178 Should Accountants Work Their @$$ Off in Their Twenties?

Should accountants be pumping in hours like crazy when they're in their 20s? If so, what about their 30s? Their 40s? Their 50s? We're talking about doing a better job of like scheduling out and planning work in your accounting firm. Social media advice and how to struggles with feeling like you're really leaving an impact on folks when you're trying to do social media or when you are talking to a new lead. You ever feel like those people like look right through you or that you're the issue or something like that? Interesting story. Along those lines. We're going to talk about that. Come on in. It's Q and A Friday. Okay, you may have seen this conversation kick off on Twitter. The subject should people be absolutely working their buns off in in their 20s? One guy said your 20s are for hustling. Do not ask about work life balance. Josh McGowan jumped in, Life is just as important in your 20s as it is in your 40s and 50s. Spending time with aging parents and young children are moments you you will regret missing. Then Brandon hall jumped in with a longer post said everyone has different circumstances and what works for you may not work for everyone. That said, I believe front loading effort or hustle enables you to get more reps in early and reap the benefits later in life. For example, Tony Nitty's commitment to being a top tier technical exper has granted him many benefits in his career. During one conversation I asked him how he became so prolific. He told me he did the things nobody else wanted to do. Early in his career he read tax court cases ad nauseam before work, during work, after work and to wind down from bed. Over time he became the go to technical resource for everyone in his firm. I know there's more examples of people hustling early in their careers that set them up for success later in life. Point is, you want work life balance earlier in your career. You have to recognize it comes at a cost. You miss getting the additional reps that speed up your career and you may not have the financial stability and career flexibility later in life when you really need it. I think many of us are closer to ruin than we realize. Can one catastrophic event wipe you out? What if your kids get cancer? What if you take one to two years off to care for them? Do you have the financial resources to give them the best care in the country to ensure that they have the highest chance of survival? Seen too many cases of these stories in my short life to realize how fragile it all is when viewed from this perspective. My answer is to front load effort, hustle hard early and set up a financially stable and flexible life later on. And Brandon said this at the beginning, there is no one size fits all answer. I think that I would. I think I was more in the hustle in your 20s camp before than I am now. But a number of things in this post let's talk about the Tony Nitty thing. So Tony Nitty, if you're not familiar, he's a guy in the US here who's like kind of a, I don't know, kind of a tax celebrity. Like, really good speaker, very good technical guy. Brandon points to Nitty's willingness to like go and read court cases at work, around work, like before and after work when other people don't want to do that. To me, what that feels like is finding the thing that feels fun to you, that has work for other people. Because there's a whole lot of people that work very hard that still would not want to stay up reading court cases. And honestly, I would argue that like most people who are prolific at a specific thing, they're prolific because they're able to enjoy the journey in a way that other people aren't. So like myself, I learned that I really enjoyed making videos and I did it a lot when nobody was watching. And eventually those videos started to get okay and more people started watching. And I don't know that I attribute me being good at that stuff as much to me being able to work really hard as me being able to enjoy the process more than most people. And that led me to a point where I could do it well. So this whole calculation of how much should you work in your 20s? There's a whole bunch of different things that will go into, you know, will you ultimately be successful long time, long term? And so if you look at like the normal distribution of, of or no, you do like a regression analysis of what are all the factors and what are all the things that people did in their 20s, and you look at how successful they will be long term. People that worked around the clock, will they generally be more successful? Probably. But I can tell you a whole bunch of other things that for me that were actually bigger drivers of success. One, building community, finding other people who did what I did. I mean, that compressed my learning process from what for many people is decades and many things that they will never learn down to like five years. Because I just spent a huge amount of time talking with other people who do what I do, like running accounting firms, finding that community and finding people who would be transparent There, that had a massive impact on me, finding the things that I enjoyed that other people didn't enjoy and investing in that skill to make me an outlier. So I became an outlier because I invested a bunch of time and getting good at video and I was okay at all the other stuff. And I could talk about how to run firms, but the only reason anybody knew anything about me was because of video, was because I invested in YouTube and social media and all that. I don't know that most of us are going to get to the end of our lives on the old deathbed and go, glad I worked a lot in my 20s. Like, do you think we will? I can tell you when you wouldn't is if you're on your deathbed and you're in your 20s, you're 28 or 25, or pick a number you're not going to be like, I'm glad I worked a lot in my 20s. I mean, I've shared before, like my story with my dad where he got terminally ill when I was in my 20s and that was a big wake up call. And obviously everything kind of stops and you