Today our guest is Jacob Schroeder. Jacob is founder and CEO of Ascend Consulting, which we’re going to discuss today because that is not the only business he has been part of and probably still part of. But this is part of the discussion we’re going to have today. Jake and I have met over the last handful of years, and honestly I don’t even remember where, so he’ll have to remind me where we originally met. But Jacob, welcome to The Unique CPA. 

Thanks for having me, Randy. Excited to be here. 

Yeah, me too. I think we discussed this last July, if I recall getting you on here, so I’m glad we got this done. But yeah, go ahead. You were going to say something? 

No, I think that’s when it was, and I was trying to remember when we met as well. It’s been a number of years ago, it might have been at a QuickBooks Connect, but I actually don’t know. 

I don’t either. That’s my guess too, is what it was at, before it was rebranded to Intuit Connect, it was at a QuickBooks Connect. I’m pretty sure that’s where it was. And I think it was in ’22. ’22? At QuickBooks Connect, ’cause that was my first year.

Then maybe, yeah, because I—yeah, maybe it was ’22. I feel like it’s been longer ago than that, but maybe that’s when it was. 

I know. Me too. That’s honestly what I was going to say before we got on, it’s like, okay—and I will say this, Justin, you can edit anything you want—even though we’ve known each other just a few years, it feels like it’s, I’ve known you forever, which is a very positive thing. You’re an easy guy to get to know. 

Yeah. So obviously I am founder and CEO of Ascend Consulting. I also have four other businesses I’m involved in. So like a little bit of everything in there, I’ve always had that entrepreneurial spirit and kind of come out and, you know, have had other businesses in the past shut them down, closed them. But something I think that I’ve realized is I am an inventor-discerner. So like if you use Patrick Lencioni’s Working Genius model, I’m very much an inventor. So like I go out and invent things consistently right? And that is who I am. You see that happen in my firm as well. Like I definitely try a lot of different things and throw a lot of mud at the wall and see what sticks, right? That is just a central part of who I am. I’ve come to learn. 

Yep. A true entrepreneur, you’re not afraid to take chances. That’s the funny thing is that, you know, people look at an entrepreneur and you say, well, how did you come up with that idea? How does, how did they do that? And how do they, and nobody has to jump in opportunity, but there’s an opportunity in front of everybody every single day. I mean, there’s always something out there that needs your attention that you can, at least in our minds, we can do different, we can do even better. And it’s interesting when I talk to people that. Don’t see, and I’m feeling that you would probably agree with this, don’t see the risk. They just see the opportunity and let’s go for it. I’m assuming that’s how you feel? 

Yeah, and I mean, I think we still see risk, because I often talk about entrepreneurs and your best entrepreneurs aren’t actually risk takers, they’re risk hedgers. So typically if you’re like, you’re going to be a great entrepreneur as you go into things, you hedge your risks in other areas, right? So like if you’re going to take a massive, risky bet in one area, you’re probably making some really safe bets in another area of your life. And it’s, you know, it’s like, “Hey, I’m actually going to live in a smaller house and I’m not going to go buy the new house right now because I’m taking a big financial risk somewhere else,” right? So you hedge those bets against one another is what you learn. 

And you know, I definitely think you know, from an inventor perspective, you see those people. And the biggest issue is learning what to say no to, um, is actually the bigger risk. And some of our past business failures is because I said yes to things and actually didn’t have the time or the allocation of resources that I could make at that time to make those successful because I had too many other things going, so.

Got it. Yeah. I find that really interesting because I probably should have learned that years ago because I had the big house, I take the big risks and I didn’t hedge my bet in a lot of areas. Luckily for me, it paid off in the long run, but there’s always up and downs the for sure, with as an entrepreneur, and I’ve had plenty of downs and I’m not afraid to talk about it. Luckily for the last, you know, 15 plus years I’ve been riding a really nice high and really enjoying it, so you take those ups and downs as they come and you learn from them, which I’m guessing you did. And the one thing that I want to talk about today though is on that line, I mean, you took a pretty big risk recently or at at least a major change in your business model. And, well, I’ll let you explain what you did—was it last year in ’24? 

Yeah, so I’ll set the stage a little bit. Some consulting was historically just a traditional accounting firm. You know, we did taxes—a lot of tax, a lot of bookkeeping, accounting, and then we always had this advisory practice that we dabbled in. And like we’ve always been an advisory firm, so a few years ago it’s been probably three or four, we said we were an advisory first firm and we were only taking on clients that had advisory, but we were still doing bookkeeping and taxes and some advisory. And what, you know, as time grew, you know, a lot of that work, our advisory was a small piece, and we were doing a lot of bookkeeping and tax for those clients. So while they were an advisory client, still primarily bookkeeping tax. 

