093 Prioritization In Your Accounting Firm

I tell you what's overwhelming about running an accounting firm is knowing what to work on next. Of all the things that you could do, how do you know what to prioritize? What to do because your clients want you to do it, what to do because you're losing your mind and you need to do it for yourself. We'll talk through a basic framework today of how to decide what to work on next. Take some of the stress out of it. Come on in. So the idea for this one came from a comment from Derek Foote. Kind of around, along the lines of, operationally, what do you decide to work on next? But also from, like, a fulfillment standpoint, if you are a firm runner, especially if you're a solo firm runner or just have a small team, how do you even know, like, from a fulfillment standpoint, what you're going to enjoy? What will, like, give you purpose, you know, and, like, make you feel inspired and motivated to keep doing all this stuff? I struggled with this a lot in firm running because there were so many stakeholders pulling me in different directions, from team members to business partners to clients that had specific wants to what I actually wanted for my own sort of fulfillment and what I thought I would enjoy to what I saw, like, the outside world and other people talking about firm running, saying, I mean, and I'm. I, for other people am an example of this. We could put a lot of pressure on ourselves to do certain things because we see, you know, smart people talking about this being a thing that you need to do and honestly, consuming a bunch of stuff. And, like, I know what I'm saying right now, consuming a whole bunch of stuff can actually put a lot of pressure on you to do stuff that may make sense for you, may not make sense for you. So I know myself personally, I grappled with all of those forces, oftentimes pulling me in different directions. I personally loved consuming this stuff. Like, a show like this I would have really enjoyed. Not because I was gonna come away from every episode and be like, oh, man, everybody drop what you're doing. We gotta go do this. But the way my mind has always worked is rather than, like, a single framework to rule them all. Like, I love kind of collecting frameworks and collecting ideas so that I've kind of got all that stuff bouncing around in the noggin. And then when it comes to solving a specific problem or when it comes to, I don't know, kind of building the next chapter for your firm, I'm able to kind of coalesce all those things into Something that makes sense for me and my team and my clients. So I was a big consumer for that reason. But when you got a whole bunch of different forces pulling you in different direct directions, it can be really hard to know what to prioritize. Now it's interesting. There's an analogy in so I'm Life update. I'm still in the thick of Jason Daly family vacation. We've been on the road for, like six weeks now. Today I'm in Tustin. Last month I was in west la and there's this idea in Hollywood, if you are, you know, an actor or a director, this. This whole notion of how do you balance the art form and the fact that you got into it because you enjoyed and appreciated the art form versus making something for the studio, like making the movie that will make money versus making the movie that will challenge you and be fulfilling and be the entire reason that you got into this thing in the first place. And the old adage is like, you make one for them and then you make one for you. So you make one for the studio, you make one for, you know, that's kind of going to be that box office hit, the thing that makes money to then give yourself the freedom to make one for me, where it's not necessarily for the critics, it's not necessarily for, like, that mass appeal, but it's for you. It's the thing that's going to energize you and you will be, you know, proud that you did that thing. On the other side of it, I think there's a degree of this that we can incorporate into. Into firm running, where I know I have skewed too heavily to doing stuff for other people, doing stuff purely through an operational lens to a really extreme degree, where I wore myself out and then on the other side realized, man, this is actually, like, worse for me. Like, I don't enjoy any of this stuff now. That was a good operational decision and on paper, how to make the company more profitable and this and that. But none of that matters if I can't do it. Like, if I can't get out of bed and be energized every day. Like, I'm a big believer in energy, and that's not just because I've been in LA for the last month adopting that kind of Woo Woo Valley vibe, but it is because, like, I was always at my best and I could do more work when I was feeling energized about what I was doing. You know, we could be perfectly positioned. You could have all These things going, right? But if you couldn't turn up to work with excitement and energy for what you're doing, like, you're not gonna be any good at what you do. And on the flip side, if you got a bunch of hard things to do, you can get through just about anything with the right amount of energy and motivation. And there's ways to hack that, you know, like that kind of grind set mentality of just working really hard to do that thing that can get you over hump sometimes, but it's never a forever thing. So how this change energizes you and leads to fulfillment and all that, like that is a big factor in how you prioritize all those different things you can't be the victim of, like putting your team, your clients and all that stuff first. How you approach your firm is the same as how we approach your clients. The best version of you for your clients is the version of you that is investing in yourself, not sacrificing every day for your clients. It is in your client's best interest for you to have the time and space to invest in yourself. Same goes for your firm. There's a lot of stuff that in the short term feels super urgent, feels like a really big deal. But the best version of your firm is the one where you are taking the time and the space to do the best things for yourself. So thinking about this purely through an operational standpoint, and then we'll come around to more the fulfillment side. Last couple of years I've come around towards putting a greater level of priority on the client experience. And so working backwards for why I've gotten there. I've just come to the conclusion, and it's one of those no duh sort of things. 