175 Managing Key Person Risk in Accounting Firms

Hey, welcome in. Today we are talking about managing key man or key person risk inside of an accounting firm. Perpetually being one person away from disaster, yourself included. What happens if you get sick? We're also touching on what else MPS surveys, how to make time for social media or if you even should the struggle of software subscriptions and some questions on the new Channel Chat GPT plan, which is killer for accounting firms. Come on in, let's talk about it. We're in New York today for a AI thing we're doing with the aicpa. So you can hear some hawks, you can hear some vroom vrooms. But it is nice being in, in the windy Apple, the Big Apple. The city of Brotherly City is going to be in New York. Okay, Optimal firm size to avoid key man risk. You ever heard this one before? Oh, if only we get across this little size threshold, then we just, we won't have this risk of people leaving and us being up a creek. Okay, I'll read the question from Zach Jensen here. Jason, I recently read Small Giants, a book about companies that choose to stay small. I'd love to stay at a certain size, but I'm worried if I don't keep growing, there's too much key man risk at my current size. Is there a sweet spot you found where folks are earning, quote, good money and you're not one quit or bad employee away from total chaos? This seems to be general wisdom that there's a certain size threshold beyond which this gets easier. I would hazard a guess that if you asked accounting folk who run firms of any size, most of them would tell you that's by and large not the case. Maybe it helps a bit. Maybe there's an itty bitty threshold there where, I don't know, beyond a few people, it gets easier. But I can tell you that I thought that growing would solve this problem. And so I grew and it didn't solve the problem. And maybe it gets a little bit better. But obviously with different size accounting firms, there's all sorts of trade offs, positive and negative, as the headcount goes up and down, as the, as the staff, the client headcount, as all those things shift. But I would point you to actually different things to mitigate key man risk. So two things I would push you towards. One, the other day when we did the 13 questions to, you know, to think about, one of those questions was how could you run your accounting firm in two hours per week? And you know, that's obviously absurd and unthinkable, but those Constraints are oftentimes, I think, where the best changes happen. Like for example, you're going on vacation, you got a person going on maternity leave. Something just fundamentally breaks a process as it is. And oftentimes this is where great change comes about. It like kind of forces the hand of change. Right. But without these forcing functions that change, it would seem impossible, it would just, it would never happen. And this accelerates it. Well, this question of how would I run my accounting firm? And two hours per week, I think it's really interesting because you can also think about if I just had those two hours, what aspects of my business would actually be just fine? Would like, I don't know, the bill pay services that we sell our clients, could we still keep doing those and would people still be perfectly happy with those as opposed to maybe this advisory service where I'm the only one doing it? And that's, that's the thing that would immediately go out the window. Like if you pair things super, super back, what are the things that would remain and what are the things that would go away? Because not all firms and not all service lines and not everything that we do is tied to human inputs like actual labor to the same degree. Some things, you know, obviously are totally devoid of incremental human, human labor, like another person watching your YouTube video or another person buying a piece of software. Some things are fundamentally super high leverage, right? You know, somebody buying a digital course. On the other end of the spectrum, we have traditional one to one work where we are doing something completely specific to that client. They're the only ones that will ever see it and will ever benefit from it. And if you think of everything that makes up your revenue for most accounting firms today, 100% of their revenue is, is in these one to one services that are completely tied to butts and chairs, people doing work. And so the first thing I would, I would point you towards is is there a path towards revenue that isn't quite as associated with the human inputs, the labor as it is today? And it doesn't mean all your revenue has to be replaced by this. But if you do that exercise of, you know, in two hours a week, what would I do and what aspects of my firm would survive? Are there sources of revenue in there or service lines that would keep doing just fine without anybody tending to them? And is there a way that you could lean into that further? I think I said I was gonna give you two, I'm gonna give you three. Here's a bonus one and something that I learned in practice that was really helpful for me is I began leaning into offering services that I could easily hire replacement folks for. So not all jobs and the people behind those jobs, like there is not an equal level of scarcity and finding new people to do that job behind all the things that we sell. So I just gave you a good example of accounts payable, paying the bills versus advisory. It was not hard for me to go out and find another person that could help us do accounts payable for clients. It's actually one of the reasons why we sold a whole bunch of accounts payables. We get paid a reasonable amount of money for it and we could staff it until the end of time. It wasn't hard to staff as opposed to tax work. More technical stuff, advisory, not a reason not to do those technical things. But again, look at your revenue mix. Look at all