Most of the advice and knowledge people present about #internalaudit is very theoretical. If you are like most auditors you are still asking “But how do I implement at my organization.”

In this #jammingwithjason #internalaudit podcast I talk with Toby DeRoch of InsightCPE on how we can become much more practical and just do things instead of talking about it. Two areas we dig into deeper are how to practically apply an Agile Auditing approach, and how to deal with a virtual audit environment, including how to develop relationships remotely.

Join Toby and Jason for the next cRisk Academy webinar “Why Do Auditors Ignore Fraud?” on Tuesday, October 20, 2020 ยท 9:00 AM PDT. Register at: https://www.bigmarker.com/crisk-academy/Why-Do-Auditors-Ignore-Fraud

Check out Toby’s list of upcoming webinars at: https://www.insightcpe.com/webinars
and his full list of courses available through the cRisk Academy on-demand learning platform at: https://www.insightcpe.com/on-demand

Transcript

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Jason Mefford: Hey everybody, I have a special, special, special, special treat today and I had to throw in for

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Jason Mefford: But I have my friend Toby de Roche with me and Toby heads up inside CP. And we’re just going to get in and start talking about some stuff that I know a lot of you.

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Jason Mefford: As we were talking beforehand, Toby and I get asked a lot of the same questions. So we’re going to try to answer some of those so Toby. Welcome, welcome aboard.

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Jason Mefford: You know, maybe, maybe spend just a minute or so and give a little background on yourself so people get to know you a little bit better, too.

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Toby DeRoche: Sure, yeah. So my background is all internal audit. I was an internal audit with Macy’s, that the corporate headquarters

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Toby DeRoche: As an audit manager for about four or five years before I went into consulting and I went into consulting with teammate through Wolters Kluwer

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Toby DeRoche: And was there for just over 10 years and recently went off on my own, so that way I can do things that are more applicable just to the industry in general, really wanted to focus on education.

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Toby DeRoche: And, you know, working with the entire audit profession, not just with people who are looking at software.

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Toby DeRoche: Because that’s kind of a nice piece of it, the whole thing, but I really wanted to be able to influence where all of my peers are going

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Toby DeRoche: Mostly because I keep hearing a lot of this, like you said, the same questions over and over again. And really just want to help them address all those same questions.

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Jason Mefford: Yeah, well. And so again, you know, what are some of the questions you’re hearing and then let’s just kind of dive in and actually give people some practical things that they can take away

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Toby DeRoche: Yeah, that’s really it. The questions that I’m hearing, no matter what the topic is is that’s great, but how do I do it.

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Toby DeRoche: You know, we talked about

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Toby DeRoche: How we need to make a transition to being an agile, a lot of department, how we need to start working with other lines of defense how we’re going to

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Toby DeRoche: You know, work within this new reality of. Not everybody can go in the office. I can’t travel. What am I going to do, how am I going to account inventory. If I can’t travel. We keep hearing the same questions over and over again and

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Toby DeRoche: When you look for guidance you usually get something very theoretical

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Toby DeRoche: If you pick up a book on agile auditing, it’s going to give you the history of agile processes.

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Toby DeRoche: Taking the software.

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Toby DeRoche: And it just shows a bunch of stuff on you that you’re not going to use and we need to be a lot more practical about the

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Toby DeRoche: Way that we’re going to use these things, you know, like for something like agile, we can follow a great method that’s going to get you there without having to take all these crazy paths down reporting, you’re probably not going to use

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Jason Mefford: Well, and I think that’s, that’s an important thing. I mean, I’ve talked a lot about kind of the whole learning process.

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Jason Mefford: And I think this is where because you and I are on the same page exactly on this of trying to help people.

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Jason Mefford: Get something that’s much more practical. Right. But we’ve been trained in training that we we acquire knowledge and skills. Yep, we do and we get that through training.

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Jason Mefford: But that’s just the first two of the four steps in the learning process. You have to figure out how to apply those knowledge and skills and then actually experience it for you to really learn it.

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Jason Mefford: And like you said, I think that’s where you know most people help provide knowledge, like you said, they’ll give you the theoretical knowledge, they’ll explain the history of agile.

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Jason Mefford: Big Whoop dee doo shit. Right. I mean, at the end of the day, you’re like, but how do I apply it to me. And there’s not really very many people

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Jason Mefford: That are actually helping people learn how to apply it right into what they’re doing.

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Jason Mefford: Right, because again it’s like you learn about agile. Okay, great. Well, what does that mean, well, I’m probably going to do things a little bit faster, right, always. I always hear people say that, well, I gotta do things faster, right. No, that’s not what I

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Jason Mefford: Mean

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Jason Mefford: No.

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Jason Mefford: No, that’s not what it is.

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Jason Mefford: So, so how do we how do we, I mean I you know I know you kind of left and started on your own to try to help people with that, how

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Jason Mefford: You know, maybe let’s let’s let’s talk about a couple of these things that people are are struggling with and come up with some practical solutions that people can walk away with

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Yeah.

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Toby DeRoche: The agile conversation is probably one of the ones that’s top of mind for most people.

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Toby DeRoche: You know, because

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Toby DeRoche: For every single person out there when we got to January through the audit plan away.

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Jason Mefford: And tried to figure out where to go. Yeah.

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Jason Mefford: So if it wasn’t January, at least by March you three was partially you did. Right.

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Toby DeRoche: Yeah, it was. And if you haven’t, please do it now.

