058 The Case For Recording Your Meetings

All right, today, by the end of this pod, I'm going to convince you why you need to be recording your client meetings that happen online on Zoom on video conferencing tools. Wow, what an exciting proposition for a podcast. You say, hear me out. In accounting firms, this is a big deal. We're missing some big opportunities by not capturing these meetings. Come on in. Let me convince you. Let's have some fun. Play the music. You know what, at the end of the day, it's your decision whether you do this or not. But I used to be in the camp that's like, it's weird. So I'm not gonna do it. I now think I'm in the camp that says it's worthwhile and on the path to being normalized. So what I'm talking about here specifically video conferencing tools, Zoom, Microsoft Teams, that sort of thing. We've probably all been on those calls where a note taker joins. That is like recording the meeting or creating a transcript of the meeting. This is not a human note taker. This is an app that is doing the note taking. The popularity of these tools took off when late last year, we saw some huge improvements in how auto caption tools work and big time reductions in the cost. So right now, the quality of the captions that can be generated by AI are way beyond what it was like 12 to 18 months ago. And so it became much cheaper and more trivial to bolt a system like this onto your Zoom or onto your Google Calendar. And then this service just joins the call whenever a call starts. And specifically inside of accounting firms, you know, a lot of what we've talked about with AI and where we're headed is it's becoming increasingly important for us to capture valuable context. And examples of context are like organizational email, you know, all the conversations you've had with clients in the past. Team chat, if you use team chat with clients, the documents that you use, all that stuff is really valuable context. But a massive source of context that we are not capturing is live meetings. In the past, this was, you know, the yellow legal pad or something where you scrawl out those notes. Nobody in the firm but the person who wrote them can read them. And then you've got the old hokey pokey issue of they just took a page of notes. That applies to three different clients. Do I save this in three places or do I save this in one place? All very complicated, hard questions that there isn't a very good answer to. But the better version of this is a full doggone transcript of everything that was said in that meeting. Because, oh, we have, if you came of age in accounting firms, you know just what a pain in the butt it is to find the meeting notes, to even to just track that person down, to be like, did you remember to ask Steve about just this one last question? I have to get the tax return out the door or the financials out the door. And when it's your boss having these meetings, that can be a really frustrating affair. The other thing that you come upon a lot is you get to like the end of a project and you've got an open question and you're like, did I talk with them about that thing? It feels like at some point in the past we may or may not have discussed that, but you're not quite sure. And now you're afraid you're gonna look like a numpty for asking the client for that information that they may have already given you. So you like, you do the ol searching, you know, through Outlook, searching through Gmail, and that's just a whole frustrating experience in and of itself. Just the search functionality of email. And the odds are no matter what you just, you're not gonna find it. Just not gonna happen. Never works out that way. So for me to be able to like have a record of all these past meetings, that is, that's gold for me, really valuable. But let's acknowledge that is weird. It is not yet normalized. So we're gonna talk about some tools, what they do, how to normalize it with your clients. I think there's a way I'm feeling inspired and it will make you all much smarter and more productive and live a more fulfilled life. Okay, so examples of tools that were kind of innovators here. One of the OG ones was Fathom. And it is still a free meeting recorder that anybody can bolt onto their meetings. Now what does that ultimately mean because it's free? Probably not good things. It's probably worth paying for something. I'm not gonna assume they steal all of your data, but that's just how those things usually go. So it works with your Zoom, with your Microsoft Teams, with your Google Meet. And when you're in a meeting, there'll just be another box there for a person that is Fathom. And in the end it can send out summaries to all participants. Super handy. It can create follow up items. You can integrate it with like your task management system to push follow up items out. Another great argument for these systems is oftentimes people will get pulled into meetings Just to maybe pick up a little tidbit that they needed to be a part of. And what I see with these types of tools is it's easier now to add a colleague to a meeting or add them in, you know, Fathom or whatever you're using just so that that person's in the loop when the meeting wraps. So when the meeting wraps, they get the same call, summary, action items, all that stuff that your client