208 How To Rip Off Bandaids in your Firm

I've unlocked it. The secret to doing hard stuff in an accounting firm, how to put nervous Ned in the rearview mirror and commit. Plus, I share some of my experience rolling out reporting apps to clients. How to build a side hustle if you're trying to build your own firm from scratch, when maybe you don't want your current employer to see that. What to do when marketing feels hard. And my favorite moments from our first 200 episodes of the pod. Come on in, It's a Q and A Friday. Hey. Saw some discussion online the other day and I don't know, something kind of clicked in for me around all these things that people kind of agree are best practices and things that they know that they need to do. You know, raise prices and cut the bottom X percent of clients every year. And all of these hard things that somebody could sit you down and you'll be like, yep, I agree on everything. And you know, you ought to do it. Yet why do so many people not do it and end up like, stuck in kind of this loop of self inflicted suffering? And like, why is that so hard to do? And I would argue that it boils down to belief. Belief that this is actually the best thing for you. Now there's things that actually stop you from doing it, like not wanting to have the uncomfortable conversation and all that. But if you are convicted enough to do something, you will make it happen. So I think it comes down to belief. But belief in what we do, I think is actually a product of how many people you've talked to or you've seen who have done this exact same thing to great success. So somebody can like logically convince me of a thing. But until I see it in practice and until I can talk with folks who have done it and see their before and after, I'm gonna have a hard time committing. And I know for me, certain ideas reached critical mass in my head when I talked with a person I may have initially known. Sure, concept totally makes sense on paper. And then I talk with one person who's actually done it and I'm like, okay, now that is pretty compelling. Then I talk with a second person, a third person, and 10 people. And there's a threshold at which there you kind of reach that critical mass of like, okay, this is actually working for people. I need to be paying attention to this. And at that point it makes sense. You have a different level of belief and so many like trickle down benefits of this belief. And when you acknowledge that, that it's about belief, how do I put myself in an environment where I'll be exposed to cool and interesting things from people so that I have the benefit of that belief. Because if getting over the hump to do the hard thing is a product of how much I believe it, that if there's something worth believing, I want to put myself in a spot where I will have, like, that radical belief in the thing. Right. And it's a good example of why I, the accountants that are hanging out online on social media, engaging with stuff like this, are much more progressive because we are. Like, when you come to social media, you're not a fundamentally different accountant, but you are exposed to more people doing different things. And when you see people finding success with those things, it accelerates your journey, kind of your path of learning. I think it's absolutely the case with online communities when you build relationships, like real relationships that maybe go a little deeper than social media, but with other folks that run accounting firms, and you can have really frick conversations with them about what works and what doesn't work. And here's maybe a win that I had, but some nuance to, like, bake into that win. The folks engaging in that step, I think, are on a totally different growth trajectory, and it's because they're putting themselves in a position where they can share those experiences and as a result, experience the upside of, like, that really compelling belief. And this all started for me back during COVID Relief. I was super active on Twitter for the first time. So many smart tax professionals. And this, for me, this is us tax professionals who are digging into the legislation as this stuff's coming out, like, by the hour, as we're trying to advise our clients. It was like the very beginning of COVID where everybody had to shut down and business owners were in panic all around the world, if you're an advisor, you had your own version of this. I can only speak to what it looked like. In the US There were. I mean, it drug on, honestly, for years, and we're still struggling with ERC stuff, but it was like, by the hour. Not even daily by the hour. It was like, okay, here's a program they're gonna do. We don't know how to get it yet. Okay, here's how it looks like you can go out and get it. Okay, we just found out this, so maybe you don't actually want to do that yet. And now that we've done it a few times, be sure to select this and not that. It was like, by the minute sort of guidance. And I mean, our research companies, like, nobody was on top of this to the degree that social media was on top of this. And so you had a bunch of tax bros sharing really smart tax bros sharing good information. And if you were like me and plugged into that stuff in your firm, boy were you a know it all boy. You were like, you were so ahead of the curve. And somehow like for all the folks in the firm around me, it was, it was a degree of like, how do you magically just know all of this stuff? Like the folks. I mean tax Twitter at that point in time was honestly months ahead of the curve on all of this stuff. And we were calling out all the BS around, you know, EIDL loans and PPP and ERC and all of that, like within the first 30 days of these things existing. And that's an example of like a little community sharing what they're doing. You benefiting from the collective, like sharing all of that