Instantnonprofit, start your IRS compliant non profit, from idea to 501(c)(3) in less than an hour with Christian Lefer CEO Yippiekiyay

Business Leaders Podcast

Nowadays, getting your idea to IRS-approved 501(c)(3) is a pain in the a**. The unyielding bureaucratic obstacles can test the limits of those looking to process their IRS compliant non-profit. In the midst of red tape, we’re lucky to have companies like Yippiekiyay, whose mission is to ease the inconvenience as much as possible. Christian Lefer, CEO of Yippiekiyay, describes it as an attitude of empowering non-profits by fighting the bad guys. The way that translates is whether you’re starting a nonprofit or getting fundraising compliant, which is a difficult process as well, Yippikiyay will get you from idea to IRS-approved 501(c)(3) in less than an hour for under a thousand dollars – and you’ll never talk to a government agent or lawyer!

Start Your IRS Compliant Non-Profit With Christian Lefer, CEO Yippiekiyay

We’re incredibly fortunate to have Christian LeFer. He’s from Yippiekiyay. He’s the CEO and he’s going to tell us about his company and what it does. Christian, it’s all yours.

Yippiekiyay is an attitude of empowering people and shedding light in the darkness, fighting the bad guys, making the world a better place by helping people get past all of the bureaucratic obstacles to changing their community through a non-profit. The way that translates is whether you’re starting a nonprofit or getting fundraising compliant, which is a difficult process as well, we’ll get you from idea to IRS-approved 501(c)(3) in less than an hour for under $1,000 and you’ll never talk to a government agent or lawyer.

I think about the folks that are out there that have intent that want to go and help the planet, and a great deal of those ideas, like many others, die on the kitchen table. They die because they can’t figure out how to get from A to B. You basically take out that barrier to entry for a budding 501(c)(3).

If you look at all the great movements in history, there’s been a little bit of moral outrage to power them. With this one back in 2009 or 2010, I volunteered to help start a 501(c)(3), and you know how difficult can that be, give me that paperwork. I welcomed the challenge. When I got a letter from the IRS and called in, they said, “Don’t worry, it’ll take about a year for 501(c)(3) to get approved. I questioned, “What in the world? If I wanted to start a used car lot, it would be twenty minutes at the Secretary of State’s website, $50 or $100.” I couldn’t imagine why even attorneys were looking at an eight, ten, or twelve-month cycle to get approved. I took that letter and I called about ten or fifteen extensions north and south of that phone number and I begged, cajoled, bribed. I promised to send chocolates, whatever I could get out of that person on the other end of the line who is processing the files because it was reaching somewhere into that exempt organizations department. At the end of the day, I put together all my research and tried it out and we started getting approvals in 30 days for people long before there was even a company or a process or software conceived, and I thought this is something people could use.

In the midst of Hurricane Harvey and the effects down in South Texas, I think about all the outreach. You’ve got athletes and luminaries raising funds and all I can think of is the bureaucratic nightmare. Somebody raised $4 million or $5 million on donations and gone. How’s that working in the 501(c)(3) space?

What many nonprofits aren’t even unaware of, let alone people who want to start them, is that say you have a little local neighborhood nonprofit and you’re providing some school lunches and maybe some support to people in the neighborhood. You’re in Beaumont or you’re in Port Arthur, Texas. Right now you’ve got the opportunity to reach the entire world and help in the way that you know best on the ground, but you are prohibited from raising money in 41 states if you’re not fundraising-compliant, which is our other main product. We can do that as well with a turbo tax-like process and get you fundraising-compliant quickly and easily at about a third of the cost of an attorney because these should not be barriers to helping our neighbor in my opinion.

We were chatting a little bit before and we were talking about Simon Sinek. We talked about the tilting at windmills. This is a bureaucratic tilting at a windmill for the nonprofit world. In your background, talk a little bit about why it’s important to you to take and help these nonprofits take and grease the skids, for lack of a better term, to get compliant and be able to do their mission.

We hired a visionary friend of a friend who’s become a close friend of mine and advisor, Eliott Frick, out in St Louis. He runs a marketing agency called Big Wide Sky. I said, “I need a name for this company, like InstantNonprofit.com. It needs to become something that’s more expansive and can provide these multiple services.” He said, “Forget the company and forget the products and all that stuff that you’re all caught up. We want to find out where this idea came from because these businesses are very near and dear to the heart of somebody when they’re born.” They asked me about some of the battles I had been involved in and inflection points in my life. I don’t even remember having the exact conversation.

There are people in the world that need somebody to fight for them.

