Preparing for Year End

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

Welcome back to the podcast, everybody. And today we're going to talk about year-end planning for our clients, probably also maybe want to talk about it for ourselves, and, um, hopefully that somebody has a checklist or something because it's actually a timely topic for us. And I'm sure this will be airing right before the year ends. So we'll get everybody ready for it. I don't know the date, but I'm sure that it's going to be important to start to think about it because, you know, once the year-end happens, there's not a lot of fixing that can going on in January. So, Sarah, what do you think about year-end planning? And see, I just hit her up cold. Maybe I should go to Steve first because she just made me deer in headlights and she took her glasses off.

I know I took my glasses off. I was like, oh, because I you know, decompress from speaking. You're in planning. I really, I think what you just said, a checklist, or if you're using a tool and have the checklist inside of it. But I do feel that it's tailored specific to the client. There's tweaks or modifications would be fair to say, don't you think? I mean, that's my— You have to modify it to the entity. Into the client. It could make or break you as an accounting professional when you don't get it, you don't get your ducks in order. So now's the time. I know we're in extension throws deadline. Oh my God, yeah. Today is the day for corporate or for S corps and partnerships. So now's the time. If you have wrapped those up with the tax person, if you do tax, is great. And then flip the switch to the next one. I know we've got the next deadline coming up as well. So yeah, but Steve, what are your two thoughts on this?

Steve had more than 5 seconds to figure out what we were talking about today. Sarah was told, in her defense, she was just told, so I probably should have tossed it to Steve too. That's okay, that's okay.

Good intro, Sarah, though. You recovered on that real well.

I love you, Steve.

So I wrote down just 8 different things. Some of them apply to clients, some of them apply to our businesses. So I'm just going to go through the list real quick.

Okay.

Yeah, that's—

But the first one that— oh, we just finished the Law Lab and Lynda, I grabbed my pen right away because she came up with a really good one. I was like, we've got to add this to the podcast today. And that is running a P&L prior year comparison for each of your clients and see what their business has done so that you can adjust your pricing accordingly based on whether you took on a lot more work for them at the same monthly cost this year or not. I love that one, Lynda. That was awesome. AR collections, reviewing the trust accounts for accuracy and making corrections, reviewing the financials, going through all the detail reports and looking at everything and getting those questions answered, getting ready for tax season, you know, reaching out to the tax preparer saying, this is where this client's books are at this moment in time. Come on in, take a look, ask your questions. We're in the fourth quarter. They're usually a lot slower than 1099s. That's huge. This is our opportunity in the fourth quarter of the year to really get our arms around the 1099s and have that spick and span clean at year end, looking at a budget for the next year, both for your clients and for yourself in your business. And I like to do this in every October. Um, look at the budget for our company for the next year, and also what is our exit strategy if somebody gets sick, somebody leaves. What is your exit strategy? How are you going to handle those challenges? So those are the notes I made on year-end planning. I know there's a lot more, but—

Can I go back to one thing that you just said that Lynda and I— I didn't mean to cut you off, Lynda, but Lynda and I very naturally was— we always do this. We always pull a P&L with prior year and we pull it for balance sheets as well.

Yes.

Because you You don't know, and I know this, I'm gonna cue you up, Lynda. There's this particular account on the balance sheet that your eagle eyes hit so quickly. I mean, I barely can scroll down the dang list and you're already got your eyes on it fully knowing like, I'm gonna spot this and this is gonna be a problem.

On the balance sheet?

On the balance sheet. Uh-huh.

Usually payroll, the payroll accounts usually get my eye because if I see negative ones.

That's not the one. That's not the one.

It's not the trust account. Where it doesn't say equity. No. Let's see. Opening balance equity.

No, no. Got another one. There's one more. Undeposited funds.

Oh my gosh.

Undeposited fund account, which is now called payments to deposit.

So if you're— Okay, whatever they want to call it.

