180 9 Ways To Increase Capacity In Your Accounting Firm

All right, we are. We're still early in the year. And early in the year for me was always a lot of do I have everybody on the boat that it's going to require to deliver on all the promises we've made to people this year? And usually when we're thinking capacity, it all just comes down to do I need to hire another person? When there's actually a bunch of other ways to augment your capacity. And I think where most of us turn to first increase capacity is probably the wrong place. So. So we're going to zoom out a bit on how we manage capacity and look at nine different ways to manage capacity, four kind of human capital ways, and then five more systematic process related ways. Come on in, let's talk about capacity. Okay, so number one, this is where everybody, this like where we all first turn full time offshore employees. And this is probably where 90 plus percent of firms turn when they need additional capacity. And there's nothing wrong with this. Full time onshore employees are great. But for all of these different options, some of these are trending upward and some of these are trending downward. And full time onshore hiring right now is definitely trending downward. And a big thing that, that kicked us off here is Covid really quickly forced folks into learning how to work in a distributed way where maybe they hadn't before. And the first step of that is realizing, oh, it doesn't matter if Tina's in the office or out of the office, she can actually do her job more or less just fine from anywhere. And some jobs, this is super easy and trivial and it's not a big deal to take them out of the office. Some jobs, that's a little harder. But I think we can all agree that Covid took us further in that direction. Like it massively accelerated folks openness to doing distributed work. Now, running a distributed organization has a whole different set of challenges. In fact, if you're interested in geeking on this stuff, check out the podcast. It's called Distributed. It's done by the folks behind WordPress, who's a 1300 employee distributed company and was doing this well before COVID Well before it was cool. They were distributed from day one. A lot of us who start with in office work and then go distributed, we can sometimes carry like the worst of both worlds because we're kind of applying the in office model to what distributed work looks like when there's a lot of things you can do fundamentally differently. But that first realization of, oh, it doesn't matter if Tina comes into the office today or not. It's just a matter of time before that leads to, oh, this the next Tina that we hire. Doesn't matter if she's across town or across the world. Now there's somewhere in there there can be a barrier of fear of the first time you're working with folks who are not local and you know, zooming out to anywhere in the country. And then another barrier when you're zooming out, you know, somewhere outside the country. And we've talked about that a lot in the past. Another thing that has this trending downward is folks just don't have 30 year careers anymore. Like, that's just not how folks of my generation and younger approach work. And it's really easy when I say that for your mind to jump to. Well, we're going to be the exception. Well, not in my case, no, we're going to find the folks who, who will do that. And we're a great place to work. So that'll be different for us. And I, I like that's human nature. That's where your mind jumps to first. The reality is there will be exceptions to that and there will be people that still have 30 year careers at a, at a specific place, but for 95%, probably more of the hires that you make anymore, that will not be the case. And 30 years ago that was, that was very different. Folks did not have the same access to opportunities that they do now. There was, I don't know what you want to call it. I don't know if loyalty is the right word. There's just a different approach to, you're going to go to work for someone and you're going to put in decades there. And that, I mean, you think about those two changes, the globalization of work, the fact that the Internet enables us to work in a distributed way with anyone in the world, and the fact that folks just on average are not going to spend more than, honestly probably not more than three years with a company. You take those two things and it has made, you know, the, the prospect of full time onshore hiring. It has vastly changed the relative value of that to the other options that you have of getting stuff done. Now. Super hard to run an accounting firm without some full time onshore hires. But it changes, I would say, the fulfillment aspect of how you get all of the work done really dramatically. Maybe not quite so much the client relationship, the client management side of it. But those two things, like, let's acknowledge those have really massively changed how we approach full time hiring. Also And I guess we haven't even touched on the difficulty of hiring and attracting really talented accountants who are onshore number two, part time onshore employees or contractors, I think this one's probably trending upwards as more folks are looking for gig work and more folks are building a side gig as they ultimately want to build their own thing at some point. So almost everyone who is, I mean anybody who's starting a new firm, you need to start that by building a side gig. You don't quit your job cold turkey without any clients. That's just a bad idea unless you're buying a book of business from somebody else on day one. And for those folks, honestly, a really good way of augmenting that journey in the short term is doing some work, some contract work for another firm. It's not gonna be