while also then having like, like a profound belief. And like, I'm very convinced of what I think here for this reason because I've seen the experience of so many other people. And so the value here to me is to think about how do I reverse engineer that belief? And I think it starts with more conversations. If you're thinking about doing a thing, how can I talk with more people who've already done it and either had success or had failure or something in between? I'm thinking about going to a new piece of software practice management system. How can I get on calls with people who have done this in the past 24 months to learn and on the other side come out either knowing maybe that I don't wanna do it or becoming that much more vindicated that this is the right thing to do. And another big problem here is for most of you, you're not the only person in your practice. The other problem here is buy in. And it can be a real challenge when you are the person who's out there having all these conversations and everybody else in your business is not having these conversations or has no interest, consuming podcasts or going on social media like that asymmetry in a partnership or you with the rest of your team, that can be a real struggle because you are on a different growth trajectory to the rest of the people around you. But the problem for them remains the same. It is one of belief. Getting buy in for them is going to work just the same as it does for you. Where if they had had all those conversations and if they had seen into all of those people's experiences that you've been able to see into, they're probably going to buy into, but unfortunately you can't really like shortcut that. And when it comes to change management, like brute forcing it when you don't have buy in, like, there's definitely a risk to that. But that just kind of dawned on me as people were having that conversation recently that it's, I mean it's just like how much do you believe that this is ultimately the right thing to do? And there's a million different things from well, you're scared to make the change and, and you don't like having, having the hard conversation. And like there are a whole lot of things that go into actually taking the steps to do it, but overarching. Like there's just a spectrum of how convinced am I that this is absolutely the right thing for me and this will make my life better. And if you are like 1,000% committed to that, it's a lot easier to make that stuff happen. So interesting to me then is how do you reverse engineer that belief? And another lens I've been thinking about this through is, you know, talking about doing way more hands on level of planning and capacity scheduling throughout the year for accounting firms and what that looks like for tax firms and accounting firms and CFO firms and thinking about, you know, do potentially doing a week on this on the pod next month. And as I'm kind of planning for that, I'm thinking how can I learn more about what this looks like for different types of firms while making it feel accessible for people? Because it's one thing for me to like take the stage and shout and yell about here's the right way to do things. And maybe a degree of that is helpful, but what I think is really helpful is hearing stories and hearing people share how they went through this progression themselves. What went well, what didn't go well, and having a bunch of those conversations through the lens of different firms. So I'm actually thinking if we do end up doing that week, we'll actually start it with conversations of people who made that transition and are actively doing that thing now to get a window into what that looks like in their firm and not just one firm, but a bunch of firms so that you can hear those things and be like, got it. Okay. I'm kind of processing that you're building your own kind of mental model for what that could look like for you and the way that you work with your clients. But I truly think every time you hear one of those conversations and you see that stuff in the wild from somebody you trust, it makes you more convicted about is this the right thing for me? And it demystifies it a bit. It makes it less scary, less like, you know, you're going out on a limb by doing this. And if you're making a big decision, like, you need to be very convicted about that decision, if you kind of like hemming and hawing and in the middle. And I've found myself in this position quite a bit where I'm like, I think this is probably the right thing to do, but I'm not quite there yet. But given the timeline I'm working within, I wish I just knew today, like, if your business is on this big annual cadence where certain things have to happen certain types of the year at certain times of the year, oftentimes you don't get to that point at the right time of the year. And so if you're looking for a way to accelerate this, I think this is interesting because it means you can take a little more control if you have the power to have these conversations or bring these conversations to light. And if you engage frequently on social media, that could be as simple as just putting out a tweet or a post or something like that. Say, hey, anybody who has done this, are you open to sharing your experience? This is the value of, like, building a bit of a network of folks who do what we do online. But I just think so much of this comes down to, have I seen a bunch of people that I trust do this? And if I have, then I know it's possible. Because goodness knows, if you look around where you are, like, geographically, honestly, the people that are building firms online and engaging with this stuff are so, so far ahead of the curve. Like, I could go to every firm within a 20 mile radius probably, and there's not going to be many that are even sniffing around any of this stuff. But once you have a