Yeah, the undeposited fund account. I mean, you— and, you know, I've always had— I've had people ask me, well, how do you know what's in there? Well, just click plus deposit and then look and see what's in there. That's the easiest way to figure out what's still hanging. If you pull it out of a trial balance or balance sheet, it's hard to figure. So I think that that's definitely one because that's just money. That's where you get all that duplication in Clio that we were talking about at the Law Lab today. You know, people change transactions and it shoots in another transaction and you have to deal with that. You don't want to leave that hanging. I think, but when you're doing, when you're working and I'm going to figure that maybe October, November is a great time to do this because that gives you the leeway in December to make any expenses, buy stuff. If you're looking at a big tax burden, you might want to spend some money, but you want to reaffirm your financial goals and your priorities. I think that that's— Yeah. When what Steve was just saying, looking at budgets and forecasting.

Yeah.

Sit with the client and say, let's, let's go through, let's go through what you had for goals in the beginning of the year and let's see how you did against them. And then let's start to set some goals for next year. I think that's probably number one. And look at your priorities. And this is hard to do with a client because sometimes clients don't want to take the time and it's such an important time, especially this is the, this time after you get past October 15th and the, been the personal deadline. This is really the extension. This is the time that we have. It's so short. Like Steve was mentioning, 1099 season, we're trying to keep that at bay this year. Evaluate the tax exposure, right? Look and see if they're sitting with a huge increase in revenue and a huge increase in bottom line. Like all of a sudden they're sitting there. I just did this this morning with a client, looked at her books and we were like, where am I at and where was I at? Like Sarah said last year at the same time, what are we looking at? Because a lot of tax professionals will do the tax return. The client never talks to them until the end of the year. They submit the forms, you know, or will submit the financials. They'll do the taxes, and then they'll go, okay, based on this, did you make estimated taxes? Because you're, you know, you're— maybe you're an S corp or something of that nature, or even a partnership. Okay, you took this much out in distributions, which is a great time to review that too with the client.

Mm-hmm.

You didn't pay any taxes. So how did you do, did you do your estimators and you do them timely? And a lot of times they don't think about that at all. They just think about taking the money out and they don't realize that there's a tax burden there. So I think you wanna look at the tax exposure there. Look at how much money they made. Is there a need to buy anything that's not an asset where it's gonna get, you know, capitalized and then we're looking at depreciation, but is there anything they can spend maybe to bring that down a little bit? And I think reassessing spending and savings needs. Because right now, if you've got money and you want to put it aside, it's a good time to put it aside, put it in a savings account, and let it sit and make some interest. That's also something that they might want to look into. I just think it's a good idea to really look at those things.

I think those are great tips. I love that there's a different process for each of us. Like, I mean, Steve brings up the obvious, very obvious ones and other ones that we I would have— it's a future planning thing in tandem with year-end planning. I love that.

So—

And overpaying.

Spending down, spending down at the year-end. Yeah.

You could bonus up too. If they're on a payroll, they can give themselves a bonus, pay some taxes, take some money out, but you're taking it out not as a distribution if they're an S corp and they have a payroll. But how about looking at things? I always look, my eyes are always drawn to the negatives, right? Especially if you're looking at the P&L, you see a negative, what the heck happened there? Or even on the balance sheet, I see negative accounts receivable, which is very rare in law firms, but can happen. Why is there negative accounts receivable? What, what happened that— what did the attorney record payments but not invoices? That's usually the thing that happens. Sometimes we see just going through accounts receivable and accounts payable and looking at what's open and aged is another thing, because that's something we do at year end. So why not look at that now and maybe clean that up? This is a good time of the year to clean up that. Clean up trust that have closed. That's another thing. And then of course, like Sarah saying, undeposited funds. But also how about looking at— you've reconciled the bank, what's left over and never cleared the bank?

Right. That's big.

We do that monthly, but you want to stay on that because we may do it monthly and show the client this is what's open. They ignore it all year long and you want to kind of press for that, especially in the trust if it's something that's been open forever and not clear the bank forever.

