191 Developing New Skills As An Accountant

Are you looking to up level your video skills or really any skills at all? I'm going to share the untold story of how I got good at video. Never before told. You're not going to want to miss it. We're also going to talk about taking vacations during busy season Pillars for your social media content. What's the stuff that you talk about on a regular basis? And knowing the size of a niche before you move into it. How important is that? Come on in, it's Q and A Friday. Got a very kind comment on a YouTube video. I It might have been from an actual human. It might have just been from a bot that wanted to do my YouTube editing. How did you get so good at editing your videos? Your style is so entertaining and engaging. Jacob, you just made my day. Listen, here's the secret. You may have seen me talking about this on social media earlier this week. The story of how I became a natural at video for two years while running a 40 person accounting firm, I published two videos a week to YouTube. That's the truth. I was running a 40 person firm with one other partner. If you've been around the podcast for long, I've told this story before. The whole untold story thing was a lie. Running a 40 person firm, publishing two videos a week to YouTube. I had never done anything like that before. I was not like the video nerd in high school. I wasn't the movie nerd. The genuinely never done any of that stuff. And let me tell you, when I started publishing two videos a week, were they bangers? They, they certainly were not. Nobody watched them. After 18 months publishing two videos a week, I had. Drumroll please. 500 subscribers. 500 subscribers after 18 months. And this is not unusual, Mr. Beast. After like, I think it was after three years or something like that had like a paltry number of subs. This is actually one of those things that make people think it takes forever to do like video and social media and the ROI takes too long. I'm going to table that. I'm going to circle back to it. But I was spending more time and effort and money honestly on video than anyone else would think is reasonable. And I even tell people that now. And a lot of people just straight up like don't believe me that I was doing that while running a firm. Rowdy was. I had managed to get myself totally out of client work. I, I was exclusively working on, you know, firm strategy stuff. And it's not to say I had an abundance of free time, but I, I was not working 80 hour weeks like I was not, I was, I was able to manage the firm with a level of balance. During that 18 month period I also had two kids. So my first two kids were 15 months apart. Still remember the moment we found out the second one was coming. Our first kid, my daughter was rough. Like from the moment she entered the world, everybody in the room was like, whoa, that's a, that's a loud one. And for various issues, for various reasons, some of them our own limitations, some of them just the nature of, of, of her, of the kid. That first baby was rough. And we were however long would have been five, six, seven months in and it was one of those days where the kid was just in their crib beside themselves. We like when she was a, you know, three weeks old, she would go like 18 hours without sleeping. Like just the most weird, bizarre things. And so we're like, I don't remember what it was six months in, maybe this kid has not slept like all day. Had a rough night the day before. And it's just like, it's one of those situations where you're just at your wits end and there's seemingly absolutely nothing that you can do and you're just like losing your mind. And this is probably worst with your, with your first child too. And I'm just, I remember just standing there in the hallway just like so fried because you're sleep deprived and all these things. And my wife comes out of the bathroom with a pregnancy test and she held it up and I said, I don't remember what I said, but it wasn't kind. And I looked at it and she just like started crying. And needless to say, we were not at a point at that stage in our life where we were like, yeah, can't wait to have another kid. We were like, how do people do this? And then we had our second kid and he was like the most chill baby ever. And we're like, oh, we can do a bunch of these. And then we had a third one and we're like, okay, we're probably good. But anyways, during that period when we were publishing those, that, those two videos a week, I had two kids. I had a kid, Smack Mill Attack Season. And I maintained that two videos a week cadence. And just like anything else, just like we're talking about newsletters the other day, there are a whole bunch of different ways to make videos and publish them at varying levels of effort and like planning ahead and like optimizing for time and delegation. I was, you know, pulling people in to help with that video workflow, like from the very beginning. But no reasonable person would say that you should be publishing two YouTube videos a week when you have all that other stuff going on. I've worked with over 70 video editors at this point. Again, far beyond the threshold of what people think is reasonable. And so now people turn up and they say, would they say one of