170 Shut Up And Make Something!

Heard a quote from Casey Neistat the other day that has stuck with me and the whole, the whole accountant's condition. Shut up and make something. Yeah, I'm looking at you, the one turning up to work today in service of everyone. Everyone else. Look at you, got your little halo on sacrificing, putting the cape on forever. What about you? How are we splitting the time that we spend in service to others with the time we spend investing in ourself, making cool stuff, building leverageable assets versus solving everybody else's problems? Okay, listen, I want to get you enthused about taking just a few minutes to exercise a new muscle. I got some good ideas to get you started. Come on in. Let's do it. You have a skill set, a technical skill set. Hopefully you do. You do. And through the lens of an accounting firm, we're usually applying that skill on a one on one basis in a format that has to be sneaky secret. Like obviously we can't disclose any of the things that we do for our clients. So we are kind of heroes in these itty bitty micro situations. And that's not bad. That's a good thing. We need those heroes. We need the people who can be rock stars at applying context, like applying this stuff contextually to enable entrepreneurship and all these other things. But should it be 100% of your time? Because obviously the worst part of a service business is just that inherent hamster wheel. And so just to make it really simple, solo practitioner, you're getting paid as long as you're doing the work right. Maybe you got people on monthly retainers and all that and that can kind of float that for a little bit. But if you get sick for six months, who's going to pay you to do nothing? What is the thing that is working while you sleep? Because it ain't you, man. Unless you're like me and you wake up at 3 o' clock in the morning every single day and then spend the next 90 minutes simultaneously annoyed that you just didn't get out of bed at three because you're still awake at 4:15. And then number two, also annoyed that you're now going to be just dog tired the next day. I digress. You have this, this technical skill set. And if you zoom out and if you play executive coach for yourself for a moment, if you think about your career trajectory, our jobs are really to, to find the highest leverage way to apply that skill, to apply that technical ability. Right? And we don't, we don't talk about this enough. If you can sell an hour of your time for 150 bucks, 200 bucks. Can the same person create something that somebody will buy for 200 bucks or 20 bucks? The answer is almost universally yes. But we don't really think of running a business that way because we are service business people. Maybe you like me, came out of college and went straight into working in accounting firms. We know nothing about developing products and selling products and marketing around a product and all that. That's just not what we do. Right? Like we work directly with people, we solve their problems, a couple of them or sometime appreciative of us, and we try to get home in time for dinner. But I am very convinced that the highest leverage application of your skill set is not to spend 100% of your time in one on one work with clients. You're going to help a lot of people doing that, but I don't think that it is ultimately in service to you. And this doesn't mean going out and doing a new thing and spinning up an Etsy store. I mean this could literally be just product revenue inside of an accounting firm. It could be something else if you wanted. It's more like a. Today I'm talking more about like a way to go through life. Leaning into like the fact that creating is just, it's in our nature. But the way an accounting firm runs is counter to this, right? A hundred percent of most accounting firms revenue is straight up service revenue. And it's because most of us don't identify as people who make stuff, people who build products. But the reality is we do, we make stuff on a very tiny scale. On a, on a client level scale, you come up with creative solutions, you will things into existence that weren't there before. You come up with ideas to help these people. But for whatever reason we don't generally do it on a larger scale. And in the past I've called this, you know, one to many and people call it a bunch of different things. But I think like at the core of it is just this drive to make stuff. And if I think about, you know, how I'm different from some people, I think I probably have just that bigger innate drive to need to make things, to need to create, you know, silly things, but also very useful things. I'm in a particularly bullish state right now. I made something absurd completely off the wall. That was way too much work. At the time, time that I'm recording this, it's not done yet. At the time that you're hearing this, I sure hope it's done and went out on the main channel yesterday. It was a massive lift, something that I had no business trying to bite off. And it was definitely one of those, I'm excited about doing this thing and I kind of want to lean into that because it's going to teach me a lot. And then you get 10% into it and you're like, holy heck, this. I