the things that make you money. You know, the holy grail is that thing that makes you money that doesn't require any human inputs. The other end of the spectrum is the work from your most scarce people. And in the middle there is work that people will pay you for that's not very hard to staff. And if 100% of my revenue is that really hard to staff work, as opposed to maybe 50, 50, half is really hard to staff, half is maybe easier to staff. And then anything you're getting onto the gravy train of stuff that you can sell, whether you've got human inputs going into it or not like that is gold. And we're seeing this more and more from firms, firms selling products to their clients and to non clients, more one to many, higher leverage, like mastermind group type things with clients, attaching a community to an accounting firm, charging for a community, stuff like that that supports the business as a whole, supports the same type of people, but gets you away from exclusively doing that one to one work. That's my second consideration on key man risk is how easy is it to replace that person if you do lose them? And then third, do you have like a release valve or a backup plan if somebody does leave? I would argue the reason that most firms are one person away from panic is because they're fully reliant upon traditional hiring. And the solution here is can I pull in part time people? The solution is can I pull in an outsourced group that's maybe doing some of our work, but in a pinch could pick up more of our work. And oftentimes we don't even explore this stuff. I mean there's a ton of blockers to the outsourcing and the offshoring that, that I think the profession can come a long ways towards overcoming. But oftentimes we don't lean into those things because they might be more expensive than the ideal onshore hire. Maybe that outsourcing group, it's gonna charge you some sort of flat rate for tax returns or something like that. But then you look at your line item of the in house people that you have and you're like, oh, well, if Judy does another 20, those are gonna be more profitable. Or if we could just find another person like Craig, we're gonna make more money on those returns. When I think the real value, and in a perfect world that is usually the case, like building your own people from scratch, developing them to do that stuff in house is generally gonna be the most profitable path. A mix of onshore and offshore. And so the outsourced group, who's taking their own margin, do they still have a place in accounting firms? I think they absolutely do. And that for me that's the main place is I'm gonna have cyclical times where I would love to chuck some work, some, some work their way. But also what if something happens to somebody? What if all of a sudden we need a whole bunch of help? You want to talk about groups who have scaled and have large labor pools to try to distribute work across, that is outsourcing groups. And if I have to pay a premium and a pinch to get that work done, I'm happy to do that. Because what's the alternative like? The alternative is you run yourself into the ground and you run your team into the ground and you run the risk of this compounding worst case scenario where one person leaving puts even more work on everybody else and then they become more likely to leave. And we don't want to think about that. So three main thoughts for me on, on mitigating key man risk. Is there a way that you can generate more revenue that actually doesn't require direct like labor efforts, you know, by the hour? Or is there a way to not just do 100% like traditional one to one work? Second, how replaceable are those team members? There's a big spectrum there from super hard to find high level tax people to the type of folks that could come in and do like bill pay or very proceduralized cash planning? Honestly, even advisory, there's many aspects of advisory that can be made very turnkey that you can plug just about anybody into. And then third, what's your backup plan? You got to have some sort of plan if you do lose somebody some combination of things in the fold where you can flex work in a pinch. And if I wish it were as simple as just growing and getting a bit bigger, I'm curious actually. If you run a firm beyond, I don't know, 40 people, I'd love to hear in the comments. In your opinion, does growing beyond 10 people make mitigating key man risk easier? My instinct is like a little bit, but there's a whole lot of other things that happen when you go big too that almost make that secondary to me, as opposed to other ways of trying to mitigate key man risk which apply to all sizes of firms. But if you've gone through that journey from small to big, I would love to hear your take on that as well. That's the beauty of this honestly, is like collective kind of experiences and getting to hear from folks what that looked like for them. I could share what it looked like for me, but ultimately the more I can hear from y' all the better. Okay MPS surveys I I think I went on an NPS survey rant a few months back, but this came up again in a Q and a on LinkedIn. Question around how much do you want to collect when doing an MPS survey? Automated NPS surveys? Do you just collect the 1 through 10? Do you get their name? Do you have them do it anonymously? Do you leave it open to any other feedback? I think the best MPS surveys are actually kind of like they look like email opt outs or where the opt out happens when you first click unsubscribe but then it says give us some feedback after that. But at that point you are already unsubscribed and leaving feedback is optional. I think that style of MPS survey is best where you can let them do it in one click, but if they want they can give you more information now biggest thing that I think people miss with MPS's and MPS's are very valuable MPS surveys. It's the the NET promoter score. 