184 What To Do When Apps Share Common Features

Increasingly we have the problem of all of our apps trying to do the same thing. It's really irritating. They have all these common features and so how do you navigate having a whole bunch of different apps that all bump up against each other in different places? Do you try to consolidate all down to one? How do you make sense of that? We're also going to cover if you are a bookkeeper that works with Tax Pros, how in the world are you expected to read their mind and know exactly what they want? We'll talk about the inverse as well. Tax Pros, how to better collaborate with bookkeepers, what to do if you can't find a good video editor, how to start a newsletter. Some great questions we've gotten in the last week. Come on in, let's talk about it. Nothing irritates me more than when you have an app that does a single thing really, really well and you love it for that thing and they get a bit of traction, maybe they take some investment and then they say, oh, okay, now we're gonna go do all these other things now. And most of the time that is so irritating to me because I love them for this thing. I don't want them for all the other things. But then they go and they do all the other things and I get it. Like I get why that's good for them. And sometimes there are good versions of that, other times there aren't. But increasingly when we are being pitched on a piece of software, you see the value of the software in a vacuum, but where your mind actually goes is, well, I have this tool that does this part already and this other tool that does this part already and actually creates more friction in the buying process the more that app is trying to do. So what brought me around to this was a question on YouTube. I think it was on the the Copilot demo day that we did. So Copilot is a client portal tool. Like that's all it does is try to make a super flexible client portal. Question was this seems cool, but would you use this and Keeper or how does it work? If I plan on going to Keeper. So Copilot it is a, a customer client portal tool. Keeper is a month end close app that does a deep integration with the accounting ledger. Helps you do some quality assurance like you can publish reports to clients. It is a, a task manager. Like you can ask the client about uncategorized transactions and all that. And so Keeper has a, a client facing like client portal component, but co pilot was built from scratch to just do that and do that really well and in a really flexible way. And of all the places where firms are running into like a log jam of every tool offering this thing like that is no worse than when we look at the client facing experience and we're all struggling with this very disjointed experience problem where you're sending them a link to this portal and that portal and every single time you ask the client to go do something online or complete a form or something like that for you, it looks different. And that's, that's annoying. In a perfect world it would all look the same. And so right now like reality is the trade off we are stuck with is you have some super flexible request tools and client portals. Copilot's a good example of that's actually exactly the problem that Copilot is trying to solve is stop putting 100 different interfaces in front of your client, put this one single interface in front of your client so that they can do all of the things there in one place. And Copilot specifically is enabling things like being able to embed some third party apps within Copilot. So for example, if you're a notion user you can embed notion pages or if you're an airtable user, you can embed airtable stuff into Copilot. So that's, honestly that's, that is the problem that they are trying to solve for is being the one like unified place so that your clients can have a more consistent portal experience where they can log into this thing and that's the only thing that they ever have to log into and use. Reality is like that's a great customer client experience, but it's going to come with some integration trade offs. So for example, on the Keeper side, Keeper syncs with like all of your ledger activity. And these, these two tools like do two very different jobs, but they both have a client facing component. But Keeper for example, integrates with your ledger and let's say you've got some transactions that are sitting in uncategor and you need feedback from a client. This is maybe the best example of where integration like direct integration with the portal is helpful. They can, Keeper can push a prompt to that client portal saying hey, we need your input on transaction X, Y and Z. The client can hop in, update that information and then it pushes back in all updates. In Keeper where you have this kind of over the top view of the status of all your monthly closes and in this dashboard you can see how many client questions are outstanding and how many do they need to still respond to and all of that and that all updates automatically based on actions that the client takes in the portal. And that's really nice, but it's just around the month end close. It's just around the things that Keeper does for you. But what if I wanted to collect tax information? What about all the other things you may need to put in front of your client? This comes up so much with software. Is the solution to, to a lack of integrations, one more app, right? Like there's. It seems like oftentimes the solution to the problem is, well, we just need that one more tool to then unify them all. The reality is you're never going to have a tool that's going to integrate with absolutely everything that you do. So this is a frustrating problem to which there isn't a great solution. But a few bits of advice I would offer from the software company's perspective. They are trying to capture inbound around specific framework features and Client Portal is one of those features where definitely a ton of systems will have landing pages that say we have a client portal, we have a client facing experience. And they're all wildly