got. And that's potentially a way of like keeping that person from getting sucked into a meeting that they really didn't need to be at. Because maybe the summary or the transcript is enough. Great. Not like people wasting their time on meetings. So Fathom's cool. But a huge improvement on this as far as I'm concerned, is what Fireflies did a few months later. And this has been out two or three months now. You may have seen me talk about it in my newsletter and all that. But the really cool thing that Fireflies added is a chat assistant that can see into those meeting transcripts. Now I'm all for meeting summary. That's helpful. They're usually pretty accurate. It can get a little complicated in situations where things are said in a meeting that are actually contradictory to itself. So oftentimes a meeting will start with consensus in one place and end with consensus in a totally different place. Sometimes that can make the summaries confusing. But the context in which I come back to meeting transcripts and is 90% of the time when I want to know a very, very, very specific thing was this thing said? And that might be included in the summary. But like, by definition it may not because the summary is not going to include everything. And so what Fireflies enables is you can actually chat with a specific meeting. There's a little meeting assistant, so I can roll up and be like, hey, did they talk about the rental property in Astoria? Or something very specific like that, which is just the little bit that I want to get. And it'll be like, yep, they talked about it at this timestamp or here's a summary of what they talked about, or no, they never talked about this. You can even ask it for like timestamps of when specific things were brought up. Because if there's an hour long meeting, there's a video recording or something like that. Good luck ever finding it in video. But it'll basically just let you jump around in a more efficient way to find the actual thing that you wanted to talk about. So that's Fireflies. I'll put a link to Fathom And Fireflies in the show notes. For me, the ability to chat with a transcript was a huge upgrade because I could ask it just specifically for that itty bitty thing that I wanted. So 18 months from now, did I talk to this client about that thing? Boom. That's super quick. Right now, this is one of those things where I think it is easy to sit on your hands and be like, well, Zoom's gonna launch this, right? I'll just wait for that. Or teams is gonna launch this, right? And the answer is maybe. But for me, this is useful. Today, Zoom has announced some new AI stuff, like, as recently as last week, and to be honest, it kind of stinks. Kind of looks like they're going after the enterprise market, and it's not really doing things in a way that is interesting to me. If you use Microsoft Teams today, look, take a look at Microsoft Teams Premium. Their premium tier has, like, some AI assistant stuff that goes alongside your meeting. So let's say you're in a meeting and you've gotta get pulled into another meeting, say, in the bathroom. You can come back and it'll summarize, like, hey, what did I miss? Or even if you join a meeting late, it'll summarize what are all the things that have happened so far. And hopefully within that summary, it's not them badmouthing you for being late, but they're building some cool stuff in. There's even, like, an assistant thing that I think may do what Fireflies does, but I haven't actually seen that in the wild yet. I don't know if they've actually released it. Fireflies, they're doing that stuff today. And there's. You're like. You're not locked into that Microsoft ecosystem at all. But in terms of, like, the mainstream meeting apps, I think Microsoft Teams is the furthest along today. Hey. This episode is sponsored in part by Fire Firm 360. You know, 360 because it handles all aspects of your firm in a single, single platform. You don't want to hop around all these different places to do different things. That's why it's 360. You think they've got. Hang on, sidebar. You think they've got, like, VR headset support? You see the new Apple Apple VR thing? Wonder what that would look like, right? Okay, let me tell you about Amanda Spivey. Amanda approached Firm 360 in the second half of 2020 because they needed a platform to streamline their processes, enable and enable remote work. Remember that old chestnut, Remote Work. Oh, a lot of people having to rip that band aid off coming into Covid. Before firm360, their team had to haul boxes of work documents between home and the office if they wanted to work remotely. That is disgusting. That is absolutely disgusting. But you know what? Gonna level with you. That was happening. That was happening at my practice more recently ago than I would care to admit. But let me tell you, thanks to firm360, they had the opportunity to add more clients. First three months they were seeing improvements in team productivity, better transparency into what everybody was working on. And it was because they could pull all that stuff together into one place all in one place. 