Become a Creator today!Start creating today - Share your story with the world!
Start for free
00:00:00
00:00:01
Cool Careers in Accounting Ep. 19 - From CFO to Whistleblower with Andrew Jordan
295 Plays7 days ago
Andrew Jordan, CPA, recounts his remarkable path from valedictorian and Big-Four-style tax staffer to tech-company CFO turned whistleblower. In this candid conversation with host Mike Potenza, he explains how uncovering a fabricated Walmart contract led to an FBI fraud case, the collapse and turnaround of the business, and his eventual launch of Jordan CPA Services. Jordan discusses career setbacks, ethical dilemmas, leadership lessons, and advice for aspiring accountants seeking meaningful, balanced careers.
Earn CPE by listening to this podcast through a Becker Prime CPE subscription.
Listen to this episode through your Becker LMS platform to complete practice questions, pass the final exam, and earn CPE credit.
Already a Becker Prime CPE customer? Login here.
Have access to Becker CPE through your employer? Earn CPE credit for this podcast however you consume Becker CPE, either through your company’s LMS or via the Becker platform. Not sure where to log in? Check with your CPE admin.
Learn more about CPE Podcasts from Becker: https://www.becker.com/cpe/becker-podcasts
Recommended
Transcript
00:00:00
Speaker
Thank you.
Introduction of Andrew Jordan
00:00:09
Speaker
Hey everyone, it's Mike Potenza from Becker's Podcast's Cool Careers in Accounting. And my guest this week is someone who has a really and truly unique story.
00:00:20
Speaker
His name is Andrew Jordan and he is a CPA, but he has gone through just about the gamut of everything there is out there for a CPA to go through. And one of the biggest things that a lot of CPAs can never say they went through whistleblowing. And we're going to dive into that in just a bit.
00:00:38
Speaker
But first, I'd like to introduce and welcome my guest this week, Andrew Jordan.
Andrew's Early Life and Career Decision
00:00:43
Speaker
Andrew, thank you so much for being here. Thanks for having me, Mike. Okay. Well, I know you're a really busy man and you have a really great story, but I really do appreciate you taking the time to come out here and talk with us today. Now, interesting last name, Jordan. and You are not related to Michael Jordan, are you?
00:01:02
Speaker
You know i get that fairly often. I don't think so. Well, he's my favorite basketball player. Growing up in New York, rooting for the Chicago Bulls was not easy. I just wanted to make sure. I just wanted to make sure. All right. Well, anyway, listen, first question I have for you. Really interesting.
00:01:15
Speaker
You know, where'd you grow up? And just give me a little bit about the Andrew Jordan childhood. Yeah, so I grew up in a small town called Joplin, Missouri. my dad's an eye doctor and um yeah, had a pretty good childhood growing up.
00:01:29
Speaker
I actually got to decide in high school I wanted to be an accountant, which I consider myself pretty lucky. All my friends had to change majors a bunch of times and I just kind of knew from high school it's what I wanted to do. so let me Let me ask you this. If if you have a dad that's a doctor and it's kind of kind of coincidental, my father was a doctor growing up as well.
00:01:48
Speaker
You know, a lot of times people are like, oh, your father's a doctor. You're going to be a doctor. So why don't you go down that medical path? You know, so I was valedictorian, um good test scores, all that kind of thing. Dad's a doctor, uncles are doctors.
00:02:00
Speaker
And if you grow up as the kid of a doctor and you see kind of like the the negative side of medicine, man, I don't know if you saw it, but like it made me decide i didn't want to be a doctor. That was the one thing I knew I didn't want to be growing up.
00:02:14
Speaker
yeah I can definitely relate to that. I would like in a summer 13 year old work in the, ah you know, in the office and go to the waiting room. And I go to my father's like, Dad, all these people that are old and sick, do you know that? Yeah, I'm a doctor. I know that i was like, you're not for me, not for me, for sure. So I get that. We get that.
00:02:31
Speaker
um Well, let me ask you, though, but how does though having a father that's a doctor, uncles that are doctors, but then going to school and saying, well, accounting is for me, what drove you to accounting?
Challenges and Success in Accounting
00:02:42
Speaker
you know So no one in my family a CPA. I am the only CPA in my family. um But we had doctors, we have lawyers. And so when I was in high school, trying to figure out what I wanted to be, which is like an impossible question for an 18-year-old to answer.
00:02:55
Speaker
But my dad took me around to talk with his lawyer and talk to his CPA and talk to some other people and say, what's your life like? What's your career like? And i talked to his CPA and I loved it. I was like, this sounds fantastic because it was...
00:03:09
Speaker
what I wanted. I knew I wanted to help people. um and I knew I wanted to do something that was technically challenging and interesting. And CPA did both of those things without having to be medicine. You know, medicine does that too, but it's it's medicine. has all the negatives, including like, I hate needles, just personally. So I knew I didn't want to be in a career that had me around needles all the time.