different, very, very different. Some are great to use, some are awful to use. But the risk here is when we see that they have this feature, you dismiss that other maybe dedicated tool that does that thing super, super. Well, you, you dismiss that because maybe a tool that you already use has a version of it or another tool you're considering picking up. They say they have that too. Another good example of this is UNCAT. UNCAT was my top new tool like 3 years ago or something like that. And it was kind of novel because it was the first dedicated tool to give you a client facing experience that would let the client add more information for uncategorized transactions. So basically with Uncat, you point it to any number of accounts in the ledger, be it uncategorized expense. Ask my accountants. You can point it to any set of accounts and when transactions hit those accounts, it pings your client via email and says, hey, can you hop in and provide clarification in these few transactions? They do that in Uncat, you can use Magic Link so they don't have to remember a login doesn't require them needing access to the accounting file. And you can do some really smart stuff with it like set up bank rules. You know, let's say every time the client has an Amazon purchase, you want the client to provide clarification of what was bought there or upload a receipt or something like that, rather than Doing the whole email hokey pokey back and forth or send them a spreadsheet each month or something like that. In the accounting ledger, you could set up a bank rule that says every single time I get a transaction from Amazon, I want to automatically categorize it to uncategorized expense or something like that. And so as soon as that comes through the bank feed, you have an auto rule that will put it in uncategorized. And then at the end of the day Uncat is going to send an email to your client saying, hey, here's all the stuff we need info from. And you didn't have to lift a finger there. So if you're doing that that month end close, if you're getting in there on a monthly basis throughout the month as those things, as those auto rules, categorize that stuff. Uncat is reaching out to the client throughout the month and it actually makes you look like you're doing way more work than you actually are because you're actually collecting that information from the client on the fly. Now you can set up all sorts of flexibility around notification schedules, like do you want the client to be notified every single day or every week or once a month, do you want them to provide receipts, do you want them to actually pick the account or just put in a note to let you pick the account? Uncat implemented this in a really, really good way. And then when you hop in and you make any updates, all those updates get pushed back to the accounting ledger. And so it pulls it out of uncategorized and puts it wherever you want it to go. And so they built a really robust version of this with like classes and all these different things that you could do. And it was this novel new thing that people hadn't really seen before. And then a whole bunch of other software solutions said, oh yeah, we handle uncategorized transactions now. And the in most cases it was like a very half baked version of that thing, as is usually the case when you have somebody that is like doing something really well and they're best of breed in that very specific thing, you get a bunch of copycats that'll say okay, now we do this thing too, but it's like not the full blown version of it and oftentimes over that, like over time that will develop and eventually they get to a version of that that is good enough. But the trap here is we make buying decisions based on what a landing page says that thing will do. When two implementations of a feature can often be wildly different and not at all solve your problem. And I mean a great example when it comes to client portals is the platforms from our tax softwares have, you know, for over the last decade, they have these client portals and the client experience is so bad that nobody will actually use them. So like we have this functionality with the tools that we use already, but that functionality is just so bad that you don't use it. So there isn't a like sweeping answer here of of what is always the right answer. 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 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 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. 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 to the 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. This episode is sponsored in part by Live Flow and talking a lot lately about the new consolidation stuff that they rolled out. Honestly, a killer solution for for rolling up a large number of companies. But a couple good use cases for Live Flow 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. 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 liflow around just giving granular access to folks who can't be into the file themselves. Kind of wild 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. You know, the way things are going, I do think we need to be leaning more towards being super, super mindful of the client experience. And that is something that most of the time is going to trump like other considerations because ultimately what drives the profitability of a firm is what can you charge people and what people are willing to pay as a product of the perceived value that they're getting from their service. And they don't understand the technical aspects of what you do. So they're making decisions based on the things they do understand. Like how smooth was this? Was it a modern experience? Like did it feel really inefficient? And so if you can give them a really smooth client service, even if it means behind the scenes you're moving stuff from A to B, like you're having to develop extra systems because things won't integrate just perfectly, usually that's the right answer. Like the flip side of that. Trying to build this highly automated