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Jason Mefford: You know,

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Toby DeRoche: So it’s, um, it’s something that a lot of people were thinking about if I have to figure out how I can

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Toby DeRoche: Adjust my audit plan really quickly and focus on something that I had no idea what’s coming. Suddenly, I have to shift around and start thinking about logistics.

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Toby DeRoche: And I have to start thinking about just my business continuity plan include work from home. And then how do I come back. How do I get people back into the office. Do I get people back into the office.

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Toby DeRoche: Do we scrap everything and just go completely remote all the time and and audit has a conversation here like we’re part of this. We’re not just one of the, you know, corporate victims of whatever’s going to happen.

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Toby DeRoche: So we have to have a say in everything. And that’s going to get reflected in our audit plan.

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Toby DeRoche: So if we’re doing something like an agile plan. The whole idea would be, I’m only looking at the risks that are relevant. Right now, the ones that are the biggest, most important to leadership in the organization.

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Toby DeRoche: And all the stakeholders and so if I’m taking an actual strategic risk based approach.

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Toby DeRoche: I’m not looking at every single process in the entire organization.

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Toby DeRoche: I’m looking at the strategic risks and working my way down and then I’m going to carve out. Here’s what I actually can get done in the next three months.

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Toby DeRoche: And if I’m looking past three or six months. I’m looking too far because we just proved that within two or three months, the world can change.

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Toby DeRoche: So there’s really no point in going any further than that.

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Toby DeRoche: And then one of the things that I think is a really practical.

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Toby DeRoche: Approach to all of this is

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Toby DeRoche: You don’t start thinking about just, okay, how do I get stuff done faster. It’s how do I break it down into its component pieces.

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Toby DeRoche: And then make sure that each of those pieces are happening in a very timely fashion like within whatever parameters, I have to work with. Right. So if I’ve got six weeks to get an audit done

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Toby DeRoche: I can’t afford scope creep anymore. I can’t afford to these things to drag on forever. And I can’t wait until the very end to start reviewing and then take it right back to the beginning to deal with the issue. I found at the beginning of the audit, so we’re

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Toby DeRoche: Breaking the audit down to pieces.

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Toby DeRoche: And then getting through each of those pieces as a team.

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Toby DeRoche: And it’s a shift in the way that we typically think about how we would assign workout, right, because

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Toby DeRoche: Now it’s, I’m going to go look at

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Toby DeRoche: Xyz process break that down into a couple of sub

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Toby DeRoche: Processes and, you know,

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Toby DeRoche: You go take one I’m going to send somebody else on the next and then

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Toby DeRoche: I talked to you in two months, you know,

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Jason Mefford: That that’s not an agile approach.

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Toby DeRoche: Know,

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Toby DeRoche: And so now what we do is we say, so I’m breaking it down by risks. Now there’s three of us on this team, we’re all going to jump on risk number one.

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Toby DeRoche: And we’re gonna knock it out when that one’s done, remove the risk to we knock it out.

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Toby DeRoche: And we keep ourselves accountable that way because you might be doing the work. I might be helping you with some of the different procedures and testing things and then someone else is coming behind and doing the review right right on our heels.

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Toby DeRoche: To make sure everything is good.

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Toby DeRoche: Because let’s say I’ve got six

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Toby DeRoche: Weeks. By the end of week one or two I need to report out the door.

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Toby DeRoche: And the point of agile was supposed to be, you know, we go back to the history of agile.

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Toby DeRoche: It was supposed to be that you had to deliverable software at the end of a cycle.

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Toby DeRoche: And so now we’re

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Toby DeRoche: Basically saying my deliverable product is report.

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Toby DeRoche: And that report is done at the end of each cycle. So at the end of each week, I need to have a report out the door when I get done with that audit.

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Toby DeRoche: I’m done.

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Toby DeRoche: Because management seen the report since day one.

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Toby DeRoche: You know, I have nothing.

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Toby DeRoche: There’s nothing left for people to review. There’s nothing left for us to deal with.

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Toby DeRoche: And then that rolls up because that was the audit and then that rolls up to the quarter which rolls up to the plan.

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Toby DeRoche: And it’s keeping everything moving in this way where I’m looking at things on a three month horizon and I’m turning out work in a way that I know it staying on track and I’ve got my deliverable of the report coming out at the end of every week.

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Jason Mefford: Excuse me. Well, and I think that’s

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Jason Mefford: To me that’s what he here’s a, here’s a practical thing for you folks right is that

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Jason Mefford: But, but it’s seismic in in shift in our thinking because historically, you know, we go out, we work 2346 weeks on an audit we spend two weeks, preparing an audit report, boom, at the end of that time we issue our final report.

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Jason Mefford: And instead, you know, using an agile approach. You’re effectively writing your report or mini reports all along the way.

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Jason Mefford: Right now, that’s a big difference for a lot of people. Right. Which means, again, that goes back to how we’re scheduling people, it’s, it’s, it’s, you know, the, the whole other idea of

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Jason Mefford: Focusing on the biggest thing first.

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Jason Mefford: We don’t get distracted. We are. We’re focused on one key objective in each one of these Sprint’s

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Jason Mefford: And when we get that done, we move on to the next thing.

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Jason Mefford: And that actually because it you know reminds me of some different stories and other stuff around project management that you know really one of the reasons why we’re so inefficient is we usually have too many things on our list to do. Yeah.

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Jason Mefford: And we get scattered, we end up working a little bit on this thing. Then we switch gears, we move over to something else.

