Intro: [00:00:02] Broadcasting live from the Business RadioX studios in Atlanta, Georgia. It’s time for Association Leadership Radio. Now, here’s your host.

Lee Kantor: [00:00:20] Lee Kantor here another episode of Association Leadership Radio, and this is going to be a good one. Today on the show we have Jon Bassford with Lateral Solutions. Welcome, Jon.

Jon Bassford: [00:00:31] Welcome Lee. Thanks for having me.

Lee Kantor: [00:00:32] Well, I’m excited to catch up with you. For those who don’t know, share a little bit about lateral solutions. How are you serving folks?

Jon Bassford: [00:00:39] Yeah, Lateral Solutions is a operations management company where we specialize in the launch and management of internal operations for startups, small businesses and nonprofits.

Lee Kantor: [00:00:52] So what’s your back story? How’d you get involved in this line of work?

Jon Bassford: [00:00:55] Sure. So, my my. I got started this I felt association work. Not necessarily intentionally. I am one of those people who went to law school, did not know what I wanted to do after law school, and I end up working for a legal organization. I was a member of law school and I started out in the membership programmatic volunteer management side of the house. And then as time went on, started taking on more internal operational roles staff management, budget management, building management, etc. And so when I was looking for a new role, I was looking for operational roles, and I got a great opportunity to work for a tech trade association that was a startup in service startups. So even though it was still an association world, it gave me a this this immersion into working for startups in the startup ecosystem. And it really allowed me to kind of grow my skills and experience while the organization grew. And from there it continued on a number of other operations roles and then became a consultant where it started out just with me launching and managing internal operations. And then as time went on, grew it to have an accounting staff and an HR staff to service more clients.

Lee Kantor: [00:02:10] So operations are one of those kind of unsung heroes of an organization, right, like that. It’s something that every organization has, whether they’re being proactive in, mindful about building it effectively and efficiently. Are there some mistakes you see when you enter a new client or prospective client that you’re like, Oh, here they are. They’re making these kind of basic operational mistakes that can so easily be fixed if they would have done some of these foundational things.

Jon Bassford: [00:02:36] Yeah, I think, you know, young organizations with a for profit or nonprofit run into a couple of mistakes. One is that starting out, sometimes they’re going to overpay for the work needed. I mean, I literally have seen an organization pay their corporate attorney who is being billed at 4 to $600 an hour, handle their business insurance, which is an administrative function. Right. It’s filling out forms and sending them back into an insurance broker. So one mistake is definitely overpaying for administrative tasks. The other one is having very junior knowledgeable people do some of these tasks that do take some expertise in nuance. So you got to have both ends of the spectrum there where they’re having really skilled, educated, specialized people doing administrative work. And then you have administrative people doing specialized work, right? So both ends of the spectrum. Another common mistake that I run into is a lot of times the CEO, executive director, founder or whatever believes that they know enough about operations, that they can handle it themselves. And look, nothing of a rocket science, right? I mean, with an education, enough experience, research, etc., you know, intelligent person can handle and figure out most things. But the problem runs into the fact that that’s not what a CEO or a director should be doing. You know, they should be focusing on the core mission, the core service of the organization, and making sure that they’re driving profits and revenue. And so it always ends up happening. Is these operational matters fall to the wayside. And I can’t tell you the number of times that I’ve come into a situation where they’re paying me and my organization far more to clean up the mistakes and to clean up their books and HR, etc., than it would have cost them to hire us from the beginning. And that CEO or the other people involved want to save their time as well.

Lee Kantor: [00:04:40] But when you mentioned like kind of both ends of the spectrum, if you aren’t kind of a knowledgeable about all this stuff, it’s hard to discern what is the thing that I got to have my lawyer do and what is the thing I can have my admin? Do you need somebody that at least kind of knows the lay of the land so they can point and say, okay, that’s something that can easily be handled by admin and this is something that you better hire an expert because if you screw this up, that’s going to have ramifications for years to come.

Jon Bassford: [00:05:08] Yeah, absolutely. And that’s why Lateral Solutions really offers a range of services. So we’ll do everything from being your. Outsource Operations team. From the start, I have literally had a few clients come to me and say, We’ve incorporated in Delaware now what? And so we get in their bank account, set up their business insurance, their books, set up their HR payroll, etc. We set up all the administrative functions for them, which normally can be done in 30 to 45 days. I say normally because sometimes it depends on the an officer of the organization to sign forms and that sort of stuff. And there can be some delays. But we also offer services like co advising, you know, for an organization that’s not quite ready to take that leap, but they need that trusted advisor who’s there to hold their hand, direct them so they’re not making costly mistakes, but also not spending an arm and a leg for just the advising.

Lee Kantor: [00:06:09] Yeah. So that’s why I can see, especially if there’s a change of leadership or an organization that’s plateaued or is frustrated, to have you come in and just kind of get the lay of the land to let them know, hey, you know what, if we share this area up, you might be on the new trajectory. I think that that’s critical, especially if you don’t have somebody on the team that can do this kind of stuff.