They have a fiduciary duty to try to— I think in preparation too for the tax return, it's good practice to be able to share with the tax professional, you know, this is what's sitting and uncleared because there might be some determinations based on the way that they choose to do the tax return. And to your point, Lynda Artesani, the compliance. Piece. It might be of value for us to do it. So, yeah, it's— year-end planning also, I think, includes things that we don't touch. So if we're in good order or in a space where we can help support having conversations, like our own selves, our business is a huge part of our personal. Well, maybe there are things that we don't know that are changing in the client's world. Maybe a child that's going to be in college soon or future planning methods for that, or they're looking— maybe they have like, you know, Lynda, you personally, you had, you know, 179 exchange that happened in your life at one point. Decisions like that, those things at this time, if we have the books in a stage where the conversations can be planned ahead to what you were saying, Steve, That's such a huge help and support for them. Now I'm gonna ask you both what tools, like I know Lynda, what tools we use, but what tools would be good if you're just getting started? I see your little kitten, by the way. What tools would you use just getting started? What do you recommend if you're, if you're new at doing this this year, if you're fresh accounting?

Even in this topic, If you're thinking, oh, this is something that I am a little nervous about doing with my client, kind of initiating that conversation, do it for your own firm to start with and try it out that way. If you're really new and this advisory type of work is a little bit frightening, make a budget, make a forecast, make some goals.

Try it on yourself. Is that what you're saying? Yeah.

Try it on yourself first.

I love it.

I mean, I think you've got books review inside of QuickBooks. I'm trying to think of things you can do that are not expensive because if you're first starting out, you don't like to spend too much on software. I think book Books Review is a good one, a good place to go. It's a great place to go when you get a new client. You want to look at exactly what's going on in the, in the books itself to see how many transactions, what's—

Oh, you're talking about in, in the QuickBooks product?

Yeah.

There's an Ethereal product.

Yeah.

So QuickBooks, yeah, it's baked right into the file. So I think that that's a way to do it, to look for irregularities where there's no vendor names or payee names and reconciliations. You want to look at reconciliations and make sure everything's reconciled. Do they have a 3-way reconciliation? Does it match 3 ways? Because that's the big, you know, the crux of our work is we get in and we're finding out, oh yeah, it's reconciled, all my things are reconciled, but it's not really reconciled. Nobody really knows about the ins and outs of the money that who it belongs to. So that's a huge one, I think.

And my other one is—

And compare it against the billing software.

Yeah, that's the other one I was gonna, thank you, Steve. Yeah, the other one is comparison. You're right on point, yeah. We think alike.

I love it. Also too, and something you should think about, because this just came up with a tax person that we dealt, we deal with, is, uh, were there any assets? Did they take on any purchases of assets? This is where it's crucial to have that software in place. And QuickBooks does this too. You don't have to buy Dext or Hubdoc. Inside of QuickBooks, you can upload, you know, pictures of the documents to the transaction. Most of the tax people do not want to, they'll go into QuickBooks, but they're not gonna touch anything. That's my husband. And, um, your you're inside the product, you have that picture. So when the tax person says, well, I see that you bought, I see that you bought something this year, you bought a big computer that was over $2,500, have the picture there because they need to know the details on it to do the depreciation. And I think that that's important too.

That's also with Xero, with a lot of products, you can add these additional documents. If you don't have that in your You have a Google Drive or you're in the Microsoft product and you have a folder that you can place everything in per client. That's another idea. You know, we have to think about what we have to adhere to. How compliant is that? Are we safe? Is this secure? Yeah. But yeah, no, those are, that's true.

And assets is something I, I sometimes forget about. And also with payroll, don't you think with the payroll?

Yes.

You wanna make sure that that ties back. I mean, yeah, you have full service and yeah, that's fabulous and everything, but with your payroll figures, you want to make sure it's being put in because sometimes I hate to say it, but sometimes they hook up like Intuit's payroll, they turn it on and then it dumps into two categories and it's not really broken out properly. Sometimes those categories just dump down the bottom of the profit and loss, the expense side of it, and it's kind of buried and it's not under payroll expenses like a parent category. And it's— and sometimes you look at it and it's wrong and it's negative, and it's like, oh my gosh, what happened here? Or even in fact, think about this. If you've got an S corp, the owner has to have their owner salary separated from the rest of the wages from the employees.

And your health insurance, depending on how—

Health insurance has to be separated. Life insurance. If there's life insurance on the books, you want to have that properly stated for the tax person. Multiple partners, you're looking at separating it by partner because they need those numbers by the partner.

