218 The Client Who No Longer Appreciates You 🥺

You ever had that client where you made all their pains go away and then a couple years go by and they no longer remember just how painful those pains were for them when they came to you? You're doing such a good job that they, like, don't value you as much as they once did. What do you do? We're going to talk about it along with some questions on staff not following expectations, AI avatar use cases, some stuff on Google reviews on starting your own firm, and a really stupid thing I did when delegating. I'm going to share that story. You will be impress is Q and A Friday. Come on in. Quick programming note. If you're in the uk, get on down to DAS in London Digital accountancy show as this podcast is coming out Friday. I will be there next week. I think the conference is Tuesday, Wednesday, something like that. It is free. 3,500 other accountants there. I'm giving two talks. Come and hang. I think it's the only time I'm in the UK this year. Also free conference. As an American, I'm like, what? That's a thing? Evidently that's much more normal in other parts of the world. Okay, got this question via email. I think we've all probably felt this in some form or another. The notion that a client comes to you and they're just. Just getting started. Maybe not even when they're just getting started. Have all sorts of problems and they come in and you solve them all and you're working with them on an ongoing basis and everything is going swimmingly. You've got the bookkeeping, humming, payroll benefits, all these tax stuff, all these complex where only you know just how hard it is to get all those things working together. And the client knew when they came to you what a pain that all was. But maybe three or four years have passed. Then they're like, man, I'm paying you a lot of money. And those things don't quite hurt the way they used to. This is actually kind of a bummer. I've. I mean I. And I've had clients that have ended up on both ends of this where they come in and they're a mess and they appreciate you forever and they're always like, oh my God. They just, they still remember those pains. And then other people that do get like less appreciative over time and I don't know, I don't have a totally perfect answer for you besides the fact that reality is at the end of the day, somebody's only going to pay as much money as it's really worth to them, you know, and that's independent of the price that you're willing to do it for. So if it just doesn't hurt somebody, you probably headed to a frustrating situation where they're not going to value you as much as you think you ought to be valued. So I don't know that I have, you know, I don't know there's a blanket solution to this. I jotted down three thoughts. One, interestingly, this is actually a hard aspect of positioning yourself to just work with new businesses. This got a little easier for me as I went. Some aspects of this got easier for me as I went up market. When I went up market a bit, what I would get is people who are far enough along to have struggled through not having great help or know just how much of a disaster it can be when you try to do some of this stuff yourself. So they were a little further along, they had more money to spend to fix it all and they knew just how ugly it can get. Folks who are new, they think it's all easy. Like they don't have an appreciation of just what a mess this can be. And that can kind of be a bummer. Aspect of working with brand new companies is they just think that all this stuff's just going to work and App A is going to talk to App B. And you add to that the fact that they probably don't have much money to pay for good support. So when you're working with new businesses, that's admittedly a really tough spot to find yourself in. I would argue this is why some pros, like I've seen Brandon hall do this with his tax advising. Some pros go as far as marketing directly against your current provider. So the copy there is your accountant isn't responsive, we are. Or your accountant isn't doing proactive tax planning. We will. So you are feeding into the pains of what their current help is not doing for them. So hard aspect of working with new businesses, a little easier as you get up market. But that's for like clients when they come in. Right. The problem here is really over time, like does that pain atrophy? So the second thought I had here, do they truly trust that you're still the best person for the job? For them to accept another provider as being a viable solution for them means that they think someone else can do the job as well as you, potentially for less money. And so this comes back to the bigger positioning conversation and how we prove our expertise. It's, it's not with credentials. It's not with a landing page that says we provide peace of mind, that's even peace of mind here than anyone else whose landing page also says they provide peace of mind. It's about truly being like the best. The unique solution for beekeepers, the personality that they see on podcasts, the one with the newsletter that they're learning things from. And so from a positioning standpoint, you know, just like with value pricing, stuff like that, it still comes down to stuff substitutes. If somebody values a pain such that they will pay $1,000 for a solution, but there's somebody who will do it for $20, they're gonna be tickled. They're gonna be thrilled with that experience. So even if the value to them is a thousand bucks, if I come and charge them a thousand bucks, but there's somebody on Fiverr or somebody across the street that will do it for 20 bucks, they're probably gonna go to that person. So as that trust sort of atrophies over the long term, is that person getting a diet of your expertise? Like, are they being reminded of that? If there are viable alternatives, then the answ. And we're not all in a place where like we are there yet. The firm building journey is usually something that's general and gets more specific over time, so that you are the subject matter expert for the type of work that that client needs. Not a complete solution necessarily, but ought to help. If you are the guru, then at least you are like the premier solution there. Third thought I had here, you know, is just really an acknowledgement of business relationships for what they are. And the reality is they're all gonna have a shelf life. Not every client engagement has to be a for everything. In fact, shying away from this is usually going to be in the best interest of your firm because this is particularly true for firms who are evolving, who are upwardly mobile, getting more specific, generally charging more. The reality is that roster of what clients will be best for your firm, it's just going to evolve over time. And this can be a little scary for us because it's easy to focus on the client that no longer is appreciated, no longer appreciates us. It's easier to focus on that person because that's a known rather than that person who's going to find you online tomorrow and be thrilled to work with you because everything is on fire. As we were developing our, our kind of managed outsourced accounting business, oftentimes those engagements end with them taking that work in house. And sometimes that's A good idea. Sometimes it's not a good idea. But it wasn't uncommon for us to help folks do that because we were. We're kind of doing that accounting, accounting department in a box