S1E6 - Blake Oliver, CPA | Earmark
Taylor Zork, CPA [00:00:10]:
Hello and welcome to Niche. To Necessity. My name is Taylor Zork. I'm the host. And today we have a very special guest. Today we have Blake oliver. He's a CPA. And the co founder of Earmark. CPE? Welcome, Blake.
Blake Oliver, CPA [00:00:23]:
Thanks, Taylor. Great to be here. Great to talk to you.
Taylor Zork, CPA [00:00:26]:
Yeah. So one of the first things I wanted to just get out of the way is to have you tell us a little bit about your background and kind of how you came into the accounting world and all that.
Blake Oliver, CPA [00:00:36]:
Yeah, so I'm a career changer. I think a good number of accountants started out doing something else. They didn't dream of being an accountant. I was a music major. I played the cello, and so I went to college, and I ended up majoring in cello performance, got a Bachelor of Music degree from Northwestern, and then I graduated into the Great Recession. And those of us who remember that time knew it was a very dark time for anyone who didn't have practical skills. And so I ended up working at Starbucks because I couldn't get a job at Barnes and Noble, even though I had a bachelor's degree from I think it was the most expensive school in the country at that time. So that started to teach me about ROI and thinking about money in a way I had never really had before. I had to budget. I had to make a living as a barista. And that got me really interested in bookkeeping. So I got a job doing bookkeeping work for a tutoring company, and I fell in love with QuickBooks. So started doing QuickBooks Consulting, eventually started my own bookkeeping business. And I discovered all the cloud apps right around when that was starting to hit mainstream. So I was helping people put in QuickBooks online. Then I found Zero, and I started a cloud based bookkeeping business where we were doing a lot of the stuff that's very familiar, now completely remote. We hired part time bookkeepers. We hook them up with small business owners. We would do technology implementations. We'd hook up your Ecommerce store to QuickBooks or Zero, all that good stuff. And I was fortunate to grow that really fast and sell that after about five years to a CPA firm that wanted to buy our processes and technology, essentially. And then I decided to go into tech. I worked at two different technology companies as a product marketer. Basically, the CPA on the marketing team, right? Translating what they wanted to do into CPA and backwards, that sort of thing. And then I did that for, like, four years. Worked at a company called FloCast as their first product marketer, they made closed management software. So I was working with corporate controllers, small business, kind of more like Main Street businesses. A lot of the mid sized companies, mid market companies is the word that people use. And then I went to be director of marketing at Giraffe, which makes financial planning and analysis software. So kind of got just a wild decade of experience there. And then I'm doing my own startup now, so it's called Earmark and it lets you get CPE for listening to podcasts. So like this podcast episode, we wrap it in a self study course and so CPAs enrolled agents, CMAs could actually get CPE for listening. And I'll be happy to put it up on our app if you're interested.
Taylor Zork, CPA [00:03:34]:
Yeah, absolutely, that'd be great. Yeah. So that leads me to my next question. So the first time I saw Earmark, I was like, holy crap, this is insane. I didn't know that you could even do this. I didn't even know you could package CPE like this. And so my first thought was like, wow, this is going to fundamentally change how people consume CPE. So can you talk a little bit about how you came up with the idea kind of how it all started and all that?
Blake Oliver, CPA [00:04:01]:
Yeah. So around the time when I sold my firm, I started doing a podcasts called the Cloud Accounting Podcasts, and we've been doing that for four years. I say we, that means David Leary, my co host, and myself, we do it every week. We have not missed a week in four years. Actually might be more than that. We might be getting closer to five, I think. And so we built up this audience of CPAs who like to listen, and every now and then a listener would email us and say, I love your show, I should be able to get CPE for this. So that stuck in my head and I kept thinking, how could we make that happen? And so I had left my last position in marketing and I was kind of deciding what to do next. And I sat down and I read the National Association of State Boards of Accountancy Guidelines, their standards for CPE, and I realized that I could design an app that would allow me to wrap a podcast episode into a CPE course that fulfills all their very specific requirements. And so I found a guy on upwork to design the app for me and then it turned out he could actually code a bit too. And so he said, hey, why don't you let me code this for you? And we spent, I don't know, six to twelve months building the app. And then we released it a little over a year ago. And so far we've got 6000 accountants who have signed up for the app. We've got a few hundred paying subscribers. We have over 500 hours of CPE content now on the app. Dozens of different podcasts, all in the accounting space. We have a federal tax podcast, we've got an Fpna podcast, we've got my podcast. So yeah, it's great. And the community loves us. I think we've got five stars on the App Store on Apple, and it's like 420 something reviews, five stars. So I feel like this is something the community wanted and fun to be building it.
Taylor Zork, CPA [00:06:10]:
That's really cool. And for those accountants or those people who need to get credits and they have a long commute, it's kind of a no brainer for them. And for you guys it's great because you get viewers. Plus people are incentivized to view it because they get all the CPE. You're obviously a pioneer in the CPE space. What do you see the vision? What's your vision of the CPE kind of content delivery and the actual content itself five or ten years from now? How do you think all that's going to the landscape of that is all going to change?
