Globe Trotter: Amy Jones

Amy Jones is the founder and managing director of South Street Partners LLC in Elmherst, Illinois. She started her own company in order to share her passion for finance with other start ups. Prior to that, Amy spent fourteen years with the McDonalds corporation's Global Finance team with a three year assignment to Singapore. Amy is a 1996 Harbert Graduate with a BSBA in Accounting.

Transcript

Narrator:
Welcome to the Harbert College of Business podcast with your hosts, Sarah Gascon and Currie Dyess
Today's guest is Amy Jones. Jones is the founder and managing director of South Street Partners, LLC, in Elmhurst, Illinois. She started her own company in order to share her passion for finance with other startups. Prior to that, Amy spent 14 years with the McDonald's Corporation's Global Finance Team with a three-year assignment to Singapore. Amy is a 1996 Harbert graduate in accounting

Currie Dyess:
Amy Jones, War Eagle, and welcome to the show. We are so excited to hang out with you today.

Amy Jones:
War Eagle, thank you so much for having me on the podcast. I'm very excited to be here.

Currie:
Yes, ma'am. You have had a really impressive career working with industry titans such as KPMG, Home Depot, and McDonald's. Can you share with us a few career defining moments that have allowed you to reach those levels of success within highly competitive industries and highly competitive businesses?

Amy Jones:
First, I'd like to say I visited Auburn University in 1992 before I was a student there, I didn't know much about the Auburn Creed. I was near Samford Hall, and the very first line of the Auburn Creed just struck me. I'm going to quote it too, I say it to myself quite a bit. I believe this is a practical world, and I can count only on what I earn, therefore I believe in work, hard work. That pretty much defines me very well and my trajectory and my career. I've never been afraid to put in the effort. I would always raise my hand for assignments where some of my peers might have thought the ask or the task was a little bit beneath them. I would jump in, I'd help wherever I could. I believe that it helped me work very closely with people in varying backgrounds or the different companies I've had the opportunity to work at and because of that, I'm a fast learner.

I feel I just had opportunities and doors open for myself or may not have been available if I didn't take that chance and put the work in. So I'd really say it's fundamental to who I am as a person it started at Auburn my degree in accounting, then receiving a job at KPMG in Chicago and Atlanta.

Home Depot was a great opportunity for four years within their finance and internal audit department, and the majority of my crew was spent internationally with McDonald's working in global finance

So I say take a chance, just get my name out there and raising my hand for assignments.

Sarah Gascon:
Looking back through your career, were there any early influences, mentors or decisions that helped shape your leadership style as you navigated through each one of those titans?

Amy Jones:
So I'd say that I've had the opportunity to work for some very phenomenal bosses within my career, some that the stand, I'm very close friends with. I've taken the great skills from my favorite bosses and incorporated that into my leadership style. But I've also taken some of the not so great traits or some of my more challenging bosses that I've worked for, just because I know how it feels to be on the other end of that and that everyone has a contribution of some type, big or small a team.
And so I would say that learning from my great bosses and taking the lessons learned from my more challenging ones is a big piece of my style. Also, I think it's very important within your companies or your networks to have what I call SAMs. And I've spoken about this several times at the College of Business, Women's Leadership Functions I've been at. And the SAMs are your sponsors, your advisors, and your mentors. So I'm first going to start with your mentors because your mentors are, you have many of them, but these are the people that you share everything with.

You share the good, the bad, the ugly, they help guide you, you balance ideas off them, you ask questions that you might think are ridiculous to anybody else and you use them really as a sounding board. And so I still to this day, my very close mentor friends are people that I started with in 1996 at KPMG in Chicago. We will call each other randomly and be like, I've got this crazy question, how would you handle it such a very close group of people. Your advisors typically are more say, middle to upper management. They can know a little bit of the ugly you really want to make sure that they're seeing the good foot forward, that you're more using them to help navigate decisions that you might need. You can be very, you can't be as honest with your advisors and your sponsors as you can with your mentor, in my opinion. I like to say the sponsors and the advisors are really the ones that you always put your best foot forward, best first attempt, you come prepared to meetings, you're asking very purposeful and directed questions. And again, your sponsors are really, I'm calling your higher end executives, the people that will take you under their wing and help you navigate your path through a large organization, even a midsize organization that helps as well.