reassess what's important and how you need to allocate your time. But I think oftentimes if you do go all out in your 20s, there's a risk there that you never bounce back from that. And that was my dad's experience. Like that guy worked his butt off. That's not to say there isn't pride to be had in that. Worked his butt off in his 20s, built the first house that he and my mom lived in, proceeded to work his butt off in his 30s, kept on going into his 40s and then midway through his 50s, retired. But then, you know, got a terminal diagnosis on the day of his retirement. Brandon made the point here. Can one catastrophic event wipe you out? I think the reality is we are all one catastrophic, catastrophic event away from wishing we didn't work more. No matter how old you are, and that could be a financial thing, but the bigger thing to me is non financial. I heard somebody say, if you want to do a better job of like living in the moment and soaking up the moment, treat it as if that is the last time you will ever do that thing. As if it's the last time you'll go into the office or put your kid down for bed or make your kids lunch. Like, treat that thing as if it is the last time you'll ever do it. And it assigns like a very different value to it. Another trap Here is that working hard in your 20s will get you to a place where you will ultimately be happy, when that's usually a trap. Like there's a whole lot of unhappy billionaires out there. There's definitely like joy to be found in going after something really hard and satisfaction and like getting there and like having a goal and all that. But if you've got 80 years on this planet, my perspective is if all I'm doing is playing the game, that's. I don't know, that feels like wasted effort to me. And I get the whole, like financial trade off, work hard now, get the money later, kind of feels like a slippery slope. Now in my 20s, I genuinely didn't have, like, good things to get up to. I worked a lot because it was like, what else am I going to do? Play video games? I wish there were other better things I was exposed to in my 20s, more community stuff, more service stuff. So I didn't have anything to fill that time. But I think if you're not capable of like finding joy in the journey, you're never going to find joy. You're not going to be happy when you get to the destination if you can't, like, be happy and enjoy yourself along the way. So the bigger talking point here, I think is like, can you find a way to enjoy what you're doing right now? If so, like, great. Like do it. As long as you're enjoying it, as long as you're helping people, as long as you find that fulfilling. There's a whole lot of very messed up financially successful people and families out there. So for myself, I don't know that I would just optimize for that. In fact, wanna go further down my family rabbit hole. My parents split after 25 years, right around that retirement time too. It was like they ultimately, like, didn't really learn how to have that relationship with each other without the kids around. And one could argue that, like a big part of that was the sacrifice of working hard and all that. I don't know, we probably got young folks tuning into this to ultimately, like, dig into, is it really worthwhile for me to bust my butt on, you know, working my fingers to the bone for somebody else's company for the next decade? I didn't want to do it. I had no interest in going to Big four, going to Regional. It was definitely glorified in college. But I didn't want to go count potatoes for three years. I went to smaller firms and eventually, you know, bought into smaller firms. And that was my path And I found more flexibility there. But I don't know that trading now for later is, is ever the solution. Like, it always kind of feels like a trap. And maybe that's a privileged thing to say. But I also know there's the old trap of like working yourself to the bone. Kind of like tricking you into thinking that you did your best. Right. I also think that there's a, like a generation of people who want to hire people in their 20s who are willing to just absolutely work their butt off. This happens in accounting firms. It happens in tech. There's like this class of person who does not yet have a family and has nothing else to do and therefore nothing, nothing to lose by pouring every ounce of their humanity into this company. And I get like they're, I get the appeal of that and hiring those people into your organization, but I don't want to be responsible for that. I don't know if you're old or young. You got wisdom there. Drop it in the comments. This episode is sponsored in part by Cloud Cloud Accountant staffing. You'll 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 like, 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. 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. If you're listening to this, there's a very good chance I have an album out on Spotify, Apple Music. Wherever you get your music, it's going out over the weekend. So this goes out on Friday. It's probably going out on Sunday. It is the IRS hold music, but lo fi. 11 tracks. Kind of a love letter to us tax pros, of which I used to be one. Here's the track list. Engage Ordinary Necessary Open Season Fresh llc, Feeling G Wagon, Augusta Retroactive. Is that one too soon? Fully depreciated Ultra Sax. Pretty proud of that one. There's like brass instruments in it. And the last one's called Bonus. Why produce an album that just remixes the IRS hold music until the end of time? Why not? If you run events, anything like that, it is all royalty free. You are welcome to use that music any way you like. Okay, I want to shout out Brenda Cannon. Brenda, are you listening? So Brenda posted on Twitter our calendar link was sent to clients at noon. 110 clients out of 365 total clients have already picked a date to drop off their tax docs in the first 90 minutes. I don't think accounting firms are doing enough to plan and schedule their work. And we talk about capacity planning and this and that. And what people usually do is, well, here's