041 Getting Your Accounting Firm Off Timesheets

Today we're giving back to all those accountants, bless their hearts, that are hustling away in an old timey practice. Maybe it's a big firm where change is hard. Maybe it's a we firm where they're living in 1985. Buddy, I've been there. I've been there. A lot of us have been there. Some of us are still there. A lot of people that listen to this podcast, that's you. And you know what? That's hard. It is. It really is. But you are the future of the profession. And so let's do something today to give back a bit. What are the things that if you're not in that situation, we learned along the way that would have made navigating those situations easier, to make sure that before those people just peace out and go on to do something else out of frustration, let's give them the tools that they need to be change makers to kick stuff off in their firms. Because you know what? Gosh darn it, you can do that. That's a thing that can happen. I didn't go out and start my own firm from scratch for reasons that I'm happy to share and I think I've talked about a bit in the past, and there's a type of person who just like, I'm not gonna hang. I got my own vision for doing this. I'm gonna go start my own firm. For me, that wasn't the right path and I fought those battles and made that change happen from the inside. So trying something new. We're gonna call it Old Old Timey Tuesday, where we dive into an old timey accountingism. Why? Like, why those old timey things came to be and how to navigate them and potentially even ultimately overcome them. Today we're starting with the king of all old timeyisms timesheets. Let's do it today on Jason Daly. So I've had this, like, running log on Twitter. I will link it in the show Notes, a field manual for communicating with legacy accountants. And it's just like a running thread of all of the so many of the old timey isms that I've encountered in accounting and a ton of other people have added their thoughts on here. At some point, I'm going to write a book about this. That is the book that I needed like 10 years ago when you go out and you look around yourself and you're like, I don't yet have the perspective to exactly know how to navigate this, but some of what's happening around me seems absolutely ridiculous. Right. We've. We've. If you've worked for somebody else, you've probably encountered that in your lifetime. But the hindsight I have now would have changed, I think, how I approached some of those issues and maybe a more practical way. I also think oftentimes the dialogue online, since there's just an inherent lack of context on Twitter and on virtually all the conversations online, I think oftentimes that dialogue isn't framed in a way that's helpful for the person who is still at that firm trying to initiate change to ultimately, like, show them the path to going about that in a. In a tactful way. So let's talk about timesheets. I will say I am not a. I'm not a, like, absolutes guy. The more the like, the more accounting firms I've seen, and I'll be honest, I would argue I have seen into just about as many US Accounting firms as virtually anybody in the last two or three years through my accountant community, through all the relationships that I've built, through the trust that I have with people who are willing to be open and transparent, many of whom are like thought leaders that we go and talk to in conferences and stuff like that. Like, I feel like I have a degree of transparency into as much as just about anybody. And with that transparency and the things that I've seen, it has made me more sure of some things and less sure of many things. And depending on the corners of the Internet where you hang out, there is definitely levels of collective group think that take over certain corners of the web. So that's 100% true. On Twitter, I think there are around certain, like, hot button issues, there are perspectives that kind of get picked up by kind of the, like, thought leaders and tribe leaders on that corner of the Internet. And those people are real vocal about their approach to certain things. And as a result, it actually, I think, makes people who don't feel that way less likely to speak up. And so when you go to those corners of the web, it can look like that's the only thing people think or that that's this like, unanimous universal thing. And, you know, for example, and this isn't to, like, call anybody out, but like, for example, if you see Blake Oliver and David Leary talk about something on the cloud accounting podcast, be it, you know, timesheets or stuff around crypto or whatever, and they kick off that conversation online. And then you have people who love that podcast who engage with that conversation and largely are going to be in agreement with their position on it. The Conversation that you see that happens there as has all kind of, like, coalesced around a certain viewpoint. And I think when you come upon that stuff, like, your natural reaction is that this is like kind of this universal truth and that everybody feels that way. When in reality, conversations on Twitter are usually engagement happens with. And there's exceptions to this, but the majority of engagement, I think, happens in agreement rather than in conflict. So when somebody