80% of running a successful, profitable firm is just being able to set prices aggressively. Setting great prices is the path to freedom, the path to flexibility, the path to avoiding overwork, to not having to have a humongous team. It all comes back to prices. So then what are the drivers for prices? That's the specificity of the problems that you solve. And it's like how great of a client experience you can craft. But as accountants, I think it's much easier to geek out on workflow. And emotionally, the notion of improving our output by 10% or 20% year over year, that's much easier to get excited about than telling your clients you're going to increase prices, or then going out and doing this marketing initiative to attract a new type of client that will happily pay 20% more those things feel more foreign for accountants than, I think, the operational workflow things. But the reality is, even if you increase your output by 20%, that is at best reducing costs by 20%. But in reality, you're probably not going to fire anybody. You're not actually going to let any of those people go. You're. If you think about it just through the lens of the pnl, we are accountants, after all. Operational improvements are like a percentage improvement of a percentage. Best case, in all likelihood, it doesn't actually reduce expense at all. Whereas pricing increase like that goes straight to the bottom line. You double your prices depending on your margins. You have to do not half of the work, more like a third of the work, to get to the same level of profit. So then what are the drivers of price? A big one is client experience. And I think like most of us historically, always focused on our internal systems and what it looked like for us to get the work done. And I do think that we are biased to over focus on our internal processes because it is the stuff that we use every day. Whereas if we were a client and we were forced to go through the client experience all day, every day, we would give that more love and care and attention than we currently do. So when it comes to what to prioritize, I have over the years started leaning more towards the client experience experience. But that being said, doing things because your clients ask for them can be a real trap if they are the wrong clients. And this has been a killer of meaningful change in my experience is you think we ought to make this change. This just seems like it's going to set us up better for the future, you know, using requests in a portal or something like that, or switching to a digital organizer. But what we do is we think about like, oh gosh, but what about all these people on our client list today who that won't be great for? That can be a real trap and honestly can, like, keep your firm from progressing for years, if not decades, when what you really need to be thinking about is what is that the best experience for that dream client or for the very best of the best clients that you have right now? This episode is sponsored in part by, 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. Their accountants aren't freelancing or contracting for Multiple firms, they're all yours. They work exclusively for you and are incentivized to stay with you and your team long term. They're not gonna get swiped. Cloud account staffing is 100% dedicated to the accounting industry and founded by a former accounting firm owner that understands your business, knows your pain points. They had to hire some accountants and they said, you know what, we're gonna build our own pipeline in the Philippines, gonna pull in some super talented people and then open that up to other firms. Basically that's the story. I've been talking about a lot about staffing, building more resilient staffing pipelines for your firms. I had staff in the Philippines like totally red pilled me to like, oh geez. Like we need to globalize the way that we get our work done. Check these folks out. Link in the show description Cloud accountantstaffing.com hey. This episode is sponsored in part by Canopy, the practice management system. Canopy unlocks the firm that you always wanted. Think about it, think about it. Close your eyes, lean back in that chair. What is the firm that you always wanted? Oh wait, Canopy unlocks it. And they do this by unclunking accounting firms with an end to end solution that makes your tech stack feel a little less stacky because it's end to end. Putting our customers first with world class user experience, support, education and innovation rooted in customer feedback. Working and working well anywhere and for any size or type of firm, wherever you are now and wherever you're going, multiplying your efforts so your practice requires less proverbial midnight oil, you know, Sidebar, if you go to the conferences, Kanopy's got like, they always do some like really good little like sorta, you know, the stuff that they use to like trick you into coming to the booth. Well this year they've had like Legos out there, maybe, maybe a double down on the midnight oil thing, you know, maybe like I know, give away a little, little, you