207 Writing A Book To Build Your Accounting Firm

Gang, you are in for a special treat. Today we are chatting with the author of a book I've talked about quite a bit. This guy. This is a podcast. Why am I holding up a book? The accountant Marketer. You hear that? But we're not actually really talking about her book. You don't get to come on Jason Daly and shill your wares. We're talking about mainly two things. One, why write a book in 2024 in this economy? Have you seen TikTok? Can people even read anymore? And then two, who do you think you are to write a book? I don't know about you. If I think about, like, if I think about writing a book, I get sweaty in all sorts of places. I don't know how you manage the imposter syndrome problem of being like, well, I'm. I'm not a person that writes books. But then again, nobody is an author until they become an author. Until they write a book, right? So how do you manage that? Super fun conversation. Karen runs a successful agency. Not unlike somebody running an accounting firm. She's got plenty of things to do, so why write a book? We dug into that in this conversation. Hope you enjoy it. So, without further ado, here's Karen Raber.

Okay, Karen, for people who don't know you have actually I've talked about your book, I feel like, a number of times, and so they probably already have. But for the folks who don't know who you are or what you do, give them the. The quick and dirty intro.

Karen. I'm Karen Rayburn. I'm the owner and founder of pf, and we're a creative agency that works exclusively with accountants. We always have worked only with accountants. I'm a CPA myself, and we believe in helping accountants to understand marketing, even enjoy marketing, so that you get to attract the kind of clients you love working with and that your marketing can do that for you.

Karen, I never knew that you were a cpa.

I am. And that's why that was very important to me, so I could put it on the book.

Oh, my gosh.

Hey, this. Now I realize it does matter. I feel like it matters a little more in the States, but we work with accountants all over the world. And just having, you know, qualification, I worked hard for it, so I'm gonna keep it.

Yeah, I didn't realize you had that street cred.

Yeah.

It also explains why you do not.

Ask me to do your taxes. Like, please do not. But I've got the qualification. I watch the webinars. I keep it Alive, but no. I studied accountancy university. I worked as an auditor in the States for four years. I worked for an accountancy firm here in Scotland before I moved into the whole business development marketing thing. So, yeah, that's a. That's a big. That is why I work with accountants, because I'm an accountant, But I didn't want to do accounting. No offense. Accountants are amazing, wonderful people. I wanted to do the fun stuff of helping accountants to take what they know and do so well and help them translate it a little. You and I were talking about that if you stick with your accounting terminology that other accountants are familiar with, you'll attract other accountants. But if you turn it into something that is appealing to your kind of audience and talk in the way they do, then they understand why what you do is so amazing. And I think accountants are amazing.

Okay, so you went and did audit, and that's ultimately why you then said, I'm now going to do marketing.

I mean, really, the. The super. The short version of the super long story is I decided to go to Scotland for other reasons. I was like, there was an organization I was with, and I was like, hey, I'm gonna go to Scotland. Yay, Scotland. Beautiful country, right? Very, very beautiful. Spoiler alert. That's why. That was 23 years ago, and I just kept living here. But I got a job in an accountancy firm because that's what I was qualified to do. That's what I knew. They hired me as an auditor, and within a couple months, they're like, do you know, I think you could be really good at this business development thing we're doing. It's this new thing, and I'm like, I'm not quite sure what that is, but I'm all for it. Let's go. It sounds exciting. And it was, you know, the compliance to advisory, the marketing aspect, the consulting, and I just really enjoyed it. And I think there is an aspect that I could talk both languages and I could understand the accounting side, but then also turn and look at it from the client or potential client's perspective.

Yeah, I love that. I mean, that's like. There's so many great things. Most great things, I think, start that way where you're like, I don't really know what this is. And it starts very humbly. But then people see you on the other side of that. And, like, my assumption was, oh, Karen studied marketing and did all these things. And it was like, no, I'm actually like, just an account like everybody else. And one day somebody asked me to do this thing.