two things. They say, who's your editor? And man, that just kills me because I'm like, there's so much more, there's so much more that goes into it than editing or a nice camera. Or they say, man, you really got the sauce stats. And I really struggle to convince people that in 90% of cases, being good at something just means doing it more than anyone else thinks is reasonable. I have a few talents and that is just like being able to pal around and be funny and making, being able to make people feel comfortable and stuff like that. But if you are watching my videos from the beginning, buddy, it wasn't, it wasn't impressive. And the production and the, the silly things and this, this last video, it's just coming out on, on Sunday. It's kind of dumb. It started in a useful place and then went super off the rails. And it might have been because I was super buzzed on DayQuil, because I was sick, to be clear, but I was really in my bag and I was, as I was delivering it, I was like, dang, like this is, this is about as smooth as I think I've been able to do this. And it honestly, it is a product of having doing it so so much A lot of people don't realize. Most weeks right now we're publishing seven videos a week. Some weeks we're doing five dailies. We actually might get back up to five a week here pretty soon. A Sunday main channel video and then a Wednesday sponsored demo day video. So people look at what you do and they're like, nobody's as good as him. No, he's boy, he's got it. Or they're like, nobody's got as good of an editor as him. And the reality is like, no, like nobody else in this space is publishing seven videos a week or being as consistent on social media and all these different things. It's so much about effort and systems and delegation. And the beauty of that to me is that you are fully in control of the skills that you develop. Now you may not be a natural born sprinter. Like there's all these things where we're like, I could never be good at that. And There will be some like, variations there, but like, by and large you are, you're more in control than you think you are. And a really unfortunate thing that's happening is we all consume everything all day long from algorithms and like, we still haven't figured out all the ways that this impacts our little monkey brains. But an algorithm is like purpose built to feed you a non stop IV drip of people who are the most prolific in the world at their craft. And if all you ever see all day long is people that are absolutely superhuman at this, whatever specific thing it is that they do, then anytime you try to go do something, you're going to be like, am I just bad at everything? Yes. Compared to the people that you're going to see in these algorithms, you will, you will be very bad at things. And the, the, the byproduct of that is that we're then unwilling to be bad at a new thing. You know, and so because like, we see all these great examples of folks that are prolific at video or public speaking or whatever it is, we make those comparisons and you make that first loom, video or whatever it is, and you're just a big, hot, sweaty mess. You're like, well, I guess I learned that's not going to be for me and I'm never going to do that again when the reality is that person that you saw on social media, you just weren't watching when they made their big first sweaty video. But like, the beauty of this is this kind of concept of skill stacking, which we've talked about a bit, but the notion that you have the agency to invest your time and stacking complimentary skills that will increase your visibility and you know, get, get that, that, get those technical abilities out there in a more visible way. Like we all spend time on continuing technical education and all these other things when you're already like, to that point, like you can already do the work for the vast majority of your client base, fine, you've got the technical stuff down, you're in the 95th percentile at that thing. And when you decide what to invest next in, you're like, let's get to the 96th percentile, even though it'll take a thousand hours. Meanwhile, other skills like how to manage people writing, emotional intelligence, those skills are all like 20th percentile and it takes very little time to get better at them. But for whatever reason, we don't invest in that stuff the same way. And when you look around, you know, the people that we look up to, we look up to them. Because they're prolific at something in addition to that technical thing. Like Tony Nitty's a great speaker. Logan Graff is really good at making videos. Laurelin Wilson's great at like TikTok and writing. Brandon hall is a social media machine. None of those things are like technical things. It's all, it's always the, the next thing, like the adjacent skill that is the reason that you even know that they exist. Yet when it comes to running our accounting firms, we think just being good technical operators, that's the most optimized way to run an accounting firm, right? Like zero visibility. I'm just going to rely on hopefully somebody that works for me now will tell somebody else how good I am. That's my visibility and that works and you can get by on that. And like that's honestly that's what 95% of accounting