 show. We have a lot to talk about my friend and this is going to be a lot of fun, but before we get going, I've just got to do a couple housekeeping things. I'm Julia Patrick, CEO of the American Nonprofit Academy. Jared Ransom, my trusty sidekick is traveling today. She'll be back with us tomorrow. We want to make sure that we thank all of our presenting sponsors without them. We would not have this conversation and I've got to say YPTC was one of those first people that joined us. We are now marching towards 600 episodes. So we want to make sure that we thank Blumerang, your part-time controller, American Nonprofit Academy, Nonprofit Nerd, Fundraising Academy, Staffing Boutique, and Nonprofit Thought Leader. And again, you can find us on Roku, YouTube, Vimeo, Amazon Fire TV, and now our episodes are on podcasts. So cue us up and when you're vacuuming or going for a walk or doing whatever, maybe going back to your office and you're in traffic, check us out because we're there. Okay, Jennifer, my friend, again, you were that lifeline to all of this craziness that started now almost three years ago. Unbelievable. Unbelievable. And I said we were on the getting on the other side of it, but there's still implications and what we're going to talk about today with the labor market. Big time. You know, it's fascinating to me to have your wisdom on this because, you know, we think, Oh, accounting, finance, they're looking at the ledgers. They're not going to see any of this. But in so many ways, you're on the front lines of this. And so your voice is amazing to give us some perspective. So I'm going to start off by having you define the great resignation. I like your words, the great reevaluation. Yeah. So we have all heard about the great resignation. It's a term that was coined by Adam Anthony, Anthony Klotz. I heard him on an Adam Grant podcast recently. It defines the fact that 47 million people left their jobs in 2021. And that trend continued in 2022. And I have the question, where did all the people go? Where did they go? But during the pandemic, what happened was many people left their jobs at many women left their jobs because of child care issues. Kids were home, schooled and daycares were closed. Also, a lot of individuals on the, you know, were experienced end of their career towards retirement took the opportunity to retire during the pandemic. And but the lockdowns had a lot of people questioning. What else? What do I want to do with my life now? And that's where I, I say I coined, but actually Dan Tritch in our, you know, Dan, in our Phoenix office, more on dance, dance doing lots of things around the country now too. He, he told me it was called the great evaluate reevaluation. So I call it the great reevaluation. People are reevaluating their work. Non-profit leaders are really reevaluating their work. Non-profits just in general, the staff there are leaving 60% more than the regular labor force. So we're really having a crisis in the non-profit sector. That stack comes from SHERM, the Society of Human Resources Management. So that's all crisis. That's not just, is that more on the the C suite or that's just like there it's all across the board. But just recently in the Chronicle of Philanthropy in May, there was an article called large numbers of non-profit leaders are stepping down and the competition to find new ones is fierce. And it is, it really is. And it's both in the C suite of non-profits and throughout the organizations. And what's happening is people are burnout in the non-profit sector. They're really reevaluating the situation. Now they stayed during the crisis and it was a lot on people. They were scrambling to keep their organizations alive, staying afloat. They were figuring out the pandemic funding and what they were going to do with that and trying to serve their constituents. So I guess, you know, now it's two and a half years in and people are saying, you know what, how about me? And I've been through a lot and now I might be looking for a more, a better place, greener grass, if you will, where it's not so stressful. You know, it's so fascinating that you would say this. I have spoken to two different CEOs on different topics in the last like three weeks. And both of these people, just as an aside, had told me that they had put off some major medical interventions because they were going to have to take medical leave and they were afraid to leave their non-profit because they just didn't, you know, their, their client base had gone up, their, their labor force had dropped, everything that you were talking about. And they had imperiled themselves to where they're going to have to both leave, you know, and one is in the West Coast, one is in the East Coast. I mean, it's been heartbreaking. And I've got to believe to your point, this is being played out. We're seeing it all the time, very much so in the finance area, where we work. But we're also seeing it because we work with 1400 non-profit organizations. We're seeing it in their struggle to find staff all throughout. And so I'll give a plug to what I think one of the big things non-profits should be thinking about is succession planning, especially in the executive director level, because that is where it can really so disrupt your operations if you have an executive leave, a CFO, a director of development. So succession planning, thinking about what could happen next is super important. And I will direct the audience to a webinar that we just did two weeks ago, featuring David Harris, who has been on this show, who is the head of Interim Executive Solutions and Patrice Keegan, who is the former head of Boston Cares and now serves as an interim executive director. And