Attention: This is a machine-generated transcript. As such, there may be spelling, grammar, and accuracy errors throughout. Thank you for your understanding!

David Leary: [00:00:09] Welcome back to the show. This is the accounting podcast. And I'm David Leary and.

Blake Oliver: [00:00:13] I'm Blake Oliver.

David Leary: [00:00:14] And we are still at SuiteWorld talking to NetSuite customers. Blake. And I'll introduce our next customer. This is Jason Balk. He's the CFO of Media Place Partners, which is a marketing firm. Is that correct? Correct. Yeah, absolutely. I'm going to jump right in to the elephant in the room. I looked at your LinkedIn page. You basically you're not an accountant. There is no like not even like a stint in an accounting firm. But you're the CFO. Can you bridge this 25 year gap for me? 100%. Yeah, yeah. So I started.

Jason Balk: [00:00:49] Out going to school not knowing what exactly I wanted to be. Right. I started off architecture. I went into like 6 or 7 different, like engineering type of degree programs. Couldn't really figure out what I wanted to do, but I always had jobs, so I always worked full time while I was going to school. And one of the first jobs I got out of school was working for an ISP. And so I managed the are for an ISP of a bunch of dial up customers in the late 90s. So from an accounting perspective, where does my accounting experience come from? Some college classes and some hands on experience. So essentially what I did is I was taking a lot of computer science classes at the time, so I started getting a little bit of programing. So I was just trying to figure out ways to make my job easier. And so it was working for this ISP. And so I managed all the are for, for the business. When it came to the internet, clients automated that. And what time was this? This was in the late 90s. This was like 97.

Blake Oliver: [00:01:56] So this is like the peak dial up.

Jason Balk: [00:01:58] Oh yes. Yeah yeah yeah. So AOL yeah, we send out CDs just like AOL did and everything else. We were a little see like in Grand Rapids.

Blake Oliver: [00:02:05] What was the name of it?

Jason Balk: [00:02:06] It was called US exchange. Ultimately. Like, believe it or not, going back to the dial up, EarthLink is where that company now resides. But that's probably through ten different, you know, M&A activity throughout the years over the last 25 years.

Blake Oliver: [00:02:23] And fun fact, EarthLink is still around. Yes, you can still buy dial up internet.

Jason Balk: [00:02:30] I don't know, like if the TCP IP settings still come on computer I don't know, right. Yeah, I'm sure it does.

Blake Oliver: [00:02:35] But there's somebody with that pretty pink iMac. Yeah. That's still dialing up, you know, into that ISP that you used to work for, I'm sure.

David Leary: [00:02:45] And this is like 39 bucks a month and you're sending out invoices and 995. Yeah, ten bucks a month, and you're sending invoices and collecting the invoices, which is a lot of manual work. Absolutely. And you're like, there's got to be a better way. There's got to.

Jason Balk: [00:02:55] Be a better way. So we looked at bringing on a solution. At the time, it didn't quite work out. That was my first experience with a system implementation. And like I said, it didn't it didn't quite get to where we needed it to be. But that experience let me automate my accounting department and then also let me open up some opportunities within the existing business to work on the C side and get involved in like system development project. So the wet.

Blake Oliver: [00:03:24] Side what's that click.

Jason Balk: [00:03:26] Yes. Yeah. What is that man. Now you're really testing me, right? A competitive local exchange carrier. So. There some drag going on in like 97 with all these like, you know, the, the bells and whatnot. So it just opened up a flood of, you know, let's just say a couple hundred million dollar companies getting into that business and then trying to monetize and sell out. So what I ended up doing is I ended up getting involved on the on the main part of the business and connecting systems doing system integration work. So again, where's the CPA stuff. Come in. Yeah. Because you don't really there yet.

Blake Oliver: [00:04:06] You don't really look like a CFO. I got to say. You know, I mean you work for a media company, but and you've got like the did you used to have a mohawk at one day?

Jason Balk: [00:04:15] One time. I never have shaved my hair down to the skin. I heard that that's not a good thing to do, but pretty close.

Blake Oliver: [00:04:22] You could if you wanted to. You've got it going and you've got the Nine Inch Nails shirt, which I love. Yeah, yeah, but. And the sneakers. Yeah. You don't look like a CPA or a CFO.

Jason Balk: [00:04:31] Yeah. So computers got me into. The accounting and finance world, and I've just been able to parlay that. So I left the select went into. Consulting world, a company that ultimately got bought by EMC consulting. But we were doing system implementations for e-commerce companies, everything kind of around that.com bubble of the 2000. So after I did that, I went back to Media Place Partners, which was known as Altegrity at the time, and I worked with Scott, my partner at the select, the ISP. He interviewed me for a job. I never worked for him. Within two weeks he got moved somewhere else. I think this company went from 60 employees to like 1500 within a year and a half. So it was like a huge, just like behemoths like start up company. And we ended up connecting back together for Altegrity.

