 Hi, Jeff Rick here with the Cube. We're on the ground at the San Jose Convention Center at Intuit's QuickBooks Connect. It's their second year they've had the show. Over 5,000 people sold out. Got Jessica Alba here, Oprah's here, she's gonna come. She hasn't shown up yet, we're keeping an eye out for Oprah, but we wanted to come down and get a feel for what's going on, share them all with you. Excited, our first guest is Jim McManus, the VP of Accountant Segment at Intuit Small Business. Welcome, Jim. Hi. So accountants, I don't know that people that aren't accountants necessarily know that Intuit targets accountants as a segment. I wonder if you could add a little color to that. Absolutely, you know our mission since Scott Cook founded the company 30 years ago is to improve people's financial lives so profoundly they can't imagine going back to the old way. And the first person that small businesses and consumers turn to is their accountant to help them improve their financial lives. So we help accountants help small businesses. So what kind of size of accountants are typically using QuickBooks? What kind of your segmentation? Yeah, it's a great question. You know all sizes of accountants. We have people who are just starting out who are almost, we call it kitchen table pros. We're helping friends and families all the way up to the big four use QuickBooks to help their small businesses thrive. All right, terrific. So you gave a keynote yesterday for the folks that didn't make the keynote because it is sold out. Give us a little flavor of what the keynote is all about. Absolutely, you know, we're helping small businesses and accountants transition to the cloud. There are some major things happening out there like data, like mobile, like cloud computing that are causing people to shift from the old desktop way to the cloud way. And this isn't easy. So we're helping accountants learn about becoming a firm of the future. And what a firm of the future is it's about getting on the cloud. It's about becoming a trusted advisor instead of billing hourly, actually getting paid for the advice that you give small businesses. And finally, using things like LinkedIn and Facebook to get connected and build your message. Used to be you built your businesses and accountant at the local Kiwanis club or something like that. Today you can build your business worldwide by getting on the cloud and getting connected. Now what's the biggest kind of inhibitors to adopting on the cloud? Is it trust factor? Is it newness or is there really not much of a gain? You know, it's newness, it's change. QuickBooks has been out there for over 30 years and it is a fantastic program. It's helped them. They're used to it. The most important thing to account is saving time and being productive. Learning new stuff works as far as that. Right. And then of course with the cloud, you get this whole new thing called you don't have to wait for the every year upgrade, right? You guys can constantly update the software, roll out and release this new feature. So that's probably a little bit of an adjustment as well. Absolutely, you're right on top of it. We have some accountants who run nine different old versions of QuickBooks because they have to run the version that their small business runs. On QuickBooks online, everybody's on the same software and when we add a new feature, everybody gets it at once and it works with all the modern browsers. There are instances where there's QuickBooks that doesn't work with the most recent edition of Windows. That's over when you're on the cloud. Yeah, that's tough. So let's shift gears a little bit. Look at your background. You've got a great background. You've worked in China. You've worked in Argentina. But most importantly, you're talking offline. You worked at P&G. And I think a lot of people in the Valley don't necessarily appreciate the sophistication and the rigor of the old P&G program to really learn marketing. What if you could reflect back about some of the things you learned at P&G that you can apply here in the modern software cloud world? Absolutely. Some of the best advice I ever got was pick a function that you're interested in. Find a company that's good at that function and learn it there. It's almost like going to an academy. That was what I did so many years ago at P&G. They really taught me marketing. They taught me how to dramatize the benefit and how to communicate, pick your target. All those things have served me well as my career has moved from selling soap to selling potato chips, orange juice, video games, and now, software to account. Yeah, clearly a risk taker. So, you know, a lot of people talk about mentorship and sponsorship and a lot of stuff of limited tech. And one of the things that we are over and over is be ready to get out of your comfort zone. I would imagine with your international experience you obviously took a chance to probably kind of got out of your comfort zone to go to China, to go to Argentina, to take new challenges. What's the benefit of doing that and how do you really take dividends for your career? That's a great question as well, Jeff. You know, I feel like it helps you grow. I remember landing in China and not knowing a soul on the continent. I spent three and a half years there. I built a network. I learned a little bit of Chinese. I made some great friends who are still friends with me today, picked up and did the same thing, moving to Argentina. Again, not knowing anybody in the country. It caused you to really think hard about who you are, what's important to you, and be the person you are regardless of the environment, not just be defined by the people who are around you. It's pretty cool. That's great. That's terrific advice. And again, we hear it over and over again. Don't be afraid to get out of your comfort zone. Take a risk. You might just like it and you certainly grow. So I'll give you the last one before we cut away. What are we going to see if we come back here in 2016? What are some of the things you're working on? What's the trajectory look like for QuickBooks? That's a great question. We are really excited about building out the ecosystem. QuickBooks used to be just a desktop, money in, money out, financial management, software application. Quite narrow in scope. Everybody used it, but it only did one thing. With QuickBooks online, we're building on an entire ecosystem. We have over 1,400 applications that work with QuickBooks online so we can meet the needs of every small business no matter how small the niche. What you'll see next year is you'll see even more of that, even more applications, an even bigger ecosystem to help those small businesses thrive. That's what we're all about. I don't know if a lot of people know that it's got kind of a developer ecosystem, an application ecosystem. Is that relatively new? Or is it just getting traction or getting more focused or you might just not kind of in the know? You know, it's all those things. This is what the online atmosphere, online capabilities unlock. And we really got on it hard about three years ago. And events like QuickBooks Connect last year and this year and like you say next year are about getting that word out. And people like Oprah bring a lot of attention to us and ultimately we're able to tell a story to the small businesses, to the developers and to the accountants. I should tell you why we name it QuickBooks Connect. It's all about connecting all three of those so they may thrive. Awesome, well Jim, thanks for taking a few minutes out of your day stop by. Very good, thanks Jeff. All right, with Jim McGinnis, I'm Jeff Frick. You're watching theCUBE. Thanks for watching.