A Critical Financial Opportunity for Schools | Christopher Loesser and Andrew King

On this episode of Anchored, Jeremy is joined by Christopher Loesser and Andrew King from Hundredfold Consulting. They discuss how schools could potentially claim hundreds of thousands of dollars in Employee Retention Credit (ERC) funds as compensation for the COVID-19 restrictions they had to accommodate. They outline qualifications and the consulting and filing processes schools must complete before the April 15 deadline. They also talk about how the money can be used, and the ERC success stories they’ve already seen. 

Listeners can book a free meeting with Chris here: https://calendly.com/meetwithchrisloesser 

Or they can email him at chris@hundredfoldconsultingllc.com to learn more.

Transcript

Jeremy (00:02.251)
Welcome back to the Anchor podcast. Consider this podcast episode a CLT public service announcement at the bidding and the request of Keith Nix. Keith Nix, who think we talk about probably more than any head of school on the Anchor podcast, a dear friend. He's the first president of our academic board. Chris put us in touch with two of his friends. We have with us today, Chris Lozier and Andrew King from Hundredfold Consulting. We're doing really important work and I'm excited to tell you about that. Chris, Andrew, welcome.

Christopher Loesser (00:31.432)
Good to be here.

Andrew King (00:32.546)
Thanks for having us.

Jeremy (00:33.97)
So the hope with this podcast is that folks will listen to this and they will text, email, call their friend who's ahead of school or an academic dean and say, hey, have you got your ERC money? Because some of these classical Christian schools, Catholic schools, you name it, they're getting half a million dollars or more ERC money, but a lot of schools aren't getting anything at all because they're not applying, because they haven't heard about this or it sounds too good to be true.

You have worked with a lot of our dear friends, Michael Van Ecke, Keith Nix, and have had so many success stories. So we're excited to get into that. But before we get into talking ERC and COVID money and all this, it's great to just get to know you a bit, understand a little bit about your own educational backgrounds. We'll start with Chris, as I understand you spent some time at Grove City College, our CFO, of course, and a Grove City College graduate. How did you discover this whole world of classical education, Chris?

Christopher Loesser (01:32.254)
Yeah, you know, first, know, went to Grove City College, actually studied education as my in my undergrad English and Ed. So I have a passion for education. And my dad was the head of the board of a Christian school. went through Christian schools. My kids are in Christian schools. I don't have a classical school close enough by my place to be able to send one there. But, you know, just a real, real passion to see people, you know,

know God and be really intelligent Christians. So it's just a joy for me in the classical space to be able to serve, you know, heads of school and that sort of thing. So yeah.

Jeremy (02:13.209)
Awesome, love that. Andrew.au, what's your educational background been like?

Andrew King (02:17.612)
Yeah, so I went to another Pennsylvania school, Bucknell University, and then eventually got my MBA at University of Maryland. that's a little bit of where I came from. But now that I have kids discerning school education for my kids, I know my oldest did the public school education for

for kindergarten for one year and we realized we were looking for something else. And when we started touring schools at Christian classical education was really attractive. And so we ended up moving our girls to a Christian school and having teachers pray for students where they're learning Christian background alongside of science and math and how math is integrated into God's world.

Jeremy (02:49.745)
Okay, okay.

Jeremy (03:06.117)
Mm.

Andrew King (03:15.382)
or order was really attractive to us. So that Christian, that classical education, we're very passionate about and really excited to be here today.

Jeremy (03:27.619)
Awesome. And then how did y'all find yourselves in this particular world, this world of finance and this thing that as far as I know, didn't exist maybe pre-COVID. And now you're helping so many organizations specifically within the classical arena to get large sums of money that is due to them. How did y'all find yourselves in this kind of work?

Christopher Loesser (03:46.814)
Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. So for me, you know, initially studied education and that sort of thing. But after school ended up working actually in a financial firm and love, love education, love finance, actually then moved into some nonprofit development type work. And so my passion is always about helping mission move forward for Christian leaders, fundraising, that sort of thing. And

So Andrew actually helped me become aware of this whole world of ERC because of kind of some of his background. But I'm always on the hunt for how do we help a school? How do we help a nonprofit move mission forward? Fundraising and the fundraising journey can be challenging and so looking for different avenues that are high ROI and worth the time and right.

have the right risk profile associated with it or really something I'm always kind of thinking about. But yeah, Andrew kind of initially got me aware of this whole world of VRC. So I'm sure he could walk us through that a little bit.