Jon Bassford: [00:06:31] Yeah, a lot of times, you know, we are reached out to by individuals who just lost our director of operations. Right. A lot of times it’s probably more of a an office manager who’s been elevated a little bit and been handling accounting and HR and maybe don’t really have that background or that skill set. And so they’re when they when they lose that person, like, okay, now’s a great time to reassess. Let’s figure how, you know, how much time we’re spending on internal operations, how much time should we be spending, and are there better ways to do it?

Lee Kantor: [00:07:05] Yeah, absolutely. So part of the reason you’re here today is to educate our listeners about a program called Employee Retention Credits. Can you talk a little bit about first what what they are, number one, and number two, where the opportunity is for so many associations?

Jon Bassford: [00:07:25] Yeah. So the employee retention credit is part of the CARES Act. You know, this is all part of COVID relief measures that Congress passed back in March 2020. And what it is, is it’s a payroll tax credit. And without getting too granular with everything, there’s basically four ways to qualify for this. And, you know, part of the problem with I.R.S., it’s also referred to sometimes as RTC, the employee retention tax credit. They both mean the same is that again, this launched in March 2020. But the the the time period that you can qualify for this runs all the way through 2021. And so there has actually been nine updates by the IRS on who to qualify, who can qualify and how to qualify. And every time they’ve done one of these notices, it’s expanded these parameters. The perfect example of this is when I.R.S. first launched. If you got PPE, you were exempt from applying to I.R.S. After some time, they said, No, no, let’s not make it an exemption, but it will discount the amount of credit you receive. And so going back to the question of what this is, this is a payroll tax credit. This is not an income tax credit. This is not a loan. There’s no forgiveness. This is a credit against the payroll taxes that you have paid across these periods. And so this is why it is a perfect opportunity for associations, because it it is not a it’s not an income tax credit. Right. Like when they filed nine nineties, they don’t pay taxes. And so this is still a credit that they can get.

Jon Bassford: [00:09:18] And secondly. You know, with the qualifications for I.R.S.. Associations are ripe candidates for it. And I can kind of jump into a little bit here what those four basic qualification areas are and why I believe associations are the best fit. Even though associations across the board really are not applying for this and quite frankly, 400 billion that is 400 billion with a B dollars was allotted by Congress and only a fraction of this has been applied for IRC is just now kind of really getting some steam I think partly because. Accountants and people in the know about this type of stuff got burned out with PGP and the IDL. You know, managing those operations and filing those for their clients doesn’t really fit their business model. And with all the changes that affected that came along with I.R.S., they just haven’t stayed on top of it. So there are four basic. Ways to qualify for IRC one is being a startup. It’s pretty straightforward. If you began operations, not corporate, they began operations including having employees after February 15, 2020, and you average less, less than $1 million in revenue per year. So across 2020 and 2021, you qualify for the the startup qualification and that is actually the lowest amount you can qualify for because it only covers your employee counts in Q3 and Q4 in 2021. But if you qualify for startup, does that mean you have to? So you should always if you qualify as a startup, you should also assess the other ways of qualifying to see where you’ll get more money.

Jon Bassford: [00:11:08] Because the next three qualification areas I’m going to mention, they run from Q2 2020 through to three 2021. So we’re a startup, only has two quarters of qualifying these other ways have six quarters you can qualify, which obviously will maximize the amount of credit you can get. And the other thing good about I.R.S. is that it’s all quarter based, and with these other three, it’s all cumulative. So if you tell me that it’s not all or none, right? So if you qualify for one way for two quarters, two quarters for another way in one quarter for the third way, it all adds up. It builds up. They don’t cancel each other out. It just all adds to the quarter you qualify for and the amount of credit you’ll receive. So there’s three qualifying areas that run across these six quarters. The first one is a gross receipts reduction, which is what the IRS called it. So basically lost in revenue. And it it is substantial. And I think this is the area where there’s a lot of misinformation because I think when accountants are telling clients they don’t qualify, it’s based upon this financial reduction. And it is hard to do so when you’re looking at a quarter by quarter comparison between 2019 and 2020. So so comparing Q2 2019 to Q2 2020, did you have a 50% reduction in gross receipts that substantial? Not very many businesses and organizations can lose 50% of their revenue quarter by quarter and stay in business. But it gets a little softer.