But you're going to find these different groups of people along your way and you've got to make sure you know the role that each one of them plays. I think that's really critical. And it could be male or female. So as much as I sit and I, of course, am a very big proponent and supporter of female leadership within the business community, some of my key sponsors this day are males.
And that's great, which just works for us. It's a great relationship that we have

Currie:
Amy, you mentioned a minute ago that you got to lead an international team or you got to work on an international level when you were at McDonald's. What has traveling for work taught you both professionally and personally?

Amy Jones:
So when I tell my kids I have been to 61 countries in the world, they think I'm not telling the truth.
I'm like, there is no way that's possible. So I pull out my three of my old passports that I've had over the years. Because at some point if you run out of pages, even before it expires, our US Department of State says, please, time for a new passport. So it is really fun actually to go back and look at all those stamps and all those trips that I've made over the year. So international business is a gift.

It was a wonderful large portion of my professional career and also my personal life. I would say the biggest advice I could give anybody interested in international business or taking those trips overseas as an American into a new environment is there's a book called Kiss, Bow, or Shake. And it's by Terry Morrison and Wayne Conway. And it came out, I want to say, early 2000s. And that was the first book that McDonald's HR told me to pick up before I made my very first trip to London. And they said, oh, you should read this book in just each country, the few pages on it to give you to acquaint you on business practices and anywhere from what to wear the office, how to greet dinner, etiquette, who pays, do you go out for drinks afterwards?
Just all of this experience that we as Americans take for granted because we know how things are done in our country and we assume they're done similarly around the world, but they're not. And so being prepared as a guest in a host country was a very big part of my life where I wanted to come and make sure I knew as much as I could about the country before I was visiting.

Sarah:
How do international business practices vary in the accounting world and how did you adapt your approach while working abroad?

Amy Jones:
So from an accounting perspective, I wouldn't say that they were drastically different.  I would, inside the four walls of the McDonald's office, the regional or corporate office or headquartered office that we would visit, that was somewhat, you know, Americanized. Obviously, to an extent, obviously you would have local talent working from that office, but I would always say would feel different. It was a little bit of a bubble. A story I want to share is an interesting one that my one and only time I went to Saudi Arabia was preparing with my Kiss, bow, shake and the very first comment read basically that in public settings will be separated by gender. And I didn't really understood what that meant. And so I thought, well, this is interesting. And I know that a very male dominated dominated country. I know females don't have the same rights as males. I know they're working on that and women are fighting for their rights in Saudi Arabia. But in mid 2000s, I didn't understand that comment.

Well, what it meant was we went to a McDonald's restaurant and there was a curtain drawn halfway dividing the restaurant and single men. So even if you were a married man and you had a family and a ring on your finger, but if your wife or children were not present with you at the restaurant, you had to sit on the other side of the curtain. And the women and their children had to sit on the other side of the curtain. So even when we went in as a team of male and female as McDonald's employees greeting restaurant staff, having a meal, talking with the crew, when we sat to have our meal, we had to separate. So we couldn't we couldn't even sit together. And so I was like, okay, but you can't fight culture of course said no problem. We're sitting over here. We ate quickly and then you know got back together. But to me, as an American, I was had to try to keep my poker face on because I was just kind of shocked. I didn't I didn't know how to react when I saw the divider between two genders in the restaurant.

So yeah, that was probably one of my more interesting international stories. But like I said, had I not read the four pages on Saudi Arabia out of this book, I wouldn't have prepared myself. And so I in the back of my head, I was remembering that saying, what do you mean that in public settings, segregated by gender? And now I mean, I saw it everywhere I went

Currie:
So Amy, other than that experience in the Middle East, we would find that shocking, like you just said, are there any business practices that you found were maybe like counter to what we would consider productive or you felt like it was an impediment?

Amy Jones:
So I would say that American led business meetings are very to the point. We come with an agenda where I know that there's this whole trying to keep an hours on your calendar. You try to end the meeting at 45 minutes to give people an extra 15 minutes to debrief and, you know, go on to their next meeting for the day. I would say internationally with the exception of Australia, Germany, a little bit in the UK. You'll have an agenda.

