Financial Forecasting - Building a Future-Proof Business Plan

Welcome to Accountants LawPod, where accounting professionals and law firms converge. Hosted by Lynda Artesani, Sarah Prevost, and Stephen Libhardt.

Welcome back, everybody. Hey, how's everybody doing? Steve, I'm glad you're still here and you didn't take off on us again.

You know what? Today's— we're recording this on the first day of fall. So for me, with summer over, fall is a national day of mourning. Because I have to put the RV away soon and not go anywhere and just sit here and be miserable for the next 6 months. Just saying.

In Florida, it's when all the people come back.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, you get that.

They're already starting car carriers and I'm like, oh no, they're back.

It's already snowing in the mountains and the leaves are changing here.

I don't want the leaves to change in New England 'cause we're going to ClioCon and I wanna see the leaves 'cause I never, fall is my all-time best season.

Is it?

Smell to it. In New England, it has a smell to it. There's apple cider, there's like pumpkins, and it's just, I don't know, it's so pretty. And the leaves are turning. I wanna see that. So it has to hold off for a few weeks though. My daughter said it's 47 degrees at night. So if it's 47 degrees at night, the leaves are gonna change fast because that's pretty cold. She had 70 during the day and 47 at night.

Well, the only thing I'm looking forward to is a blanket and the remote control. And you don't have to feel, you don't have to feel guilty because it's cold outside.

And I'm outside going, oh, going to walk into the gym. This is great. It's cooler. It feels good.

Yeah, where you live, for sure.

Yeah. It's like 70 in the morning, which it's been 90, so 70 feels great.

Goodness. We're not as cold as Rhode Island, but—

No, but you guys are very equal. I don't know if you're directly across the country, but you— and on the water, you both seem to be like very similar weather temperatures. You don't get it.

You get—

yeah, you get quite a bit of snow, but not as much as I think that side does.

Yeah, I think they get it worse over there.

Yeah, a little bit. Not much though. I mean, depends. Like where Tammy lives, she's inland, so she gets more snow. But if you're on the water side, you don't get as much snow.

Yeah.

Where I lived, it didn't snow at all.

Well, and you say the word Denver or Colorado and everybody thinks it's just like lots of snow. And it's, you know, the really best kept secret we have here is that it snows and then the sun comes out and melts it. So, you know, we don't get piles and piles of snow. It's kind of nice.

But when you guys get these storms, they're psychotic.

Yeah, it's rather dramatic. People running and screaming, you know, things like that.

So we're gonna talk about financial forecasting, building a future-proof business plan. That's the topic today. So we kind of get into all of the things I think that attorneys need to do to make their business fruitful and have a great business trajectory to just make a lot of money. And although this funny thing is we've had so many conversations of late because everybody filed late taxes and people like bitching— sorry for the word— but bitching about paying taxes. It's like, people, you made money, you pay taxes. It's actually not a bad thing, you know. And you really shouldn't just be eye open, look at your work in August You should be looking through the year periodically every quarter. So you pay that estimated so you're not coughing up a big amount of money at tax time. That seems to be a thing. But, and I think, well, why do you think forecasting matters, Sarah?

Well, Steve, give Steve a break. Honestly, forecasting matters for determination of what you're going to do for your business as far as if you're going to hire. If you're going to remain the same, if you're going to make some fine-tuning, we actually had a conversation a couple weeks ago with an attorney who's been at this same kind of level and is electing to bring in-house a certain individual and release the contract with a contracted style service. There's reasons to— for your tax planning, number one, because We sat on a call recently.

Yeah. I mean, there's some things on the horizon that could really affect you if you outsource and have a team too.

Not just that.

Maybe it won't happen, but it's a possibility that you should be aware of.

Not just that. I'm just thinking in general, Lynda, when you're looking at what that tax bill will be, you're chumming along. As you said, you're in August. August closed. It's September. You have 4 months.

Yep.

3 months to make a change. We always say, you know, give yourself a cushion of a 3-month runway, at least for financial needs, because if something happens, you have 3 months. Lynda and I work a little differently. We like to be a little bit more comfortable because that's just— I think it's just accounting.

It's people who are very reserved in their processes.

Yeah. However, it does— there's a lot. So if you are at the top end of it and you've got to make some big financial planning. That's not a lot of time, friends. So also, I think Steve, for you, you bring this up, is that cornerstone moment right now as we're getting into this fourth quarter, you're planning on bonuses or you're planning on profit share. And then obviously raises happen somewhere in this span for some people. Sometimes they happen throughout the year. Mm-hmm. But what other things can you think of, Steve, on the planning?