so we had them on a webinar two weeks ago. So see that at our website yptc.com. And it goes all into what you should be doing to best practices for succession planning, what you should be doing now to get ready. So when we talk about that, Jennifer, and I love that you can give us another resource. And these implications, can you give us a little bit more of a picture that might help some of us understand why that planning is so important? It's not just that individual. It's, it's the culture lost. Okay, yes, those are the costs. So givebetter.com is a website that you may have heard of. And they have a stat on here that studies estimate that losing an employee can cost a company one and a half to two times an employee's salary. This takes into consideration hiring, onboarding, training, ramp up time, and loss of engagement of other staff. You forget about that too, that in addition, you know, when someone leaves, then there could be just a circular, you know, things start going downhill in the organization, because there's just creates negativity, people leave and then other people start thinking about leaving. So it's the cost is it depends on who is leaving what it really costs. So in for you know, a staff member, it might be like $1,500, all these things, this is this is again, give better stats here. But it could be for a technical person in your nonprofit, it could be 100 to 150% of their salary. And then in the C suite, it could be almost 200% of an employee's salary. This. So it's expensive when staff leave. And again, I mentioned before, it's the cost of that transition time. But it's also the interruption potential interruption to your mission. What happens when these people leave to your constituents and being able to fulfill that mission? Yeah. And I love that you brought that up because I think a lot of times when we enter into this discussion, we're, we're playing, you know, as my mother would say, was scared money. And we're looking at what's right in front of us. And we lose sight of that. And then it's too late. It's just so catastrophic when you lose sight of that. Because generally, not such good things have happened to alert you to how your constituency is suffering. Yeah, it's a real thing. I mean, if you're not planning appropriately, say, you know, an executive director just up and leaving a nonprofit organization and giving two weeks notice is not ideal. That's where I go back to the succession planning and what needs to happen there. And certainly, it's hard to fill the that those shoes of an executive director, what's a board to do? Typically, a board member will jump right in and help out. Perhaps, perhaps there's somebody on staff that could jump in to meet an interim, you know, situation. But it's a tough one when somebody up and leaves. Now, in the CFO role, it's, you know, I think it's a little bit easier because there's firms like your part time controller that could step right in and fill that role very quickly. And I guess I would say on the executive director role, I have to give David Harris a plug too, because he would say interim executive solutions could jump right in on the executive director side. But without lack of, you know, without, you know, significant planning on that side, it really becomes tough. You know, I'm so fascinated by so much of this. And I'm wondering, one of the things that I've always been fascinated by you and all your team, you seem to come to the table with a lot more knowledge and observation than just the accounting and the finance piece. And I'm wondering if you as another implication of what what's going on, if you your people are being brought in and asking being asked to actually talk about these other things like HR and programming and things that are not really in the purview of the accounting and finance, because the more I speak with you and your team, it seems like they're now having to talk about things that are management and fundraising and marketing and not just the cost and the invoices and the reporting. I mean, is that fair to say? Absolutely. What I always say is accounting sees everything everything goes through accounting. All every all of the transactions financial and non financial, you're seeing when you're in the finance role where you should be because you're talking to programs on a regular basis, you're talking to executive management, you're talking to the development department and sometimes the linkage between all of these different departments as well. So indeed, there is a lot of opportunity for us to help in and recognize and I'm not going to say we're going to give advice, HR advice or you know how to do a capital campaign because that's not our area of expertise, but we could recognize different issues that people are telling us about in that in each department and then bring them up to executive management and not that they don't know that but hearing that from another outside consultant often helps facilitate the conversation in the organization for needed changes in all areas, not just the finance. Okay, so you've shared with us about what you're seeing and how you know this is bubbled up and it's going to continue on. This isn't just going to be solved in the next 60, 90, 120 days, largely because of this demographic shift. And I've got to ask you this curveball, your Sunplace Baseball, so I'm familiar with the curveballs. Yes, it's a tough one. You know, this is making me think is this a good opportunity or a time of opportunity for people who want to elevate their careers up into that C-suite or think, oh man, I want to be an ED, but that's 10 years down the road where now maybe things are like, okay, hey, you're getting tapped on the