This definitely does happen over in Asia a lot. You'll have an agenda and the meeting will start with the boss. And for example, if the boss is a Chinese boss, they will start first with a lot of small talk, getting to know you. None of this will be on script. So if you're setting the agenda for one of these meetings, you have to bake in some of this extra time that you are going to have to sit and talk through things that you weren't expecting and then you get to the meeting. And so if you're kind of a the agenda, get your points done and on time, you're going to be a little bit of flexible with that because there's a lot of,

I would say some hierarchical things that happen in a lot of countries outside of the US makes sense.

Currie:
We are curious though, whenever those folks come here, if you're leading the meeting, do you adapt to their culture as if you were on their home turf or do they have to adapt ours?

Amy Jones:
Great question. Just with one of my clients I'm working with we just had a team from China come in a couple months ago, and I had to coach the American team to say they are going to want to get to know you guys a little bit. Even though we had done intros over zoom calls. But now we're face-to-face and they wanted to exchange gifts that they had brought to us. And I had a feeling they were gonna bring gifts and I said so we you're gonna have to leave a 20 minute buffer at the beginning of this agenda because there's gonna be a lot of nicities and the boss is gonna want to say things and they're gonna want to present gifts and this and that. And the CEO I'm working with here. We say oh, that's no that they don't have to do that It's you know, they're not it's not necessary. I'm like you understand They're going to do it we have to be prepared for it. And so thank goodness I give them all the heads up because it happened exactly like I said it would. So and they did bring these sweet little gifts over ever, you know, there's something called a chop, which is your signature. Over in China specifically where it's like an official stamp You need legal documents and so it have your merit. You had your English name and then your Chinese name underneath it. And so they want had these really nice chop made chops made for everybody. Which they thought were really very kind. But I feel just to be polite you have to bow I prefer to balance both cultures in a meeting regardless of location.

Sarah:

So kiss, bow, or shake is I mean, it's a powerful tool even if you're not the one getting on the plane.

Amy Jones:

Oh absolutely. I mean it sounds kind of nerdy, but I will sometimes just pick the book up and I went to Scotland a couple months ago. One of my best friends and I have family from Scotland and I know a lot about Scotland. But I picked up the book just to look at it to see what it would say about Scotland. And there were a few things in there that I had completely forgotten about. Oh, yes, I forgot about this. Oh and this word does mean that right? So even if you're just traveling for fun, I just think it's a really fun book. And who knows maybe Terry Morrison and Wayne Conaway will hear this podcast and be like, oh, we love her. Can we get her to come on a tour with us? Because I do really think that they've done an outstanding job with this book.

Currie:
Yeah, we'll see in the DMs and Thank you.

Amy Jones:
Thank you. So hey listen to this. I'm giving you a plug.

Currie:

Out of curiosity, if you were to have somebody come over and you're leading the meeting and you're adapting to their culture integrating it into your meeting style if they like the Chinese if they did not bring you a gift. Would you think this is not off to a good start? Maybe this relationship isn't as good as I thought.

Amy Jones:
Ooh, it would be unusual. Definitely would have some questions in that meeting, after that meeting thinking what happened there. And for example, we had a translator in the meeting again, their English was very basic. And so a friend of mine I worked with at McDonald's came over to be our translator for two days for those meetings. So if that had happened and my friend is very, you know, she's Taiwanese, but she knows she does a lot of business in China. I would have asked her point blank, what happened here? Why do you think they didn't bring gifts? Because that would have been unusual. So I wouldn't have said anything in the meeting, but I definitely would have thought, okay, what's going on here?

Currie:
Where's my gifts?