And spoiler alert, I've never studied marketing, which is why I'm the biggest fan of, like, the people we hire at my agency. In one sense, I do not care if you have a marketing qualification or not. I might lean a little bit to. It's better if you don't these days because I think there's so much that you can learn and show by experience and by what you try. Whereas, like, I took a management class at university and it was the most boring and the most utterly useless class I ever taken in my life. And I've certainly learned a lot more about management by managing and by helping our managers do that than I ever would in a class. So it's that, you know, you don't really learn to ride a bike at a seminar kind of concept. I think there's a good aspect of that to things like marketing. But, you know, hence writing the book. I'm like, I do want to summarize the things that I've learned and my clients have learned that when you have these principles, then you can play with it and feel a little more as an accountant especially feel a little more comfortable. Accountants tend to really like that structure that we're laying out. But we're like, it's not a rigid structure. Like, play with it. Have some. Use some of your innate creativity. Some accountants are like, yes, I have that. Some are like, oh, I'm not sure if I do, but it is there. And when you apply that to these principles of who's your audience? What do they think about? How do they think and feel? How do we connect what we do? What format do we use to tell them? That's when it really gets to be something that they can practically do on a daily basis.

Okay, Highly recommend you check out Karen's book. There will be a link in the show notes. What I super wanted to dig into with Karen today is this is the first book you'd written. Is that right? Is that the first book you've written?

Okay, it is correct. I'm working on book two, but this is book one.

Okay. Specifically, the first thing I wanted to dig into was why, of all the things that you could do, you are a busy business owner, you've got a team, you've got 100 other responsibilities. Not unlike an accounting promoter. Why write a book?

Yeah, my first reason was that had principles of things that I kept repeating over and over to every accountant that we worked with. Every talk I ever gave, every. Every. We do like 30 minute momentum calls with people who Just need to take a step forward or people are in our accelerator group. And every single one of those would come back to one of these 12 elements. So we just kept repeating. And I created a coaching group from it, and I was running that for eight years, and we're still running it now. And I thought it would be helpful to summarize what these 12 points were. And so I just put them into a Google Doc. And I was like, okay, this will be a nice little summary of all the content I've written on emails, which is chapter seven. Okay, let's put that in there. And all the content on video and all the content on branding. And oh, look, there's 60,000 words. Hey, this is a book. That was the practical element of turning the course and then the coaching group into just content that I was compiling. I felt like I was. At one point, I felt like I wasn't writing it, I was just gathering it. But I had been writing it for. Since I set up pf, I wrote an email and a blog post that I sent out every week for seven years. I never missed a Friday and sent that out every single week to be like, here's something. I'm marketing. So when I got to the point of saying, well, I have these 12 elements. What do I want to say? What's the most important message on each one? I. I just gathered what I had been writing, and that was my approach. Everybody approaches a book differently, but I remember when I was meeting with my editors and they're saying, yes, yes, you write a book to, you know, get your name out there and make money and all these things. And I'm like, first, let's not kid ourselves that writing a book makes you money, like in the book sales itself. I mean, I will not deny that there are many people have read the book and are more inclined to work with PF or more excited about it or more educated on it. We have a better, more collaborative relationship, and I love that. But actually, my. My real heart desire with writing the book was to help as many accountants as possible all over the world. And I cannot reach them all by even with things like my accelerator group or having pf. Like as many accountants as we want to work with, there are some who want to work with us. There are some who don't. There are some who aren't sure yet. There are some who aren't ready. There are some who worked with us for a time, and then they've hired and they just use us now and then for some strategy. But I wanted to have something that could be helpful for any accountant who picked it up, even if they never worked with us, that I could help take what I had learned and understood about that balance of accounting and marketing and say, here, here's this knowledge. Use it as you will. I want to help you as much as possible. That ultimately was what I wanted to do. And that is, that's been really exciting for me. Every time I get a message or somebody saying, hey, I read this and it made me think this. And then I did this and this was a win. Doesn't matter. There's no small victories. The tiniest things that people do, I'm like, I got to contribute in a small way to that. I love that. And I love being able to. I'd love being able to help people. It's one of the number one things that I want to do, whether it's helping them by working with me or helping connect them with somebody else who can help them better. As long as they get helped.

This episode is sponsored in part by the fine folks at ShareFile. ShareFile is a secure, easy to use collaboration and workflow solution made to meet the needs of your accounting firm and their clients. The ShareFile Fair 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're 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 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 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 Folks, 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 attention. They 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 encourage you to at least learn about it and start heading down that path. Consider cloud accountant staffing.

So let's just, can we just cruise through a list of like, what are all of the ways that this book ties back to Karen Rayburn? So I guess if top number one, you know, like, chief reason is like, I want to help people and I want to put it out there into the wild and I wanted to find folks who need to hear the things that I'm currently saying in, you know, smaller rooms, uh, give easier access to that. But there's a whole, there's a big old long list. And this is kind of the, I don't know, maybe what's sort of ambiguous about book writing is like the more abstract ways that things end up coming back around to you. So for, for everything that Karen does, like we're helping people now, but obvious, obvious tiebacks, you know, potential customers for the agency.

