1. The customer is everything. Don’t start a company to own your job. Start one to meet a need and offer something valuable. To real people. Any discussion about your company should begin and end with your customer.

2. Avoid debt. It’s not your friend.

3. Technology is a tool. Technology has changed how we do EVERYTHING and has helped us be different from other firms. But it’s not why we do what we do. See #1.

4. Focusing on a niche is very rewarding. Learning who you are NOT is just as important as knowing who you are. And once we determined that we love to serve people in creative businesses, our own business became a lot more fun.

5. Risk brings reward. And sometimes pain. But big reward rarely comes without risk.

6. If you aren’t changing, you aren’t learning. We have had to accept that change comes with the territory when you learn new things. We learn and implement and mess things up. Then we tweak our process and make it better. Then we do it all over again as we learn some more.

7. We don’t sell time.

8. Our team is everything. God bless these people that learn and grow and change with us! They make us better. Stephanie, Lisa, Cody, Julie, and Alex are amazing and we are thankful for them. In the video below, Jason explains where each one fits in here at Blumer & Associates. Take 3 minutes to get to know how they are serving you, sometimes behind the scenes!

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But be careful, you might hate working here.

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Here’s why…

The Internal Revenue Service makes you file a one page extension form to extend the filing of your return.  That’s all you have to do – file one form, and we’ll take care of that.  You don’t even have to pay any tax because S Corporations don’t pay tax.  So why are we worried about the March 15th deadline for our business customers?  We’re not.  We track who our business customers are in our fancy CRM/Workflow systems, and we manage the tax process for you.  Stop worrying.

As a reminder, here is the Blumer CPAs tax filing process for businesses and individuals (easy as pie):

We’re big planners.  As you can see above, we’ve mapped out the whole year.

1.  We perform Tax Planning each year during the months of October and November.

2.  We plan ahead each year by Setting Appointments for next year’s tax season during the month of December.

3.  Finally, we perform our Tax Preparation each year during the months of February through September.

Our customers shouldn’t have to worry about deadlines that aren’t really deadlines.  Sure, you have to make sure your taxes are paid on time, but we’ll take on the burden of tracking that for you.  Our customers shouldn’t worry about deadlines and due dates that the IRS imposes on them.  We track those dates for you, file the extensions that are necessary and make sure you are paying in the tax you are supposed to be paying in.  In fact, if you are a business customer of ours, we’re busy filing extensions this week and mailing stuff for you, or electronically filing your return online.  Did you know that?

Don’t worry about it!

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1. What  – You can differentiate by what you do. What are you better at that anyone else? What is your core competency? You can also decide what you will NOT do. Our firm has chosen not to do audits. Where are you excellent? Answering these questions can help you determine one way to position your company.

2. Who - This is our biggest differentiator as a CPA firm. We have chosen to dive deeply into creative designers, developers, and agencies. All new customers to our firm must fit into our WHO (our niche). We want to be experts and know what you, our beloved customers, need and want the most. We can’t do this if we are serving many other industries. You too can choose to serve only a particular industry as a differentiator.

3. How – This is a difficult way to actually be different. In what way are you distinguished by the way you think or by your philosophy? For us, this would possibly be that we serve customers virtually (no office) and that we are a Results Only Work Environment.

4. Why – This is your purpose. Why do you exist? This is a tough question to answer until you have considered the other three load bearing walls, but it’s a very important question to answer.  Hint: your purpose should be something other than to make money.

For more about positioning your company, listen to the whole episode and be sure to listen to The Businessology Show this week for a discussion on pricing. And again on March 14th with guest Jon Lax.

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As a Valentine’s Day gift, here is a video of what the Blumer CPAs Big Ideas Journal is, how we made it and how you can use it to develop your next big ideas (and make more money).  Scroll down to the bottom of the page to buy a Big Ideas Journal now!

We explained the Big Ideas Journal a little more in a presentation one time, found here:

Pictures of the Big Ideas Journal:

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If you’re like most of our clients (and like prettymuch everyone we’ve ever met), the answer should be “HECK YEAH!” So take 5 minutes to listen to Jason explain one way you may be able to do this.

It’s not for everyone, of course. There are a few variables at play when it comes to figuring out if an S-Corporation is a good idea for you. If technical terms like “S-Corporation” serve as sedatives and sleep enhancements to you, just remember terms like “thousands of dollars,” and know that Jason explains it here in a non-technical way that we think lays it out pretty well.

Check it out:

Move to an S Corp to Save Taxes from Blumer & Associates, CPAs, PC on Vimeo.

If you want to explore your own tax situation, and you’re in the world of creative business, let’s talk to see if our firm is a good fit for you.

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Many designers are great at their craft but struggle with the more technical side of running a creative business. And whether you’re a part-time freelancer or running a massive agency, you are definitely running a business. So let’s talk about how to do it well!

The show is co-hosted by Daniel Mall and some dude named Jason Blumer. Not coincidentally, both of these guys have a particular interest in and passion for the business of design. If you’re late to this party, don’t worry – you’ve missed the first two episodes, but they’re available on iTunes.

You can catch the next episode live on Friday at 3 pm EST, when Dan and Jason interview author and consultant Tim Williams on “Positioning, Brand, and Value.”

Check it out!

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I liked Jason’s response. He said, “No.” He went on to explain that there is not ONE recipe. There are many recipes for success. And all (well, many) of them are right. Just like there are thousands of CORRECT recipes for chocolate cake, there are endless CORRECT recipes for building a successful company.

But Jason did explain that there is a specific recipe that will work best for any individual company based on it’s unique culture, positioning in the market, owners, customers, processes, etc. And there is room for improvement in every area to make that company even MORE successful. Ingredients for success will include careful timing for hiring, developing a marketing strategy, specific revenue goals and how to spend that money. It will include an ingredient for working with specific people and for building culture as growth occurs. Success always includes finding your purpose as a company.

I like that there is more than one way to make chocolate cake. And more than one right way to build a business. Our job as coaches is to help you find that exact recipe and to determine which ingredients you may need for that perfect recipe.

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However, the bill Congress passed put these high income amounts at $400,000 for Singles and $450,000 for Married individuals.  Much better.

Other provisions:
-the freakin’ AMT was fixed permanently, thus, a bill will not have to be passed each year to keep middle-income Americans from being unduly taxed by the Alternative Minimum Tax (AMT) provisions.  The AMT income limits (before which AMT is applied to you) are now $50,600 for Singles, and $78,750, and will be adjusted annually for inflation.
-If you make over the $400k mentioned above, then your rates are higher now.
-Capital gains and dividends taxes are also higher if you make over the $400k mentioned above.  They are 20% now.
-In addition to the 20% capital gains and dividend tax rates, a new health care tax of 3.8% is now applied to capital gains and dividends (on top of the regular rates.
-There was a 2% payroll tax cut that you probably didn’t notice last year.  That was NOT extended, so your paycheck should be lower by a few dollars this year because the payroll tax rates adjusted up to what they were a year ago.

That’s the big stuff. 

Because of these last minute changes, the IRS always has to scramble to update their forms so we can all file our taxes.  They will be behind this year and you’ll see the IRS begin accepting returns in February some time.  So, no rush on preparing taxes, because most forms won’t actually be ready until late February.

One last thing – the country’s debt ceiling (the legal amount of debt we can borrow as a country) was reached on 12/31.  That means we will default on our debt as a country, if something is not done.  Some ‘guvment accounting’ was juggled to avert this crisis until February.  So look for these ‘fiscal cliff’ discussions to continue at that time.

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