writes about, you know, the right way to deliver a tax return, I think most of the discussion there's going to be around, like, you know, the agreement with how you do that, rather than the people who have some sort of experience that makes them think that isn't the right answer or that that's not the right answer for their firm or for their clients. So on this, like, Old Timey Tuesday stuff, if this becomes a recurring thing, which I think I would like it to be, because I think on this podcast, I would like to do more speaking to me 10 years ago, not me one or two years ago running a firm, but me 10 years ago trying to figure out what does this profession look like for me? And, like, how do we give those people the perspective that will keep them in the profession and help them to feel like they have agency and control over what they're doing and all that. And for all of you folks who have gone through that journey, like myself, please engage in the comments and all that stuff. Seeing other people navigating the same thing, seeing people who are on the other side of that is really helpful. Like, I mean, imagine you when you were working for somebody else, imagine if you had this level of perspective of like, oh, there's actually a whole bunch of people that feel the same thing, and there are ways to navigate this. It would have given you a whole lot more hope. Right? So I feel like that's something that's a listener that's maybe missing in the things we're talking about on this podcast right now that I would like to help, because I know I've heard from folks that are like, there's a lot of stuff about firm running and all that, but, like, what about me when I'm not quite there yet? So bring this back to timesheets where I am on timesheets, actually, where I've always been. I don't think timesheets are generally a helpful way to price what you do and invoice what you do. But I've always kept timesheets and I've always had my team keep timesheets for perspective. The smallest, my firm ever was was about 30 people. The largest it was was just over 40 people. As long as I was an owner of the firm, I had a remote team that I was managing around the world. I say those things to say because I do think those are contributing factors as to. To decide whether or not timesheets are right for you. If you're looking at, in my opinion, if you're a small firm, if you're doing stuff for yourself, if you have a small team, if you're all very plugged into yourself, plugged into what everybody's doing each day, I think that is a scenario that's probably lends itself best to not having to manage time and all of that and that working totally fine. I. In my experience, there's very few people, in fact, I don't know any who have scaled an accounting firm beyond 30 or so people and not made the decision to have the team track time. Doesn't mean that that's how you price your engagements, doesn't mean that that's how you bill out. But the vast majority of those people that I still know are tracking time. And I can tell you why I did was especially in a remote setting. I think if you can break down the culture of fear around me doing something wrong or me not being good enough at my job, if you can overcome that culture, then transparency into time is tremendously helpful. When it comes to people's blind spots that they have doing remote work. Like we've talked about some of the, like adjacency of work that you don't get when you're working remotely. You can't reasonably expect people to have an understanding of how long should something take if they don't have the context to know how long does it take Jimmy or Tina to do or something like that. And so, like, there's definitely ways to try to manufacture that adjacency and teams being more in touch and working in pods and stuff like that. But I think a lot of the, A lot of the issues with a lot of the, I guess the negatives of timesheets come with the culture around timesheets too, where it is a production environment and you will be punished if you're not able to produce at the appropriate level. I think if you strip a lot of those things away, there are ways that timesheets are helpful. Now what I think nobody should be doing is billing and pricing engagements according to timesheets. So you are in a firm that is built atop timesheets. If that's you that honestly think that's still 95% of accounting firms out there. If you are trying to lead that firm on a, a path towards modernization, and that may mean getting rid of timesheets, it may mean value billing instead. I think what you run into when you run to your boss and you say, I heard this really compelling podcast, I think we should throw out our timesheets. I think what you run into, and I've been this guy, I think what you run into when you say that is not resistance to getting rid of timesheets, but just a general lack of understanding of, if we don't have timesheets, how are we going to bill people? Right? Like, the issue, I think, around timesheets and maybe devaluing them within an organization or even eliminating them altogether is not the timesheets themselves, but how people price their engagements when they've never known anything else. And one of the most helpful ways that I framed this for my colleagues in the past who were really married