you want to do tax, I’ll keep talking to you.”

I felt like I was vibing with this guy. We were getting along really well. And so I said, nope, that’s fine—want to keep talking to you. And that’s when I decided on tax, right? So, you know, we talk about how, you know, in the process of becoming an accountant or a CPA, you’ve gotta make that decision. Do you want to do tax? Do you want to do audit? Do you want to do CFO type work? That was the moment when I said, nope, tax. And it can be that serendipitous.

Yep.

It can just be you just happen to find somebody that you really click with and you just want to take the path that, you know, they’re taking or that they’re leading you down. And so that’s what ended up happening, and he ended up becoming my mentor—is still my mentor. Not as much as in the early days, but, you know, I still stay in touch with him. And he just basically opened up his entire business model to me. He had about a year or two before we started working together, he had left a regional CPA firm that he was working at to start his own firm. And everything about that firm that he didn’t like, he was doing the opposite in his own firm. So he was billing flat monthly fees, to his clients, so essentially putting them on what Ron Baker today is a subscription model. 

Right.

You know, and he was doing this 6 or 7 years ago. And so I started doing that. He was doing tax only—I started off tax only. After about a year or two, I started figuring out, these are little things about his business model that don’t quite work for me that I want to tweak. And so I started tweaking those things. You know, I was working with, for example, clients that needed S Corporations. And so as a tax-only firm, you know, there’s only so much you can do. You know, I can advise them. I can talk to them throughout the year. But when it came to things like bookkeeping and running their own payroll and that sort of stuff, I realized pretty quickly that S Corporation owners, the vast majority of them, are not very good at doing their own bookkeeping, and they’re really not good at doing their own payroll. So I knew that if I was going to be valuable to them and I was going to help keep them compliant, I just needed to do that work for them. So, you know, I started rolling those services out as well. 

And you know, after a couple of years of tweaking the model and figuring out what worked for me and what didn’t work, at the end of 2019, I just went fully independent. And like I said, I still stay in touch with him, we still, you know, talk about how our firms are doing. I still get his help on some more complex questions, both on the tax side and on the business advisory side. But, yeah, for the most part, it’s been a great relationship. I think it’s a great alternative model to the partnership model, right? Where you have to come in as an employee, the partnership expects your loyalty as an employee, they want to bring you up through the ranks, but on their own timeframe—there was none of that pressure here. 

He did not want an employee. He made that clear from the very beginning. He wanted somebody that he could bring into the profession, somebody that he could impart some of, you know, his experience and his learning on in the meantime, get paid for that. You know, we had an arrangement where he took a cut of my revenue, and, you know, that was to pay him, one for his guidance in his mentorship, but then also, you know, I got the benefit of him teaching me the software, him letting me file returns under his EFIN for those first couple of years, you know, those sorts of things. But then, you know, when I was ready, I took the plunge, got all that on my own, started billing my own clients, that sort of thing. But, yeah, it’s been a great relationship. 

And I push that on a lot of people. When I see solo accountants out there, for example, in Facebook groups asking questions, you know, that sort of stuff. Or, you know, when I see an accountant that’s working at a firm, and is looking for that way to make that leap into their own independent practice, I tell them you’ve got to find a mentor—and I know that’s hard. I know I got lucky stumbling upon him.

Yeah, you did!

But, yeah, but mentorship for me was huge. And so I recommend that to anybody and everybody that’s within earshot.

Yeah. I had not heard a story like that before. That’s pretty cool. I didn’t realize that that’s how you got that start—so he specifically was searching for that, somebody that he can mentor—and make money, obviously at the same time.

I don’t know how much he really made off me. I mean, I do know, I could go back to the records and look, but, you know, it obviously wasn’t all about the money for him. You know, but in the meantime, he figured out a way to make sure that he was compensated for, you know, what he was imparting on to me. But at the same time, there was enough leftover, right? It wasn’t it wasn’t one of these ridiculous revenue cuts where I walk away with 25% or 30% or even 50% or like that, like, a lot of firms will do with new employees to try to encourage them to bring in big business, but they’re still capturing the lion’s share of the revenue, right? No, for me, it was the opposite, you know, I was still capturing the lion’s share of the revenue. There just wasn’t that much because they didn’t have that many clients yet.