firms are ever going to do. But it's, it's like closing the door on this much more highly optimized, like serendipitous way to go through life as a professional in a way that is higher leverage and more visible. So when I say invest in high leverage skills like, like what is that? It's fundamentally anything that will work for you when you sleep. Today's episode, it's sponsored in part by liflow. Okay, so thought experiment. Close your eyes with me. Lean back in that chair. Oh yeah. Now imagine, imagine if you had a single spreadsheet with a whole bunch of your clients, balance sheets and P&Ls all viewable in one place. They kept auto updating from QuickBooks so you could pull up a single spreadsheet and see all the clients that you want in a single place. Gang. This could be helpful for monitoring what shenanigans your clients getting up to for ensuring that they're keeping within like the profitability boundaries that maybe you had from a recent tax planning sesh. How's it possible? Through the magic of Life Flow, they got a new consolidations product that makes it super easy to roll up a whole bunch of different sets of books in one place. And this is obviously helpful for like when you've got a client with a bunch of companies and you need to report that all at once. But it can also be helpful just for informational reporting this. See all that stuff in a single spot. Otherwise you're doing the hokey pokey, hopping around, jumping into all these different QuickBooks files. And the really nice thing about this to me is because it's in Google sheets, you've got the entire ecosystem of Other stuff that's built in Google sheets that you can like put on top of this. So like monitoring specific cells. All that in a single view across a whole bunch of different clients. How cool is that? Pretty nice. Same tech or I guess the same use case where folks are now using Live Flow to like review month end books for their clients. Tying out balances, pulling in ledger detail directly from Live Flow. That stuff keeps syncing and keeps updating without you having to like pull in the numbers, print a PDF to like put in a work paper, that sort of thing. Be pretty nice, right? All those books in one place. You're thinking about it. Learn more about that one. Check out the link below to Live Flow in the show Notes 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. 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. They keep 100% of what you pay them and it's a lot more affordable for you so you can retain your team for the long term. Team up can source accountants with experience working at US or Australian firms familiar with tools like 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 going to 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 tima. I did the math. This is nuts. In the last 24 hours people have consumed 254.3 hours of my content. 254.3 hours of my content in the last 24 hours. Gang. 5 years ago I was a staff accountant. I didn't own a firm I've shared before, I wasn't a particularly big brain staff accountant. Like, I didn't have the network and hadn't learned from other people, like, what are the right and wrong ways to run accounting firms? I. I genuinely just like anybody else and never posted on social media. And the hard thing about making time for that higher leverage thing is just how to do that ROI calculation. When you got a client sitting there who will pay you for another hour of work, but then you're like, nah, I'm not going to do that other hour of work. I'm going to do this other more ambiguous thing that'll probably pay off someday. But then when you look at all the other people that are good at that stuff, they seem prolific cause they've done it for so long, right? And so you're like, well, I'm not like that guy, so no, I shouldn't do that. I'll just keep plugging away over here. And then the result is we have nothing that works for us while we sleep. I can't tell you how crazy, like how wild that figure is for me. Like 254 hours. If you want to think about does higher leverage stuff really enable opportunities for me? I think people always understate and there's no way to sound this. It just doesn't kind of sound like a prick. But people perpetually understate the opportunities and the value and the money there is to be made. All of those things that come from being visible online. Like people just on the other side of that, folks who have not. They are perpetually underestimating how much Money, man, a YouTuber can make through sponsorships and a social media influencer can make through brand deals. Like, people just perpetually underestimate that until they've seen the other side of it. And it's really as simple as I'm a micro niche creator and I have 200 people consuming other humans, consuming 254 hours of my content in the last 24 hours. That's not like total views. That's like watch and listen hours. Like people who have actually listened and you don't live in the headspace of that many people for that much time, watch without being exposed to opportunities and without delivering like unbelievable amounts of value. So like, if I go back to 14 months ago when I'm like, man, if I leave this accounting firm and I really disappoint these people, folks that I've