Jon Bassford: [00:12:43] When you compare 2019 to 2021, it’s only a 20% reduction. So I always. Recommend that my clients look at the financials, even if top of their head they’re like, There’s no way we increase in revenue across both years. We didn’t have any reduction. You never know where. You just might have had a light quarter on your books in 2021 and you meet one quarter of that financial reduction. So that’s you want to keep an eye on that. Again, you’re going you’re going to add each of these quarters up and qualifying up. So that’s that’s that’s number one. Number two is supply chain issues. Again, this is something that’s not going to really affect most associations, but for for businesses that rely on buying goods and selling goods. Supply chain issues were were definitely hit throughout COVID, but I’ll brush over that so it doesn’t really apply to associations. The third way to qualify in this group of three is full or partial shutdown. Now the IRS says that or estimates that 70 to 80% of all companies in the US qualify. And it’s really based upon this criteria that most of them fall under that. And this is the area where I believe that majority of associations qualify as well can have an association background. I’m very well versed in the type of operations that they put on, the type of events, etc. and there’s no doubt that associations qualify under this. So for a full and partial shutdown, full or partial shutdown, I should say, sounds draconian, right? You had to stop operations.

Jon Bassford: [00:14:15] You had to lay people off. You had to stop delivering your goods and services. But again, looking at these notices that the IRS has put out to to clarify these various rules. You can quickly see that. It’s not that harsh for this qualification. And in fact, it’s pretty straightforward. The rule basically is, is that due to government orders, no state, local, federal, no travel, no events, no one person this. No one person that. Government. Covert orders. Affected your organization’s ability to deliver its goods and services from its normal course? More than 10%. So what does that mean? The best example that I can give is restaurants. Every expert I’ve talked to, every article I’ve read. Agrees that this is a prime candidate for full and partial shutdown. So my area restaurants I think were had no indoor dining for four or five months, then went to 25% and 50%. And when they did that, let’s just say a restaurant in day one of these shutdowns built a patio out front. Replace every table and chair. So they lost no revenue. They want they replaced it all from indoor dining to outdoor dining. But they also increased their takeout sales by 30, 40% because that’s what people did during COVID. So not only do they not lose money, they increase their revenue. Every expert agrees that this restaurant qualifies for full or partial shutdown because it changed the way it delivered its goods and services. Now think about all the different industries at that time. Effects. Schools move to remote learning. Now move over to associations.

Jon Bassford: [00:16:13] Now what are some key components of associations? Live events, trade associations, trade events, those pretty much got shut down for 2020. And given the size of them, a lot of them probably couldn’t happen in 2020, 2021 either, depending on where it was located. So you have the big events of these associations, trade shows, conventions, conferences, etc.. But you also have to keep in mind. The more local and regional stuff. Many organizations are built around chapters which have chapter meetings and chapter events in person, social events in person because of government shutdowns. Pretty much all of that had to stop in 2020 and some of it in 2021. Again looking at the trade association route. Look at lobbying. Lobbying drastically changed. Congress and government buildings were shut down for a long period of time. So again, the full or partial shutdown. Isn’t that you had to stop doing these things completely, but you had to change how you did them. If you normally did it in person, you had to change the virtual. If you normally did this type of marketing, you had a change of this type of marketing. When you look at all the notices from the IRS, the way I describe what is trying to do with a perfect shutdown is recognize and understand. That these government orders had a dramatic impact on how our businesses and organizations conducted their operations. And what it’s doing is rewarding companies who were creative, who adapted. Kept their businesses making money, kept their organizations in business, and kept people employed. That’s what it’s there to do.

Lee Kantor: [00:18:08] So when you’re working with an association and you bring this up to them and obviously, you know, in an ideal world, their own CPA or accounting firm would be proactively telling them this. But as you describe, that’s not not always the case. But when you’re working with this association, can you come in and and kind of assess the situation and do a turnkey service where you’re like, okay, this is what I see. This is where the opportunity is, and now we can apply for this. Or like, what is your relationship in this matter? Is it just you telling them, Hey, this is something that your accountant should do? Or is this something that your company, you know, takes the ball and does it on their behalf?

Jon Bassford: [00:18:51] Yeah, very good question. So like you said, there’s two parts to this. The first part is the education. Educating people on what IRC is, what the qualification areas are, and how does that apply to their organization. That’s the first step. And now that you and I are talking about this, you’re going to see everywhere you go ads and start seeing IRC places now that we’ve talked about this. But the problem a lot of them are making is they’re just sending people links to pre qualify. And so without educating people on these various qualification areas and breaking it down for them so they understand how it affects their business, they’re going to go through these pre qualification forms and just. Mark No, because they’re going to go into it with a mindset that I don’t qualify for this because my CPA said I don’t or I didn’t lose revenue. Whatever it is, whatever that preconceived notion is, they’re going to go into it with that. So we help break that down. So we do one on one calls, webinars, etc., and we’re offering this education to organizations, business owners, associations for free. Now, the second part of this is the actual filing. So we have partnered with the second largest IRC filing company in the US. I believe to date they have filed for over two and one half billion with a B credits for small business and nonprofits.