know, little actual midnight oil. I guess it would need to burn too, but that one's free. I think it's a good idea delighting your clients with a modern, easy to use portal that helps you get the info you need when you need it. That is Canopy. Check out the link in the show notes to learn more. You are building a firm in large part for the client that you want, for the client that you want ten times more of. And it's easy to say that. And yes, you don't want to totally sweep the rug out from 80% of your client base and create problems overnight. But I think what we do is we, we bias too much of that decision making on what will our current suboptimal clients. Think of this as a hundred examples of this. From deciding whether to increase prices, you immediately think of all the people that already complain about prices. Right. To modernizing your services, you think about the clients who, like, don't want to lead into those modernized services. Ultimately, the North Star needs to be. How does this take us a step closer to the firm that we want to be? So generally, as I'm improving my firm, there's kind of two firms that I'm thinking about. I'm trying to visualize the firm that I want to become and how to make small steps toward it. I think oftentimes in talks and in consulting and stuff like that, there's a lot of like, big ambitious kind of platitudes about here's the absolute way to run a firm. And those are helpful oftentimes when you're starting out a firm or making kind of a big break and making some painful changes. But most of the time we're doing things in an incremental way. And there's certainly going to be exceptions where you should do a big hard change. But most firms changes like over the course of running a firm will be relatively incremental changes. And when you're considering all of the changes that these stakeholders are telling you to make, ultimately what those need to be trending you towards is that visualization you have of the next, better version of your firm. Maybe that's, you know, the top 10% crop of your clients making up 20% of your client base instead of just, you know, 10%. Maybe that's working with taxidermists. You found that's a really fun, really profitable way to build your firm. Maybe you want to double the number of those in your client base. It doesn't mean that you, like, throw out the kitchen sink and stop doing anything for anybody else. Like, the reality is, in my experience, it's usually something more incremental. So as you have all these clients asking for things or maybe running into issues, those, like, data points matter. Just ensure that the changes that you are making and the changes you're prioritizing are in alignment with your very best clients. Because where I often got trapped was we would have clients who would really struggle with like some sort of digital transition or something like that. And those clients weren't well aligned with the direction that we were headed. So we would make all of these accommodations and super complicate our processes to accommodate this 20% of our client base who maybe this wasn't great for. Meanwhile, the clients who we really wanted to invest in were like, thank you so much. This is way better. Yet, we were still anchoring and putting all this undue effort into accommodating the other folks. And I'm all for, like, taking care of people and not leaving people flapping in the breeze. I'm not about to do that. But when it comes to prioritization and what feedback you listen to and what feedback you deprioritize, you want to make sure that you're listening to the client that will take you to a better place, that will continue to build that kind of vision of what is the next slightly better version of your firm. Now, like, absolute advice, like, that's really hard advice, will totally differ from firm to firm. If you got a firm that's being run on a spreadsheet right now, my advice for you is going to be very different than a firm that like, has kind of the core operational stuff sorted out. In fact, I think I'm going to do an episode on like that kind of minimum viable operational setup for a firm. Like, what are the five or six things that every firm needs to nail down to be in a good spot operationally? Because beyond that, there's all this advice of things that you can do. But many of those things are secondary to core things like automated requests and having a scalable staffing and a fulfillment model. Like, there's certain core things that you need to nail down and those, whether they take six months or three years, like, those need to be prioritized kind of over all other things. So, for example, if you got a firm that's running, you know, if you're running your firm on spreadsheets right now, I'm not going to tell you. Well, the real problem is that you're not recording your client meetings to have all that context. So sorry to give general advice, but common traps. As you pull in more and more and more of these considerations, and what it generally biases you to, especially the larger your firm gets, is to inaction. You are overwhelmed by all the voices and all the inputs in the process, and that biases you to inaction. But I think you need to laser focus on what is good for you personally and what is good for your best client or your dream client that you're still trying to attract. Pretty much everything firm running has to pass through the filter especially, and this is more true the smaller your firm is. Pretty much everything Firm running has to pass through the filter of does this work for me? It doesn't matter how good of a business idea it is, it doesn't matter how much money that will make your firm or even how good it is for your staff. Does this work for you first and foremost? I think oftentimes we make the right business