hired off of Twitter, who were really like the super fans of my superfans who had more belief in me than anybody else. They would literally quit their jobs and come work for me just due to my vision for how to run an accounting firm and all that. And I'm gonna bail on those people now. Leave the accounting firm. When I'm doing that math of all the people that you let down, but then who are all the people that you can help on the other side of it? And does that matter? Like, should I do what's best for me or what's best for my family? When you're doing that math, boy, a really good, like validation is. Yeah, but like what are the assets that you are building that help people that don't require any incremental effort from you that are working while you're sleeping? Inherent to running an accounting firm is doing a lot of one on one work. Like that's just how it is because you've got, you know, private stuff. Obviously you can't do a tax return in a one to many way. But that doesn't mean that we have to exclusively just do one on one work for our clients. It doesn't mean that the only thing you ever have to do is just like sit there and solve those people's problems one on one until the end of time. And I don't want this podcast to become like Jason just railing on getting everyone to do social media. Cause trust me, I know just as much as you do that's how it can feel sometimes. But it's just, it is such a like red pill thing. Like once you are exposed to the value of visibility and reach and all that stuff, you just never go back to living and thinking about things the same way. I genuinely think it's the difference between running an accounting firm before the Internet and after the Internet. There's so many, so many things we're stuck in that are still like pre Internet thinking. The one thing I said I wanted to circle back to the notion that you have to invest, invest years of putting stuff out into the ether that nobody will ever see. This is why we talk about specificity. The more specific the audience that you're, that you're speaking to, the faster you'll find people. And so one of the issues for me early on was my subject matter wasn't very targeted. It wasn't like super targeted towards accounting firm owners. I hadn't figured that out yet. I hadn't figured out how to package something in a way that would be appealing to an accounting firm owner. So I'd post a video that was like, this client portal is $149 lifetime for unlimited usage. And in that video I would be talking about accounting firm stuff and I would show like five or six tools and most people will get to that video and be like, what the hell is this? I'm not an accountant, I'm going to bounce. And accountants would get to it and be like, yeah, maybe that's interesting. But if I had said $149 client portal for accounting firms, even if it was for everyone, if I had packaged it in a better way, accounts would be like, oh, I'm listening. Like, they would be much more likely to stop in their tracks and watch that. Instead, I got anybody and everybody. And then they would come and watch that video and 95% of people wouldn't be accountants and they would bounce and the algorithm would be like, oh, nobody actually likes this video so we're not going to put it in front of more people. So where I struggled for years was like I wasn't specific enough. And I would still be making videos that nobody would ever watch. And if I was doing, you know, general small business content or something like that, and maybe it would pick up some and it would, it would be bigger than the channel that I have now, because it is, what I have now is a micro niche channel. I only have 13,000 subs on the main channel. But you don't want to pump yours into this with no results. I get that the solution is specificity, speaking to a very, very specific person where nobody else is making that content. Because the further down that funnel, like the further down that path of specificity you go, the less it matters. And this is why you can sit across from a CL in a one on one situation or send a crappy loom video to a client in a one on one situation and they're like, thank you so much. That was incredible. But by traditional standards, that video was crap and you were stammering and, and your hair didn't look right and the lighting wasn't right. They don't care. That was specifically for them. Like they just wanted to see you and get value. And that is the bottom of the specificity funnel. It's for one person, a very specific thing. If you go to the other end of the spectrum and you're making something for everybody, man, that bar is through the roof. We're trying to get like further, further down where that stuff just doesn't matter. Ultimately, people, like, in the business context, if they're going to take time to watch a video, they really just want value. Can you like, attract more people through fancy editing and stuff like that. Like, yes, but if I'm the only one making videos for beekeeping business owners, they're going to watch my crappy loom videos if they're helpful, if the subject matter is there, if I packaged it in a way that's attractive to beekeeping business owners. So get specific. Like that is how you get ROI core quick. On this subject of firms pre