productized accounting firm, you're just not going to do that as well as somebody like Pirate Pilot that goes out and raises a hundred million dollars and two thirds of their staff are software engineers. Like that's just not a battle worth going into. So if I can give you any sort of overarching wisdom here. I would say optimize for the client experience, even if it means doing extra work on the back end. Having to take. Nobody likes having to take information from tool A to B. We talked about this in the pre accounting episode of the podcast. If you run an accounting practice. Absolutely. Check that out. The frustration there is we have all these banks and systems that we can't automatically fetch documents from. And so you have to go and you gotta log in and you gotta go and download this thing and you go do the accounting and you're super frustrated cause you gotta go out and manually grab all these things. Gang, it is not hard to build systems around manually fetching things. And I don't like manually fetching stuff any more than the next person. But when you have to do it, we don't just like stamp our feet and be annoyed that that automated solution doesn't work. You, you make a process for it. Like you, you dictate how it needs to be done and then you plug a human being into that process. And human beings don't like spending days and weeks and months like manually taking things from A to B, but they can do that. Like that's, that's something that people can do. If you are a tax pro, you know how bad this is with tax software integrating, you know, a client address update or something like that, There is no meaningful, like, good way to do that for clients. I joke that the holy grail of a client portal is a client being able to log in and update their address and it'll flow back to your tax software. Like, that's fundamentally impossible right now unless you're doing additional stuff like rpa, which is going in and crawling your clients. And a bot is like making those updates. But because those things don't integrate automatically does not mean that we shouldn't have a system for then like doing the manual stuff where it falls through the cracks. So does it suck when tool A doesn't talk to tool B? Like, yes, it absolutely does. But that's also not a super hard thing to solve for. Like, we just need to have an explicit process every time there's a change here. Somebody has to tick off that task that yes, I went and then made this update there and that's a bummer. But again, like, we need to optimize for client experience and obviously there's a spectrum there. Like, it doesn't mean we should be doing super outrageous things to accommodate that. But when push comes to shove, like if all all else being equal, the right thing to do is generally to optimize for the client experience. So to bring this back full circle to the original keep reverse copilot question, I think you got to look at very specifically, what do you need from the client portal, like do you do tax or do you just do accounting? If you just do a bookkeeping and that's all you do, and that's the only context in which you're ever going to put something in front of a client, then maybe keepers portal works fine. If you do a bunch of other stuff that's not bookkeeping and you need to put a whole bunch of other things in front of clients, maybe a more like all encompassing portal like copilot makes sense. It's easy to lose perspective of what that client experience looks like because we sit on the other side of it. We're biased to be probably more focused on our own workflows than we should because that is where we live and we spend all of our time. If you spent all of your time on the client side and from 8 to 5 you were trying to get information from the accountant and like doing all the things that your client does, you would be much more biased towards like optimizing the client experience. So just keep that like front and center in mind because it plays a huge impact on how folks perceive the value of the work that you're doing for them. Okay. This is a common point of friction between tax accountants and accountant accounting accountants, like between the bookkeeper and the tax pro oftentimes, and I hear this most frequently from bookkeepers, but both sides can do a better job of, of working together. So here's the question I got via DM. As a bookkeeper, I often get different feedback from CPAs and I think that really means tax pros on how to handle different things, such as S Corps putting personally owned vehicles on the books and depreciating them as assets and paying the loans for them. Without an accountable plan, can you share something about why there can be so many different ideas on what is right? Just because accountants are fickle and they think that their way is the right way to do it. And if you're a bookkeeper and you are doing books for clients that work with 10 different tax pros, you're going to have 10 different like expectations of you. And I think the best thing that we can do here is probably just be really explicit about those expectations up front. So if you're a bookkeeper and you want to look really smart, put all this stuff into a web form or into a set of 10 questions that you can pose to the tax pro to say, like, hey, I bump into a lot of different sort of preferential things among tax pros. Can you tell me what you want me to do in each of these situations? And then when it comes to, you know, putting the books together for tax prep or doing that handoff to the tax pro, you've got all that information about that tax pro's preferences. And it will actually go a really long way towards, even if it's not perfect, they will at least super appreciate that the questions are being asked. And if you're looking to build a bookkeeping business, like partnerships with tax pros is a, is a great way to do that. And honestly, I think it's going to make them more likely to probably send more work to you because you are leaving the door open to them, like having a say in how that stuff gets organized at the end of the