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Jason Mefford: And you’re much more effective and efficient when you just knock out that one thing right you knock it out. Then you move on to the next thing.

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Jason Mefford: And and at the, at the end of the day, that’s more like the true risk based approach. I’ve started trying to use that term.

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Jason Mefford: I don’t know if it’s going to catch on or not. But there’s a lot of people that are like oh yeah I’m doing risk based auditing until you ask them a couple of questions and then it’s like, oh, maybe I’m not

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Toby DeRoche: Right, you’re doing enemy base audit.

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Jason Mefford: You’re doing entity or process based out of the you’re not doing risk based on the right.

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Toby DeRoche: And so one of the things that

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Toby DeRoche: I think is another big shift in this whole thinking process, especially around Agile is

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Toby DeRoche: Standard never actually said you had to write a report.

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Jason Mefford: This is you have to communicate.

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Toby DeRoche: Is we have to communicate results. That’s it.

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Toby DeRoche: And so whenever you started

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Toby DeRoche: Looking at it as Leslie, let’s use the standards for what they say.

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Toby DeRoche: Let’s not add anything to it because we’re adding work to ourselves that was never there.

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Jason Mefford: We have a couple of examples.

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Jason Mefford: Yeah.

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Toby DeRoche: What we can actually take from an

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Toby DeRoche: agile process is this concept of a

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Retrospective

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Toby DeRoche: So,

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Toby DeRoche: The retrospective is what you’re doing. It’s supposed to be like an internal thing.

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Toby DeRoche: At the end of every one of these sprints where you basically say what worked and what didn’t.

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Toby DeRoche: What I’m really suggesting with this whole agile thing is we take that retrospective and we flip it and use it in place of a report.

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Toby DeRoche: And so what we can do is, you’re they’re very, very standardized processes where you’ve got four steps and you’re laying out here’s what we did.

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Toby DeRoche: Last week,

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Toby DeRoche: Here’s what we did this week. Here’s what went well. Here’s what didn’t you here’s what didn’t go well that’s the issue about

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Toby DeRoche: The point of the retrospective as you’re doing this with management. So you’ve got them in the room with you. This is you presenting to them at the end of the week. Forget the idea of having a written report, you don’t need it. You just communicated your results.

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Toby DeRoche: Of the audit right there in person and I want to get a response on the issues in this meeting.

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Toby DeRoche: And you put a time limit on it. We’ve got

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Toby DeRoche: 30 minutes

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Toby DeRoche: So here’s what we did. Here’s what well here’s where we you know we had problems that we found. What are you going to do about it. Let’s document it right now.

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Toby DeRoche: That’s documented on the board.

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Toby DeRoche: Let’s do this together.

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Toby DeRoche: I don’t know if you’ve ever used to hello

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Jason Mefford: I have. Yeah.

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Toby DeRoche: I love it. It keeps my entire life on track right now.

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Toby DeRoche: It’s like it was built for this, though, and

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Jason Mefford: You can actually it is prize for project management.

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Toby DeRoche: Project Management. A lot of people use it.

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Toby DeRoche: It’s free, which is wonderful. Like, you can go spend more money, you get something like JIRA and you might have that in your organization already but

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Toby DeRoche: Trellis free. Anybody can have an account you go sign up and you can show how you can actually take that little four step process projected on the wall in a meeting.

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Toby DeRoche: type out the answers with everybody watching and you’re done.

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Toby DeRoche: You didn’t need to have a report.

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Toby DeRoche: You didn’t have to wait to the end of the audit to start tracking things you’ve got

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Toby DeRoche: What they’re going to fix. You’ve got dates we all committed to things in that quick meeting release those things out for people started dealing with them.

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Be done with it.

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Toby DeRoche: And you basically then when you’re done with your audit, you know, at the end of that six weeks. Not only were we done with the work we’re done with talking about it because that last day we had the last meeting with management and we walked off, we were done.

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Toby DeRoche: And now they’re dealing with whatever follow up, they have to do

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Jason Mefford: Well, that’s why I think it’s great. You know, one of the webinars that you did a little while ago I think was titled no more audit reports.

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Jason Mefford: Yep. Right. And we have that course now and see risk Academy, you know, for people to go back and listen to, but I’m sure you know when a lot of people see

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Jason Mefford: Saw that saw that title, they’re like, what are you kidding. We have to write a report, because that’s what the standards, tell us we have to do. Right. And again, it’s like, All right, folks, you know, if you’re saying that to yourself, just do a timeout here.

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Jason Mefford: Because just like Toby said, Does the standards say nothing about having to write a report, it says that we have to communicate our findings are the results of our audit well community writing a report is only one way to communicate it, and so again you can

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Jason Mefford: Still be

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Jason Mefford: Don’t, don’t make the word communication mean audit report you can communicate and add value to your organization without even writing a report. In fact, I think, you know, most of the stats. I’ve seen 30 to 40% of audit time is wasted writing reports.

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Jason Mefford: Which is just stupid. You can get 30 to 40% more work done. If you just quit writing the damn report.

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Toby DeRoche: Like I was I was talking with a group down in Texas. A couple months back, and they were looking for a way to speed up some of their processes and their biggest problem. Their biggest time train was the report.

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Toby DeRoche: Because everyone in the entire organization gets hung up on the words.

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Toby DeRoche: You know, you have to in their case give this entire backstory of, well, here’s where the process started in 1930 all the way up until now. And, you know, everybody in their brother, and who touched it.