Andrew King (04:58.146)
Yeah, and so I started a hundredfold consulting in the really in the midst of the pandemic when we were all kind of going through an upheaval of what we thought is normal. And in the midst of that, the ERC was created right at the start of the pandemic. And it was an opportunity to help support organizations that were experiencing

seeing this upheaval. And one of my passions is helping organizations unlock potential, unlock capital, so not just potential, but financial capital to help, to Chris's point, move that mission forward, whether that's businesses, nonprofits, what have you. I too, like Chris, came from that nonprofit fundraising space. And so when I,

Jeremy (05:36.88)
Mm.

Andrew King (05:55.983)
when I saw the ERC kind of take hold during the pandemic, I knew that was gonna be a really big catalyst for helping a number of organizations. And so we started a hundredfold consulting kind of out of this root, this Christian basis that, where a seed is planted on good soil, it may grow 30, 60, a hundredfold, hence our name. And so the real desire here is helping organizations.

especially Christian ones, kingdom-minded ones, that this can be a place of new financial capital that they may not have any otherwise realized.

Jeremy (06:34.499)
of that.

Jeremy (06:40.314)
Andrea, I love that mission, that mission mindset. I think probably the giant elephant in the room, we've got so many of our anchor fans. We all love that Hillsdale and Grove City and Patrick Henry and Christendom College, not a penny of federal funding, right? And I think a lot of our great K-12 classical schools, Christian schools, Catholic schools, they're also very weary of the government. I think all of us for the most part are very excited to see if they're gonna

shut down the Department of that, get the government out, return it to the local level. So I think there may be some apprehension, maybe Jeremy and CLT were selling out saying, go get this government money, it's yours for the taking. How would you respond to that kind of concern?

Christopher Loesser (07:22.462)
Sure. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I think it's really healthy to steward your relationship with the federal government with the discerning ear and eye to be wise about it. I think, and that's often when we talk with folks, one of the very first questions. So I love, I love the idea of more money. That sounds great. You know, what are the strings? Tell me more about that. And so here's,

couple of things that are helpful to think about. around the same time in March of 2020, we had PPP loans, which came out. A lot of folks took PPP loans. That is a loan from the Small Business Administration, right? That's a kind of a relationship with the federal government. At the time, you had to pay it back. Most folks got forgiven. So that was one situation. Simultaneously to that, the IRS has the ERC, which is the Employee Retention Tax Credit.

So functioning as a tax credit, it's really your money. So the way I would think about it is this way, and this is probably the easiest way to frame it is when folks go ahead and, you know, refile like a 941, a 941X, they will receive the funding that they've applied for. And on top of that, they typically see interest.

Why would you see interest on something that's actually the federal government? It's actually your money. They're saying, well, hey, we've been holding these dollars since 2020, since 2021. And in recognition of that reality, your money has been in our hands. We're going to pay interest to you. So to show, yeah, this is actually a separate from, a separate from the federal government. You're getting your own money back essentially in taking access.

to a tax credits. there's, it functions, you know, being in the nonprofit development space, it functions like a major gift, a lead gift on that capital campaign, that sort of thing. So that's one of the things.

Jeremy (09:25.905)
Working with Michael Van Ecke, working with ICLE schools, with Keith Nix and SCL and ACCS kind of schools, and you've heard so many of these stories. And in a lot of states, I think that ACCS kind of schools thrive in, they weren't too restrictive, in other states, super restrictive. So people were impacted in really different ways depending on the state. I know the school that my daughters went to, had to put up plexiglass and

between every seat in the basement, hundreds, can't imagine how much they spent. How does that impact applying for ERC funds? We're talking about federal funds when things are so different on a state by state basis.