Right.

So potential firms coming back.

Yep.

I know you do a, is it like a mastermind group or like you do like sort of group coaching?

We call it a coaching group. So there's between 20 and 30 accountants, usually this time a little more. But they're about 30 accountants that go through 12 weeks of going through these concepts together but applying them to their firms. So accelerator is for sure 1. We're just about to open up the DIY account at Marketer which is, listen, if you're not ready to do the 12 week live coaching group and the time that that involves it's a series of 10 minute videos per session with a workbook and everything you need. And you can do it at any time of day or night. So you can do it that. So it's, it really is a bit of a triangle. You know, Daniel Priestley talks about that in the concept of 24 assets. You can buy the book or listen to the book or read the E book. You can go through the video course, which is there's a little higher price tag on that, but it's your own time and you can do it as you will. Or you can go through the accelerator group which is at a little higher price tag still. But you get more connection, more connection with me. I'm reviewing any content you create, so is our team. You know, there's a community element there, but any one of those three will help you to move forward in some way. And then from there you can choose. You know, there's things that we can help you with at the agency or to identify what those next steps are. So any one of those intro routes then leads into what's your next marketing project that you're going to do? Is it going to be branding, it's going to be websites, it's going to be campaigns. So any of those, it can lead into those. So I think that's part of it. It's also one of our team members said, gosh, the book is just like a little salesperson out in the wild. I'm like, it really is though, because every sales call that I have now, people are at least aware of it or they've read the intro or they listen to a chapter and like, do you know, I liked what you said about this and it made me think about this, you know, full disclosure. That doesn't mean every call I have that people automatically sign up, but it means that the conversation is stronger, clearer, faster you get to the good stuff, faster. I, I hate wasted time. That's one of the things I hate now. I like wasting time in my own way. No trouble with that. But know I will sit at the edge of the sea and just stare out at the water. No trouble. That's not wasted time. Wasted time to me is something that I'm doing that I have to be doing. And anything I can do to make things more efficient, I appreciate. So any, anything that I can do to make those meetings more effective. You know, the fact that you and I are talking is because I wrote a book. You know, I was aware of you before that. And now it's like, hey, we have this connection. And look, we're both CPAs. Let's talk about how we can help accountants in different ways and then that can reach somebody else and they can go off a different way. So there's just so many ways that people can enter and exit that. But in terms of connecting either with me or with pf, it's, it's a way to get to the good stuff faster.

Yeah.

So accountants are very ROI based creatures. Right. And very careful with how they spend their time. And part of that may stem from the fact that, you know, historically we always sold our time by the hour and maybe that's why it's hard to disassociate from that. But how do you make the ROI calculation for doing something as big and ambiguous as a book? Or would you say that misses the point because you also said there's an element of like, mission here, like just helping people.

Yeah, it's a, it's a really good question and it's one that I consider often with marketing, because you have accountants looking at what marketing they want to do and they're going, well, do I invest this big in this brand project, for example, and that's going to cost me 20 grand or 50 grand. What do I get? When do I get my 50 grand back? And the trouble is that integrating pieces, like you said, I, I 100% confident that publishing this book is one of the single best things that I've done for my agency, for me, for accountants, because of all those things that I wanted to do. And we're only six months in. You know, when I think of how much it smooths the way for the good conversations or just an easy thing for somebody who isn't ready to spend thousands and thousands on their marketing yet, because the, it's a mindset issue. Like a lot of accountants that we talk to have been burned with marketing. They've had bad marketing experiences, they've spent money or been promised things and then it hasn't delivered. And so their ROI little thing is like, yeah, but I already spent 20 grand and basically flushed it down the toilet, so I don't think I want to do that again. So there's a framing element and an education element to it, but I also think it's important to track as many numbers as you can when it comes to ROI and look at the patterns. So if we look at the kind of clients that we're working with in the past six months, the conversations we're having, the ease of collaboration with the team, the understanding that an accountant comes into a brand project now versus a year ago is already different. And even that, if that was the only thing that my book did, I'd be like, winning. Really glad I did it. But you have that, plus you have. We have one of the biggest accelerator groups that we've ever had because so many people are going, hey, I read the book now I would like a little additional help. And then we get to reach more accountants. So there is the numbered practical ROI, there's the mission Helping Heart ROI, and there's future ROIs that I don't even know. Things that are simmering that I don't even know the impact of. And it's. You and I were talking about this. It's the, well, I did this, and then this happened, and then I did that, and that happened. And part of creativity is just opening yourself up to. There are things that I know will come from this, and I don't know what they all are. And that's okay. I know what some of them are, and I'm going to do as much as I can with it and see what happens in a very positive way. And it certainly helped me when I was thinking of writing a book that I'm like, even if I'm not, you know, making cash money on the book, my sole goal, because I've talked to enough authors about that. I do know that those who have a book find that their clients are more educated, the sales process is easier, the impact is bigger, they reach more of them, and it just helps things. So for me, that alone was worth it, much less the 4700 other little things that daily happen that I can tie back to it.