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Toby DeRoche: And why it looks like the way it does basically like

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Toby DeRoche: I don’t care, you know, nobody cares. And if we weren’t spending so much time trying to

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Toby DeRoche: You know tone down these things to the point that they’re meaningless and take all of this stuff out of it, just stick to the facts. Here’s what happened.

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Toby DeRoche: Follow the standards for this one, you know, it’s criteria condition cause effect write it out, be done with it. And then it’s very hard to argue with just normal facts spike, you know, current political

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Jason Mefford: Stuff. It’s fake news fake news.

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Toby DeRoche: Fake you pick out a report.

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Jason Mefford: That should be a title.

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Jason Mefford: We’ll see if you come up with it. First, or if I do, but yeah.

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Toby DeRoche: But yeah, it’s, it doesn’t need to be this long drawn out thing just here’s what we found. Now if we don’t put it in print.

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Toby DeRoche: If it’s not going into it into an otter report and which is actually dealing with what was bound. Does that actually make things better.

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Toby DeRoche: You know, because now, people aren’t getting hung up on but we can’t use that word because that’s going to bend, Betsy. Sue and we can’t use this word because legal is going to have a problem with it.

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Toby DeRoche: And you know we we can just get down to the point of here’s what we found, here’s what you’re going to do. Let’s go. Yeah.

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Jason Mefford: Well, and I think it’s that that’s the point to where we need to get to is you. You just have to start doing it right. You know a lot of people get hung up on the thinking

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Jason Mefford: They’ll read books and books and books and books and

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Jason Mefford: You know, go to different trainings, or whatever and agile, but you know as an example is just look here’s kind of the basics. Just try it.

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Jason Mefford: Right, just start implementing it. You probably going to make some mistakes. The first couple times you do it, but that’s part of the normal learning process but

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Jason Mefford: The quicker you can start implementing it. The quicker you can start doing it, then you can modify but yeah everybody that I’ve talked to, that’s actually gone through and and really taken true agile approach has loved it.

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Jason Mefford: And the people. The people in their organizations have loved it as well. And it takes way less time, you know, to do it, but you have to, you have to let go of some of those limiting beliefs and and things that you believe are true, that are

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Jason Mefford: Not about the standards or about what internal audit has to do. Yeah.

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Jason Mefford: Cuz honestly internal auditing, it’s

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Jason Mefford: 150 or 200 and we were joking before it might even be 6000 years old.

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Jason Mefford: Yeah, in, in the same same old, same old of what we’ve been doing it, it doesn’t work for most people anymore.

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Toby DeRoche: Yeah, and that’s the thing, like, as a group, we haven’t made a lot of changes.

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Toby DeRoche: We’ve were 30 years into trying to adopt data analytics.

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Toby DeRoche: And so if we don’t move fast. But this is something that we can take on, you know, it’s right now is the right time. And so what I’m doing, you know, I

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Toby DeRoche: I’ve written up a bunch of advice with examples and screenshots. A lot of things like trail low and put it into a book and put that on Amazon.

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Toby DeRoche: I’ve carved out some of it. I’m going to be putting it into some of the webinars that I have coming up. I’m actually doing one it’s going to be a full two hours on just how to transition from a tree in the traditional audit process into agile.

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Toby DeRoche: And the whole the whole goal with this one isn’t to say, well, you know, here’s what Agile is and really for my spend five minutes on that. But the point is, how do we transition

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Toby DeRoche: Because I guarantee you. No one cares about the history of agile.

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Toby DeRoche: And yet every single conversation. We start with Agile auditing started with the manifesto from MIT guys who did some stuff. And no one cares.

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Toby DeRoche: Yeah.

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Jason Mefford: Yeah. Quit wasting your breath on some of the stuff that doesn’t really matter. Just figure out well. And I think that’s why

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Jason Mefford: You know, people are asking these questions, but how do I do it right because the problem is when you only have something theoretical

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Jason Mefford: You can maybe kind of understand it theoretically or academically but unless you know how to actually implement or start actually doing some steps.

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Jason Mefford: Then you end up in this kind of mental loop, where we start asking questions. Why Why Why Why Why right and asking yourself.

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Jason Mefford: Why questions just makes you go crazy because for every answer you get to a why question, it comes up with another why question.

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Jason Mefford: So, you know, one of the practical things that I do when I’m coaching people is quit asking why questions start asking what and how right so what can I do

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Jason Mefford: To make my traditional approach more agile based. Okay, you’re going to get an answer, then go and try it. How can I improve this, how can I do this better.

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Jason Mefford: You’ll end up with some idea go implement it.

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Jason Mefford: Right and don’t overthink it. Because when you overthink it. Then you won’t take action.

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Toby DeRoche: And, you know, for the people that have seen who have tried this and it doesn’t work. It’s because they took that approach they they overthought the whole thing. They wouldn’t got a book on Project Management using Scrum.

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Toby DeRoche: And they started trying to apply every single thing that you would do in this it environment.

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Toby DeRoche: That includes things like

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Toby DeRoche: Well, I have to have burned down and I have to have all of these other things. And I have to show. And the moment you look at this, you should say, do I need this.

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Toby DeRoche: Like, that’s, that’s great for somebody, but as auditors. We don’t need this. And the beauty of this is we’re adopting this process we pick and choose whatever we want.