Blake Oliver: [00:05:28] Which is now Media Place.

Jason Balk: [00:05:31] Now Media Place Partners. We, we we bought a traditional media firm back in 2017 and took on their name because we were pretty much a white label solution for traditional agencies where we just bought all the digital aspects and buying for them. And then we white labeled all the, you know, platforms and reporting and whatnot for them and just kind of did outsourced services for digital buying and planning.

David Leary: [00:05:59] So he's like, hey, does anybody have any experience implementing anything? And you're like, way back in the ICP, I did it. And they're like, great, roll out that suite. Is that kind of how the that's.

Jason Balk: [00:06:07] That's kind of how it went exactly. Back in the day, there was a company called Right Media that was a NetSuite customer. And this was in like 2004 ish, let's say 2005. Ultimately, they got bought. They were one of the first programmatic exchanges in in the world. They got bought by Yahoo for roughly $1 billion in like 2009. So we were at the forefront of all the programmatic media buying space. So we do a lot of integrations with all of them, hence my background. So really my background comes from computers and system integration and just extracting the data. And now how can I create processes to make sure all that information is accurate. Over the last 25 years? You pick up audits, everything else. And so that's where a lot of my experience came from, from the finance world was just like on the job training.

Blake Oliver: [00:07:01] But yeah, so so David and I have an app called earmark. Okay. And you know, we we buy ads, we have a campaign on Facebook, Instagram, that sort of thing. So we're tiny now. We just do it ourselves. Yeah. Yeah. But I imagine that, you know, as we grow, like, at what point would we need the services of a media place partners?

Jason Balk: [00:07:24] I guess that really just depends. I mean, you try and handle everything you can internally until it becomes too big of a problem where you need the expertise to bring it in house. That's usually right around the time it makes sense to talk to somebody. But, you know, the marketing world is so fragmented. There's different people to talk to about the creative aspect, the media buying aspect, you know, the messaging, all the brand stuff. Our clients, we typically like to work with clients who are over half $1 million in, like media buying on an annual basis. So we have several client accounts that are larger than that. So like one of the recent wins is a Trinity Health, which so we're buying media in roughly 25 different states for about 50 different hospitals across the country. And so we built kind of platforms to help us communicate with them and then also communicate with the platform. So you mentioned you got earmark. So you're going to go check your stats at some point in time. See how much money you made. Yeah I want.

Blake Oliver: [00:08:24] To know what you did with that. Half a million.

Jason Balk: [00:08:26] Yeah.

Blake Oliver: [00:08:27] Right. What did I get for it. Right.

Jason Balk: [00:08:29] Yeah yeah. Yeah, right. Not much. Right. When it boils down to it in time. Right. It all comes with scale. Yeah. But so that's, that's usually kind of like the inflection point where we start to have conversations with folks because right around half $1 million in media buying.

Blake Oliver: [00:08:46] So my daily budget is about $15 right now. So you have to come back to you. Yeah, yeah.

Jason Balk: [00:08:51] We're familiar with companies like you and we just say like, you know, hey, we'll help you out, give you some pointers and everything, and then let you take it from from there.

Blake Oliver: [00:09:00] Is it all digital ads that you're buying or is it like across media?

Jason Balk: [00:09:04] It was strictly all digital until 17. And then we bought Media Place Partners. That brought along some client relationships specifically like a Spartannash, which is a large regional commercial grocer, like kind of like a Gordon Food service as well, and then local colleges and universities. For a while we were doing University of Notre Dame, all the Mendoza College of Business. So when you ask me, is it all digital? No. Nowadays it can be anything, anything that somebody is willing to buy ads on. Got it? If you want to. I'm going to YouTube tonight, so if you want me to put your mark on the sphere, just let me know. We have those relationships too.

David Leary: [00:09:43] Be great. We talked about this.

Blake Oliver: [00:09:44] The green our logo is circular. Okay. I think it could fit really good on the on that ball. Both sides of the outside of it. Yeah. Or like these billboards. I've seen some of the partners here. Some of the vendors at SuiteWorld have purchased ad space on the strip. Like you're walking as you're walking to Caesar's Forum, you're seeing an ad for Tipalti or.

