047 How To Build An Accounting Firm To Sell

Come on in. The profession's fine.

It's Q and A Wednesday. We're talking about how to optimize a.

Firm for sale, how to build the ultimate accounting tech stack from scratch. What would I do if I started a firm tomorrow? And what are the spiciest accounting conferences that you need to be turning up to year after year?

Come on in.

Let's talk about it as Jason Daly.

All right.

Happy Wednesday. Thanks for coming and hanging an update on the plague. I might almost be over it. Word of wisdom. If you're going into the business of having kids, those little things just catch everything, absolutely everything. If there's a disease out there to be had, they're going to find it, they're gonna lick it off a handrail and they're gonna bring it home for everybody to enjoy. And that's just, that's just life now. But you know what? They bring you a lot of good things too. But a diaper just made it through the washing machine today too. And I don't know that that load of clothes is ever gonna be the same because that thing just disintegrated. But I guess there's good things too. So. Q and A Wednesday. Couple questions here from Alison. You mentioned that our practice or book of business is an easily transferable asset. I think it's a bit harder for solopreneurs. Our clients come to us because they have access to us and the relationships that we have with them. A buyer is going to ask what they're buying, how do we set ourselves up kind of to plan for that. And you're totally right. So the Patrick Dieter on Twitter talks a lot about buying firms. He's rolled up a few firms and is out there talking with as many. I don't know, he's, he's kind of my go to guy for best practices when it comes to what the ideal target accounting practices to purchase. In fact, let me put, I'll put his Twitter in the show notes here. He talks about how basically 99 of firms aren't suited for acquisition for just this reason is when you have a firm that's built around the identity of an individual and a new owner comes in, there's literally like no reason for that client to stay besides just the annoyance of having to switch. I will say if you're new, if you're acquiring a practice like that, usually like you do have the first opportunity to keep that client or to prove to them why they should stay. And depending on how the buyout is structured, like I never did a buyout where there wasn't a clawback if those clients left so that everybody was incentivized to try to keep those clients so that the, you know, the owner that was going out wouldn't like badmouth you. So it's absolutely a factor. And so when it comes to buying a practice, like a practice that is managed by the team, where you have an owner that is, have kind of remove themselves from the management of the clients, that's a much more valuable firm, should be a much better multiple. That being said, the reality is like, that's just not how most small practices are. And so if you look at more of their traditional firm buying and selling brokers, like, who's the one that literally leaves me voicemails and sends me text messages? I don't know. There's a number of them that are getting more and more up in your face. But I would say you're absolutely right. Your firm's gonna be more valuable if you've disassociated yourself from the client management and if your team instead is overseeing the, the client management. But even in that scenario, oftentimes you're gonna have strings attached to the team hanging around. So even if you do delegate those relationships down to team members and some of the like deal structures that I've seen, it really just rather than you being incentivized to keep all the clients there through a clawback, you still have a clawback just around the team staying. So if you built a team and you have delegated all those client relationships, that's a positive. But I will say in some ways you are trading some limitations of the deal for a different limitation of the deal. Because have you delegated those staff relationships? Is there any reason for the staff to stay when new ownership comes on board? All that being said, I do think the kind of all things considered, a firm is still going to be more lucrative if it isn't, if all those client relationships aren't tied to the owner. So you're totally right there. How can we set ourselves up, you know, and kind of plan for that? Just, you know, the, the whole, I'm working on a roast video that'll go out on Sunday and, and this, it's a single person firm who's kind of at that, that point where they've worked for five years to build a firm from zero to one and are having analysis paralysis on how to get beyond one. Because, you know, building a practice from zero to one to beyond one is completely different. And there's a lot of folks that enjoy what that 0 to 1 firm looks like, where it's just them, it's people that they enjoy working with, but they may not enjoy what it looks like to develop a firm beyond that. Cause it usually means. Well, I guess initially it means supporting that one person is how most people approach it. But ultimately like to outgrow yourself and to delegate those relationships. That usually means bringing in a different type of client that's suited not for you, but is suited for your team, which could be a totally different type of person, totally