Right, right. Okay. So let’s talk about this journey then. So now four years totally on your own, or just over four years, right? Beginning of ’19, is that what you said?

That’s right.

Okay. And you mentioned earlier that, hey, you were looking for this more, you know, flexibility, freedom, independence, family being near—has it turned out the way you expected that, or has there been bumps along the way?

Yes and no. So self-employment is just a funny thing, right? And, you know, I had never been business-minded. My wife and I joke all the time because, you know, I went down a path that I was supposed to be a professor. I was supposed to be working in academia. I was supposed to be an employee, you know, of a university or college somewhere. And she actually went and got a business degree and then an MBA, and she was supposed to be the one that’s more business-minded. And now we wind up to where I’m the one who owns and runs a business, and she has stayed at home and been a mom and a wife for the last few years. But yeah, she never really saw me, you know, as a business owner before, you know, we went down this path. I didn’t either, really.

But the flip side of that is, now that I have been both, I realize that I’m a terrible employee. Anytime someone tries to impose their way of doing things on me, where I don’t really have a choice, or I don’t have any input on, you know, tweaking that approach, or you know, making it my own—that sort of stuff—I just get real difficult to work with. And it’s more of a reflex, right? It’s not necessarily that I’m choosing to rebel or, you know, or anything like that. It’s just that that’s just not the way I’m built.

So actually when, like I said, we were in Texas and I started all of this late ’17, early ’18. By the middle of 2018, I knew I was done with academia, which worked out well because it was a summer, you know, the academic year was over. And so we ended up moving to Florida to be closer to my wife’s side of the family. And I needed a job—my firm was bringing in a little bit of revenue, but definitely not enough for a family. And so, I got a job working at an accounting firm here in town small firm, just the owner, one other staff accountant, and the receptionist. 

But it was doing, I think when, the one tax season I worked there, the tax season of 2019, I think the firm as a whole maybe did, you know, 1,200 tax returns. I think I ended up prepping about 500 or 600 of them.

Wow. A lot.

Yeah, it was a decent tax season, and that was the first, you know, real tax season. That was my second tax season, but it was the first real tax season where I was working for a firm and, you know, under those kinds of expectations. And, you know, I really appreciate the experience, and I really appreciate the guidance that I got from the firm owner—I just hated having to do things under somebody else’s systems. He came up through you know, your traditional accounting firms, your traditional partnership model, all that sort of stuff. 

Right.

And I just did not buy well with that at all. So that really showed me that, no, I need to be a firm owner. I still have moments over the last several years, even since leaving that job, I still have moments where I say, to heck with client relations and marketing and the administration and all of that stuff. I’ll just go work for a startup in their accounting department, or I’ll just, you know, go work for somebody else’s firm as a tax manager, or something like that. and every time I start going down that path, I just have to remind myself, nope, nope, that’s not going to work, right? It sounds great. The grass is always greener. But yeah, this is this is the path that I’ve chosen for myself, and the more consistently and the more confidently I stay on that path, the better off I’ll be.

Yeah. I’ll give you this. I don’t know if it’s advice, insights—my personal experience, I merged my firm in with another firm in 2016. I had another business going at the same time, which is a real estate development firm. That, my partner brought me out five months later. So in the middle of 2016, I was “businessless”—both my businesses were were gone, and I was trying to decide what to do. I took about three months off and then ended up deciding, you know what? I’m tired of being in charge of everything. I’m going to go work for someone. That did not work. Exactly what you’re saying—I was not, you know, I don’t think I was a terrible employee—I just was so frustrated with decisions other people were making that just didn’t seem to make sense at all. But in the long run, it worked out because that’s how our current business came to be, is from the experience I got there.