few of those conversations, like, it totally opens it up for you. In terms of programming for the podcast, it's actually got me excited to have more conversations with people that aren't like, tell me what you have to say to people that are just like, okay, tell me the story of how you transitioned from A to B and what was good about it, what wasn't good about it, because that's kind of how I've gotten to, like, my mental model of how to run firms. It's just a whole bunch of those conversations. So having those conversations in public and a context that is not filtered, you, you know, vendor webinars Big time filter conferences, big time filter like the upside we have here is we can have those unfiltered conversations. So I think I'm gonna lean into that a little more because I think that can get people over the tipping point of kind of believing in something. This episode is sponsored in part by the fine folks at ShareFile. ShareFile. It is a secure, easy to use collaboration and workflow solution made to meet the needs of your accounting firm and and their clients. The ShareFile for accounting solution helps enhance client onboarding processes, organize document collection, and orchestrates 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'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 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. The story is super simple at accounting firm in the US hired a bunch of people in the Philippines, fell in love with them, but didn't fall in love with the fees they were having to pay to the staffing companies that were managing these employees. So they built their own solution and now they're starting to pull other accountants in. I'd encourage you a big tipping Point for me was when I was like, I'm going to stop being opinionated on this and just try to learn. And so I talked to the other practitioners, I talked to some of the vendors that would like help you get into offshoring. That really opened things up for me. So if you've been on the fence, I'd encourage you to at least learn about it and you start heading down that path. Consider cloud accountant staffing. Okay, question that came up from Tim in the comments around reporting. So right now we do just bookkeeping and tax, but we also explain our standard qbo. So standard out of the box QBO reports to our clients from time to time. I love all the fancy reporting tools. So these are third party reporting apps that'll connect to QuickBooks and do kind of fancier and different types of reporting. I feel like if I brought this as a feature, it should be for all the clients since it helps. But I don't want to eat that cost. Do I just bump the prices for the newbies and have that built in or do I offer just to those people who want to pay, let's say another $200 a month for it? The TLDR have you been through the process of adding up sales into your accounting firm and how did it go? I did. Man, you can tick the box of all the wrong ways to roll out reporting in an accounting firm. I did it. The way I did it is I said, hey, look at this cool reporting app. That's probably going to show you a bunch of cool stuff. You want to pay some extra money every month for it? And most of the clients said, nope, not particularly. And maybe the worst part is the clients that really trusted me, that liked me the best were like, yep, nope, let's do it and see what we learn. And every engagement like fell on a space. And I don't know if I got too sucked into the, the marketing hype of the reporting apps, but I was, I don't know what I thought would happen, like, oh, I'm going to plug this thing in and poof, my clients are now going to have profound insights and they're going to be so grateful and we're to find all these great unlocks for their business. Maybe that happens for some folks, like in the framework of how we didn't, which was very basic, it definitely didn't happen. So that was a big time fail. And we took a second stab at it. And like, to be fair, I don't think I would have done the second stab as well had I not done that first fail. So you kind of gotta start somewhere. But yeah, what we ultimately ended up doing was for our clients using reporting actually to simplify what they had to look at rather than do like more big brain complex stuff. And an example of big brain complex stuff is benchmarking. Everybody always talks about benchmarking. I can honestly say I don't know that I've talked with a single accountant who has ever meaningfully rolled out benchmarking in a way that was helpful to their clients. There's some apps that have like benchmarking data built in and they will do basic benchmarking just based on like the Naics code, like the industry that you select. But I mean if you've worked with businesses very much, you know, there's so much context there and all benchmarking is, is like are you doing it in an average way relative to everyone else? And that gets tricky when you know, the chart of accounts changes. If you've found a way to productize benchmarking in a compelling way, drop a note in the comments. I would love to hear it. But I mean for every time I've heard people talk about like benchmarking as the holy grail, I don't know that I've talked to the single person, single accounting firm that has actually productized that in compell selling way. So what we did is actually the other, other end of the spectrum is we boiled the reporting down to just a select few KPIs. Mike Lyons, just like everybody else's, there was a spectrum of how much they could understand the balance sheet and the P and L. And as I've shared before, we had a rule. Every set of financials had to go out with a loom video that was three minutes or less walking them through the balance sheet and the P and L. But even if they understand how those financials work, it doesn't mean that they were actionable. So we