decision at our own expense and you ultimately pay the price for that, which in a more roundabout way just hurts the business. So like you have to kind of put your own mask on first. Right. Like you have to prioritize your own well being. And that's honestly like one of the really big issues in our profession right now is just kind of that servant mindset of being an accountant and putting others needs first and then you pay the price for it. And that may solve some short term problems of things that people really want from you, but it does nothing to solve the longer term problem of how will you, you know, find a fundamentally better way to approach that same problem and invest in yourself and be a better advisor and all that. When it comes to refining like what the inputs are of what to prioritize, I think you need to be front and center. What do you need to do for yourself? Your staff needs to have a voice because oftentimes there are things that are really painful for them that are not painful to you. And if those pains become really problematic for them, like you need to solve them again, gotta be like first, foremost through the lens of what works for you. But your staff need to have a voice and what's prioritized, if you do have a team, your clients need to have a voice, your very best clients. But then the fourth thing that I think a lot of us are lacking is you need some sort of external visibility. And that could be like a consultant, it could be a friend that runs accounting firms. But if all you have is you, your staff and your clients, and you all have tunnel vision for the way that you work right now and the systems that you use and the norms that you have trained your clients on and your staff, and you don't realize just how like severe that tunnel vision is until you go out and you're at conferences and you're talking with other firms about how they do the same stuff. So part of that decision making framework still needs to be somebody external. And that's usually like a coach that works with other firms. Honestly, if they work with other firms like yours, you're going to be the beneficiary of a lot of nuance about how to do very Specific things by working with that coach that you wouldn't otherwise be aware of. And they can kind of be that set of eyes that has the perspective of more general best practices so that you ensure you're not. You just, it makes you more aware of your blind spots as a firm, I think, and most accountants don't do this. And I'll be honest, I didn't do it either. And I think if there was a, A, a person or group or something like that that I really trusted that I knew about, I would have absolutely done that. But I don't feel like I ever had access to that. I could have never put my finger on somebody that would have been great for that. I knew some people who did it, but my vision for what running a firm looked like didn't really seem to align with what theirs was, which was largely like realization based. And I don't know a lot of the stuff that I was actually kind of trying to get away from. So I will admit I didn't lean into this as much as I should have. And honestly, it's why I talk so much about community and about sharing your journey and all of that is I got burned by that big time in a lot of ways because we just, we had that tunnel vision and we didn't have the perspective of any other firm runners or like external coaches or anything like that. If you don't have that, ask around. And a lot of people say, like, when's the right time to do that, buddy? Every single step along the way. I mean, you know, if you are starting a new firm and you make a couple wrong decisions that can cost you years. This episode, believe it or not, it is sponsored in part by the fine folks at firm360. You know what's better than anything else? Because you can't. You don't know how to make sense of this ad, right? Like, how do I know this better than any other tool that I'm using? How do I cut through the fluff? I'll tell you what's the ultimate validation. Social proof. When your friends like, yo, that stuff's for real. It's the best. That's what I look for, right? So let me show you some social proof on firm360 who has a shocking, shocking number of five star reviews. How about this one from Kelly? Great project management software that allows seamless communication with coworkers and clients. Think about that. Do you have seams right now? Are there seams in your communication? I bet there are. How about Brandon? This one in June of 23. Wow. We just an amazing company to do business with. With their firm management software and assistance, we have streamlined more of our processes and become more efficient and profitable. Every other firm management software we researched and demoed seem to be lacking for accountants until we found firm 360. Which is not surprising since accountants are the ones who founded the company. True story, Cherith. And know the needs of accounting firms. Every month we get updates and in the year we've been with them, they've adapted and evolved their software as well as they listen to their customers. Okay, Brandon, why don't you do the ad read? That's it. That's the end of the ad read. That was better than anything I had written. Learn more about Firm360 and the link in the show notes. This episode is sponsored in part by Copilot. Modern accounting firms, let me tell you, they run on Copilot. Differentiate your firm with a secure portal that gives your clients a one stop shop to upload files, sign contracts, send messages, access dashboards, all that and more. You know what your clients don't enjoy is hopping all around to all your different tools, logging into this magic, magic. You know what I'm saying? Magic email linking into this other doodad. Every little thing they pop