Esther: Welcome back to The BusinessMakers Overtime Show, heard here and online at thebusinessmakers.com.

[Applause]

Esther: We are here at The Tasting Room Uptown. It is just so fabulous to be here. We could not be more excited than we are –

Katie: Yes.

Esther: - to be interviewing Jen Lemanski and Raissa Evans of PKF Texas, just – they are incredible. They are marketing geniuses. I mean they've done some incredible things over there. Actually, the Director of Practice Growth just walked in the door. Karen Love.

Katie: Awesome! Woo!

Esther: Welcome, Karen! Woo!

[Applause]

Esther: She's been really instrumental in making everything that happens at PKF really happen which is, I know that Jen and Raissa have just said amazing things about her. Everyone at The BusinessMakers has said amazing things about her so we're really happy to have her here. I think we'd like to introduce Jen and Raissa, what do you think?

Katie: Yes, I'd love it. Welcome, ladies.

Esther: Great.

Raissa: Thanks so much for having us, you guys.

Jen: Thanks for having us. We really appreciate it.

Esther: Yeah.

Jen: This is a lot of fun.

Katie: So I mean, let's just jump off here. Tell us about PKF. Like, how in the world are you so incredibly different than all of the other accounting firms out there? Because there's something in your eye that's not an accounting firm quality. Like tell us what the secret is. (Laughter) What's different here?

Raissa: Thanks so much for – thanks so much for acknowledging that we're different. We like to think that we're different. And it really starts with the culture of the firm and we feel like our team reflects that in how they recruited us and how we work together. We're just really well-balanced and we get along as friends and as coworkers and the team really has a culture of using skills where they lie and that's really the core of how they recruit all of the talent that we have at PKF and if you look at our team, for instance, our skills overlap to some extent but we all know what we're really talented at and we play off of each other really well. And that's reflected throughout the rest of the firm as well. That gives us a strength that some other accounting firms don't have in our industry.

Esther: That's really – that's really awesome and you guys are doing some incredible things. Can you tell us about some of the things that you're doing and what exactly is going on at PKF that's just so special?

Jen: We've got a ton of different stuff going on right now. This year we saw the launch of our Entrepreneur's Playbook, which runs on the normal BusinessMakers Show every Saturday morning.

Katie: Yeah.

Esther: Right.

Jen: And we're breaking ice.

Katie: Woo!

Esther: Woo!

Katie: Yay.

Esther: We're looking at it – it's amazing.

Jen: We launched, we launched an actual book of the scripts this year and we're really excited about that and –

Katie: Wonderful.

Jen: We're getting ready to launch a new website in the beginning of January and so we're excited about that and Raissa's got some other stuff that we've been working on.

Raissa: It's like picking your favorite child. I mean, how do you do that, right?

(Laughter)

Raissa: But I mean the website is really, it's really gonna be exciting. I mean, it's something that we're working on just as we speak, every day, and it started with talking to Content Active about wanting to go take our website mobile and they're really a forward-thinking company. A client of ours and personal friends –

Katie: Excellent.

Raissa: - of our firm and of our Director, Karen Love, and –

Esther: That's right, Lisa Holland-Nelson.

Raissa: - forward-thinking – Lisa Holland-Nelson.

Esther: That's right, she's great.

Jen: We love Lisa.

Katie: Yeah. Yeah.

Raissa: She's out everywhere in the marketplace and just a real forward-thinker and she came in to talk to us about mobile and we were so sold on her vision that we decided that it was time to update our look and everything else. So we'll be one of the first – or maybe the first – accounting firm that's a mobile friendly site.

Esther: Wow.

Katie: That's wonderful.

Esther: Mobile is big.

Raissa: A lot of little –

Esther: For this year.

Jen: Yeah.

Katie: It is. It is.

Jen: Yeah, then you'll get us on your iPhone, your Droid, everything.

Esther: Great.

Katie: Excellent.

Esther: That is exciting.

Raissa: We've got a bag of tricks to launch along with that, including some videos of our directors, we like to call the Director Preview.

Katie: Ah! (Laughter)

Raissa: You'll see a friend of the show.

Jen: You'll see Russ Capper on there and –

Esther: Wow.

Katie: Oh!

Jen: Kelsey Ruger behind the scenes, videoing. So –

Esther: Very good.

Jen: We're a big happy family with The BusinessMakers.

Esther: And you guys are big, big time into blogging, too.

Jen: Uh huh.

Raissa: Absolutely.

Jen: I work with our Director, Greg Price on From Greg's Head, fromgregshead.com. I run the backend with him and then it's been a phenomenal success. You know the one –

Raissa: We were the first accounting technology blog to launch, according to all the research that we did.

Esther: Wow.

Katie: Wow.

Raissa: And there were only about – less than ten accounting blogs out at the time.