So, you know, going into last year we were looking at things and you know, I said we want to be an advisory firm. And so we started exploring how to do that and we took a massive bet last year and actually said we are going to split our firm into three firms. And we have a lot of reasoning for that, but we actually split the firm from Ascend Consulting into Ascend Consulting, which is an advisory only firm—we only do advisory work now. And then Ascend Tax, which is a tax firm, and NexGen Accounting, which does bookkeeping and accounting work. So took that single firm and split it into three.

This goes against a lot of what I would say, conventional wisdom of like, “Hey, it makes more sense to bring those under one roof and have a seamless experience and you know, provide more services to a client.” But in the time we’ve done it, and we can go through the reasoning that we did it, but in the time that we’ve kind of done this, we’ve actually seen massive growth and benefit from being separate instead of together. You know, we had it integrated and like had this seamless client experience, but in a lot of ways we’ve found it more powerful to be a part than it used to be being together. And it’s opened a lot of additional doors too. So this is the interesting thing. And yes, we have great partnerships and we work and make a seamless experience across those. And from the advisory level, we’ve actually signed other partners, the other bookkeeping firms and other tax firms that we work with, in a seamless partnership as well. So it’s opened that door up and yes, we believe those clients need a collaborative experience with both firms in there, but it’s definitely doable and we’ve opened a door up that’s completely different, you know. 

And as I look at this, people are like, what made you do this? Or what are you most proud of of doing this? And I think I’ll start with what I’m most proud of is that, is, you know, we took current staff members and gave them ownership in these companies and let them take them on. And they are running those companies. So everyone’s like, oh, well these were your companies, so you just are still a piece of each of those. And no, like I do not have an operational role at all inside of the tax firm anymore. I do not have an operational role at all inside the bookkeeping accounting firm. I am there as an investor and board member, and that’s the extent of it, right? And yes, we did roll forward some equity, but we’re giving them ownership, the employees’ ownership, they earn more equity as they grow it. So they have growth plans and as they grow them, they earn more equity, and my ownership gets diluted day in and day out, right? Every time they’re growing, my ownership goes down. 

So what I’m most proud of in this is like, the ability and like, I can’t describe like how much it means to me to be able to see employees that were employees of mine for a long time, just growing, taking ownership, building their own thing, opening up a world that’s possible for them and their families or future families, like their worlds are changing ’cause we gave them this opportunity. And like that to me means probably more than anything. And like, yes, you know, there’s a lot of other reasons and we can go through the reasons, but like when I look back, what I am most proud of in doing this is seeing the growth in the employees and just unlocking opportunity for them, that probably would’ve never been possible otherwise. And to me like that probably means more than anything, as we did go and do that. 

That’s pretty cool. That reminds me of a conversation I had with Josh Lance years ago where he talked about the ownership opportunities that he was able to give people that he worked with because of the way he structured his business. I was always impressed with that. So now as much as I talk about Josh Lance, I’m going to have to start talking about you too with this.

I don’t know that I’ll ever live up to Josh, just putting that out there, right? Like, I don’t think I’ll ever get there. He was an amazing person, but like, glad to be in the same conversation as him.

Yeah. So let’s dig in. There’s so many things and we can go any area of that, but I’m going to dig a little deeper into that ownership structure. So you pulled these three parts of the business apart. You pulled them apart for some reason, one did not get the ascend name, but the other two did. 

Yeah. And so. I’ll talk about that reasoning a little bit, right? Like when we actually went into this and said, “Hey, how do we come an advisory focus firm? What do we do? What’s holding us back?” And so what we actually realized was, you know, the volume of bookkeeping and accounting interactions with a client actually was devaluing our advisory services. because when they looked at us as a firm, you know, while we were saying, “Hey, we were an advisory first firm,” we were charging them a decent amount, the number of interactions they had with us in bookkeeping and accounting greatly outnumbers the number of interactions on an advisory level, right? Just because of volume of transactions and everything else. So that means they started associating us with a bookkeeping and accounting firm, even though, yes, we’re an advisor there, but it started devaluing our advisory services, right? So as we went into that, we said, “Hey, we want to actually separate those brands, right? And yes, there’s some shared clients still,” but we wanted to separate those. 