Absolutely. And I see it on the client side too because when I first started off, I was attracting— and my mentor was referring to me—because, part of the reason he he created that mentorship set up for me was because his client roster was full, and he didn’t want to take on more clients, but he also was getting referrals that he wanted something to do with. 

Oh wow.

And so I was benefiting from getting from him, and then that turned into referrals from them. And, you know, I started attracting a few clients of my own. But the niche there was what he called “freelancers.” You know, independent contractors, soloists, like whatever term, you know, independent knowledge workers, right? Whatever you want to call them, but he was attracting a lot of that type.

And in the first couple of years, I didn’t really see it, but over the last couple of years, I’ve gotten a lot better at seeing it during that discovery process, of, you know, doing the free consultation and then doing a discovery call. And I’ve gotten a lot better at filtering out the ones who are committed to entrepreneurship—the ones who know that they want to own and operate a business. They’re starting off as a soloist, or they’re starting off as a freelancer, so they don’t really have all the trappings of a business yet. But that’s the path that they want, versus the ones who are still sort of teetering between employment and self employment.

There are a lot that I’ve worked with over the years where we will get everything set up, we’ll get the S Corporation set up because they’ve been an independent contractor for a year or two, but with just one client, right? But, you know, and so they still see themselves as a worker almost as an employee that’s just getting paid. Their income is reported on a 1099 instead of a W-2. But we’ll go through the work, we’ll go through the process of getting the LLC registered, making it an S Corporation, getting books and payroll set up. And then six months later, I’ll get an email saying that they took a job with a different company or with the company that had been paying them as an independent contractor all along. And now they’re a W-2 employee and “thanks, but I don’t need you anymore.”

Right. 

And that’s just a really disheartening moment because you spent the last 6, 12, 18 months trying to build up, you know, somebody into having an actual business and, you know, creating a different future for themselves, and they just kinda give it all up for employment, which is fine if that’s what they want, right? I just wish there were a better way to sort of discover that about yourself other than going through the process of having all of the trappings of a business set up and then saying, nah, this is too much. I don’t want it.

Right. And so you said you’ve gotten pretty good at being able to determine that in your discovery calls at this point.

You just—and this is true of, you know, discovery, you know, when you start working with clients and trying to bring on clients, you just realize you know, you don’t know what you don’t know at first. You don’t know what questions you should be asking, right? And then over time, you just start to figure out, okay, these are—and it’s not always, you know, 100% obviously, but, you know, I have a friend who’s in marketing who told me one time, you know, red flags are like cockroaches, right? You see one, but you don’t see the thousand that are still behind the wall or still under the front, right? Like, you know, and so if you see one, that’s all you need, right? You don’t need to keep looking any further. And I try to remind myself of that during that discovery process. If there’s any sort of hesitation toward the idea of being a business owner, it’s probably not going to be a good fit. It’s probably not going to work out.

Well, I think that’s a really good lesson for people to learn because a lot of times when people are starting their firms, know, it’s just, hey, I need a client. You know, I need a client. I need money. I need revenue. And it ends up causing headaches because then you get these false starts, and you get these clients with the, like you said, the one red flag that just become those C and D clients you don’t want to deal with. And then so if you can weed that out at the beginning, I think that’s a great lesson for people to learn. 

And then niche is another thing that you—now if you defined your niche, it’s “startup, entrepreneurial,” and then you said something else. How would you define that? I mean, are you specifically looking for, you know, this, whatever your definition of niche is.

You know, the terms change all the time. And the more I’ve gotten into this and the more—really, social media has been a big influence on this because, you know, I will see who the people I’m working with are following on Twitter, on LinkedIn. I’ll see who they’re citing in the newsletters that they send out, right? Or I’ll see who they’re retweeting and this sort of stuff. And then I’ll go in and I’ll look at, okay, if they’re following these people and they’re buying services from these people, you know, what are they saying? Who are they marketing to? How are they defining their target market, their niche, right? Their ideal clients, all this kind of stuff? 