shoulder. Or do you see that? Yes, I mean, I think it is a good opportunity for so many people in so many ways to step up. And I would say even within our firm, you know, we might have been thinking and reevaluating a lot of different strategies that we might have taken like right after right before the pandemic, we were thinking about going national. And we probably would have stayed, you know, thinking and reevaluating that we're evaluating that for months and months. And then after we were able to switch all of our clients at that time, remote in just several days, we're like, hey, we can do this. And then we needed a leader of to help us in expanding throughout the nation. And we wouldn't have tapped that person necessarily to do that in normal times, or, you know, I'm sure we would have come to that conclusion, but it would have been months and months down the road. And we would have, you know, so I think it's a great, there's great similarities in other organizations that are now having to reevaluate their strategy in so many ways. And one of those strategies is succession planning to look at individuals with different backgrounds and experience to take over that executive director or in other leadership roles. Now, I would say in the CFO role, that's a little tougher because you do have to have some financial expertise to do that. And executive directors obviously also have, you know, a list of core competencies that they need to have. And people need to meet that. But there's, I think, so much opportunity for individuals to step up and be part of it. Because as you mentioned, the demographics are really, it's not in our favor right now. It's pushing it. So we've been talking about that aspect with our C suite and our nonprofits. Now, if you can jump over into the accounting and finance labor market, because we all need this work, whether we're outsourcing or we have somebody in the cubicle next to us. This is a key part. So what does it look like for our sector in getting this brain trust? Yeah, just in general, the accounting profession is struggling to get people. I just did a presentation for the Pennsylvania Institute of CPAs, their Women's Leadership Conference, and just did a whole presentation on the accounting profession and the struggles that we might be having, but also the real benefits of being an accountant. And I think it's awesome. And my whole presentation was like accounting is awesome. But but we're not we're seeing a tough trend right now. The graduates of accounting with accounting degrees and master degrees, bachelor's and master's degrees are really coming down. It's an 8.6 percent decline since 2016. Also really trending down is CPA, you know, certified public accountant candidates. Those taking the test is really coming down as well. So part of it is just demographics. There's less people in college right now. It's just that younger set that there's less people, but there's also just, you know, accounting gets a bad rap sometimes in finance. And I would like to change that around. And also, I think some of the reasons it gets a bad rap is the overworked, you know, the number of hours some public accounting firms have people working and some of the culture in some organizations is not as strong. And I think that's why we're your part of the controller, you know, able to attract and retain a lot of accountants and specifically to work in the nonprofit industry. So that's it's a problem for nonprofits trying to find finance staff because of this trend in the in just the sector, the accounting sector overall. And then you think about the amount of money that a nonprofit might be able to offer a finance professional, then it's it makes it even tougher. So that's, you know, there's a lot of things going against the nonprofit sector in the finance world, finding full time staff for their accounting departments. But there's a solution. You know, I love that you said that because now I'm thinking, this has got to bleed over into our board service and committee service, robust audit or finance audit committees. Yeah, not just who's doing, you know, the actual reconciliation of the accounts. Yeah. I mean, it's the brain trust. It's people understanding how to do finance for your nonprofit. Yeah, it's always been a struggle for organizations that I've seen. This is just, you know, what I've seen organizations we work with and words I've sat on, finding that the appropriate financial advisors for your board. So this is probably going to sadly be a tougher situation for nonprofits going forward. But I was going to say on the outsourced side, you know, even though it's a struggle, I think, well, I think it's going to be continued struggle for nonprofits to find full time accounting finance staff. I mean, outsourcing is really a great option. I know I am biased, but but it really is. I mean, you're getting the expert you expert expertise, easy for me to say, that you need when you need it, better financial reporting, better analysis and recommendations, because you're going to you have a firm standing behind the individual that's working for you at the organization, and you don't have to worry about supervision. You're not supervising that person, you have a firm that's supporting them, but you have a person that has, like we mentioned before, all of these other great recommendations for the whole organization and often has the ear of the executive director, some sometimes more than a nonprofit finance person might because of the fact that it's an outside party. And real biggie, the real biggie on this is that turnover is one thing that nonprofit executive directors don't have to worry about in the finance department when they