a forever thing, but it can fill that void. Also for folks who don't have a huge amount of experience, you know, for example, say you're coming from a larger firm or coming from something totally different like a tests, services and you want to run a tax firm or an accounting practice or something like that. Contract works also a great way to get experience. With firms that do that. You can see into their systems. Particularly if this is a firm that you respect, you can learn a lot by seeing into how they get stuff done. Doesn't mean you're going to swipe all of it, but you're going to learn from the good and the bad of that and probably shave years off of stumbling through figuring all that stuff out for yourself from scratch. So on the supply side, there's very real upside to talented folks doing contract and part time work. Now if you don't have a network, this can be a total crapshoot. You know, if you go to Fiverr for every, and this has generally been my experience with fiverr, for every 20 people I hire, two of those might stick. Two of those might really be good and be dependable and all that. But if you've got a network, I mean there are, uh, I mean a thousand people will listen to this podcast in the next 24 hours. There are 50 plus folks listening to this right now who would happily take contract work from a firm that they respect. And so if you can build out that network further and, and be out there and be visible, it makes it much easier to find those part time folks. Now for the firm, the upside here is at its best, part time staffing is a flexible source of capacity. So if, let's say somebody leaves, but you have, you know, five contractors you work with on an ongoing basis, it's potentially a way to flex some of that capacity across those folks, maybe even pull them in seasonally. So if you're having issues managing like cyclicality in the annual workflow, pulling in seasonal folks is great. This was, you know, something in tax firms that they super relied on was these oftentimes quasi half foot out the door retired folks who had just come back for busy season. And if you can find those people, great. It's kind of a band aid for cyclicality issues that probably need a more long term solution. Where this stuff falls, falls down for a lot of firms is you don't have. This requires really good systems for part time folks to be able to come in and quickly contribute. So if you don't have clear systems, this can be a frustrating exercise because you're pulling folks in, you're paying them more than you're paying your full time employees and they can feel less productive because they're not plugged into the systems quite in the same way. So the, the more you've got those systems nailed down, the better they're going to be able to contribute to what you're doing. But inevitably you're probably paying a premium here for this flexibility. Number three, full time offshore employees. Obviously this is trending upwards big time. This is specifically somebody that you have, you know, 100% of. And this is where most firms are going now with how they build an offshore team is you're building it the exact same way you would build a distributed onshore team. This is what I did. We had 100% of these folks time we dictated their training. I mean they were genuinely just another member of the distributed team. They were not any different than the rest of the folks that we had across the US this has gotten easier because we have now various different flavors of folks who are helping us to get access to talented folks offshore. You've got the traditional kind of big facilities that these people will come and work in that are like very secure and locked down. And you know, they leave their phones in a locker and then they, you know, scan their, what if, you know, scan a card or something like that to get into the office where the computers are very locked down from an IT standpoint. And those folks will help you, you know, find the right hire for the role you're looking for. But then on the other end of the spectrum you've got, I mean like online jobs ph you've got job boards where firms are now going out and just hiring folks directly who will then work from home for you. And then you've got some flavors in the middle where recruiters will go out and find people who will work from home for you. Some of those will even like help you manage the it. And some of the other headaches that come with that are not honestly any different than hiring distributed folks onshore and some of the headaches of managing hardware and stuff like that. So this is, this is easier than ever before to do because there are a growing number of intermediary companies there who will facilitate that stuff for you. And it goes without saying, big upside here is you can get really talented people that can do pretty much everything you're offshore. I mean, that can do everything your offshore onshore team can do besides perhaps client management. Although a growing number of firms are even having offshore folks do that at a fraction of the cost. So in the Philippines you can have bookkeepers starting at under a thousand dollars USD a month. You can get CPAs for a couple thousand dollars a month. The back of the napkin math I did since I was doing a lot of hiring in the Philippines was generally you can get folks at a quarter of the cost. The one variable there is are you paying an additional fee to a company to manage the facility that they're working out of, but the cost of like what you're actually paying that person generally going to be a quarter of the US equivalent. 