year. Unfortunately, there will never be like a standard, like all tax pros are going to want the same thing. So the best we can do is try to be accommodating of what their expectations are. Now, sometimes tax pros can go too far there. And you as the bookkeeper, you may be putting together those books in a way that works best for management, which is not always necessarily going to be the way something needs to be reported for tax. Some tax pros like to insist that the books need to be like perpetually reported in like just what that tax pro needs to report for tax purposes. Those don't necessarily need to be the same thing. And some tax pros will be accommodating an understanding of that and some less so. But if you're a bookkeeper, the best thing you can do is just have that conversation or start building a boilerplate list of questions that you ought to put to tax pros just to get in alignment as well as possible. And it'll go a long ways towards like them appreciating you at least asking on the flip side of that, if you're a tax pro, yeah, we, I mean we get wildly different things. If you're a tax pro, you get everything from the business owner doing the books to the business owner's spouse doing the books to bookkeepers who super know what they're doing and bookkeepers who absolutely don't know what they're doing. And from tax pros perspective, sometimes it could be hard not to lump all those people into like a single avatar of like, bookkeepers are just frustrating and they don't know what they're doing. But the same goes the other way. If you are a tax pro, just develop a little one pager of what your preferences are, what you like to see, like how you want to see adjustments posted back to the books if at all. Like what are your expectations of the bookkeeper? Can you put that stuff into a one pager to try to get you into alignment from day one? As with many things from hiring to AI, human nature is we expect those folks to just be able to read our minds because we aren't really aware of all like the implicit assumptions we are going through. 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 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 could source accountants with experience working at US or Australian firms familiar with tools like Xero, QBO 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 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 podcast? 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. Love this question posted on an old podcast recently. I think it was just the second episode. Simplified Consultants Love this video. I have a little content on my channel but stopped because I haven't found anyone dependable that can edit my videos and make it look professional. Any advice? Finding editors is work. So like I've shared before, I've worked with over 70 editors now and I have a team of three. And one of the most common comments I get on my content is like, wow, your stuff looks great. You must have a good editor. To which my first reaction is to jump through the screen and punch them right in the mouth. Because no, it's a lot more than the editing that goes into it. But I digress. Yeah. Finding a. A dependable editor who, as we were just talking about, aligns with your aesthetic and will do what, like, we'll put it together in the way that you want it to be put together. It's wildly difficult, especially as your videos get more intricate. Like when I do a main channel YouTube video, like, I'm literally bracketing like a. A pretty large amount of detail about how I want something to be edited. And that gets better over time as you get experience working with editors and like, as. As you kind of get an alignment in that editing style. But I think this is. For most of us, this is really missing the point. Because if you look out there, there are YouTube channels that have grown well beyond a million subscribers with no editing, with literally zero editing, or with super, super basic vanilla editing that that person does themselves. So I think the solution to not being able to find an editor is probably just to lower the bar of what it is that you're trying to do. Because like going over the top and big graphics and stuff like that, Honestly, I don't know. And in 90% of our cases, I don't know that that's going to make a difference. Now, I'm a bad person to ask here. And I think because I now this is like, I am in the business of just making content as good and as gauging and engaging as I can. I can be a bad model to follow because it may look like all of this is necessary when it absolutely isn't. Like you look out online. Who is the. There's a massive tax channel. What's the guy's name? Clear Value Tax. If you've seen this guy on YouTube, he has 2 million subscribers and he stands in front of a wall and talks to camera pretty much every day. Massive channel. I don't know that he needs to even run a firm because you can run a. I mean, off a 2 million sub channel, you can run a very profitable business. But it's just a guy in a suit and tie standing in front of a wall. 2 million subs. All he does is talk about tax. So I, I do. I truly think usually the answer if you're stuck on the editing is to get it to a point where it doesn't need editing or to where in half the time it took you to shoot. You can chop it together, you know, as soon as you're done editing and. And be done with it. And so the easiest tools here, you know, I. Most of the time I tell people to start with Loom because Loom is. I mean, there's a free version of it. I think the free version has kind of gotten neutered over the years. But the nice thing about Loom is as soon as you're done recording, it just shows you a timeline and you can just select and clip out anything that you want to remove. So the biggest mistake people make when they're getting started with video is they try to do the whole thing perfectly in one take. And you never will. And I don't. Like, I've been doing this for years and I. I can't do that. And so you end up doing a hundred different takes and it gets frustrating and you just get sweaty