to the billable hour was to kind of like look over their shoulder as the invoice clients. And generally what they will do is already some form of value billing. They just don't call it that. Because I think virtually nobody, let's say you do annual tax work. I think virtually nobody sends an invoice out the door without seeing what they billed that client last year. And that invoice 95% of the time is gonna come in within some sort of a reasonable threshold relative to what it was last year, oftentimes, regardless of the time that went into the project. At its worst, I think people are billing out, quote, unquote time by looking at last year's invoice, marking it up some just to cover inflation or something. Maybe there's another adjustment there based on scope. And then the only time where the only situation where the time really comes into play is if the time is really high, that person gets a slap on the wrist if the time is really low. I don't, I don't. Have you ever been, have you ever been congratulated for getting a project done quickly? Never happened in my experience. It was simply a way to ensure that the project didn't get over budget so that you could then crush that person's spirit and tell them that they're not fast enough. And why can't you be more like Steve? This episode is sponsored in part by Client Hub. That's right. Hey, this week on Tales from the Hub. Remember last week when we did this super smart accounting firm figured out that getting answers from clients was the key to unlocking the profitability of their firm. So they chose Client Hub, a practice management system with a client portal at its core. When they rolled it out, the clients were like, omg thank you. Beautiful and modern. Modern, simple experience. They said their exact words for this hypothetical firm and a killer mobile app. How many of our like accounting platforms right now have a helpful mobile app? Not many. Now the firms and the clients are on the same page about what's required to do the work. The staff at Super Smart Accounting Solutions can assign clients tasks for the clients to tackle. That can be like a yes, no answer. They can be a request for files, even requests for categorization. It'll automatically sync back to QuickBooks or Xerox. That's handy, right? Whatever the client task is. They discovered that their clients on Client Hub now respond right away and have overcome some of the like blocking that happens with getting the work done waiting for clients. Nobody likes that. Hey. To learn more about Client Hub and how you can unblock your life, check out the link in the show notes. This episode is sponsored in part by the fine folks at Cloud Accountant Staffing. Do you hire accountants? Bless your little heart. Not the best part of the job in my opinion. Not something I ever enjoyed. Well, listen, you can build your accounting dream team with talented offshore accountants in the Philippines that work 100% full time for your firm. 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Check these folks out link in the show description Cloud accountantstaffing.com so if you're looking to modernize a practice and the way that it approaches the management of time, I think the way to start that conversation with your colleagues is to look at how you invoice your projects and how you Price the work that you do. And I did this in a firm with about 1500 clients. We did a ton of once a year tax work for folks. And I can run you through what that process looked like for me because it was a long journey. But by the time I was out of there, we got there. By the end, we were running over a thousand engagements a year out of ignition value, pricing that stuff, kind of sort of depending on the project. But I think what we hear oftentimes in podcasts and we see online and all of that, what we see is the destination, the best case scenario. And when you're running your own firm or you start something from scratch, you absolutely have the flexibility to, you know, do whatever you want from day one without any regard for what the expectation of the clients is, the expectation of the staff. Whereas within an ongoing firm, you have all of this inertia going in a direction that is just the way people think things have always been done. That is the expectations of your clients, which we all know is really hard to, you know, the fear of giving your clients whiplash when it comes to getting them to engage with a portal or adopt some process that you want them to kind of follow along with you. If you're in a firm, the bigger it is, man, like, the harder it is to steer that ship. So how I navigated that was in a whole bunch of steps. And it takes really long. And it's really frustrating that it takes as long as it does. But in my experience, that was the way to kind of walk us to a better place. And in the end, it made, I think, a huge difference. But if you zoom out, took a long time, took a lot of getting people around that methodology. And I think, particularly I would say in the US and tax firms, the change cycle is really long because so many things happen on an annual cycle that oftentimes those changes can, like, take years to play out where you wish it was something that you could push through faster. But in my case, the very first, like, itty bitty