360. Put those goggles on. That's not a thing yet. Maybe soon. If you're still hustling information in a whole bunch of different places, check out firm360link in the video. Description this episode is sponsored in part by dark horse CPAs. Hey, if you're a regular listener of the show, you've heard me say that Dark Horse CPAS is a platform CPA firm about five times now. And I know that each time I've said that, you're like, what the he double hockey sticks? Does that even mean? It's a community of accountants operating under the same brand, building their practices collaboratively together. Turnkey resources. You're not reinventing the wheel. All the stuff that solves for you and will get you through. You know the hard things about launching a firm, about not making the same mistakes everybody else is making. Dark Horse brand will help you attract the talent you need and the clients you want. Buddy their tech team. There's a tech team. Hang on. Tech Team Alert will ensure you have what you need to automate the mundane and augment your advisory muscles. Advisory muscles? Do you have those? Dark Horse is the only CPA firm built exclusively for CPAs. Unlike a franchise, they will work with you one on one in group settings, get you everything you need. You're no longer a lone ranger. There's a better way. There's a better way. You got a whole squad behind you now. To learn more about how Dark horse is helping CPAs build practices from scratch and scale existing practices within a community that helps each other continuously up level their game. Head over to Abetterway CPA now. Ultimately, the perfect version of this, if you think back to our this is your practice management system on AI stuff that we've talked about. The best version of this is built into my practice management system. Right? That's where I want that information to live alongside Emails alongside documents and all of that, there's a couple like, oh, snap moments that we're going to get in the next 12 to 18 months from our practice management systems that will be incredible. One is when a meeting transcript resolves an outstanding request. So we're staging requests in our practice management system. Here are all the things that we need from a client. My colleague hops on a 30 minute zoom with them when it gets that zoom transcript and the client answered some questions that resolve those requests, buddy, let me know right away, resolve that request, notify the right person, put the information in there, like link it to the transcript that has the source of truth for that answer. That is going to be wild. Because if you think about all the situations within a team where a client may tell one person something, but the other person has the question, they're trying to track it down. Maybe today I create a request that is resolved a month from now when my colleague meets with them. Or maybe today I create a request that can be resolved from a meeting transcript that's now a year old that's just as valuable, right? So when I create that request, I want it to be like, whoa, tiger, check out this transcript from a year ago. Does this answer your question? All of that is gold right now. We need to be capturing that stuff. So ultimately when we have that functionality, it's useful. So like meetings, resolving requests, that's one really cool kind of oh crap moment. The second one is a universal search across all this stuff within our practice management system. And this is enabled by Ta da, what we talked about last Friday, embeddings and vector search. I know this is like, this stuff is the underpinning of like all of the cool new, coolest new AI stuff that we're getting. So basically all of the documents in your practice management system, all the transcripts, all the emails, all that stuff is embedded. So when I search for something, it's not doing a text based search, it's doing a conceptual search of. Here are the most similar things I can pull up for you and that can even be extended into like three third party things that they're integrated with. Imagine having a single search that searched across emails, projects, documents, like the contents of the documents, meeting transcripts, your calendar, the client's accounting ledger, the documents associated with those transactions. Imagine getting all of that stuff in one place rather than like 15 really crappy versions of that search experiment that search experience in 15 different places, right? Like even just having a search function right now across your past meetings would be absolute gold. But this is where we're headed. Like, this is one of the really cool things that AI enables is it makes information more discoverable. It pulls all that stuff in in a more meaningful way. But it starts with building that context and capturing that context that we may not be capturing today. And meetings are a huge source of valuable context. Now, how to do this practically, because it's weird. How do I navigate this with my clients? I'm having a one on one meeting with my client. How do I explain that third weirdo that is also sitting in the room that is a robot? Well, I think like the, the most important thing to acknowledge here and if I can think to like my clients who would have been like, this is weird, I'm kind of uncomfortable. Ultimately, if the reason that my client is uncomfortable is because they don't want what they're going to tell me to be recorded, do I even want them to tell me that thing to begin with? If I can only have conversations