00:03:30
Speaker
So I didn't have a bookkeeping class like a lot of people have in high school. So I went in knowing I wanted to be a CPA because I love the profession. i love the idea of it more than loving accounting.
00:03:41
Speaker
My first couple accounting classes, honestly, were kind of rough. I think they're for most people. You occasionally run into those people who are like, oh yeah, I loved accounting 101. I think those people are kind of odd and because most of us honestly struggle through the first couple of classes.
00:03:55
Speaker
Sure, sure. So where did you stay in Missouri or where'd you go for the undergraduate school? Yeah, I went to Missouri State. So it's maybe an hour or two from my hometown and it's a school of 25,000, 30,000, has a really good accounting program.
00:04:08
Speaker
Interviewed at a bunch of other schools and thought I was going to go somewhere else. And then just ultimately it was the right fit. And I'm really glad I went there. Got a great education, had a lot of fun while I was there and got my undergraduate, got my master's and set for the CPA exam right afterwards.
00:04:21
Speaker
And you stayed in Missouri State for the Masters as well. Yeah, we did the one year accelerated Masters. I know those are probably going to change some now that the 150 hours rule is changing. But back when I got it in early 2000s, that was the thing.
00:04:34
Speaker
So then you said you right away studied for the CPA exam and and took that. Did you sit for the CPA exam, start studying while you were in school? Did you wait till you graduated? how did you prepare? Walk me through that process.
00:04:47
Speaker
So I decided I would take BEC, which was used to be the the smallest course. I would take that one first. And I took it during the intersession of my accelerated master's program. So right between Christmas and the next semester starting.
00:05:00
Speaker
And that was a terrible decision. Like it was way too much. I was so busy. had just gotten married within the last year. We'd moved into a house. like I had so many things going on, but I really wanted to get one of the sections under my belt. And so I did, and I passed it.
00:05:12
Speaker
and which was great. But actually I took Becker's review course. So it was the DVDs at the time and it was pretty great. And I passed all the sections first time. It was one of those, like I had so many friends who got 74s, you know, 75s passing. So they get a 74 and they have to spend three months studying for it again. i was like, not me, man. I'm going to make sure I overkill. And I did. And I'm really glad I did. It worked really well.
00:05:37
Speaker
Yeah, it's amazing. One point is the difference between the perfect score of 75 and the worst score of 74. Right. It's amazing. Oh, my goodness. So you you got married then at a young age, like pretty much right out of school and went right into the exam and married life and everything altogether.
00:05:52
Speaker
There's a lot going on right then. Yeah, absolutely. When I was in college or just getting out of college, I could not take care of myself. I give you a lot of credit. That's pretty impressive. Wow. OK, so now things are going well. You you graduate with your um you know undergraduate degree in accounting and you have your master's.
00:06:10
Speaker
You're now starting to study for the CPA exam, knocking those off. Where do you go work first? You go um public, you go private, big, small. What'd you do? ah So a little bit more background, right? So I got a 4.0 in my undergraduate and I took 150 hours in four years of undergraduate. and And just got my master's anyway, because I wanted to have a master's. 4.0 in my master's, like top of my class. i was feeling really good.
00:06:33
Speaker
i started at... At the time it was BKD and now it's four of us, right? Their headquarters is in the Springfield, Missouri, where I was. And so they had like six floors of this office building. There were a ton of people. was the most prestigious place to start, paid the best.
00:06:49
Speaker
And so that's where I started. i did an internship there during my master's year. And then I started on there full time. Okay, so
Career Transitions and Layoffs
00:06:57
Speaker
what'd you do? You start audit, tax, like what was the route you decided to go?
00:07:00
Speaker
Tax side. Oh, nice, tax guy myself, love that, love that. All right, so now, so you're at BKD, now Forbes, and you know, there's always a big adjustment, right? Especially you're a young guy, your new wife, ah just getting all acclimated, sitting for the exam,
00:07:17
Speaker
tax busy season must be coming along. Talk to me about making that shift from you know college life to professional career, busy season, easy, hard. How'd you find it?
00:07:28
Speaker
you know the The thing I loved about college, I loved high school. it did really well in high school, but then college was so much better because you had the flexibility and the freedom. You could do whatever you wanted. I remember actually calculated out Despite taking an overload of classes, I actually had more like regularly scheduled events and activities with all the clubs I was in than I was in class.
00:07:49
Speaker
And so I was able to balance all these things and do really well because it just mattered that you got it done and got it done right. Well, public accounting, and it's changed a bunch in the last 20 years. I'm really glad for that. Especially back then, it only mattered how many hours you spent grinding at your desk.
00:08:03
Speaker
And so I went from this like a lot of flexibility, a lot of free time, a lot of you know being rewarded for being fast and efficient to an environment where you just had to be sitting at your desk for 60, 80 hours a week.
00:08:17
Speaker
And it was it was honestly not a good fit for me. So right after tax season, my first tax season as a full-time employee, had been there just under a year, i and a few other people were called into the partner in charge's office and we were all let go.