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I was telling them the story when I was eight years old, my mom came home with my little sister from the doctor and my mom was visibly shaken, pretty upset, and she sat me down and she said, your sister Monique isn’t speaking at nearly four and we found out why. It’s because she never will. She’s mentally retarded, we called it back then, or developmentally disabled. I said, “She seems fine to me,” and I ran out to play with my friends and didn’t think twice about it. A few weeks later my single mom who was waitressing that day had to come home from work and pick me up from school. I was in trouble for fighting and punching out a couple of kids in the third grade New Jersey Elementary School. Everybody including the janitors and the principal’s office want to know why and they demand that I say sorry. I had my arms folded and I said, “I’m not sorry,” and I had a little twinkle in my eye and I said, “Those boys will never make fun of the special kids again.”

I realized that day that there are people in the world that need somebody to fight for them because my sister was unable to fend for herself. I didn’t realize it then but I embarked on a whole series of battles in my life, whether it was for free market principles or for my sister or whatever other jobs I’ve taken, things I’ve done. There’s always been a cause associated with them, a holy cause that was greater than me. I figured out backwards. I backed into this, and only after I talked to this marketing agency that I realized I had another holy cause with this company and that was to enable every person out there who runs into the bureaucratic brick walls to make the biggest difference. They can see themselves as great as they possibly can so that they can help their neighbor and help make this world a better place. If we’ve ever seen a time where that’s needed for us to pull together and help each other, it’s today.

If you’re a typical wannabe nonprofit and you and I have an idea, there’s a cause, I want to put this together, historically, how long does it take to go from conception to be an approved 501(c)(3)?

Historically, it probably reached the high end around 2014 where there was talk among law firms. I have an article saved. These big law firms in DC were talking about suing the government for violating their own guidelines that this is only supposed to take 250 or something days. I forget what the statute is or the guideline and we were up to eighteen months on average to approve a 501(c)(3). I don’t want to create any false hopes out there, but our record is nine days from somebody calling us to them getting an IRS approval for their 501(c)(3). We generally like to say that we reduced the time taken by about 75% and the fastest approval times in the industry. That’s from the date of the call to us to IRS approval because it’s not just about the IRS. There are a number of steps in this process, and if you break any link in that chain, it causes you more delays and more challenges and sometimes more money. Our job is to eliminate any red flags and any broken links in that process from day one.

For the audience, 501(c)(3) is just a nonprofit organization. I’m a budding wannabe nonprofit and I’m faced with figuring this out on my own and then I retained counsel or whatever it is somebody directs me to do. What would I be looking at in general for an expense to do this?

Typically, you’d see $3,000 to $5,000 for starting a 501(c)(3) with an attorney. We still get phone calls where people have either given an attorney money, and since I don’t know of any attorneys that say, “Result guaranteed,” you may or may not get out of the traffic ticket. You may or may not get your 501(c)(3) by the time they run out of that $2,500 retainer. We get calls with people that didn’t get across the finish line two years ago. They’re still taking money out of their pockets and their community, donors’ pockets to put lunches in kids’ mouths or books in their hands. We have to clean up some messes sometimes even from other online services that purport to do what we do. We have got this system greased and it’s our job to predict where the problems could lie and smooth all those things out. That’s why to date we’ve only gotten top ratings with the Better Business Bureau and Facebook five star reviews; we don’t get fours.

We’ve talked about many different things that I had the privilege of talking to the ladies that make this happen.

Our staff is incredible.

They were a killer, the three ninjas, the heroes squad. One, you’re faster. As I understand it, you’re less expensive. What is the typical range for somebody that would utilize you to form a 501(c)(3)? What range of pricing could they look at?

The fees for us to do this right now is $677 for our part of those services or $967, and that falls along a natural break where the IRS created a more streamlined solution for smaller nonprofits that predict or project that there’ll be under $50,000 per year in any of their first three years. What’s interesting is the IRS are collectors. They know how to get money out of people and they’re not usually very ambiguous about it, “This is a dollar total.” With this process, they are asking for a boy scout’s honor, best guess. If you believe that you’ll be below $50,000 and you apply on that basis and you exceed your expectations, they don’t even have a mechanism to come back for that additional fee because their fees below $50,000 are $275 to submit that file, so you have our $677 plus $275.

If you’re above the $50,000 per year projected, our fees are $967, moderately more for quite a bit more work, but $850 for the IRS filing fee. It brings a sub $1,000 proposition to almost $2,000 proposition. They want your best honest guess. If you’re going around buying houses for veterans and converting them for ADA use, etc., it’s not going to fly that you’re $50,000 or below, but many organizations do take longer to get up to those larger numbers. We don’t advise or influence people unduly. It’s like anything. If you’re going to launch a small business, don’t buy 1,000 hammers for your new hardware store; buy twenty and see how they go.

One of the questions that comes to mind is obviously there’s a lot of folks that have good intent in mind. Why doesn’t everybody know about you or use you?