with you on burner phones, you may not be the client for me anyway. So it is worth acknowledging. Can you help me to understand why this makes you uncomfortable and like talking through that a little bit? Like, I think that problem usually solves itself. Unless you've got those clients that are looking for creative accountants that can quote unquote, think outside the box. That type of client. Sure, maybe they don't want to be recorded. But the really simple framing here is, hey, this ensures that my entire team is up to speed on the things that we discussed. It gives me this ironclad memory so that I don't have to ask you for that same thing three years from now. And I think this can be normalized from the time you begin the client relationship. So I was talking with Chad Davis at Engage about just like kind of weird, squishy, human like setting expectations on a firm for things as simple as is your team required to have video on when you have a zoom meeting? Like stuff like that. And they've been doing the remote thing for like over a decade now. And so I was kind of picking his brain on the policies they've gone through for that and just how they manage that conversation. But they have the same thing with clients. Like if I'm going to get on a zoom meeting with a client, is my expectation that they're going to be on video or not? And the age old struggle, what happens when you get on a zoom meeting with somebody and you've got the video on and they don't? Do you just pretend like you didn't notice you had the video on and, like, ride it out and avoid eye contact with the webcam. Do you then immediately turn the video off as if you missed some sort of social cue that should have indicated that we're all coming into this like, no guns blazing. Don't act like you don't overthink this. Like, like, I do. I know we all do. But anyways, setting client, facing expectations for what video looks like for them and their firm, that just always happened at the very beginning of the sales process. They would say something as simple as, hey, we like, we do all these. These meetings via video conferencing. We love being on video. We think there's certain things that can be communicated on video better than just over audio. But if you want to go video off, that's totally fine too. That's just kind of our default. Let us know, like, what are you comfortable with? Yeah, that conversation once and you're good. Like, no problems after that. So, like, through the same lens, a meeting recorder, I think, is something that you just frame a very, like, the very same way. And like, in the initial time that you talk with someone, that may be new for them, but you just outline. I have a lot of these conversations every single day, and I don't have a perfect memory. This enables me to be more engaged in a meeting and what we're saying rather than scrambling, trying to take notes of everything. If you have a team, it's really easy to say. This ensures that my whole team is up to speed on the things that we discuss and that I don't leave any details out if I'm then trying to play telephone and communicate this stuff to them. It just keeps us all on the same page and it keeps a record of where we're at and the things that we discussed for years to come so that I don't have to bug you with the same questions ever again. And for a reasonable person, like, I think that's pretty straightforward. Like, I don't think most people are going to have an issue with that. Maybe you'll get some people that do, but, like, the vast majority of people will be like, yep, nope, that totally makes sense. So right now, this is not a thing that has been normalized, but I think we are going to be seeing it more and more. I know in the zoom meetings that I get on, I see it more and more and it's becoming less of a weird thing. But ultimately, when you're working with your clients, like, you define what that relationship looks like, you set the rules And I think today this is a useful enough thing to merit doing the work of doing those recordings. And right now, like where that information ultimately lives, does it just live in my fireflies and then I have to log into fireflies to search for specific things. Do I export it in some format and then pull it in like a work paper into where all my other stuff lives? That's more nuanced right now. You think you have to probably choose your own adventure on what the right answer is for your systems. The best long term solution is let me pull this into my practice management system or give me a more meaningful way even just to search inside what is inside of documents. So like right now, if I can search in my practice management system and it will pull up results that are part of a document, then when I have a transcript from a meeting, it could be as simple as just like pulling a PDF or text file or something that is a transcript of that meeting and then it shows up in search inside of your practice management system. I don't want my practice management system to be my video conferencing system, but I do want to have a way that I can pull that information in because it's a huge part of like we think of all the ways that we interact with clients. Obviously email is probably the biggest one, but not far behind that is like live meetings and the things