The other reason we separated those pieces is at that time we had some bookkeeping firms coming to us and saying, “Your advisory model’s really interesting, and we would like to partner with you to provide advisory for our clients.” So from that perspective, we don’t want clients knowing that we have a bookkeeping arm, right? It’s like, no, like you are with your bookkeeper. We are not going to offer you bookkeeping services. We actually wanted to separate those. 

Yep.

On the tax side, we decided to keep it the same because Ascend Consulting, in our advisory model, we do still offer some tax strategy work and as a result there we include a tax return with those. So we don’t do it at Ascend Consulting, we white label it to Ascend Tax. And like Ascend Tax files it and there’s communication there. So we said, “Hey, that’s an easy way to like not feel too distant.” Now we do work with other tax preparers as well and have clients with other tax preparers doing the tax side, but we decided just to keep that consistent from an ease perspective, walking into it. It doesn’t mean it’ll be that way forever, but it is that way today, right? And so that is kind of how we approach that and why we didn’t keep the same name. 

Okay, so let’s two things. First, let’s talk about the partnerships with other firms. So they like your advisory model, they want you to come in and advise on their clients, but they know you have tax and bookkeeping as well. I assume you don’t keep that secret. Do you ever see fear of, “Hey, you know, we’re not going to bring Jacob and Ascend in because we don’t want them taking our tax work, they don’t them our bookkeeping work?” How do you alleviate those fears? 

Yeah. And so obviously the bookkeeping side’s really easy ’cause we’re just like, we don’t offer it at all from there. When it comes to the others, it’s really around explaining what we look at in a partnership and what a partnership means to us and how collaborative it is for us, right? So when we go and partner with a firm, almost all of our meetings with that client are joint meetings. So we have a bookkeeper, we’re bringing that bookkeeper right in. They get to sit in those advisory meetings. And I think, you know, set the stage a little bit—when we talk advisory, it’s a little different maybe than what a lot of people in the industry say, oh, that’s what advisory is. You know, it’s not just CFO services. CFOs a piece of ours, but our advisory covers seven key areas is what we call them around tax strategy, so we’re looking at like lifetime tax rate minimization and looking at the big picture. 

So yes, we’ll get a little bit in this current year, but especially if we’re partnered with a tax firm, we’re not doing current year projections, your tax provider’s doing your current year projections, like we’ll discuss overall business strategy and how that aligns to tax strategy, but that’s still on the tax return, right? We are looking at that long term, what’s that lifetime tax rate? We’re looking at capital allocation strategies. Many of our clients have multiple businesses, so okay, how are we allocating capital across all of them, and to their personal side? So we’re also bringing in the personal piece and saying, what’s their personal financial plan? How do we align those pieces? 

We do the CFO in the business. We spend a lot of time on business strategy work. So what’s the vision? You know, VTO from EOS, or we’re actually working on our own version of the VTO right now and like doing a proprietary model of some things VTO is missing and some things we don’t think are as important, so we’re actually building our own full version of what that looks like and how to build clarity inside of an organization and deliver that and set a strategy. Risk management, so where are we taking risks? Where do we hedge against those? There’s another category there. We do some legacy and estate planning. So what’s that legacy you want to leave inside your business and individually, so, and then how do we achieve both those? And that goes hand in hand with our last category of people. So are the right people in the right seats in the bus? As we start thinking about the legacy, you want your business to leave, how are we going to fill those gaps as you start exiting it? And what does that look like? As well as just for the growth that we have. 

So we are not a CFO shop like we do some CFO services there. We’ve actually even looked at partnering with some CFO people to like, we’ll do the rest of the advisory, the rest of that wheel. So that is what advisory means to us. So when we come and say, “Hey, this is our advisory offering” to a bookkeeping firm, they quickly realize most booking firms do not want to do that wheel, but their clients need that wheel, right? And so then instantly they’re like, oh yeah, bookkeeping’s not on there anywhere. We very much talk about we don’t do bookkeeping. When we come into these partner meetings, we’re going to be doing them together with you. So you get to hear how we go through that wheel. With your client and you understand all those things, and when we start talking a business strategy piece that’s going to impact your bookkeeping, you’re aware of it right away. 

You know, when we have a tax practitioner, we bring them in here and we’re talking, “Hey, we’re doing this business strategy, which may result in, you know, an extra business line over here. Oh, that’s going to be another tax return.” You’re aware of that right away. You’re brought into that conversation and we’re looking at you and saying, “Hey, what are you going to need this year? What is that going to change from a tax perspective? What do you need?” We may be looking at lifetime tax rate, but we’re looking to you for that short term aspect of, “Hey, what is that going to change for this year? What do you need to be aware of? What should we be missing?” So they realize it’s a very collaborative approach and not that risk of us taking their client as much.