just bit off a whole lot more than I should have. But then at the same time it's like, yeah, but aren't those like, aren't you usually glad you do that by the end? Like, and this is a very short term project. It's basically a one week thing where at the end of that one week I was going to learn a ton of and be thankful that I did it. But what it has reminded me of is the pride that there is in leaving a trail of things that you are glad exist that you willed into existence. So right now you can spend your time making something that people can consume for years that will be there, that is a snapshot of your expertise, of, of you, of your identity. Or you can spend all of your time on things that are ephemeral. And I would argue in traditional accounting firms, while we do help a ton of people, if you look in the rear view mirror, you don't see a whole lot, right? You don't look back and say, oh, I'm really proud of this thing. That's still driving value for people in this thing. Now we've helped a lot of people and enabled a ton of entrepreneurs and that is awesome. But what are you leaving in your trail of things that you've done that continue to live on, that you are really proud of? And this to me is what made this project worthwhile. Is five years from now, I'm still going to be able to look back and be like, I'm really proud that I did that thing. It was really weird and off the wall and kind of sucks and it's kind of great at the same time. But at the end of the year, when I look back and think about what I did this year and even three years from now, if I look back at what I did the last three years, that will be something in my wake that I am really proud that I made. And the day to day humdrum of accounting firm life does not leave enough of those things in our wake unless we intentionally make time to create them. And if you are looking for time to do this, I am busy. Right? We're all extremely busy. How in the world Are you going to make time to make something? A good place to start with, where to find that Time is all the time that you will spend consuming things that other people make. So social media, reading other people's posts, reading articles, reading books, watching shows. We say that we don't have time to make things and then we spend a bunch of time consuming things that other people make that are consumed by millions of people. And then we clock in and serve one person at a time. Right? Doesn't make sense. So to get you excited about this, to get you some ideas, I want to quickly run you through some things you could make. Why I think we don't because the reasons we don't are just as important as the reasons why we should. And last, why this is like a bigger picture investment in yourself now if you never read it. Super cool book, the Creative act by Rick Rubin. It's like, I don't know, the bible for creative people. That's a bad analogy. It's probably not the bible. Creative people really like it. You know, people often ask me, jason, who is this episode sponsored in part by today this episode sponsored in part by liveflow. Did you hear the news? Live Flow just launched a consolidation product. You actually might have seen it on the main channel recently. We did a whole demo day of it. Liveflow's automated multi entity consolidations. It's beyond simple to use. You can easily map multiple unmatching chart of accounts from multiple QuickBooks Online companies into one standardized report. And once it's set up, LifeFlow is gonna get to work updating the consolidations automatically in real time, the realest of time, so you can focus on analysis using instantly updating data across entities. LifeFlow can even consolidate financials that are in different currencies. That sounds disgusting. Yikes. And it doesn't stop there. Liflow offers flexible, powerful reporting tools. Create customized dashboards that meet your specific needs. Little Snowflake build executive presentations, cash flow forecasts and more with just a few clicks. The consolidation thing is actually super cool. You haven't seen that yet, check it out on the main YouTube channel. And thanks to LifeLow for sponsoring the pod. This episode is sponsored in part by Cloud Cloud accountant staffing. You all know I'm a big advocate of hiring offshore. One of the biggest changes I made in my firm, we transitioned a Legacy firm from 100% onshore local hiring to 100% distributed US and then 100% distributed globally. Hiring and honestly is the best thing we did. It virtually alleviated all of our hiring pains completely Changed how we thought about staffing projects and the type of work that we wanted to bring on. Because you know what, the folks we hired offshore, really freaking good. A lot of misconceptions around the type of people that you hire offshore, because your enterprises will oftentimes use offshore folks for like, menial work. Absolutely not the case. There are tens of thousands of people working for big four accounting firms, you know, offshore outside the U.S. you can get folks that can do anything from tax to junior level stuff to super senior level stuff. But try to do that yourself. Figure it all out yourself. That's gonna be hard. It's gonna be scary. Really good place