Katie: Holy moly, so you're like the Coca Cola.

Raissa: It's exciting.

Jen: We are. We're like the Coca Cola of accounting blogs and it's been really successful. That's where we run our Entrepreneur's Playbook scripts. It's just been really phenomenal for us.

Katie: Well and the blog is super because I mean it's not just "Blah, blah, accounting, blah blah accounting."

Jen: No, we –

Katie: It's really – it's so holistic in like you know, you're a business. You wanna grow. You wanna be amazing. Here are some tools. Here are things we learned. It's inspirational.

Jen: Right, we talk about everything from some of the stuff that you guys were talking in your first segment about business news, to technology, to things going on in Houston, going on in the community. It's really more inclusive than just accounting technology but that's, you know, where it's more from, from the beginning.

Esther: And I have to say this right up front because we're a radio show, not TV, people can't see you but you're very young.

Raissa: Yes. Yes.

(Laughter)

Esther: You guys are – you guys are really young.

Jen: Yeah.

Esther: And we can relate to that. You've already enjoyed some really – you've enjoyed some great success. So how is it being kind of in this millennial age, you know, you're – that's kind of your age group – working in an accounting firm like this?

Jen: I'll speak first because I'm the actual millennial. Raissa's a cusper.

(Laughter)

Esther: We still like you.

Jen: We – our firm culture is such that it's important for millennials to have a voice at the table and at PKF Texas, we have many outlets to do that and it's our culture that really helps us be successful. You know, we have a staff advisory committee where we've got all levels that report directly to Kenneth Guidry and his door is always open. All the director's doors are always open for anybody to, you know, plop in and say, "Hey, you know, this is what I'm doing. Is this – am I going in the right direction?" So it –

Katie: Wow.

Jen: - you know a theme of our conversation today is gonna be our culture because it's what supports us and what drives us to be the successes that we are.

Raissa: There's a lot to be inspired by at our firm and I think that's just incredible to work for a firm where you've got the leadership and the mentorship. I mean I've been the lucky recipient of having a mentor for Karen Love, now, for seven years.

Katie: Woo!

Raissa: And we've got a team –

Katie: Yay!

Raissa: - you know, it's Karen.

Jen: We love Karen.

Raissa: And she, you know, she's – she leads by example and we've all got a servant's heart attitude toward the rest of the firm where we view them as being our internal clients and then the marketplace is our external clients. So that's part of the key to our success is having those champions in place that just pave the way for our creativity and our contribution.

Esther: Uh huh, very cool. That's really amazing what you're doing. Did you always know that this is where you wanted to be? Did you always know you wanted to be –

Raissa: No.

(Laughter)

Esther: - in marketing?

Jen: Sort of.

Raissa: No. I'll take this one first. I'll introduce Jen. In fact, I was supposed to be a lawyer, if you can believe that.

Esther: Oh wow.

Katie: Ooh.

Raissa: I went to college on a debate scholarship. I was the president of my debate team in high school.

Esther: Ooh.

(Laughter)

Raissa: I ended up at Ol' Miss and sometime just before my senior year, I found a love of marketing and knew that that's what I wanted to do. I had really done my time, if you will, in telemarketing my way through college, because that's the only job that I could find. There were too many lawyers at the time. I'd done a lot of research and you had to be in the top five of the law school that you graduated from. Not just the top five percent but the top five.

Katie: Wow. Okay.

Raissa: So it was lucky that I kind of found this other talent or skill set that I wanted to go pursue. So I found a job with a technology company for four years and when I left there, I was really looking for my dream job and I knew that I found it and I told people for months – and I still tell people, but – for months when they asked me, you know, how I liked it at PKF Texas, that was my line. "I found my dream job."

Esther: Wow. We can really feel your passion about it.

(Laughter)

Esther: It's really unbelievable.

Katie: It's that spark.

Esther: Really, it's great. I mean I think you're very rare to feel that passion about your job.

Raissa: Thank you. Well we – you know, we did it alone, Karen and I, for about four years, with the help of an assistant and then when we wanted to add to the team, we put our heads together and went through a lotta drafts of the job description and eventually found Jen. So I'll let Jen take over from here.

Jen: Yeah, I've always had an interest in communications. You know, I've been writing since I could, you know, was young enough to tell my mom, "Hey, write this story down," you know, and went to school and got my degree in public relations and so marketing's definitely part of that advertising, PR, the whole Vin diagram.

Esther: Of course.

Jen: And so I graduated in 2004 and lived in Denver for a while and didn't find anything – by that time mom and dad had been to Houston and they said, "All right, you gotta move to Houston," and I'm like, "All right, let's do it."

(Laughter)

Esther: Awesome.