00:08:31
Speaker
And so it it was, it was brutal. I mean, as valedictorian in my high school class, like I'm good at this stuff. I passed my CPA, 86 was my low score. And suddenly I didn't have a job. It was very surprising. out of them So wait a minute. So you get them through busy season, right? You're working a a million hours a week, right? Busy season ends.
00:08:50
Speaker
And then they just kind of did a like chop shop and got rid of a whole bunch of the staff accountants. So it's another thing that used to happen a lot more. I think it's happening a lot less now. But yeah, they didn't want to carry people during the off season when they didn't have a whole lot of work and as a tax guy. So all I did was tax and some of the other people as well. And so they just let a group of us go. And that was something that apparently happened April 15th pretty much every year.
00:09:14
Speaker
Wow. So that must have really been a major blow to the ego right after being so successful grade wise, academically exams. And then you think you're doing well professionally and that happens.
00:09:24
Speaker
So what feeling does that leave you with and how do you rebound from that? Oh, my goodness. I mean, we could we could talk about this for a while. it was it was brutal. It was um i wasn't used to failing at things.
00:09:39
Speaker
And this felt like a real failure. We had, before we started, before our start date, I i invited all the people who had gotten offers from BKD over to my house. We had them for a nice dinner and we, you know, toasted all making partner together 10 years from now kind of thing. you know, that was the track I thought I was on.
00:09:56
Speaker
And so it was very much rug pull out from under me. i i remember that I would wake up in the morning after this happened and I feel this, like, you know when have a dream when you're falling and you wake up and like the pit of your stomach hurts?
00:10:08
Speaker
That's what it felt like. And it just was this a few seconds of coming to awakeness and then it hit me. Oh yeah, I've failed at this really important thing to me and I didn't know how to cope with it very well, quite honestly.
00:10:23
Speaker
So how long does this last between when they you know tell you your services are no longer needed to when you go through this really pit in your stomach feeling to that now, hey, I'm back on my feet. I got another job. How long did that take and what was that job?
00:10:37
Speaker
you So it was tough because it's a fairly small market. It's like we're in a big city and it's like April 20th or whatever. And like not many people are hiring tax accountants. Mm hmm. And so I eventually found a role is a few weeks, maybe a month or two later, I found a role at a small CPA firm.
00:10:52
Speaker
And so i was like, you know what? Maybe the big one just wasn't for me. I'll try a small CPA firm. So like a solo owner firm had like 10 or 12 employees. Okay. And then you stay there for a long time and you do just tax work or you start to now expand the skillset.
00:11:06
Speaker
You know, i I got to expand the skillset. Like one of the things I realized is even with a master's degree, I knew absolutely nothing about payroll tax. And so, which is something i think we should teach more in school. But at this firm, I got to do payroll taxes. I filed 941s, filled them out by hand in some cases. And so really had to learn the forms and learned how it worked.
00:11:26
Speaker
I learned a ton there. A year in though, i was hating it. And to the point where I was thinking like, do I go back to school? Do I get a law degree? Like maybe I'm not cut out to be a CPA because I don't enjoy this one bit.
00:11:39
Speaker
Tons of hours still, A lot of work and it wasn't work that particularly enjoyed. i had zero client contact at either firm. So it was just doing the work and not getting to ever like see the results of it.
00:11:52
Speaker
So you're at this new firm in the hometown. How did that go? You know, how long did you stay there? Did you like it? And ultimately, what did you wind up doing after that? So I liked it, it was fun. I felt like I had my groove. I understood what I was doing.
00:12:06
Speaker
got to work directly with clients a bunch, which was really rewarding. So I liked that, liked the work. But then we had a client who i actually had brought in. There was a tech company. And they were growing pretty
Rise and Turmoil as CFO
00:12:18
Speaker
rapidly. They had about 30 employees and they felt like they were ready for their first CFO.
00:12:23
Speaker
So I brought them in and our CPA firm was doing their taxes and doing their bookkeeping, but they definitely needed more support. And being a CFO sounded pretty fun. It sounded pretty rewarding. So I made the jump and became their first ever CFO.
00:12:38
Speaker
Excellent. So now you're moving away from working at an accounting firm to working in corporate America at a tech company as a CFO. So yes, a lot of your skill set does transition, but it's very different. So how did you find that transition? And then walk me down the road on when things started to go a bit awry.
00:13:01
Speaker
So it was actually different than I expected. i mean, I've been working with this client. I've been in their QuickBooks every day, you know, so I was familiar with it, but man, there was so much more politics. i was now managing people.
00:13:14
Speaker
i had accountants on my team that inherited that didn't know what they were doing. So we had to make changes there. Just a lot of new things, a really big learning curve. And I really thought I'd be working less going to private. You know, people in public always think people in private work a lot less.
00:13:30
Speaker
I worked 60 hour weeks for about a year straight. There was a big mess. There was a lot of cleanup we had to do and we were growing really fast. So it was busy.