Amy Jones:
Well, no, but just knowing that they do love to share a piece of their culture and this and that. So we did, so funny, quick story. So when I told the company here that they were going to be bringing gifts, the CEO said, okay, what, I'm gonna run and get something, something Chicago. And so obviously they had gear with the company's name on it because now they are the lead franchisor in China for their brand. It was really an exciting opportunity. So we got branded image, apparel, all this and that. So the CEO was like, I'm gonna grab something Chicago for them, which I thought that's a great idea. So he goes and spends all this money on a Bear's jersey. Well, I wish I would have told him before he did that that American football is not very big over in Asia. It's all about basketball and baseball. So he holds his shirt up and like he's so proud of himself that he got this Bear's jersey and his Chinese counterpart was looking at him like, I don't know what that is. And I was like, oh my, and he's like, oh, we only know basketball. So we went and exchanged it quickly, got a Michael Jordan jersey, it was all great. But I thought, had I known you were gonna do Bears, I would be like, oh, do basketball. So like little things like that, right? Still a great meeting. It was a couple of months ago and it made me realize how much I do miss the international piece of my former life. It was a great time.

Currie:
Was it an adjustment coming back from Singapore?

Amy Jones:
It was more of an adjustment than I thought. Yeah, so we were excited to come back home because there being 9,000 miles away with young children, their grandparents wanted to get their hands all over them. But we had to remind ourselves how to drive on the right side of the road again, right?

So former British colony, everything's on the other side. There's more space here. Singapore is a very small, tiny island and you can get from one end to the other in 30 minutes. So it was, you just got to know everything and get around real quickly. And so then coming back to the US, you realize, oh my goodness, we live in such a large country.

Sarah:
So someone with deep experience in audit, can you help our listeners understand why audits are such a critical part of financial integrity?

Amy Jones:
Absolutely so obviously for any public company. You are required to have audit of financial statements as part of your quarterly an annual 8k 10k all of your submissions through through the SEC as a registered public company trading. On either Dow Jones or the Nasdaq I would say there's majority of private companies as well are doing audits just it's good financial hygiene is what I like to say gives the the board of directors and management a great snapshot of. The financial reporting processes the internal controls in place and really the integrity of their company's financial statements. So I do like to just use the phrase good financial hygiene audits. Those audits are really critical and we have you know all of this AI coming out it's it is everywhere and it is the landscape the future looks kind of scary in some regards.

Currie:
Can you talk to us a little bit about AI in the auditing field?

Amy Jones:
Absolutely yeah definitely this has been evolving over the last few years so. I think I believe that audit has been on and when I say audit it could be their internal external audit I'm going to use it kind of.

Generically but I think I feel that they've been on this journey for a little bit of time now. It started with analytics and went to automation of certain controls like paying bills receiving cash. And now AI is actually has been developed and built in some of in their large big four firms to perform audit testing procedures. So what's needed in the future from an audit perspective or CPA perspective is they're going to need skills to root cause analysis what caused a problem if they find a deficiency within an internal control figure out how did that happen. Make process improvement changes they have to be able to do full risk assessments on companies you can have AI start with a risk assessment but you need. In my opinion human intervention to go in and look at those results and tailor it to be company specific. There was an article that I saw the other day that they're considering. I don't know it might be the ACPA brought this up which is the Institute of certified public accountants. That they're thinking in the future that big four firms will be providing assurance services which is basically an audit opinion on AI technologies within some of these companies that are relying heavily on AI. For some of their
production generation of financial statements that in the future there may be there may need to be separate assurances on the amount of AI embedded in with companies which I thought was really interesting. Because investors are always going to need some type of financial assurance on financial statements it's just how the auditors are going to provide it in the future. So it's exciting time.

It's how we're all going to work together with this.

Sarah:
Yeah, you've had a lot of different changes in your journey. You went from the corporate life to then shifting to prioritizing your family and having a little bit more balance. Can you walk us through that transition?

Amy Jones:
Absolutely. Yeah, so my husband and I were both blessed to have wonderfully successful careers. We
had our children a little later in life. And at one point when we got back from Singapore and had to hire a nanny to help us realized that priorities needed to shift a little bit where I was on one journey with my career. He was on the other but careers jockey over time. So my husband did a position with a local Singaporean company when we were based over there. So I felt it was kind of his time to take the lead on the career side. So we made the decision that I would step back from McDonald's and focus on our family. At that point our children were and 7 Yeah, 9 and 7 sorry. And just in a really critical time with school and friends. And so I decided to start my own consulting practice.

