Jeff Russell and the art of making yourself less necessary

On July 15, 2017, Jeff Russell left his company behind and got on a bicycle. His plan was a solo journey from Vancouver to Tijuana, roughly 2,000 miles, carrying a tent and his own gear. Back in Boise, board member Gary Budzinski took over the CEO’s job. Before Russell departed, Budzinski watched him delete most of the social media apps from his phone.

Russell was doing about 65 miles a day when the trip was reported that August. Jitasa’s board had encouraged him to go. The company offered six weeks of paid leave to employees with five years of service; its founder was the fifth person to use the benefit.

For an entrepreneur whose business asks clients to entrust essential work to somebody else, the arrangement makes a good opening scene. The accountants were still accounting. Another executive was minding the company. Russell had a road to follow. Delegation, usually delivered in a conference room with a diagram, had acquired a tent.

A small organization should be allowed to stay small

Ten years earlier, while studying at Yale, Russell had described a problem with the nonprofit funding market. Smaller organizations served particular needs but lacked economies of scale. Growing larger could dilute the very focus that made them useful. Administrative costs presented a dilemma: stay small and carry the expense, or expand and risk losing the original purpose.

His proposed answer was to pool administrative services through outside providers. Several small organizations could share the advantages of scale while keeping their individual missions. In 2007, he was already arguing that such an arrangement would let them “stay small and innovate.” The phrase leaves room for a good idea to remain small.

Russell’s own preparation crossed several kinds of work. He trained in industrial engineering at Georgia Tech, advised Fortune 500 companies on business process outsourcing at Accenture, and oversaw Asian operations for supply chain company PACCESS from Bangkok. Those jobs concerned how work gets organized across people and places. At Yale, he brought that experience to a sector where the administrative budget had to compete with the cause.

The distinction matters. A nonprofit can be excellent at its mission without wanting to become an accounting organization. Russell was proposing a business in the space between those two abilities. Good intentions would still need reliable books. The people keeping those books could develop expertise across many clients, instead of each client starting the learning process alone.

Two years before the doors opened

Russell began developing Easy Office in 2006. He earned his Yale MBA in 2008, and the business opened that June in Boise’s Water Cooler, a nonprofit business incubator. The name sounded almost aggressively practical. In a field full of urgent missions, he was offering help with the office.

The preparation was unusually patient. In a 2009 interview, Russell recalled two years of market testing, feedback and planning during business school. He called that time a “luxury.” Easy Office entered the William James Foundation’s business-plan competition in 2008 and reached the semifinals. The judges’ feedback became another input to refine the proposition. He was looking for investors willing to give a socially minded business time.

Boise supplied an affordable base for a shared service center. Nonprofits supplied a specific customer group. This combination put an operational choice behind the social ambition: concentrate the work, understand the customer, and make the service accessible.

His recollection of the early workspace is particularly economical. Russell later described the beginning to web partner Valitics as “just me in a 150 square foot office.” That is approximately enough room for a desk, a chair, and an ambition that has not yet learned to sit quietly. Valitics remained a web partner as the company developed its lead-generation systems and online resources.

The useful business behind the good cause

Jitasa’s work lives among donations, payroll, reconciliations and monthly reports. Those nouns rarely make a fundraising poster. They do help an organization know what it can afford and what it must account for. In a 2022 interview, Russell described the company’s service plainly: “We deliver accounting solutions exclusively tailored for nonprofits.” Exclusively is the operative word.

The customer’s mission could vary; the accounting team’s concentration remained. That concentration gave the business a repeatable field of work. It also put a service provider behind organizations whose public achievements were happening elsewhere. Russell’s contribution was often one step removed from the visible result, which is rather the point of an outsourced service.

He put his argument into a book in 2013, Do What You Do Best: Outsourcing as Capacity Building in the Nonprofit Sector. The title states the bargain without much ceremony. Capacity can come from deciding which tasks belong with specialists. A leader need not turn every necessary function into an internal department.

His connections to the sector extended beyond selling it services. Russell became a founding partner of Idaho Social Venture Partners. His public professional profile records volunteering with Create Common Good and board service at Riverstone International School, including finance committee responsibilities. The overlap is practical: the founder helping nonprofits with their accounts also spent time inside community organizations where financial decisions had consequences.

An employee supplied the name

Easy Office became Jitasa in November 2012, taking a name suggested by an employee. The company translates it as “The Spirit of Serving Others.” A month earlier it had become a certified B Corporation. The new identity gave the office work a stated purpose while preserving the narrow focus on nonprofits.