0 to 10 or 1 to 10, whatever it is. How likely are you to refer this to a friend basically and it's designed to be this super simple like one click give me a number. That number itself is useful, but also the trend of those figures over time is really useful. But it's also really easy to fool yourself with NPS scores in my opinion. And the only way to make those things legit and actually meaningful I believe as if they are a mandatory part of your workflow. For example, a client has to complete it to get their tax return or A client has to complete it to get their monthly financial statements. It doesn't mean you need to put it in front of them every month. Could do it every quarter. But the problem is, unless it is mandatory, you're cherry picking because people are conflict averse and like their excitement or willingness to to leave that, that feedback, it will change over time and it will actually change according to how their satisfaction with what you do ebbs and flows over time as well. And this is a really useful metric in many ways. This is like the granddaddy of all metrics. If you're looking for ways to benchmark employee performance, this is a big one. Not that every client is going to necessarily not be a jerk and not necessarily that your staff has 100% control over their happiness here, but it's a pretty darn big driver. And so I am a big believer in the value of MPS scores and particularly how they trend over time in assessing, you know, pods like teams, how are they serving clients versus how are other clients being served? How are particular types of clients being served? Are your small projects your little clients happiest? Are your big ones happiest? Are your beekeepers happiest? Are your dentists happiest? This is all good information to have, but I think the way that most people do this now is after a project is done, they use an automated tool to just send out this like YOLO email that's coming from something completely different. And 90% of clients will not complete that MPS survey. And so when only 10% will, ultimately, what does that even tell you? In my opinion, not much. It's got to be part of the workflow. And you can get creative with this. Like if you're using a request system right now or if you have recurring requests that go out for a monthly accounting client, for example, like you can have a mandatory just single question in there with all the other questions, how did we do last month? One to ten and that's it. Like you're not asking a lot from them, but that data point becomes really valuable. So how much info to gather on those? Less is more. You don't want to ask too much of them. I think you still want to keep it one click easy. And different tools do these NPS surveys differently. But I do like the notion of being able to click a number and it submitting. And then after that they can optionally say who they are or add more context. You know, people often ask me, Jason, who is this episode sponsored in part by. Well today this episode sponsored in part by Live Flow did you Hear the news? LiveFlow just launched a consolidation product. You actually might have seen it on the main channel recently. We did a whole demo day of it. LifeFlow'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, Lightflow is going to get to work updating the consolidations automatically in real time time the realest of time. So you can focus on analysis using instantly updating data across entities. LifeLow can even consolidate financials that are in different currencies. That sounds disgusting. Yikes. And it doesn't stop there. LifeLo offers flexible, powerful reporting tools. Create customized dashboards that meet your specific needs. You little snowflake. Build executive presentations, cash flow forecasts and more with just a few clicks. The consolidation thing is actually super cool. Haven't seen that yet. Check it out on the main YouTube channel. And thanks to Liff Flow for sponsoring the pod. This episode is sponsored in part by Cloud Cloud Accountant Staffing Y' 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 I we did at 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 US 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 going to be hard. It's going to 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 with 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. Let's talk about the struggle of software subscriptions. Kristen Keats was talking about this on LinkedIn, said I want AI to go through my software subscriptions and cancel the ones I don't use or could consolidate. This is a big line item on our P and L, you and everybody else. Kristen, man, we spend, we all spend so much money on software and I think what we all don't like about recurring fees is you just, you forget what your paying for. And so there, there's, there's a bunch of different things there. The, whoops, I forgot I was paying for this. I need to get rid of it. But there's also the inefficiency in the licensing that we're on or having too many seats. Oh my gosh. You want to talk about wasted money? The way that legacy tax platforms in the US sell you on a fixed number of licenses, lock you into like a three year contract with X number of seats and like, oh my gosh, that like legacy sales model drives me insane. But just the management of like those, those licenses is a big project in and of itself. And I do think there, there are some dedicated card companies now that will let you like connect to, you know, your Dropbox scanner. Like we'll actually go out and connect to those service providers to give you some suggestions on how to optimize those things. But that's getting super into the weeds because then I've obviously like every single app will not be supported in that way. It's just gonna be kind of the big mainstream app like here's how to optimize your slack subscription. But what's that gonna do for all the other little fiddly