to start. Cloud accountant staffing. They will hold your hand through that process. Their story is super simple. An accounting firm in the US hired a bunch of people in the Philippines, fell in love with them, but didn't fall in love with the fees they were having to pay to the staffing companies that were managing these employees. So they built their own solution and now they're starting to pull other accountants in. I'd encourage you. A big tipping point for me was when I was like, I'm gonna stop being opinionated on this and just try to learn. And so I talked with other practitioners, I talked to some of the vendors that would like, help you get into offshoring. That really opened things up for me. So if you've been on the fence, I'd encourage you to at least learn about it and you start heading down that path. Consider cloud accountant staffing. But the reality is like, we think of creative people as those people, and then there's us. When it's like, no. Creativity is, is in everything. Even the most, you know, dry stuff like accounting. I've been going through that book lately. A couple, a couple notes I had that I think are relevant to this. Creativity is not just about the final product, but about the process of exploration and discovery. It is a way of being, not a means to an end. I've been thinking and talking a lot lately about the process and how do we find a way to enjoy the process? Because we like to fixate on the destination. But on the other side of the destination is what manufacturing Another destination. And when we fixate on the destination, we like to just steamroll everything, you know, in the today, in the now. And so how do we find like the joy in the process? And to me, creativity, it's absolutely. That it's not. It kind of. It breaks the whole accountant ROI mindset of. It's not about the outcome necessarily. It's about the act of creating and exercising that muscle. And another note I had here. Everybody's capable of creativity. It is core to being human and even a powerful tool for. For healing and transformation. With your nose to the grindstone of. Of, you know, helping people and navigating the really hard aspects of being an accountant and running an accounting firm, what is your, you know, what is your release from that? How are you making time to. To heal and to make something for yourself? Like, this is. This is kind of where my. I guess my love from. Love for making things come from is. It feels like. It's really hard not to enjoy the process. Like, creating is just. It's all about the process. So when I'm creating things, I just. I feel more. More present and more like I'm in that moment enjoying what I do. Okay, first up, some ideas, things you can make. Some people may be bursting with things to create. There's people that are just wired that way. They're like, for you, it's more an issue of time. Like, oh, if I could just find the time to make this, that and the other thing. And I challenge you. Every time you tell yourself you don't have time, you just. You do. There are cracks here and there. There are. There are assumptions we have to push back against of. Of things we think we need to do that we really don't need to do. Having time is a choice. You have control over how you spend your time. Some on ideas, on stuff to make. First and foremost, write something right. There's so much value in writing. Not just, I think we fixate on the output and what value the output has to others. You know, focusing on the extrinsic value of that thing. Let's talk about the intrinsic value of writing. Writing is tremendously helpful to organize your thoughts and ideas in a more cohesive way. There are so many contradictions in our heads and in our ideas and the ways that we think about things that are not fully realized and organized until we take the time to write it. You know, there's the whole notion of you don't have something to say, or you don't write because you have something to say. You write to find what you have to say. And so there's a really interesting thing that, that happens as you write is you just have a much more developed understanding of the things that are. That are in your head and what you actually have to say. And I. I, for one, am, was a terrible writer. Like, English was always my hardest class in school. It's nothing that Ever came easy to me. And so for me, journaling is, is really helpful. Cause it's like low stakes. Like you don't have to worry about it really being good. It's not intimidating for me. But writing can just look like a ton of different things. That could be something very technical. You know, if you're trying to make something helpful for clients, could be telling a story, you know, alongside technical things. Like, there's so much value in just storytelling. Oftentimes storytelling is actually much more powerful than like, here's a very tactical valuable thing for you. It could also be fiction. Like the version of this that excites you has gotta be very true to you. And then last, it could also just be like a total brain dump, like stream of consciousness on that subject. The next thing I had, I had noted down a voice recording, a voice memo, like a just a five minute brain dump on a