different type of business. So it's worth. Yeah. Thinking ahead about how to not make yourself irreplaceable in that relationship. But I've got a big asterisk on that that I'll circle back to after this second question that Allison asked. Kind of goes on the same thought. How should we think about building and designing our business with the end in mind, at some point all of us will retire. What can we do to build a business? Someone wants to buy, or when we want to leave to a family member, how do we do it while keeping our goal of having a life, being present with our family, friends, et cetera, ever present and how we run our business? I think the hot take, you may not agree. And it's one of those things where it's. It depends. I think the mystique around exits is overblown and glorified. When we look at other people and we see, oh, they have these sales, and this is like this kind of cherry on the top of this career as you had this big successful exit. Why I think that can be problematic is I've seen a lot of examples of, I would say two reasons that's problematic. It's really hard for a practice to continue being successful and continue being what you wanted it to be after you set sell it. Like so many sales that I've seen, the firm gets rolled up into a larger group where, like, what made that firm special is squashed because it's gobbled up by this larger group. They say in the beginning they're not going to change anything, but eventually all those processes get gobbled up into their processes. And generally the clients don't like it, the staff don't like it. So an external sale, to be totally honest to you, for me, in my firm running days, that was that to me, never felt like a positive outcome. Obviously I would get a payday. But if I think about, like, cool, I'm going to build this, this firm and all these clients, and I'm going to pour all this Effort into all these people and then, like, kick them in the nuts on the way out the door so that I get a payday. Like, that is how most external firm sales I've seen have gone. Like, I don't know that I can think of any examples of a firm sale to a third party where everybody was tickled on the other side of that. And so, yes, there is a payday that could be had there. But would I feel good about doing that? Probably not. I mean, the holy grail is, is the internal firm sale, but, boy, that's really, really, really hard to do to sell the practice to the people that you employ. Because, like, unless they have some external source of wealth, the notion of paying them to then go back and turn around and pay you is hard and not always realistic. That being said, for me, an internal sale was always the best case scenario. But we never had a way to make that work. Like, we weren't able to get there. It was an issue of, like, if you had the purple, the perfect people all lined up to make it happen, great. Like, I would happily sold internally to the team at a big discount. But that was just a really hard thing to line up. And so, like, while I do think that is the best case scenario, it's really hard to do and doesn't work in most situations, which gets me to my hot take, that is, I don't think it's worth sacrificing the here and now in any way. In the way that you build your firm in order for some hypothetical potential future payoff. If you sell a firm at a 1x multiple. I would rather have made that firm perfect for me, flexible for me, let me work the way that I want to work and be able to do it for another two years and make the same money at the end of the day and then just like, hand it over to the team or something like that, or sell to the team at a huge discount. I think. I think the. The whole exit thing is glorified. And so we think about that as like the ultimate. It's almost like the partner track equivalent mindset for firm owners. And the biggest. The big reaction when I talked about getting out of my firms, everybody's like, congratulations on the sale. And like, I'll be real with you. Like, I didn't make a dime on the sale. Like, I had a big obligation. What I was most concerned with in the course of the sale was not leaving all of those people flapping in the breeze, like, my team and the clients and all that stuff. And so unless you're like a real M and a nerd and what you enjoy is really just doing the buying and the selling and the rolling up and all that stuff, just make the firm that's going to work best for you, that will give you the most sustainable, enjoyable version of doing that thing. Because if you can even, you know, if you can extend your firm running career another 24 months, like, great, you've made all the money back that you would make in a sale and then you've got this thing where you're not moving it on to the next party out of some sort of financial need anymore. It's, it can be a less financially motivated decision so that maybe you are pulling the team in on a more preferential deal where maybe it's not as big of a burden for them. But I personally, I don't get super excited about selling firms because of how it just seems to like hurt everybody on the other side of it. Like, I just, I don't see external sales going well. So my thinking is optimize it for yourself to do it longer term and then best case scenario, you have the people in the firm who can take that stuff over at a really preferential rate.