threw all that stuff out. We didn't throw it out. They could still dig through it if they wanted to. But we paired it back to like five or fewer KPIs where it's like what are the drivers they have control over that we know will lead to the company, you know, being more profitable, getting a step closer to X goal, that sort of thing. And so the reporting tools we use were actually just built around. Here are the KPIs. And many of those things were driven from the financial statements. Some of them were non financial or a combination of the two. But where we ended up with Reporting was actually going to the very simple end of the spectrum. And we rolled it out at a service tier. Basically they're not going to cut you a check because you want to use a reporting system. They're going to cut you a check if they think they're going to get more value from the service as a whole. So we rolled it out to folks where we were doing a little bit more advisory. It wasn't like full blown, like what I would think of as full CFO type of work. And these are pretty small companies, so I don't know that that would even be like justified. But the folks who valued us getting a little more hands on and helping them to, to decide what to focus on and then like what sort of KPIs their team members ought to focus on too and how those ultimately like percolate up to the owner's KPIs. That was the most success I ever had with reporting tools. Definitely one person's experience and I know folks that have gone way deeper on reporting tools than I ever did. But yeah, just rolling out like a fancier version of reports and asking people to pay, probably not going to work. And most reporting tools are not cheap. Like they really aren't some of them. Once you get up to a large number of clients per client, it's not a huge amount of money, but you're getting a pretty darn big check to like roll that out to 50 sets of books or 300 sets of books. So I do know people that do like larger, more templated involved reporting packages. In my experience, less was more. But it's also going to depend on the type of client you have. Tim actually asked the follow up question. Based on my response, he said, so was cash reporting ultimately more valuable for my clients? And it was. We had a good number of cash strapped clients or clients with complex timings for kind of ap and when money came in on projects to where we spent way more time on short term cash reporting for them and that actually became a really profitable service because we were able to automate a lot of how it came together. Does that ultimately make cash reporting a more valuable service than like more beefed up month end reporting? I don't know that it does. In fact there's maybe even a risk that if you go out and you flout the fact that we do this great short term cash reporting that all you do is attract the people who are like barely scraping by penny by penny every week. Which maybe isn't the client that I want long term, but that was just one experience. One nice thing about cash reporting is in an accounting practice I'm looking for anything that I can sell that will get full away from cyclicality. More reporting tied to the month end close builds to the crunch around the month end close, which we got to try to get away from. Cash reporting was something that people would pay me for every week or several times a week that was not tied to the month end close. So from a bigger picture business standpoint, that was a really nice aspect of cash reporting as well. Question I had on the main channel and I won't call out the person. How do you go about being visible and trying to develop a side hustle while in your current full time role? So if you are an accountant and you have ambitions to go out and start your own firm, I did not recommend just starting cold turkey with zero clients. Best thing you can do is generally going to be to build like a little practice on the side to get a bit of cash going before you fully commit. And also like equally important to learn if that's a thing that you actually want to do because you won't know until you do it. But the question is basically how do I be visible and start building that practice when I have to keep a low profile because I have a full time role? I'll season all this with like be aware of the spotlight effects. And for all of us, whenever we do anything, we think everybody's watching and the reality is they aren't. And so there's an exceptionally small likelihood that anything ever comes to light if you, even if you do do this stuff in a visible way. That being said, it's a, it is a tricky one and maybe that's a scenario I usually tell people. Like be yourself, be your identity and let your personality come through. Online people are much more likely to engage with people than they are brands. Maybe this is an exception to that rule. Maybe until you're out on your own that messaging is more coming through the lens of a brand because your brand can be visible and people don't necessarily know who the person is behind that brand. Once you're out on your own, like I would definitely recommend flip that to like you, your identity being out there just easier to connect with. But yeah, maybe while you're building a side hustle it makes more sense for the brand itself to be visible. Depends how good your employer is. Like there's also a very transparent way of doing this as well. Like I was thankful to have some pretty good employers where anytime I was had kind of something in the works. I was like very transparent about that. And the right employer, like they will be happy for you and they may even look for a way to support you. If that's ultimately the thing that you're going to do, it really is in the best interest of everybody involved. If they do at least know and you are on the same page, you can have a bit of a plan. Because