steps towards kind of the devaluing of, of time. And to me, the value of devaluing time was cultural. It was taking the fear out of time. Tracking it was using time as a way to help people rather than a, like, big stick to slap them with. There's a lot of people that just like, say absolutely no. We just hate timesheets so much. Get rid of them, whatever, that's fine. If you hate them that much, sure, throw them out. That wasn't me because I found without time There were people who would flounder and we didn't have like, perspective into the degree to which they were struggling. So that's how we used it. But that only works if you can build a safe culture around time. So how we took baby steps to modernizing our approach around time. So started with modernizing our approach to pricing new engagements. And new clients are always a great opportunity to test things because they have no, like, they have no expectations otherwise, right? Like, they, they don't. There isn't this element of unlearning what the process has been to then learn this new process when they come in day one, as far as they're concerned, that's the only, like, that's all they know. That's just how it's always been from the beginning of time. They're like little kids if you've had little kids. It's always funny to me, like, how much of what I think is normal I project onto them when like I had a whole herd of COVID babies and they didn't know anything besides being stuck in the house all the time and things like going out to the grocery store, going to a Target, oh my gosh, just like blew their minds. And then the first time we took them to a theme park, we went to Legoland in San Diego. And they're like looking around like, are you kidding me? This exists within my universe. New clients are the same way and it's a good opportunity to test things out, see how it works. And also a really low stakes way to get your colleagues to lean into something new because it doesn't have that same inherent fear of trying to get an existing client to change or fear of souring a client's relationship because of that thing that you talked them into. With a new client, there's a little bit more of a feeling of like, nothing to lose and you don't have to take them from A to B. So it just feels easier. So how we started modernizing the way that we priced started with new clients. And in the past, the process would be something like, well, here's some other clients where we do similar types of work and the time usually comes in around here. So that's how we priced it. But arguably the most important sort of tipping point to get over here is, is to get over that association of effort and costs and all of that as they relate to what you are going to charge a client. I even said this last week when I said end of an era. We have ads on this show now. What a shill, man. That sucks. And one of the rationale I gave was because it costs money to produce this show, but that ultimately doesn't matter. It doesn't matter how much it costs to produce this show. When you're creating a thing, it's up to you to consider the value that the people on the other side get from it. So what is the value of that work you're going to do for the client? You have to then, like, marry what you're willing to do that for with their perceived value of it. So where we did still take into account time and effort, the closest thing we had to a quote, unquote cost calculator in our firm was to define the floor of the engagements we were going to take in. So if a client assigns no value to the work that you do, value pricing that engagement, that price is going to be very low. Like, when you value price, that doesn't necessarily imply that you're going to invoice, you know, a ton for every single client. Like, ultimately, it's up to you to find the potential customers who most value what you do. So, like, the more specificity you get, like, the more you double down on that perfect client, the problems that you solve for them should be really, really painful so that they assign a lot of value to what you do. But in the early days, buddy, that ain't the case. And so you will have some clients that assign very little value to you doing bookkeeping for them because their spouse used to do that, and that was free. So why would I pay any more than some, you know, pittance to somebody else to do it? If that old, you know, the old ball and chain can do it, why am I going to pay you very much for it? We would have, we had like a calculator to kind of define what that minimum was. And we would even flex that according to capacity. So if we were nearing capacity, we would actually jack that up to say, like, no, anything that we do take right now, like, it's gotta be really good for us. So we would use a calculator for that, but we ultimately would not price according to that. We wouldn't take anything that fell below it. But ultimately, when the person was running them through the sales process, it was more about learning, like, what is painful for this person and whether we can solve that problem in a meaningful way. And when I got the partners of the firm and like the people who are pricing things to. To kind of accept this methodology, which was easier than said than done. Like, accountants are such servants. There's an element there