specific topic or thought or story or something that you're making up off the top of your head. One of the coolest things to do with AI right now is to take just brain verbal diarrhea and turn it into something majestic. Maybe we'll do an episode on this at some point, but the part of our brain that lets us form good words that I evidently don't have is a totally different part of our brain than the part that, you know, helps you write. Like those are very different things. And for many of us, talking things out is much easier than writing things out because that's what we do in our job is oftentimes if you're on the phone all day, like that is something that will just come easier to you. And as a way of getting those ideas and thoughts out of your head. For many people, a voice memo is gonna be much easier than writing that down. A lot of people are also just verbal processors. You talk to, work through things. And in my book, capturing that sort of thing counts as creation. Especially if you have kind of a, a, a goal in mind of what you want that output to be. Taking the time to stop and record your thoughts on that subject matter. For example, you have a call with a client and you're like, gosh, I've explained, you know, how reasonable compensation works to so many people over the years. What if I just had an article I could send them to when that question came up? Hit the brakes, bud. Record a 3 minute voice memo of how this works. Have ChatGPT put it into a professional sounding tone. Bob's your uncle, you just made something. How about a new social media account under your actual identity to talk presumably about like business stuff, about the problems that your clients have. But it could also be about Pokemon cards. I don't know. Creating doesn't have to be like for work or for personal. It can go either way. But a blocker for a lot of us on social media is we've always talked about this thing and I see the value of social media for this other thing. What will I ever do? How will I bridge it from this to that? Tell me, do you have, does your social media account have a million followers and is this big valuable thing? Probably not. More likely thing is you've built some relationships with folks over the things that you talk about right now and you may not want to lose that by going and talking about something else. Great. Spin up a different account. Use, you know, Instagram for fun and LinkedIn for business or something like that where you can just start sharing those bite sized thoughts. Whether they are posts on your own feed or replies on other people you are creating, you're adding value by engaging. How about a crappy screen recording of a common thing? Tax payments, filing instructions, how to invite your accountant to QuickBooks the right way. Have you ever made a guide for any of those things? Now think how many times you have told people how to do those things. Yep, guilty. Don't overthink it. Go spin up a free loom account. Just do a screen recording. Don't even have to have your face on the screen. Good job. You just made something. Now when it comes to deciding like what do I want to make, a lot of it should be led by where is your energy? Like, are you excited to make something in the moment? Great. Do that. Because that is when work doesn't feel like work. And that is the very best kind of creation. But if I put my business hat on and maybe I'm not feeling that inspiration right now, but I still just want to make something valuable. Think about how evergreen something is. If I'm making something that's only relevant for the next three days, is that going to be valuable? Again, like we're thinking about, what are the things that I'm leaving in my professional wake that I can be proud of and point back to that people will get value from for a long time, is that an evergreen thing? That is something that will still be relevant, you know, three years from now. Now again, it could be personal, it could be business related. If it is business related, see if you can tie it back to a client problem. So the other day we were talking about building that database for problems that your specific clients have. And one of the values of having that list of problems that they share is you can then associate those problems with assets that help them to solve those problems. So if you're looking about, if you're, if you're looking for something to create or ideas of subject matter to create around that, that database of client problems is a good place to start. Now, y' all know I'm a big fan of content creators, influencers, whatever you want to call them. You know, people in our space who took the time to create. Ashley Francis created AI education stuff for accountants. And that rather unexpectedly turned into a cool business. And that all started with being like, I'm not a video person, I'm not an AI expert. Until enough people told her that she was. And she could do it. Having the courage to, you know, be really bad at something and figuring it out, figure it out for the first time. And that is, that is how it feels to you. But outwardly, you're giving a tremendous amount of value to people. That all started from creating. This episode is brought to you in