206 What To Do When Clients Want a Status Update 🫠

How do you deal with the dreaded status update request? Hey, you got that thing done yet? How's it coming along? Listen, Bob, I'm working on it, okay? Bless the hearts of us tax bros who are in the thick of this right now, but it impacts any type of work, accounting, work assurance. We're going to share some band aid short term solutions for when you are in the thick of it, but also some longer term how do I solve this to never have to deal with it again sort of thing. Hi, is my tax return ready yet? Just checking in. I know you're busy. Thanks so much. Oops, haven't heard. Back on vacation. Hope you're well. Kind regard. Okay.

Just checking in. How's it looking? Not to interrupt your work, but let me interrupt your work. Is it done? I'm just wondering. I thought maybe it was done and you just forgot to tell me. Please get off my bleeping bag. I've got work to do, probably more than you, and I'm trying to stay on track. Please take your questions and shove them. Will let you know when it's ready to go. In the meantime, go away. Go away. Go away. Get off my.

That's the Jason Daly house band with Go Away. If this is your first time tuning into the podcast, let me welcome you with an apology. Okay, status update requests. Just checking in. Is it done yet? Am I going to owe tax? When do you think it'll be done? Does the fact that I'm going on vacation mean that I can get it earlier? It is a tale as old as time and it is a symptom of under communication. But that doesn't help me get out from what I'm stuck in right now. Right. So yes. Is it something that we probably could have had a better solution for? Upfront? It is. But the reality is a lot of people, us tax pros in particular, you're in the middle of it right now. So it doesn't really help for me to tell you that I do think it's. I'm noticing an interesting trend these days. As we all use products, more and more aspects of our lives get kind of productized and built into software, that people expect product level things from services, from people who do services. When I'm not a product, I'm a person that does a thing. And maybe to a degree, it's a generational thing where you have. I definitely think generationally folks will default to using software for a thing rather than a human for a thing. But you'll see people online who are like I can log in and check my bank balance anytime, but why can't I log in and see when my landscaper last visited my house? And then somebody will reply and be like, if I needed to check when my landscaper last came to my house, what's the point of even having a landscaper? And then that conversation just goes in circles. People, I feel like are are increasingly demanding of service companies expecting more product like things from them. That is always being on, always being reachable. And to be honest, service businesses in general have probably trended the opposite direction. I blame it on Covid, blame it on staffing, whatever you want to blame it on. It's probably just like reaching peak hustle is honestly probably what it is more than anything else. At the end of the day it's a capacity thing. But we find ourselves at this weird intersection of needing to be premium because we cannot get lumped in with Bench, with TurboTax, with QuickBooks, Live Bookkeeping, with the growing number of productized solutions. And AI is going to make this even. I don't want to say worse, but AI is going to help product services continue to come up market. We don't want to get lumped in with all these productized services and if we do, then we're ultimately living on borrowed time. So we have to differentiate the way in which we deliver our service. So we can't be a product. But some days it also feels like I can't be a service because I just can't do enough and I am just a person. So how do I deliver some aspects of being a product without getting lumped in with products but still do so in a way that feels high touch like that feels premium. I think long term for accounting firms, what we would call premium today or white glove is all that there will be and software will gobble up the rest. And so if we zoom in specifically to checking in on the status of a project, does that mean making a client log into a thing to check the status? Does that mean sending an automated email so they always know what's going on? Does that mean just humans getting in touch? Then what do you do when every client wants something different? And as with many things, firm running spoiler alert, there isn't a perfect answer here. There is no like one size fits all solution. That's gonna be the right answer for every firm and for every client who are gonna have wildly different preferences. But I'm gonna share some advice both to get you through the short term. If you are, if you are struggling with this today alongside more long term. How do we just build a better plan for this in the future? Not to solve for it perfectly but to take you further down the path of finding something better. I find, and maybe this is just maybe I'm bad at giving advice but I find when it comes to accounting firms cuz there's so much nuance that the the easiest way to frame and sell advice online is to have the ultimate solution to say this is the framework and the way to do it when I don't. There's very very few things that are the right answer for everyone. So so take this, take this as advice to get to something better. Not just something perfect, but something better. Okay. How to stop the bleeding Band aid kind of considerations. Now nothing can be more infuriating than when you are at your