So now we're getting into a tailored workflow essentially for that. Exactly. So Steve, you had— what was number— what was number 4 on your list?

Get ready for tax season.

Oh, that was 4. Okay, maybe I'm thinking of 3. What was 3?

So I had all 8 of them. AR collections, review the trust accounts for accuracy, review financials, get ready for tax season, 1099s, your exit strategy, the budget for next year, and the P&L comparisons by client. And I have one other thing to add, but which one do you want? No, you add it.

What is the What's the other thing?

I'm curious. The other one is if you're dealing with, especially with your newer clients that you took on this year and you're struggling with their bank and their bank feeds and all that, this is a great time of year to plant the seed with the client about moving to a more robust bank and having every, having that in place at the beginning of the year.

Mm-hmm. Okay. So I was gonna ask you about exit strategy, but it just reminded me of one more tip I think is of value. Because I've been caught in this scenario and it's not something you automatically think about. So let's say you have access, you can grab anything you need. You don't pull down those bank statements because you have access, right? Well, I think we need to add in our checklist where we need to pull down bank statements because we have— just because we have access. Because what if we don't get that same access any longer?

Are you attaching them every month to your reconciliation?

I don't. Nope, I don't need to do that. But I'm just having them available to me if something will come up. And so there's that. And then the second one I'm thinking is some banks have a, a period of time where you cannot grab images. So I know, like, in Florida specifically, when we work with, um, trust accounts in Florida, we have a very specific way that we handle it due to the rules of that bar. Um, but We tend to follow that same etiquette with everybody else. Well, some banks, um, maybe like, I think it's US Bank, it's like 180 days or 120 days. That's all you get for deposits. It's not very long. So if you're looking to grab all those, you got to build it in your system, in your workflow, because you're not going to remember a deposit slip. You want to look at the tangible piece, right?

Well, one thing to remember is that QuickBooks is getting better too about bringing over images of the documents. In the bank feeds.

Yeah, but I'm just saying secondarily to that, because not every ledger system, like Xero, it's not. But you, you have to have a system so that no matter what.

Agreed.

The exit strategy. Can you elaborate on that? This is the first time I've heard about this and I'm really fascinated.

So the last business that I owned was a really successful day spa and we sold that for a few million dollars and I got to take a bunch of years off of work, which was really fun. And we had an exit strategy in place, my partner and I. And every October we would visit that exit strategy, whether we were for sale or not.

Okay.

We would visit our exit strategy.

Exit strategy, Sarah.

And what happens if— what happens if Steve gets run over by a bus and we're in business together? You know what I mean? What happens if— attorneys run into this a lot in their compensation structures. You know, Sarah suddenly brought in $38 million worth of business this year and Lynda brought in $10 million. What is that value worth? What does that mean to the exit strategy and all of that? So if you visit that exit strategy and you have it in place, those are just a couple of small examples. It can get very detailed, but you can, you can have that in place and then you share that with your own attorney, with your own CPA, all of that. They know more about your business, just like we're trying to learn more about our clients' businesses. And it helps. Create a safety net, if you will, between the partners, especially those firms where they are eat what you kill firms. Yeah. You know, it really, really spells that out. What happens when a managing partner leaves?

It happened.

I don't think they think about those things either. It's really—

They don't.

It's critical for us to bring it up because a lot of times they don't think about those things at all.

And you share that with your insurance broker for key man insurance.

You know, it's fascinating that you're bringing this up because I thought it was— I'm here in Chicago at the Bookkeeping Buds conference. And quite honestly, I thought this was fascinating and I was really— I mean, it's happened. So, but I thought it was fascinating from the perspective of a participant here. She brought up the fact that she said, well, my client didn't tell me they were selling and they've sold. And now I've got to close the books.

Yeah.

And the reason why I was going back to your question was because Lynda and I have been in that scenario independently and, and jointly where it's like, wait, what happened? Um, but the, the kind of position we are as individuals where we sit, I like what you're saying because we're adding the value and reminding them of our value. In that, that space. So it's interesting. I never thought to add it to a year-end checklist. That's why I wanted you to elaborate, but I appreciate it.

Once you get the basic document in place, you just change it every year. You just change it up to whatever's going on.