that we discuss. And right now I think we kind of just commit that stuff to memory, which means it's not going to be there long. Like my bar was always, well, I just got to remember longer than the client does. And so I could usually at least beat the memory of that client. But if you do a whole ton of these meetings and then you've got a bunch of people reliant upon you to communicate all that stuff completely to them, that's just a hard spot to be like. It's. This is just in my mind a fundamentally better way of getting that done. What do you think? Pro up, thumbs up, thumbs down? Have you done this before? What has the experience been? Do you have any best practices for how to navigate what's maybe a little bit of an awkward conversation with clients? I think this is going to become more the norm and for us that is a good thing. This episode is sponsored in part by Client Hub. This week on Tales from the Hub. That's right, it's back. Remember last week we were talking about super smart accounting firm and they were celebrating how everyone could stay on top of things from clients, from Client Hubs, Jobs Dashboard. That's right. I said celebrating. They were celebrating it. Now they're getting ready to head to conferences. It's conference season. I've been talking about conferences a lot lately, right? Man, they can't wait to take their partnership with Client Hub to the next level by doing some irl, glad handing, back slapping and a lot of other analogies like that. I tell you what, it's one thing to chuck support requests into a system to email with that support team, you know, share your new ideas for features. It is a whole other thing to stand in a booth with the delightful people that you've been talking with and actually build, build some human relationships. Client Hub, co founded by a former firm owner. It's why they just seem to get it. It's why when you flip the switch on Client Hub, you're like, wow, these people understand me. They understand my pains and they understand why all I want is for my client to respond to my request. Well now, super smart accounting firm, they can't wait to see Client Hub at scaling new heights in a couple of weeks. You're going to be there, I'm going to be there. Client Hub is going to be there. Let's all hang out. Even if you're a Canadian, they're going to be at cpp, CPB Ignite in September this year. I got no idea what that is, but if you're Canadian, you probably do. That's it for this week's episode of Tales from the Hub. Check out Client Hub. If you're going to be at these conferences, let's hang. Swing by their booth. You can meet the actual people behind it. Parting thought. Last Sunday, my main channel video was about video deliveries. It's something we've talked about here before, delivering tax returns and financial statements over video. And I'm like, that is never something that's going to be for everyone. And I acknowledge that. But there's kind of this maxim I have tried to stick to. Something along the lines of perception is reality when the client doesn't understand what you do. Like, we take pride in our technical ability and there's nothing more rewarding to us than like the respect of our peers. The people who have a deep technical understanding of accounting or tax and they look at you and they think, wow, that person really knows what they're doing. The problem is that ability is never gonna be the thing that gets you home for dinner. And your clients, like, they will never understand that. This is like the work that we do is not something that can be easily benchmarked from firm A to firm. B, like, take a tax return. If you send the same tax return to two different firms and they give you different answers, one answer may be more positive than the other, but you still don't know if it's correct. Like, sure, you can just make up deductions and give somebody a better answer. So how is a layperson ever going to know who's better at this or that? Honestly? Same kind of thing with accounting. Like, there's so much of this that is subjective. There is never in my mind a path to a client being able to truly put their finger on this and be like, ooh, technically this person is better than that person. And that's why this ends up being like a relationship business. And like, how can you make them feel about what you're doing for them? Because they just don't understand the nuts and bolts. And as long as they don't understand the nuts and bolts, they will cling to the aspects of the process that they can understand. And that is stupid, arbitrary stuff. Like, how does this person present on video, like, can I see the mustard stain on their shirt when we get on a zoom call? Do I, like, what, like the lobby looks like when I come in? Or does it look like an old legal firm and maybe that's what they want it to look like? Like, it's really dumb and really annoying. Really arbitrary, especially for us who invest in all these technical things and we assign importance to our technical abilities. But, man, like, there's a baseline level of ability that you have to have to run a business like this. But all the technical ability in the world doesn't get me home for dinner, doesn't help me run a profitable company, doesn't make me a good manager of people. And video deliveries, to me, like, I'm so