Christopher Loesser (10:07.454)
Right, absolutely. Yeah. So I think there's, two, let me back out just a little bit because we'll get right into that. What, to kind of get at the ethos. So the Trump administration, which is, you know, now back when they were kind of processing, how do we respond to the pandemic? They created in within the ERC kind of two ethoses for the way you might approach it. The first was

If you saw a decline in revenue, if you saw 20 % decline in revenue in 2021 relative to the quarters in 2019. And that's really a relief aim. Hey, you're losing money, we wanna help you out. On the other side of this is disruption. And it's really kind of a technical term, but you can get the idea, disruption kind of like you mentioned. And what are you looking at are the places and spaces where your typical

business operations, your typical ways of doing things are heavily disrupted. And that changes, like you said, from state to state. if you're looking at somewhere like Texas, you probably only saw significant disruption through 2020 because the laws that really mandated the kinds of procedures that you had to take on were really only in effect, I believe it was till like December of 2020 in Texas. And then things changed significantly.

But if you look at a state like California or even North Carolina, Massachusetts, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, places like that, lot of up and down the East Coast, West Coast, you find that the restrictions on things like cleaning and distancing really had a huge impact. And I've listened to story after story of people who, you find some really funny things actually, like, so how did you deal with a mandate to

you know, deal with six feet and your classrooms are 12 by 12, you know, what did you end up doing? And so there's some real funny stuff. There's real sad things as well. But yeah, the the ways that people had to respond to the pandemic were so significant that the government, the ethos there is, we want to repay you for the back flips that you had to do in response to these government orders.

Jeremy (12:27.601)
Okay, and then what is the process and is it risk free? You know, if we've got an administrator listening to this and they've got a lot on their plate, they've got a hundred things vying for their attention and they're thinking, well, maybe there's only 20 % chance we can get money and it's gonna take them this time and are we on the hook to a hundred full consulting even if we don't get any money from the government? Can you speak into some of those questions?

Christopher Loesser (12:42.302)
Of

Christopher Loesser (12:50.526)
Yeah, so stewardship of this is really important. It's kind of unfortunate. It's the middle of the way, a way kind of joke to folks is like the IRS in the pandemic had a baby, you call it ERC, and it's going to be complicated and difficult, right? So it sounds complicated already. So the idea there is

Jeremy (13:07.953)
That sounds complicated and difficult.

Christopher Loesser (13:15.186)
They produced and created this wonderful opportunity. Some folks, I've had schools get as much, I had one school get over a million dollars in ERC funds. It was incredible to see what it's going to be able to do for their school in the coming years. And then some on the lower end. But what you have here is sort of a difficult situation. One is there's lots of money. On the other side, there's this very kind of murky law that's kind of new and

How do we know whether or not to file for it? We certainly don't want to just say, buy $2 million or half a million dollars, 250K. But at the same time, is, I haven't been down this road before and there's not all these, there's not years and years and years of track records or how do you, so what do you do? It's a rough situation. And so the position we often invite people into is, well, you don't want somebody who's done it once or twice, right? Like your local accountant could probably agree, great.

But do you really want them doing their second DRC when you file for half a million dollars? Probably not. Right? I mean, we love them. We have CPAs that work with us. We want, you kind of put it in this situation where we've been down the road with almost 70 schools and walk through the situations and really discern is this, is this appropriate? Is this fiscal? Is the

risk profile on this filing too great? Is this appropriate? We can help dial that in and present that in the findings to the head of school and the financial folks that are connected and kind of make that discernment process. So yeah, I'm not sure if I got all your question there.

Jeremy (14:59.548)
Yeah, that's helpful. How long does the whole process take?

Christopher Loesser (15:02.994)
Yeah, typically, you know, you get a board involved, who knows how long it'll take, typically about four to six hours of school time, if that makes sense. it's, the steps are, typically I have a meeting with the head of school or the head of school and the, know, the CFO type person, finance person, to say, hey, does this make sense? We just put our, get a sense of things, a sketch of it.

Then they sign an engagement letter with us and we do a little discovery. So there's really two moves. One is around just document collection. We need to look through the financials, certain things they upload to our portal. The other thing they do is set up about a 60 to 90 minute meeting where we walk through, what was lunch like? How did you do drop off and dismissal of students?

Were you able to have sports or how about the recitations that you typically do? Did you have to do those differently? Graduation, was that the same or different? So we get kind of in the weeds and then bring that back, do some finding. So four to six hours on the school's end.

Jeremy (16:10.353)
That's fantastic. And then the processing of it, once they do that, how many months does that take?