By then, the business had opened an operations office in Thailand. Bosnia followed in 2016, with later expansion into Costa Rica and the Philippines. The service was built around American nonprofit clients, but the people doing the work were spread across countries. Russell’s earlier experience managing operations from Bangkok had a recognizable echo in the organization he built.

Acquisitions added another dimension. In 2016, Jitasa brought together accounting services and technology businesses, including AVF and K12 Enterprises. Russell described an integration intended to develop new combinations of products and services. The units were initially operating separately while the company worked through that process. Combining businesses was work in its own right, rather than a result achieved by signing the paperwork.

That distinction would matter again in his next venture. Buying a firm brings knowledge, relationships and working habits into the room. The value depends on what happens afterward. Russell’s account of the Jitasa integration emphasized new offerings and investment in growth, with hiring across the combined business units. The acquisition strategy was already becoming part of his operating experience.

“stay small and innovate.”

Jeff Russell, Yale Insights, 2007

A second venture organized by industry

In September 2023, Russell launched Keeping Count with Housatonic Partners. Its first two acquisitions were RealCount and Reveal Business Solutions, providers of virtual accounting, bookkeeping, CFO and payroll services. The intended customers included professional services and real estate businesses. He was moving beyond nonprofits while keeping specialization at the center of the proposition.

His diagnosis was that accounting firms had historically been organized around geography. A nearby accountant might know the town. Keeping Count would organize expertise around the client’s industry, with dedicated professionals and brands. Familiarity with the work of a particular kind of business would be part of the service, alongside the accounting itself.

This was a new audience for a recognizable idea. Jitasa had concentrated on one sector; Keeping Count would build several industry-specific practices. Remote delivery allowed expertise and the customer to be in different places. The important proximity would be between the accountant’s experience and the business owner’s needs.

The partnership also put capital behind acquisitions. Housatonic managing director Mark Hilderbrand pointed to Russell’s experience in the accounting and bookkeeping industry. At launch, the platform was seeking firms with roughly $1 million to $20 million in revenue. These were existing service businesses with customers and teams, a different starting point from the lone desk in Boise.

Four acquisitions, and a question about careers

Total Accounting and Bookkeeping Solutions joined the platform in December 2023. Founded in 1996, TAABS brought bookkeeping, payroll, bill payment and invoicing services across industries including e-commerce, professional services and real estate. Its owner, Song Pettus, became KeepingCount’s chief operating officer. An acquisition also supplied a leader.

Ximplifi followed in March 2024, the fourth acquisition since the platform’s launch. The Wichita business specialized in vacation-rental accounting, using its technology to collect data from property management systems and booking platforms. Founder Jesse King Ehret joined as president of RealCount. Here the industry focus had a concrete shape: rental managers, their systems, and the financial reports assembled from them.

Russell’s response to the acquisition on LinkedIn widened the lens to employment. His goal, he wrote, included creating “careers worth having,” with purpose and opportunity, while helping the small and midsize businesses embedded in the American economy. He described building around specific market niches as a fun process.

The ambition has two audiences. Clients want a service that understands their businesses. Employees want a place where specialist experience can become a career. A larger platform has to make both propositions work. Russell’s public statement placed them together, giving the acquisition story a human test alongside its commercial one.

The founder changes seats

On January 1, 2026, Russell became Jitasa’s executive chairman. Don Needs, the chief financial officer, and Jon Osterburg, the chief operating officer, became co-CEOs. Each had spent more than a decade at the company. The handover followed a year of succession planning, with Russell retaining a role in strategic support and vision.

The announcement described a business serving more than 1,650 U.S. nonprofits. It reported annual revenue growth of 25 to 40 percent over the preceding three years and recruitment and onboarding of more than 350 global staff during that period. These figures described the organization at the handover, rather than the room in which its founder began.

“Jitasa has always been about service, integrity, and stewardship,” Russell said. Stewardship is a fitting word for a founder choosing a new seat. Needs and Osterburg had already held responsibility for the company’s finances and operations. The succession made their authority explicit, while keeping Russell connected to the business he started.

The bicycle journey offers an earlier, temporary version of the same arrangement: somebody else took the CEO’s responsibilities, and the founder had something else to do. The 2026 transition is its own event, with its own plan and people. Together they give Russell’s career a recurring concern that reaches beyond bookkeeping: how to build work that can be trusted to others.

A small nonprofit can keep its mission. An accountant can become a specialist. A founder can hand over daily leadership. Across these different decisions, Russell has kept returning to the allocation of work. There is a certain generosity in making that allocation well. It leaves room for other people to be useful, and, occasionally, for the person who started everything to get on a bicycle.