the worst thing for an employer obviously is somebody peacing out when you don't expect it. I've put out the idea a number of times that I haven't really like developed much. But I love the idea of like the opposite of a non compete. I called it a compete agreement. Basically a way to give to let staff who want to start their own thing go with some clients in a way that's mutually beneficial for everyone. Where they're basically buying those clients from you at a discount. If that person is going to leave my squad eventually, no matter what, to be honest, I'd be perfectly happy if they took some clients with them as long as I got paid something for them. So like if you think bigger picture about getting hoes from somebody leaving you versus like helping support them to go do their own thing, I think there's probably a way to do that where you can like be supportive of those people. That's a pretty hot take though. A lot of people aren't ready for that one. Derek Foote asked the important question, when will we get an album of client related songs? We did the status request song the other day. I'm glad a bunch of people commented. I'm glad you liked it. Pretty proud of that one. I posted it on social media this week. Here's the problem with making an album and this is literally how I think about this. Here's the problem with making an album about these client related songs is I could, I could publish all this stuff to Spotify and all that. Like I could publish a single. I genuinely don't want to do that because I want to at some point have people go to Jason Stats at Spotify and see, oh, there's actually good music here as opposed to these like crappy memes that were churning out. And we have published one album. We did the Lo Fi remix of the IRS hold Music. If you haven't heard it yet, just type my name into Spotify, Apple Music, whatever you use. It's an 11 song album of a bunch of Lo Fi remixes of the IRS hold Music. And gang, I'm very proud of it. Like I worked with actual music producers to put this stuff together, and it's really freaking good. It's all royalty free. You can download these tracks and use them as like your old music for your firm or at, you know, a tax conference, wherever you want to use it. You can use this stuff however you want. And I'm genuinely very proud of that album. It was a big project, it was a massive waste of money. But simultaneously, like, probably an example of my favorite thing about what I do now, the fact that somehow all of this silliness can make money so that we can do more silly things. So that's why I'm hesitant to like, you know, put that sort of thing on Spotify or something like that, just because it feels kind of permanent. Maybe there's something, you know, what we could do is we could spin up like a Cloud SoundCloud account or something like that. And maybe anytime I do music, I post that to SoundCloud so that folks could go to my SoundCloud and like, see all the past songs that we've done there. That's actually a pretty good idea because that has like, that's more where just like music producers just kind of riff on ideas and share concepts. Maybe that's what we do. That's actually not a bad idea. A few different comments. Something of kind of along the lines of marketing still feels really hard because we're accountants and like, nobody ended up. I don't know. That's. This is kind of a problem with all types of small businesses. And, you know, the E myth normalized a lot of this conversation. I think the notion that you're a pie maker and you love making pies, so you create a business selling pies and you end up doing everything but making pies. No accounts are going into business to do marketing, and so it just feels hard. If I can give you one piece of advice here, obviously there's tons of little optimize this and that and so many little more detailed things. But if I can give you one kind of overarching piece of advice for how to approach marketing for your firm and social media content? Do enough of different types of things to get a glimmer of, like, what do you enjoy? Like, is there a way that you can test out a number of different things from writing on a blog each day to doing an email newsletter, to doing an interview podcasts with people in the space, to making silly videos, to making educational videos? Is there a way that you can hop around and try some of those different things with the goal of hopefully stumbling into something that you enjoy maybe public speaking. Like, there's just, there's so many different ways that you can get your message out there. That was definitely my experience and is still my unfair advantage is I was poking around at different things. I started with email marketing and I was like, oh, that's fine. But then as part of that recurring email, I dropped a little loom video in there and like the rest is history. I learned in that process. I actually really enjoy making silly videos now. I don't know if anybody else are going to like these things, but I stumbled into this like, kind of edutainment sort of thing and it was something that was totally new for me, but I loved it. And, you know, so much of, I don't know, success and professional this and that. People boil down to like discipline. But discipline gets really easy when you enjoy what you do. So are you trudging ahead through like sheer force of will? There's times where that's necessary and that's a valuable skill to have, but it's not a way to build your life. It's not a. For everything. Finding something that you enjoy doing that can support your business is a massive gift. Like, it's something to keep an eye out for. You know, you look at people in the space that very obviously, you know, have things that they enjoy. Scott Scarano like doing raps about accounting. Nancy the dancing accountant Randy Crabtree loves doing public speaking. Like, you