busiest and you just want to be left alone to get work done. But people keep making stupid trivial asks of you. And honestly I think part of what makes this like make your blood boil is the fact that you might not have good news. In fact you usually don't. I'm annoyed that they're asking, but I'm also annoyed that it isn't done and I would love to tell them that it is, but it just ain't. And it is worth trying to keep perspective of how clients can't see into what it is that you're dealing with and try to give them a bit of grace. Because honestly the worst thing that you can do in this situation is ignore them or make them feel not valued. And sometimes folks will do like auto auto email replies during busy season or put stuff in their email signature and I don't think there's anything wrong with that necessarily. But I do think you want to watch out for a tone that can come across as maybe unappreciative is the best way to frame it. I think you just want to be careful there because what people are going to remember and this isn't the case for all types of work, but it is definitely the case for the type of work that we do. What people are going to remember is not the technical stuff. Like with very limited exception, maybe pull a rabbit out of the hat and you save em a bunch of money unexpectedly or something like that and they'll remember that. But most of the time what they're going to remember has nothing to do with the technical stuff. It is all the stupid stuff that honestly most of us don't want to fuss with. But as a like a byproduct of doing this business, it's being polite and being responsive and make making them feel smart, not talking down to them. When they think back on the experience of, you know, getting the bookkeeping done or getting a tax return done, or doing some advisory work, what they're going to remember is much more emotional, much more relational and just like on a, on a bigger scale, comes back to the notion that anytime you are doing technical work or anything that the person isn't going to understand or can't visually look at and benchmark from A to B, they're going to make buying decisions and their perception of it will be totally driven by the aspects of that process that they can understand. Which is not the technical stuff. It's going to be how you come across on video, how how clear your written communication is, how accessible you are. This episode is sponsored in part by the fine folks atshare file sharefile. It is a secure, easy to use collaboration and workflow solution made to meet the needs of your accounting firm and their clients. The ShareFile for accounting solution helps enhance client onboarding processes, organize document collection and orchestrate secure document exchange. With document status visibility, automated emails and e signature capabilities, ShareFile makes for a more modern client experience. Because that stanky old client experience they have right now, it's not good enough. Stop emailing files back and forth. You better than that. To learn more about how the ShareFile for Accounting solution can help increase your firm's workflow efficiency, security and collaboration, go to sharefile.com or click the link in the Show Notes to learn more. This episode is sponsored in part by Cloud Cloud Accountant Staffing. You'll know I'm a big advocate of hiring offshore. One of the biggest changes I made in my firm, we transitioned a Legacy firm from 100% onshore local hiring to 100% distributed US and then 100% distributed globally hiring and honestly is the best thing we did. It virtually alleviated all of our hiring pains, completely changed how we thought about staffing projects 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. We 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, 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. It's all these other things that frustratingly, when we take pride in our technical abilities and that's what we talk about with our peers and all that those technical abilities are a long ways down the list of what things are front of mind for the client. Now, they may not say that, they may say, I want the best of the best, but the reality is they don't have a way to benchmark what you're doing against what anybody else is doing. So how are they going to know that they get that they're really getting the best of the best? In fact, if you do pull a rabbit out of the hat and save them a bunch of money, that person could just as easily say, well, if I'd have gone to the person across the street, they would have done the same thing. So is that really differentiating you or is that even your fault for not having brought that up earlier? So it's even hard to say that that's really a differentiator. What they're making decisions on is all is is the packaging. It's all the stuff wrapped around the actual doing of the work. And it's why, even though this is really dumb, it's why ignoring them and being curt and rude is just not gonna be the solution. And in the end, this means, yes, you're gonna get less work done. Like, it will take longer to get their return done because you had to stop and have that stupid conversation. And the best thing that we can do is embrace the fact that that is okay because more important than this project or this thing that you're trying to get done Right now is the long term health of the relationship. And this is counter to the accountant blood that runs through most of our veins where we're focused on the technical stuff and squeezing everything that we can out of it. But the reality is slowing down, getting less done and making people feel valued