Well, Lynda brought it up, you know, the surprise in their eyes when they owe taxes. Well, what, you know, let's look at the positive side of that. What did you do that caused you to have to pay taxes? What worked in the business? And the phrase of what gets measured gets done. And so if you're looking at forecasting, really, really take the time and embrace it because it's going to tell you a lot about the business. This is a good time to, you know, you know, attorneys generally slow down in the autumn and, and, you know, early winter. It's a good time to take a look at everything and say, okay, we're going to do it different this next year, or we lost this employee in the third quarter, are we going to replace them, or can we absorb it for the rest of the year and put some money in the savings account, or, or whatever. And all of this can tie into the business plan and year-end planning.

Well, also, that's the thing, that's the thing, right, Steve? So like, if Sarah and I wanted to do a business plan, we have to sit back and say, what do we want to be doing in a year? What do we want to be doing 2 years, 3 years, 5 years? And have that first before we start to plan, because we need to know what is what we're thinking of happening, right? What are we working towards? Are we looking towards doubling the revenue and growing, growing, growing? Or are we looking to like steady the ship and keep it the same? Are we looking to downsize? And there's a lot of factors, you know, even within some of the things that we saw when we've been talking to tax people about some of the changes that might happen.

Yeah.

You have to start factoring those things in because we don't know. I mean, if we're going to lose our expense because we outsource to a company that's out of the country. And there's a possibility with this new change in this new hires thing that we might lose that entire expense. I mean, as you know, anytime you have expenses in your business, the wages and the money you spend on contractors is a big chunk. It's the biggest chunk and we don't want to lose that. So, and that might not happen, but it's on the table, which makes—

Yeah. And don't you think in the, in the planning, you've got logistics and projections, right? So you're logistically like, like chess. Yes.

Strategic, right?

You're moving ahead logistically. Is this the right move? For some it might be okay, you know, with all of the change that have happened and when they start to roll out '26, year '26, '27, and so on. If you are an established business, you've been going for a while, and leasing doesn't make sense. Does it make sense to own? What does that look like? What are the changes that need to occur there logistically? Are you like Lynda and I, you know, when we look at key person insurance, you get asked a lot of these questions.

Oh my God.

What are like this going on?

It makes you crazy when you start to look at the key person insurance. But how many times we had the conversation with some of the law firms and they don't have it at all and they're like, what is this? And it's like, you need to have this in place.

Obviously you have to qualify. There's certain criteria qualifications for it. But really, ultimately too, is, uh, when I was, uh, last week at, uh, Gusto's event, I thought it was really interesting. They had a roundtable. There were like several roundtables going on, and one was exit strategy. And yes, it, it kills you. You start a business and someone's already asking for the exit strategy. I was so frustrated when I got that. I'm like, hey guys, back up. But as you establish and as you work through— and Steve, I think you've got some points on this— you really have to start considering what does the market look like because it is shifting pretty quickly in general.

Absolutely. And I, you know, I've got some experience with an exit strategy in a business that I formerly owned. And we wrote our exit strategy every year in October. We would have a retreat and we would update the exit strategy. And it served us so well when we put that business up for sale because it just all fell into place.

Can I ask you Can I ask you, why did you update it annually? What made it so that you needed to update it annually?

Well, because it also fell into play with the budget and with the forecasting. And so we were—

Smart.

Yeah, and we were on the type of business that it was, it was a day spa and it was a very successful one. And it was on the bell curve, if you will, of day spas. Now there's one on every corner in every city. Back then it wasn't, you know, you were, you had the market if you had the market, and we had it.

We're like one of these.

No, I'm kidding. Yeah, exactly. And so, you know, we just visited it every year. What would happen if one of us partners became incapacitated? What would happen if we had to have extra time off for family things? You know, it's all those sort of things come into play, and it diluted the, the, the recipe, if you will, in that we had the comfort of knowing what to do if certain things happened or if the revenue went, you know, went wacky for some reason, or if pricing went up on all of our retail items or, you know, all of the things that come into play with that. We loved doing our exit strategy once we embraced it. I love doing an exit strategy. And it's so important for lawyers because lawyers tend to move around during their careers.

Yeah.

