Meet our DLC Finance and Accounting Consultant, Jack Tjards!

Favorite things to do outside of the office: My wife and I enjoy visiting and spending time with our children, other family, and friends. For fun we enjoy going to concerts, reading, watching movies, and playing golf.

How has your background impacted your experience as a consultant? Before joining DLC, my career spanned Accounting, Audit, FP&A, M&A, Project Management, and Operations. This diverse background has served me well at DLC in that our CSDs can fit me into many different types of engagements seamlessly.

What’s a typical workday like for you? On days when I am working remotely, I try to exercise in the early morning before work and then get busy with the day’s activities thereafter. If I’m in the office, my commute typically absorbs close to an hour. The workday is spent addressing items in priority order as discussed and agreed to with the client. I typically end the day with looking toward the following day to ensure that I know what my priorities are the next morning.

What motivates you to wake up and go to work every day? I get joy from helping my client achieve their goals and I know that by helping them, DLC will be rewarded with additional engagement opportunities in the future.

What kind of projects have you been working on at DLC?  My last engagement was focused on Project Management work associated with systems implementations. Prior to that, I was involved in an acquisition project where I was focused on intercompany accounting and forecasting models. My engagements have been quite diverse in my time at DLC like my pre-DLC career.

Where do you believe you deliver the most value to your client? Value propositions always differ from project to project but I would say that my largest contributions typically come from simplifying client processes so that cycle times and work effort are shortened. The recent systems implementation projects helped reduce overall accounting teamwork efforts by giving them consistent tools to use while eliminating licensing costs globally on sunset systems. On another recent project, our DLC team identified numerous operational changes that the client adopted which helped the client shorten their monthly close cycle from five to three business days.  

How do you organize environments with a lack of reporting infrastructure or inefficiency? For the client that we helped shorten and simplify their close process, we studied multiple monthly closes to understand the volume, source, timing, and P&L impact of all journal entries recorded. This data had never been produced prior to our study. It clearly showed the organization that they bunched too much work into the days immediately following the fiscal period end as well as spent too much time on immaterial entries. Once we showed these details to the client, they were able to leverage it to make the necessary changes to improve their overall close process.

What is your process like? Consistent client communication is the key to a successful engagement. At the beginning of each client engagement, it is imperative to talk to the client to be confident of your understanding of the work / role needed to be filled, the timelines involved, and to set the correct priorities for the immediate future. These client discussions will then be repeated at each subsequent milestone junction identified and reached along the journey of the engagement to ensure that together we are focused on the most impactful needs for the client.

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