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Toby DeRoche: You know, it’s not like we’re going to get a loser audit certification if we

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Toby DeRoche: suddenly go off and do something slightly different from some other methodology that we’ve learned about us whatever of it works and just adopt it to yourselves, make it, make it

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Toby DeRoche: Make it something that helps us work better.

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Jason Mefford: Yeah, because if we get into that overthinking and believing that it’s going to be perfect the first time we do it right, we’re setting ourselves up for failure. Right. So realize that, you know, nothing’s going to be perfect the first time. So just start just try, like you said, just

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Jason Mefford: Just take a piece or two of it.

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Jason Mefford: Try it. Start incorporating it when you get that working well. Then you go and you grab the other thing, right.

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Jason Mefford: Yeah, like you said, so much of the time we end up thinking oh my gosh there’s 100 things I have to do. And then we feel like, well, I can’t accomplish all hundred things. So then we just don’t do anything.

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Toby DeRoche: Right.

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Jason Mefford: And instead, picking one or two. Okay, let’s let’s work on those until we get them. Good. Now let’s go get a couple more. And over time, you end up getting through all 100 of them right but you’ve got to actually take action with it.

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Jason Mefford: Yeah.

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Jason Mefford: Yeah, so there’s there’s some practical stuff around, you know, agile, which a lot of people are talking about now.

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Jason Mefford: I know to one of the questions that I keep getting a lot is, is around the whole virtual or remote working and some of the stuff like that right and

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Jason Mefford: You know, you mentioned before about well, how, how can we do this if we’re, you know, how can we physically count inventory. If we can’t be there and it’s like

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Jason Mefford: Well, first off, folks, if you’re still physically counting inventory. That’s probably not one of the things you should be doing. In fact, that’s a carry over from an archaic audit standard for external auditors.

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Jason Mefford: That they must physically observed inventories a year in for financial statement audits. There’s no requirement for that for internal auditors and in fact most of your inventory processes are probably working well enough.

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Jason Mefford: With enough mitigating controls.

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Jason Mefford: That we shouldn’t be, you know, messing around with inventory anyway.

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Toby DeRoche: I can tell you after spending four years in retail on it. And every year you kind of go through, you know, a week long of

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Toby DeRoche: all nighters

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Jason Mefford: Oh yeah, I’ve been there.

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Toby DeRoche: Watching people count and even before that I spent eight years in retail

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Jason Mefford: Was actually doing the inventories yourself.

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Toby DeRoche: I was a store manager at a smaller retailer that’s now gone.

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Toby DeRoche: But yeah, it’s, you know, all night long. You spend counting all this stuff, piece by individual piece.

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Toby DeRoche: But in reality, people were doing things like psycho counts and spot checks and everything was would have been fine. Anyway, you know, check the things that are strange and outstanding look for exception reports, but outside of that it was a waste of time.

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Toby DeRoche: For, you know, thinking about like remote work.

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Toby DeRoche: One of the things that as a practical approach. I’ve been suggesting is that people make a decision tree. So let’s, let’s assume that at some point we’re going to be able to go back and have some travel

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Toby DeRoche: But first, you’re if you’re working for a company, they’re probably not going to be real big on the travel budgets that we used to have.

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Toby DeRoche: Because we just made it six months without it.

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Toby DeRoche: And so they’re not going to just suddenly open up their wallets and say, okay, goes back

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Toby DeRoche: And we don’t know what travel is going to look like, you know, if we start having airlines collapse price tickets might go up.

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Toby DeRoche: Alone. So we’re going to have to see how much we can even feasibly travel start making a decision tree of well, how, how big of a risk is this thing I’m looking at if it’s a high risk, let’s assume that it would be better if I were on site.

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Toby DeRoche: But maybe I don’t need to be on site for the whole thing before we would do is from day one. Today, you know, finished we were on site.

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Toby DeRoche: And we would spend every waking moment, you know, travel out on a Monday morning, come back on a Friday night and you spent every minute on site, you didn’t need to spend your planning time there.

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Toby DeRoche: You probably didn’t need to spend much time that first week or two, because people were still gathering evidence for you.

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Toby DeRoche: And they could drop that off somewhere in a shared drive and be done with it. You didn’t have to go and sit and wait

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Toby DeRoche: You can probably had a bunch of zoom conversations with people.

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Toby DeRoche: And done a lot of the due diligence before you ever ever set foot on site. And then if you had to go out there.

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Toby DeRoche: Then you go for what matters and you get that up. You get that part knocked out and go back home. You don’t need to be on site because it’s not just the travel is the flight but hotels, the disruption. They may not want you there.

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Toby DeRoche: Because now we’re introducing a new risk element to them by having outsiders walking around the building.

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Toby DeRoche: Your people may not want to go.

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Toby DeRoche: Now, you know, I personally would not want to go anywhere right now.

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Toby DeRoche: So it’s, it’s too much to ask people to start traveling

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Toby DeRoche: And we have to find a way to get around it. And so one of the things that we can start to look for as well. Do I have any local resources that I could adopt, you know, it’s not a new thing for us. We’ve been using internal subject matter experts forever.

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Toby DeRoche: And so if I’ve got somebody there that can do the work for me create they just got deputized now they’re in on it.

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Toby DeRoche: And using the go do some of the legwork for you. You know, you gotta go and do it and inventory observation. Yeah. Everybody’s got FaceTime on their phone.

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Toby DeRoche: Turn it on.

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Toby DeRoche: To put a walk around the building.

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Toby DeRoche: You know, if it’s something that’s not a high risk God

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Toby DeRoche: We probably never needed to go to begin with.