And you have to think about what will we do You know, we're getting an idea that maybe this one attorney is going to leave and go start their own firm or what have you. And so you kind of have to play with a lot of what-ifs when you're doing your exit strategy. It really shows you a lot.

I have a question because I hear this, this question I see come like boomerang because it can bounce not just by us or, you know.

Sure.

How do you predict your financial income revenue?

It depends. I think the best answer that I can come back with is it depends on the type of law that you're doing and who the client base is. Because you really need to tap into, if you're the owner of the business, you need to tap into who your clients are, what they're telling you during all the financial meetings throughout the year, and the trends that you're seeing will tell you a lot.

Yeah, 'cause I, I feel like, I mean, we, the 3 of us, have all sat in these meetings where the tax planning is happening right now.

Yep.

To Lynda's point, right, earlier. And then the question is, well, how much are you projecting to the end of the year?

Mm-hmm.

Often what I see is a deer in headlights. In all fairness, I can feel the same way. Right? Like, I could say, yeah, I predict this, but we don't know when the sky turns purple.

Yes.

What do you mean?

Well, or you can use it, you can forecast a number.

Okay.

I'm going to do this for the rest of the year. And then you work backwards. Well, how am I going to get there? Go to the end and work your way backwards.

I love that. Because that's in the beginning when you're starting your business.

Exactly.

That's the same idea.

Oh yeah.

I feel like demystifying how to forecast. So I have a question then for both of you. Would you ask AI how to forecast your business?

I would ask it, yes, just to see what it says. And it's all in how you ask it.

I would say it has to be a specifically worded question.

Yes, it's all in how you ask it.

You have to put bumpers around how you ask it, I think. I don't know. I just don't know what to say. You know, when you say that, Lynda, I think of the bowling alley lanes. Yes, exactly.

I think of the bumper cars.

Because just random stuff I do sometimes, I'm like, well, that's not right. And so you don't want to— I wouldn't weigh heavily everything AI says only because, A, like you were just saying this earlier, when you listen to a podcast, you're not talking to somebody, a seasoned professional who's been through many, many businesses. You know, we're the people that get asked, My profit was this. How come I don't have that amount of money in my bank at the end of the year? How many times do we ask that question? And then we have to start diving into the reasons why. So this is something that I think, you know, I guess you could ask AI that, that it probably won't know the answer to that. But these are the— it'll give you an answer though. It will give you one.

You know what? I named— I think I've shared this with you before. I named my AI Fiona. And Fiona has gotten to know me very, very well. And so I've created, a projects folder. I had her create a projects folder.

Mm-hmm.

And every time I ask something, she has to title it and put it in the projects folder and save it. And what'll happen when I ask a number question like forecasting, 'cause I'm not afraid to ask her that and see what she says. Mm-hmm. She'll say, well, in this folder, we talked about this on that date, and this is what it was gonna cost to do this and that. Mm-hmm. And she starts pulling from all those past projects.

Mm-hmm.

And sharing with me the answer. And they get more in depth as time goes on. And I really like that. So will I rely on what she says 100%? Absolutely not.

Oh no, you named her Fiona. She might be very smart.

She makes me think about things. What did you say?

I said you named her Fiona. She might be very smart. I'm sure she's a very attractive woman though.

I love Fiona.

Okay, so I'll give you guys a quick rundown of when I threw this in on a Google search, but I used the AI mode. Just to throw it in there. So in the bullet points, it quickly went through things to consider in the strategy, which I think Blake Oliver said this best when I was— I've heard him say this a few times.

Mm-hmm.

It's not a replacement. It's like you're delegating a task to it, and then you have to— it's like any staff. You have to comb through all the details, right? So continuous learning and employee development. I wouldn't disagree with that on future strategies. Fostering innovation. I'm not sure how you do that, but yes, that's still number one right now. Adopting flexible work models. Well, as we see in the news, that's going everywhere this way to Sunday. So I'm not gonna read the news too much, but headlines have these. Diversification, regular market research, strategic partnerships, customer feedback and engagement, investing in technology. And the first thing after it says adopt AI. Quite literally AI is saying this.

AI is telling you to adopt AI.