Soon everyone will, I hope. I’m the CEO and I have to have some irrational beliefs, but we’re an early stage growth company. I wouldn’t quite characterize this as a startup anymore. We’re racking up thousands of customers at this point. We are emerging growth and eventually you have to use all these different channels and different media to get to people. If you talk to a high schooler today, Facebook, they’re like, “Dad, you’re old.” My kids go, “Dad, I’m not going to answer you on Facebook. That’s so old school.” My mom thinks she’s cool because grammy finally got on Facebook. It’s Snapchat, it’s Instagram, who knows what’s next. You now have to diversify your ability to reach people and go where they are.

People are abandoning TV and picking up Netflix. I don’t know that we’ll ever run a traditional TV ad by the time we get big enough to do traditional TV ads. Our job is to get it in front of as many people as we can. When we do, we do well on Google paid ads, for example, because when we do get in front of people, the value proposition is clear. We talk to where people are at, not like a bunch of accountants and lawyers using stock photography and clean language. We don’t use dirty language, but we don’t use those stilted terms. We talk in real language to real people and help solve real problems.

IRS Compliant Non-Profit: We talk in real language to real people and help solve real problems.

We were chatting a little bit about this notion of a barrier reduction in what you’re doing. You took a similar approach with the structure of your company. Talk to me about that evolution of that thought process on how you wanted to take and structure your company to follow your belief system?

It was Oliver Wendell Holmes who said, “I can’t define pornography but I know it when I see it.” I hate to use that example in a way but I don’t necessarily know what’s best for this company at any given moment when asked on the spot and facing a new situation. We’re facing new situations every single day in the moment. What I’ve learned is that I know the right one when I see it. I’ve also learned because of my amazing Chief Operating Officer, John West, who started out as a Google ad vendor and maybe a marketing vendor and has come to wrap his arms around a majority of operational, staff, advertise, all that systemic stuff in the company.

John and I read Simon Sinek. We have similar beliefs that people are greater than some institutions might want to give them credit for and they can make decisions that suit them and also suit everyone else. Adam Smith believed this as well. We’ve ended up deferring by necessity often to the staff, “We have this problem. A customer complained there is a glitch in the software,” and most management want to go run and fix the problem themselves and then go tell the staff how it’s going to be fixed. We have flipped that on its head and our first instinct, because we have learned how capable these young women are that you interviewed, our young staff, to take a look at a problem and be the best ones to fix it because they are the ones that are dealing with the customers, using the tools, operating the company on a day to day, and the brain trust that we’ve built.

It’s like a computer before the internet. You might’ve been able to crunch some spreadsheets and things, but once these computers are all connected and people are connected, these solutions that come out of that are absolutely mind blowing. I don’t care how smart you are. I’m not smarter than three people in my staff or five people collectively coming up with a solution for something. It’s been amazing to find some raw talented people. We did pick some good people and help them grow by empowering them. Sometimes it’s like parenting. You got to let them make a mistake and encourage them to continue.

You also took the approach of sharing the financials of the company and how that had a bearing on their behavior and activity. What’s your observations or impression of that initiative on your part?

What we encountered was, because of age, Millennials have grown up in a world where everything has been sold to everyone and a lot of things have come out not like they were sold, whether it’s government or Wells Fargo creating fake accounts. You name the examples of the betrayal of corporate, government, etc., and maybe in our own lives. Nobody’s unscathed by this, even our own families. They have BS detectors, so they don’t want to be considered salespeople and they weren’t hired as salespeople either, but they’re wanting a level of honesty and authenticity and integrity that’s lacking in the world in many ways.

Everybody’s on Facebook putting on their best face and it’s like dating. It’s maybe why divorce is so high. People go out in their best shiniest outfit to the best shiniest restaurant and when the diaper is flying across the living room ten years later, things are not so rosy.

We have a motto in the company called make things suck less. That means for you as a staff and for us as a company and for our customers, how can we organically continue to make things better for people? Part of that was sharing the financials. They have certain goals in their lives and we sat down and thought of how do we connect what we want, which is company growth. We want sales, we want to close, we know we have the best solution. We’re doing a favor by closing a customer to work with us instead of the online solution or a lawyer down the street. How do we get them to do that if they don’t want to sell and push things on people and rope them in and all those old tactics that don’t work anymore? The way to do that was to share with them. They’re believers, as you can tell. They believe that what we’re doing is a good thing.

We had our finance guy come in and teach them how to read a financial, which I didn’t know how to do until a few years ago by necessity with this company, but also how to tie their life goals, the raise they want. They want to make a certain amount of money, they want to get married, buy a house, do all those things. Those come out of financial results from this company, so how can they choose their own adventure? If they want more vacation time, how can they take care of their fellow employees? How does that impact the company? How do refunds impact the company? What’s come out of that is a set of policies that is inherently humane and loving. Our job as a company is to love people by giving them a great service, backing it up with honesty and integrity and being the absolute best. We want to, and not for any other reason, to serve people and the money will come. We’ve seen a lot of growth because of this philosophy.

Whatever you were doing before here, before this company, there’s this thought process after you went through the journey of...