counterintuitively is going to be the best long term thing for the company. And that's annoying because I'm like, I'm like a purist, purist. I want that like factory line just humming and churning out things as quickly as we can. And in many ways this is kind of at odds with that. Now some other more actionable things you can do here when you're in the thick of it, a big one. Don't be afraid of sending the no update update. The update that says I don't have anything to tell, more to tell you, but we're still working on it. People super appreciate that. And I think oftentimes we don't want to do that or we're maybe afraid to do it because we don't like the fact that we don't have anything more to share and that we are still working on it. But that is better than nothing. And it's ensuring that they know you haven't forgotten about them, which is what a lot of this boils down to, I think. Like they're actually following, following up just to make sure like that they're still a priority and haven't been forgotten. And in most cases they haven't been. Every now and then somebody follows up and you're like, oh shoot, no, that one did fall through the cracks. But when somebody's coming to you from that place of like, have I been forgotten? And you're like, get off my back. Yay hole. I don't know that you've actually made them feel better rather than like painting a picture of the story of, you know, how their work is going through your process. That's a very fanciful way of saying that, but like that's what people want to hear, is that they're important, is that everybody's working really hard on their stuff and that it's really important that you do it as best you can. And the no update update ensures that they know that they're not forgotten. Now when you send that update or if you kind of ending, ending some conversation as you go back to working on it, consider telling them when they can next expect an update. If you tell them when they're going to get updated next, it buys you that time. Maybe that's two Weeks out, maybe that's a week out, maybe that's a month out. But if you actually say I'll follow up with you by X date, then you've at least bought yourself that block of time. Now you gotta remember to actually do it. So put it on the calendar, put it somewhere where it's not gonna get missed. But I would do this oftentimes with the most demanding clients who were really regularly following up like several times a week and pestering me. I'd be like, hey, I'm gonna get you an update by the end of next week. And it would buy me some time with them. Now strategically, if you are bearing down on a big deadline like us tax pros are now, it might make sense to just put together a quick little plan for how we're gonna manage the burn down to the deadline and what those communications look like. So maybe that is an email going out to everybody. So tax deadline for US tax pros 415. But you're gonna have a bunch of examples of this from like, you know, year end processes, all those thresholds where a bunch of stuff hits the fan at the same time. But I'm gonna look at the deadline, I'm gonna work backwards from there. Maybe I send an update on the first, maybe I do it every Monday from here to that deadline. And maybe it takes somebody on the team a half a day to do this. But also consider like the time that folks are going to get back. Consider how clients will value that and actually feel like they're getting attention even though you are busy. Like that will go a long ways with them. Always better to over communicate than under communicate. So what can this look like in practice? This is probably going down the list of all the projects in process that are due on that date or that person thinks they're at least going to get some sort of communication by that date. You got some templated communications for what those look like according to the status that a given project is in. So if it's in status X, like here is the message that goes out and you probably have that person who will be sending those emails doing a quick run through with the people in charge of those accounts to say, here's what I've got on the list. And if there's, you know, for some reason, any reason why that email shouldn't go out to that person or why it should be modified, then the person in charge can speak into that. Now if you run a team in a perfect world, this isn't your most technical super busy people and everybody's busy as you're coming up on a deadline. But in a perfect world, it's not your technical folks who are doing the heavy lifting on this, sending this email out, because sending emails out to everyone will trigger an avalanche of emails. So you don't necessarily want to start a new conversation to tie up that person's time further. And I mean there's, there's no solution here that just doesn't totally grind your gears on. Yeah, but we're taking away time from doing the work. Yeah, but it means we're gonna get less done. And that's, that's gonna be the truth. If you zoom out and you think about what's happening for the profession and for professional services in general, the reality is running a service business that will hold up against productized solutions and AI and all that stuff, it's high touch business. And with that comes a lot of communication, a lot of overhead associated with managing the relationship itself, even when that can get in the way of doing the actual work. So if you're in the thick of a deadline, no magic wand that's going to make all this stuff go away. But as is always the case, any system is better than no system, even if it can't be automated. There's this almost