00:13:41
Speaker
it took me probably about a year then to get that team in place, get them trained and then be able to hand off some of the day to day accounting to somebody else. But and during that process, so we grew from 30 employees to 75 employees in about a two year period. We also moved into a new 40,000 square foot building, which is huge.
00:14:02
Speaker
And during this whole process, we were constantly like scraping the bottom of cash, you know barely making payroll, but also growing just super aggressively. And so I got to learn, you know, choosing which bills you could afford to pay, making sure you had enough money for payroll, all of these different things that you don't think about even ah like a good, healthy, growing company often experiences.
00:14:26
Speaker
Cashflow. yeah Gosh, cashflow. Right. And the thing is like, at some point you almost need to bring in other investors if you want to keep growing really rapidly. And so that's what we did. We talked with,
00:14:37
Speaker
different banks. We talked with different equity groups and did, you know, I would tour them around the building. i did the dog and pony show as a CFO. Here's the financials, talk through everything.
00:14:47
Speaker
And we eventually sold majority interest. we We had one owner, the founder, and we sold to a Native American tribe. They have a private equity group, like investment group. And so they came and bought the majority of our company.
00:15:01
Speaker
Now, the reason they bought us, and we're good little company, we're growing, but the reason they they really interested in us is we were about an hour away from Bentonville.
00:15:12
Speaker
So Bentonville, Arkansas, where Walmart is headquartered. we had gotten ah Walmart contract. And the way this was explained to me by my boss, the founder, that this worked is Walmart gives you like a test contract.
00:15:27
Speaker
It's like a $350,000 contract, but for them, super tiny. And once you succeed at that contract, like the floodgates open, we could do as much work as we wanted kind of thing. Because they really liked that we were so close.
00:15:38
Speaker
They liked we were all in America, all those kind of things. Okay. Okay. So things were going well. Like with the tribe buying us, we had plenty of cash. We could grow aggressively. We could hire whoever we needed to.
00:15:50
Speaker
We never run out of cash, which was really nice coming from this really scarcity period. And things were going well. Like we were building a great team. We were getting a lot of attention. All of our sales though. So we didn't have any salespeople.
00:16:04
Speaker
All of our sales came from our founder CEO. And so he was talking to like Gulfstream, Procter & Gamble, as well as we have this big Walmart contract. Now, the Walmart contract, um and I'll leave out some of the details because, man, there are so many nuances. It's really a convoluted situation.
00:16:22
Speaker
i can imagine His wife used to work in IT at Walmart. And so that was like our in. She had to wait out her cooling down period of like a year or two years whatever, and then we could go and approach them and use all her contacts, and that's how we got this work.
00:16:39
Speaker
But they kept sending us more and more requirements. We had to have a very specific kind of server, and then we had to have all these test environments set up, and then we had to have all these different technical hoops to jump through, and it was like there was always another hoop.
00:16:54
Speaker
And this went on for like a year. And every week, my boss would come into my office and he would tell me about the meetings he had had that morning. Because once a week he drove down to Bentonville and met with his contact and went through all the things and then came back and he told me all the details.
00:17:10
Speaker
And I forget the guy's name, but um he had a granddaughter. He was really into golf. His granddaughter some health problems, so that came up sometimes. And there was this this it felt like I knew this guy I'd never met before.
00:17:23
Speaker
And eventually, it was in the summer, this had been going on for probably a year or something, and my leaders of my IT team, They had come to me and they had expressed some concerns. They were like, some of these requirements don't make sense. It seems like we can never get any traction. They were getting very frustrated.
00:17:40
Speaker
And eventually got to the point where I was like, I think this thing might not be real. Like we can never, no one else was ever allowed to talk to this guy. We only had to go through our founder.
00:17:51
Speaker
These requirements, yeah were these things that um were you think were being put in place just to kind of make you waste time? Or like, what do you think the reason that all these so special requirements were being requested?
00:18:05
Speaker
mean, at the time, the deal was like, you're working with Walmart. Walmart's like the federal government. It's hard to comprehend how big they are. it makes sense. in In hindsight, it was absolutely...
00:18:17
Speaker
In hindsight, it was absolutely just put put in place to distract us, keep us busy, and try and have people throwing off the scent of like, hey, I think something's wrong here.
Whistleblowing and Legal Battle
00:18:28
Speaker
So I remember that morning, I decided I was going to go to the the tribe's headquarters and talk to their CEO, so my boss's boss. is boss I remember telling my wife that morning, and we had two little kids at the time,
00:18:43
Speaker
and she stayed at home. But I remember saying to her, like, I'm gonna probably come back without a job because they literally referred to my boss who I was you know whistleblowing as the goose who laid the golden egg.
00:18:54
Speaker
He was the guy, right? he He was getting all these big contracts, huge, super important, couldn't upset him. And I had no evidence. I just had this, you know, as CPAs, we talk about don't subordinate your judgment.
00:19:08
Speaker
Right. That's one of the things that's drilled into us. And well, what's your judgment? Your judgment is like, this just doesn't feel right. And this, I had no proof.