when people normally bring in their work and this and that. And so we give folks sort of this general we can usually turn around your work within X period of time and usually that works. But ultimately you don't have any control over it. If they make a run on the bank, you're hosed. And while that may never happen, I would say most of us struggle with cyclicality in the time that our work gets done throughout the year, whether you do tax compliance work, whether you just do like month end closes, like you've got that issue big time throughout the month. And it isn't until you more intentionally take control of when you're going to deliver work to people that you can finally make that calm and like get that under control. Otherwise you're, you're sitting there like servicing this intake that you have no control over the volume of. And this is like such a core aspect of running a more calm accounting firm. To me, the notion of scheduling out when people need to have their info in by and when that work's gonna go out the door and everybody has a week, or everybody has, you know, a block of a couple of weeks when that's gonna go out could be down to the day. Basically, you know, break up your client list into. It could be a few tranches, it could be literally everybody has a week. And you get caught up on like the cases where this is gonna break. Like, you can flex it like within reason, but that's not a reason to have no plan. Like, a manufacturing facility isn't just going to let people bring them raw materials or orders at any point in time and say, yep, we'll do your work like no other business works this way. Because the work that we do is not like super scalable. It's not like you can just snap your finger and it'd be done like it requires a bunch of human inputs. And our minds immediately jump to the situations and the current clients we have for whom that just won't work. You could never imagine doing that. That's what we do. We jump to the worst case scenario that is completely natural. But you know what your next new client will say if they come in the door and you say, okay, here's the plan. Here's your delivery date, here's when you're gonna get us your stuff each year. This is how we do it. They're gonna be like, cool, got it. Sounds good. Actually might even appreciate that now because I know exactly when I'm gonna get it and when I need to get you the stuff. You may have a small subset of people that are bent out of shape about that without getting like too into the weeds of us tax stuff. Man, I've just been like harping on this for the longest time. There is virtually never a reason to file a tax return earlier. There is almost always good reasons to wait, either because you're going to have more information about the next year, either because you're actually going to have the final rules and forms. All these, you know, other things we would quote, unquote, complete a lot of tax return for clients and then just sit on it because there's literally no reason to file them, have them make payments if they had to make payments, but there's no reason to file. In fact, in many ways, like, being able to wait the longest is like a privileged position because you can, you can. And this is for like SMB clients. You got more time to wait to like lock in decisions on that tax return because you know more about the following year, you know more about maybe changing tax legislation. And so there's a bit of education some clients need on like why that is actually often in their interest to wait. But imagine being in Brenda's situation right now. They sent this. They use a calendar for folks to like schedule whether they're going to bring that stuff in. You have 365 clients and 110 of them scheduled within 90 minutes. Imagine knowing when all of your work is going to come in and actually being able to plan when you're gonna do all that stuff like over the next six months or however long that time horizon is. Isn't that awesome? And then you can like be checking in on that stuff every single week. See are we ahead, are we behind? Rather than just kind of guessing. And folks bring their stuff in whenever they wanna bring their stuff in and you're just like doing it by gut or doing it by tax return count, which is like the worst metric of all time. Because a tax return or a month end close is not a standardized metric. Good for you Brenda. That's like such a big step to me towards getting towards a more calm accounting firm. I think the biggest blocker there for most of us is actually, is not actually what will my clients say it is. I've never been in a firm that does that. That like that just seems so foreign to me. But I think it just enables like a totally different level of calm. A thought Social media advice. I see. I see you people that listen to this posting more to social media. Good for you. Great work. Keep it up. But something that could be helpful here is for me to give feedback on things. So sometimes I will see social media posts where I'm like, you very obviously could have changed this or that and it probably would have 3x the engagement and I actually pulled down a collection of social media posts this week and I was like, let me just cruise through these real quick. And I think like by talking through all this stuff out loud, it will be helpful for everybody just to kind of be thinking along the lines of best practices. But then I got cold feet because I don't have permission for these people to like pick apart their their post. And it's not all bad stuff. It's you know, the helpful things probably actually going through posts that are outliers on the bad direction and outliers on the good direction. But I got cold feet I don't want to, I don't want to do that without people's permission. If you've been doing social media stuff, drop in the comments, some posts you've done recently, or just drop your profile in there. Say, feel free to pick anything apart here that you ever see. And maybe on these Fridays this would be a helpful thing to go through like five social media posts and be like, you could have