and post Internet, great question came up on Twitter. I did another rundown of like, hey, here's 50 specialization ideas. The one I did this week is actually really cool. We may do a standalone episode on like take a specialization and go through the steps of finding. In this case, I found like conferences you could go to for it. I found a list of blog posts that you could sponsor and get a plugin. I found a book, book about it where you could get a plugin like the next edition of the book. A lot of like really tactical ways to get into this specific, like really valuable niche. Anyway, somebody replied on there, said, these are great lists. Be cool to know the total size of each of these markets to help prioritize. And this is it matters. It's not to say the total size of a niche does not matter, but we are biased to too much still to it needing to be massive. Because pre Internet you had to go after a massive niche. Like, that was just how it was. You're going down to chamber meetings like you're just doing business with local people. There's no way to find specificity. And so like, you know, is there enough dentists in town for me to work with to build a firm around? Probably not. And unless I'm on the circuit and like physically going out to conferences doing all this different stuff, I probably can't build a national business doing that stuff as opposed to these days. And Covid pulled us way ahead on this stuff matter where you are. Like, it really doesn't. And clients more than ever before, they're all happy with video conferencing. They're probably going to video conference you if they're across town. And due to the way that algorithms work and the fact that algorithms, like focus us on very, you know, specific interests, we can now attract people from anywhere. And like, our brains just aren't capable of seeing and projecting the amount of specificity there are in people's problems and the number of people that are out there. Like, our brains just, we try to simplify everything, right? Like our memories, like, everything is just. Our brain is like this trash compactor and if we think about making a post online and everything and every person that can be on the other side of engaging with that post, we just can't see into how many people there are and how many pains they have that we can help them solve. And so we're still biased to try to find markets that are bigger than they need to be. When, man, when it comes to running like small accounting firms, the most fun version of that to me is not big. It doesn't take many clients. The the specialization we looked at today on social media was private, private, private air charter services. Most of them fall within like $1 to $20 million a year. 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 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 US you can get folks that can do anything from tax to junior level stuff to super senior level stuff. But try to do that yourself. Figure it all out yourself. That's going to be hard. It's going to be scary. Really good place to start Cloud accountant staffing. They will hold your hand through that process. Their story is super simple. An accounting firm in the US hired a bunch of people in the Philippines, fell in love with them, but didn't fall in love with the fees they were having to pay to the staffing companies that were managing these employees. So they built their own solution and now they're starting to pull other accountants in. I'd encourage you. A big tipping point for me was when I was like, I'm gonna stop being opinionated on this and just try to learn. And so I talked with other practitioners, I talked with some of the vendors that would like, help you get into offshoring. That really opened things up for me. So if you've been on the fence, I'd encourage you to at least learn about it and you start heading down that path, consider cloud accountant staffing. I think the another one that we looked at a week or two ago was software development agencies for healthcare providers, which is a real thing. I've got a buddy who they do like big platform stuff for big healthcare groups and they have like conferences specific to healthcare software. All this different stuff where you could go and build that specialization, these specializations, like if you're running a small boutique firm, you can charge top, top dollar for this stuff. And it does not take many clients to have a killer business. I mean you can run a 50, a 50 client firm where you're averaging, you know, 20 to $50,000 a years in fees per client and you've got a 3 to 5 million firm that you could run with 10 people. Like man, that's an accounting firm that I get excited about, right? And these are specific, very specific clients with specific needs. You know this stuff better than anybody else. You're visible, you are perceived as the expert because you're at the conferences and they see your thought leadership and you're one of one, like you're solving meaningful problems and they're going to pay top dollar for what you can do for them. And like, for context, like that may sound very hoity toity. And I mean most accounting firms are not there and I wasn't there when I was running a firm for context. The accounting firm that I