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To stunt your career growth for as long as you let them. Check out the link in the show notes to Dark Horse CPAs to learn more. A LinkedIn DM. I usually don't say who people are. If they're sending me a dm, I assume. I assume I should keep that private. Asking about, you know, changing tech and AI and all of that. Are there any key new or revamped positions and firms that you see? I potentially see a future job posting at a firm that sits in between traditional IT and department leaders where the primary focus is identifying and solving processes, challenges, inefficiencies, competing priorities that distract from the firm's larger goals. Tech exploration and awareness would be a large part of the gig. Yeah, it's absolutely true. There are firms that have in house automation folks and like the whole notion of the chief automation officer was something that was really picking up steam. AI is kind of eclipsed all this. But like, no code stuff will like has really exploded the last few years. The idea that anybody can build a mobile app in five minutes and create, create a website and build your own little custom workflows and integrations and all that stuff. And at a certain point I think we're going to stop calling it no code and now it's just like software. Like software has been on this inevitable path towards simplification where anybody can build it from the earliest days of computing when people were writing lines of code for like the actual hardware in the machine and managing memory and all these things. Like that stuff has been abstracted and abstracted and abstracted to now where most development languages are super, super simplified and way easier than the older ones. But like, the inevitable destination of that is it just keeps getting more and more simple to where anybody can create software. And like Zapier is a great example of that. Like the ability to visually integrate two different apps in a customized way. All that stuff's just going to keep getting easier and keep getting more accessible and keep getting more powerful. So the, the, like, the real problem with automation tools and all that is nobody identifies as an automation nerd. Like, besides the people that are going out and consulting with people just around automation and workflow and all that, like accountants, there's a small subset of them that do. But in general, if you're an accountant, you don't identify as the person that's going to do a deep dive on this software stuff. You see it and you're like, well, I like, this is my job. Is this other stuff, I've got obligations I've got to meet. And so like, that's not me, that's for somebody else to tackle. When these days that line is getting more and more blurred between who are automation specialists versus, like, is this just a part of knowledge work now? And now we're seeing this conversation starting to come up around AI, where it's like, okay, do you have AI experts and then the normal workers, or is AI like, you know, like everybody just kind of has to learn it because, you know, every we're getting into conference season, every single talk that you're in, whether they're talking about AI or not AI is the elephant in the room is how is AI going to change this workflow or this process or this type of work? So is it something where you have leadership, where that is their dedicated role, that's what they're going to do? And maybe part of their role is to help bring people up to speed, up to like a base level, so that they can lean into that stuff to at least some degree? Or is it something that just becomes an expectation for everyone? And that's something organizationally that I think will be different firm to firm. Is there will be the real nerd firms where you're expected to have this level of technical capability just to get your work done. And I mean, in the past this was like being able to use the Microsoft Office suite, like, how many words a minute could you type? Like, can you use a computer? Like are you savvy with Excel? Like these are past versions of these sort of same things and like future equivalent things may be like building cloud integrations and understanding AI and being able to get the most out of Chat GPT and stuff like that. So it probably depends on the makeup of the firm. If the expectation in the beginning is that like folks are very savvy and like everyone's, everyone is at a certain level, then I think you probably don't need a dedicated role. If it's a more traditional firm where not everyone is kind of this hybrid individual where they can do the automation stuff and the traditional work, which is 99% of firms, then maybe it does make sense to have that, that automation person in there as kind of a force multiplier and to not only develop the top level tech, that is the stuff that the entire firm leverages, but also like try to upskill everyone so that personal productivity is increased. And like I've, I've talked about, I don't know if I've talked about this on this show, but I do think there's a real shift in technology happening where technology historically was all organizationally led top down. But the faster that software changes and the more cool tools we have at our disposal, the more personal productivity or bottom up productivity is like way more helpful and hard for larger organizations to lean into. And so Chat GPT is a great example of that. It's something that changes every week as the underlying models, capabilities change. And if you're going to wait for like a top level, like look at a big organization, if you're going to wait for some top down implementation of that technology, it's going to take a really long time as opposed to the people who are using ChatGPT the day it launched for writing emails and stuff like that and saving time. Obviously the harder aspects of bottom up personal productivity is security