part by Team up, helping you recruit top Filipino accountants without any ongoing monthly fees. The difference between teamup and all the other offshoring options is that Team up helps you hire staff directly. No middleman. You work directly with your new hire in the Philippines. Hire the person, not the company. Guys, gals, gang. Here's just a few reasons to hire directly. You have access to higher level talent. Makes sense. You have complete control over team culture and training. They keep 100% of what you pay them and it's a lot more affordable for you. So you can retain your team for the long term. Team up can source accountants with experience working at US or Australian firms familiar with tools like Xeroqbo and Dex. Also recruit specialist roles, team leaders, tax specialists, administrative assistants. Thought experiment. What if you had an executive assistant for the first time this tax season? Just. Just throwing it out there. What would they do? Start at that email video I did on the main channel recently. Get help with that stanky old inbox. I digress. Team up recruits these talented folks for a flat one time fee of 4,000 US American dollars. That's it. 4K one time. Somebody at Robert Half just did a spit take. Robert Half reference. We ever gonna get Robert Half to sponsor this podc? Not anymore. And they can connect you with the an affordable employer of record if you need help with payroll and compliance once you hire that person. Big fan of hiring in the Philippines. You know, I did a Bunch of that. Check out the link in the description to learn more about Team Up. Laurelin Wilson. She's got, I think it's Mad Woman Media, which is like a newsletter service where she writes a couple few things I think every week that you can use in your client newsletters. She writes because she stopped and took the time to write. And obviously she has a really unique tone of voice that's really fun online and that turned into a business. And the goal here isn't necessarily for this thing you create to turn into a business, but in every one of these cases it is taking some of your time away from doing that one on one trade with clients to creating something that you can look back on and be proud of that works while you sleep. And then last and least, Logan Graff started his own firm, has been sharing his journey on YouTube. That's kind of his creative outlet. Now he's getting speaking opportunities and all that from it. And it's all come from a place of like being willing to hit pause on the status quo on the default path of just doing client work and stopping to make something. But most of us, it's easy to see the value of doing that thing. The reason that we don't are those same old internal voices that always stop us. So we've heard from these internal voices before. Nervous Ned, change of verse. Doesn't like new things, just wants to stick to the old ways. We've been around enough nervous Neds in our time to know that we, we don't want to be one of those. Spotlight Sally, the person in your personal life that you know will roll their eyes when they see that thing you made. You know who that person is. You know that's a factor. But are we really gonna let these other people who may struggle to be happy for you dictate how you are going to run your life? No, no, no, no, no, no, no. How about Carly the comparison lady? Carly can always point to someone who will do it but better than you as a rationale for why you shouldn't start because you're never going to be able to do it as good as this person or that person. You're not going to be able to make a video as good as Jason Gang let you in on a secret. I wasn't me until I was me. You weren't you until you became the you that you are right now. And you're the you that you are right now because of all the stuff you did that got you there. So what are you doing today to get you to the version of you that you want to be. That's all that matters here. Not what anybody else is doing, but what you're doing today to get to a better version of you. How about Peter the perfectionist? Constantly worries about the need for perfection and everything leading to endless delays and procrastination. Buddy, just hit publish. Just ship it. In my journey, the very best thing about committing to a publishing schedule on YouTube has been you got to hit that publish button no matter what. Whether it's something absolutely amazing or whether you could have spent another week working on it. The act of being able to publish is a skill. And it's why I tell people, like, don't, like, go make this giant, huge thing like a giant course or this massive project and pour all this time and years or months into it and then go try to sell it. Like, no, you got to start small because the act of selling, the act of publishing, the act of marketing, getting it out in front of people, that's a whole nother skill to learn. The ability to overcome being Peter the perfectionist, like, that is a muscle that you have to exercise over and over again to truly manage that. Ian the imposter syndrome guy doubts one's own abilities and accomplishments. Feeling like a fraud and fearing being exposed as unqualified, let you know, secret. That's just how. That's how