accounting apps you have where you know it doesn't support those things? But the easiest win here in my opinion is better hygiene when it comes to card management. So here's what you do. You go out, you sign up for a new app, you're not sure if you're gonna keep it or not. You, you do that on a virtual card that you create just for that app and you set it to die after 30 days. So you created this single use Virtual card that is only good for one charge. You put it in, charge is successful, you've got a month's access. Unless you bought a year. Oh, God. So, so many things I've bought that are like, I've bought a year, but I'm like, I don't know when I'm really going to need this in a year's time. And I'm definitely not going to for I'm not going to remember in 12 months to decide do I want to renew this or not. Anyways, I digress. Use a virtual card, set it to die in 30 days, and it effectively makes all the new apps that you sign up to opt in rather than opt out. Is it going to break in 30 days? Yes, but it's then requiring action from you to make that permanent. Or you can go in and extend how much time is on that card rather than the default being to be charged until the end of time. Not bad, right? Doesn't get you out of the situation you're in right now where you've got a dumpster fire of all these subscriptions. You just gotta do the good old hard work of logging that forest. But next time you set up a new one, do it on a virtual card. Set it to die in 30 days. And at the very least then you're opting in again after 30 days rather than that being the default. Okay. Finding enough time for social media dancing. Nancy, which is the most polite comment on YouTube? Nancy, don't worry about hurting my feelings. I think this was on the. I think this was on the shut up and make something episode. The gist of it is, Nancy says, I don't think everyone has the capitalization or financial stability to make this happen. That is being able to put stuff out into the world and just blindly trust that it's all going to work out for you. Right. Says, I feel like it's a very privileged position to suggest that this is the obvious next step for everybody to leverage their knowledge for the greater community. But who can't just step away from the daily grind long enough to make that happen. We'd love to hear your thoughts on alternative approaches. The other thing this boils down to is like the bigger pie chart of how we all spend our times and how we decide what to spend our time on. And there's an aspect of how we spend our time that is intentional, that is deciding, I'm gonna eliminate this or eliminate that. And I think usually intentionality is. Comes from eliminating. But there's a whole other side to how we Spend our time that is like the default where we actually didn't think about it. And before we know it, we actually just spend all of our time doing this or that and we just kind of wander into that and maybe an unintentional way. And so in our perfect frame of mind, think of all the time that we have and what that pie chart looks like and how we divide up our work time and our family time and our fun messing around time. And within that work time, ultimately what is the time that we are spending on one to one client work versus the high leverage stuff that will fundamentally take you on a entirely different and higher value professional journey. And that is all very highfalutin phrasing, I know, but to like set the context, I got started on social media that started tweeting before I even owned a firm. And then I think through like two years of firm ownership and through having three kids and you know, running a 40 person firm. And what people would say when I was running a 40 person firm is there's no way that you actually run a firm if you're spending this time on social media. And one of my biggest fears of, of not running a firm anymore was everybody saying, well, I see how you can do it, but I can't do that. I run an accounting firm. And what I want to tell people was I, I was doing that back then too. I was publishing two YouTube videos, actually by like minutes more YouTube content every week while I still had a firm than I do now. And what made the difference for me is ultimately I think that I assigned a fundamentally higher value to that than most people do. And if I can open people's eyes to one thing, I hope it is. It's just that, it's that we don't invest in stuff like posting on social media because it's a really hard thing to make an ROI calculation around. We don't have control over it. Right. And it's much easier to go and spend our time on the things that we feel like we have control over. Although I'd argue, do we really have control over it that much? I don't think so. Like whether clients come or go, we have a degree of control over it. But your business has been successful by a whole lot of factors you have no control over from people finding you, people making recommendations. That's neither here nor there. Social media by comparison, it feels like an absolute yolo. You just chuck stuff out there in the wind and you just trust that positive things happen. But here's the problem is if you never make the time or rearrange your life in a way where you can begin to lean into that, you, like most people, will, until the end of time, be a content consumer, right? Think about how much stuff we consume, what if, and would you be happy with yourself if until the end of time all you ever did was consume? I think for most of us, the answer is probably not. Because on the other side of, like, being a creator is super high leverage opportunities. It's introductions to people who will open the door to new types of clients, better stuff, things that you can't imagine having access to right now. And the whole reason that I'm here and I can do stuff like the daily podcast we started last year after I was out of firm running, I