is like organizational policies around those tools. Zapier is a great example of this, where zapier is great for these fiddly little one off workflows that you have where no organizational policy is ever going to solve for that problem. So absent personal productivity and you being able to make your own tools to solve your own problems, those problems will never be solved. But the tools are sitting out there on the shelf to solve those problems. So like, unless we're accounting for personal productivity somehow and giving people access to tools that will solve their own problems, at least to some level, then you have people doing this work that can absolutely be automated. It's just not allowed at the organizational level. So to bring this back to the question of like automation roles, it depends on like where on that spectrum the firm is. But most firms where not everybody's going to be a real nerd leaning into this stuff could probably benefit to some degree of having that. And so maybe the initial version of that is like pulling someone in part time on contract. Maybe for larger firms that makes sense for that to be a full time person, but for that ROI to be there, like the technology that they can enable has to be a good enough force multiplier to make that a worthwhile investment. Right. And that stuff is like compounding and getting better and better by the year. No code was a huge step in that direction. AI is another huge step in that direction. So all of this change I think is making that dedicated role a more and more viable thing because the tech just keeps getting better. But if have you ever hired like a automation role, I've talked with a couple people before who wanted to and even put some of those things in my those listings in my newsletter. If you've explored doing that like hiring for a role like that before, please please share how that worked in the comments. This is definitely an audience that is suited for that sort of thing. Like we've got a lot of tech heavy people in here so this is kind of an interesting crowd to explore that with. LinkedIn DM here. I'm curious about your thoughts on the ideal tech stack for a new accounting practice. Wondering if you could share some insights on the software and platforms you would personally choose if starting an accounting business from scratch today? Let's leave tax out of this. Let's just assume we're starting an accounting practice. I think today you've got two paths to build that tool stack around you. Either start with your cloud practice management system and like that is a non negotiable. You gotta have a way these days to manage client facing requests. You gotta have all that stuff in the cloud like on premise systems, like we gotta get past that stuff. But having a single place for the whole team to manage work and tasks and everything that you need from your clients, you got to have it right. Now I think if you start an accounting practice today, you either the first tool that you pick and then build everything else around is either going to be your cloud practice management system or it's going to be your month end close tool. And so if you work with some larger, more mid market companies there's a good number of month end Close tools out there like Flo Cast and there's a bunch of them if you work with SMBs. For most people that means Keeper. Keeper is a dedicated app for managing clients, month end closes and it has an integration with QuickBooks and Xero so that it can actually pull the transactional detail like into Keeper as you're doing reviews and that sort of thing. So I think most people today are starting to build that stack either with Keeper first or the cloud practice management system. If you go to cloud practice management system route, make sure it's got a great way for handling client facing requests. Like it's gotta have a portal that is good enough for clients to not get frustrated by it. I've railed on this a lot but like the biggest waster of time in the accounting industry right now in public accounting is hounding people for information. Let the machines do that. But then when you've got that practice management system you gotta look at like what? What else do I need around this? Does it do billing the way that I want? Most cloud practice management systems aren't very robust when it comes to billing. A lot of people go ignition there. Some people are going go proposal or some other like non accounting industry specific proposal tools. So oftentimes you will bolt a proposal and payment solution into that cloud practice management system because Most of the PMs today like they just rely on a QuickBooks integration for invoicing or something like that. But if I want to put an engagement letter in front of somebody that will take auto payments and like let me set up my service packages and all that stuff, I don't think any of them go that far yet. File management is another one that most cloud practice management systems don't weigh too heavily into. Some of them do now, but historically that has always been the other big thing that you might need. Another solution for when it comes to practice management is a dedicated file solution. The practice management systems now are leaning more into local drive syncs, which is great. It can be a real pain if you're trying to lean into client facing portals to have a source of documents that is that portal, but then all of your other documents live in a completely different place. That can be a real annoyance. But I think the common thing I'm seeing the practice management systems settle on is having this local synced drive so that you could work with what is basically a local file structure, but that syncs to the practice management system. And then from the practice management system you can make any of those files client facing so that they can see them as well. So if you go to practice management