Looking Forward to 2016

The past year has been an exciting one for Enky, as we have grown from an idea to a true business start-up. Enky was started back in June by our co-founders & executive team, Mike Coté & Bryan Andrade, as a simple way for professionals across the US to find, track, & complete their continuing education credits. Since then, we have been hard at work on further developing & testing the idea through our interactions with future users & course provider partners who will form the 2 sides of our Professional Education Marketplace. Your feedback has been critical in learning what different professionals from industries as varied as healthcare (for humans & animals), finance, & design/engineering need in a continuing education solution. Please continue interacting with us via our Facebook & Twitter pages, as well as over email, so we can listen to your concerns & suggestions & use them to improve our service.

Speaking of the Enky service, we are excited to announce that we will be launching a public beta version of the Enky Professional Education Marketplace during the 2nd Quarter of 2016! This beta will have all of the features we have detailed in our previous blog posts, including: a full search to find continuing education courses throughout the US, Enky SmartTrack to help users track & manage their past, current, & future education courses, Deadline Digest to remind you of upcoming deadlines & courses, and our proprietary Course Recommendation Engine which uses browsing history & information shared by the user to tailor course suggestions to each individual professional. Registration for the public beta is now open at enky.com & is simple & completely free of charge. We are deeply committed to serving the professional community as best we can & we are sure that we will not let you down. Stay tuned for more frequent updates on our progress with the beta release & all of the great professional content you have come to expect from the Enky team. We look forward to seeing you in the Professional Education Marketplace!

Sincerely,

The Enky Team

Republican Tax Plans: How will they Impact CPAs & Tax Preparers?

I'm sure many of you watched the admittedly entertaining spectacle that was the second Republican Presidential Debate of 2015 last night. During that 3 hour long information & misinformation packed program, many of the candidates touched on their plans for the outdated, ineffective, & altogether noncompetitive tax code America has been saddled with since it was largely enacted in 1986. Some of the prospective Presidents proposed adjustments to the current system of Progressive Taxation that has been in place since the Revenue Act of 1913 officially established the income tax we Americans know today. Different candidates proposed a Flat Tax on income, while others scrapped income taxation altogether for a Fair Tax. What do all of these mean & what affect will they have on the professionals that spend their entire careers working to help average Americans legally deal with the taxation system?

Before delving into the affect these changes may have on CPAs & tax preparers across the country, we need to discuss exactly what these candidates are proposing. Changes to our current Progressive Taxation system of income tax include taxing carried interest, which is basically a performance fee often paid to large fund managers, at normal rates. This change will largely affect the wealthier taxpayers who are currently able to pay taxes on these performance fees at a lower rate than they would had the carried interest been normal wage income. Candidates who advocate a Flat Tax on income are for a single rate for all taxpayers no matter what their income, but this rate varies depending on the candidate (Rand Paul is for 14.5%, while Ben Carson is for somewhere between 10 & 15%). Some of these candidates, including Ted Cruz, also advocate for significant government spending reductions to go along with this Flat Tax, one of which is the closure of the IRS. Finally, the Fair Tax advocated by candidate Mike Huckabee replaces a tax on income with a 23% tax on all purchases.

Now that we know what tax plans have been supported by the Republican candidates who have publicly discussed reforming taxes, how would these plans affect those who administer the tax code & work with Americans everyday to help them navigate through financial & tax decisions? First of all, many of the more radical changes to the tax code advocated last night would abolish the "evil" Internal Revenue Service, or IRS. This crucial federal department is responsible for the collection of the bulk of federal government revenue, which is the source of funds that keep the government functional & working. Abolishing this organization would not only seriously hamper the government's ability to collect tax revenue & monitor the taxpaying (or avoiding) activities of citizens & corporations, it would, as of 2014, put over 84,000 men & women out of work (see page 76 for statistics). The gutting of the tax code would also destroy the currently thriving tax preparation industry, which employed over 65,000 people in 2012 & has large seasonal hiring surges that temporarily increase that figure. The tax preparation companies often give on-the-job training that allows temporary workers to learn important skills that can help them land permanent jobs in the industry. Not least of all, accounting firms that employ CPAs would take a large hit from a massive tax code change, especially in the corporate tax code. Many CPAs at large & small firms alike specialize in taxation & would immediately either have to relearn a new specialty within the profession or switch professions entirely.