I'd love to talk about that. The element of people building trust with you before they meet. Meet you. So even you said when we hopped on those call, you're like, I love that. It's like I'm watching a YouTube video. It looks the exact same. And when folks hop on a call with you, they're like, you know, they've seen your videos online and you're like, oh, it's like, kind of surreal. I'm actually talking to the person, they're talking back to me. And so when folks come in and that conversation is immediately higher level. I think people can understand how that happens because these days we all consume stuff from other humans and we're. We're fans of things. Yeah, but ultimately, how. From a very practical standpoint, how does that help your business? Is it. We're more in demand now, so we can. We can charge more. Is it our services ultimately work better because we're better aligned when they come in from day one, like very practically. How does that support the business?

Yeah, some of those things you mentioned. Absolutely. And so many of them. So one is the speed with which people become clients, if they are going to become clients. So if people are thinking about it, our average buyer, the length of time for our buyer cycle from just barely the first time you've ever heard of PF to committedly, regularly working with PF was 18 to 24 months for years, years and years and years. And we accepted that. We said, you know what? Accountants need time. They need to be able to mull this over, think about it, ask questions, consider, you know, we did everything possible that we thought we could do to speed that up as much as they wanted it to speed up. But ever since having the book, it's worth. I think our conversion rate is now close to five days. So when you.

From hearing about you to.

From inquiring, you know, from, hey, I'm curious about talking to signing up. Whereas in the past it could take people as long, now there are even some of those five days. People probably been aware of us for a while and it's simmering. But from the moment of inquiring. So instead of, I mean, to give you a nice specific numbered example last, we were just running these numbers last week for a board meet. So the conversion days was five, five days last month and six months ago, or it might have been eight months ago, it was 62 days. And that was from the date that somebody inquired. And that's the average. So we still have some people who got a quote six months ago, the quote's expired, they come back, we chat to them, we revive it, you know, and we go again, no problem, you know, talk to anybody at any time. But the point is, there are numbers that I have to say. I believe that the book has impacted that because I see all these other things. We had a team meet today and we had team members saying, you know, I'm just really amazed at the quality of the clients that we have. And the, and quality in terms of the values match. The, the things that they say where they're like, oh, yeah, it's like you guys say, it's this. So it makes everything more efficient. It makes the project run better, which enables us to give them a better experience. You know, we're still doing the good work we did before, but we're talking about it better. And some of the clients are more willing to say, I'm not Sure, if I like that. And we're like, thank you so much for telling us that we what is it that you don't like? And that alone makes the project go better than people going, oh no, I don't want to say anything because you're the experts. And now they know, hey, what I have to say is valuable too, because I remember reading that or listening to that, and so I'm going to pitch in. So the client relationship is better, which makes their experience better, which means we can move faster, which means they can get the results that they need quicker. They can get moving with the, they can get the foundational things so they can get moving on what feels like the more exciting stuff, like creating a campaign. And then they look at their campaign and they say, well, this is how many clients we want to sign up at the end of this campaign. Did we do it? Yes or no. And we're able to impact that.

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 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 Liveflow 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 file stuff. I mean, lifeload 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 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, lifelow 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 wanna learn more about that one, check out the link to LifeFlow in the show.

Notes.

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Okay, so the, the I think the big blocker with most people when they're thinking about writing a book is probably the first one we talked and like how do you ultimately do the mental math for the roi? I can tell you the second big one for me that I think a lot of accountants share. Who are you to write a book? Like who? Like who do you think you are? Like you? When I think of authors, it's like they're these big very impressive people and nobody I guess identifies as a book author until they've written a book. So there's like this chicken and the egg problem of well, I'm not an author so I'm not going to write a book. Like what?