look at the folks who very obviously have. Have a skill and the thing that they. There's a specific thing that they enjoy doing. Oftentimes it's not because they're like. It's not that they're any more qualified than you at doing that thing. It's oftentimes just that they enjoy that thing. And as a result of enjoying it, they've done more repetitions of it than anybody else. Nancy, I don't know if you've like found a way to work the dancing thing into, get like a booing TikTok following going or something like that to grow the firm. But one thing I, I don't know that folks have explored enough is a lot of folks just enjoy having conversations with a, with a certain type of person. I know I do. I love talking shop with accounting firm owners. And that can be marketing. It really can. Probably not talking with accounting firm owners unless your audience is accountants. But whatever that specialization is that you want to go into, or if there's an interest that you have and you're thinking about going into that space, a great way to Build that specialization is a podcast where you're just having chats with folks from that space who you would otherw guys really enjoy talking with. That is marketing and it's a fun thing. The other great upside about interview podcasts is it builds your network along the way, like making friends with influential people. So if marketing still feels hard, I would encourage you to keep iterating and find the version of marketing that looks fun. We can feel pressure to do all the types of marketing in every social media platform. And oh, what if I don't have a newsletter? And the great news is, and this is one of the things I love about running small firms, it doesn't take that many clients to build a killer business around. And the world is really, really big. You don't have to be on every social media platform. There's a plenty big enough business to be built on just YouTube, on just Instagram, like wherever you enjoy being. Be there, do the work that doesn't feel like work because it's fun and there's more than likely enough people there to build a compelling business around. But my hack is definitely I enjoyed video, so I've just done more video than anybody else and now everybody's like, he's such a natural. When nobody was saying that a few years ago. Go. 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 six bench 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 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 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 liflow 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 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 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 Xerocubio 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 throwing it out there. What would they do? Start at that email video I did on the main channel recently. Get help with that stanky old inbox. I digress. Team up recruits these talented folks for a flat one time fee of 4,000 US American dollars. That's it. 4K one time. Somebody at Robert Half just did a spit take. Robert Half reference. We ever gonna get Robert Half to sponsor this pod? Not anymore. And they can connect you with an affordable employer of record if you need help with payroll and compliance once you hire that person. Big fan of hiring in the Philippines. You know I did a bunch of that. Check out the link in the description to learn more about Team Up. A quick note here. I threw a poll up this week, or maybe it was last week. Did computers replace accountants? And like 90% of people said no and 10% of people said yes. And I just. I'm surprised we're still having the will I replace accountants conversation. That's. I don't know. Maybe that's just the most clickbait thing. So folks talk about it, but computers absolutely replaced accountants. Like that happened a while ago. But it did. Bank feeds Replaced accountants. Like people who do a very, very specific thing. Ten keys, people that do a very specific thing. If that's all that you do, and then they find a new way to do that thing, yes, you're going to get replaced. And we're so focused on like the, the boogeyman, oh yeah, I got to replace us. And then arguing over yes or no when it's like, what is, what is the point of even having this argument? That it takes away from the better question of should I be doing anything differently today because of what we think AI will do? Like, that's the more compelling question. If you are part of a floor of people in some corporate tower somewhere and that entire floor of people all does the same thing, you better believe there's somebody at that company trying to put you out of work. Now, when it comes to folks in small accounting firms, tax firms, all that, usually you're doing so many different things, you're not super exposed because quote, unquote, accounting is, is a collection of very diverse tasks. There will be tasks that are completely wiped out, that are considered accounting tasks. They're totally wiped out by AI. Every big change we've had, like this has been the case. The computer wipes stuff out. Bank fees wiped stuff out. Excel wipes stuff out. The more interesting question is, should I be doing anything differently today due to AI? And I would argue that I would probably give people pretty much the same advice with or without AI. The advice that we keep, we need to keep getting more specialized in the types of clients that we serve because we can command much better fees that way. And that's ultimately the path to freedom and flexibility. And it's also simultaneously something that can be married with a passion of yours. You super into golf caddying, somebody's got to do golf caddy tax returns or counting. Like, don't accept the narrative that work must be suffering. Like, if there's something you're passionate about, follow your