Jason Balk: [00:10:07] Yeah, those are some popular tactics that people use, especially if you're going to go into a conference and you're looking to increase your customer base. One, you want to get out some of the branding, let them know you're here. But two, there's also other things you can do where it's like you could geofence this specific building. So anybody that comes in and out, you can grab device IDs and serve ads to them at a later point in time. There's just so much technology in the in the marketing world, martech, adtech, you name it, right? Oh yeah. That there's a lot of we'd hire your.

David Leary: [00:10:39] Company and your account manager would help us. We're like, we want that screen, and they'd figure out how to make it happen for us.

Jason Balk: [00:10:44] Absolutely. Yep.

Blake Oliver: [00:10:46] And then get us the reports afterward. So we'll build.

Jason Balk: [00:10:49] The plan for you. We'll tell you, like, okay, you know, you're coming to net. Sweet. We think you should spend X amount in budget. You should be on some billboards. You should do some maybe some OT, obviously some social media and put a plan together. Let you approve that plan. Once you approve it, then it goes into the execution mode. And once the campaign is over, we deliver some wrap up reports. But you get real time insights into your campaigns on a daily basis. And what's tracking and what's not.

Blake Oliver: [00:11:17] The best marketing these days is data driven. I think that's what attracts finance people into marketing. I agree. Right. It's and it's it's so analytical. I mean, you can you can really dig down into I mean it's sort of whenever somebody complains about like how Facebook tracks us everywhere, I say, well, actually it's really good for certain people. Like if you're an advertiser, you know, you can really reach a very targeted audience. Now.

Jason Balk: [00:11:42] That's how my 30 year high school reunion got going this past year. And I held it at my house. So where do you go? You go to Facebook and you implement, you know, different, different tactics to get in front of people, you know, and and let it work. Let it work its magic.

Blake Oliver: [00:11:57] One of my favorite. So this is sort of a I digress slightly, but I got to share this. One of my favorite I might have been a Planet Money episode, was these young reporters talking about Facebook's changes to its tracking and to make it personal. They each kind of took a look at their Instagram to see how many trackers do I have. There was some sort of like disclosure that Facebook started doing, so you could decide if you wanted to be tracked or not, and you could turn it off. And at the end of the episode, these two young women who are actually they like, buy a lot of clothes on Instagram, which I do too now, right? They one of them decided to turn off the tracking and the other one said, you know what, I don't want to turn off the tracking. I love these targeted ads, you know, like it's it's like, I would miss it if I didn't. Yeah.

Jason Balk: [00:12:46] So like my I'm wearing the first pair of shoes I ever bought on Facebook. You know what I mean? I came across Oliver Cable and, you know, just. Yeah. Happenstance, you know, but to me, like, I want relevant ads, right? I'm not. You know, I got four kids at home I'm not necessarily looking for, you know, for apps for my nine year old. Yeah. I want to buy something for myself occasionally. Right. I get enough of my time. But, you know, so the relevancy, the targeted ads and and what are you giving up in some cases, yeah. Trust me. Look, there's bad actors that can ruin it for everybody. But, you know, I'm sure we're smart enough to figure that all out at the end.

Blake Oliver: [00:13:28] There are perks to it. It's, you know, we're discovering new products we never would have seen before. This this hoodie. I discovered this brand online. Yeah. Through. I think they targeted me with an ad, you know, and I bought it. I mean, I'm one of those people that works.

Jason Balk: [00:13:43] We just don't know what happ. Right?

David Leary: [00:13:43] So there's a whole market you guys could go after. Accounting firms need a lot of marketing help. You guys could the whole market if you're interested in chasing that one. Yeah, right. But.

Blake Oliver: [00:13:51] Well, no, the problem accounting firms have is they have too much work, not enough people to do it. Right.

Jason Balk: [00:13:57] That's true. Right. You know. So now let's shift the marketing over to employment services hiring. Right. So that's they just switched the marketing budget around for different tactics. Right. Oh I got too many clients, not enough workers. Well, let me shift some budget to get the workers and advertise.

Blake Oliver: [00:14:13] Your firm is a place to work. Yeah. Yeah, actually, that brings us to your team. Like, what's the what's the accounting finance team look like?

Jason Balk: [00:14:23] I laugh because I try and be as efficient as possible. So it's me and a controller and we manage it, finance and HR. Now I do have developers that work on a team as well. So I have a couple of developers and a sysadmin. So hold on, hold on.

Blake Oliver: [00:14:42] Two people, you're doing it all with two people on accounting.