first path, that's what I see most folks doing. If you go the Keeper first path, it sort of changes what you need from your practice management system. So while Keeper is really good at managing the month end close like it does a great job with that, it doesn't get into the other stuff. So what about all the other aspects of your business from the more administrative things that maybe that isn't going to manage for you? Like if you do tax, is it going to be suited for managing tax projects, stuff like that? You've got right now a logjam at the client experience. So if you do other work besides month end closes and you want clients to work with a portal, are you asking too much of a client to use Keepers portal in addition to some other practice management systems portal that may do that other stuff better? That's kind of a tough one right now. But if you go Keeper first, you probably still have to pull in some other task management system to manage the tasks of the rest of the business. Or you just have to get creative with how you set up some non clients like admin projects within Keeper. But then after that I think the process is largely the same. Like you decide what that core kind of hub or brain for your firm is going to be and then like what does that lack? And then you try to bolt on those kind of additional things as necessary. I've said this before on this pod. I do think the big thing that's changing right now is there's an increasing amount of value in all in one solutions when AI can see across all of the stuff that it's connected to. And that is very hard to do through integrations. So for example, I've been harping on how I practice. In my mind it's now non negotiable that a practice management system has to touch email because if the practice management system is where all my information lives. But then I go over to Outlook to send emails. Arguably the most useful thing AI is going to do for us in the new term is in the near term is generative reply suggestions along with like documents. Like something that can see into projects and documents. So somebody asks how's my tax return coming along? Or can you send me my prior year return? That's a pretty easy thing for AI right now to go out and figure out what it needs to fetch and then suggest that to you in an email response like that's not a huge technical hurdle. But if those don't live in the same system that gets really complicated, and apps generally won't expose that level of data to each other. Like, it would either involve your file management system embedding all of these files and then giving another app access to all of those embeddings, which I've never seen anybody do, or it would require like your email app to cache everything that's in the other system to its system and then somehow like sync it on an ongoing basis to make it discoverable when you're gonna send an email. So like, integrations right now, like the way things work, integrations don't solve for that. So the way AI is taking us all in one is getting more powerful. And so having email in the same place that you have all of that other stuff is like almost non negotiable at this point. So if you're hitching your wagon to something today, you need to have AI conversations with them, ask them how they're leaning into this stuff. You know, point to other examples of people implementing AI stuff, like what Carbon's done, like what Canopy's done, like what Pixie's talking about. Keeper has done some cool AI stuff. Definitely have those conversations with your vendor. Because ultimately what will keep us relevant in the AI age is, is our tech partners leaning into this to enable this all for us. There's stuff that we can build ourselves that will make us helpful, like that personal productivity stuff. But the big things, the organizational stuff, that's going to have to be led by our tech partners. So ask those questions, send them to this podcast, say, like, hey, like, we need to be mindful of this. And then second, consider whether that's Suite is going to have any big blind spots. I used to be the best of Breed Bolt a bunch of tools together guy. I don't think that really works, like in the current AI paradigm or kind of where we're headed. So if, if email is not at the center of that, if there's not a great file management solution built into that so that when somebody asks for a banker letter, it can't go out and see 12, 12 very similar banker letters and generate one that gets you 90% of the way there. Like the day you have that stuff, managing client communications, talking with stupid bankers, that stuff's gonna get so much better, so much more efficient. And what I don't want is right now to be building all of my organizational history on a system that won't be able to do that for me. So, like, that's the, that's where you don't want to end up flapping in the breeze. Now, Microsoft Copilot should be super cool. Like they are on such a huge hype cycle announcing all of these things. But to be totally honest, they haven't shipped a lot of it. Like even, you know, Microsoft Copilot, which was the big thing that they hyped at the beginning of the year in like January or February. As of a week or two ago, only 100 companies I think it was even had access to that. So we'll get that eventually and it will probably be very good, but I don't think that it will ultimately, while it will be very good when it comes out, it does not have the same ceiling of potential as what accountant specific suites will have because they can develop things that are specific to us, that have like deep integrations with QuickBooks and Xero and stuff like that that solve more accountant specific problems. So while I am excited for Microsoft Copilot right now, the way things look, I don't think I would put my practice on it. But we'll see. Stuff's changing, man, in a really exciting way. In a way that's really good for us.