That's a, that's a really, in light of what I just heard at this conference from that person and what you're saying, it's definitely a thing that's rolling around in my head of like, okay, we need to add some sort of request or information or something to say, hey, how do you stand? What does the future look like? Just high level. I don't need all the—

Yeah, because then you can take that exit strategy and 6 months from now something will happen and you'll go, oh my gosh, they put that in their exit strategy. And so you say to them, you were thinking about this and this is happening now. That's how we're going to help you through this. Boom. Key. Trusted advisor. There's where it is.

Yeah.

Yeah. Awesome. Well, this has been an interesting conversation. Year-end planning, such a heavy thing, like, ugh, you know, but hey, we're—

Well, marketing.

—right before Halloween.

Talk about marketing. What are we planning for marketing next year?

Oh Lord, you got your brain hat on. You're back from travels and you're like, Yep.

Well, that time of year, I'm used to doing this every year. I just, I get really passionate in the fourth quarter about not, not just shopping on Amazon for Christmas, but really, you know, setting the stage for the end of the year. So it's not as painful in going into the next year.

I think it needs to be a title, not just shopping on Amazon, planning your year. That is true.

Put down the mouse and get to work.

Oh man.

I mean, what do you guys do in your company to prepare for next year?

We fly by the seat of our pants. No, I'm kidding. No, we really are diligently in the file. We are forced into planning sessions due to distribution outlays, cash flow needs in December for certain clients, requirements of positioning for year-end. Like Lynda said, a lot of times we've got what, health benefits renewing. We've got, we've got a ton of stuff happening at year end at that crux time that starts for the new year. Also, we need to make sure, do we have, if you're going to want to set up that 401(k) 401(k) plan, as most states are requiring it. So if you want to get that 401(k) 401(k) safe harbor in place, you have a deadline that's coming up really quick. So there's that. And so these tweaks, to your point, are beneficial in the period of time we can plan them so that we can move forward to the next year. And 1099s are a huge piece of it, and we all know how hard that is. And so this is— it seems like the off time, but this is really another really busy section for us.

Yes.

In our world, on top of all the conferences that we attend, because we need to continue our education and we need to make sure that we're adding more value to our minds and our beings and what we can offer to other clients. Because as we know, technology is moving in a fast, fast pace. So yeah, that's kind of what—

The conferences supercharge us, don't you think? They kind of supercharge us.

Yeah, they really do.

I mean, that's for sure.

They realign you for sure.

They really do.

And do you share with your client, you know, I went to this this year, I went to that this year, I did this, I did that, you know?

Yeah, they're probably getting out of—

Blast emails to all of our clients individually about our podcast. We just talked about this this week. You better take a look at it. You know, this applies to what we talked about in August, you know, with your business.

Or, you know, sometimes to your point, Steve, do— are you like— we talked about a little bit of college planning. Let's say, are there any renovations coming up that we need to know about because we have to stay on top of the financials for you, for whatever it is that you're trying to do. Or is, is this a good time to get a business equity line? Um, I don't know.

You know, a lot of times they don't tell us till the last minute. They just hit us up. Exactly. Oh, I need— I'm buying a house, I need this right away. And it's like, um, okay, let's look at this. And sometimes that you don't hear from them. Those are the clients you don't really hear from all year. And then all of a sudden they're like, I need this yesterday. They don't tell you. Yeah. Why they just tell you that they need this data. And, you know, hopefully it's not at year end when you're trying to button up everybody. But really, that work kind of happens in January anyway. You have to always reconcile January, get that done before you start looking. Last year, for some reason, maybe it's because we came out of the pandemic, but everybody wanted everything like right away. And it's interesting that everybody that wanted everything right away, their tax person did not do the taxes. They put all this pressure on us. Yeah. And then the people got the documents and they're just getting them done now. And so they never did the work like they, they, that they were going to. And, and, you know, that's aggravating for us because we had to expand our resources to get things done to get for them. And then it just sat. Nobody did anything with it. I'm surprised at how many people have come to us this week and said, are my stuff, is my stuff all ready? Well, it was ready back in February. You know, we did this in February. Why are you just coming now?