into, it's got a different vibe. They're not sure, did I just get this from my accountant or somebody who doesn't mean me? Well, let me tell you gang, that is where Copilot comes in clutch. Because you can put all that stuff in one place. They sign into a single place. That's the only place you're ever gonna ask them to go. And it's a consistent experience. They know they're getting that stuff from you. They're not getting bamboozled by somebody that's posing as you. That's why Copilot was built from the ground up to be not just a portal system, but a platform to build whatever you want on top of it. So you've got a single streamlined client interface that does everything, everything you need to do. Learn more about Copilot. Check out the link in the show notes. There is no time where somebody being able to offer that shortcut to you is not worthwhile. So be thinking about what that external feedback loop looks like. We get sticker shock a lot. I mean, a lot of us accountants are cheapskates too. But you cannot assign a value to shortcutting years off of your learning process. I can point to so many examples of things that I did wrong for over a year where it's like, especially if you're running a team and you have all these people chugging along in the wrong direction and then the whiplash and the fallout of then asking them to do something different, like, you know, put a value on getting to the right destination a year sooner. That's what you're paying for for that external perspective. So you've kind of got your trusted little, little board of advisors. That is how you feel when you go home at night. That is what your staff's complaining about. That is what's best for your best clients. And that is some external advisor, those, those kind of four things. And then you kind of coalesce all those into what are the things we need to work on next. Now that is all that stuff from an operational angle. But what does fulfillment look like? Because you can build a super profitable business and not have any fun and be like, man, you know, three or four years into it, be like, turns out I don't actually enjoy this. Like, there's is. I'm not feeling fulfilled from this work anymore. Maybe you're over the hump of the excitement of having built something for yourself for the first time and you're like, well, I've done that now. And I realized that the excitement was actually entrepreneurship. It wasn't talking to people about taxes every day or closing a set of books. It was the excitement of making my own thing. And honestly, a lot of people, when they get over that hump, they're going to realize that the excitement was not actually doing the work. And that's totally fine. Like, the upside is you're now on the other side of that and you have a different level of confidence and capability that you never would have had had you not start that business before. So still for you, I still think that's a positive. But I can tell you just, I mean, through my own personal lens, obviously, because I've done a lot of different things now and I'm not running a firm and now I'm doing this silly stuff. What does fulfillment look like? For me, it is like a. I feel like we're honing in on a custom printed potholder. Inspirational quote here. It is like a. Why potholder? What are the. What are the stitching things where you put it in the hoop and then you. That's not embroidery. What is that? You put like the fabric in the hoop and then you stitch the X's and you can like make designs. Fulfillment for me is like this. I don't know. It is like a. Like, I'm like on A raft going down a river, and it keeps changing. And one day I get up and I feel one way, and then another day I get up and feel a different way, which, honestly, is really frustrating. I don't know that everybody's this way. I think we probably all are to a degree. But there's days when I'm jacked about one thing, and then other days I'm like, that's not interesting. And that's frustrating. I wish I were the same person every single day. But I can tell you, fulfillment for me is a product more than anything else. Like, more than any specific thing, like making videos or talking to people at conferences. More than anything else. I think fulfillment for me at least stems from flexibility and freedom and not feeling too tied down to a specific thing. I do think in firm running, isn't it funny how you go out and you do your own thing and you find yourself settling right into the trappings of a normal workday, of working 8 to 5, of working Monday through Friday, 40 hours or more, when the whole benefit of doing your own thing is ultimate flexibility and being able to make up all the rules, yet we still kind of slip into the norm and struggle to give oursel permission to do anything else. So this will look different for everybody else and at different stages of life. Like, in my 20s, I was way more sweaty than I am now. And fulfillment for me was like success in building the business and, you know, winning business and that kind of like, chest beating. I know I can do this sort of energy. Whatever happened to that energy? But fulfillment now looks like flexibility, like getting to go on a family trip for six weeks and like, working half days and getting to do the work that I enjoy while still getting to do, like, spend a whole bunch of time with my family. So fulfillment's definitely very personal. I. I'm not of the mind. Like, one of the coolest things about running an accounting firm to me is you can work with any type of person. So you could have a passion for a type of business where you want to learn more about it and you begin specializing in that type of work. Like, you can make a successful accounting firm working with just about any industry. There's definitely some that can be more profitable