Jon Bassford: [00:20:21] And it’s a really straight, easy, straightforward process. So typically what happens is we do a one on one call or we do a webinar with with an association or their association members. And after we educate them and walk them through the process, we send them our qualification link. Now, if they have their numbers ready, their financial reduction number is ready, they have their employee counts ready. And they kind of have that that narrative painted out in their head as to how they apply for the full partial shutdown. The questionnaire takes anywhere between two and 4 minutes. It’s very quick and easy, very straightforward to to just assess which course the organization is applicable for, for the credit, where they qualify for the credit. Once they do that, then we they will receive a estimate on the amount of credit they will receive. And an upload link and all that they do from that point of view is to upload their detailed payroll journals. I recommend that they do it by paycheck date. It can be as large as quarter based, but it’s got to show every check date in that, every employee, the salary amount, the taxes, etc. because it’s got to be those details as well as your 941. And for most, most people, they’re using some kind of payroll system where these are very basic reports that you can download with with a button and just you upload those for the course in which you qualified.

Jon Bassford: [00:21:50] From there, our partner will analyze the analyze your payroll. Analyze your your qualifying quarters and work to maximize the amount of credit that you receive. From there, it is simple as they will bring you bring back to the client the final number after this analysis and present a contract to them. So our partner offers this service in one of two ways. It can be completely contingent upon receiving the credit to where you pay nothing until the credits received, in which case they charge 15 one 5%. A A client can opt to pay an advance and they charge 10%. Now, obviously, if something happens and that credit is ever received, the IRS rejects it for whatever reason. Maybe they had back taxes or whatever it may be. They will obviously refund that that that fee, but does give those two options. And most of my clients are just opting for the 15% because the IRS right now is taking anywhere between two and six months to make the payments. And why carry that load? Another very important thing about I.R.S. is that it’s actually real money. And my clients are shocked. We’ve now helped over over 35 companies qualify and have about another 18 processing. Our goal is to help over 500 companies get back over $100 million in IRC credits.

Lee Kantor: [00:23:19] So is there a sweet spot in terms of number of employees? Like when does it start? When does it stop making sense? Like if you have five employees, is that enough? Or if you have two employees, does that even matter? Like, would you even bother? Or is it you have to have 50 or 100 or hundreds of employees for this to make sense?

Jon Bassford: [00:23:39] Yeah, that’s a very good question. So the answer is yes, it makes sense for everybody. And here’s why I say that. We’ve had a few people because they had no these are these are for profits. So for for profits, majority owners and their family members are exempt from the employee count. So we’ve had a few people who the core employees were owners and family and had a few part time people, even an organization like that, where they have no full time people who are qualifying because the owners don’t count. They still have gotten 3 to 5 grand. And again, this is with the with conversation with us and the forms and the uploading. You’re talking 15 to 25 minutes. So if you take that out to an hourly rate, you’re still talking 6 to 10000 an hour, right? So so no one’s no one. Most people don’t make that make that an hour. So even if you have very few people, I just help the association where it’s just the executive director again because it’s not he’s not an owner, right. It’s non profit. He got 12,000, you know, a small state association that probably has a budget of 3 to 500000, you know, gets an extra 12 grand in their bank account. That’s huge for them. Now it also can be large. So 1 to 1, one employee to 100 employees is the sweet spot that we play in.

Jon Bassford: [00:24:59] And here are some numbers. We’ve helped an organization that had about 7 to 9 full time employees I say about because they had some part time, etc. They’ve got 150,000. We helped the small property management company get 212,000 with a government contractor firm that had 29 employees, got 586,000. So generally I say that if you have 25 or more employees, you’re looking over 500,000. If you’re over 50 employees and you you probably qualify for at least four or five quarters, you’re looking at over $1,000,000. And the reason why I say our sweet spot is 1 to 100, because when you hit more than 100 employees, the rules do change. So there’s no limit on how high you can go. But when you switch to 100 or 500. You only can qualify in 2021, which is harder to qualify for than in 2020. So it’s reducing them again now it’s reducing the amount of qualifying quarters from 6 to 3. When you go 500 and greater. It’s still only in 2021. But it’s not all employees. It’s only employees that you paid who were not working. So yeah. Any and all companies and organizations, regardless of size, absolutely can qualify for RC. It just stores different parameters depending on that size.

Lee Kantor: [00:26:24] Well, if somebody wants to learn more, have a more substantive conversation with you or somebody on the team, what is the best way to get ahold of your website or LinkedIn? What’s the best way to get ahold of you or.

Jon Bassford: [00:26:35] Yeah, I’ll get to. So. So the easiest way is to email us at info at think dash lateral. Or obviously you can go to our website, think ao.com and we do have an IRC page on there with some videos with a form where you can put in your information and we’ll get back to you a.S.A.P. So those are the two best ways to get ahold of us.

Lee Kantor: [00:26:59] Good stuff. Well, John, thank you so much for sharing your story, doing important work. And we appreciate you.

Jon Bassford: [00:27:04] Thanks for having me.

Lee Kantor: [00:27:05] All right. This is Lee Kantor. We’ll see you next time on Association Leadership Radio.