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Jason Mefford: Yeah.

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Toby DeRoche: In those high risk times though it might be an onsite. It might be adopted local resource or that’s where we start looking at things like can I outsource

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Toby DeRoche: And it doesn’t need to be a big contractual outsourcing engagement. We’re talking is can I freelance this thing out.

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Toby DeRoche: Can I grab some local resource who’s willing to go out and spend a couple days and do some legwork for me and you can grab these guys off the things like freelancer fiber.

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Jason Mefford: Yeah.

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Toby DeRoche: We’re thinking

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Jason Mefford: We have to change your way of thinking and even to kind of go back to the retail example that we were talking about before. Right.

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Jason Mefford: I mean when usually most large retailers. They don’t do their own inventory count.

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Jason Mefford: Right, that’s, that’s why I can’t remember the name, there’s like two big companies that do most of the stuff for the people in the US. Right.

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Jason Mefford: And and so you show up and you observe or watch these people doing it. Well, you know, again, if it’s

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Jason Mefford: One of the biggest companies in the in the world that are doing this, the processes are probably pretty good right so that it can be an example of where you could probably outsource it. Yeah, you might have to do a little bit of work to verify that they actually know what they’re doing.

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Jason Mefford: But not not physically be there right and I love your idea about the decision tree, you know, trying to come up with something and really starting to ask yourself the questions.

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Jason Mefford: Do I have to physically be on site for this because that’s what I’ve been talking about with a lot of people. There’s probably creative ways, like you said, FaceTime, I was joking with somebody that day about using drones.

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Jason Mefford: Uh huh. But heck we could use drones. Right. You know, FedEx FedEx a drone to somebody at the facility and say go set it out on the floor and

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Jason Mefford: Turn it on. And then we’re going to remote do it from whatever. Right. I mean, if the military can can fly drones all the way around the world from wherever they happen to be, then we could do things like that as well. Right.

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Jason Mefford: Yeah. Or, you know, get get back to the point to where. Hey, instead of being on site for two weeks, maybe we’re only there for one or two days.

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Jason Mefford: Maybe that’s really

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Jason Mefford: All we have to be on site because honestly, a lot of times on site work, you’re usually there’s a lot of downtime.

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Toby DeRoche: To sitting in an office.

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Jason Mefford: Sitting in your office, you’re waiting for somebody three people on the team are trying to talk to the same person at the same time. And so

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Jason Mefford: There’s a lot of

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Toby DeRoche: time figuring out watching dinner.

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Jason Mefford: Where we’re going to go to dinner.

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Jason Mefford: Exactly. No, I don’t want Mexican tonight we had that two nights ago, whatever.

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Jason Mefford: But

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Jason Mefford: You know, another one that kind of goes along with this, though, that I, I know I’ve had a lot of people asking questions about, well, but, but how do we how do we develop relationships.

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Jason Mefford: You know, we have that old term auditing by walking about

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Jason Mefford: You know, where you just kind of walking around, and yet you notice certain things or, you know, maybe you’re new to an organization, you don’t know somebody, how, how can we develop relationships with people remotely.

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Jason Mefford: You know, where before, maybe we bumped into him at the coffee station or, you know, it’s easier to maybe go have lunch with them or do something like that, you know, how do we transition. A lot of that stuff now to virtually

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Jason Mefford: And I know a lot of people are kind of scared about that and thinking, it can’t be done. So I’m kind of interested to see here, hear your take on that.

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Jason Mefford: As well.

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Toby DeRoche: It’s interesting. So I’ve actually worked from home for 10 years. So this last few months has been everybody I was doing the party because I’ve been doing this for a long time and it’s so funny to watch people struggle with these ideas.

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Toby DeRoche: Reality is, you just have to be more intentional about it, you know. So I have

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Toby DeRoche: A series of people that I’m working with, and I might have

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Toby DeRoche: In the course of a week two or three conversations with each one, but it’s cameras on face to face. It’s not like you lose all human contact when you go to work from home. You just have to change the way you think about it.

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Toby DeRoche: I have a friend who he and I get together at least every other day and it is literally just get on zoom. We have a cup of coffee together and Jeff.

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Toby DeRoche: And it’s just so that we can catch up and it’s usually half work half, you know, home life whatever’s going on, but it’s not

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Toby DeRoche: It’s not that hard to keep those relationships going and it would be the same thing. It may be a little awkward at first, especially these aren’t people you know that well.

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Toby DeRoche: But get, you know, you’re going to go out and we would have been doing an inventory. So we would have had lunch with the director of some facility in Jersey.

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Toby DeRoche: You don’t want to have a Skype, get him on a zoom have a conversation with them the block out 20 minutes. Don’t make it a big thing and just have the conversation just chat be human.

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Jason Mefford: Well i think it’s it’s funny, you know, because like I said, a lot of people are kind of freaking out about this, but at the end of the day, the medium has changed, but the principles of not right.

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Jason Mefford: Right, so like when you’re talking with your friend. You know there’s there’s some rapport.

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Jason Mefford: That you’re building you’re talking about work stuff, but you’re also talking about personal stuff. Why, because that’s part of developing a human relationship with people. Right. You can do that remotely, just like you can in person. I mean, right now we’re not together.