As much as candidates from both sides of the aisle, Republican & Democrat alike, love to boast about how they would reform America's broken tax code, most of them have completely ignored the impacts those changes would have on a large subset of professionals that many Americans rely on at least once a year to help them through important financial & tax decisions. Please share this with any accountant, tax preparer, or CPA friends or family you may have, as all should understand what these potential changes could mean for their professional lives. As a CPA myself, I know what kind of impact these changes can & will have. Thanks for reading & please subscribe to the Enky blog for more professional content!


Yours truly,

Mike Coté
CPA & CEO/Co-Founder, Enky Inc.

How to Increase Your Profits for Free with Enky

On this blog, we’ve been talking a lot about what Enky can and will do for professionals across the country. What we haven’t discussed are all of the benefits Enky will bring to the professional education industry, especially those independent course providers that make up such a large portion of the current system. We aim to fundamentally change the way professional education works, but these changes will not only be beneficial to course providers individually, they will lead to overall growth in the industry space as a whole.

The primary benefit we can offer course providers is our laser focus on the most important thing to them: their bottom line profits. Unless a provider so chooses, they do not pay Enky a dime unless a course of theirs actually sells through the Enky marketplace. By ensuring that the only costs to providers are directly driven by sales & collection of customer cash, Enky removes a significant portion of the risk related to marketing and promoting of individual courses as well as the overall provider brand. We take care of the customer acquisition, all providers need to do is create the quality content that professionals have come to expect from educators today. For providers that would like to promote themselves further within the Enky marketplace, we build custom marketing plans that will help drive targeted professional groups to the courses on offer. Through these initiatives, Enky can assist with many of the problems that today’s course providers might face, including low registration figures for live courses (both online & in person) & directing traffic towards more profitable or desirable courses.

Another benefit Enky’s marketplace system provides is the offloading of the significant cybersecurity risks that come along with credit card processing & data collection & storage in the modern age. We live in an era of increasing cyberterrorism & hacking attacks meant to steal personal & professional data, including credit card numbers, professional license information, & address information. Course providers should not be in the business of safeguarding this valuable data, as there is no need for companies & universities that focus on education to be liable in the case of a catastrophic data breach. Thankfully, here at Enky, safeguarding important data is a critical part of our business & we would be more than happy to take the risk out of the hands of course providers. We also handle the other aspects of business, including direct marketing & information processing, so that providers can focus on what they do best: educating the next generation of successful professionals.

Finally, we use our emphasis on data & information collection & processing to deliver cutting-edge analytics that allow course providers to improve their decision making. By changing raw data into usable business intelligence, we can bring unseen trends to life. We analyze the buying & browsing habits of the entirety of our user base to generate important insights that help identify trends in education, courses that are underperforming, & profitability of courses & marketing campaigns. These analytics are delivered directly through the Enky platform & can make the difference between a profitable year & a year of losses.

We strive to make professional education better for all parties, learners & educators alike. We look forward to working with a wide variety of providers from all manner of professions. If you are a course provider & are interested in working with Enky or learning more about the platform, please email me directly at mcote.enky@gmail.com . I would be more than happy to answer any questions, alleviate any concerns, or just have a conversation about the professional education industry. We are excited to work with any & all course providers to bring the hard-working professionals of the United States the quality educational content they are searching for.

Yours truly,

Mike Coté
Enky, Inc. CEO/Co-Founder

The Enky Team, Part I

Welcome back to the Enky, Inc. blog! It has been about a month since our last post & I’m sure some of you have been wondering where we went and if Enky was coming back. Rest assured we have been working hard in that time not only to further develop the business and underlying software, but to learn how best to serve the market & our future users. As the summer winds down & autumn rapidly approaches, this blog will be updated more regularly with posts about the company, our mission to serve professionals of all types & how we will accomplish that mission, the state of the various professions in the US, and real experiences from professionals across fields as varied as social work, law, accounting, and medicine. We look forward to engaging with both our future professional users and course provider partners through this blog, and encourage readers to interact with us through the commentary section on each post.

Before we get into more details of how Enky will make the lives of professionals and course providers much simpler, more efficient, and less costly, I would like to properly introduce myself and the rest of the team behind the company. My name is Mike Coté & I am the CEO & co-founder of Enky, Inc., the first online professional education marketplace. I grew up in a household with two parents who are diligent, hard-working businesspeople & that has always driven me to want to achieve the success they earned. Ever since I was in elementary school, I have been trying to think of ways to start a business or project that could become a success. Whether it was trying to get my classmates to join the cast of the superhero movie I was writing & directing (it was too far before its time unfortunately, and I was in 3rd grade), or launching my own toy business during 6th grade study hall, I have always had an entrepreneurial streak. I vividly remember overseeing the paper football assembly line, while simultaneously trying to figure out what pricing to use for our variety of products & how to finish my math homework before class the next day. The experience I had starting & running that business over a couple years with some friends in middle school truly cemented in my mind a dream of one day becoming a successful entrepreneur.