couldn't have done this during firm running. The reason that I can do this is because I started small and because it opened doors of opportunity to me that I could have never predicted. And so if I do have a place of privilege or flexibility now, which, and I do, the fact that I can focus on creating content around the clock, the only reason I have this is because I started. And so starting for everyone is going to look different. What is something that you can realistically bite off and make a habit? And I do think there's a, there's a, there's a perception that social media is a. Like this forever, plug away at it for years to actually get any results sort of thing. I don't believe that's the case, especially the more specific you get in how you approach social media. We've talked about this a lot. If you are the person on social media for beekeepers, that's not a huge lift, that's not a super noisy space. There's people that look at me as kind of the voice online for, say, small firms in the U.S. or a prominent voice for small firms in the U.S. that's a pretty big space, honestly. And it's. We've probably invested like two years of real concerted effort to kind of be like, hey, want to be a leader and thought leadership for small firms. But there's a much, much smaller space than that where you can go in and make a quick impact and get quick wins. And it's in those small spaces and in micro niches that killer firms are built. And so if there's a good companion episode actually to this conversation, it's the episode we did on micro niches. It's got, I remember what it is, it's got micro niche in the name, but there's genuinely Quick wins to be had on social media if the folks that you're speaking to are specific enough. But we don't start and we don't begin learning how to do that until we make a habit of providing value. And I'm glad Nancy asked this question because I think it's, it's the reason why most of us don't, right? Like, how am I gonna make time to do this? I got a whole lot of stuff to do. I got clients to keep happy. Because somehow we always end up filling our time with, you know, one more client or one more this or that, oftentimes at the expense of carving out some time for some stuff that in the right frame of mind, we know is a good investment, but is not the stuff that we fall into naturally. I think most of us will naturally fall into serving just yet one more client. And honestly, like, there's no shame in that. There really isn't. And a lot of us are in a position where you can do what you're doing today until you retire and get a lot of happiness out of that and help a lot of people. And I don't want to frame this as, I don't wanna frame this as that not being a noble thing to do and a really, a really good thing to do. All I can say is from my experience, by leaning into the bigness of the Internet and the bigness of social media and all of the people who are out there who will never see you until you flip from being a consumer to a creator, all of those opportunities and the compounding benefits of visibility for me personally, far outweighed. Plugging away at the one to one stuff until the end of time. And it started with getting myself out of client work. It started with, with delegating really aggressively because ultimately when you're the big boss and you can make all those decisions, I want to make the decisions that are going to keep being a compounding investment in myself and my capabilities and my network and all. This episode is brought to you in part by teamup, 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 year? 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 ol 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 pod? Not anymore. And they can connect you with 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. I think most of us have like people in our lives that we look up to that we're like amazed by that. Are. And they may be, maybe they're celebrities, maybe they're, you know, thought leader types, people who write books. There's people that we look up to in our life and are like, man, wouldn't it be cool to be friends with that person or just to be able to shoot, shoot the crap with that person or hang out with them. And I don't know if you ever do this. I definitely do this. You think, oh, what would it take to be friends with person X And all the, all the times we would have together? And you think about like, how could, how could you befriend that celebrity? And the reality is in most situations, like, what do you have to offer that celebrity? Like, like what do you really have in common with them? Why would you be friends with them? My wife is dead set on the notion that if she ever met Blake Lively, they would be thick as thieves, they would be fast friends. And I push back on this and I say, I don't wanna spoil your dreams, but what do you and Blake have in common? What would you talk about? And one thing that motivates me is the really cool, like, prolific people that we look up to. We look up to them because almost without exception, these people are creators. They're going out and they're putting things into the world that we have a tremendous amount of respect from and that we enjoy watching and that take us on an emotional journey and they impact us we're changed by the things that they're putting out into the world. And if you too were putting out amazing things into the world that were at that level, that were helping people and changing people, ultimately that's how you build relationships with those people, through mutual respect. You now have something in common. You're putting things into the world just like they are and you now have something in common. Like when you look up to that person or what they do and you're like, man, that is cool. I wanna be like that person someday. It all starts with making stuff and creating. And it starts at a really crappy