Yep. And the word collaborative is one of my favorite words, ’cause I think that we need to do a lot of that in this profession because we all have passions and skills that are important and to us, but everybody else has a passion and skill that’s important to them and knowledge. And so if we could start sharing that across companies, I think it just helps us all, everybody overall, where if you can concentrate on what you’re good at and what you’re passionate about and what you like to do, how can you fail? I mean, really. Yeah. Your passion is slowing through right now and it says that to your clients as well. But I want to expand on that collaborative ’cause that’s important from a standpoint that I’m guessing part of the ease, if it is ease, ease of transitioning, or working with these firms without any fear of what you’re going to do is also the collaborative and the community that you’ve become part of, and the relationships you’ve developed over the years from being out at like conferences and like, that’s where you and I met. That’s where, you know, I’m at often and I’ve met so many people there, but I’m guessing a lot of the work that comes from other people is from these relationships you’ve built over the years.

Yeah, certainly. I mean, that’s when we started our partner program, that’s where our first partners came from, right? It’s just like, hey, we’ve developed trust over the years, so like then they even have less concern about me stealing it because we have a personal trust level. Now, obviously we’re expanding that partner program into people we don’t know as well, which is always a challenge, but you know, building those relationships opened so many doors up. You know, I go back and I think, you know, I sat on Intuit’s Accountants’ Council back a number of years ago, right? And I looked at the doors that opened and it started building some relationships with other great people in the industry, and then they introduced me to other people, and that was like a catalyst that just unlocked so many doors for me, that I look at my career and say, how different would it have been if I hadn’t sat there because the doors had unlocked were very, very meaningful to me. 

Yep. No, I’m the same as you. I’m on the Intuit Tax Council, my time is up shortly, which will be sad, but it’s also time. But, you know, over the years I’ve built relationships with historically top 400 CPA firms. That’s where I live the community. And they’re great community and great people, and they have great organizations. But over the last five years, I started going to Intuit Connect, used to be QuickBooks Connect, started going to Scaling New Heights, starting to go to these conferences where there’s probably a on average, smaller firms that I was traditionally dealing with and built so many strong relationships and met so many cool people that it’s just, I love the collaborative part of this profession. So alright, I’m ranting now without a question in there, but it’s so important. 

But it is so important. And that’s the thing, like, you know, even as we work with these, I mentioned the joint meetings, but like there’s also many times we reach out to our partner firms and have a discussion about the client with them to make sure we’re on the same page before we get on the call with the client. That way there’s never a time where, oh yeah, we just threw this out there and our partner’s like, “What on Earth? I don’t agree with that.” So like, hey, let us work out our differences over here before we go to the client. We also have a big piece that we always say, ask internally, which means internally among all the advisors, before we ask externally to the client. 

Okay, nice. 

Because, hey, why if I have this information, and the bookkeeper’s asking the client for it instead of asking me, that’s just a bad experience for the client. And so it’s way better that they ask me, let’s make the best client experience and we are working to improve our partner’s client experience as well as ours, like we want that to be better. So it’s really around better together while maintaining your independence and really going after what you love. And you talk about that a lot, the passion. We have a slide in our partner program that I envisioned as you’re talking about that, which is like two overlapping circles, you know, the Venn diagram: Do what you love, and let somebody else do what they love and there’s going to be overlap where you guys can work together. And that’s the real power. Too often we’re seeing people in accounting being told they need to do something and therefore they’re doing it and they have no passion around it and they don’t enjoy it. Do what you enjoy. 

Enjoy, yeah. That is really what my new presentations are about, is that I’m really working on some new ones. ’cause I, I think that’s so important and it took me a long time to realize that, uh, like I do what I thought I had to do often. Which is, you know, things I did not like to do. I love starting a business. I love getting the business going. I hate managing the business. I just, and I’m not good at it. And it took me a long time to realize that and to finally realize I need to hand those things off to somebody else, and let them do it, and let me sit and talk to Jacob, ’cause that’s what I love doing. So if we can do that. So that’s one thing, one of my goals this year is to really get that message out and start people thinking that, hey, yeah, why am I reading my email when I can have technology or an assistant do that? Why am I whatever? Because I can have someone else do that. Why don’t I spend more time on the tax advisory part of stuff? Because I love tax. I love helping have an impact. So that’s really a goal of mine this year is to really get that message out more and so. You and I might have to do a session at a conference together

I’d love that. I’m curious, have you done Patrick Lencioni’s Working Genius model? 