00:19:19
Speaker
It just didn't feel right. Well, one question, where was money coming in from Walmart at this time? So the way the contract was structured is we didn't get paid until we started the work and we weren't actually able to start the work. That that was the part, that was the goalpost that kept getting moved.
00:19:38
Speaker
Okay. And so I went and I talked with my boss's boss and to my surprise, he heard me out, um you know, no evidence or anything. And so he's like, well, we're not going to do anything, but we're going to watch it.
00:19:50
Speaker
And so from that time on, I basically got to be a double agent, which was the worst experience of my professional career. So every week my boss would come in, he'd tell me all these stories about his meeting in Bentonville, what had been discussed, so much detail.
00:20:06
Speaker
And increasingly I was thinking, I think this is made up. Like, i don't know if this person's real and just we don't have a contract or like if the person is made up, which actually ended up being the case. So there were fabricated emails, fabricated contracts. Multiple people were just invented with this whole backstory to make it seem like it was a legitimate deal. So why now? What was his end game by making this all up and fabricating all of this information?
00:20:32
Speaker
So it's a question though, if you ever look at fraud, that's always it. Fraudsters are usually caught because they don't say, you know, that's enough. I'm going to stop at 2 million. They keep going. They don't know how to stop or when to stop.
00:20:44
Speaker
And so that's kind of the case here. I think it started as a way for him to bring in an equity investor and get a big big chunk of money. I think that was part of it. But then asked him that question. So when we eventually confronted him, he confessed and he said, you're right, I made it up.
00:21:04
Speaker
And we just looked at him and we said, why? Like, why would you why would you do this? And what he said was, i felt like everyone else put so much pressure on me to deliver, to perform. i just couldn't keep up with it. I couldn't keep up with people's expectations. So I had to start inventing things.
00:21:19
Speaker
So interesting. So really, he was profiting, you know, through fraud by selling this equity in the company. And, you know, he's selling his ownership interest. The money is going in his pocket.
00:21:30
Speaker
But he's trying to justify that by just saying too much pressure on me. It was my only course of action, so to speak. Yeah, he felt like he was backed into a corner by people's expectations. Wow. So what happens at this point now? So everybody now knows what happens. It all comes to light.
00:21:47
Speaker
So what happens to the company? What happens to him? What happens to you? You know, it's not at all what I would have expected to happen. What what I would expect to happen, what happens in movies is here we here's a smoking gun. and and I should back up and say the accountants in the room will appreciate this.
00:22:02
Speaker
So the deal with the Walmart contract, eventually ah the CEO said, oh, they'll pay 10% down. After a year, they'll pay 10% down, help defray the initial cost, that kind of thing.
00:22:14
Speaker
And so there was this check and he actually went and picked up the check in Bentonville and brought it under a lot of pressure. Cause increasingly the, his boss was starting to get suspicious. This wasn't real.
00:22:26
Speaker
And so under a lot of pressure, he went and got this check from Bentonville and he deposited himself. He never did this. He was never helpful. There's no way he would go to the bank for me to save me making the deposit.
00:22:39
Speaker
And so i called up the banker and I said, hey, I know our auditors are going to need a copy of this check, which is true. And so I need you to send me copy of the check. And it was a bank check. It was a counter check drawn from his personal account. It wasn't from Walmart at all.
00:22:53
Speaker
So when we confronted him originally, he actually pulled out his iPad and started reading from an imaginary, pretending to read from an imaginary email saying, oh, no, here's why I can't be in this meeting with the CEO that was supposed to happen because it would have uncovered everything.
00:23:08
Speaker
And so then we, here's the printed copy of the counter check. We have the smoking gun. Right, right. Wow. And then we have the confession. So and then he confesses and he explains why and and all those kind of things.
00:23:21
Speaker
What happened next really surprised me because what happened next was he wasn't put in jail. He wasn't prosecuted. FBI has brought in, um you know, this whole whole big thing.
00:23:34
Speaker
But he lawyers up and he changes his tune and he says, well, no, this wasn't it. Andrew, as in me, is part of a scheme from the tribe to steal the rest of my equity.
00:23:50
Speaker
Because yeahank he kept the minority interest. And this is just a way for the tribe to try and take the rest of his equity from him and his company that he built. And so a couple, a very persuasive guy, a very charismatic guy, he convinced several the employees of this.
00:24:04
Speaker
Took them with him, went over here, and then all of a sudden anonymous posts started popping up. a picture of me with a chef's hat, Andrew Jordan cooking the books. A bunch of comments about how Andrew was helping this tribe steal his company, all these anonymous comments. it was like he had a ah group of employees whose full-time job was to publicly harass and make me look bad and and cast doubt on the case.
00:24:29
Speaker
Which again, to me, was an open and shut case. He confessed in front of multiple witnesses. We had the smoking gun. Like there was just... But the wheels of justice turn very slowly. Wow. And I mean, I don't mean to laugh or anything, but it's it's just like you're telling me the story and it's like something I could be watching on Netflix. Right.