slightly rewritten this for this thing to be above the fold and it would have helped engagement or why did this one pop off? You know, it's probably these three things. I know for me, the more I consumed about best practices from folks that were really good at this stuff, the less spooky it all was. And when it comes to social media, it genuinely is like sorcery, like where to put certain things, slight changes to like hook people much better. The way that you word things, it really does make a big difference. But the more you're around it and the more you see what a good version of it is, the more easy it is for you to just go out and put out stuff that people are going to engage with. And I'm by no means like the be all and end all expert and I, I post stuff that bombs all the time. But the reality is I've been posting three to five times a day for the last three years and I have learned stuff in that process. So if you're trying to invest in this stuff, in fact I can even share the. There's no need for me to even identify who the posts are from when we're doing it. So like drop your profile below, drop any specific posts that we could go through in the, into the comments. And it's like I'm into the notion of like transparent kind of consulting and public advising folks because being able to see other people be advised I think is really helpful. So feel free to pop that stuff into the comments. Something that stuck with me. So on Monday we did that Inconvenient Truths about Running Accounting Firms. And that was just like repeated like 20 punches in the grief bone one after the other. One of those that really stuck with me is having problems posting on social media is probably an ego problem. It's probably you're afraid of what people are will say, or you're afraid of how you look or you're afraid of how impressive this other person's background is when you watch their video. If you ever notice that it's actually really funny on social media stuff that people post, they are very careful, especially when they're out and about to have a very impressive background when at the end of the day, and this is great news for all of us, at the end of the day, nobody gives a hoot. All they care about is what can you do for them? Like, can you provide value to them? That is all that matters. So nobody cares that you got a boogie in your nose, that you got salad in your teeth, that your hair doesn't look as good today as it did yesterday? People won't care. Just be helpful. If you saw the thumbnail to Wednesday's daily podcast, it looked like an absolute hostage video. I was in the middle of traveling. I recorded that one earlier than normal. And in fact I was on east coast time, so it was like 5am Normally my time. Whew. And I was feeling good at the moment. But when the team published that video and I went back and I saw the thumbnail, I was like, who's that person? Somebody get them help. But you know what? It's fine. Cause I think that post like that helped people and ultimately that's all that really matters. And like any other answer I do think is ego. Like, if I didn't want to post that, it's because I'm going to be afraid of what I look like or what people will say about what I look like. And do you care what those people think? Like, the people that tune into this stuff, who I like, who are good people, who get value from this, who I have a relationship with, are they going to care? No, they're not going to give a hoot. The people who will. I got a comment on a year old ChatGPT video the other day that said if I trim my beard, I'd get more clients, which is just ironic on a number of levels. You don't care about those people. Like, you're not sitting there when people are walking by on the sidewalk going, trim your beard. Why? You look like you just got out of bed. You look like garbage today. You don't do that. So why are you going to care what the people who would do that to you are going to say? Like, I'm not concerned with those people's takes on the world. 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 Team up and all the other offshoring options. The 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. 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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 T Team up. Okay, one thing Somebody shared on LinkedIn that I think will resonate with a lot of folks, especially as we are talking about visibility and how, you know, your visibility ultimately enables opportunities. Somebody posted this on LinkedIn. I think it will super resonate. Took some courage to post this. Here's the post. I've come to the tough realization that I'm one of those people who leaves no lasting impression despite being told I'm articulate, competent in my field, and pleasant to talk to. This week, a prospective client even called me impressive. I'm still too easily forgotten. While attending qbc, I had an engaging breakfast chat with an industry leader. But later, when I approached her at a session, it was clear she had zero recall. We'd already connected. It wasn't even the first time. That week someone I'd previously conversed with failed to remember me at all. Oof. In most professional roles, receiving praise for one's work is greatly satisfying. Hearing good job from a manager or client affirms that steady efforts are paying off. However, even effusive compliments rarely translate into tangible career visibility or advancement. And that prospect who called me impressive? They hired a bigger, flashier firm. She mentions a quote here from me the people you look up to are no more capable than you are. They invest in skills that increase their visibility and by extension, opportunity. So she's trying to lean into that visibility. Promoting oneself can feel less about forging authentic connections and more like a 24.7image circus crying look at me to earn a living. The irony of voicing this over LinkedIn or any other social platform built on vanity metrics hasn't escaped me. I know when I hit post algorithms will judge if my expressions of feeling got enough claps and comments to warrant