Thankfully, I was able to continue to follow my passion in high school, as I studied business & learned more about what it really takes to understand how an actual business runs. By joining business clubs, competing in a wide variety of business plan competitions, and throwing myself fully into school projects where entrepreneurial spirit was required, the passion I had was further stoked. Some of my fondest memories of these years involved our business club’s weekly pizza sales fundraising events, which I ran with the help of two of my best friends. I am proud to say that we not only found a pizza supplier that cost less & had better quality than that of the years prior, but we were able to significantly increase the profitability of these weekly fundraisers, which helped send deserving students to business competitions across the state & country. At Boston College (go Eagles!), I studied accounting & finance, while competing in the school’s venture capital competition with classmates. Although the business idea we presented did not win, going through the process of speaking with start-up lawyers, angel investors, & venture capitalists was an enlightening experience that reinforced my desire to move my career towards entrepreneurship.

Coming out of graduate school, I joined Ernst & Young as an auditor & CPA. Following this career path, I thought, would give me great experience in multiple types of businesses varying by size, industry, and public/private status. In the two years I spent at EY, I gained a great deal of knowledge on these subjects from a wonderfully diverse & international group of managers, teammates, & clients that I had the privilege of working with. After leaving EY, it was initially a challenge to move on with my life & career, but the spark of entrepreneurship caught fire within me again & with the help of my co-founder Bryan Andrade, my family & friends, Enky was born. I am extremely excited to be able to share this ambitious vision for the future of professional education with you, & I look forward to the opportunity to deliver upon that vision. Stay tuned to this blog for further updates & bios for the rest of our team, and I sincerely hope you give us the chance to impress you. I know we will.

Yours truly,

Mike Coté
Enky, Inc. CEO/Co-Founder

The Enky Team, Part I

Welcome back to the Enky, Inc. blog! It has been about a month since our last post & I’m sure some of you have been wondering where we went and if Enky was coming back. Rest assured we have been working hard in that time not only to further develop the business and underlying software, but to learn how best to serve the market & our future users. As the summer winds down & autumn rapidly approaches, this blog will be updated more regularly with posts about the company, our mission to serve professionals of all types & how we will accomplish that mission, the state of the various professions in the US, and real experiences from professionals across fields as varied as social work, law, accounting, and medicine. We look forward to engaging with both our future professional users and course provider partners through this blog, and encourage readers to interact with us through the commentary section on each post.

Before we get into more details of how Enky will make the lives of professionals and course providers much simpler, more efficient, and less costly, I would like to properly introduce myself and the rest of the team behind the company. My name is Mike Coté & I am the CEO & co-founder of Enky, Inc., the first online professional education marketplace. I grew up in a household with two parents who are diligent, hard-working businesspeople & that has always driven me to want to achieve the success they earned. Ever since I was in elementary school, I have been trying to think of ways to start a business or project that could become a success. Whether it was trying to get my classmates to join the cast of the superhero movie I was writing & directing (it was too far before its time unfortunately, and I was in 3rd grade), or launching my own toy business during 6th grade study hall, I have always had an entrepreneurial streak. I vividly remember overseeing the paper football assembly line, while simultaneously trying to figure out what pricing to use for our variety of products & how to finish my math homework before class the next day. The experience I had starting & running that business over a couple years with some friends in middle school truly cemented in my mind a dream of one day becoming a successful entrepreneur.

Thankfully, I was able to continue to follow my passion in high school, as I studied business & learned more about what it really takes to understand how an actual business runs. By joining business clubs, competing in a wide variety of business plan competitions, and throwing myself fully into school projects where entrepreneurial spirit was required, the passion I had was further stoked. Some of my fondest memories of these years involved our business club’s weekly pizza sales fundraising events, which I ran with the help of two of my best friends. I am proud to say that we not only found a pizza supplier that cost less & had better quality than that of the years prior, but we were able to significantly increase the profitability of these weekly fundraisers, which helped send deserving students to business competitions across the state & country. At Boston College (go Eagles!), I studied accounting & finance, while competing in the school’s venture capital competition with classmates. Although the business idea we presented did not win, going through the process of speaking with start-up lawyers, angel investors, & venture capitalists was an enlightening experience that reinforced my desire to move my career towards entrepreneurship.