Nope. I’ve heard the name, I’ve had people have told me, so this is, yeah, I have not, I probably should read the—there’s, it’s a book, I assume, right? 

It’s a book and a test. So you can go online and take the test and basically there’s, there’s two types. I mean, you basically, each individual has two working geniuses, two working competencies, two working frustrations. So working genius is something they could do all day every day, and like, they could do it all day and at the end of the day, they’re more energized than when they started working. Competency, you can do well for a while, but do it long term and you’re going to get annoyed doing it. Working frustrations, you hate doing that type of work. And the types are wonder like, why are things the way they are? Invention, create new ideas. Discernment—is it a good idea or not? Enablement, galvanizing, like, so enablement would be, “I’ll help with that.”

Right. 

Galvanizing is like energizing people behind things and tenacity. So tenacity, getting things done. So it’s always interesting, ’cause a lot of accountants are enablement people, tenacity people, right? 

Oh yeah, I can see that. 

So they want to help get things done and they love checking the boxes off. But you know, you need all types in there. And the really interesting thing for me, when we look at it as an industry as a whole, we’re telling an industry to move to being advisors. And if we think, “What does advisory typically involve?” It involves like why are things the way they are—wonder. Invention like, “Oh, we have a problem, let’s create a solution for it.” And discernment—”is this a good idea or not?” Yet, most of the accountants are probably having a genius of enablement and tenacity. Yeah. So now suddenly we’re asking them to work in areas that they’re not going to enjoy. And so how do we actually distill that down, and like, there are types of advisory and like how do we take advisory and break it down into an enablement-tenacity piece that they can enjoy and that’d be their passion, or focus still on doing bookkeeping and accounting. Still focus on the task, like focus on what you enjoy.  Understand what you like. “Oh yeah, everyone’s telling me I need to do that.” No, you shouldn’t if that’s not what you’re going to enjoy doing because you’re just going to hate life, right? 

Yep. Oh man, we could talk about this all day, ’cause I’m the same way. I get so frustrated when I hear people say, yeah, you know, I got there. I was, I hated my review. And my manager told me, here’s my weaknesses and here’s what I need to work on. It gets stronger at, and I said, that’s a bunch of crap. It’s your weaknesses because you don’t like it or you’re not good at it, but your strengths are the important part. What are you doing that is awesome and why is it awesome? Because you’re passionate about, because you love doing it, because you have that, I keep saying this on the podcast the last couple of episodes, and this is just me: The way I look at it is I live at the intersection of my passion and my skills, I love what I’m doing, and I’m good at it, in my opinion at least, and so when I put those two together, and I, you’re right at that intersection. Nothing’s work. It’s just you’re loving every moment of it. And so that’s my small version of what maybe other people say, but for me, in my head, that works out well. So I love tthat’s where you are striving to be and where you’ve gone and where you’re telling other people that they should strive to be. That’s great. 

I have done Clifton Strengthsfinders. I’m guessing it’s kinda-sorta, it’s not, but at least tells you what you’re labeled as. You still have to figure out what you do with that label. It’s like there’s four things when you distill it down. There’s all these strengths and everything. No weaknesses, just strengths because everything’s a strength, it’s just a matter of level of strength is the way I understand they look at it. But then once you get all those strengths together, there’s one of four boxes you go in, which is the doer, the innovator, and that that’s different than this, but it’s, that gets stuff done, the relationship builders, the strategic thinker and the influencer. And those four working together when we did this as a company, and saw the groups of all four of those personalities or strengths in our room, I looked around, I go, wow, if everybody was over here in this corner where I’m at, we would go nowhere, and it’s so cool to see that we need this whole group and everybody’s personality and strengths and diversity of everything to be successful. And that was one of the most powerful things I think I’ve ever done, for me, in our company, just to see that.

Yeah. And I think these tools are all amazing, right? And I think we don’t put enough emphasis on them in firms. Like, we don’t understand who people are and we don’t understand ourselves. And we don’t understand our teams. And so, you know, Working Genius, Clifton Strengthsfinders, personality profiles, like they can all come into play and now there’s no one magic bullet. You know, typically, like if we’re using Working Genius, we also use. Predictive Index or Working, you know, like in conjunction with Working Genius. So like we’ll marry them together. 

