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Every EzyLearn student eventually meets Jerry Lame. Some meet him when they’re untangling his shoebox of receipts. Others meet him when they’re building his cashflow forecast. And a few get to help him launch an entire real estate career.
But who is he — and why have we built so much of our training around one man’s business adventures?
An Ordinary Bloke With a Big Decision
Jerry is an ordinary man with a corporate work history, a lovely wife and kids — and a growing itch. After years in the corporate world he wants to take control of his own work hours and lifestyle.
He has lots of ideas, he loves talking to people, and like thousands of Australians every year, he decides to back himself and start his own business.
That’s exactly why we created him. Case studies are the best way to breathe life into office admin and business admin courses, and Jerry’s journey is based on real life work, business and everyday scenarios. When you help Jerry, you’re practising the same tasks you’ll perform in a real workplace — because his problems are real problems.
Read Jerry’s story here
The Messy Startup: Where Most Students Meet Jerry
Jerry’s first appearance for most students is in The Messy Startup — and messy is the right word. Like a lot of new business owners, Jerry is brilliant at winning work and hopeless at keeping records. By the time you arrive, there’s serious catch-up bookkeeping to be done.
This scenario was deliberately built around the factors that are inherent to startups but rarely covered in generic training:
- Jerry lends his own money to the company for cashflow — a director’s loan that needs its own careful coding.
- He buys a car that can’t simply be written off as an expense and must be depreciated.
- He spends money on advertising to build awareness,
- makes some small sales, and
- pays himself a wage on an ad hoc basis whenever the bank balance allows.
Every one of those transactions has a trap in it, and you’ll learn to handle them all.
The Messy Startup is where you’ll practise journal entries, asset purchases, depreciation and transactions with different GST components — then run a bank reconciliation that doesn’t balance and track down the errors.
It’s used in our Xero Journal Entries, Bank Reconciliation & End of Month Course (513):
Read more about the Messy Startup Case Study here.
The Next Quarter: Jerry Grows Up as a Business Owner
Fixing the books is only half the story. In The Next Quarter, Jerry has survived his first chaotic period of trading, and now the question changes from “what happened?” to “what should we do next?”
Using data from Xero reports, you’ll help Jerry compare financial results with the previous period, align expenses with revenue to understand profitability, and confront the mistakes he made funding larger capital purchases.
Then you’ll explore the opportunities he’s weighing up — becoming a trade agent providing a measure-and-quote service for local tradespeople, using HiPages as a lead source, even studying for a real estate licence.
This is where bookkeeping turns into business skills: financial reporting, cashflow forecasting, budgets and strategic decisions. It’s the difference between recording what a business did and helping a business decide what to do.
Explore The Next Quarter Case Study here.
Jerry the Real Estate Agent
True to form, Jerry doesn’t stop at one idea. In our real estate case study he becomes an independent real estate agent — promoting his own brand with the help of an established online real estate platform, saving money and keeping the majority of the commission fees himself rather than paying franchise fees.
Different industry, same transferrable skills: quoting, invoicing, tracking income against expenses, and understanding whether the venture is actually making money.
Why a Fictional Character Makes You Genuinely Job-Ready
Here’s the thing about Jerry: he makes mistakes so you can learn to fix them.
Real businesses don’t hand you perfectly coded transactions and balanced accounts — they hand you director’s loans nobody recorded, cars that should have been depreciated, and three months of unreconciled bank statements.
Students who’ve worked through Jerry’s businesses walk into interviews able to say “I’ve done catch-up bookkeeping for a startup, I’ve corrected mis-coded GST, and I’ve built a cashflow forecast from real reports.” That’s what employers mean by experience.
Browse all our case studies and micro courses – when you’re ready to meet Jerry yourself, his messy books are waiting.
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