Bought is an 80 year old tax firm. We were doing like we had 1040s, we were doing for decades for $200 or less. I think I've shared before I did an analysis, we had something like 1500 clients and, and 80% of the headcount of clients in the firm made up for less than 5% of the revenue in the firm. So we had a huge volume of itty bitty projects that were like the hundred dollar bill on the sidewalk. Who are you to walk away from that $200 project? Like somebody wants us to do their personal tax return, you know, charge them 200 bucks. It's gonna take us 20 minutes to do like we're a hundred bucks in costs into it. Like why not? That's $100 bill on the sidewalk and before you know it you've got, you've collected like decades of these little itty bitty projects that aren't really moving you forward in a meaningful way. So like I am truly from itty bitty firm. Like all of the traditional legacy firm problems. Like that is my background. And it was not until talking with and learning from people who run these super specialized firms and seeing the power of visibility and leverage myself that I got excited about. Holy smokes. Can you run a killer firm with the specificity that social media and all that enables, like in a way that's just. It makes accounting firm running so, so much more compelling than it ever was before. When you're out there hustling like chamber meetings and sponsoring little league teams, not to say you shouldn't still be. They'll go to chamber meetings, sponsor the little league teams, but it just makes the prospect of running super profitable little accounting firms like so, so juicy. So does the size of the market count? It does. But I do think we are still biased to thinking it needs to be larger than it needs to be. We're not going micro enough. Last thing we'll tackle today. Thank you for this question. On Tuesday's pod where I last railed on social media for accounting firms, what are your thoughts on content pillars? All the gurus rave about content pillars and how they're necessary to create an intentional social media strategy. Pillars for me are what are the pains I'm building around? So I want to attract clients via very specific pains and then sell them a solution to those pains. So those are the pillars that I talk about. When you're starting out, it doesn't make sense to go all in on one. I will say you ought to have a landing page for a, for a specific avatar. So if you're, if you're on a traditional firm right now, but you want to start working with board game creators, you ought to have a separate landing page that is like optimized for those board game creators. But, but my pillars that I'm building around are the pain points, not the general tax and accounting pain points that all small business owners have. Try to spin that to an angle that is specific to that type of person. Do they all share tax and accounting pain points? Yes. But what is a weigh in that is going to be so specific to that type of business owner, to where they see that and they're like, oh man, I can't work with anybody else because they're the only one that's actually attacking it from this angle. And that may feel too specific and you'll drill into like, whoa. But the pains are different at different stages of running that type of business. Yeah, like that specificity is fine. And even if people are kind of just outside of that bubble, they will still be excited by your specificity and be like, I'm not quite that, but can I still work with you? And that's a good position to be able to be in, to be able to say yes or no. So the pillars, when I think of pillars, I think of what are those pain points? And then what's a hundred different ways that I can talk about those pain points. Do that consistently. You will sound like a broken record. But know that nobody has like that spotlight effect on yourself quite like you do. You're going to say something and think, well, everybody heard it last time. The good news is they didn't. They just didn't. Last one is from the same question. A two parter question says, from my research, most bookkeeping or accounting firms are creating content on how to start a firm and not content for potential clients. So interestingly, I suspect what is happening here is because you consume content about accounting firm running, your algorithm serves up people who are talking about accounting firm running because that's what you engage with. But if your firm works with vet clinics, am I gonna go engage with vet clinic content? Probably not, cause I don't really care about that. So all the accounting firms that are targeting vet clinics, like you're not gonna see that stuff in your feed. I suspect that's probably what's happening. And there are an increasing number of accountants who are, you know, marketing and creating stuff for accountants. And I'm for sure like an advocate of that. I think we need like, I would love to see way more content creators like myself building helpful stuff for accountants. I try to say all the things that I needed to hear five years ago. I also think that like me being able to do this and find success in this has been proof for other folks and make made it feel more accessible for other folks to see that. Oh, like you actually can like build a