What?

I guess, how did you overcome that kind of imposter syndrome and do something which honestly is like pretty brave? I think to put yourself out there. How did you. I don't know, how do you overcome that? Or did you feel that so much?

Yeah, it's a great question. You and I were talking about the kinds of content that we default to or, you know, everybody has something that they lean into and something they avoid. So my avoid is video. Yours was writing. I thought those were literally the direct opposites there because I feel all of those things you were saying about video. So I'm like, who am I to record a video? Who am I that somebody would listen to me? But oh, Jason. You know, everybody puts Jason up on this pedestal because he's got all these videos. So he's a shining example. So why even try? So I do think that that imposter syndrome kicks in for something that you're less comfortable with. So I had less of the imposter. You know, who am I to write a book? Because I knew my whole life that I would write a book. I am a writer. I didn't consider myself an author until I had finally gotten that first book to final manuscript stage. And then I started embracing that and believing that. But I already knew I was a writer because I just write, it just flows out of me. It couldn't stop me doing it. But I don't want that to come across as well. You have to have that in order to be a writer, an author, to publish a book. You don't. All kinds of different people publish books. Some people's books read a bit like a Google Doc and that's fine. Some people just throw it together really quickly and self publish it and just get it out there. I took longer over it because I was very intentional about the branding and the impact it would have. But it circles back to what your default content type is. So, you know, you and I were talking about video. If video is your favorite, pour all your efforts into video and you can just use the transcripts and worry about compiling and editing. And then your book writing becomes a matter of compilation rather than hands to keyboard. For me, it was the writing I had been doing for years and years. And this is again why I encourage accountants to create content of whatever kind, whatever format you default to. If you enjoy writing or if you don't know you enjoy writing, try it. Don't presume you don't try it. Write. Write some blog posts, record some videos, take the transcript, record quick videos on social media, try different things. And when you find the one that you're most likely to lean into, do lots and lots and lots of that. Until you start to notice themes. And that's what happened to me, is I knew that I would write a book. I actually had noble ideas of different kinds of books that I would write. I. When I started putting this together, I thought, oh, well, this is just a Google Doc PDF guide on the points from the accountant marketer coaching group. And then it was too much to be a guide. It was 60,000 words. And then I expanded it with more stories and it became 140,000 words. My editors are like, that needs to be shorter. So my problem, I always tell people, like, I had to cut out. So I had to cut 40,000 words. It was one of the hardest things I've ever done. And everyone's like, why don't you turn in two books? I'm like, no, because it has to be all in one. It's really important that these 12 things be 12 chapters. And I've. I've a picture in my mind. And this circles back to your question about why write a book? I could see the connection of my book to the other services, tools, resources, assets that we have, and I knew that it was important that the 12 chapters match the 12 elements of the account, the accelerator, and the accountant marketer. And there were so many things that make it easier when you do it that way, but I gathered that from doing it. So I don't think I had imposter syndrome about who am I to write a book. I instead have imposter syndrome of just the general who am I that somebody is to listen to me. But what helps me is that having, you know, being a qualified accountant myself, having worked with accountants for 20 years, having worked in accountancy and auditing and those things myself, and most importantly, having talked to thousands of accountants over that time, I have a pretty good sense of the things that they're talking about. And that's what gives me the. Well, anytime I'm worried about who am I to do this, I say, all I'm doing is gathering what I have learned and trying to present it in a simplified way. And if that helps some people, great. And if there are some people who think that it's rubbish or don't like it or whatever, I might have a little wobble. But in principle, I know what I've written is good and helpful because individual people told me that for 20 years. So now I'm just summarizing it. And then more people say it. But there's still. There's still bad days. There's still days where you're like, oh, my word. Is this. You know, how do I get it out there more? How do I get people to engage with it or act on it? That's the thing. If you read it and don't do anything with it, hasn't done you any good.

One other question before we wrap up here. I think it's. It's easy for people to, like, point a finger at Karen and say, well, she's always been a writer. And I think when you see people do things, I think it's easy to look for something in them that's fundamentally, fundamentally different to you. To then be like, well, that's why I couldn't do that, because I don't have that thing. And people do it with me with video. They're like, oh, he's.