showing more people how performative we all must be about our career success, carefully curating the illusion that we have it all figured out. As the adage now goes, if a tree falls in the social media forest and no one heart reacts, doesn't make a sound. I feel caught in a catch 22 between craving meaningful work and financial security. So here I am making a post posting inspirational content about personal branding even as I question that rat race for visibility that demands it. So I ask for those who have feedback on how do you convert positive feedback into visible wins? How do you balance self promotion with introverted tendencies? How do you progress one's career through means other than aggressive personal brand branding? Good for you putting this post out there. Super good for you because there were some oofs in there. Also major moment of panic when she said I had an extended conversation with this person and and I had been tagged in the post and then they forgot who I was because apologies in advance. That's a thing for especially for me. I there's there's probably more going into here than I'm qualified to to fully speak into. But a few like kind of crossover like Venn diagram situations where I have felt the same way and kind of how I rationalized it for myself because we all struggle with this like posting on social media feels self promotional. We're bad at promoting ourselves. But if you don't promote yourself, whoever will. Like if you don't market you and what you are good at, how will anybody ever know about for me, I think human nature always says it's me. It's my fault that person didn't remember me because I wasn't memorable enough or that client didn't go with me because I wasn't X, y or z enough. I think it's absolutely human nature to point the finger at yourself. I said in the reply. Here inside of all of us is that kid who thought the divorce was their fault. Right? I think that's just how we're wired. The reality is there's a big old world out there with a whole bunch of other people that have their own problems and insecurities and reasons for making decisions that are so much bigger than any of us. And we fundamentally don't have control over any of that stuff. So I think our minds go this way because we want to have control, because we want to think that we have control over all of those things. That's why we say it's me, because if I had been different then, then the outcome would have been different when I think we have control over less than we like to think. So we've talked about the voices you're gonna have in your head as you're going through all these, all these different situations. Something to be aware of, to look out for, is that feeling that is, that is pointing the finger back at you, saying, it's you, it's your fault. When the reality is the people who are going like everybody else is focused on themselves in the same way that you are right now, where you're thinking, well, this was my fault. Everybody else is going through life like, just with that spotlight effect on themselves. And LinkedIn is a peak. HORN TOOTING like it is peak. Look at this cool thing I did. Look at this promotional thing. It's kind of awful. And it's why LinkedIn is prime real estate to go great, create helpful content. Because when I Scroll through LinkedIn, every third or fourth thing is an actual promoted thing. Virtually every other post is promotional. Either somebody very directly promoting the things that they do, or here's why you should go sign up to my newsletter. And very little here is a helpful thing like, that's how you attract people. When the whole world is a bunch of selfish individuals that are just trying to figure out what is in this for me. What you do is you put out stuff that is for them, that somehow helps them. Now you will encounter people in your life who will reciprocate, who will be energizing for you rather than just leech all of your energy. And when you find those people, those people are absolute gold. Signed every adult who has ever tried to make a friend when you're an adult. So when you do find those people, like, man, invest in those relationships, because those people are a dime a dozen. But the reality is everybody's focused on themselves. They're not thinking about you. They're thinking about, how can this help me? So for me, visibility online is, is not, look at this achievement or this accomplishment. I'm not talking about being with, you know, top 100 most influential accountants. You will never see that in any of my bios. I try to be ruthlessly helpful because ultimately, like that Is my value to other people is how can I help them get to their next step or their, their better state of being. So, so this is a bit of a shift of what visibility means. I think visibility is not tooting your own horn. Visibility is having something to offer and putting it out there. There's no better proof that you know what you're doing than to help somebody. Like that's just how you do it. That's how you build trust with people. So if I didn't know anything about running accounting firms, folks would turn up, they would see a video, they'd be like, wow, that's a shiny looking video. And then they'd bounce because there isn't any meat to it. So if you're, if you're looking to social media, you know, to enable visibility and opportunities, which I think we all, all should be doing because there are so many millions and honestly hundreds of millions of people on the other side of those posts that you're literally 10 words away from finding. Like, that's kind of the magic of social media. And if you're not leaning into that, the, like, the implication there is no, no, no, no, no, no. I have by, by, I have greater control over my destiny by just going through life and reaching out to people directly and just relying on someone else referring a good relationship to me. Like, the implication is that through sheer will you will get to a better outcome than putting yourself out there where you'll be exposed to more people than our little monkey brains can comprehend. More opportunities, more