Intro: [00:00:00] Broadcasting live From the Business RadioX Studios in Atlanta, Georgia, it’s time for association leadership radio. Now here’s your host.

Lee Kantor: [00:00:17] Lee Kantor here, another episode of Association Leadership Radio, and this is going to be a good one today on the show, we have John Basford and he is with lateral solutions. Welcome, John.

Jon Bassford: [00:00:28] Thank you. Happy to be here.

Lee Kantor: [00:00:30] Well, I’m excited to learn what you’re up to. Tell us a little bit about lateral solutions. How are you helping, folks?

Jon Bassford: [00:00:35] Sure. So it’s an operations management company and what we do is is launch into operations for startups and non-profits for profits and really help them create streamlined, efficient and effective internal operations. Then it can also provide ongoing management through bookkeeping HR services, as well as CFO and CFO level strategy.

Lee Kantor: [00:01:01] So what’s your back story? How did you get involved in operations?

Jon Bassford: [00:01:05] Well, so I got started in associations as a whole, you know, not like a lot of people, not necessarily intentionally. I went to law school and I am one of those people who was leaving law school and did not know what I wanted to do with my law degree and with my life. And I started working for a legal organization. I was a member of in law school and that launched my career in association management. And when I was, you know, my my position grew with that organization, I took on a lot of operational duties and responsibilities, even though it wasn’t my core job. And when I was ready to move on and go to the next next position, I focus my my search on entire operations and have built a career around it.

Lee Kantor: [00:01:50] Now, having, I guess, worked with a lot of different types of organizations, do you see kind of similar challenges that maybe a non association firm would have, but an association firm doesn’t have and vice versa?

Jon Bassford: [00:02:07] You know, I say that the only the most part, the only major difference is taxes, right? Which nonprofit doesn’t pay taxes unless there are some, some? Not not to say that that never occurs with different business lines for an association, but for the most part, that’s the difference. At the end of the day, everyone is trying to deliver on their end goal, whether it’s to sell a product or deliver on their mission, and they’re trying to do that the best way possible with the resources they have. At the end of the day, you know, that’s what every company with a for profit nonprofit is trying to do from a business operations standpoint.

Lee Kantor: [00:02:50] Now, when you started getting into operations, was that something like you? You said it wasn’t kind of your initial goal, but you got into it. What made you think you were good at it? Like, what were some of the clues that you had where you’re like, Hey, you know what? You know, I can really make a difference in an organization by becoming kind of a ninja in this space?

Jon Bassford: [00:03:11] Yeah, a couple of things. One being, I am probably the definition of jack of all trades, master of none. You know, throughout my career, I have been involved in marketing. I have been involved in budgeting and finance. I have been involved in HR or legal events, management programs, programmatic management, volunteer management. And, you know, operations is really, to some degree where all that comes together and working for small organizations and small companies, it really allows me to utilize my diverse set of skills. Again, I have a lot of great, but I’m not a practicing attorney. I have an MBA, but I’m not a CPA, but I really have a broad knowledge in all of these areas and really have able to to hone those. The other part of the operations is that, you know, it takes, I think, a person who has problem solving skills and an analytical mind. And I think those are two areas where I really excel throughout my career and in my life.

Lee Kantor: [00:04:15] Now, is there any, any kind of actionable thing, an association leader right now while listening to you and your background about operations? Is there something they can do today that can help make their life easier?

Jon Bassford: [00:04:31] Yeah, I think this is true for all companies, but I think it’s even more true for associations. And my answer is to question everything, you know, the reason why I say that that that’s even more true for associations is because of the longevity that associations tend to have with their staff and being mission driven. And you know, everyone who works and works for or is involved in that organization loves and cares about what that organization does. They tend to fall in the trap of doing the same thing over and over again. And, you know, we’ve all we’ve all heard it before, like, what do you do? What do you do? It’s the way we’ve always done it. I think the biggest thing for association leaders to change with the times, with our digitally staff culture, whatever it may be, is to really question what it is you do and why you do it. And I think nothing should be left on the table. I think you should. You should question everything. Obviously, I’m not suggesting that you review your mission every week. That’s certainly done at the governance and board level, but your day to day transactional work and your tactics and why you’re doing it, questioning why you’re doing it, how you’re doing it and whether or not it’s delivering the results that you intend.

Lee Kantor: [00:05:47] Now, do you find that folks are hesitant to do that kind of an audit because they’re kind of afraid of what they might find? And when you bringing up these points where, hey, you know what? We’ve always done it this way. This is how it was done before I even got here. So why question, you know, if it isn’t broken, you know, why fix it? And people not realizing that sometimes you should be breaking some things because they have out kind of lived their usefulness?