Blake Oliver, CPA [00:06:47]:
Yeah, I mean, you can say this about anything, but it definitely is true of CPE. COVID really changed how CPE is delivered because most CPE used to be done in person. That's always how it's been. You go to a conference, you go to a seminar, you sit in a room for four to 8 hours, maybe you do that for a whole week and you get all your CPE. And we all know if we've been to those, you see the people that are just plugging away at their email. They're not listening. People read, they might be like even sleeping. It doesn't matter. You get the credit, right? You just have to scan in and out. And so that all went away in the pandemic and all these state societies and CPU providers started doing online that became really popular. And so people got a taste for that and they realized, oh, I can learn just as well or I cannot learn just as well in a webinar as in a seminar. And so all the in person stuff has just disappeared in a lot of cases. I was just at a conference of CPA society educators, the people who put together these programs, and they were saying like, yeah, nobody wants to come to in person anymore, it's just done. So they've all kind of pivoted to these online platforms where they do basically the same thing they used to do in person. But it's online now and it kind of sucks. To be honest. Nobody wants to be sitting at their desk. Every we sit at our desks, I'm at my desk. I don't know about you all the time, right? I'm obviously self interested in making this happen. But I think that people want to be able to do other stuff while they learn. And I personally can't focus. Like if I'm sitting at my desk, I've got my email there, I've got all this other stuff, I lose focus real quick. But if I'm out for a run or a hike or I'm doing the dishes or I'm well I live in Arizona, so I don't have a lawn. But if I were, if I did have a lawn, I'd be mowing the lawn. Yeah, I can learn, right? We even had a member who said that she goes to the nail salon and gets her nails done while she earns CPE. And I thought that was great.
Taylor Zork, CPA [00:08:49]:
What's the craziest? You've heard of people that's got to be up there?
Blake Oliver, CPA [00:08:55]:
There's one other that I can't remember right now that really stuck with me skiing and earning CPE. Yeah.
Taylor Zork, CPA [00:09:06]:
It's like one of those memes where it's like everyone thinks I'm listening to hardcore rock or something like that. Snowboarding. But really I'm listening to, you know, the tax update for 2023.
Blake Oliver, CPA [00:09:17]:
Exactly. Right. Why not? Why not? And for me, it's like, I feel like we're accomplishing a big mission, which is accountants are too sedentary. We were really unhealthy as a profession, like, overall, because we spent so much time sitting. And so anything that we can do to help get people outside the pandemic changed my life, too. I moved from La to the Phoenix area, and now the weather is good enough, like, ten months out of the year, I can be outside hiking and running and stuff. And so I get like an hour of exercise a day now. And you could do that too, if you just change some of the things you do so you can do them while you're out working. While you're out working out, you could be working.
Taylor Zork, CPA [00:10:00]:
Exactly, yeah. I'm here in Costa Rica. I fully did the remote work thing. I started my business. I had a CPA practice for the cannabis industry, and I was doing cold calls from the jungle. I think you're seeing a reckoning in the accounting profession, and because there's such a lack and it's going to only amplify because of the lack of accountants and accounting professionals, I think we kind of one of the things we've started to try to coin in our company is, like, making accounting cool again. Was it ever cool? No, but we can try to return to some form of glory.
Blake Oliver, CPA [00:10:40]:
I think it can be. I buy into that mission because the reason accounting isn't cool is because nobody cares about the numbers that we're putting together. But if we find the numbers that people care about, if we actually go out and talk to the leaders of these companies that are buying our services and we say, hey, what do you want to know that could help you build a better business? And we get them that information, whether or not that's financial or operational, then we can really deliver a lot of value. Those are the CFO people, right? Accounting and finance are really the same thing. It's just the finance people, everybody tends to like them because they're helping. The accounting people are, like, saying no, and they're being a drag, and they're putting together all this compliance stuff for taxes that nobody really wants to do, but they have to do. So that's the trick if you want to be a CPA that people like to talk to. Ask them what they need. I don't think we do a good enough job of that.
Taylor Zork, CPA [00:11:43]:
Yeah, I think it's a branding issue and an image issue. Yeah, for sure. That's what we're trying to do with crypto CFOs. We're trying to make it interesting. Right. Me personally, I'm an accounting that doesn't really I got into accounting so that I could I studied accounting in college, kind of being like, okay, I study accounting. I'm going to figure out what I want to do, and accounting is going to be a good baseline for whatever it is I want to do. I knew I kind of had an entrepreneurial spirit, but that's kind of why I gravitated towards first Burton Snowboards, then the cannabis industry, my own practice, and now crypto. It's kind of like I had to seek out these interesting things to be able to kind of make accounting cool for me. And, yeah, I think that speaks to me a lot. The delivery of it needs to be repackaged to something that provides more perceived value to the end user. I think you're right.
Blake Oliver, CPA [00:12:43]:
Yeah, exactly. And we say it about CPE. We could say it about accounting. It's all about how do we make that end user more powerful or more productive or help them. We got to think about it. We got to put ourselves in their shoes.
Taylor Zork, CPA [00:13:01]:
Very cool. Well, nice and short and sweet this time. It was really great talking to you, Blake. And yeah, thank you so much for joining us.
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