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, 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 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 going to 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. This episode is sponsored in part by Live Flow. Been talking a lot lately about the new consolidation stuff that they rolled out. Honestly, a killer solution for rolling up a large number of companies, but a couple good use cases for LifeFlow may not be thinking about LifeFlow syncs accounting data from your QBO file out to Google Sheets, which can be super helpful in situations where you don't want to give somebody access to the QuickBooks file itself, but they need access to specific data from the accounting file. That could be your client who you don't want in there messing stuff up. Could be some other stakeholder who may need access to metrics, but you don't want them in the file. Like actually in the file. Could be you're up like bumping up against user limits within QuickBooks, where maybe you have to upgrade to another level to let more users into the file. Some interesting use cases there for lifelow around just giving granular access to folks who can't be into the file themselves kind of. While if you think about the whole ecosystem of all the things that can be automated around spreadsheets as well, stuff you can build with, you know, zapier and make, and the scripting built into Google Sheets and all that. Use Live Flow to get the accounting data there and you kind of do whatever you want with it. So if you're looking for a way to liberate that accounting data from the accounting file, check out the link to LifeFlow in the show notes. And for you as the business owner, ultimately you're thinking, what is, what is the most reliable way to manage fulfillment of all of the different ways we have of getting the work done? What is the highest quality and most reliable way of getting this stuff done? In my case, the folks I was working with we could get a new really good on offshore hire within a matter of a couple of weeks. When it came to onshore hiring, that was a really, really long cycle. I mean we had, it would take, I don't know, pick a number. Sometimes it was quick, maybe we could do it in a month sometimes. Other times it took nine months to find the right person. And you still have the risk of something falling through. And that was just really hard onshore, offshore, much, much easier time finding folks. Maybe it was by chance, but for whatever reason, the offshore hires were much, much stickier. They generally stayed with us for much longer than the onshore hires. Not sure why that was could have been roll the dice. Now you also have a lot of offshore groups in India which will generally be a little lower cost than the Philippines, but comes with a little more of a language barrier. And then Latin America, South America and South Africa now are growing pretty quickly. The number of folks that want to come work for Western companies, this is, this is growing. You have people genuinely going to school with the plan of then going to work for a western company. This is a well respected thing to do in these markets. So on the supply side, whereas in the US is really dwindling elsewhere, it's not elsewhere, the opposite's happening because the market for hiring offshore folks continues to grow as it was accelerated big time by Covid. Number four is the last of kind of the human capital pass outsource services. So I would say this one is trending kind of, kind of neutrally. But with an outsourced service, you're buying a unit of work, you're not buying a person, you're not buying, you know, their time. So you're paying for a tax return, you're paying for a month end close. The upside here is that group is responsible for managing fulfillment, managing staffing. If somebody leaves, it's their problem, it's not your problem. And this is going to be more costly. But the upside is you don't have to manage that staffing and capacity planning or the training and development of the team. And for the groups that do this really, really well, it's really good. You can imagine, you know, systematizing that fulfillment management, systematizing the development of people. If you nail that, it's, it's really nice. There are a lot of services here though that do not do this well, where you go through the sales process with them and do a few trial projects. And in that sales process you get a phenomenal experience with their very best people. And then when it comes to the ongoing engagement, the quality there may not quite be what you need and definitely isn't as good as it was in the sales process. This is why I think most firms are going to number three, developing their own people, because they have then full control over that. So if you have people that aren't the right fit, you're able to turn those people over. If your folks don't have the right skills, you have full control over the training and development that you do for them. I also think picking up folks that just work for you offshore is a little less of a reach for folks who already know how to develop all that stuff onshore. Like, we already know how we manage those problems with our onshore team. And doing that within your offshore team really isn't any different. Now, one area where outsourced services can be great is as sort of a flexible buffer. So if somebody leaves, leaves you in a lurch. Outsource services, more so than maybe any of the other things we've talked about, can spin up quicker and, like, have the capacity to absorb some additional work from you. Now, not all services will work this way. Sometimes they'll make you lock into, like, buying a specific number of things. But this is one place where it can be a good release valve to have a group there in case you need them. And maybe you're sending, you know, some minimum level of work to them on an ongoing basis, but if you needed them