level, right? Cause they're already prolific, they're already up here. But for you, that journey starts in a really humble, much more basic way. But it never starts until you kind of flip the script and go from being a consumer to a creator. The thing that's blown my mind most, for me personally, I've shared. I went to my very first ever accounting conference. It was zero con San Diego in 2018. Opened my eyes to, oh my gosh, these are all people that have the exact same problems I have. Why am I trying to just figure it all out myself? And I went to all these talks there and man, I was fanboying on, you know, the folks behind the apps that I loved. And I just had so much respect and admiration for all these kind of figureheads in our space who are super smart people that I looked up to. And then a few years down the road you get a cold email or a DM or something like that from one of these people and they're like, man, it's such a fan of you watch it every single week, love it this or that and just blows my mind. These people that you have put on this pedestal as like, oh my gosh, like these people are the pinnacle of what we do and they are so smart. They now want to be buds with you because they watch your stuff and they think that you're smart. I know it's, it's easy to forget. Like you look at, if you're a tax person, you look at like the Tony Nitty's of the world who's just like, just about the coolest tax bro you could ever imagine. You look at people like that, your Ron Bakers, your whoever your thought leader is, you get excited about them and you look up to them because those people made the decision to invest in something that was bigger than just sitting down and doing one on one work helping clients. They took the time to get good at writing or Public speaking or something like that. What compels you to watch them, although they may be technically skilled, is a whole bunch of other stuff that oftentimes we, when we're in the trenches, don't make the time to invest in. Like, we don't invest in those adjacent skill sets that are force multipliers for the technical skills that we already have. We just push that technical skill, like, ever so slightly further when the reality is, like, you know, all the technical stuff that you need to do for helping your clients. Right now, your problem is, you know, systems or emotional intelligence or communication, all these other things. But when's the last time you took CPE on building systems or emotional. Emotional intelligence? I don't want to. I don't want to, you know, say that folks should be pushing themselves to do more than supporting, supporting clients. I do want to open people's minds to the bigness of the world that the Internet has now enabled and how many amazing people and relationships are out there that you would not otherwise have every person listening to this podcast included. I would not know any of you, you would not know who I am had I not started investing in that. And I think, if I may be so bold, I think we're helping people here. I think we're helping people with what we're doing. And for me, this goes back to the really hard decision of, you know, not running a firm anymore and, and leaving and disappointing a lot of those people. Going back even further, not serving clients anymore and disappointing a lot of clients who loved working with me. It starts with really hard changes that come from a place of conviction where I know that this is the right thing to do. But oftentimes because we're stuck on the people we're leaving or the people that we're letting down, we're not focusing on. On how we're growing and the next group of people that we can help. And ultimately, for me, this was a much higher leverage way for me to help people. I can help and inspire the people who then go and. And serve a whole ton of clients. And I can do that in an accounting firm or I can do it in a format that's like, very scalable, right? And you people listening to this, you are more capable than you think you are. I think we generally sell ourselves short. And I have heard from a lot of folks send me DMs voice memos. Thank you. Sharing. Hey, just started a YouTube channel, started blogging, started writing all these different things, started a podcast, and I love it. Good for you. It's really easy to look at other people. You look at people like myself that do what I do and think like, man, they just, one day they emerged from the womb and they were born to podcasts. And it's like, nope, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. There's a whole lot of bad stuff that you just never watched. But you got to start somewhere. And long term, the world and the Internet rewards the people who are investing in themselves and learning these high leverage skill sets. Honestly, we need, like, we need so many more accountants who can put together really good educational content and be good public speakers. And like, you go to the conferences, we need, we need some fresh meat. Like, everybody can agree. You see a lot of the same people at conferences. We need fresh ideas. We need a, like a new generation of accountants that is. Is thinking about what accounting looks like through the lens of, you know, zoomers. How is that different? And how do we give those people a voice to share their ideas? I can't remember who it was I was talking with on Twitter today, but they were like, point me to the good channels on like, learning Zapier and AI for accounting and taxdome and all these different things. And I'm like, buddy, if you found those, like, please send them my way. And he's like, I've already watched all your stuff. I need more. Honestly, we, like, I want there to be a hundred times more people out there serving the accounting profession with really good educational content, with helpful podcasts, YouTube videos, all this stuff. Like, there's such a need for it in our space still. So