Jen: So came to Houston and just pounded the pavement and looked on the PRSA Job Bank one day and there was this description of this Practice Growth Associate and I read the list of stuff that they had come up with and said, "Yeah, I can do that. I can do that," so you know, sent in my resume.

Katie: Excellent.

Jen: And the rest is history.

Raissa: She's always had that attitude. I can do that.

Jen: Yeah.

Katie: (Laughter)

Jen: Why not?

Katie: It's the best one to have.

Jen: It's the millennial thing. You know?

Esther: We will do it.

Katie: Yeah, yeah.

Jen: We can do it. Whatever we want.

Raissa: And she can, too.

Katie: Exactly.

Esther: You can do it.

(Laughter)

Jen: So the PR background has really helped within our team because that was a skill set that they had outsourced before and so they brought that in-house when they brought me in and it's been a lot of fun doing pretty much all the non-technical writing for the firm. Have a hand in and the advertisements like we said. You know, coordinate with Greg on the blog and whatever else that you know, we all dream up to get done and get our message out into the marketplace.

Esther: Awesome.

Katie: Excellent. So I mean it sounds like, you know, we've talked so much about your internal culture.

Esther: Uh huh.

Katie: What is it like pushing out all these amazing innovations and ideas into a marketplace and an industry that's probably like, "What are these guys doing. Those girls are crazy." I mean, what kind of challenges are you facing out there in a world that – it is not used to this yet? This isn't quite the status quo.

Raissa: It's not the status quo for an accounting firm, that's true. The accounting marketing industry is fairly young –

Katie: Okay.

Raissa: - and it doesn't date back for too long. I mean the Bates Law, believe, was 1977, maybe counting marketing legal, but so it's a very conservative industry still but where we have a leg up, if you will, is the champions at our firm that champion what we're doing in both the industry and external to the marketplace, align us with some of the best minds in the country and – through several ways. One is they support our involvement through the Association for Accounting and Marketing and then through the leading edge and PKF alliances and then we just have peers and mentors and folks just like us facing the same challenges to share experiences with. And that's been really important.

Katie: Excellent. Now –

Jen: And again, we're really lucky that the firm leadership at PKF Texas recognizes the value of marketing; recognizes the value that we as a team provide, both internally and externally and they're willing to, you know, support a crazy idea like a blog. There were a lotta checks and balances that had to be put in place before it could launch, but the fact that they were willing to say, "Okay," you know, once we gave 'em, you know, they're CPAs, they need the number breakdown –

Esther: Right.

Jen: - and how everything's gonna come back to the ROI but you know, once they met the criteria – because I wasn't there when the blog started – they let us run with it and we've been successful that we've – you know, proven ourselves over and over again. So they're willing to let us do things –

Katie: Take a chance. Right.

Jen: - a little bit different.

Katie: That's wonderful. Well –

Raissa: The one thing is we're creatives in non-creative world and so we've learned how to navigate that. We've learned how the accounting mind works and how we do our research and we create our reports and we build our case to get the buy-in that we need to get support and not support on faith but support on the facts and the statistics that we can bring.

Esther: Yeah, that's great. What do you think it's like between you and kinda the old guard, you know?

(Laughter)

Esther: I'm not saying old old. Just old – old –

(Laughter)

Esther: - the people who've been doing it a certain way for – And I'm not even talking about Karen. I'm talking about anyone –

Katie: She's young.

Esther: Yeah. She's – that's what I'm saying. I'm not talking about Karen. I'm talking about, you know, maybe people who've been there for a really long time who are kind of – you know, maybe they're on the accounting side and they're just not sure about these kinda crazy new things that you guys are trying.

Raissa: We think that we blew away the old green eye shades image when we launched the first accounting technology blog. But you know we've, we've got some great directors over at PKF Texas and Jen mentioned earlier the open door policy and it's fun – the relationship that we have with the – you know, Karen and our team are personal friends. But even beyond, extending beyond the four women that make up our team, you know, we've got a group of directors that laugh and joke and they're some of the wittiest guys I know, guys and women that I know – and are such successes in their careers that we could just look up and find inspiration in each and every one of 'em.

Esther: Uh huh.

Raissa: And the open door policy is so true. I've got directors that'll come throw themselves into chairs in my office or I can go do the same to them.

Jen: Today, we literally, you know, Raissa and I, bebopped into Kenneth Guidry, our President's office and, "Hey, Kenneth, what do you think of this funny thing?" And he, you know, laughed and you know, then we left –

Raissa: Rolls his eyes.

Jen: - rolls his eyes and laughs and then, you know, but the fact that we have that – we don't really have an old guard at PKF Texas and we're really lucky.

Esther: That makes you guys very special.

Jen: Uh huh. We're really lucky.

Katie: Truly unique.

Esther: Yeah. Very unique. It's very cool.