But the tax— And the CPAs at the beginning of the year are always looking for that basket full of employee— of customers that they can extend so that they can, you know, have a more organized life up through April and then work on all of that towards the extensions.

I feel—

It's the best time to communicate with the client and them and say, this is what our plan is. We're going to have the books ready. Take a look at them now in fourth quarter because it really usually is slower for the tax preparer then. That's their time to look at the books and ask questions.

Mm-hmm. Yeah, there's, there's a lot.

You know, prepping for the 401(k) 401(k) annual audit. That's a good time to do that is in the fourth quarter. Get that all buttoned up and sewn up and, and all of that. We have a really cool potential client that is going to open up their new firm in February. We're already working with them now and we have laid out a plan in October for all the meetings with the software vendors and all those sorts of things so they can decide which vendor they're going to go with for their billing platform and, you know, what they're going to use in their tech stack and all those sorts of things. And we're working on all that now so that I can give them homework assignments in November to start entering all of their clients in the billing platform and getting QuickBooks set up and all the things we need to do so that when they open the doors On February 1st, we're not scrambling because we just finished 1099 season. You know, we're ready, we're ready to go and they're ready to go. And that really makes us look good that we're being proactive now and saying this is what we're going to do to open up the doors for your new firm.

And you want to— another thing I just thought of is you want to make sure that your advanced client cost account is correct.

Yes.

Anything up there you need to book down because it's not going to ever be collected. You want to book that down into reimbursable, you know, the un—

Yeah.

Uncollectible. Uncollectible, right?

Yeah.

Also, if it's a new client, because we do end up getting a lot of cleanup work in January, is there any money that's in uncategorized? My favorite account, all those uncategorized assets, the transfers. You want to kill, you know, you want to just scream when you see these transfers done that you got to undo and unravel and re-reconcile. If they're using a class feature to separate income and expenses, you want to make sure that the classes are you know, they're properly classified, but is there anything in undefined that nobody classed the transactions? You want to clean that up. Anything in that Ask Need Help account, or we call it Ask Need Help, but it could be our Ask My Accountant account. You want to look at that too, because that's another place where you're going to see some transactions that you just didn't know where to put them and you want to make sure you put them there.

Mm-hmm.

Maybe look at cash flow as well. Run the aging reports and kind of look at that, see if something's old that's been sitting there. I've seen some really— I just looked at one the other day. I'm like, oh my gosh, there's transactions in here from 2017. That should be— I mean, you're not going to— you're not paying your bill from 2017. Let's get it off the books. PPP, we just had this happen where a PPP, you know, second round wasn't written off. And you want to make sure that— or if they had an EIDL loan, you want to make sure that those EIDL loans are properly stated.

You want to have the conversation about year-end bonuses. For their, their staff.

You just had that on the Law Lab. Yeah.

Yep.

Make sure they run through payroll, right, Steve?

Right. Make sure they run it through payroll.

If people are working with remote employees, there could be remote work environment where you have to have some of those expenses put in the books. So that's another place. I mean, there's so many places you really need to look, and now's a great time to start to look. I highly recommend if you're doing this work as a bookkeeper or an accountant, start looking through your files now because we, we always— you don't want to do it up against the clock. You want to have that grace of time and space to kind of take the time to look through the files. And what the heck, if you get it done now, we're almost on the last quarter. You're going to be in a good place that you're only looking at one quarter instead of the whole year's worth of stuff. And I think that's probably the biggest reason to do, uh, looking at the year-end work now as we approach the year-end. Get ready for it. Definitely for the 1099s though, that's such a big body of work for us. And get yourself prepared and ready for it. And maybe shoot that list over to the client, say, this is what we have and we're missing these, you know, W-9s are not filled out. Can Can you please put those together and send them out so we can get that information? And Keeper is a great software to have for that purpose, if for no other reason, which is a ton more reasons to have Keeper, but that one in particular is a lifesaver because it's done electronically. And with this new FTC stuff, you really want to send it out electronically, receive it back securely. I think that's another thing that we really like to look at too.

Yeah.