I do control my own schedule which is great. So I do a lot of work when the kids are at school and
they're home I try to really balance all the extracurricular that happens in our home after school.

So with that role, I do heavy strategic finance heavy lifting from a strategic finance perspective for small or entrepreneurial companies that for example have a bookkeeper who does quick books and is familiar on on booking and debits and credits but need come in and look at the business from a high level perspective set budgets do financial analysis look at ratios figure out where focus should be for the management team going forward. So I'm able to do that five hours a day or so when when they're at school and it's worked out beautifully for our family and the first couple the first couple months that I did step away I had a couple panic attacks like what did I do you run this path and it was something you've been working towards since were 21 years old but at the end of the day I'm gone I want I want people to remember me as being a great mom a great wife daughter sister friend.

I don't feel that they're going to remember me for being able to rock and excel spreadsheet like a pro which I can by the way. I didn't want people saying that at my funeral so I thought what's really most important to me is are these other components and so it's been it was a great pivot and I am able now to reflect on the journey I had and really I think enjoy it more and say wow I did do a lot of great things.

Currie:
For other career, especially women who are highly ambitious with their professional and their personal life, what guidance or perspective would you offer them?

Amy Jones:
This is gonna sound really simple and I was thinking through just this piece of it and I would say, you know follow your heart. Just you've got a you've got to do what's right for you. Don't let social norms or perceived social norms tell you how far you can go or how it's a balance between home and outside the home It's really what works for for you and your family And so follow your heart and I'm here to I've I've had this conversation with a few MBA students at at the College of Business and happy to share my experiences, but my experience will Experiences won't necessarily be the same as someone else's So I have to just say follow your heart You're gonna know you're gonna know the right path you're supposed to be on and again, it's gonna things may change I was on the right path for a while and then I knew I wasn't and so something had to change.

Currie:
What was it inside you that let you know like the change it is time like right now I gotta make the transition?

Amy Jones:
When I was when my kids were younger they didn't know how much I was traveling. I was gone a lot and when kids are little they don't have a frame of reference and so got to a point when it's in 2018 I was taking a trip over the Middle East and My daughter was just in tears. I was leaving and she was seven and she said why do you have to go again? Why are you leaving us again? Like she just she got to the point where she realized even though mom Would call in FaceTime and bring home gifts and this and that it just rocked her to the core and I thought why am I doing this. So it would that that on top of a few other instances. It was just more of I've had a great run I've got to give These this is my legacy here. These two people are my legacy my son and my daughter and they need my attention right now

Sarah:
That's also like really heartbreaking as a mother, right?

Amy Jones:
Oh, it was terrible. The car is like in the driveway picking me up to go to the airport my husband's like let me take her let me take her and She won't peel herself off me and I'm like, oh my goodness, you know, I'm like crying. She's grown. My goodness is terrible and it just it was one of those Moments where it happened before in the past but this point in time. It was like, okay, you've got to pay attention to this this means something here.

Sarah:
So what is next for you both personally and professionally?

Amy Jones:
So personally have a rising junior in high school and an eighth grade daughter. So I am in the throes of
things high school and middle school. Both my children are very active with sports, my husband coaches them. My parents live close by so I'd say my personal life is very active just trying to be as present and in the moment as I can with them. In the summertime, my clients know that I like to be up in Wisconsin or Lakehouse. So I'm like, if I can do stuff up there, great. If not, you're going to have to wait. So I do really try to put more boundaries in place over the summer just because the kids have more free time and we can be together as a family. So I do really try to protect that family time as much as I can in the summer.

On the professional side, I would say I am continuing with the strategic finance rule with some of my clients, but I do have my first client. And I'm going to name them because I'm so proud of them. They're called Ultimate Ninjas. They have a several gyms where they build similar courses to the show American Ninja Warrior. So we have Jesse LeBreck, which I'm sure most women know, I'm sure you've heard Sarah, she heads up neighbor, Bill Jim. She's also very pivotal with our, the franchise onboarding new franchisees within the US business. But I help, I was part of a team to help them open up or sign a master franchise agreement with a company based in China. And so they will be opening their first location sometime in October. And now that Ninja will be an Olympic sport in 2028. This has been a very interesting pivot for my client because there's a lot of interest popping up. So I, and I see you guys looking at each other not knowing that Ninja was going to be a sport in 2028. So, No, do you not know that.

