Hidden Profit Academy: Harnessing the Genius of Accounting Professionals

Through her new learning management platform, Hidden Profit Academy, Professor Dawn Fotopulos helps CPAs increase small business survival rates.

Professor Fotopolus teaching Business
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In 2017, Professor of Business Dawn Fotopulos launched a learning management platform called Hidden Profit Academy with a mission to “double small business survival rates by harnessing the genius of accounting professionals.” According to Fotopulos, the platform is the Lynda.com for accounting professionals.

Hidden Profit Academy has since received full accreditation by the National Association for the State Boards of Accountancy (NASBA) to offer continuing professional education credits. The site is one of only eleven organizations to earn NASBA’s rigorous Blended Learning Asynchronous accreditation in the United States, says Fotopulos.

The accreditation process, begun in February 2018, entailed an intense series of applications and reviews. Ina Kumi, a past assistant provost at King’s, guided the application process. Fotopulos’s team included a web developer; an attorney; an accountant; one King’s alumnus, Meric Pope (PPE ’19), who coordinated the faculty in course development; and NASBA, their accreditor.

Hidden Profit Academy first underwent a nine month review and then completed an initial application for course accreditation. Then the team reapplied for stage two, which required a six month double course accreditation process followed by an application for full platform accreditation. While scouting out a conducive website platform to meet NASBA’s web standards, the team considered platforms developed in such places as Greece, Boston, and India. Gaining accreditation took two years and Fotopulos’s personal investment of $40,000.

Fotopulos explains that Hidden Profit Academy is intended to transform the Certified Public Accountant’s role:

Our mission is to transform the role of the CPA from a tax repairer to a true business advisor. Most people see their CPAs as a necessary evil. But CPAs are brilliantly well-educated and there’s an awful lot a CPA needs to know in order to be effective. The underlying mission of the academy is to double small business survival rates by harnessing the genius of accounting professionals; in that sense, we are disruptors because we are fundamentally changing the role of CPA through training.

As a regular speaker at Scaling New Heights, the largest accounting professional conference in the world, Fotopulos discovered that the CPAs were brilliant, but they spoke a different language than business owners so their good advice often went unheeded. The Academy’s value is to be the bridge between CPAs, who are experts in financial statement preparation and analysis, and business owners, who are not. The goal is to improve profitability and cash flow for all the Academy’s clients. The Hidden Profit Academy flagship course provides a roadmap in order to generate 50% more profit in only four weeks.

Hidden Profit Academy uses conference materials and a crowdsourcing approach to equip the “best and brightest” in the marketplace to train their broader community. So far, Hidden Profit has put 50 certified public accountants through the coursework, CPAs among the 100 top accounting professionals in the U.S., an award presented at Intuit and the Woodard Institute’s conference Scaling New Heights. Several of the courses feature Fotopulos’s award-winning Accounting for the Numberphobic as a textbook. The platform also allows CPAs to apply their knowledge by working with a small business client, with Fotopulos and other course instructors on hand to offer guidance.

In one instance, a CPA named Hal worked with a granite countertop installer in the Utah market who was earning $700,000 in billings and only taking home an income of $40,000. Within six months, Hal had honed the business model and eliminated unnecessary expenses, allowing his client to work more efficiently. The overall increase in profitability allowed Hal’s client to increase his salary to $140,000.

Public statistics indicate that there are roughly 31 million small businesses in the United States. According to the JP Morgan Institute, half of them have less than thirty days of cash on hand and a quarter do not even have 14 days of cash on hand. The current pandemic further jeopardizes the viability of these small businesses. According to Fotopulos, small businesses are an economy’s lifeblood. In order to preserve these vital members of society, Fotopulos is working to raise up an army of CPAs equipped with the practical skills of generating profitability and cash flow.


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