and like it. It's not a fun experience. The best thing you can do when you are shooting something is if you make a mistake, go back to the beginning of that statement, start over, and try to get through that statement again without. Without making that mistake. Never go back to the beginning again. And so by the end, when you've shot that video, you may. It may. Some of those statements may have taken you a few tries, but collectively, across the whole recording, you have a good take of everything that you wanted to say. So never stop and go back to the beginning. Just don't do that. Just give it another try. If you stumble on something, then at the end, just go back and remove all those mistakes. You're just going to select that stuff in the timeline. Loom makes this super easy. Clip it out. There will be cuts. Then as you're watching the video back, you'll be able to see cuts as you go from one statement to the next. If you made a mistake, that's totally fine. I used to get sketched out about that. Like, oh, my clients are going to think this is so high effort, they're going to notice it. Nobody gives a hoot. Like, when they're watching that video, they are exclusively thinking about, how can this add value to me? They don't care what you look like. They don't care about the graphics. They are simply sitting there to determine, is this going to deliver some sort of value to me? Is it worth my time sitting here and watching it? That's it. So think really simple, like Loom's usually the answer. Description, that's another video editing app. But I don't know that with Descript you're going to like very quickly chop that together yourself after the fact. Like, it's a higher lift than loom if you're struggling with the editing and the production, all that stuff. I honestly, I think the solution is to lower the bar. Like, try to simplify. A lot of the mainstream advice we see around how to make great YouTube videos are made for mainstream channels. Like, you are not Mr. Beast trying to attract the attention of everyone. We are trying to attract the attention of a very specific person who could be a good client. And those are, those are two very different business models. Like I've got a, I've got a half written episode around like what Kim Kardashian taught us wrong about, you know, social media or online content. Like many of the maxims and the advice that apply to mainstream channels do not apply to you. Like, we're not going after mainstream. We don't, we don't want that because those people aren't the clients that we're looking for. So keep it really simple and focus on delivering value in a way that people will engage with. And that's not like fancy editing. Like, it's, it's much more humble than that. Also got the question on the marketing main channel video, how do I make a newsletter? Because that was kind of like the first recommendation of like, just have an email list and start collecting those emails so that folks can hear from you on a more regular basis. Starting a newsletter, I mean, it can be as simple as. And this is where it started for me. Just bcc a big list of people. From an email deliverability standpoint, that isn't always the right answer, but there's a few. I mean, there's some super simple email newsletter services out there. Mailer light Lite is one I like. ConvertKit. If you are doing a newsletter for the first time, don't overthink it. A great place to start is what are all the questions I got asked this week? How can I, rather than exclusively delivering that value one on one privately to a client, can I put that stuff out there for other people to learn from? Exactly. Like what we're doing right now. Like this Friday podcast that we do the Q and A. Like, it is a bottomless pit of, of content because people always have questions and you may feel like you're repeating yourself because you've said that thing before. The good news is nobody was listening. It's okay to repeat yourself. And if somebody was Listening, like, and I struggle with this. Like, if somebody heard something from me 80 episodes ago in this podcast, it's probably okay that I say it again because that's now like three months in the past. And people, people are not just, like, committing everything that you tell them to memory. So don't overthink the newsletter thing. Like, figure out, like, what's a consistent way that I can provide value to folks. The more specific type of person, the better. If it is a general small business newsletter, odds are you're not going to be able to produce anything more valuable than all the other small business newsletters that are out there. But if it is Finance and Tax for Beekeepers, if it is something so specific to them, even if it's all the same advice put through their vernacular, through their lens and the things that they struggle with, like, that's where you want to be. It's got to be specific enough to be helpful so that you're not up against every other, like, much larger publication. Last, this is a us thing. How to explain what an enrolled agent does as a question I got. Unless you're a CPA firm getting questions asking the difference between a CPA firm and an enrolled agent kind of with an implication there of like, are you qualified and should I be paying you as much? I think the only situation in which folks are clients are worried about the credential is when you haven't proven that, like, you are the ultimate solution for their specific pain points. So the way that I want people coming into my firm is like, at a high level of trust, where they've seen my content, they've seen my newsletter, they've seen me talking about very nuanced, like, specific to them problems. And they're coming in in a state where they're like, oh my gosh, this person is a great fit, a great fit for me, where you have to then prove your wisdom through a credential or something like that. Like, at that point, you've already lost the battle. Reality is, when you're building a firm, like, you're going to have, you're probably taking in some level of general clients, and these may not be forever