like, you know, automations become so sexy. There's almost this like shaming of manual processes that happens these days. I for one, like, obviously I love automation, but I'm also a really big fan of manual processes because a byproduct of that shaming and not wanting to have manual processes is folks will oftentimes try to automate something, realize it's not possible and then have no process. So like, you've failed to make a rule that humans can very easily follow because it can't be automated. And this is an example where it's like if we're going to say the rule is every week or every other week up until the deadline, everybody gets, all the clients with projects in process get an email, and that requires some manual work, then that's how it is. But if you're running a team, like you've got to set the rules there. Particularly because if you have a whole bunch of people doing this work, they're not all going to assign the same value to managing the client throughout this process. Your team likely thinks, if they're technical people, that the most important thing is just to get the work done. And maybe that's what we're saying here is it isn't, is there something more important than Getting the work done, it's making the client feel heard and understood and maintaining that relationship. And so it may actually take you making the rules and saying this is how much time, this is how much we need to communicate with folks to ensure that they know that we're still working on it and they feel heard. Now those are some ideas for kind of short term band aid things to do. Longer term, if you think about how various different types of products manage communications and we're not a product, but it's worth thinking about. The one everybody always brings up is, you know the Domino's Pizza tracker, which you order pizza and you've got a little visualization of like what step in the process that pizza is. By the way, it's completely fake. It's not tied to reality at all. It all just works on a timer basically has two states that it started and that it's done. And when a worker indicates that it's done, it jumps to the final step. Otherwise it's just progressing through those things on a general timer that ought to be accurate. So you got the pizza tracker. You think of stuff like, you know, door dash, like meal delivery sort of things you get. There's a, a whole sequence of things from the restaurant, working on your order to the dasher, going to the restaurant to the dash or being on your way to the dasher, dropping off six other orders on the way and they put, you know, the GPS front and center, like that is the focal point because it's a very visual, like tangible, here's where they are. In fact, when I pull it up, if that dasher is on the way to my house, it doesn't show a zoomed in view of them or it doesn't show them on one side of the map and my house on the other side of the map. It shows the restaurant on one side of the map and me on the other side of the map and the progress of the dasher towards me. So they're doing all sorts of things to show the progress and show the work that they have done. You're getting mobile notifications for like every step along the way. And you compare that to for example shipping like tracking packages. This can actually be a frustrating experience, especially if you're dealing with like more like freight carriers. There's fewer updates. When something goes across the country, it can be like a week to get an update because it's sitting in a truck somewhere there. The other end of that spectrum is some areas where Amazon like you can literally get updates when it's like they're three houses down, there are two houses down. Like the other extreme end of the spectrum. So what can we take from this? The, like the products, like your doordash, your meal delivery, stuff like that, like, they are the most optimized for human happiness versions of this. I think, like they put a ton of money and research into what is going to be the perceived, like, best experience for the user. It ultimately doesn't change what time your food arrives, but it can have a big impact on your perception of the experience. This episode is sponsored in part by Live Flow. You may have seen a recent main channel video or my newsletter where we showed how to build an AI chat assistant on top of a set of financial statements so that when you deliver them to a client, the client can like chat with the financials. It's actually really interesting, like really good at like answering dumb, like basic questions. What happened to my office expense this month? You know those questions. And actually a really compelling way of building cool AI stuff right now is using Live Flow to sync data from QuickBooks to your Google Sheets. Because Google Sheets has an entire ecosystem of stuff built around it already. All sorts of other tools you can plug into Google Sheets and when those tools can then see all of your accounting files stuff, I mean, liveflow lets you push like all of the. A whole bunch of the reports from QuickBooks, balance sheets, P and L, but also general ledgers. All of the detail you could possibly need. If you are looking for a really interesting way to like make your firm stand out, particularly if your clients are the type of folks who are into AI right now, it's a really cool way to do it. Use Live Flow to bridge that data to the spreadsheet and then AI tooling to take it from there. And then use that spreadsheet either by uploading it to an AI tool or via integration, letting people then like interact with that accounting information. Pretty cool. And if you're