And have the conversations with your clients, people. Don't not talk to them. Don't not talk to them. They love the attention. They really do. The girl today that I met with, our client today, Sarah, that I met with, she's like, I love you guys. I'm so glad I have you. I just wish I had hit record at that part so we would have a nice little testimonial. She's like, I love it. And I said, well, we love you too. I'd like to multiply you by you and have 100 more of you because when you ask questions, you ask really good questions and you're not constantly at us. You just wait and you have a meeting and we go over things and she wants to understand things. And I love I love that. She's a fabulous client. I'd love to multiply her by 10. You know, she's one of those great clients that we have on our list that just— she's just fabulous. And she does what we tell her to, and we give her advice. That's the other great part. You know, it's wonderful to give advice, but if they follow it, it's even more wonderful, right?

Yeah. Yeah. Well, I—

Wow. Heavy topic. Heavy topic. That's a lot. I picked this one.

Steve, is this yours? You asked me what I wanted to talk about today.

I did. What do you want to talk about? It might just be me and you because I wasn't sure with Sarah with her presentation, which I heard you kicked it. You did a kick-ass presentation.

Thank you. Yeah, I'm very honored. I had so many people after come back and say, I actually rewrote this email. Thank you for providing me these tips. I, yeah, it just—

They all want Sarah and I tell her they can't have her, she's mine. So I'll let you borrow her, Steve. That's the only person I'll let you borrow.

Yeah. I kind of feel like I'm on the inside here.

Absolutely. Absolutely. Everybody.

Yeah. I really enjoyed this. If you need to be in a network group, if you're in the niche, the network groups, like we are a group, is very helpful. If you aren't in this and you just happen to come across this podcast, there are wonderful groups like this one that are just fantastic and very supportive, and we need each other to support each other.

We do need each other, especially if you work remotely by yourself. You just need somebody else to talk to and collaborate with. I mean, every time we're on the Law Lab together, I always learn something from you, Steve, and obviously—

Yeah.

You know, you know.

We just all feed into each other.

You're our accidental marketing that you are.

Today, like today we had some great help for one of our members from two tax people that stepped in and really gave her great advice.

Good.

I think, and I don't know if I can call them out, so I won't say their names, but we really appreciate our members in the Law Lab because they all help each other and they all help with a problem that was across tax years and the problem that the tax, the attorney And it gave wonderful advice, better than I could give. I thought they were amazing. And it was so nice to see everybody's so kind in our group. So it's, we have a great—

Well, we had some newbies in the Law Lab today, and I think that they really, um, I think it resonated with them how to, uh, go find clients.

Yes.

That discussion that we had, I think that really helped them out a lot. Sarah, what was the title of, of your presentation today?

Oh, it was It's the same title I've been speaking on as how to handle client pushback.

Okay.

But what I did in my natural state is, of course, everyone loves my slide deck, and that slide deck comes courtesy of Lynda Artesani. But what I did was I got to a certain slide and I said, I would like to role play. I'd like to use some live examples. And I gave a lot of cues and prompts to be able to facilitate some of that. It was very, very helpful. It was helpful for me, but it was also really engaging for this audience. You know, there's like about 30-something, 40-some people here.

And with Sarah, when she did that, and we did it at scaling together, and that was your first time doing it, I just wish you had— and that was one time, you know, we've done long, long, long sessions with them in the past, and this was a shorter one. It was like 50 minutes. It just wasn't enough time. Everybody wanted to stay and just talk, and, you know, it was just not long enough because she was getting into answering all these questions and live scenarios of when a client pushes back. And we see that so much in our industry, but—

Correct.

All industries, but ours in particular, I think. All industries. It's a great industry.

And clients, it's not that, you know, in most industries, people are like, we'll talk about the client value, keep the clients. I mean, not just like in any profession, not every client client is not valuable. There's just different means to how you're going to engage. So, yeah.

Yes. Absolutely.

Well, it has been enjoyable. Thank you.

Thank you.

So we have our lovely Tiara. Who's going to take this away.

So until next week, let's—

Yes. Here we go. Come back.

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And rate us, rate us, give us 5 stars. We love stars. Well, this is a great topic. I'm going to give Steve the crown for this one, and we'll see you all next week. Well, bye.

Bye, everybody.