And so you know, the terms will change probably about every 6 months, you know? For a while it was freelancers, and then it became solopreneurs, right? Justin Welsh uses that term solopreneur a lot in his content, but I’ve also seen creators a lot, “coaches, consultants and creators.” Sometimes all three of those are lump together, right? And then we try to come up with a term that’s a little bit more all encompassing, but also still kind of focused. So Tiago Forte, creator of the Second Brain system of note taking, he uses the term “knowledge worker.”

And so I try to think in terms of independent knowledge workers—that’s kind of where I’ve I’ve fallen on. Because, you know, I think coaches, consultants, creators, I think on one hand, that’s lumping too many different disparate groups together, and on the other hand, it’s still leaving a lot of people out. But in my own firm, I’ve got attorneys. I’ve got other accountants, bookkeepers. I’ve got marketers. I’ve got coaches, consultants, creators, right? I’ve got all these different groups. But really what ties them together is that they have a very similar focus—not in terms of the work that they do and the industry that they’re in—but how they think about that work and how they think about selling that work. And really, it gets back to the focus of selling expertise, as opposed to the actual work that they’re doing. And this is the direction I’m trying to push my own firm in. 

In accounting, of course, we talk about advisory versus compliance. And, you know, at the end of the day, I’m a tax professional. I still have to prepare and file tax returns. I do a lot of clients’ bookkeeping and payroll. I still have to make sure all of that gets done. But I really try to lead with the advisory. I really try to lead with, I’m here to help you, I’m here to make you feel more confident about your tax returns—not just get them done on time, but also make you feel confident about the process that’s leading up to what’s going into those tax returns. The tax return is a story. It’s also a reconciliation of everything that we talked about and everything that we’ve worked toward the prior year, right? And so I really try to push back against that notion of it’s March or April, let’s find you all the tax savings that we can. No. No. No. No. We’re 6 months late for all of that, right? Like, we should have been doing all of that. You know, 6, 9, 12 months ago, right? 

And so I try to educate my clients on that. I try to deliver content to them that will help them think in those terms. I try to make myself available to them over email, over scheduled video calls that, you know, we can talk about these things, we can put these things into place before it gets busy, you know, time for tax season. And so you feel more confident going into that.

And then as an advisor in general, I assume that having a niche type client base makes it a lot—I was going to say easier, maybe that’s not the right word—but you can concentrate your knowledge on the base that you’re dealing with. And now all of a sudden, you’ve got this targeted information that you can use in advising these clients. I assume that really helps with that advisory end the things.

It clicked for me a couple years ago when a client of mine who actually runs a website design and SEO agency—and it was about the time that he started converting a couple of his, almost full time contractors into employees, and I was helping him with this—I was helping him get registered for payroll in these different states and, you know, convert some of those contractors to employees, and start thinking a little bit more intentionally about how he was building his business, and getting himself out of the day-to-day operations, all these kinds of things. And, you know, we were having a big you know, video call, Zoom call about this and going through all of this and he just sort of stopped at one point and he said, you know, I, I really look up to your advice on all of this because I know you’re doing the same thing, right? Like, I’m in website design, I’m in SEO, you’re in accounting—these are two  completely different industries, but we’re building very similar businesses here, right? We’re both trying to figure out, how do we pull ourselves out of the day to day? How do we build teams that we can trust and rely on to do more of the heavy lifting and the day to day work for us. Like, business model wise, you can call an accounting firm. You can call it a law firm. You can call it a marketing agency, right? It’s the same business model.

Right.

And so that’s when it really hit me, like, yeah, I’m not really trying to focus on a particular industry or geographic location. I’m focusing on a business model here. So you know, it goes back to what’s the definition of a niche. Well, it’s basically just how do you specialize? How do you not be a generalist? How do you define this is type of people we’re working with, and this is the transformation that we can help them achieve? And if you can define that in terms of a message where any given individual out there will hear that and actually resonate with it and say, yeah, I’m like that, this person could probably help me—then you found a niche. It’s both more difficult and a lot easier than a lot of people think it is to find that niche.