Christopher Loesser (16:15.964)
Yeah, on our end, like just getting things out to the IRS shouldn't take too long, a few weeks we could kind of really get into it. And then onto the IRS, I think Andrews could speak a little bit more to that side of it.

Andrew King (16:33.322)
Yeah, the IRS is, that is the great crystal ball. How long does it take for the IRS to process ERC filing? So the long and short of it is it should be in the range of a couple months. For the last 18 months, the IRS was really processing these quite slowly. More recently, they have been processing them

at a normal clip. think the IRS wants to process tax filings within six months. And so that would be my hope and expectation that for new filings that we're submitting, it should be on the six month order.

Jeremy (17:22.009)
And then my understanding is there's some real urgency around this, that there's a deadline, which is one of reasons I wanted to do this podcast. Is that accurate? That's coming up?

Christopher Loesser (17:33.244)
Yeah, so April 15th is the final, final opportunity is when the deadline is for ERC. you know, nobody wants to make fast financial decisions, right? That's a bad decision, bad thing. And so, you know, we invite people to consider acting soon, just even to explore, hey, is this something we actually want to do so you can take

Jeremy (17:46.438)
Yeah.

Christopher Loesser (17:56.882)
the time you really want to mull this over and ask the questions and have your CPA talk to us and have your lawyer kind of work it out if they want to. We've worked with quite a few schools, but yeah, April 15th is what we're looking at.

Jeremy (18:13.987)
And is there anything prescriptive that the government has in terms of how the funds are utilized? If a school receives these funds, can they put in a new field house, put in a new theater, give teachers a big raise? Can they do anything?

Christopher Loesser (18:28.168)
That's right. You know, there's nothing prescriptive. One of my favorite stories there, one of my earlier schools, it was an urban school and they just haven't been doing well financially in the last few years. They were able to, I think they were sort of smaller. They saw about $50,000, but their school is in an urban area and it's a little bit, not the nicest of areas, a little bit.

more dangerous where they are. They were able to install a security system and repaint the glass, the windows of their schools. So they're in a safer school now, right? That's the kind of use of funds that we get really excited about hearing these stories on the other end. yeah, no, no strengths. Yeah.

Jeremy (19:13.627)
Well, I love that. That was my first time when I heard about this. It's got to be a bonus employees with this or something. no, it's your money, as you said, not the government's money. And they're giving it back as they should for sure. So OK, on the ERC front, any other things that will be good for folks to know about? Again, if you're listening to this, we really do. You've got a brother-in-law or whoever who is

running a school, text them this podcast and ask them, have you got, did you receive ERC money yet? And our thought, Chris, Andrew, is that if there's even a couple schools from this podcast that maybe benefit several hundred thousand dollars, absolutely, we're thrilled that we did it. Other things for folks to know about though, in terms of this process or anything connected to ERC.

Christopher Loesser (20:05.778)
Yeah, I think generally about ERC, you want to do your due diligence and that can be in kind of one, two ways. One is around risk. So as you consider something of this size, you want to find somebody who's done this a lot of times. Like I think that's important to find someone with expertise. It's kind of a weird thing to say, I'm an expert, you know, but I have worked. It's like I've worked with this niche very

very many times and I'm really excited about the potential it has. I think on the other side is opportunity loss to consider as well. You know, if you have a major donor in your, you know, in the nonprofit space, if you have a major donor and you know they might give $100,000, how many times do you reach out to them? Quite a few, right? You know, they might give you 50. So, you know, even if you've seen, you've maybe you filed for ERC that one time or

You you checked it, you put your feelers out, you did it, you just want to double check. That's the way I would think about it is what if, what if there's actually another little bit out there that you could conservatively file for? How many major donors would you meet for $50,000 or $100,000? Because that's often the apples to apples on this kind of thing.

Andrew King (21:24.682)
One other thing I'll add is, you know, every school is going to be different. There's a phrase in the IRS speak that the facts and circumstances have to line up for someone to qualify for the ERC. And the facts and circumstance for every school are going to be different. And so you may say, that that school over there didn't qualify. Well, that doesn't mean that you don't either.

that another school may qualify for a lot. That doesn't mean that you're going to get the same amount. So every school has its own unique facts and circumstance that plays into where the school is located. know, going back to if a school is located in Texas and Texas was fairly loose in terms of restrictions, well, not in Dallas, not in Houston, not in some more urban areas where they actually did.

continue some of those restrictions longer than the governor did. So every school has its unique set of facts and circumstances that should be considered.