Coming out of graduate school, I joined Ernst & Young as an auditor & CPA. Following this career path, I thought, would give me great experience in multiple types of businesses varying by size, industry, and public/private status. In the two years I spent at EY, I gained a great deal of knowledge on these subjects from a wonderfully diverse & international group of managers, teammates, & clients that I had the privilege of working with. After leaving EY, it was initially a challenge to move on with my life & career, but the spark of entrepreneurship caught fire within me again & with the help of my co-founder Bryan Andrade, my family & friends, Enky was born. I am extremely excited to be able to share this ambitious vision for the future of professional education with you, & I look forward to the opportunity to deliver upon that vision. Stay tuned to this blog for further updates & bios for the rest of our team, and I sincerely hope you give us the chance to impress you. I know we will.

Yours truly,

Mike Coté
Enky, Inc. CEO/Co-Founder

Our Feature Presentation

Thanks for coming back to the Enky, Inc. blog! If this is your first visit, my name is Mike Coté and I am the co-founder and CEO of Enky, the first online professional education marketplace. Enky was founded by professionals to make the continuing professional education process more transparent and competitive, while allowing customers greater selection and freedom of choice. Our mission is to make all aspects of professional education and accreditation as simple and straightforward as possible, while providing features that save users’ time and organizations money. In this blog post, I will describe some of these key features in more detail, including our proprietary Course Recommendation Engine. These features are only available to registered users of Enky.com, which will be launching in the coming months (subscribe to this blog for updates!). Fortunately for you, registering as an Enky user is completely free of charge! Now, let’s discuss some of the amazing benefits you receive as a registered user at Enky.com.

•    Enky SmartTrack: SmartTrack allows users to upload previously taken credits, track and manage current and future education, and set and measure progress towards certification or education-related goals.
•    Course Recommendation Engine: Enky’s proprietary Course Recommendation Engine (CRE) combines individual user data with broad insights generated from collective Enky user browsing activity to learn about a user’s interests and suggest courses that both suit the user’s distinct interests and fulfill mandatory credit requirements. The CRE may even help you find a field you would never have known you were interested in!
•    Deadline Digest: This periodic newsletter is customized to each individual user to best remind her of her upcoming certification, licensure, and course sign-up deadlines. Deadline Digest also includes recommendations from CRE about which courses to take, as well as updates on new regulations that apply to the individual’s profession(s) and state(s) of licensure.

Enky SmartTrack
Enky SmartTrack is the backbone of the features suite that is offered to Enky users, and many other Enky features interact with and use the data gathered by SmartTrack to enhance the value provided to our customers. SmartTrack is our system for tracking and managing continuing education credits and courses, as well as setting and measuring progress towards education or profession-related goals. SmartTrack allows users to upload previous course credit data to the Enky cloud, where it will be synced and compared against our comprehensive course database. If the course is found in our archives, the relevant information related to the course will be pre-populated into the user’s profile in the SmartTrack system. Once a user books a course through Enky, that course and any subsequent credit(s) gained therein are automatically associated with the user in SmartTrack. The system associates users with the profession(s) they are licensed in, as well as the state(s) in which they are licensed so as to automatically calculate the progress made towards mandated professional education requirements (if any). Users may also set goals for themselves manually or select from curated goals related to certifications, education credits, or other professional development milestones and measure progress towards these goals within SmartTrack.

Course Recommendation Engine
“We have CPE Credits for YOU!!!”, “CONTINUING LEGAL EDUCATION – CLASSES AVAILABLE”, “Online Nursing Degr. – Attend Day or Night!” Don’t you hate spam emails like these? I sure do, and it seems like many of you do as well. One of the biggest complaints we have heard related to professional education is not always the inability to find some sort of course for credit, but the inability to find any courses or trainings that are actually of interest or that can be useful to professionals practicing in the field today. This is where we come in. Enky is developing a proprietary Course Recommendation Engine (CRE), which combines individualized user data with broader insights gained from the Enky user base to suggest courses which may be of interest to a specific user. We are able to do this by leveraging our massive database resources, along with informed participation from our registered user base.