working with big clients like company groups, like I was doing before I got out of firm running liveflow Consolidation can actually roll up a whole bunch of those files and give you that reporting too. Imagine being able to chat with like Consolidated Reporting. That's pretty darn cool. You want to learn more about that one? Check out the link 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 Team up and all the other offshoring options is that Team up helps you hire staff directly. No middleman. You Work directly with your new hire in the Philippines. Hire the person, not the company. Guys, gals, gang. Here's just a few reasons to hire directly. You have access to higher level talent. Makes sense. You have complete control over team culture and training. They keep 100% of what you pay them and it's a lot more affordable for you. So you can retain your team for the long term. Team Up Consource 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 pod? Not anymore. And they can connect you with an affordable employee 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 and there's probably some things to steal there around like messaging and showing the work that you've already done and like a little bit of education on what it means to be in the status that you're in right now. Now some folks have fully committed to giving clients access to see the status or like automated emails every time the status changes, that sort of thing. And that's becoming more commonplace among practice management systems as part of that client portal is they can log in and see the status of any projects that are in the works I think. And people have like people end up being really opinionated here on on all things client portals people seem to seem to be opinionated. I think that both the white glove approach and the self service approach is the path forward. So for example if you need a copy of your tax return, if you need a copy of a past month end close I'm happy to get it for you if you ask But I'm also going to have a self service portal so that you can get it yourself if you want because reality is like we fixate on the few people who will complain about I don't want to have one more thing to log into like goodness sake people it's 2024 but oftentimes those people are the exception. I would say what's become much more normalized is people being able to log in to a portal and grab whatever they want when they need it. Like I'm not calling somebody to get my utility bill. So for me I'm going to do both because I want the people who are happy to self serve to be able to get that stuff immediately to then obviously not have to bother me. But I also want them to feel taken care of. And oftentimes when those little trivial things come up they will lead to something more. So somebody asks for a tax document and that actually leads to a whole other conversation that wouldn't have happened otherwise. And so I don't mind still having that touch point but the fact that I still want to have that touch point in my mind is not a reason to not have a portal, to not have a self service solution. So when it comes to updating people on statuses, if I can manage this in my practice management system so people can like log in and see that, I think that's a win. I think that's a good thing. Automated emails on status changes, I'm unsure on that one. If it's too much, it can be spam. Also because the software platforms are required to give them a way to opt out. I say that I don't know that that's actually the case because there's certain updates like that where you're allowed to not give them a way to opt out. But most platforms do because clients can generally opt out of those or start putting them in junk, which is even worse. I don't know that those automated notifications actually did anything to like get us to a standard across the board in our firm. Because if we're going to say the only way we're going to notify people is with these automated notifications and then people send me to send them to junk or opt out then those people have now fallen through the cracks. They're not getting contacted on the cadence that we expect. So my opinion especially and I generally was more in favor of like running things more on the, the high touch end of the spectrum because that's, that's more protected from the productized solutions that are coming up market. I never got away from more personal updates that coming from an actual person that the client knows now. I think the best thing that you can do here is in a system agnostic way, doesn't matter how you do it, have a firm wide policy on how much you're going to communicate. So for any projects in process, what is the rule that the client has to hear from us every week, every two weeks? Make a rule across the board and if there's some kind of automated ways to get there, great. But at the very least there needs to be a manual process to ensure that you are following up with those clients, even if it is a no update update. Again, over communication beats under communication. And I suspect the reason that most of us don't do this is maybe you don't have somebody on the team who would be that communicator. Like I do think, and this is something firm owners go round and round on. Do you have a client relations person? But then does that like fragment conversations with the client even more? Where now they have to go to a tax person and a bookkeeping person and a client relations person. Did that really consolidate those two or did it just add a third? I do think we need something, you know, more along the lines of a paralegal where like somehow your most