AI, yeah. Business continuity planning, which Steve is kind of what you're saying in event of emergencies, like the exit, internal financial controls, which we would, yes, that should have been number one in our opinions, investing in growth and innovation and risk management. Those are the things that in the planning. Here's what the challenges it tells me, and this is interesting. Economic uncertainty, market volatility, regular changes, data accuracy and availability. Again, number one is that right there, data accuracy, because we know you can't plan on that data. And complexity of predictive models. So I think it's funny to me that I wanted to— I was curious what you personally, both of you, thought. I see it again like that's where it's taking unstructured data and trying to help you structure it. But to—

Well, then you ask probing questions. You pick out some of the subjects one at a time and you go deeper and you ask those probing questions and you can tell it, um, start, start a spreadsheet, start whatever for me, a chart, whatever, and start— when I ask you these probing questions, I want you to chart them for me. Because it'll start, you'll start, your mind will ping on some of these things that you're not thinking about because you can get overwhelmed when you're doing these exercises. So I, you know, I don't discount it at all, but I think it's all important things. Some of the things you read off, I agree, are like, well, okay, fine, what's that? But, but, uh, but it can help you.

As business owners though, Steve, as business owners, this is a tool. But Lynda, what you were saying as we were off camera a little bit earlier, it's we do want a seasoned individual having some input or guiding us or mentoring us. And we might—

don't you think we might end up seeing like everybody's all excited about it's new, just like the cloud when it was new, and then it might actually eventually switch where we're like, we just want more in-person. And I think I'm starting to see this today with like my daughter's generation. So she's taking time to turn the phone off. She's trying to go back to when she was a kid before cell phones were around and spend more family time, more face-to-face time, face-to-face meals. She's trying to really put in an effort to do more of that. And I think it's great. And, um, the fact that that's— I think you're going to start to see some of that, the in-person stuff, because really, I mean, I read a story the other day about like how many men are actually like falling in love with their AI girlfriend. And I'm like, wow.

Oh my gosh.

Is that really a thing? Like, that's what— but you could picture that reclusive guy that lives by himself and then he's got made this perfect person. I mean, you know, I tease you about my next husband's gonna be, you know—

I know.

Tesla robot. Okay, I can turn it off when it starts to annoy me making funny sounds or something. I'll be like, all right, it's enough, Optimus, you're done. But I mean, it— It's still— it's not a person, right? So I don't care. I'm sure they're all gonna start to look more like humans, but it's not a human.

Maybe I better not name her Fiona.

You name her Rosie.

Yeah.

Mara probably doesn't know what that is.

She's too young. I don't know. I mean, I will say—

The Jetsons robot was Rosie.

Jetsons robot was Rosie, yeah. I will say, though, what I'm saying is I don't know at what point, like you're saying, Lynda, where it becomes— it's still so— I think if we have to reframe it, it's a tool to assist us. It isn't a replacement of.

Exactly.

And it's got to be like we have to start thinking about it. Like right now it's not great, right? It's not perfect. Every time, every reiteration of it is getting better and better and better. Right. I mean, some of the times you go in it and it's like, wow, why is this so slow? The next thing you go and the ant, like, I'm over here doing something else and I go, oh, the answer's already here. It wasn't here before.

Yeah.

So, um, it's getting faster. I think the scary part of it is also how much energy do we have to find to create, to be able to produce, to keep this going. That's, it's a huge amount of energy. I never realized until I started reading about it, how much energy is gonna be needed, where they're gonna have to do more nuclear energy or I don't know, they're looking at stuff on the moon, but whatever, to get the energy to be able to run these things.

So, so the financial planning piece of it, because we know that there are tools out there, and the kind of why I've sort of brought this into the conversation is I'm seeing a lot of tools that says, oh, you just plug in or you connect your data, your accounting data, and it just puts it out and you get your CFO-style dashboards. Well, and number one, I jokingly said this, but we all agree because we see it all the time. How credible is your data?

Exactly. And there's no meat and potatoes in what comes out. You've got to understand the background.

Yeah. Who understands? The other part too that I feel is interesting, and a colleague Lynda and I know really well, she told me she's doing a lot of AI cleanups because the Intuit product is not working as great as everyone thought. And so now Used to be you'd have the cleanups from— and I don't know why this is, but somebody owns their firm and they think their spouse is the best person to do the books with no financial background.

Oh yeah, yeah, yeah.

That's brilliant. Okay. Yeah, just drop you in. Guess who gets to clean that? Guess what the costly mistakes are in tax planning on that?

That's the biggest part of it, right? If the data is bad, then you hand that to a tax person that doesn't really pay attention, just pumps the numbers in. Now, the bad data means you may pay more taxes. And, you know, who wants to do that? Nobody.

So how do you plan for it?

You can't.

Right?