Jon Bassford: [00:06:14] Yeah, it’s a good question. And obviously we’re talking broad here. So, you know, it’s always tough to kind of maybe narrow down some specifics. But you know, here’s one example it just how how life and the digital world everything has changed. You know, a colleague of mine who is a very similar job as a director of operations for a a quasi governmental organization and, you know, operates as a as a nonprofit association, if you will, to a certain degree, but gets funding from the government. And she runs payroll for four 30 people, and she spends two to four days a month entering, internalizing, reconciling, reconciling with benefits. She’s been two to four days a month on payroll, where clearly right now I handle payroll for five companies myself personally, not outsource anybody else. I personally run payroll for five companies. I spend less than 15 minutes a month on all five combined. Not for payroll, not per company combined. And the reason is is because I’ve I’ve stayed out there and watched and listened to to what new strategies, what new platforms are out there so we can streamline the process. And again, I realize that this is is one tiny little piece of the pie.

Jon Bassford: [00:07:36] But just think if you if an organization could get back two to four days a month that someone’s time, what much more could you do with that time in that money than having them sit there and enter manual payroll? And I think that can apply to a lot of areas, whether you’re marketing strategies or old school or your H.R. strategies, right? Are you a company that still? You know, has as a very manufacturer based PTO policy. And is that the best time to be using your staff’s time and counting hours and and book and PTO and someone on the back end managing all that? Or is it time to go to a more modern tactic and strategy with that and have an unlimited PTO policy? So there’s a lot of different ways, you know, that I think. Leaders need to be looking at. How are they using the most the most up to date technologies and strategies? And they’re for. Are they being as efficient and as effective as possible? And that’s and that’s the bottom line that they’re trying to get to right.

Lee Kantor: [00:08:47] And I think this is where having an outside person come in and shed some light to this is really important because the people in the organization just don’t know what they don’t know. And you need to have somebody with fresh eyes, especially that has deep depth of knowledge of some of these areas to be able to say, Hey, you know what? There’s a better way, and it’s not as scary or as hard as you think it might be to make this kind of a change. And the and the benefits can be dramatic. And especially like you’re saying, oh, a day or two here, a day or two there doesn’t matter. It seems minimal for the cost of change, but those things add up, you know, a day a day here, a day there becomes a week here. In a week there. Pretty quickly.

Jon Bassford: [00:09:36] Yeah. Another, you know, go back to your question about a difference between the for profit nonprofit world. I think another area that I see a big difference between my for profit and nonprofit clients is is outsourcing. You know, I think most associations, they tend to figure out the skill sets they need and build an entire team internally around that. And by no means is that for me to say that’s a good or bad strategy. But what it does to lend itself to is having people performing duties that they don’t have an expertize in. Whereas when you take a for profit startup, you know, that’s that’s just as lean just as just as as, you know, trying to scale and do the most it can with limited resources like most associations are, you know, they’re outsourcing the majority, their stuff and what they can do by that is is reduce their costs a lot of times because you’re not paying for that nine to five job and the benefits. But what they also, what they get instead is expertize in every single little area. If they have a campaign that that is direct mail, they hire a direct mail person. They have a campaign that social media that hire social media person. Whereas you take your normal association and it is one person who does all the marketing and all the communications across the entire organization. And if it’s not a specific area of expertize for them, you know, they just kind of have to figure it out. And again, you know, I came up that way in my career and it served me well. But at a certain point, our organizations getting the amount of expertize and skill they need for the amount of spending.

Lee Kantor: [00:11:23] Now can you share a story, maybe where an organization was struggling and you came in and help them maybe get to a new level, a level that maybe they didn’t even imagine what’s possible? You don’t have to name the organization, but just shared kind of the pain they were having and how you were able to intervene and and help them.

Jon Bassford: [00:11:44] Sure. So, you know, I’ve a lot of my clients when I moved to consulting side again, it’s been on the operations front, a lot of it, a lot of that has to do with with organizations that are completely startup, even for a nonprofit. You know, at some point they’re going to start from the ground up or an organization that was incubated under some kind of fund and that was branching off. And that’s actually where I’ve had a number of my nonprofit clients in the last three years, and a lot of that has to do with, again, kind of going back to this area of expertize. Most day to day functioning business people or operators, you know, again with their executive director for a for profit or nonprofit or your CEO for nonprofit, they don’t know the ins and outs of minutia of Inter operations. It’s not rocket science. People can figure that out, but often it’s something that needs to be ramped up quick. You don’t have time to figure that out, right? You know, you don’t. There’s only so many mistakes that you can make on accounting before it affects your taxes. There’s only so many mistakes you can make on an HR front and take it soon. And on top of that, do you know what insurance you need, right? So a lot of my clients have come to me and said, Hey, we’ve incorporated or we’ve branched off from this or we’ve done. We gotten to this point, but we have no idea where to go next. And what my company tends to do is to say, you know, and a four as a one stop shop, come in and say, we will do all of the internal operations and administrative functions that you need to take this from, you know, just a project or idea and turn it into a company because non-profits and associations, they are companies, they are incorporated and they need to make sure that the the operational processes and procedures that they are putting forth are in compliance with with local and federal laws and regulations and and really making sure that they are following the best industry standards in those areas.