00:24:48
Speaker
And it would be like, oh, my God, he's so guilty. How do they not see this? Right. And you're telling me, hey, that's how it works. Yeah. It's like you're taking what you see at the end of the movie, the bad guy's taken away in handcuffs and you think they go to prison. But what really happens is there's no handcuffs and they're living at their beach house.
00:25:05
Speaker
So he he went out and spent the next, it was a good two years and the FBI got involved. So it disrupted our whole ton of negative publicity. bunch of our clients got skittish.
00:25:17
Speaker
We figured out that the Gulfstream and Procter & Gamble and multiple other things were also fake. And so it was really kind of this house of cards. we were We thought we were profitable because our books were profitable.
00:25:27
Speaker
It turns out that some of the invoices through a bunch of shell games and stuff, we were actually losing a couple hundred thousand dollars a month. Wow. And so it was it was a tough two years. We had to take one of the companies through bankruptcy. We had to move locations.
00:25:42
Speaker
lot of things happened. And eventually, after postponing as long as he possibly could, and it was about a two-year process, during which he was free and living his best life and and harassing me a whole bunch, he is still in prison. And so it was like a $20 million dollars restitution order, I think 10 years in prison, something like that. And he's still serving.
00:26:04
Speaker
Wow. Well, you're happy that, you know, the bad actors, at least in this case, got what, you know, they deserved. And hopefully that that they were able to collect a lot of that 20 million and make the restitution to those people that he, you know, fraudulently scammed.
00:26:19
Speaker
Yeah. I mean, the the sad thing is he'd already spent the money. And so, like, I think there's probably a garnishment against him for a long time. But the equity group, that tribe, innocent party completely. They're not going to see their money again.
00:26:31
Speaker
Well, that's a terrible story. Yeah, that is a terrible story. so then So then what happens to the company? What happens to Andrew? Do you stay there? Do you leave? Does the company ultimately close down? What was the end of game?
Leadership and Company Turnaround
00:26:42
Speaker
Yeah, so the tribe said, um Andrew, you were CFO, you're now president. Figure out how we stop losing $200,000 a month, please. And which which was awesome. It was really, really great of them giving me the opportunity. I was like 32 at the time, right? And so I had the fantastic team. um great executives, great programmers, just just fantastic people. And so we pulled together and the first thing we did, and so now I do a lot of like CFO, fractional CFO work and coaching.
00:27:11
Speaker
And one the things I'm really passionate about, because it's what worked for us here, is we said, we as a company have never had any values. Our whole point was, Yes, our owner had ah a second house, a beach house, but he really wants a third house. So he's paying for his third house.
00:27:28
Speaker
That's not a very good sense of motivation and can lead to this kind of behavior. And so we set out and we created our set of company values, which the company he never had before. And the first of them is transparency.
00:27:41
Speaker
And so one of our core values for my CPA practice today, we have to be honest, we have to you know be proactively candid as we describe it. And with those values, it gave us something to rally around. And we, in the course of one year, took us from losing over $200,000 month to being consistently profitable.
00:28:00
Speaker
No sales team. So we had to figure that out from scratch. You know, everything was ah big mess, but we cleaned it up and got it consistently profitable, just a little profitable, but you know, in 12 months.
00:28:11
Speaker
And that's a great, great turnaround, great series of events. So how long now do you serve as president? Do you stay with this company before you move on to the next game? And so I was president for about a year, maybe a year and a half.
00:28:24
Speaker
Loved it. Every day I felt like it was the highest and best use of my time. i felt like I was doing something really meaningful, worked with people I loved working with. Meanwhile, completely unrelated to us, our equity group, the the tribe that owned us, and they had gotten a lot of money from online payday loans.
00:28:42
Speaker
And there actually is a Netflix special about this. And about kind of their partner in the business. And so... they had a hundred million dollars or or some big amount of money. And there was a federal case pending and the federal case, they thought worst case scenario, they lose a chunk of it.
00:29:01
Speaker
Federal came back, they lost all of it. And so they went from having a huge amount of cash to having you know basically no cash. So their CEO, they outed him and they brought in a temp CEO to come in and was kind of a hatchet job. Like we have to cut this, we have to cut this.
00:29:19
Speaker
We had so many bad memories for them, I think. And we were just barely profitable. And so we were one of the, don't know, half dozen or more companies that they shut down. Oh, wow. That's that's terrible. So now now you're back out on the street again, so to speak.
00:29:35
Speaker
Back on the street. Also, it happened April, like middle of April. So once again, like just rough timing for a tax CPA. But ah so tried to help all my people find jobs. You know, where there was a flurry of activity and I decided like now is my time to launch my company. Because again, we're in a small town, town of like 40, 50,000.
00:29:54
Speaker
There's not a lot of president, CEO jobs open at any given time. And also, I decided I kind of want to work for myself and kind of control things myself a little bit more. And how much interaction during the course of all of these events are you actually working with the FBI? And how does that kind of launch you into a next career?