Right. Yep. So there is so many different things that we could still talk about, and we’re about out of time. Because I wanted to go into the whole advisory. I wanted to go into pricing. I wanted to go into—

This is what happens when two podcasters get on a show together, right?

Exactly. I wanted to go into—and I’ll ask one more question just because this is, and then, you know what? Maybe we’ll do a second episode where we’ll talk about more of this kind of, just following this journey of your firm. But I’m going to wrap up on that end. One last question, or really two last questions before we wrap up—and everybody gets this question. I didn’t tell you ahead of time, so we’ll see if you’re prepared or not. But we just talked about business for the last 45 minutes and everything you’re doing, but that’s not really who you are. You’re a family man, you’ve got kids, a wife. You know, what are your passions outside of work? What do you love doing that’s not accounting-related?

Yeah. So our daughter turned—she 5, she’ll turn 6 in July, and we’re lucky to live at a coastal town, Saint Augustine, Florida, which is just a little bit south of Jacksonville. We’ve got great beaches here, we’ve got a great climate, and we’re just trying to spend as much time outside, especially this time of year, especially after being cooped up in the office for the last 4 months. We’re trying to spend as much time outside, whether, you know, that shopping around, or playing on playgrounds and taking her to parks or going to the beach. You know, she’s at the age now where for the first couple years we were living here, we had to hover over her, you know, if she was walking around on the sand or out toward the water. And now mom and I, you know, we’re still keeping an eye on her, but we can stay in our seats over, you know, on the beach, while she goes down to the water and gets her toes in the water. So, it’s getting a lot more fun to hang out with her. You know, it’s some of these sorts of things, especially like taking her to the beach or to the pool. So that’s a big part of it.

As far as me, personally, at my one “vice,” my one thing that I put on the calendar, and she’s actually okay with it, is I’m a big fan of soccer, and especially, Chelsea, which is one of the one of the soccer teams in London that plays in the English Premier League. And so, yeah, whenever they’re playing, I watch them. The European soccer schedule is actually pretty good for me because their seasons run from late August, early September, through May. And so it’s always a little bit of, good, much needed downtime during tax season, right? You know, it forces me in February, March, April, to take, you know, 90 minutes, 2 hours, right? The good thing about soccer is a lot of their matches, they don’t have extra time. You know, they don’t have overtime, right? So if it’s a tie, they just end the game. You know, unless it’s a tournament game. So most of their regular season games, they just end that way, right? And so you can predict.

You know the time.

It’s not going to last more than 2 hours. And because they’re playing them in the evening, that’s usually our early afternoons. And so it’s a good time, sorta, you know, early afternoon, late afternoon to say, okay, I’m going to give myself a couple hours here in the middle of the afternoon, when I probably wouldn’t be that productive anyway, and I’m just going to give myself a break and just kinda zone out to some soccer for a few minutes.

Nice. Alright. Well, awesome. And then last question, if people want to get ahold of you or see more about what you’re doing—I know you’re on Twitter and LinkedIn and other places. Where would people find you?

Twitter is the absolute best place @JWellsCFO. For some reason, that network just draws me more. Now it’s a little more dicey these days, with the new management, but, you know, it hasn’t affected me too much. But, yeah, definitely Twitter, JWellsCFO. And then, you know, if you want to just reach out to me directly, either DM me there, or if you don’t have a Twitter account, or you’re opposed to Twitter for some reason, then email—old fashioned email— jwells@jwellscfo.com.

Awesome. Well, Jeremy, this was a lot of fun. I enjoyed it. I think we can all learn a lot from what you’re doing with the firm and what you have done and look forward to speaking again with you. So thanks for being on the show.

Absolutely. Thanks for having me, Randy.