Jon Bassford: [00:13:45] Because whether you are a for profit or not profit, accounting as accounting for the most part other than taxes that are legal is legal. Insurance is insurance for the most part, and you’ve got to make sure that you’re working with a partner that knows those areas to make sure that you’re doing this right because here’s what ends up happening. A lot of people convince themselves that they know enough or they care enough about the internal operations matters, that they’re going to stay on top of it. And I can’t tell you the number of times that I’ve been brought into a situation where books have not been reconciled for a year or, you know, having a client that doesn’t want to pay my company to do certain aspects. And so we don’t. But then we handle the reconciliation of the books or something down the line. And the amount of money that they spent for us to clean up their books and to make things right is what they would have spent. They would have had us do the entire thing all along and give themselves back that time and money.

Lee Kantor: [00:14:49] Yeah, it’s one of those things where you’re coming in to fix a problem that could have been prevented in the first place.

Jon Bassford: [00:14:56] Right. And a lot of times without any additional costs, usually usually, you know, for example, you know, when I when I first started out consulting, I had a just a few small clients. You know, I think at the time I had, I had five clients and it was just me at the time. And the the one person who did not want me to do their accounts payable, I would spend more time reconciling their books than the other four clients combined.

Lee Kantor: [00:15:26] Right, it’s because the system, the system isn’t good, then the the output of information is not going to be good, so. Correct. Correct. Now when you’re working with a new client, what is typically the pain? Are they in some sort of a crisis as something happened where they’re like, Hey, we better call John and his team because, you know, we screwed this up or something, you know, something isn’t. You know, I’m feeling some sort of a pain. Are you coming in in that kind of regard or are people proactive in trying to get ahead of things?

Jon Bassford: [00:15:59] You know, so because a lot of my work has begun at the startup phase, again, whether it’s true, start up from nothing or branching off the pain point is we’re incorporated and we don’t know what to do from here. Right. And so that’s that’s that’s certainly a big, big pain point that I’m feeling it is providing that expertize on all those different aspects that you need to to set up and start running. The other part, yeah, I would say, you know, more than any other area. Where the pain points become visible to the executive director of the owner, et cetera, is around accounting, you know, you can kind of fake it till there’s a problem, right? Business insurance you you don’t know that there is a problem to there is a problem, right? You don’t you don’t sit around thinking, Oh man, do I have enough insurance? But the accounting is something that is going to pop up all the time. Whether you’re doing the finances for a board meeting, you are getting ready for taxes. You are, you know, just trying to get to a point where you’re reviewing your own financial reports on a regular basis. You know, there’s a there’s there’s there’s several different flows of information that occur with accounting that at some point you’re going to be like, Oh, like, this isn’t right, and I don’t know how to fix this. And it’s usually because there aren’t the systems and processes in place. And you know, as much people are good intentioned on on stay on top of accounting. It’s an area that slides because it’s not an area of competency. And for most people, it’s not fun, right? It’s not what they enjoy doing. It’s not their core mission, it’s not their core business, and they tend to let it slide. So yeah, a lot of times we are brought in to say, come in and say, Hey, like we say, something is off on our books and we don’t know what it is you need. Can you come help us find it?

Lee Kantor: [00:18:03] And then so when you start an engagement, you’re coming in to maybe solve a specific problem like that or build a strong foundation. Is it something that you’re coming in to just kind of triage that situation or does this eventually turn into a Hey, Johns? I might as well just outsource this to John because he seems to know what he’s doing.

Jon Bassford: [00:18:25] Yeah. We occasionally do ad hoc work for problem solving, and I’d say that happens more on the association side for me more than anything, and it probably happens a little more outside the outskirts of operations. You know, one of my one of my clients is redoing their component relations handbook for their professional association, their professional chapters across the country. And it’s just one of those things that, again, it just falls to the wayside because it’s not the core job of the individuals. And so it just sits and sits and sits, and they’ve engaged me to say, Hey, look, you know, we need to revamp this and we want your skill and expertize on how to do that. So we certainly do that. Add how to work. But my goal is always with clients is to get my foot in the door with some kind of project and then from there provide ongoing services, whether it’s and sometimes it’s just from advisory standpoint, right? Maybe you have that person at your office that the EPA or the operations manager who handles all the transactional day to day work, you know, they make sure the bookkeeping is done. They make sure there’s business insurance. They respond to the emails and the inquiries when they come in that maybe they don’t have that high level view and experience on some of these areas. Or again, that’s an area where I can come in as a CEO or CFO advisor and really just kind of help quarterback the person, right? They can handle the transaction work, they can handle the day to day. But I can come in and provide them with some a little bit more expertize in helping make sure in a limited number of hours, you know, five or 10 hours a month. Making sure that that organization is is getting ahead of the future hurdles and making sure that they don’t get in that same place again.