Jeremy (22:26.095)
Okay.

Christopher Loesser (22:34.494)
That's great.

Jeremy (22:36.305)
Fantastic. Again, a hundredfold consulting. Chris, Andrew, how do folks get a hold of y'all? What is the best way to contact you?

Christopher Loesser (22:47.454)
Yeah, if there's information in the show notes, I'd love to, you know, there's a link you could schedule call actually with me, you know, 1530 minutes happy to kind of chat that way. And we'll have kind of the information there. And you can email me as well. So I think that's probably our our best bet. that make sense?

Jeremy (23:06.225)
And I would be willing to bet that 95 % of our listeners have heard the names and love the names, Keith Nix and Michael Van Ecke. And they recommend working with you all very strongly. So I want to just remind folks of that again. And before we let you go, we always end the Anchor podcast the same way. We love to talk about books here at CLT. And your book does not have to be a COVID related ERC book by any means. But the question is just, what is kind of the one book that may be

has impacted you the most, maybe a book that you reread time and time again.

Christopher Loesser (23:40.574)
that's a good one. Man, I should have thought about this. Because I was English major. So you gotta, you just asked me the big question. I'll go to Andrew. If he's got one off the top, let me think here.

Jeremy (23:46.673)
You

Andrew King (23:53.528)
Well, I'll answer it slightly differently. The book I'm reading now is The Highly Sensitive Child that talks about children that can feel very sensitive and how to parent them. I have three daughters, eight, seven, and five. so really helping to parent, particularly one of my children who really can feel the senses of those around her, can react to, you know,

larger than life and that sort of thing. So just kind of a book that incorporates psychology into parenting and that sort of thing.

Jeremy (24:34.085)
That is good. The highly sensitive child. I think in the Tate house, we've got six kids and I think six are highly sensitive. So that would be something my wife and I could benefit from. Chris, what about you?

Christopher Loesser (24:44.542)
Yeah, you know, I think this one is more on the professional side of things for me, but I'm in love with the book Story Brand by Donald Miller. wrote Blue Like Jazz. Some folks know the reason I like it so much. And you have to kind of work with it to make it work. But I work with a lot of people that, you know, they do great work, right? They have amazing, great nonprofit.

Jeremy (24:57.743)
Yeah.

Christopher Loesser (25:12.766)
type work and but they don't know how to communicate it quickly. They don't know how to articulate it. And for me, that was also my story. I couldn't quite get it out in a short time frame. And working on that book and kind of getting on that really helped me and now helping like a bunch of other folks get their message down to like a bite size that you can kind of really understand. So it's been transformative outside the

Jeremy (25:40.72)
Yeah.

Christopher Loesser (25:41.096)
Well, it's my fave, you know? That's one of my faves.

Jeremy (25:43.826)
We have a tradition at CLT where we read out a lot of book every quarter together. And we did that one time. And I think it was the last time we did a contemporary book. We now basically just do kind of classics. And it was a really good read, but we realized it wasn't like a full company read because we realized we had a number of people who had just started and we weren't doing like any of the things that Don Miller recommends at the time. We were like, oh, we should totally be doing that also. And it was a little bit, but he's a very engaging. I remember Blue Light Jazz.

Christopher Loesser (25:52.926)
Yeah. Yeah.

Christopher Loesser (26:04.094)
Sure. Yeah.

Jeremy (26:13.901)
and reading that a number of times. Again, we're here with Chris Lozier and Andrew King, hundredfold consulting. I want to just thank you both for the work you've done for so many classical schools, Catholic schools, classical Christian schools. I know many of them now have funds that they would not have had without your work. So thank you both and keep up the great work.

Christopher Loesser (26:34.568)
Great. It's gonna be with you guys. Love what you're doing. Thanks, Jeremy.

Andrew King (26:36.386)
Thanks Jeremy. Yeah.

Jeremy (26:39.026)
Good to see you.