Jim Mullaney, Founder and CEO of Edoc Service, has always been ahead of the curve. He has jokingly been told that he is a right brained accountant, which he thinks is a fitting description. He says that accountants are typically not very good at thinking outside the box, and that is a gift that he has been given.

Driving to work at a staffing agency one day twenty-five years ago, Jim had the idea of utilizing people who work at home to do clerical work. He says, “I saw a vision of hiring professionals who were stay at home moms looking for a way to have a career at home and also have a life at the same time. That idea motivated me, and I launched Electronic Document Service more than twenty-three years ago. Now we have nine employees and seventy two contractors. It has been a very viable business. After a few tough years, things took off, and it’s been a tremendous ride. For me personally this has been of the great joys: having my own business from an original idea and seeing it work.”

Currently Edoc Service has four major divisions. Jim states, “the largest service we offer is medical transcription. We have 72 medical transcriptionists all across the country. Everybody in the company still works from a home office. It’s a very busy division. We also have a number of cloud-based products that I am very proud of. We have an electronic signature platform called Edoc eSign. We are polished enough in that division that we can compete with DocuSign. It’s a wonderful platform. We have a number of counties in Ohio that are using this exclusively. We also have a program called Digital Labor Law Posters. All of the required compliance posters that are supposed to be posted in an office are online for all of the states. We keep that updated on a monthly basis. Any company that subscribes to that service can subscribe to any state they want or all of the states across the country. Another service that just launched this year is called Onboard. We were onboarding so many transcriptionists at one time that we designed our own platform for bringing on new employees and contractors. All of the onboarding paperwork is online.” Currently all of these cloud-based services are growing.

Through his involvement with At Work On Purpose, Jim was captivated by the idea of Biznistry. Jim says, “I started a Biznistry called Amaizing Grace Kettle Corn. Eleven years ago I got a group of people in the church, including our pastor, and put together an ad hoc committee and came up with the idea for Amaizing Grace Kettle Corn. We sell kettle corn at festivals. That ministry has done well. We have done more than a half million in sales and all of the money goes to ministry. We’re all volunteers. It’s probably the hardest work I do, but it’s great fun and very rewarding.”

When asked how he sees faith at work playing out in his life, Jim says, “There’s a couple of things. First of all, not following status quo of corporate America. I had a wonderful career in corporate America and I am not criticizing it in any way. But there are a lot of things about that environment that I wanted to change. I wanted to take some of those policies and procedures that you find in a corporate environment and just blow it up. I believe very strongly in operating a credible and ethical organization. I like the organization to be run by Biblical principles, but we are not Bible thumping people. We don’t screen people according to their faith or anything like that. But we do operate with high character and good principals. In fact, if you look at our website, at the bottom is a link for purpose and principles.”

“I also believe in stewardship. I don’t consider myself a business owner but a business steward. God has given me this wonderful business to run and I have to honor him with the way I steward this. So as an accountant, I don’t look so much at the profit and loss statement as I do the balance sheet. That is the most important document in my view. And I believe we have an enviable balance sheet because we are debt free. I believe in total open book. All of my employees have full access to our financial statements. We have no secrets. This is good for a number of reasons. First, it gives the staff an understanding that they are part of this organization and that I trust them very much. The other thing that it does is keep me on track as a steward. When I pull out that business credit card, I know the staff is going to see this purchase, so I have to take a pause and ask myself, ‘Is this something I would let the staff do?’”

He adds, “We have also developed over the years what we call the virtual cultural model. It’s built on a number of pillars around biblical principles, but not advertised that way. How do you have a good culture in the company? For that reason, I belong to another organization called Small Giants. In fact, Edoc Service was recognized as one of the twenty five Small Giants in 2020 by Forbes Magazine. That was a very high honor.”

Jim concludes, “At the local Rotary Club, I started the Ethical Business Committee. The idea was how do we build a guide to help businesses operate ethically. As a start up company I was doing some research on business ethics, and I couldn’t find anything out there that was helpful. It was about bottom up driven stuff. It was all about, ‘Teach your people to be ethical and you’ll have an ethical company.’ Well, if the head of the company is not ethical, you’re not going to have an ethical company. We actually put together an Ethical Business Guide. On the back of that guide is a place for a business card. The idea is that you put your business card on the back of those pocket-sized guides, and you hand them out to your staff, your suppliers, and your clients. And if you hand them that guide and look them in the eye and they don’t laugh, then that’s a good litmus test that you have an ethical business.” #AWOPHometownHero

To learn more about Edoc Service, visit their website at https://edocservice.com. To learn more about Amaizing Grace Kettle Corn, check out their website at https://www.amaizinggrace.com.