All posts by Jason Blumer

We serve entrepreneurs at Blumer CPAs, especially those in service-based businesses. Because we serve many industries,  we have noted some commonality between these entrepreneurs. They push through a market to create new opportunities and to capture the value that others are not capturing. This means they can leave financial messes in their wake. It’s okay, because our firm is known for being able to clean those up, add structure to their businesses, and bring accountability around their financial processes. We lead entrepreneurs at Blumer CPAs.  Right now, many entrepreneurs are experiencing a familiar surge of trying to make the most [...]

Cash flow is the heartbeat of your business, yet most entrepreneurs are flying blind when it comes to understanding what's happening with their money. Actually, clients don’t even know to ask us this - but we typically try to sell our clients some form of cash flow reporting (and there are great tools to do this for our clients!). We do want our clients reviewing their financials monthly (in a summarized format) but monthly statements only tell you what already happened. That’s not bad, it just gives you the patterns of how you’ve been operating. Cash flow reporting is always [...]

Like many of our clients, our firm is at a size where we have to nail down the revenue production of our firm. That is, at our size, we have to have a machine that is now producing our revenue to support our team of 15, as well as the growth we anticipate over the next few years.  Like many things in scaling a service organization, we’re finding that what got us here won’t get us there. We have always been an ORG (“Owner Revenue Generated”) company. As the owner and founder, I’ve always sat in the seat of sales [...]

How you have conversations in your organization, and the intention with which you speak, matters. “Half the world is composed of people who have something to say and can’t, and the other half who have nothing to say and keep on saying it.” – Robert Frost Overspeaking, looping with no point, and speech riddled with generalities or exaggerations do no good to move your organization and your team forward. But transforming speech turns out to be a difficult challenge.  Your speech patterns are habitual, and likely have been allowed by those around you for years and years. So if you [...]

We coach and consult with many service-based organizations and we are finding some patterns after the pandemic. Many entrepreneurs are struggling with what it is like to now lead a company considering the remembrance of where they were before the pandemic, what the pandemic has done to their companies, and how they have been affected personally as leaders.  We’ve all been struggling personally after the impact of the pandemic on our lives and those around us. And now an unstable economy is bringing a lot of discouragement to service entrepreneurs. You are not alone if you feel this too. Many [...]

With experience comes a lot of value and power in business. You can typically raise your price or hourly rate as you learn more and hold yourself out as an expert. We teach entrepreneurs how to narrow into a market just so they can do this - become experts. But with experience and knowledge comes the belief that you ‘know enough.’ You prove this to yourself every day as you solve complex problems and you become the person that people go to for answers. You begin to believe that you know enough. This belief can sneak up on us as [...]

This year is an exciting journey through the world of capacity planning, and research around resource planning for service firms that are growing. I’m partnering with Ian Vacin in this work and we are learning a great deal of information in the research we are conducting with service organizations around the world. For a brief primer, when service organizations (like agencies) scale and expand, they often run into the complexity of knowing the ability of their growing teams to be able to produce revenue. How you bring in your revenue is important. Project-based vs recurring revenue will dictate and change [...]

I know we’ve heard this before, but as a reminder, there are no people with magic skills who are smarter than us at business. But we do get confused when we see people who seem to have a touch of ‘magic’ in the craft that they perform. How do they do that? When you study these people you find that they have a different view of what it takes to achieve mastery in their work. Essentially, mastery of something is a matter of getting in more reps than anyone else in your craft. Kobe Bryant is one of those people. [...]

When designers and freelancers begin to think about growth, they eventually run into needing to hire. When you sell services there is no other way to grow except to hire people. You can use software, become more efficient, and even let AI help you do some of your work. But you will eventually have to replace yourself if you want to grow the revenue of your creative studio.  Who do you hire first? Of course this depends, but there are some general principles we can learn from here. When growing, most smaller design and freelance studios think of replacing themselves [...]

My partner and I work with a lot of service-based entrepreneurs that are seeking to grow their firms, agencies, and consultancies. We’ve been doing this for decades, and the more we work with these entrepreneurs the more we see the trouble so many have with something that is generally labeled “Capacity Management.” Many want to know if they have the right team capacity to take in a larger amount of revenue. Many don’t even understand how closely capacity management is tied to revenue performance. And many don’t look at these concepts at all, and their agency begins to consume them [...]