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Jason Mefford: You know, you’re, you’re halfway, or you’re pretty much the whole way across the country from

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Jason Mefford: Me, right. So we’re probably 2500 miles apart but camera on, we can still have a real human connection and I think

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Jason Mefford: Like you said, that actually

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Jason Mefford: The video options, you know, whether it’s

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Jason Mefford: Skype or zoom or team or whatever you’re using

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Jason Mefford: Is much better than just a phone call.

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Jason Mefford: Oh yeah, right. But in the past, folks. Right. You know, you think about. It’s like we wouldn’t have thought it weird to pick up the phone.

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Jason Mefford: And call somebody and talk to them over the phone, but actually video is a better medium anyway. So again, you’re doing the same things building rapport with them, you know, developing those relationships.

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Jason Mefford: You know, discussing what you need to getting this stuff done. I think I think more than anything actually virtual, like you said, You’ve got to be more intentional about doing it.

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Toby DeRoche: Mm hmm.

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Jason Mefford: But I think we can be much more efficient when it’s virtual as well. Yeah.

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Jason Mefford: Right, because now it’s, you know, you’ve scheduled a time with somebody, you’re not interrupting him in the middle of something else. People know they show up. You can be quick on and off, you know, kind of thing as well.

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Toby DeRoche: Yeah, a lot of the suggestions that I’ve been giving to people on this is think about the other person and yourself and think about the schedule. Right.

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Toby DeRoche: You don’t want to block out an hour for every single meeting, you’re ever going to do

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Toby DeRoche: You probably don’t even half an hour, either.

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Toby DeRoche: Because before it would have been, you might have schedule something you sat across from them at a desk took you notes and then what when you were done.

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Toby DeRoche: It’s not like you stayed the half hour just because you had a half hour block. And for some reason, we put things on the calendar and we do virtual. A lot of people get into this idea that I have to fill up the time

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Toby DeRoche: And it’s okay because you’ve got these phrases that well I’m going to give you five minutes. Back in your day.

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Toby DeRoche: And it’s when you’re done, you’re done. Just be done.

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Toby DeRoche: And when we’re being more intentional about it. You don’t schedule things for half an hour you schedule it for 20 minutes because they’ve got another meeting to get to, they might have back to back calls

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Toby DeRoche: You know, whatever it is that’s going on. And you might have the same thing. You don’t want these things running up against each other because now you didn’t have any time to actually think process go get that cup of coffee that you really needed

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Toby DeRoche: Whatever it might have been. So do you think that shorter blocks. If it was going to be an hour call 45 minutes and be done.

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Yeah.

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Toby DeRoche: And when you put things on someone’s counter like that, you know, the piece of it is setting expectations.

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Toby DeRoche: And tell them up front, even put it in the invitation. It’s 20 minutes to talk about this.

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Toby DeRoche: With cameras on

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Toby DeRoche: And let them know the cameras need to be on because

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Toby DeRoche: Part of this is still part of your audit right i mean it’s it’s the, the more informal part that we would have had from walking around.

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Toby DeRoche: But you need to see them, you need the body language, you need the eye contact. You need need to be able to see if they’re getting really square new you can start talking about something, because maybe they get something to hide.

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Jason Mefford: This are touching their forehead and run Windows or anything like 12

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Slides.

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Jason Mefford: Well, and I think that’s, you know, I’ve been, you know, similar to you. I’ve been working from home for a years

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Jason Mefford: Myself and it’s

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Jason Mefford: You know, the camera on is a big deal.

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Jason Mefford: You know, and even when

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Jason Mefford: Depending on the call.

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Jason Mefford: But I won’t really do a cop do certain calls unless people will turn on their camera. Yeah.

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Jason Mefford: And if and if they can’t get their camera on, then it’s like, Okay, well, we’re gonna have to reschedule. Yeah, right. Other other times where, you know, again, I might let them hide, but I never hide. I always have my camera turned on, except for one meeting.

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Jason Mefford: That I have with one of my clients because they don’t have it on. It’s quick meeting kind of thing, but

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Jason Mefford: You know, have your camera on, don’t, don’t try to hide and in most of the time people will be like, Oh, well you know i i look I look a mess today. And it’s like, well, so do I look at me right now. I don’t care.

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Jason Mefford: Because it, it gives you the better the better connection. And since only about 7% of the message is the words that are used.

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Jason Mefford: You need to see people

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Jason Mefford: See how they’re responding see their

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Jason Mefford: Their intonation their volume. Everything else as well, but their body language too so

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Toby DeRoche: This is, this is something that’s like a really personal thing for me. So I have a son who’s seven with autism.

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Toby DeRoche: Okay, and he’s verbal

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Toby DeRoche: He speaks just, you know, but his vocabulary is limited, his ability to have a conversation is limited and you learn really quick, that you can say a whole lot without opening your mouth.

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Jason Mefford: Yes, yes, he says.

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Jason Mefford: He says a whole bunch without opening his

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Jason Mefford: Mouth, doesn’t it.

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Toby DeRoche: Yes, all nonverbal communication even look at you and you know exactly what’s going on.

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Jason Mefford: Uh huh.

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Jason Mefford: Yeah, well, and so we need to incorporate that in into what we’re doing as well. Right, so

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Jason Mefford: And like usual. We kind of end up bumping up on time here so we

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Jason Mefford: Were gonna have to do a timeout and probably have you on later, too. But it’s, you know, hopefully for everybody that’s listening, you know. And as we’ve been talking

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Jason Mefford: There’s practical ways to start implementing some of these things, but you just got to get out of your way. Quit overthinking it try to take it in some small chunks, you know, and realize that

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Jason Mefford: You know everybody’s running around saying, oh, the world is so different today than it’s ever been. No, it’s not actually it’s not folks right

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Jason Mefford: We’ve gotten used to going to the store. Why because, for the last, I don’t know 60 or 80 years we’ve been programmed to go to the store. But how did people in the US, get their bread and their milk and their eggs 100 years ago home delivery.