everybody feels. That whole thing of your internal identity lagging behind your external reality, it is real. The things that you are capable of, the things that the people around you perceive you as being capable of, your internal identity legs behind that. It's like, we need enough people to convince us that we're capable of something before we actually lean into, like, thinking we can do that thing that's completely normal. Like, that is. That is human nature. In fact, it's kind of weird if you're not that way. Ira the isolationist Social anxiety means they'll project onto every action how it will lead to a weirdly elaborate and detailed social foible with someone down the road. So this may look like, okay, you just had that call with the client. Now you're going to record this thing about reasonable compensation. Oh, my gosh. What if the client sees that I post that blog post in three days and they think it's because I had that conversation with them? Like, are they going to be weirded? Are they going to be bent out of shape if I post this tweet after I just had this conversation with? Are they going to think it's a subtweet? I Think, gang. Nobody gives a hoot. Nobody is watching you. Like that whole spotlight effect where you think everybody's paying attention to what you do, let you know in a secret. Nobody cares. And frankly, that is great news that nobody cares because you can take control of your own life and do what you want to do. And then last 10pm Tony, your unhinged internal monologue at after 10pm the crazy thoughts you have as. The completely unhinged thoughts you have as you're laying in bed thinking about the day's events. That's a tricky voice to turn off, but I at least know not to listen to it. Now last why is this an investment in yourself? Again? I love the whole process of creating because it is about taking you to. It's not about taking you somewhere. It is about the, the journey of creating and how much joy there is to be found in that act and in exercising that creative muscle. I know I've referenced this a few times. The Elon Musk book. Not a big Elon Musk guy, but there's just, there's a lot of things in that book that are just kind of, that just kind of break your brain. And when you look at stuff like SpaceX, some of the companies they built, it reminds you, oh, and the real example here was just the whole like space travel industry, how development there really had gone backwards since the 70s and more like since the 90s. Like we have this, we have this built in assumption that tech and everything just naturally progresses. When it doesn't, things only happen. Things only progress when people decide to will those things into being. And the things that we love, the things that we watch, the things that other people that we create, that we consume, those things only exist because people are making time to make them happen. Which is like, what's better than that? Like to have that agency to will something new, something cool, something you can be proud of into existence. For example, if I made a YouTube video that was just like a total sellout sponsored video and did not have value to someone and I was just like shilling for a sponsor or something like that. In the context of being within an accounting firm, we don't generally make things that live on, especially in the billable hour paradigm. That's kind of counter to investing in assets that provide value to clients and are scalable and leverageable. But imagine right now if you spent two hours on a, on a PDF, helpful PDF, solving some problem for a client that you could put on your website and people could go out and download it for years, five Years from now, somebody could go out and download and spend an hour reading that thing, solving that problem. Think of all the ways you could spend the next two hours of your time. Obviously, that's really cool. That's a really amazing, unique thing to be able to build an asset that can give people value for that amount of time. It's my favorite thing about YouTube really, because YouTube people go back and watch five year old YouTube videos all the time. Podcasts, not so much. Social media, not at all. Social media is just like ephemeral. But for me it comes back to you have this skill set. What is the highest leverage way you have to apply that skill set? It probably looks like creating, not servicing, not consuming creating. And I think most of us are probably spending 80% of our time consuming 20% of our time. And I think most of us are probably spending 80% of our time servicing 20% of our time consuming and virtually no time creating. But there's so much joy to be found in the process of creating. And long term, as an investment in yourself, it's a great career decision. Creating things attracts people, attracts opportunities, attracts things you don't have access to today. But it all starts with like stopping, reassessing how you spend your time and making a thing. Because cool stuff only exists because people will it into existence. That's all I got today. Go will something into existence. In fact, link it in the comments, I would love to see it. You got a lot to offer, you little snowflake. Now go out and make something cool. Sam.