Starting a New Venture
00:30:16
Speaker
I mean, so I had the best FBI agent, our local agent who who had the case. He was the best guy. He was so smart. He was so professional. And there definitely was a point during it um when he said, hey, Andrew, we really need some more CPAs, you know, in the FBI to handle fraud cases like this. And you now have this direct experience.
00:30:36
Speaker
You know, let's talk about you joining the FBI, which... It wasn't something I wanted to do. I didn't want to move, uproot my family, any of that kind of stuff. But it was it was really flattering and confidence boosting. And it was kind of cool knowing that you have options makes everything better.
00:30:52
Speaker
And so knowing that like I could do that if I wanted to helped me to choose launching my own firm and have some confidence with that. Okay, so now you open up your Jordan CPA services. So, you know, what exactly does that do? And, you know, is it built off of all of these experiences that you went through up to this point in time?
00:31:12
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, kind of the the idea was I was CFO for a company that grew really rapidly. We hit all these pain points, had to figure out how to work with bankers, how to upgrade our insurance, how to do all of these different things.
00:31:24
Speaker
Small businesses don't have someone typically that they can afford to hire in-house. Let me be a fractional CFO. and So that's how I launched. Okay, so what are the services you offer for Jordan CPA Services? And I know you always, um I've seen in articles you've written, make reference to EOS, Entrepreneurial Operating System and Leadership Level 10.
00:31:46
Speaker
Talk to me about what all of that stuff means. Yeah, so one of the things that really helped us turn this company around was our set of values.
00:31:57
Speaker
And i i don't remember where I found the book, but when I launched my own firm, I found this book called Traction. And it talked about every company has an operating system, whether you recognize it or not.
00:32:07
Speaker
Here's a thoughtful one that really works in practice. so And it talked about things like determining what your company values are, determining why you're here as a company, and then giving you like really practical steps like the leadership level 10 once a week, you have an hour meeting and you have this agenda you follow and you just continually make the business a little bit better and a little bit better.
00:32:29
Speaker
And when I read it, I was like, oh, this is like what we did the tech company when we turned it around. It's just this is way better and better thought out and, you know, has all these tools and stuff. And so from early on, we use EOS and and ran our company. We still do on the this kind of set of principles and guidelines.
00:32:46
Speaker
And what what are like the main principles you say? Hey, if somebody is going to go down this road, these are like the top three things that you need to make sure that you do. Yeah, so if you're interested in EOS, definitely the book is worth reading, right? Gives you all the principles.
00:32:59
Speaker
but But basically, it's a being intentional with what you're doing, not being scrambly, and helping getting you out of the scramble that businesses are usually in, especially when they're smaller. And the idea is, instead of fixing things in the moment,
00:33:14
Speaker
and then not not going and really fixing them, which leaves you with a company that's held together with like duct tape. Fix in the moment and then add it to this list. And then once a week you go through and you work your way gradually through this list. And so a year or two later, like look at all the things you've solved and actually you have a really good company.
00:33:32
Speaker
Excellent. That is great advice. Now, your firm, you started up yourself. Is it just a one-man show or does it start to grow? Do you have employees or how is that working out?
Business Growth and Client Strategy
00:33:43
Speaker
Yeah, so i I realized at some point along the way, when I had probably two or three employees, that I wasn't very fulfilled. Like this this isn't what I wanted to be doing either. And it's because I missed having the team. I missed having a team to lead.
00:33:56
Speaker
missed being able to specialize, you know having to wear all the hats when you're a small CPA firm. it's It's exhausting. You have to do a lot of administrative work when you're three-person firm. And so we intentionally grew. where there's There's about 14 of us right now.
00:34:10
Speaker
And so when get a little bit bigger, that 20 to 30 person size really lets you specialize. And that's what we're gunning for. So we're just in the process over the next couple years of trying to get there. you You're back to doing taxes. Is there a busy season? Is there a burnout factor? Tell me about that.
00:34:27
Speaker
Yeah, so i worked at firms where the minimum hours were 60 and we definitely worked some 80 and 90 hour weeks. And we so we don't do that.
00:34:38
Speaker
We do taxes, we do bookkeeping and we do advisory, but we only do it for small businesses. And so like we don't take on individuals unless it's the owners of a small business. And so we're not trying to do the cash grab during tax season. We're trying to spread the work through the year.
00:34:52
Speaker
It's worked really well for us. And so we generally, other than than me, I'm still working some overtime, my business partner, and then we have one key employee. and We're all working some overtime and we're working actively to get those hours down.
00:35:05
Speaker
But the rest of the team, like they're not working overtime. And for me, that's like a huge win. Oh, and without a doubt, that's a huge win. Just quality of life, right? People are in better moods, things like that. That is great.