of. Some people think that that is unfair. The, the idea that what you charge is not tied to time or cost or anything like that. Like, there's an element of like fairness that is hard for people to get over there and some people never get over that. And like, there's people right now who will take that to the grave. That just feels the most fair to them, I would say. And like, I would also temper all this to say, like, you could run a really heckin profitable firm on timesheets. Like you can, like I've seen them. Like, you can make a shocking amount of money billing your time. I don't subscribe to the notion that it's like unfair for a couple of reasons. I think the more you look around and all the other things that we do and the way that we exchange value and all of that, like ultimately virtually none of it is tied to effort or costs or anything like that. It's often used as an excuse to increase the cost of something. But when I pay for something, like, I don't, I really am ultimately not concerned with the cost. And I think there's a bit of like an old timey notion to like, that's just the right thing, that's just the most fair way for me to spend my time. But I've kind of gotten over that. Hey. This episode is sponsored in part by Firm360. Firm360 is practice management system that's just going to help you get more done, help you run a more organized accounting firm. If you're out there running an accounting firm on a spreadsheet or on that legacy tool that your tax vendor says, oh, no, we're gonna bundle this one with you and it's gonna be like free for three years. Okay? If you're that guy, you already know you've made a mistake. Listen, cloud practice management systems, they're here to stay. This is the future. You just gotta get on board. Okay, let me tell you a bit about firm360. Nice thing about firm360 is it's trying to do all that stuff for you. It is trying to do project management, file management, time and billing. You're getting all that stuff into a single place in the cloud that you can work with anywhere. You can associate your documents with the projects that they related to your time and billing, all that stuff in one place. Just like that crappy old tax vendor told you their tool would do, right? How's that going for you? Mm, check out firm360 developed by actually an accounting firm that was like, none of these things do the things that I want them to do. Let's build our own, right? If that's feeling like you right now, check out firm 360. I'll put a link in the show. Notes. The other thing that I think is hard to get over here is the notion that you've worked with clients who come in with things in immaculate condition and things that come in and just like a dumpster fire state. And you want that to be fair to everybody. You want to reward the organized person, and you want the disorganized person to pay that tax for the extra time that it's gonna take you to do that work. And so you think that you need to split hairs and invoice every single client, any bespoke way to ensure that that is as fair as possible for everybody. That's another thing I was up against quite a bit. And what helped me there and what our team ultimately got behind was zooming out and thinking about the business more through the lens of, like, portfolios of work, types of work, and how you make those portfolios of work as profitable as possible. So it took kind of zooming out from that super granular level, and it didn't mean that we hosed that person that came, like, brought their stuff in in a really organized way. But we did become less focused on doing that really granular billing on every single client. We weren't as concerned with, like, losing our shirt shorts versus making a bunch of money on individual engagement engagements, because we were kind of zoomed out, looking at it in a bigger picture way, which I think is more healthy to consider. The 1040 work that we do from February through April, how does that impact the business? And how can we make that as profitable as possible? And should that? Is that something that we should even be doing? I think when you zoom out and look at it that way, that's much more constructive than, like, looking at individual projects when it comes to decision making. So ultimately, we got to a place where we were pricing new engagements better. Part of the motivation here, too, was just acknowledging that we had been chronically underpricing what we did. And, like, much of that was anchored to this notion of hourly billing. And we just kind of accepted as a business, we just needed to start looking at this through a different paradigm. So as we were really aggressively increasing our rates, that was kind of the opportunity to just decide, nope, like, this is the value that we're going to assign to our time and to not our time, to the work that we're doing. And this is how we're going to have a more meaningful sales and onboarding conversation with a client, or I guess, discovery process with a client to arrive at what that value price ought to be. And once we had done that and then you come through and you build a client, it ultimately didn't matter where the time came in. And I think once my colleagues had gone through that exercise and saw that there's actually a lot of upside there, it took