clients, but, like, you may be in a mode where it's like, I'm going to take whatever I can get. But even then, even in the case of general clients, if they're coming in and having to ask about credentials, like, this is something that they can Google. So, like, why are they asking me this? I don't know, but it points to, like, a lack of Trust I think that they have in you and your ability to solve their problems. And if the only place that people ever hear from you is like one on one in meetings and over email and stuff like that, like this is kind of one of the downsides of not investing in any other way of getting information in front of clients is they don't understand how you work differently or how you understand their problems any better than anyone else. And unfortunately, sometimes the answer to that question is maybe you just, you don't understand those people's like, needs better than anybody else. And if we're serving a general small business audience, like reality is probably don't like there's a whole bunch of other people that may have been doing this a decade longer than me and may know more than I do. But it's not until I found that like specificity and those specific people that I, I'm going to like go deep on and really learn a lot about that, I then become a great advisor for them. So what is the best way to explain the difference between an EA and a cpa? And like, do they know you're qualified and all that? Like, obviously there's tons of like information out there already. You could write a blog post. But I do think that it is a signal that you're losing the larger battle of building their trust. Because if you get them to the point where they're like, I can't imagine working with anybody else, they're not asking about credentials, like they don't care about any of that. You've already proven your expertise. That's where you want to get to. That's where people are paying top dollar. It's where they're not like trying to dictate the way that you advise them and saying, well, here's when I should file your tax return and all these different things, like, no, at that point they've accepted that you are the expert and they're going to defer to you on that. The project's going to be more profitable because like they can see that value. And at that point credential doesn't matter. Right? But it starts with like making that investment in like how am I getting information and value out one too many. And the mental calculation, like the paradox of that is always the perception that if I stop and I post to social media or I do a blog post or newsletter, if I do that one to many thing, it's taking away from the value that I'm providing one to one, right? Like, and that, and that's, that's where we get stuck is like, can I really reduce the amount of time I spend on one on one client work to do a one to many thing? And if you're just looking at like the aggregate total amount of value you're putting out into the universe, that question seems ridiculous, right? Like, oh, of course. Like you should always stop that one to one thing to put out value one to many. The problem is you don't know how you get paid yet on that. What, like how, how you financially gain from that one too many value investment is much more ambiguous than if I put two more hours into this one client, right? So that's where we get stuck. But if you throw the money out of the equation, if you were just thinking like how much value am I putting out into the ether? Obviously the more you lean into one to many, the more you're putting out there. And this may feel like, I don't know, a privileged thing to say or something that's going to take a bunch of time or take a big investment. All I will say is the answer is not to put no investment into one to many. Like we have to be investing in both. The reality is like one to many drives the much better, much more profitable one to one client relationships. It drives opportunities for you professionally. Like it introduces you to new things and new people that like you could not imagine because you have that, that visibility where folks can see what you do. But the whole like questioning your expertise, like being worried about certifications and all of that, it's secondary to like, does that client truly believe that you understand their needs better than anybody else if they're asking about credentials? Probably not. So where else could we invest in proving our value and proving our expertise? You know, for farmers in this specific region or for beekeepers or whatever it is, like that's, that's the bigger problem I'm going to try to solve. If they really want to know the difference, I can link them to an article somebody else wrote. I don't really care. But it is a signal that we're not solving the larger problem of like ensuring that they trust in our expertise. Right? That's all we got for today. We do these Q&As every single week. If you got any questions, drop them in the comments. Talking through these things in public, even putting out questions that other people have, every single one of the questions that we went through today by taking the time to put that question out there, you question askers, you helped people. And that's kind of the beauty of like social media and content and all that stuff is the more we drive these conversations online, the more it benefits everybody, the more it could make a random connection with someone that you didn't expect. And it can start with things as as humble as like dropping a question into a comment. If you are podcast listeners, and these days 2/3 to 3/4 of folks just listen to the podcast feed here, your podcast player will have a link to the YouTube video. You can hop in and drop an anonymous comment under any of these podcasts in the comments on YouTube. That's where I pull the questions from. So if you're a podcast listener and you ever have a question, just click through that YouTube video and drop a comment underneath if you got a comment or question or anything like that. Thanks for coming and hanging today. I'll see you in the next.