passion, find a way to do that. But on that path there's greater specificity, which is a more profitable firm and more enjoyable thing to do. And that specificity ultimately protects you from the general tools and the productized solutions, your pilots, your turbotax, your bench, even ChatGPT. And we're going to get a new AI model from OpenAI this year. Generally, every new generation of model, the things that were like right on the ragged edge of the last model being able to do it is completely table stakes for the next model. So if we think about the things that are on the Ragged edge right now, self completing checklists. It's something I've been talking about quite a bit online. The notion that you could have a quality assurance checklist, check all these things on a balance sheet, for example. It could be a hundred different things. Accountants love their checklists. This could actually be a really big change for our profession. And for that given checklist there's certain documents that have to be uploaded for it to complete the checklist. So the balance sheet maybe specific supporting documents, but you have this intelligent checklist when, where, when given the necessary information can go and it can complete itself because you have an AI agent that can go and see was the balance sheet run on cash basis? Did it include the comparative prior month? And right now you can ask it to do like five things and that'll work like 75% of the time. But that's the sort of thing this table stakes for the next model where the next model you can plug in your PPC or you know, whatever checklist you're using and actually get AI to complete some checklists for you. Like that's really valuable. So we got to keep our pulse on that stuff and how it can, can help us do our work in a more productive way. But as all of the tools get better from the same tech, the general solutions will continue to come up market and we have to be, we have to be evading that. We have to be continuing to continue to get more specific. Which is the advice I would give people even if AI wasn't a thing right now because that's the more profitable fern to run. The people that are at risk are the ones doing all the general stuff where you're afraid to go specific because maybe you haven't heard from enough people who have done it yet and had an amazing experience with that. Maybe it's a belief thing or a buy in thing. Those more general shops, which is 99% of small accounting firms. I don't think an AI is going to come out tomorrow that's going to like swoop in and scoop up all that stuff. But on the spectrum of what is a, what could something potentially replace? It's always the general stuff first, right? So I don't know that my advice is ultimately that much different with the AI stuff that's coming in. Part of the problem is like I get asked to do a lot of speaking engagements and I'm like AI will replace accountants, do you still want me? And they're like, that's not really the messaging that we're going to go for. And I'm like, okay, see you later. Okay, let's wrap this up. Some of my favorite moments from the first 200 episodes. We're actually a little ways past 200 now. Bless your hearts. I still can't believe that people listen to this thing. Just trying to explain this to a reasonable person is like, okay, so there's a guy in his garage talking about accounting. No, it's, it's. I had to do this at gymnastics last week to arrival. I had to explain this to a rival dad. You know, so it's not about accounting. It's about, I used to run accounting firms. It's about how to run accounting firms. And like, wow, you make a podcast about that? And I'm like, yeah, it's like pretty much daily. They're like, every day, Mike. Yeah, don't need to remind me. There's that much stuff to talk about. And like, evidently. But here we are, man. And honestly, new people find the show every day. New people start firms every day because of this. Like, I do think we're enabling a level of belief and confidence just by having these conversations, like in public and asking smart questions and getting to see other people's questions. I hope we are, like taking an itty bitty bite out of the problem. That is we need more forward thinking people starting accounting firms. Okay, favorite moments. I got seven things here, Q and A's I love. My favorite day is Fridays. I just love interactive stuff at, you know, especially at conferences. Like, folks want me to come do a talk and do the slide deck and all that. And I'm like, man, the way more interesting thing is having a conversation with the people in the room and that being interactive, that's a lot more fun than talking at people, I think. Second thing I wrote down here, I still remember in Australia, I was there for Zero Con and I kind of just had this moment of like, this is kind of wild. I'm in Sydney giving a talk at Zero Con. They had just flown my wife and I out to go see the Women's World Cup Final. And I had a moment on one of those podcasts where I was like, if you all knew, only knew what a dummy I was five years ago. And now people think that you're like the expert. And I was like, I'm so not far removed from just being a staff accountant. And it was just one of those, like, one of those moments where you just realize how great you're doing at faking it. And I shared that, like, with the goal of hopefully inspiring folks to Realize something totally different is a lot closer than you think. I say totally different. Something much better is closer than you think. And a totally different version of you. Even like a totally redefined version of what are you an expert in and what are you capable of. It's all just. It's all just made up. It's all like in your head. What do you identify as? That was a fun one. That was right around when we hit 100 episodes. Number three, stumbling to the idiocy that is