He's such a natural.

And it's like, oh, he just didn't see all my dad videos. And in a perfect world, that thing that you're making is like a marriage with a thing that you really enjoy. So it doesn't feel like work. Do you have any tips for people who maybe haven't found that thing yet? Like, that adjacent thing that might be content, might be having conversations and recording them with other people? How do you find that thing?

Yeah, it's a great question. I mean, the simplest way is simply to look back at the last, say, couple months of the year and pull out the things that you most have enjoyed doing. You're like, when I do those things on that day, I come a little bit alive. So one of mine is truly helping and connecting people, either connecting people with other people or people with ideas. So when I share something with a client and it's like the little light bulb goes on above their head, I'm like, yes. And I feel. Feel great. You know, you're telling somebody, I had a great day today. Like, look back for patterns over what days. You said, that was a great day. Whatever was in that day was probably a couple of the things that you default to, the things you enjoy, the things you lean into. I had an accountant tell me that his way of stirring up creativity was going to conferences and talking with people about ideas. He said, when I do that, I've had the best day ever. And I said, well, I really enjoy conferences, but I come away from them pretty drained. I'm definitely ambivert to the level of introvert, where I need some quiet time and space after I've had lots of noise. And so for me, one of the things I really enjoy is just sitting quietly and writing either blogging or social Media posts or book writing. And when I look back at some days where I have crafted time for that, then I'm like, that was one of my things. So looking at your days and picking patterns is one. The other one that's great is 100 day challenge of some kind. And this is when you have an inkling of something either that you want to get better at or you think that you could lean into, but you just don't have the practice. You don't have the. I haven't done all the, the ones that haven't worked out yet. I haven't given it the iterations. And I'm doing one right now with video. I'm just recording a 90 second video every single day for, for a hundred days and putting it on Instagram. Sometimes I put it on LinkedIn as well. You can do it with writing. You could set. I'm going to write 200 words a day for a hundred days. I don't care if it's completely rubbish. I don't care if what I've written, I end up deleting the next day. But I am going to write those words and I say 200. It's a nice reasonable amount. It's enough maybe to challenge you. When I'm book writing, my goal is a thousand words a day. Your goal is just going to be whatever is achievable with a little push for you. It could be drawing or sketching, it could be booking calls. Whatever thing that you want to lean into, do it every day for 100 days. And that 100 days is pretty much a proven concept. And by the end of that, you will either go, do you know, I actually really enjoy writing. I'm actually leaning into that. Or you'll go, well, I really don't love that. I didn't think I did and I don't. But here's what I got from it. And there's a surprising creative turn or multiple turns that will happen in that hundred days that I don't know and I don't predict. But when you show up every day for a hundred days for something, see what happens.

I don't know if this is a.

Getting something will happen.

I don't know if there's a getting old thing, but there's something fun about like discovering something about yourself and learning. Like, oh, this is why I've always felt this or that way about this thing. And like stumbling into a new thing you can be passionate about. Like, that's, that's a really good feeling.

Yeah. And it might be A format like we said, like content writing or blog writing or book writing or recording audio notes or recording video or it might be a direction like you might go. Actually, I don't, I don't care if it's writing or content or video, but this thing, this topic, you know, say at the end of my hundred days, I'm like, do you know what? I'm talking about this topic more than any other. I think I'm gonna follow that path and see where it goes. Which again, is what happened to me with my books. I've got three more like drafts of books that will be coming later. And those again are themes. I just keep saying, you know what? I do feel really passionate about the power of rest and how it stirs up creativity and the anti hustle culture. But what is rest and what actually is it? So I'm gathering notes on that for another future book. Yeah.

Cool. Karen, thank you for coming and doing this. Let's ride this promo pony out of here. Where can people find you? What do you want to point them to?

Great question. Probably the easiest, fastest way is look me up on LinkedIn. Just make sure it's spelled R E Y B U R N. Then you find me. But you can also go to karenlrayburn.com that's got links to my book, my upcoming books, my email newsletter, all those things to stay connected with me. And of course, if in the course of that you want to connect with pf, those links are all there. But that's how to connect with me personally. And I do make a strong effort to reply to every message that I get from a real human person. So feel free to reach out and I will do my best to drop you a note and reply.

Cool.

We'll put that stuff in the show notes as well. Karen, thanks for coming and hanging today.

Thanks, Jason. Good to see you live in person. Yeah.