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Jason Mefford: It was just done by horse and carriage. Right.

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Jason Mefford: Instead of Amazon trucks. So, you know, a lot of this stuff isn’t really that different

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Jason Mefford: And there’s there’s ways when you start thinking about it.

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Jason Mefford: That you can, you know, a lot of it’s just keep doing the same thing. It’s just with a different medium.

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Jason Mefford: So,

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Jason Mefford: Anyway, any final thoughts that you want to leave with people because like I said, I appreciate what you’re doing to and trying to help people become much more practical and actually do stuff. Yeah.

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Jason Mefford: Instead of getting hung up in the theoretical

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Toby DeRoche: Yeah, I’d say like the way that I’m trying to get the message out. I’m doing webinars.

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Toby DeRoche: I try to do them every third Thursday of the month. They’re very practical. I try to keep it all. You know, we don’t talk theory we’re really getting down to, how do we do things.

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Toby DeRoche: Those are all on demand on the risk Academy

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Toby DeRoche: Yep. And I’m also doing these where they do get to be a little more technical. I’m actually putting them into a book format that I’m putting on Amazon.

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Toby DeRoche: That way you can follow along with it if it’s something more like it really is a long drawn out process to go from

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Toby DeRoche: I need to move from traditional to agile, there’s some steps in the middle. And it really does work better. Sometimes if you’ve got those as a reference to go back to. And so I’m putting those in print, so people can have that as a takeaway as well.

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Jason Mefford: Which is great. Yeah. Because like you said you can’t get from that knowledge and skills area to the application or experience unless you have some kind of tools with that are, you know, eat it at a minimum questions to answer or kind of thought exercises to go through

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Jason Mefford: To be able to make that application.

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Jason Mefford: Over so

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Toby DeRoche: It’s really like we’ve been talking about, you have to change the way you’re thinking

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Toby DeRoche: And this is really to be a guide to get you from A to B, so that now that you’re looking at things differently and you’re trying to apply it.

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Toby DeRoche: Trying to be as explicit with it as possible of here’s how you do it, and you’re going to have your own take on it. But now that you’re thinking that way you can make that week.

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Jason Mefford: Yeah, well, and for everybody to just relax, too, because like we talked about a couple times in our discussion, your organization doesn’t have to do it the same way as

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Jason Mefford: Somebody else. In fact,

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Jason Mefford: You shouldn’t do it the same way as somebody else because your organization is different.

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Jason Mefford: And so, you know, there while you know everybody always likes to hop on the best. Well, it’s best practice to do this as best practice to do that quit worrying about best practice and do what’s most practical and valuable to your organization, regardless of what everybody else is doing.

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So,

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Jason Mefford: All right, well, Toby. Thank you.

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Jason Mefford: Like I said so. Yeah. You mentioned you know you doing webinars third Thursday of the month. Usually, and that’s inside CP. So how can people find find those webinars will try to put that in the show notes as well.

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Toby DeRoche: Yeah, it’s on inside CPA com slash webinars.

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Toby DeRoche: Okay.

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Toby DeRoche: We post them on LinkedIn as well.

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Toby DeRoche: And then all of our on demand. I have links to them on my page and they’re also they’re all on serious Academy

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Jason Mefford: Yeah, so on there and serious. You can even just search by Toby’s name and it’ll, it’ll filter out all of his courses as well.

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Jason Mefford: So that you can see it because, yeah, there’s some great ones out there like no more audit reports, one that you just recently did to us about. Was it something about the fraud triangle and getting we need a new fraud triangle.

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Toby DeRoche: Triangle. This

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Toby DeRoche: A lot of the ones that are doing. It’s really just taking some of these things like cross training has been around for 70 years. It’s really a different world out there that doesn’t work anymore.

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Jason Mefford: Well, in the whole reason it was created was for law enforcement.

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Jason Mefford: And then it’s just been kind of

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Jason Mefford: Kind of adopted by the fraud industry as well and the

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Toby DeRoche: Fraud industry, the way that it’s been taken, it’s purely financial

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Jason Mefford: Yeah.

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Toby DeRoche: It doesn’t consider things like, well, what about hacking and what, what about all. What about AI. Where does the I come into play. What happens if there was no motivation behind it, other than I wanted to see if I can do it. It’s not because

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Jason Mefford: The classic hacker

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Toby DeRoche: Hacker. Yeah. Yeah. Not because I was under some financial pressure, but I wanted to see if I can hack the VOD

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Jason Mefford: And I did. No, I didn’t. I did not. And so you’re

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Toby DeRoche: Not eating.

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Jason Mefford: Yeah. So anyway, so go check out, check out you know Toby’s webinars and like I said, if you can’t catch them live there.

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Jason Mefford: They’re on see risk afterwards for you to be able to go back to as well. So, Toby. Thanks, my brother. Let’s keep up the keep up the fight. Keep out them that profession and help everybody be more practical.

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Jason Mefford: So that we can move forward into the future.

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Jason Mefford: And not not just becomes some other compliance activity in the organization.

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Toby DeRoche: Absolutely. Thanks for having me on.

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Hey, thanks.

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