talking with AI Personas. I just really get a kick out of that. That is going to keep getting better as AI gets better. Oh, I did a mind blowing thing with AI yesterday. I'll probably do an episode about it next week. But the whole debating with like the internal dialogue, you know, nervous Ned imposter syndrome guy. Who was the girl? She was like mean older sister. That's been a fun bit. Number four, seeing people at conferences. Man, there's nothing more energizing for me than going to conferences. You don't forget. Like I'm literally sitting in a little room off the garage. It's cold as heck in here today. Right beneath our family room, we got a split level. I got three of five and a seven year old that are tippy tapping away right above me all day long. It's pretty humble production setup. And right now I know like, you're listening. It's me in a room by myself, looking into a camera lens, acting like I'm talking to an actual person. Landscaper goes by out the window. I'm like, no, this isn't weird. It's just I'm talking to somebody. Everything about this is like a weird isolating thing. But going to conferences is awesome. Just meeting so many people. It is. I'm really bad with names as it is, but a kind of bummer aspect of this is the fact that I just can't remember everybody. It's very hard to remember names and identities online and stuff like that. They, they kind of all run together because there's just like more than my brain can keep up with. But you have a conversation with somebody at a conference that is so energizing because it is a real life story. I mean, I still remember the stories, folks. Tell me the last one I have here. I'll just Skip ahead. Number seven. I've heard from 10 times as many people. They loved the story of me leaving my firm and so many people have brought that up to me. Of all the stuff that I've done at conferences, telling unbelievable stories about things that happen in their life, really personal things. And that video helped kind of get them over the hump. It's a belief thing, like, get them over the hump. That, like, no, they needed to do this. This was the right thing to do. And having those conversations is just, like, so energizing. I mean, we are like, as long as we are human beings, we will struggle with, what am I actually doing with this life? Is this worthwhile? Am I helping people? And those conversations, like, are really, really meaningful. That was number seven. Number five, how much work this podcast was in the beginning compared to now. This podcast as honestly, all the greatest things I've done, like, all of the. What's a better way to say that all the I think most impactful and successful things I've done started on a whim. Was just like a flyer of, like, I got an idea. This seems like a good idea. I'm just going to do it today. And that's how this podcast started. And I was like, what am I going to call it? Let's call it Jason Daly. Because I think narcissism is kind of funny. But I was genuinely going to try to do it daily. And I didn't have anybody to edit those at that point in time. I had an editing team that was at full capacity with just my main channel YouTube videos. And so I was editing those things myself for the first week or two. And then I made the stupid mistake that we make also in firm running, where you get over capacity and then you try to hire, which is a pile of work, you're like, you're over your ski tips already. And then somehow you have to come up with even more time to then go hire and train the person that will get you that time back. That's why you can't wait to hire until you're at capacity. That's already too late. But I don't. I don't take that advice. That was rough. It was so much work. So a lot of late nights, putting together the little intro graphic and the song and all that stuff, and now it's like, you got the team. It's humming. We've got several folks that can put together episodes. And had I just done that a week, I'd be like, that's unthinkably hard. I don't know how I could ever actually sustain that. But like most things, it comes down to systems and finding the right people, doing it wrong, getting burned. But like, just building that system more and more until you're doing something that is really impressive and Seems outwardly really hard, but it's now a thing that is a unique capability for you because you've invested the time into figuring out how to do it and build a system around it. Number six, the first person who is willing to sponsor this show, that moment of realization that, like, oh, you can actually get paid for doing this. Somebody will come along and just, like, cut checks for you to make helpful stuff for people. That was pretty wild. I'm still surprised by that one. And then number seven, I shared, before sharing the story of leaving my firm. That was a really. That was a tough one to do. I didn't know a way to do it that wasn't going to, like, burn people. Last thing I wanted to do is, I don't make, I dunno, the folks at the firm who I care about a ton to make that you know about them or leave them feeling shafted or something like that. Ultimately, it was more about, like, how did I get there? And acknowledging that you're letting down a whole ton of people. And it was a selfish thing to do, but despite all of those things, it was still the right thing to do. What does that say? Easy decisions, hard time. Hard decisions, easy time. I might have just butchered that, but you get the idea. Doing the hard things leads to something better and easier for you. That's it for Q and A Friday. You got any questions, you know where to put them. If you're listening on the podcast feed, there'll be a link to the YouTube video. Pop over to YouTube. Pop any questions you got in the comments there. Like I said, These Q&As are my favorite episodes of the week. I'll see you next week too, Loo.