Sarah:
We thought they only added like American flag football and baseball and softball again.

Currie:
I had no idea.

Amy Jones:
My understanding is it will have some component of it in 2028.

Currie:
So it's to the Olympics.

Amy Jones:
They just have a really great business model. Again, they're focused first on fitness and family fitness and then has an entertainment component to it. Obviously, if you've seen the show, everybody loves to show. And they've got this warp wall and the salmon, you know, salmon ladder and all that stuff and all their locations. But again, what I love most about their, their platform is they really are focused hers on fitness. That's great. So that's professionally where a lot of my energy is going to go right now is helping to support them.

Currie:
So interesting to me that American Ninja Warrior is based on a Japanese show the American company was the one that franchised in China.

Amy Jones:
Yeah. Yes. I know it's all full circle. We each country has their own form of Ninja Warrior. And so what we're hoping is if we continue to expand in Asia that these these franchises will come together and you're almost have kind of this experience, right? Where you could rotate locations within, within Asia and really show the power of the network for the Ninja family. It really is a family. It's really happy to be to be part of it.

Currie:
Amy, what advice would you give current students or recent grads if they're interested in pursuing the audit route?

Amy Jones:
so I would say definitely with a public accounting firm. It could be one of the big four. It could be a regional accounting firm. There are a lot of options available to them, but if they have an interest in audit, I would say either external or internal audit would take for a public accounting firm.

And one more piece of advice for students, and this isn't necessarily just for accounting students.
I mention this every single time I speak at the College of Business that it's never too early to start working on your network in college. And so there's a phrase, and I say this quite often, it's not what you know is who you know. I remember hearing this when I graduated from college and thought it was completely absurd. I'm like, My grades are so good and I've got this and that. Yeah, well, my uncle also called a partner in Chicago, a KPMG Chicago, and got me that interview. Now I had to go in myself and get the job, but a phone call was made and that's how I got the interview. That's how it's going to work.

So I tell the college students, get your LinkedIn profile up now. Please put a picture that is acceptable, not one of you in a bathing suit at the beach. We can kind of laugh about this tongue-in-cheek, but there are some pictures that probably should not be up on LinkedIn. Hit up everyone in your network, hit up your current teachers, hit up your parents, your parents' friends, all of their connections. Go and search Auburn University alumni and hit me up. I am encouraging people, students as much as possible to not wait until you graduate to have you to set up your network. You need this as early as possible

Sarah:
Yeah, without a doubt. Is LinkedIn a better option for you for listeners keeping up with your journey and networking with you?

Amy Jones:
Yes, LinkedIn is I don't post as much as I should but I definitely check it every day I've been in contact with people via the messaging function and then I'll set up calls separately with people that like to would like to speak with me So definitely LinkedIn is the best way to connect with me.

But I think another thing back to Auburn real quickly. We truly have an outstanding alumni base it goes back to The common at the beginning where we just say war eagle So if you're wearing something Auburn, and I've trained my husband who is the University of Wisconsin graduate that if he is ever wearing anything Auburn And someone says war eagle to you after 20 years. He now knows he war eagles people back, right? So It we have an amazing Base.

Sarah:

Amy any last words or final advice you'd like to give our students?

Amy Jones:
I would say just continue to be inquisitive about how the world operates. my mom likes to remind me that my favorite question of the kid was why. I would ask why to everything. I just wanted to understand how things work, why we did things certain way. I just love learning. And so I would  encourage people to continue to be students of life soak up all you can as much as possible. And how things operate work together. don't be afraid to raise your hand. Take that stretch assignments. I'll do it.
I'm ready for it. Be courageous.

Sarah:
That works in the classroom and out of the classroom.

Amy Jones:
Absolutely for sure.

Sarah:
Amy, it's been a pleasure speaking with you today. We are so grateful to you and really excited about sharing your story and your journey with our audience. War Eagle.

Amy Jones:
War Eagle. Thank you

Narrator:

Harbert. Inspiring Business.