business around thought leadership for accountants. But I suspect it looks like firms are talking about how to make money as a firm because that's the content that you'll engage with. So that's what the algorithms will continue serving up to you. It's really odd and each, each platform is a little bit different. But I was going through the people that I follow on Twitter the other day and I'm like, man, I haven't seen anything from this person in forever. I hope they're all right. And I'm like, they posted 12 times last week and then I went to another person I was thinking about. I'm like, they posted three times today. Like this stuff is never coming through my feed. These feeds are like so, so optimized for what they think you will click on now and so far removed from here are the people that I follow, and so here are all the posts that I see. The risk is you end up in this little echo chamber and you think this is like a complete reflection of reality, right? Just what's served up in your social media algorithm. And this is the risk, but it's also the opportunity. This is why your itty bitty account posts about beekeeping can be found because of that specificity, because the people that engage with beekeeping stuff will get served up your posts from your itty bitty account, while your account that posts about general business stuff nobody's ever gonna see. So that's the risk, and that can create confusion, but that's also the opportunity and why you can actually get an ROI from this stuff without having to sink years into it. And I do, like, I try to share a bunch of the stuff that I've learned to, like, cut the years off of that for you and look at like, real posts from real people to help you more analytically think about, like, how can I write this in a way that will actually convert and actually find people? If you had to do all that stuff from scratch, it would take years. But there's a different level of like, maturity and thinking around how to optimize for algorithms now than I would even argue there was a few years ago when I started doing this. And so, you know, nobody is better positioned to be successful at this stuff than the folks who are consuming content to teach them how to do that better. Right? Like you are, you are better positioned to get a quicker ROI on that stuff than the person who, like, hasn't taken the time to learn any of it or will just like, chuck a post out a week or the person who's hired the marketing agency to do it for them because they don't want to. I know people that run marketing agencies that are good people, but I don't think in the Internet age that you can delegate the value of being visible online because it is about building a client base, but it's also about building your professional identity and all the other adjacent things that happen that are like a great upside of being visible. I go to a conference, I meet a bunch of cool people I wouldn't have otherwise met. I get invited to conferences because people see me online. Is that something that you can really delegate to a, to a marketing agency? And I get that it's not something that, like, most people want to do, and that's ultimately the folks that the, the marketing agencies are probably serving. But it is interesting how, how you know, what a echo chamber, the little algorithms that we scroll all day are now and how they're just a reinforcement of the stuff that we engage with. I would encourage you to think about what is it? What is. What is a high leverage skill that you could develop that would aid everything else that you do. Public speaking, interviewing, podcasting, writing, doing video. How can you invest in a skill that will work for you while you sleep? Because accounting firms, by default, are just kind of inherently low leverage. You know, what's the thing that you would take to most that sounds fun, that you would enjoy, that can work for you while you sleep? It is quite the drug. Like, once you start experimenting there and you're like, oh, dang, this person has like seen a bunch of my stuff already and they're now willing to pay way more than any of my other clients. Or I just helped a whole bunch of people at a scale at which I've never helped anybody. I could have stayed at my firm and sat there and developed junior accounts and created a great place to work. But I am very convicted that this is like a higher scale way of. Of helping more people. And usually the reason we don't invest in that thing is on a micro scale. It means maybe letting somebody down or not being able to serve as many people one on one. And that feels more painful then the flip side than the upside. Of all the people that we can help that we can't see yet, we're blind to like, the opportunity of doing that. Cause we're fixated on the. The more immediate pain of like that smaller scale, the people that you will disappoint, that sort of thing, man, that's. There's a lot of aspects of just being an adult that that gets in the way of. But thanks for coming and hanging this week. We got a pretty fun thing in store next week. I'm not gonna blow it. Tune in on Monday. I think you will like it. It's not going to be me railing at you about social media. That's the good news. It's going to be fun. I'll see you there.