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I don't own it anymore. Try my Brainchild for free. Link in the show notes. Go check it out. Pretty cool. Okay, one more about accounting conferences.

I'm a new firm owner. This was Chipmun on Twitter less than 18 months. Very new firm owner. Congrats. Bless your heart. We need more of those and would love to find some great conferences. I'm not worried about continuing ed. Just awesome Firm Runner content. As you should be. Your recent episode said you go, you participate in lots. Any suggestions?

Yes, don't go to conferences for continuing ed.

That's the big thing I hear that a lot of people do is they and accountants are so roi. We're so ROI based based on what we know. When I think there's so much value in setting yourself up for I always say serendipity, like what cool and like what cool people could you meet? Like what things could happen that you.

Can'T even plan for?

Because if all you ever do is the stuff that has a really concrete ROI where you know exactly what's going to happen, then it's like, I don't know. For me that's kind of a boring way to go through life. But yeah, continuing ed is like the least, the thing I'm least interested at at accounting conferences. When you're at an accounting conference, you're surrounded by a bunch of people who have paid a pile of money and taken a bunch of time to be there. And these are smart people investing in themselves. And I hear this from me as somebody that goes and speaks at all these conferences. There's less to learn from the people who are speaking than there is to learn from all the people you're sitting around. Like that is the fun of conferences to me. That being said, come to all my talks, please, please, please. Okay, so for a new accounting firm owner, I think PASBA makes a ton of sense. PASBA is like, and I've never been to basma's annual conference, I would love to go sometime. But the whole deal with PASBA is like transparency and how people run their practices and how profitable they should be and benchmarking stuff like that. And that is a great, a great like fast track to learn how other people are running their firms. Which is what everybody should be trying to do is how do I steal a bunch of ideas from other folks? It'll cut years off your learning process. I've had some folks tell me that like PAAS was not always the most like cutting edge, like forward looking bunch. And I do think there's exceptions to every rule. But like just anecdotally I have, I have heard that, but especially if you're starting out in a firm, like building a practice for the first time, like having that foundation of like what's everybody else doing that's really, really valuable. Not to necessarily say that you're going to do it the exact same way, but it better informs how you make decisions for yourself. So I would put PASBA right up there especially for new firm owners, assuming it's an accounting practice. My faves, my S tier conferences in the US here I can't speak much to outside the US QuickBooks Connect is really good they'll have good speakers. It's a, it's one of the best ecosystem turnouts. There's a bunch of tech vendors there and that's really what I enjoy is like meeting all the different people who are developing stuff and finding early stage tools. It'll solve a problem for me, that sort of thing. QuickBooks Connect, they're doing that in Vegas now and so it's super easy to get in and out of. If you're on the east coast and you don't want to burn a day coming over to this side of the country, Scaling new Heights is pretty good. I wouldn't put it quite on the level of QuickBooks Connect, but if you're looking for something with kind of an ecosystem vibe with a lot of tech partners, scaling new heights is pretty good. That's coming up in a, in a few weeks here in St. Louis. I'll be there. I think I'm doing a panel. QuickBooks Connect is in November. I'll definitely be there. AICPA Engage folks. Folks. Like AICPA is just folks either love it or hate it. I don't. It's just very divisive. For whatever reason, I think Engage is pretty good. I've never been to Digital, their other big more tech centric one. I think I'll probably be there this year. It's in December and Vegas. But I've always liked Engage. With the AICPA conferences you get a little bigger