nuanced, more valuable problems that we can solve for people. You just don't know where that stuff's gonna take you. And visibility, to enable all of that, it's being helpful. It's not. I mean, if you wanna celebrate getting a promotion, whatever, that's great. But every single post needs to have value. You know, we put about two weeks into every single Sunday YouTube video that goes out. It goes out on YouTube, it also goes out on all the social media channels. And I will upload a video to social media and we'll also like spill the beans on here are all the most valuable things from this video. So I may have gone through 20 points in the video in that social media post. I'm going to say here's the top three, here's the most impactful three for you. And you may struggle with, no, I want them to watch the whole video. I'm not gonna just give that away. Like I want them to actually sit down and watch that 20 minute video. And that's really small thinking. Like, we're losing sight of the fact that for every hundred people that come upon that thing in their feed, 99 of them are gonna scroll right past it. And if there's a way to deliver even a really small amount of value to one more person by being willing to give away part of that video and text without them having to watch your fancy editing and that other stuff that you put all this work into, then that's worthwhile. Every single post is an investment in your visibility and people building trust in you because you have provided value to them. And at the end of the day, it's not about you. It is about the millions of people who can see that coming through their feed. That's who it's about. Now, you don't want to take that too far, and you ultimately, you know, take yourself to a place where you don't want to be and you become the victim of, you know, doing everything for everybody else. There's also a lot of tremendous people out there that you will build very real relationships with. And I feel that. And there are people on the other side of the podcast and social media, all that, who do care about me and, like, I have real relationships with those people. But that's a really, really small subset of all of the folks who are going to cruise past that thing that you're sharing. And as much as the Internet is like this sanitized, kind of cold, kind of impersonal thing, there are amazing, amazing people out there. The very best relationships I have in my life right now are courtesy of the Internet. Would have never happened had I not gone out and been visible. And it's not through high profile, flashy, you know, stuff, big things that you post on your feed and go viral. The reality is the best part of social media is, like, happening in the replies like you have. People will go out and they'll post on social media consistently, and they're like, why am I not building any tra. Any traction? Who are you building relationships with? Who are you actually having meaningful conversations with to this day? For everything I post on my own, on my own feed, I am in somebody else's replies or comments probably 20 times. Because that's where real relationships are built. Most of the folks who are going to engage with your content are people you have already built relationships with directly. Like, that is how the seed of trust is planted. That's what brings them to you. And when it comes to building a profitable accounting firm, it doesn't take all that many people to have a deep relationship with to build a really meaningful business so you don't gotta go to like Kim Kardashian levels of, of celebrity and fame and have big viral posts. That's absolutely not what it takes. But you do need to be a human and actually build relationships with other humans. And that happens in replies, it happens in dms. It doesn't just happen by being like this wizard of Oz that is pushing stuff out. So be super mindful of how you can be helpful. Is every single post providing value to someone or is it just a post to go to this, like a teaser to go convert to this other thing? Like, nobody's on a social media platform to go to this other thing? I'm not gonna make a post that says, go look at my newsletter over here. I'm gonna post my newsletter. That's what I'm gonna do. And if people really like it, I will say at the end, if you want to get this in your inbox, go sign up here. Otherwise, all the people that didn't, they just got value from me and that's a net win. Even though I put that together in my email platform and I need to boost my subscriber numbers and the conversions on, on the ads in the newsletter and all these things. A post to a social media platform that just says, here's a link to my newsletter, Go read it. That has no value. So make sure that every single post has value and make sure that you're actually turning up as a good, well intentioned human being. I've found if you can do that and actually be real with people and be helpful and be transparent, all that other stuff takes care of itself. But it is not to say that there are not a whole lot of mental blocks between, like just that being easy, right? But I can't tell you that it gets easier with time. With every little small win that you make and cool relationship that you build, you're like, okay, yeah, I can see how this is working now. Okay. It just got a little bit easier to tune out that person that's poking at your beard. It does get better. And it's you doing something, you know, for you. Like, it's like, unless we're intentionally investing in these things, we're kind of just being swept away with whatever happens to us that's dictated by everybody else. And I don't like that. Like, for me, that feels like a better balance of me taking a degree of control while also trusting the bigness of the Internet and social media and all the people that are on the other side of that. Hopefully that's helpful for you. If you're leaning into social media, want some feedback, drop that stuff in the comments. That would be a lot of fun actually, and really helpful for folks. Thanks for coming and hanging. We'll see you next week.