Katie: Now do you have any recommendations for, you know, maybe some bright, starry-eyed young marketers that are in – of course not your firm – but in another accounting firm or in another industry that's kind of facing some of the roadblocks that you may have initially – before it was really accepted – what are some tips that you would give in wanting to really be the innovative marketing leaders like you are in your market?

Raissa: I would say do what you love and spend some time doing some soul searching to find out what you love. You can do it the easy way or you can do it the hard way. And the easy way, hopefully, you spend some time listening to some elders or some mentors or some folks that you find inspiration from and learn their lessons or lead but if you don't do that and you do it like I did it and you get into other industries first and then you have to claw your way back to marketing – then do that, too –

(Laughter)

Raissa: - and take those risks and pursue what you love until you find it. And then find what's next.

Esther: That's great advice.

Katie: Excellent.

Jen: I think for me, the key is being flexible. Marketing – things change, even in an industry like accounting where it's seemingly moves at a snail's pace – it really doesn't. You know, and you need to be flexible enough and nimble enough to be able to change on a dime, realize whatever project that you've been working on really hard for a month and-a-half, well – something's changed, whether it's regulation or you know, the marketplace has, you know, gone in a different direction that you just have to leave that by the wayside. You know, we've had that happen, but we're – as a team – nimble enough to make that about-face and then go forward, full steam ahead with whatever, you know, needs to be done. So you need to be able to be flexible, otherwise you're just not gonna make it as a marketer.

Esther: And realize that it's not personal.

Jen: No, no. It's –

Esther: It's just the way it –

Jen: Right.

Esther: – that's just what's happening in your industry –

Jen: It's what the marketplace is demanding and you need to be able to respond to the needs of the marketplace.

Esther: Awesome.

Raissa: And I would add, too, I guess just don't ever be casual about the relationships that you're building. You never know who you might meet or what those weak links that'll lead you to somewhere new in your life and people are too casual, sometimes, about really cultivating those acquaintances.

Katie: Well, Jen and Raissa, you've been wonderful guests. (Laughter)

Esther: I think you really –

Jen: Thank you.

Raissa: Thank you.

Katie: Yeah, great guests, that's right.

[Applause]

Esther: I think you left everybody with a really good understanding of what you do and how PKF is special and different. It really is unbelievable. I know we BusinessMakers have a very close relationship with you guys and I'm so glad that we could kind of bring it in this direction and talk to some of the –

Jen: Oh yeah, this was exciting. We had a lot of fun.

Katie: Yes.

Jen: Thanks for inviting us on the show.

Esther: So I hope we get to see you guys again soon and –

Katie: Very soon.

Esther: Thank you guys so much for being here.

Katie: Yeah, thank you.

Jen: Thank you.

Raissa: Thank you.

[Applause]

Esther: Well, you've been listening to The BusinessMakers Overtime Show heard here and online at thebusinessmakers.com. Now stay tuned for The Business Survival Tip with Carl Kleimann of Odyssey One Source.

Carl: Hello business owners this is Carl Kleimann with another Business Survival Tip from Odyssey One Source. Healthcare reform is in the media on a daily basis but many small business owners remain unclear about when and how it would affect their businesses. So, I will address the key elements of the current proposal before Congress.

First, understand that the proposed reforms, if passed, are scheduled to be phased in over a 9 year period. Also understand that many of the proposed Healthcare Reforms have little or no impact on employers. These include reforms to Medicare, Medicaid, and the Children's Health Insurance Program for example. So, let me focus on those that are most important to employers.

Starting in 2010, insurance companies would be banned from selling plans that contain a lifetime benefit maximum; they would be required to cover dependents through age 26; and would be required to pay for reconstructive surgery for children born with deformities. Employers would be required to extend COBRA continuation until 2013 when the Health Insurance Exchange is scheduled to be up and running. These reforms are certain to increase claims and therefore the cost of Healthcare for your small business.

2013 is the big year for reforms affecting employers. This is when employer provided healthcare becomes mandatory for businesses with $500,000 or more in annual payroll. Failure to comply would result in a penalty equal to up to 8 percent of payroll. Tax credits worth up to 50 percent of premium would be available for up to two years to lower-wage small businesses that historically haven't offered healthcare. This is expected to give them time to adapt to the higher cost of doing business. Also in 2013, the Health Insurance Exchange will open to employers with 25 or fewer employees and will include the much debated Public Health Insurance Plan.

In 2014 and 2015, the Health Insurance Exchange will expand to accommodate larger employers. And finally in 2018, all employer-sponsored plans must conform to coverage standards as well as minimum employer contribution standards.

I am Carl Kleimann and this has been another Business Survival Tip by Odyssey One Source, ranked as the number one Professional Employer Organization three years running by the Black Book of Outsourcing. For more information on this and other issues affecting employers, please visit www.odysseyonesource.com.