convinced, is just one of those itty bitty things that does not take that much time that massively impacts the perception of the work that you just did and building in a more profitable practice. Like, yes, it is about greater specificity in the people that you help, being more efficient and increasing prices and all that stuff. But it's about finding those itty bitty little things that people assign value to. So, like in more like traditional business education, you know, they talk about, like the value chain and you know, Tesla is an example of a company that like, cut out some stuff, some overhead that some automobiles had that people didn't. I just say automobiles. They cut out, cut out stuff from automobiles that people didn't value and doubled down on stuff that people did Value like good software. Like it feeling like a modern experience sitting inside of a car. And like, my path to a profitable accounting firm is about like, how can I stumble into those little nuggets that deliver a disproportionate amount of value as part of this entire project? And for you, that may not be video, but for me, when it came to delivering tax returns, financial statements and all that, man, it was totally video. Because in like three minutes I could totally dazzle somebody that we just spent like, we spent like 10 hours on that thing. And if I didn't take that three to five minutes to make the video, we would have sent that thing off and they'd have been like, eh, okay, thanks. Like I paid you to do this thing. But with that little bit of extra effort, like it totally changed the value that they assigned to what we did because they had a better understanding of the work that went into it and like what all those outputs meant. And I'm like, I super geek on what are those little tiny like value adding things and how we deliver things to clients and how we do our job and how we work for other people and how we set a great first impression when you meet somebody. When it comes to firm running, I think there's like some low hanging fruit there where maybe because we are so attached to the technical aspects of what we do, we don't pay attention to like the window dressing and the stuff that people will form an opinion on because they don't have anything else upon which to form an opinion. So like, honestly, stuff like how you present on video, what your video background looks like, what your website looks like, like, I get that you don't need any more clients, but if somebody goes to two accounting firm websites and yours is like super dumpy and you haven't touched it in 10 years because you don't need more work, but somebody else's is like very impressive and helpful. Like they're probably gonna assign more value to that other firm just because their website is cooler. And I get that, that's annoying to me too. But when they don't understand what you do, like it is all about the narrative and how it's delivered and all of those fuzzy things around the edges that frankly none of us went into accounting to have to deal with, right? Like traditionally we're not the type of people that enjoy doing those non technical things, but they matter. And if that's a hard thing for you to invest in and work on, like, that's probably a good person to pull into the business. Like, is there somebody else in the team that can, like, give the TLC to the style of the newsletter and like, just kind of those things that may otherwise be rough around the edges. You got any examples of those little, like, tidbits that deliver a disproportionate amount of value? I always got really excited when we stumbled into those things because they ultimately led to us being able to charge more for our engagements and double down on, like, the stuff that clients were most excited about. Hey, thanks for coming and hanging today. What is it today? Thursday? Friday? Tomorrow we're gonna do another little thought experiment. Couple weeks ago we talked about what if AI, like, what is the worst case doomsday AI scenario for accountants? And so a couple weeks ago we ran through what if there was a killer AI that dropped tomorrow that just did everybody's taxes, right? Just boom, like that. It was a fun episode. Encourage you to go back and check it out. It was a couple Fridays ago. We're gonna do the same this time for. For accounting practices. What if AI just got so good, right? Like last Friday we talked about fully automated bookkeeping. Hey, what if fully automated bookkeeping was a thing tomorrow? Like, what does my business look like on the other side of that? Am I hosed? Are we all in big trouble? I think thinking down that timeline and, like, imagining, okay, what does this actually look like then? And then what's left for me to build a business around? I think that's a really helpful exercise because it ensures the things we're working on today are going to be relevant tomorrow. And in my experience, takes a whole lot of fear out of all of this discussion that we're going to get displaced because it's not going to make your clients any more organized. They're still not going to understand what the heck they're looking at when there's a balance sheet and P and L and all that. But we'll do a deep dive on that tomorrow. Should be a fun discussion. Thanks for coming and hanging and I'll see you there. SA.