Russ:  This is the PKF Texas Entrepreneur’s Playbook.  I’m Russ Capper, this week’s guest host, and I’m here today with Brian Baumler, a Senior Vice President, and Kirsten Strieck, shareholder and Director of Operations and Client Services at Joint Venture Strategic Advisors.  Welcome to the Playbook.

Kirsten:  Thank you.

Brian:  Thanks for having us Russ.

Russ:  So you’ve both sort of been in this space, this joint venture mostly for oil and gas companies, for a few years right?

Brian:  That’s correct.  I’ve been in the oil and gas industry working in the oil and gas industry for CPA firms and also within industry for over 30 years.  So lots of experience which is a very powerful tool that we need to perform the services that we do.

Russ:  And I guess they’ve probably changed over the years how you do your joint venture consulting and auditing.

Brian:  Well obviously as you know technology over the last three decades has advanced the energy industry greatly in not only discovering oil and gas, but also in collaborating and sharing data.  And one of the secrets to providing a very efficient joint venture audit is also having access to that data.  So large cubes of data are the benchmark of information that we use to perform a lot of data analytics that help us focus in on core areas of the audit or operations that may have significant red flags and we can focus on those and not spend as much time on those areas that aren’t as important.

Russ:  Wow, so how do you do that?

Kirsten:  Well one of the areas that we use is a remote desktop server.  It allows us to A, audit wherever we are in the world and receive data from our clients anywhere.  We’re also using secure portals to receive this information from our clients so volumes of data come through the internet daily.

Russ:  I guess that also kind of lowers the expense completely doesn’t it if you’re not having to travel everywhere, right?

Kirsten:  That’s exactly right.

Russ:  Do you ever actually advise joint ventures without ever going there?

Kirsten:  Yes we do and it’s very beneficial to both our client and the operators.

Russ:  Wow, very interesting.

Brian:  It also helps too for the fact that we have two office locations so we can have multiple teams jointly working on a similar project together, sharing and collaborating information.

Russ:  And the two office locations Houston and Calgary, is that right?

Brian:  Correct.

Kirsten:  That’s correct.

Russ:  That’s really cool.  Well thanks a lot for bringing us up to date on Joint Ventures.

Brian:  Yep, thank you.

Kirsten:  Thank you.

Russ:  You bet.  For more information about JVSA visit JVSA.com.  This has been another Thought Leader production brought to you by PKF Texas Entrepreneur’s Playbook.  Tune in next week for another chapter.