the spookiness out of dropping time and not. Not being so caught up on the number of hours into a project when they build. But that didn't start to happen until they had developed some of those engagements themselves. And those were actually like really profitable engagements because they weren't anchored to, you know, directly to our inputs. And that all started with new projects, new clients, because there was kind of like nothing to lose there. Now, once everybody had gotten some wins there and made it much easier to do that work on the rest of our client base. And so how do you make this transition with 1500 clients? Right. It's a big move. What we did is like, we weren't particularly interested in and going down through every single engagement and saying, how much does this person value what we're doing for them right now? Like, so what we got to is we really transitioned the bulk of our work, and that was about 1040s, made up a big chunk of all that work. I would say we moved most of that work to fixed pricing, not necessarily to value pricing. Like, the organization developed a better understanding of value pricing. And when we would sit down and do one on ones with clients, we. We would like take the time to do that. But we weren't going to sit back, like go back and revisit 1500 engagements and do that in every case. So what we did was we took these projects based on prior year's fees and we dropped them into basically five buckets. And there was then there was a six bucket that was like jumbo. It was like the big projects that kind of had their own bespoke thing. Otherwise everybody fell into one of five buckets based on their prior year fees. We transitioned to showing those people the price up front before we did the work, which was another big unlock. But basically across about 1,000 projects, we went from billing hourly after the fact to sending out an ignition proposal in December, January, saying, here's what your rate is. You need to set up a payment method. When the project's done, we're going to bill this. That was happening at A time where we were increasing our rates pretty aggressively. So we felt like, just from a standpoint of, like, good faith, we needed to put that price in front of people before we did the work so that we didn't get to the end. And it was like 30% more. And they're like, what the heck, man? So it kind of solves several problems at once. But then we established a threshold, and this was kind of the trade off with the legacy billing mindset that got everybody to commit to taking the first step. The trade off was we agreed that if a project came in at the end, and so we're coming from a paradigm where all the partners would sit down and go through the billing registers and actually invoice every single thing that we did. Where we landed here, we would send out the ignition proposals, uh, beforehand, December, January, and we got like 56% adoption on that or something. The clients who actually went through and accepted that proposal, another 20% looked at it. And we got them there by telling them that was how they could see their price ahead of time, like to go out and look at this thing. And so that sort of motivated people to do that too. But we put about a thousand engagements through this for the first time. And, like, I will not say it was easy. There were a lot of questions about, like, I don't understand this and that. And so we really tried to upskill the admin team to support clients through that process. But then on the back end, when it came to invoicing them at the end of the project, everybody agreed. If, like wip, that is time, time, you know, hours, times billable hours, came in within 125% of what we quoted, it would get invoiced without the partner having to sign off on it. And so we, we had basically, like, ran the numbers on all of our projects and said, if everybody upholds this framework, then on like a portfolio basis, profitability is going to be within this range, kind of within this threshold, and everybody could agree on it being within that range. And what ultimately happened, and this is an office full of skeptics, skeptical people, what ultimately happened is 99% of those things, those projects went out the door without the partner having to sit down and invoice them. I mean, think about. This is one of the big upsides to sell your colleagues on. Think about the amount of time that is spent by your most valuable people. Billing. I mean, it's something that you can't invoice for. Like, it is total waste. And so for our firm, we we generated just as much money as we would have otherwise. And the admin team handled the whole billing cycle. In fact, they pulled the money at the end of the project automatically. So they're like, was no outstanding ar. And it was that agreement to that framework, kind of that auto billing framework that got people. That was another big step down that path. For the legacy folks that were used to billing hourly, and then when they didn't have to bill those projects anymore, buddy, it hurt. When one hit their desk, they're like, ah, crap. Like, they don't want to have to deal with this. They really quickly got used to not having to invoice all that stuff themselves. And on the other side of that, the whole team then was actually thinking about