It's garbage in, garbage out. You cannot plan on bad data.

And we all have— All you can do is, to your point, be, from earlier, is be very conservative with saving enough cash up for emergencies.

Yes.

And you have to be—

And you have to know what that is.

I know. They don't know how much that is. And they have to know that nut, right? What does it cost to run?

What is the net? And then how many months do you wanna do?

How many months do you wanna have in the bank? And a lot of— Firms run themselves like the contractors I used to work with, the subcontractors I used to work with when I worked for a GC. They, they needed that paycheck. They needed that bill paid. Like the ink wasn't even dry. They had cash in.

Yeah.

Yeah. The cash flow is king, right?

It is. You know what's interesting too? And Lynda and I have, have said this innumerable times to people, and I'm sure you have, Steve. I'm just only speaking from our experience. A lot of people will come to us and say, what am I spending my money on? Look at your meals, for one.

Oh my God, the meals.

Look at the excess products that you purchase that should not even have anything to do with the business. And also, let's look at where you're— what tools are you using?

I have to share a funny story because you just brought it up. I was meeting with a client last week and we were talking about their meals and how much they're spending. And I said, it blows me away when I see that number and all of you are skinny. What are you doing?

Yeah, I did.

I'm like, where, where was the answer?

That's what I want to know.

I sit here in my chair all day and I'm a big blob, and they're, they're like eating all these meals and they're all skinny, and I'm like, what are you doing? So she's like, I don't know, walking treadmills under their desk.

Yeah, yeah. No, I think you know what's happening there.

But to your point with the meals, return on investment with client development meals But don't you wanna know that?

Because when the percentage is, the amount is so high, do they wanna know that maybe they're not getting that return on investment that they're really—

Exactly.

It's not—

Lucky?

Yeah. You know, is that golf tournament that you're spending money on bringing any business back into the firm?

Yep.

You know, is that skybox that you're renting at the stadium bringing any money back into the firm? These are all things that you look at when you're building that contingency and that forecasting and that, That, you know.

Well, the core thing is going back to the marketing plan. The first thing Lynda and I have often seen cut right away, and I see this, you know, from my husband's friends, marketing advertising is the first thing I get. Actually, that's kind of dumb.

Yeah, it can hurt you as it can bite you.

Yeah. So, but if you want to have a marketing plan and you're saying all those meals are customer meals, or whatever, what is the value of that business? Now, understandably, I think we can easily say this in real estate. It's one thing because real estate, there's a lot of wine and dine moments happening. But I'm not saying laws shouldn't do this, but in the legal industry. But I'm just thinking, like, if you want to sit there and look at your data and structure that data, and value it. And you both really love your KPIs and you like to both tell me that I only want 2 or 3. And one of those I know has to be marketing or advertising.

You have to start with 2 or 3, master them, and then you can add 4 or 5 and then you can, you know.

What's the first thing that gets cut when the economy gets tight?

Marketing. Marketing.

The first thing. It's the most painless thing, right? Even though that marketing doesn't make sense because then you're going to be taking it and using it Um, so that's how you get your clients. So I mean, it's how you have to figure it out. But even at that, that's something you should narrow— narrowly look at. Get some benchmarks, make sure that those things are all in line with everybody else in your practice area. Because if you're spending $37,000 a year on marketing and you're not a PI firm, you really need to take a hard look at what your spend is and why are you spending this and what's the return on the value, right? What's your ROI? On the marketing, because if it's not happening, that's a great place to save money. Just like on too much software, you— we all sign up for stuff and then we find out we didn't need it. Again, it's a way to save money when you start to take that. We call it the annual time. In fact, it's in the book that I, I, I have like a little spreadsheet link that you can get that this is just a little report card on what you have and whether it's being utilized. And sometimes being utilized can be how many users in the firm are actually using it.

Mm-hmm.

We've had that with the bigger firms that they're not using. You're spending 75 licenses and you've got 15 people using that software. Everybody has access, but nobody's—

Not using it to its proper efficiency. But the other thing too is, and I just lost my train— so when you're looking at the, the business, Lynda, and when we're looking at the marketing segment and you're looking at valuing that return and the market slumps and you take marketing off, what's the quality of service that's happening in the firm too? Because, you know, the slower you are, the idle hands are happening. And so—

Yeah, because then what's everybody doing in the firm? You mean like, what if there's less work? Yeah. Is everybody doing their work? And is there a way to shift it? Sometimes you don't want to lose a great employee because they're so hard to come by, but maybe you can give them something. Nobody wants to have a job and not have something to do. So there's always something to do, you know.