and you had to ramp that up and short order, they could do that for you. There are firms, though, that are genuinely just a couple onshore folks on top of a myriad of outsourcing groups. That's how they get it all done. And that's totally fine because at the end of the day, no matter how you get this stuff done, you are responsible for the output. Like, the quality of the output should be the same. Folks get spooked by offshore work or the quality of it not being as good when the. And then they'll instead go out and hire like an onshore intern where it's like, yeah, that is. That is not a high bar for quality. I remember where I started. So we kind of have to depersonalize all this and just look at it from a business standpoint. What are the most reliable and sustainable ways to get all of this work done for our clients? There are other factors, like, you know, for me, a big part of the fulfillment satisfaction of running a firm is helping to develop the people and create killer jobs for folks. So there are other factors like that. But as I'VE shared before. I think most firms are too heavily weighted to just traditional full time staffing. Okay, number five, now we're getting into kind of the more strategic reorganize who does the work. So some examples, a greater level of support for your most technical folks. I learned running a tax firm in the US that upwards of a third of our most senior technical folks time during busy season was taken up by managing intake, managing documents, requesting things from clients. And there's a lot of tax firms now who have admins, non technical people that manage the entire intake process. And so your technical person never touches the project unless someone has signed off that you have received everything that you need to do the return. And for some firms that's unthinkable because you're like, well you have to have the technical expertise to know what you need. And that is justification for not involving non technical people at all. Right. So you don't pull them in at all because sometimes it will matter and sometimes you will need that technical expertise. But things as simple as some admin support to help your most technical folks manage the inbox during busy season where clients are sending them loads of documents and just the juggle of having to figure out do we have everything that we need to do the project or not. That's a massive drain for your most constrained resource, which is that highest level technical person. As we developed our most technical people, something they super appreciated was having more of a support team around them as they developed. And it created this really natural skill of delegation for those folks and help them focus on more of the technical, more the advisory stuff that they actually wanted to do. Some other examples here of how you can reshuffle the work and descale the work wherever possible. This also applies to the monthly bookkeeping close ensuring that you've got everything that you need from the client before your technical people jump in and start working on it. Generally making a habit of hiring more non technical folks. So I loved hiring non accountants. Like folks who were just kind of operators had a really strong work ethic. We're good with systems. I had such good luck going out and hiring non accountants to help us with this stuff. We've talked about building a pre accounting process for your accounting firm. So having a more explicit process for gathering all the required documentation that started with pulling in admins to ensure that we had all those documents, doing all of it in an automated way as much as possible, but then acknowledging that it couldn't be a hundred percent automated. So we had a clear process for Folks that needed to manually go out and fetch things, but for us, that ultimately bled into, okay, they're fetching the documents and we need to define where they need to then take those documents. And over time, that actually started looking more like work paper prep. Because we're like, oh, if they can go out and get this thing, then they can also mark it up and name it how it needs to be named and put it in its final destination. And before long, what the preparer, the technical person was actually doing started looking a little more like review than it did prep because our non technical folks were going out and learning more of the process. And before you know it, you put these people into a couple of bookkeeping classes and you've got like a whole nother sort of class of bookkeeper coming up. Now, there's some crossover here to how you manage your email inbox too. Like when we're thinking about pulling in somebody less skilled than yourself to help, our mind immediately goes to the most sticky situation, the most technical thing you ever do in Your inbox, when 95% of your inbox is stuff that can go to other people, is stuff that maybe shouldn't even be there in the first place and isn't really like pushing that technical skill to the limit. Number six, cut clients. I mean, the reality is the answer here is usually subtraction. It's, it's worth just being aware that human nature is to further inconvenience yourself before having to have an uncomfortable conversation with a client, before having to let somebody down. And so oftentimes we jump straight to hiring or increasing capacity when sometimes the solution is actually to just be more selective about who you'll work with. So we are, we are biased to shy away from cutting clients because we don't want to let people down. Doesn't mean it's always the answer, but something to be aware of that, that is human nature. I've shared that my happiest period was when we were contracting, when we were decreasing the number of clients that we worked with, decreasing