Jason Balk: [00:14:45] And two people on accounting. Yes, absolutely. So I've been on that sweet since 2007. Yeah. Back before they had like some sweet success in different like preconfigured bundles specifically for media. So back in like zero nine, I was actually brought in to help with some media bundles to just help make it a little bit more media friendly. The platform, and obviously over the course of the years with my background, you know, we just have done integrations with probably about 15 different other platforms outside of NetSuite. You know, you name it, it could be Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter, all those. You know, we're pulling down all the data through the APIs on a daily basis just to, you know, to help out our clients understand where they are in the buying process, what's being delivered and everything like that.

David Leary: [00:15:33] So and you're pulling all that ad data down into NetSuite and then do you have like a front end for your clients that internet. Sweet. Yep.

Jason Balk: [00:15:40] Exactly. So we build a front end to to a combination of NetSuite and our ad servers. So we built some proprietary tech stack that essentially will go in and grab all the information. Clients can log into that, see all their data. That data is married from all of the ad servers in different companies and vendors that we utilize, along with NetSuite. So we pull data from probably like 3 or 4 different systems right now to present it to our client and to let them know where things are at. So if they have a new order for a hospital in Boise, Idaho, to start up a Facebook campaign to hire nurses, they can put that information in there. Then we can start collecting it, getting all the resources, all the assets, you know, the creative assets and whatnot, and get that campaign up and ready for execution.

Blake Oliver: [00:16:27] So that's incredible. I mean, so it's the automation that's allowed you to stay lean.

Jason Balk: [00:16:31] It's absolutely the automation and kind of take a pride on that. It's just like, you know, one of the first things we did is automate AP and are, you know, as soon as we got on the platform and I was mentioning earlier, there's a company called Right Media that got on NetSuite back in the day. Well, early in the 04206 range, there's a lot of advertising companies that was kind of a frothy market. So they were looking to get on platforms where maybe a lot more companies were on. It just helps you out with M&A right later on down the road. If we're all in the same financial platform, it's easier to move across. So we kind of made a purposeful decision to go with NetSuite over some other alternatives at the time because they weren't cloud based solutions. So that was a huge thing for for us, you know, as we're used to working in the cloud where, you know, other companies, it's just like we want on premise. So we just embrace the cloud and the APIs.

Blake Oliver: [00:17:27] And I think I heard you say that was back in 2007. Yeah, that was very early. I mean, that was like most people cloud was not even on the radar.

Jason Balk: [00:17:35] Right.

Blake Oliver: [00:17:36] At least when it comes to accounting finance.

Jason Balk: [00:17:38] Back then, Microsoft Dynamics was still premise based. Wow. And obviously QuickBooks was still.

David Leary: [00:17:44] Yeah, I mean, I was I was at Intuit time and I remember we used your hand out, we created luggage tags to people like join the cloud, take the trip to the cloud. Right. That's where that's where everybody's mind was. And it was like, is it secure? Like that's like nobody asked if the cloud secure. We've gotten past that. But it was. Yeah. Those were the early days.

Jason Balk: [00:17:59] Yeah. No. Absolutely right. So it's just it's real interesting nowadays. You know, if I was to go in and, you know, do a whole new process of selecting a vendor, it'd be a much different it's a much different world that we're in, you know. So probably a lot more competition at that level. But we've been pretty happy with.

David Leary: [00:18:22] Net suite how I think for a lot of the customers of Net suite we've spoken to in many cases, their newer two, three years they've been you've been on it for a decade plus. Yeah. And just, you know, understanding computer programing a little bit. You get this concept of technical debt. Yes. Where you make a decision, you write some code and then you've got to go back and fix it, but it just gets sloppy. Does that happen to you? Don't ask me.

Jason Balk: [00:18:47] To quantify that and put it in some like goodwill or somewhere on the balance sheet with that. But yeah.

David Leary: [00:18:51] Does that happen to your account accounting data when you're on the same system for so long and the way you ran your business those years is different. How you may run your business now versus the way you'd make a decision about data. Do you do you have technical debt in your data?

Jason Balk: [00:19:07] I don't think of it that way. Okay. I do understand the term technical debt. And I'm always pretty conscious, like, you know, we you know, another reason for using different systems and combining them in ways that we do is like, you don't want to just have data sitting in 3 or 4 different systems, the same data, right? So how can we rely on certain systems to have access to those data points? And then how can we pull them out and collect them? So that's what we do a lot of our stuff. And you know, in our business. Net suite is a single source of truth. So everybody uses it. So our salespeople are going to use it. They're going to go in and then put it in their sales orders. Once the sales order is in there, you know, our trafficking team is going to pick up that sales order, start configuring the campaigns. And and in a manner that makes the customer journey very purposeful and similar throughout. So if you're going to get a contract from us, it's going to show you exactly the line items that you're going to buy on and everything like that. So we're not just like saying, oh, here's $1 million budget, here's $1 million invoice. You know, we break it down based on delivery and how it's been delivered. And all that's done through third party tools that we've connected to, like I said in the past, to be able to point and click at the end of the month, all my reporting is already pulled down for me, right? That's pretty simple to push a button to have all that data create my invoices automatically inside of. Net suite. And so. That's why I'm able to get away with a lot of different things. And and I have a great team and my controller is awesome too. So, you know, I guess that's it's not a it's a unique scenario. It's not uncommon though, right?

