Russ: This is the PKF Texas Entrepreneur’s Playbook. I’m Russ Capper, this week’s guest host, and my guest once again is Mike Devonshire, COO of JVSA; Mike, welcome back to the Playbook.

Mike: Thanks for having me.

Russ: You bet. So we’ve been talking about joint ventures, about auditing joint ventures, about all the different categories but what industries does JVSA – are you solely in one or are you in all industries?

Mike: We do a lot of energy work but we can cover any industry. We see a lot of joint ventures happening in the real estate world, in the mining world, in film and entertainment; really any situation where you have 2 parties who are working together, there’s likely a joint venture taking place.

Russ: Okay, but obviously our audience knows that you’re from Calgary and we’re in Houston, there’s a lot of energy, a lot of oil and gas; is that right?

Mike: Absolutely, absolutely; probably 90% of our joint venture audits are in the oil and gas space and that’s just a factor of where we live.

Russ: Okay, so everybody in the oil and gas space for quite some time is kind of suffering through this downturn in the pricing, does that affect joint ventures? Does is affect JVSA?

Mike: It’s actually interesting, it’s actually been a positive for JVSA in that most of our clients are really cost aware so they want to make sure that their partners are charging them properly and appropriately, so we’re seeing a lot of interest in taking a look at people we might not have looked at in the past and the other unfortunate side effect is we’ve seen some layoffs which means companies have fewer people in their accounting group which increases the risk of there being an error.

Russ: Okay, so you’re saying that there’s more people sort of interested in a joint venture, but are there also people that are in joint ventures that are more tuned into hey, maybe we ought to do an audit now?

Mike: Absolutely, that’s where we’re seeing it is just kind of let’s just make sure our partners are charging us properly, let’s go through audit process; even if we don’t find dollars we’re kind of keeping each other honest and we’re making sure the procedures are being followed properly.

Russ: Okay, real interesting. Well thanks again for sharing your perspective with us.

Mike: Thanks for having me, yeah.

Russ: You bet. To learn more about JVSAs visit JVSA.com. This has been another Thought Leader Production brought to you by PKF Texas Entrepreneur’s Playbook.