technical people need someone who can help them, who is copied on the interactions you have with that client, who can be the one to manage these follow ups, these status updates, these outbound status updates so your clients don't have to make those requests of you. The way I was building my firm actually was wrapping a support team around all of our most technical people. So they would be in a pod and each pod had, whether it was a junior person or an admin person who was part of information gathering. So the most, you know, progressive accounting and tax firms I know it is not the most technical people that are doing all the information gathering. It is somebody that is working with them to do that. You look at, you know, U.S. tax season in most firms, tax professionals will spend upwards of a third of their time just gathering information and managing the documents they just got sent and putting them into the right format. All of this stuff that can be done by somebody who's not a technical subject matter expert or as a junior person. And then the time you're getting back from your most technical people there, that's gold. I'm an advocate of having not unlike, I want an admin assistant for me or a VA or something like that, building a version of that to support my most technical folks. Because if I go to them and I say, you need to email your clients every single week, they're gonna be like, good one. But if they have somebody that can help them with that, your technical people are gonna be like, that'll be great. Cause that'll take Some of the pressure off of me to constantly be updating them on how things are going. So I know for some folks right now this seems unreasonable or feels like a lot of work, but I think it's probably because the makeup of the team is not such that you have the right person to go do that job and leveraging this more entry level or admin person to like put the cherry on top of the client service. Like when a huge part of this whole thing is the perception of how that service went for the client and a lower cost, easier to find person can be the one to enable that. That's perfect. That's exactly what we're looking for. Finding another technical subject matter expert who's even smarter and can do even more astronomically expensive, hard to find pull in a person that can be high touch, that is good with client relations that can just come in and be a helper there. That's a total no brainer. Now last thing I'll say, and you've heard me say it before, the complete solution here is scheduled intake and scheduled delivery. It is taking control of when that work goes out the door so that the client knows before the engagement even begins. This is when you're going to get your stuff back. And ultimately we talk about all these different ways of managing deadlines and capacity and all these things. The only way to take total control over everything is to think more like, you know, a manufacturing facility where they don't just make widgets. When somebody turns up with an armful of raw materials like this stuff is all planned. And that ultimately to me is the only complete escape from the hamster wheel that can feel like, well, we're just going to do our best, do our best to get it done as quickly as we can. When you bring it in and then inevitably you're, you're in over your head there. You're letting people down because a bunch of people make a run on the bank and bring you their stuff at the same time. Maybe you made a cutoff deadline because you wanted everybody to get, to get, get their stuff to you by then. And then twice as many people get you their stuff and it still takes the same time to do all of that work. And you've just let half of those people down because they brought you their stuff earlier and are not going to get it any sooner. You've heard me rail on this one enough. I think we're actually going to do, we might dedicate a whole week to this after the tax deadline in April. Soup to nuts. Why and how to schedule more of your work in your accounting firm, be it tax work, accounting work, whatever it is, from a very practical standpoint, how to do that, how to baby step into it, how to transition into it, because I can convince you of the theory and why that's better, but that doesn't help me get from A to B. That was always where I got stuck is I would like go to a conference and be like, yep, makes sense. But boy, that sure seems hard to get to from where I am today. So we talk about status requests and what the ultimate solution is to that is to plan all that stuff out ahead of time so that they know when they're getting it before you even begin work. And I know as soon as I say that there's like, what about this scenario and that scenario? And there will be exceptions. That's like, that's just part of it. But the fact that there will be exceptions doesn't mean that we shouldn't have a system and shouldn't build around the ideal process and accommodate the exceptions when they come up. So if you're out there fighting the good fight right now, that's you tax pros, try to keep your head honestly. The next, you know, three weeks, the things that you say, how you come across to people, that's going to stick with folks much longer than what feels like a scramble right now. And a lot of this probably just boils down to giving yourself and your team permission to get less done and set a little bit of time aside for the clients. Because if you don't do that, what are you left with, right? And then just tick you off to acknowledge that, like, can't I just be like a factory worker and just do this stuff? Please just let me get it work done.