Blake Oliver: [00:20:48] Have you been coming to SuiteWorld for a while?

Jason Balk: [00:20:50] Yeah, I think I think my first one was back in San Jose when they were doing them there. So I would probably be in about ten of them now, I think.

David Leary: [00:20:59] How much of the sweet are you using from 0% to 100% of the sweet?

Jason Balk: [00:21:04] Yes, I would say within that sweet. I think that we're using about 70 to 80% of it. There are certain aspects of it that we are not using that I know that I could turn on, but, you know, there was an advance revenue recognition back in 2007 when I hopped on. Right. So we have created some tools to just kind of look at the contracts and automatically create invoices based on that, you know what I mean? So I'm not having to work with rev rec schedules and a bunch of other things. Everything is kind of handled, you know, with some some tricks. You built.

Blake Oliver: [00:21:41] It before they.

Jason Balk: [00:21:41] Did. We built it before they did. So I was able to build it in a manner that I saw fit. And then also, you know, in many cases kind of follows the logic of what they would do as well.

Blake Oliver: [00:21:53] One more question. I see here that you are an angel investor, and you are on the board of a number of groups. Tell me about that. Tell me about your investing.

Jason Balk: [00:22:05] Or.

Blake Oliver: [00:22:05] Your angeling. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Jason Balk: [00:22:08] We invest in early stage startups. For the most part. It was something that me and my partner, Scott Bruise, your CEO, and another friend of ours, we got together and this was probably about 12, 13 years ago. And we're like, you know, we're successful. How can we help other people be successful? And part of that was trying to come up with an idea of investing in local tech companies and the Grand Rapids area, and there wasn't a whole lot of that going on at the time. So we started doing that a little bit. You probably have about 15 to 20 different angel investments. Some of them were in funds of funds. Some of them we handle on our own. And it's really just from it just came out of networking and just being in the industry and being purposeful about trying to help others, or if somebody is willing or asks you a question, you know, you can provide some, you know, maybe just some direction and what they're looking to do and being I've worked for probably like four different startups, so to speak. I understand that world. And I also, you know, scaling from over 50 employees into the next realm. And some of that stuff is has helped me just navigate different directions where some of these folks are going. So it's really fun and interesting. It's been fruitful, I'm not going to lie. But it's it's well, that is the.

Blake Oliver: [00:23:31] Point, right? Yeah. The point is to make money and you've helped people along the way and yeah, that's great.

Jason Balk: [00:23:36] But it's a it's very fun and very rewarding. And I kind of think of that as that's like my hobby, you know, going to concerts, listening to music and helping out young, young enterprises.

Blake Oliver: [00:23:47] What's your favorite concert you went to recently?

Jason Balk: [00:23:51] So the that's a good question. I'm going to you two tonight at the sphere.

Blake Oliver: [00:23:56] At the.

Jason Balk: [00:23:57] Sphere, which.

Blake Oliver: [00:23:57] Is for anyone who doesn't know what that is, go search for the sphere. Vegas.

Jason Balk: [00:24:01] Yes, it's going to be super.

Blake Oliver: [00:24:02] Check it out.

Jason Balk: [00:24:03] Super awesome. The last concert that I went to, I like comedy shows as well, so I went to a Justin concert, Anthony Jeselnik in Detroit a couple of weeks ago and went to Pearl jam. Eddie Vedder and the Earthlings had something going on in Chicago during Covid, so I got to go there and see Chad Smith from Red Hot Chili Peppers and Andrew Watt and a bunch of other guys just go out there and just play. So and and then one other one Pearl Jam in Indianapolis, I had fifth row tickets to that one, and they canceled it an hour outside of the show. So I didn't get a chance to go that way, but they're going to reschedule it for next year. So it's back on the list. You know what I mean? So all right.

Blake Oliver: [00:24:44] Fingers crossed for you for that one.

Jason Balk: [00:24:45] Appreciate it.

Blake Oliver: [00:24:46] Jason Volk has been wonderful talking to you. Really appreciate your time.

Jason Balk: [00:24:51] Yeah. No thanks guys. Appreciate it.

[00:24:53] Thank you. Yeah.