the number of staff that we had. Especially if you're growing quickly, you can overextend both on the type of clients that you take in and on the type of staff that you take in. And when you have this sort of outer ring of not great fit clients and outer ring of not great fit staff, and then those staff are working with clients, that is a really hard way to make money and a really risky way to grow your firm. And where I was at my happiest was when we shrunk the staff size a bit and this is, I mean, do this mental exercise. What would it look like to cut the worst fit 20% of your clients? And what would it look like to even consider cutting the worst fit 20% of your team? That 20%, I mean, is probably accountable for 50% of your headaches. And so that's. That cycle is like a reality of what it probably looks like to build a calm business. If you can get out ahead of the issue, don't make it worse by reaching and taking in clients that you're not super excited about or making hires that you're not like 100% excited about. But yeah, number six, cutting clients like the best answer more often than not is usually subtraction. 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. 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 consource 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 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 month number seven. Reassess the value chain. So oftentimes we get into the habit of doing certain things in the process of delivering a service that maybe we think are valuable but the client doesn't assign any value to. So if you Always do an intake meeting. Is that intake meeting valuable to your perfect client? And so something here that can confuse the value we assign to it is maybe you have some suboptimal or not great fit clients that do assign value to this, but the clients that you actually want and the clients that are great fit for you don't. And oftentimes we will like carry forward complications and processes that the legacy clients are still acting and still asking for to kind of placate them, but it's making everybody's job more difficult. Are some clients using manual processes that you're trying to get away from? So as your ideal client, fine with, you know, using a client portal or, or getting either documents in a more automated way, but you're still having to do it in a, in a manual way for your clients that aren't quite as big of a fit or as good of a fit. One thing specifically we bumped into was as part of selling a bookkeeping service, clients came to us with very different implied expectations of, of what document management looked like. So who's managing all the receipts and the invoices and who is keeping a library of all of those things? And is that part of a core bookkeeping process? You may think it is, you may think it isn't. So I don't know, there's like an absolute correct answer there. And it's worth being aware that what that answer is to you might be different than what the answer is to your client. And we found when we would start working with clients, they've generally had no system for organizing all of this stuff, and oftentimes weren't even willing to invest the time to track all these things down for us so that we could manage it on an ongoing basis. And this document management component ended up being 50% or more of the total time we'd have to spend on a bookkeeping project. So should that be part of the process or not? Or should it explicitly be outlined that this is actually a different level of service that folks can opt into or opt out of those sneaky kind of implied parts of delivering a service. Those can be a real drain on your time. Number eight, killing a service line entirely. The usual suspects here are payroll, bill pay, bookkeeping. Though this is counter to the way the profession is trending, which is more vertical support of a specific type of person. So doing more for a more specific type of person is where we're trending because folks appreciate being able to come to one place and get all that stuff done. So I see a lot of you know, tax firms getting into wealth management and that sort of thing for the client, that's nice. But there will still be a place for specialists. So even though we see this verticalization trend happening, there is still enough space here for you to be whatever you want to be. And that could be exclusively tax prep. It could be exclusively tax advisory, not even doing the prep. Could be exclusively, you know, CFO type advising work. There are vertical ways to do this, and there are also super specialized ways of doing this. And it may feel hard to build that specialist business from scratch. It's a matter of finding, in the early days, probably some referral partners who don't want to do that type of work, but. But then longer term, it's a matter of building your visibility and trust online. If you are the guru for planning online and folks trust that you know this stuff better than anybody, they'll buy whatever you sell them. If you're the only one doing strategic tax planning for beekeepers or the most visible person doing it, folks will happily come out and pay you to do tax advisory, even if they have somebody else doing the tax prep or will happily pay you for VCFO work if they have somebody else doing the books. So even though we are trending in a more vertical direction, like, there still is space for specialization. And if you find that ultimately you just love doing a very specific part of it, man, that's the best part of firm running. Like, if we're just getting swept downstream by what everybody else is doing, then what's the point of running your own firm? So if you are finding there's a specific part of it that either you love or your team loves, it's okay to start