outsource because the firm handles that. OK, so then let's get you to talk a little bit about that because now I'm going to get you to get out that crystal ball, shine it up for us. But when you talk about this, I mean, outsourcing across the way from legal to HR to, I mean, many things. This is kind of like a new way for us to think. What are you seeing as part of these these inputs for the great reevaluation? Well, I think outsourcing general your non core competencies is a great way to go to solve any staffing issue, whether it's in HR, finance, legal, even executives in the short term, interim executive solutions. It is you can outsource your non core competencies. You're not great at HR. There's firms out there that can help you do that, where you don't have the staff that you can attract and retain in that department. Those that's a great solution for you. But I also think, you know, in general for attracting and retaining staff at a nonprofit across the board, outsourcing is one thing to consider. But I really think you have to reevaluate this has come to the reevaluation of your your organization. What about your culture? Yeah, this place somewhere that a person really wants to work and stay. I think nonprofits are at a great advantage to attract and retain staff because of the fact that they work in a mission based life. They're helping people directly every single day. So that is a great sale, great sell, if you will, if in of its own. But there has to be more for people because they're burnout, as we mentioned before. So you have to be reevaluating your value proposition. What are you offering your staff? What is your value proposition to your staff besides helping the world become a better place, which is a great reason why to go to our nonprofit organization. But nonprofits have to think about salary, benefits, time off, flexibility. Those are the biggies that I think about when we talk about the value proposition of any organization when I think about your part time controller. But I was reading again on the it was at the give better site was stop worrying about the overhead myth, invest in your people and the overhead myth meaning you, you have to only spend money on programs and focus on your programs. Absolutely. But if you don't think about investing in your people right now, you're going to have this potential risk of turnover and not being able to retain, attract and retain the staff that you want to have. Well, it was chilling and we started off this conversation and you bandied about like 125 percent of the annual cost of an employee. Yeah. Oh, my god. That's like real money. Yeah. Yeah. And that's just what we can see. That's just what we can see. That's not right. And there are intangibles. All the other intangibles about hurting, you know, the struggle to your mission, the struggle to morale of the rest of your staff, all of that. And, you know, preventing burnout, I think, is another thing nonprofits can do right away. We're thinking about that and addressing it with their staff, which is balance everyone's workload, look, evaluate what everyone's doing currently and seeing where you can balance out. Can you outsource some of the activities? Can you make some of your processes more streamlined so people aren't doing mundane work? And that's really, you know, when we talk about the accounting profession, that's really where we're going to. It has to happen. Right. And it is happening. It is happening. And it's, you know, with bill pay processes, etc., all of that good stuff. You got to focus on employee well-being as well. That's a huge focus. Are our employees, how are they? Give them also paths to success, training and development. Perhaps there is somebody on your staff that is has a lot of leadership potential, but needs to be skilled up and and take this opportunity now to look at that and reevaluate where you are as an organization. You know, I always love your wisdom. I, you know, I have seen you in times of national and civil crisis, my friend, you have come through and and in on top of all this, you work in a sector that deals with crisis. Yeah, the description of the nonprofit sector. Yeah. So I have witnessed you and your team be thoughtful and strategic. And your hair's never gotten on fire. You still have your hair. That's even more hair, Julia. And yes, it's, but it was, it was a crisis during the pandemic for all of us. And we're still, you know, I think it's nonprofit sector still fighting the way out. And this is the next crisis is this staffing problem for nonprofits. And I think nonprofits can do a lot now to plan for and address the situation. Yeah, well, it is always a lovely thing to spend time with you. You're incredibly busy, Jennifer, Aliva, CPA, the managing partner of your part-time controller. So to get you on the nonprofit show is really powerful because you have a lot of things going on. And so I truly appreciate that you spend this time with us. Check out YPTC.com. They have a really robust part of their website where they have additional resources. You don't have to be one of their clients. They have web. Yeah, it's just amazing the different things. Again, I'm Julia Patrick. You'll be joined back with Jared Ransom tomorrow as we explore another Friday Ask and Answer episode of the nonprofit show. We want to make sure that we thank all of our partnering sponsors, Blumerang, American Nonprofit Academy, your part-time controller, nonprofit nerd, Fundraising Academy, Staffing Boutique, and nonprofit thought leader. Okay, Jennifer, you know what? You helped me come up with this sign off and I'm still doing it nearly 600 episodes. Stay well. So you can do well. We'll see you back here tomorrow.