Individual user data gathered from SmartTrack will only be used to suggest courses for that particular user, while general Enky browsing history and surveys of users will be used to continually improve the algorithm. The CRE will be able to combine these data sources to generate topics of interest to users and suggest areas of study that the user may not have even considered. Within these categories, the CRE will recommend specific courses that not only fit both the individual user’s interests and preferences, but work towards any SmartTrack mandatory education requirements or user-set goals. The Course Recommendation Engine will be a major feature of Enky.com at launch, and will only improve with time and increased use. Here at Enky, we aspire to be a model for transparent and fair use of customer data, and we promise to do our best to be an example for responsible data collection while still delivering a great service.

Deadline Digest
Now that you have registered for an Enky account, uploaded your previous professional education credits into SmartTrack, and had the Course Recommendation Engine suggest a few interesting and useful courses, what else is there for you to do on Enky.com? Once all that is done, you can use the site to browse thousands of professional education courses from providers throughout the United States, compare courses and providers to see what best fits your unique situation, save your favorites, and book a course directly through the Enky platform if you so desire! Even after all of that, there is still more…the dreaded licensure and certification renewal process. Every state in the US has their own special rules and regulations for each distinct profession and even people practicing the same profession in the same state may have different license or certification renewal deadlines! Even if you do happen to remember the right deadline, what happens if you missed out on the required continuing education credits? Or you took enough credits, but in the wrong subjects? How is one to navigate the continually changing and confusing list of laws and regulations? Enky has the solution to that problem as well. Deadline Digest is our automated email newsletter that is customized for each registered Enky user. Each ‘issue’ of the Digest will contain summaries of the newest and most updated rules and regulations pertaining to the specific user’s profession (s) and state(s) of licensure, including any mandatory continuing education, the number of credits required, and what specific courses or type of courses are needed (if any).

Never miss another renewal deadline with help from Enky.com!

Deadline Digest has more than just law summaries, however. Every copy will update users on their progress towards mandated education credit goals and when they are ‘due’, where the user stacks up against their peers in terms of this progress, and Enky’s tips and suggestions on how to get to license renewal in good standing. These proactive updates will help ensure that licensed professionals remain that way – licensed.

Please let us know in the comments section below if you love, like, or hate these features, if there is anything we can do to improve upon them, or if you want more information about the features or Enky in general. If you are interested in learning more about the company, check out my first blog post titled “What is Enky?” We sincerely hope you will join us at Enky.com once the site is officially launched in the coming months, and we look forward to seeing you back here soon for more information on our team, services we provide for enterprise and small business, and guest posts from other licensed professionals.

Yours truly,

Mike Coté
Enky, Inc. CEO/Co-Founder

What is Enky?

Welcome to the Enky Inc. blog! My name is Mike Coté and I am the CEO and co-founder of Enky, Inc., a brand new web start-up committed to changing professional education for the better. We are focused on making the continuing education process simpler, faster, cheaper and more transparent for professionals of all types, from accountants to veterinarians and everyone in between. Our free to use marketplace will allow professionals to search a comprehensive database of thousands of continuing education courses from state-accredited providers, as well as training and professional development courses from vetted non-accredited providers. Finally, professionals will be able to easily compare course content, pricing, and user reviews across various providers to find the best fit for their learning style, budget, and busy schedule!

Professionals who visit Enky will be able to search our marketplace free of charge without being forced to register for an account. However, visitors who choose to register as Enky users through our quick and easy process will have access to a myriad of helpful, free features to assist them on their professional development journey. Registered Enky users will be able to track their continuing education credit data through our unique credit management tool, set and measure progress towards certification and training goals, and even receive automated course registration and license renewal deadline reminders. What really makes Enky special is our proprietary Course Recommendation Engine, which combines a user’s previous education credit history with insights gained from users’ Enky browsing data to suggest new courses the user may be interested in taking. This use of data to enhance professional learning and development is the first of its kind and will serve to make choosing professional education courses easier as well as opening up users to new areas of study in their fields.

As we approach our launch in the coming months, this blog will be updated with the status of our progress towards the launch as well as further information about Enky, our team, and the features and support you can come to expect from us. Furthermore, this blog will explore the topic of continuing professional education, the challenges and benefits of being a professional, and stories of life from actual professionals in a wide variety of fields (including myself, a Certified Public Accountant). We look forward to serving you with the best professional education site on the web, and hope you check back here often for news and updates!

Yours truly,

Mike Coté

Enky Inc. CEO/Co-Founder