stripping back the kind of adjacent things that don't align with that. If possible, find somebody you trust that can take that work on for you and do it well. I've seen this not go well. I've seen, you know, selling a payroll book of business to a group and it totally going off the rails and there being a lot of bad will from that. So it can be done poorly. It's another great argument for building a good network of folks who you can trust to do work well. But don't be afraid of paring back and getting more specialized in what you do. Last one here, number nine, changing your delivery expectations. So we all struggle with some level of cyclicality and we have various ways of augmenting fulfillment to maybe bolt on a bit of additional capacity only during your busy seasons, stuff like that. Ultimately, I mean, the best and most Calm way to build a business is to take control of when you do the work and when the work is delivered. And until you nail down the timing of when all of your projects go out the door, it's really hard to build all that stuff in a calm way, because then you're just, like, taking orders whenever that work comes in the door. And it doesn't mean that you can't, you know, augment your team seasonally. If you have access to those folks, great. But the Holy grail is something that is nice and smooth across the entire year. Right? And depending on your type of firm, that may feel out of reach. But there's a huge spectrum of how optimized some firms are versus other firms. There's a big spectrum and people's appetite for going the extra mile during busy season and then being, you know, dialing it back during the slow season. And some folks love that. I think that can be a bit of a trap because before you know it, you just. You just end up kind of working all year, but you still have the busy season. But I know, I mean, in my early in my career, I mean, I spent entire summers spinning in my chair because there was nothing to do. And the whole mantra of the firm was, like, literally, anything we can do in our slow season that will take an hour or a minute off of our busy season is time well spent, because that busy season is the bottleneck. And that felt like cool, innovative thinking where it's like, no, no, no, no. The peak, that peak season, that's the problem. Like, we need to find a way to beat that down and change and shift client expectations. That could mean working with different types of clients for whom spreading that workout lands easier. Could be building the perceived level of your expertise so that your clients will. Will just go with what you tell them to do, rather than them trying to dictate the process. Right. Like, you're the pro here. If a client's coming in and saying, like, no, there's no reason for this or that, or no, I want my. My stuff in this or that time, then there may not be enough of a level of trust there for them to come to you and just say, you're my pro, that I'm hired to do this thing, and I'm going to trust you to do it and get it done on whatever schedule. Schedule works for you or, you know, whatever schedule you deem to be the best. And it's another one of those things where shifting the expectation for an existing client, that might be tricky, but that's not a rationale for the expectation being fundamentally different for every client that comes in. So when they come in on day one, that's just how it is. They don't know anything different. And for most folks, that's going to be totally fine. Setting that expectation from day one is a very different challenge to shifting it for existing clients. But because sometimes we can't imagine shifting that for existing clients, we don't make the policy change at all. And so you keep pulling new clients into the door with that legacy understanding that you're trying to get away from, and you just make that problem worse. And that time horizon of how long it's going to take you to fix that problem just keeps getting extended. It never gets any closer because you never change that expectation for anyone. Managing capacity among the trickiest aspects of managing an accounting firm, Remember, don't plan yourself out to 100% capacity. The things that you will put on a planning board are only the things you remember off the top of your head. So you will always underestimate what's going to be there. The same way where when you plan your day in the morning, you always underestimate it. Right? Because things will always come up. If you do that on a bigger scale across an entire firm, man, that is going to burn out you and your team. And less is more like start with, is there something I can eliminate to solve this problem before you go bigger, before you complicate things further, before you make your life harder, more complex? That's all we got for today. Any other ideas you got on capacity planning stuff that you have tried that's worked well for you? Drop them in the comments. Biggest two things for me were probably not scheduling to 100% capacity. We did that for years and years and we thought that was totally normal. And it's like, no, that's never realistic because you're not taking into account step that comes up, people getting sick, new clients you're letting in the door. So biggest two things for me there were probably only scheduling to like 80% capacity. And the second one for me was offshore hiring. It was, it was just massive. Totally changed the responsibilities of our onshore teams as those technical people got more, more of a support team around them. All those folks were coming from offshore. We were able to hire them quickly and they did really freaking good work. Those are probably the two biggest things for me. But any wins you got, feel free to share them in the comments. I'll see you in the next one. Sam.