the more people are investing in themselves and building those skills, man, I get pumped for it. Anyways, that was a big, long tangent. Nancy, thank you for the question. Don't be worried about hurting my feelings or disagreeing with me, please. If you disagree with me, those are the comments I most want. Honestly, like, that is what's, that's what's ultimately most helpful is somebody's experience who doesn't align, who doesn't align with your own. And then you like, mash all those things up and you're like, yeah, like, the world is hard. Things are complex. Running a firm isn't an easy framework that I can just put up on my LinkedIn page and sell to people. That's the good stuff. Okay, wrapping up here, a couple of ChatGPT questions as we've got this really exciting new ChatGPT team plan. If you're on my newsletter, if you follow me on social media, I shared awesome new plan for companies up to 150 employees, 30 bucks a month doesn't train the model on your prompts. Couple questions people got getting into the nitty gritty. If I get a team plan, will my conversational history migrate to that new team plan? The answer is no. So, for example, I have had a ChatGPT plus plan that is the $20 a month plan that gives you access to GPT4 and all the the very best goodies. When I upgrade to the team plan, it creates a workspace that is like my organization and I can add any number of quote unquote members to that workspace. But that's a fundamentally different space than my personal, I don't know, space plan, whatever it is. Now when I log into ChatGPT, there's a toggle between personal account and then the organization account. And so everything that I did before is still in that personal account. Totally separate space than my business account now. Kind of a pain in the neck. One thing to keep in mind is you can still like publicly share conversations. Get a link from one account, open it in the other account if that's something that you actually want to be available at a public link. But if you've done a whole bunch of work in your other account, yes, that might be a bit of a pain to migrate to a team account. Now, last question is a good one. Are custom GPT conversations trained into the model? So now we have these custom GPTs. We actually have a video coming to the main channel in just a couple of days around how to build your own custom GPTs. And my favorite GPTs from the newly launched GPT Store. Question is, if you are using a GPT, like chatting with a custom GPT that you've built, are those prompts going into the model? The whole question of does it go into the model or not is going to follow what plan you are under. So if, for example, I made a custom GPT. So one prompt we gave away in the newsletter a few months back was a prompt that would take a set of financial statements, a balance sheet and an income statement and write a three minute script that you could use for delivering those financials over video. Goes through, you know, all the different sections of the balance sheet goes through the P and L. And the prompt, it says stuff like, you know, call out the items that are above X percentage threshold change and always call out changes in payroll expenses, stuff like that. Like this the, the way a, a wizened old pro would go through those. And it does a pretty good job. Builds out a little script and I could take that script and I could build it into a custom GPT and then that GPT I could then share with anyone publicly or just share it privately within my organization. And so if I took that GPT and I shared it for anyone genuinely, anyone could use it on ChatGPT. So if you didn't even have ChatGPT plus you just had the free version of ChatGPT, you could use that GPT. Now it would be using the old version GPT 3.5 and probably wouldn't work very well, but you could still use that GPT. Now with the free version of ChatGPT, all your prompts are used to train the model. So that's probably not the best. If you use that GPT that I made in a new team account, the prompts would not train the model because under team accounts those prompts don't go to the model. You get the idea. So basically at the end of the day, whether you're using somebody else's GPT or your own GPT, whether or not prompts go into the model is just gonna be dictated by what type of plan you are on. And worth reminding folks, actually if you're just on a plus plan, the $20 a month one, there is a privacy setting that will prevent prompts from being trained into the model. So problem is it just doesn't remember any of your conversations if you enable that. And that's kind of a pain because you can't come back to stuff that you worked on in the past. That'll be a fun video. Also dig into like what are the remaining kind of security considerations with this, with large language models, the big thing everybody always got upset about was well, I don't want all my data being trained into the model. They've solved for that now. But there's still a few security issues. Stuff like not being able to force multi factor authentication. Honestly, all the same security issues that we still have with a lot of the apps that we use in our space. Got that video coming on Sunday. Thanks for coming and hanging. Thanks for your excellent questions that are all sharpening us all. As always, please feel free to agree to disagree. Keep those comments and questions coming. I think the more that we talk this stuff through together, the more refined our sort of mental model for how we make decisions in our firm and is enriched. We're all just thinking the exact same thing. That's not making anybody smarter, right? The benefit of coming and doing this stuff together is being able to see into everybody's kind of different lived experiences I roll that up and just into just a big old messy, messy framework for going through life. So that's all for today. Thanks for hanging. I'll see you next.