The other thing too is, I, I think too, on the front end you advertise that— we see this, the volume comes in, but is the quality maintaining too? Yeah. So it's—

well, to my example of the, the skybox or the golf tournament, who, who are you entertaining there? Are you bringing just your buddies in, or are you—

entertaining isn't deductible.

Right.

And payment's not deductible. Yeah. And I think sometimes we tell the client that we try to name the account that so they have an idea if they actually do look at QuickBooks. A lot of them don't. And then we're like, what do you mean? Well, yeah, back in the day it used to be, but it's no longer. And then even with the meals, when they're like, why don't I have this amount of money? What did my tax guy do that made the profit go up? Well, take a look at your meals. If you spent $37,000 on meal, guess guess what? You got half of that. Half of that got wiped away because it's your meal, according to the government. And they gave it back a little bit because we used to be 100%, then it went to 50%, then they gave it back during COVID and plus a couple of years, and now they took it away again. So it is confusing. I mean, it's not their job to have to follow this stuff, but it's our job to make sure we educate the client on that. And I think that's the biggest takeaway on this is that they need to understand. I know when you look at the tax return, It's complicated. It's complicated when we even look at it. We need to make sure it ties to your books. If you have a bookkeeping firm right now and they're not doing that for you, you need to find a better bookkeeping firm. Go to your bookkeeper and say, did you tie this to the tax return? If they didn't tie it to the tax return, then you should be finding somebody who can. And a lot of bookkeepers don't know how to do that job. It's not an easy job. It's not terribly hard. And it's really like Sarah and I make sure our team does this. We don't just have one person that do it. Everybody that works in that file should know why they put things where they go and what's the effect of it. Because we want our staff to be able to answer the question, why is my profit this? But now when I look at the tax return, my profit's this. Why did it go up? I want our team to understand the answers to that, and they have to understand it. And fortunately, our team does. You know, we educate them on that. If you're their new bookkeeper, they don't really realize that. And doing that tied to tax helps them understand how everything that they're doing and how it's differently combined. Sometimes you look at the number like, what is this number? Oh, you got to go back to page whatever, schedule whatever, and find out what was in there. And maybe it's bundled in, and maybe it makes sense to rearrange the chart of accounts so that when you get that total, it's the same look and it makes life easy on you when you tie to tax.

One thing I wanted to say too is when you were bringing this up and I was thinking about this is seasonality. I mean, our industry sensed, felt it during COVID Seasonality was out the door. We were always running and gunning, right? We used to live in this seasonality. I don't feel like that's really ever the case anymore for us.

It never slows down anymore.

No, it doesn't. Yeah.

Well, and with the tools and stuff and the demand and the people's attention span. But I do feel like what marketing can do for you and something I learned last night on an unrelated thing. Was, are you marketing right? Do you have the right keywords? Do you have the right presence? Do you have the right way to attract the clients? And so when you're doing your financial planning and forecasting, I really think there are some key things. First, is your data accurate? That's number one.

Yes.

Then you can financial forecast. And next thing is, are you marketing correctly? And then are you servicing well enough to maintain those? Dollars that walk in, because it's a lot of money to bring in a dollar.

And there's always some way you can tweak.

There's always something, but don't be so foolish.

Even for us.

Yeah, but don't be so foolish in the, in the way that you approach it, because, oh my God, the alarming tax bill, or whatever it is.

Yeah, don't be reactive.

Reactive, exactly.

Very well put. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Well, that's us in a nutshell on financial planning and forecasting.

I'm kidding, we go on for another 3 hours easily, but then, you know. Tiara would fall asleep.

Somebody poke Tiara.

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I will say, if you'd like to sponsor us, you're welcome to send an email and Tiara will assist with that.

We will be your best friend.

Yeah, but also we, we do really appreciate the subscribers. It does help us. This is something that we work hard to do every week to produce for you all, and we enjoy it as well. So we love the feedback.

So any topic? Yeah, any topic?

Questions.

Boy, I love it that questions have started coming in.

Yeah, yeah, those have been great.

So Stump Steve.

Yes, that should be a piece on our—

Hashtag Stump Steve.

What would Steve say? We need to start that series.

Okay, we'll do that.

Yes, I love that. That's a great way to segue. Well, thanks for your time today, everyone.

Thank you.

Thank you.