practices and people from more mid market firms. So if you're a solo firm owner, some of the stuff may feel a little heady and like a little bigger. Like the scaling new heights. QuickBooks Connect 0con, when they do it in the US it is all very friendly to small firms and even solo firms. On the tax conference side, I don't know. Tell me what y' all think about tax conferences. I've always felt like tax conferences were more continuing ed centric, which I don't get as excited about going to a conference just for continuing ed. But for whatever reason, I've always felt like tax conferences were a little more technically oriented. What I love about the conferences that I've referenced here is there's a real emphasis on technology and highlighting the vendors and the people that are building cool stuff for us. Like which in my mind that's where the innovation usually comes from and that's what gets me most excited. Stuff I'm going to be at this year, man. So Engage. Next week I'm giving three talks at Engage Scaling New Heights. A couple of weeks after that in June, end of July, I'll be at Pronto Tax Conference in San Diego doing a keynote there. Shared a few days ago. They gave me four free tickets to give away. If you're in the San Diego area, absolutely come and do that. I don't know if those free tickets have been burned through yet or not. That's a little one like 150 people like local tax people bridging the gap. Randy Crabtree's conference from his unique CPA community. I will be there emceeing that conference the last week of August. That's in Chicago. Definitely come hang. That's a first year in person conference. I might do zero con the week before that. That's in Australia. Don't know yet. That would be a lot of fun if I did get to do that. Going back in time further, the second week of August is Gusto next. I'm told that's invite only though that's gonna be in San Francisco this year. That's August, like 8th through 10th, I think. I don't have any conferences on my radar in September that I'm going to October. Thrival does the deeper weekend. I don't think I'll be at that, but I know that's a popular one for firm runners that are looking for community. That's over on the East Coast. November we've got QuickBooks Connect midway through the month there, same time as the Las Vegas Grand Prix. If you're into that sort of thing like I am. It's going to make Vegas absolute hell. But it'll be fun. And then December You've got digital AICPA's conference that is December 3rd through December 6th in Vegas. That one AICPA Engage and QuickBooks Connect all at the ARIA in Vegas, which is super, super convenient to get in and out of. And the conference is like inside the hotel. But I will probably be at all of those this year. If you listen to this show, please come and hang at conferences. Meeting me IRL conferences are actually really hard for me because you feel like a total a hole when there's more people that know you than you know. And then you're super worried that, oh no, I actually do know them and I've met them before and I've just forgotten. So please, please, please, if you see me at a conference, like, don't be weirded out and afraid to like come up and say hello, I will. Genuinely. I spend like 14 hours a day on my feet just standing and talking to people at conferences all day long. So if you see me talking to somebody else, like, please, like, circle back and come introduce yourself. That is like, that's why I go to so many conferences. It's not to go sit and watch talks. It's to meet all of you lovely people who come and hang and, and build more of those relationships. So conferences, totally worthwhile for meeting smart people. Do it. Like, I've shared zero con 2019, like, unlocked everything for me, unlocked the Internet, unlocked making friends, which the ultimate hack. And firm running is having, like, powerful friendships with people who also do firm running. Like, there's nothing better than that. Nothing makes all of this feel less isolating than building those friendships. And it just starts with putting yourself out there. So, like, conferences, absolutely awesome. Like, couldn't recommend them enough. And yeah, come hang and if you see me, please come and introduce yourself.

That's it for Q and A Wednesday. Have a great day. I'll see you tomorrow.