Lee Kantor: [00:20:17] Yeah, a strong foundation is critical. And and just even like you said earlier, little tweaks can have a big impact over time. So get some of this stuff right at jump rather than kind of just accept certain levels of inefficiencies when you don’t have to.

Jon Bassford: [00:20:35] Yeah, and I have a great story. It’s not operation. It’s for my first, my first, very first role. But again, I think it kind of goes to a little bit of what we’ve been talking about with associations and change associations and evaluation and also the the end goal of making sure that what you’re doing on a day to day basis, weekly basis, monthly basis is driving the results that you intend. So I started my my new job with this legal organization and I done a a trip. It was it was a traveling field rep position where I was going around the country, visiting chapters at law schools and helping the ones that were struggling by training the officers, doing recruitment for them. And it really just kind of being that that in the field person to help these chapters grow and succeed. And I’d finish my my first training trip with a colleague and a couple of weeks in and I kept being told by by my boss, this is what we expect our chapters to do. You know, like it was very, very specific, right? Disney of our programs, this number of recruitment events. You know, they need to have an initiation every semester or at least once a year, you know, very, very specific requirements. And you know, I’m here, I’m training. I’m the new guy. And again, my mind is analytical. I’m always always thinking about what’s best and how things should work. And so I come to and I said, You know, you keep telling me that this is what chapter should do.

Jon Bassford: [00:22:02] Where does that exist? Where are we telling the chapters that other than me repeating the words? And the answer was, Oh, there’s this, there’s this document in the back of the district conference manual. So I’m sitting here thinking, I’m like, OK, it’s the back of this manual, I said, So what happens if if a if a chapter doesn’t kind of destroy confidence, do they see this document ever? No. Well, what if they leave their manual at the desk, a conference and leave and go home? Well, they see this again. The answer was no. So this entire organization’s chapter operations is really what a submission is all about. These chapters deliver on the organization’s mission, which is the the sole purpose of the organization and in the chapters. Doing these tasks on a semester annual basis is the whole is the whole point of what they’re doing to fulfill on that mission. And that instruction was buried in the back of a manual. So here’s what I did. Again, I didn’t make broad changes. I didn’t. I didn’t reinvent the wheel, but I took the these pages. I think at the time it was three pages and I I boiled it down to a two page document front and back, four, four printed out and two pages for digital. And I had that document be at the front of every single thing I did if I was emailing a chapter about initiation, I mentioned this document.

Jon Bassford: [00:23:24] If I email them about programing, I mentioned this document. Everything I did was geared around this around this document. And because of this kind of proactive approach of really putting out all the expectations on the chapters up front, here’s in my time there. I was there for six years during my time there, the organization, which was a 100 year old organization. So was it was it new like it wasn’t in a growth phase in the lorsqu’il department, we had a 20 percent increase in membership. We had probably, you know, sometimes hard, hard, hard to quantify, but a two or three times in programing from our chapters we had, we went from having about 15 chapters out of two hundred meeting these mental expectations to over 100. So really just really increasing that greatly. And here’s another big thing that with with utilizing this document and lioness expectations and communicating it proactively, the organization had an issue where they had a lot of times would have to subsidize people to go to their conventions to get the numbers that they wanted. And what we were able to do during my tenure is not only cut out those subsidies. We actually increased the the convention attendance. Year after year, why was there and it was all because of utilizing this document being proactive about it, laying out clear expectations for these chapters and communicating that proactively as well.

Lee Kantor: [00:24:51] Wow, that is a great story. And that shows being proactive on your part, enabled your client to really benefit and really just probably benefiting to this day.

Jon Bassford: [00:25:03] Yeah. Yeah, I mean, and there’s no doubt that that, you know, some of my bosses and people I worked with had started this process, right, like the organization was in a place of change and transition. I think, you know, five or seven years prior to a volunteer alumnus, kind of being the executive director of the organization to paid staff. So it had made some changes already, and it was certainly growing and making some progress. But but again, there’s this one little tweak. One little change of pulling this document out and really driving it home really made all the difference for that organization. They also started doing it more on that pre-law department, and they started seeing growth there. And there’s no doubt that I was. I was piggybacking on some of the great changes I had before me, and I’m sure that the, you know, the people following me took what I did and made it even continue to use the core of it. But what our continue to grow and expand that as well?

Lee Kantor: [00:26:04] Well, John, if somebody wants to learn more, have a more substantive conversation with you or somebody on your team, what’s the website?

Jon Bassford: [00:26:12] Yeah, you can go to WW Dot, think laterally

Lee Kantor: [00:26:18] Think and then the hyphen lateral. Correct? Yep. Well, John, thank you so much for sharing your story today. You’re doing important work and we appreciate you.

Jon Bassford: [00:26:27] Thank you very much. I appreciate it as well.

Lee Kantor: [00:26:29] All right. This is Lee Kantor. We’ll see you next time on association leadership radio.