than others. But if you have a passion around theater or, you know, a hundred different things, how cool would it be just to build a firm around your capacity to help that type of business? And those are the conversations that you have each day. I think a nice thing about firm running is those things can kind of ebb and Flow with your interests. They can also ebb and flow with your interest around certain types of service delivery. Maybe you're a bookkeeper that wants to get into tax for the first time. Maybe you're bored of tax or month end close and you want to do more FP and a. Like, you can absolutely sort of craft the firm around your personal interests. I love when I'm at my best and I like, I generally enjoy the work that I do. And that's not, that's not how everybody is. But I've tried to avoid this delineation between, okay, I'm working here and I'm going to do this work stuff and it's just work, but then the goal is to work as little as possible and go do this other fun stuff wherever possible. I actually like to try to align work with the stuff that I enjoy because, like, it's easy for us to forget just how crucial we are to entrepreneurship and helping people be successful and taking their, you know, stress and work off of their plate. And there's a lot of fulfillment for me to be able to do that for someone that I enjoy working with. Like, that's, that's a lot of fun. I think that's where kind of the hero syndrome comes from, where we can sometimes end up trapped and feeling like we have to be the hero for everybody else first. But if I can align the type of person with someone that I'm super, you know, interested in working with, like, what is the thing that you go home at night and read about? Like, I'm a total dork that oftentimes right now that's like large language models and AI stuff. But there was a time in my life when that was racing rally cars. There was a time in my life when that was basketball, when that was blogging. Like, I've gone through different seasons where I was, uh, it was the stuff that I just wanted to do. Like, it wasn't work, I would just do it. If I didn't have the firm that I did where it was bigger and it had a lot more inertia and going in a certain direction. I would have loved running a firm that was a little more agile, that I could build around my business, around my personal interests, because that would have been much more fulfilling for me. So I think the work itself can certainly be fulfilling. Like, don't kind of talk yourself out of that being a possibility. But then ultimately the flexibility ought to offer a lot of fulfillment too. And where we're at today always can feel insurmountable. You know, we underestimate how much we can change in a year or two year or three years time. It's absolutely possible to get under 40 hours a week. It's absolutely possible to get Under 20 hours a week. Like when we don't think that we can do that. It is 100% self limiting beliefs. It is just you haven't structured your firm in a way that will accommodate that yet. You may not have found the right fulfillment methodology to get that work done yet, but it's totally possible. I can understand the feeling of being trapped by your own business. That's kind of the one thing you want to avoid, right? But know that the very best aspect of running a firm is that at the end of the day you have no one to blame but yourself. Which is kind of soul sucking, but also means like you have the power to change it. Like you are ultimately the one that has complete agency to recraft your own reality into something that's better for you. And man, what a gift. If you think about all the people you bump into when you roll up to Jersey Mike's, how many other people in that sub shop have that same level of agency that you do? And I know when it's like at its worst, like you can kind of, I don't know, there were days where I almost like resented my firm, where I was like, what? What are you doing to me firm? Thanks. Like, this feels like such an overwhelming obligation, but at the end of the day, you're in the driver's seat. Doesn't mean you're not going to have to make hard, uncomfortable decisions. You're definitely not going to get it right on the first try. Goodness sakes. But at the end of the day, you're the one behind the wheel, which means you can get it to a better place. So that's kind of my framework for how to decide what to work on next. You have kind of those four inputs, the big one being what works for you. And then kind of from a life planning standpoint, trying to be mindful of like, what version of this is fulfilling to me? Am I just amped and I want to do this 60 hours a week right now? Am I cool enough and I want to pair it Back to like 30 hours a week right now, operationally within the firm, I use kind of those four inputs to prioritize. And then from a life planning standpoint, the things I talk about with my family where I'm like reflecting on what I'm enjoying and not enjoying, that's sort of how I balance fulfillment. But I'd be lying if I told you I had 100% had it 100% figured out. It's just kind of a journey. Like one day you're like, yeah, I feel like I'm doing this right. And the next day you may be like, woo boy, where did I go wrong? But for me at least, oftentimes that's because something came up. Like there is something that came up that day. Maybe you had an argument with your spouse, maybe there was a customer that was really annoyed and it feels like a really big deal in the moment. But usually you give it a couple of nights sleep and you settle back into like, okay, like here's kind of reality. Is there a way I could have avoided that? I try to avoid big deals, but that's my process. Hopefully that's helpful. If you have cracked the code, please do share and I'll see you tomorrow.