00:35:16
Speaker
So does it get to be the point, you know, you're trying to grow, but you have to be careful. Do I take every single client out there? Or you said, I want to kind of pick and choose who my clients are. So how do you you know handle what clients to take on or maybe what clients not to keep on if you don't feel it's the right fit?
00:35:33
Speaker
So a couple of years ago, there was a widow who came to me and she said, hey, my husband has died. This is my first tax year without him. And, you know, would you please do our taxes? We need a CPA we can trust.
00:35:46
Speaker
And so I, you know bleeding heart was like, of course, of course, we want to help. And that return we lost so much money on. right Because it turns out he had this like obscure railroad retirement that I'd never seen before. We had to do hours of research.
00:35:59
Speaker
And in the end, it was bad for us. And it honestly wasn't a great thing for her either. And so that's what I always think of when I think of taking on the wrong client. Like you end up with situations like that.
00:36:11
Speaker
That person is the ideal client for somebody who already knew all about real world retirement stuff. And they could serve for better and they could make a good profit, but it wasn't me. And so we really try to stick with what we do really well.
00:36:23
Speaker
Fast growing businesses that need advice. makes a lot of sense. so So now you're back on your feet. You own this ah CPA firm. Things are working out pretty well.
00:36:34
Speaker
You said you have a family now. Your kids are probably older. So what's going on with family life? And going to bring kids on to work for your firm or be accountants or what's happening there? So I do have an Intuit tax advisor t-shirt that I got size small that my 11 year old son wears around.
00:36:49
Speaker
So much fun. I always ask him tax questions whenever he wears it. He'll just pepper him with random tax questions. And it's a fun thing we do. But ah my kids, so my oldest 13. My youngest is nine. So they're a little young for it. But my business partner, her kids are teenagers. And we actually just this summer have them start working for the business, you know, running, getting off the supplies and doing some of those basic things. And um I like that. That's Whether my kids end up being accountants or not, they'll probably work in the firm, at least in the summer some and get some of that life experience.
00:37:19
Speaker
Excellent, excellent. So what do you think? What's next? You're going to stay at this long term, you think? Are you going to set it up and maybe sell your interests and move on to something
Reflections and Future Plans
00:37:28
Speaker
else? Any long term plans in in the works for you?
00:37:32
Speaker
You know, I love what I do and being able to focus more on the parts of it that I like, which is what I'll get as we grow and being able to specialize more and wear fewer hats.
00:37:43
Speaker
That's where I think it's at. So who knows five or 10 years from now? And that's one of the cool things about being a CPA. I could become a CEO of a different company or I could start something different or there's all different things I could do, but I'm really happy with this. I'm really thinking five or 10 years, I'm probably gonna be here.
00:37:59
Speaker
I just will have it dialed in. So there's fewer fires, you know less stress, more fun. That's what I'm looking for. All right, so let me just kind of wrap it up with this last question for you. I mean, in your career, you've seen a lot. You know you work for big firms, you work for small firms, you've seen what you thought was successful, then you've on your you know but on your backside basically getting knocked down because of ah you know fraud and other things and whistleblowing and FBI and so much.
00:38:27
Speaker
Now you're back up on your feet again. If you could take in the whole breadth of your career and think about it all, What do you tell people that are just starting out in accounting or maybe starting out working for you? Is there any real sage advice you can share with them on what to watch out for, what to make sure that they do?
00:38:47
Speaker
yeah The thing, and I had heard it before, but it didn't make sense to me like it does now. The thing you take with you always is your experience. And so whatever you learn at a given job, it's gonna serve you in your next job and your next job.
00:39:00
Speaker
I really thought I'd be in the same place that first firm that I was at for one year. I thought I'd be there for my whole career. And that's just not the reality very often anymore. So if you're in a position where you're learning good things,
00:39:14
Speaker
that's the way That's where you want to be. And if you're in a position where you're starting to get stagnant, that's probably not where you want to be. Excellent. So always keep those options open, right? And never say no to anything. Always, you know, investigate every opportunity that may present itself. Sounds like a very good advice.
00:39:32
Speaker
Well, listen, Andrew, um I know we've been talking for a long time. i could probably dive into some of these other stories in a lot more detail, but I don't want to keep you here all day. So I just want to thank you so much for coming on, being a guest and And I know it's not easy to kind of share some of these stories and you know talk about those times when things are bad, but I'm so happy for you that things are worked out and you know every cloud has a dark cloud has a silver lining and it seems like that's what's happened in your case. So I'm happy for you and I just want to thank you again for being part of this broadcast and sharing sharing your stories.
00:40:06
Speaker
Yeah, thanks for having me All right. Well, everybody, I just want to make sure that you remember that you can get CPE credit just for listening to this podcast. All you need to do is visit the link in the show notes to get your credit.
00:40:21
Speaker
And if you're already a Prime CPE subscriber, you can get CPE credit at no extra cost. Just log in and finalize your credits. So that's everything we have for you today. And we hope to see you at a future Cool Careers in Accounting Becker podcast.
00:40:37
Speaker
Thanks again, everyone. And we'll see you soon.