what they did through the lens of value pricing. And that was like the first kind of organizational step for a bunch of people who had done this stuff for decades. And we're talking about hundreds of years of collective experience. That for me, was the way to get them on a better path. And it took probably three years of really hard work to get there, but it did. It was way more profitable for us. And equally important to having gotten there was what then was next for their frame of thinking, what things started happening next. Well, time does become less important, but we can actually then look at time in a more meaningful way. We can look at process improvement in a more meaningful way. I mean, it sounds ridiculous to say, but there are a lot of people stuck on hourly billing, and there are a lot of people not investing in technology and automation, all that stuff, because they bill by the hour and they don't know how to organizationally recapture that time that they lose. Am I. Do I just increase Tina's hourly rate another $20 an hour or something like that? Like, there's. That's a lot of why there's resistance to being more efficient right now. So when you. When you kind of get people starting down that path of value pricing, what they do, you'll notice all of this is like, where we're at. Was like, if I started a firm tomorrow, that's not how I would do it. Like, if I started it from scratch tomorrow, I would. I would do it in a different way. And that is not the perfect model. Like, that is. You can listen to people talk about what they do who have started their firm in the last five years and listen to like, think boys and Internet think people talking about, here's the ultimate way to do it. We weren't there, but we had steered a big ship, like on a path to get people to a place of understanding that. And it took years. Like, so you're not going to sit your boss down and say, I think we should do away with timesheets because there's so many other things attached to that, so many upstream things from that where they're like, how do we invoice? So I would say if there's one thing you take out of this, like, it is doable. Like you can steer a big ship through that process and it's powerful in some ways it's more rewarding to me anyways. It was more rewarding than I think it would have been. Going out and just saying, screw all y'. All. I know how to do this stuff better than all of you and going out and doing my own thing. Ultimately it was like a lot of work and a real challenge and sometimes we'll feel thankless, but it's absolutely something that you can do in a firm. And then when you go through that journey, even if you do ultimately want to go out and start your own firm someday, I will say, I have like a richness of experience and perspective that I would not have had had I not gone through that, gone through that journey. Change management, man. Like, it is, it's hard. It is no joke. But that process gets massively simplified in the conversations that you see online. I would say rather than fixating on what the theoretical perfect version of this is, all you gotta do is think through what is the next step from where we are today. You gotta break it down to really, really small wins. Because people don't work that way. Like, that's not the way our brains work. They're not gonna read a thing and generally not gonna read a thing and have this eureka moment that then like turns them onto something wildly different. Most people, you gotta baby step through it and they have to get some wins for themselves to kind of taste the rainbow. And it's one of the things I am most proud of because there were so many baby steps involved in that process for us. But then when you zoom out and you think about what a big change that was over like three years for people that had done this stuff for decades. And you're like this little snot nosed guy saying, oh, I know better than you, that's how you make it happen is those little baby changes and helping those people get like small wins so that they can then kind of go to the next version of that. And all these may be well shy of this like, holy grail, perfect way to do all this stuff. And that's totally okay. Most relevant to you is what is the next thing that will take us one step further down that path. How's that? Old Timey Tuesdays. If you are struggling with all this right now, if you're managing this stuff, I love to hear about it. Just to know that you're here. If you, like me, had to wade through this muck, I'd love to hear your experience too. Because all the folks that are stuck in this right now go down, read the comments I shared some tidbits from me. But like the more the richness and kind of fullness of people's experiences we can pull in, I think the easier it is for people to go through that work and understand like it is possible. And here's a couple tips for how to just manage like those legacy folks that you can be surrounded with sometimes. That's it. Old Timey Tuesday. What do you think? We could do this each week. Feel like we're doing a lot of content for firm owners, but maybe not enough for the folks that are still, still earning their stripes, you know? That's it for today. See you tomorrow. Q and A Wednesday, you got some Q's. Drop down below and I'll see you tomor.