But I also think, what I don’t like about actually StrengthFinder is it doesn’t have like your frustrations. And I think this is what I found powerful with Working Genius: in any role, you’re not going to get rid of all your frustrations, right? You’re going to have some. But when you know that’s the type of work that’s frustrating, it’s easier to walk in like, okay, this is going to frustrate me, but let’s just buckle down and get it done. When you don’t recognize it, it’s really easy just to sit there and spin your wheels forever and get more and more frustrated. So I think that recognition of like, oh yeah, I don’t enjoy this, but let’s just get it done because it’s part of life stops you from spinning your wheels as much. 

Yep. And I’m at the point where I am, I don’t like this, I’m frustrated with this. I’m not doing it. And I think that’s, I really, I think everybody can get to that, ’cause you can delegate, you can outsource, you can automate, you can eliminate, you can, there’s so many things when you find those. And I’m guessing that’s to, to wrap this back up to the business, I’m guessing that’s somewhat when you broke it into three, you know, people were able to follow their passions, what they, you know, hey, they like the bookkeeping end and that’s where they are, they like the tax and that’s where they are. And you and whoever else came with you, the advisory end, and that’s what you like and that’s where you have the less frustrations and the more following your personality traits.

That’s exactly it. You know, that’s part of the reason we split was it aligned to everyone. You know, as we look forward to, hey, if we just become an advisory only firm and we get rid of all these things, there’s people like, “But that’s the type of work I really enjoy doing.” And it’s like, okay, how do we empower you to do more of that? And you know, that’s the big thing that, you know, it’s been really interesting to see that unlock. I’m super proud of it too, just the ability, when you give people autonomy and ownership mindsets, like what they can go do, that I don’t even know that giving them an ownership inside of the big company, would’ve unlocked. Because it’s that ownership coupled with autonomy like it’s yours to run. No, I don’t have final say anymore. Like at a board level, yes, but like within operational, so like, unless it becomes a board level issue, which are few and far between, let’s be real here, like if you have a good board, that autonomy, just like you just see it unlocked in them and go and achieve great things. And it’s an amazing piece there. 

Well, I think that’s probably a good place to start wrapping up. I’m very excited to see where this goes. I’m very excited that you’re doing this, even though it’s not traditional, I think it could become, I think, you know, having these alternative, you know, practice structures or however you want to say it. I’m very impressed when I see people doing that, changing the way, changing the model, not doing the SALY method, same as last year, just because we’ve always done it this way, we have to go this way. So I’m excited to see where this goes, and I’d love to do a follow up on this next year and see how things, see if you’re still having that big smile like you have right now, which I hope you do.

It’s an experiment for sure, right? Like that’s always in here. But that’s where I look at it is can this be a new model that really unlocks things of decoupling firms and then becoming more in their individuals and unlocking things for people and being people-centric and super excited to see where this goes and like really believing in the model and we’ll see what happens with it.

You’re saying all my buzzwords: people-centric, you’re saying, man, this is a, we should, we need to do this like every week. Alright, so we’ll finish up in a minute on just more about this and how people can learn about it. Before we get there though, a question that we, uh, always end with or second to last question is, hey, I can tell you passionate about this. I love what you’re seeing, what you’re doing, and work is great, but work is not who you are. And so when you’re not doing work, when you’re not thinking of business models, when you’re not thinking of advisory and people-centric and ownership and all these things, what do you do for fun? What’s your outside of work passions? 

Yeah. And obviously I do bring work into a lot of things, but you know, that’s actually been a big mission of mine in the last year is to not work as much. And you know, we’ve gotten work hours down under 50 hours a week, I’m like really working on that so I can have that life outside, you know? So probably the things I enjoy most is being outdoors and doing things outdoors, like getting ready to go on a ski trip next week with some other accountants. Yes, it’s pulling business in, but like bringing that pleasure in and doing some hiking trips, you know, those are, as I look at the year, it’s like skiing and hiking are probably the two big things that we’re targeting this year.

Okay. And then last question: If anybody wants to, you know, connect with you, hear more, see what you’re doing, maybe team up with you, what’s the best places for them to get ahold of you or look at? 

Yeah. Active on LinkedIn. Jacob Schroeder there. Active on Twitter. I think it’s @JacobBSchroeder is my Twitter handle, so feel free to reach out on either of those, or you can send me an email at jacob@ascendllc.co.

There you go. Well, Jacob, this was a lot of fun for me. There’s so much more I really wanted to go into, but I think we could have gone for two hours, and so that’s why I think at some point we have to do this again. But again, thank you so much for being on the show. 

Thank you for having me. Randy.