sort of thing. And as a company grows to a size, it probably does make sense to take a lot of that in house. And that was totally fine. And sometimes that worked well for them. Sometimes it totally blew up. And in a couple of years they came back and were like, can you still do this for me? And we did. And it cost way more than it did before. Not, like out of spite, but because they had grown and all that. There's an element of probably depersonalizing the business relationship where if we're not careful, it can feel like this, like, marriage or something. When it's like, nope, we may enjoy working with these people, but the reality is my business does this specific thing. Their business has these specific needs. And it's rare that anything is like a forever thing that they're going to need exactly that until the end of time and that you're just going to happen to be doing the thing that they need until the end of time. So if we flip this on its head, there's another question there of why do we feel that we need to be the solution until the end of time? Right. Or is that okay? Can clients graduate out of your client list? Can you outgrow your clients? That's definitely the case. That's maybe the more common thing. The fact that those pains get further and further in the rear view mirror, like, that's a real thing. And they forget the nuance that was in those pains and the fiddly little things that kept them up at night. I think they also see, like, landing pages every day that glorify this notion that the whole process has been wildly simplified when it just hasn't. And so some of that can be hard to, like, turn your brain off. Like, why isn't the bookkeeping just fully automated by now? They were closer to that problem when they were doing it and they were overseeing it than they are now. So you almost can't blame people for, like, losing sight of some of that stuff. We do the same thing. So to a degree, like, I kind of accept it for what it is. I still try to keep leaning into, like, reminding them of our expertise and why we are a unique solution within that space. Solving rare problems. The less rare the problems you're solving, the more substitutes there are out there, even if they're not a true substitute for what you do. And That's a hard thing for a client to determine. Are they really going to do all the same things at the level that we're doing it? But of all the people that I can help in general, I'm probably just going to be helping the people who most value the pains that I'm solving. And that may not be the same people forever, but it is hard to. There is this human nature of like, yeah, but I want to convince them to stay with me forever. And that that feeling might actually be the bigger problem is why do we, why do we feel that? Is it like the scarcity mindset that there's not going to be another client to come in and fill that spot, but we're fighting against a force that in many ways we don't any control over. Like that's something the client's feeling. We can, we can prove our expertise, but beyond that, I don't know that we have that much control over that emotion. Was that a good answer? Was that a bad answer? I don't know. If you got a. If you got other thoughts there, feel free to drop them in the comments. This episode is sponsored in part by Live Flow discussion going on online this week. Frustration with accounting ledgers and the tools not always doing what you want them to do. And so it's like why are all these like additional kind of ecosystem tools necessary? Just to augment the core app with the things that I want. And oftentimes the things that you want are gonna be very different than what anybody else wants. And this is where LifeFlow can actually be a way to customize your QuickBooks experience because it can sync out to Google Sheets just about anything that's in QuickBooks reports. So Ledger activity, specific account balances, you can lift all that information out, organize it however you want, but then give access to that Google Sheet to whoever needs it, like third party stakeholders, internal users, maybe even members of your team. And then because they have a consolidations product now, obviously you can use that to, you know, consolidate and roll up related companies books. They can also use that for internal purposes. If I'm looking at a cross section of, you know, 30 beekeeping clients that I have and there's specific things that we want to monitor, benchmark. We're really like augmenting the ledger experience and kind of building whatever we want in the spreadsheet because LifeFlow bridges all that data from QuickBooks to Google Sheets can do a one time sync, can do like a sync that continues like auto updating anytime the data inside of the accounting system changes. I've always been a like let me kind of build my own solution sort of guy. LifeFlow could be a good way for you to do that. Learn more about LifeLow Link in the show Notes this episode is brought to you in part by by Team up, helping you recruit top Filipino accountants without any ongoing monthly fees. The difference between teamup 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 and training. They keep 100% of what you pay them and it's a lot more affordable for you so you can retain your team for the long term. Team up could source accountants with experience working at US or Australian firms familiar with tools like Xeroqbo 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 employer of record if you need help with 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. Okay. Staff not executing to a specific expectation. Freedom Folio Shared this one in the comments. Thanks for sharing this. Just fired a staff before a tax deadline cause we couldn't get them to use work papers. For the last four months we have templated work papers. How do you get people to use them after telling them repeatedly repeatedly to use them to no avail. Just had to let them go. This was a comment on the deskilling episode this week. Yeah, I mean it boils down to basically two things. One have a super clear cut standard for the way the work is supposed to get done. I'll be honest, most firms don't do this. If if you're like me and you're dealing with like some of the trappings of legacy firms as I came into you know, an 80 year old firm, the reality is everybody just kind of does what they're going to do based on their experience, and they all have their preferred ways of working. And where that blows up is anytime you want to change some part of the process, because some people for the way that they work, that change will be phenomenal. But for other people who work differently, they'll be like, no, that won't save me any time. Or that actually just totally doesn't work with the way I do that thing. So you have two people doing the same job wildly different ways, and as long as they're doing things differently, you can't help them. And it's really, really frustrating. And so if you're, and this is probably most firms still. So if you're coming from a spot where you just rely on quote, unquote expertise and experience for people to just do things, and there's a degree that's needed, but if there's no, like standardization, then one thing that can happen is people will just choose their own adventure. Like, they'll just, you know, come up with their own ways of doing things. And they're like, what do you mean? It's, it's correct. Does it really matter how I got there? And so, number one, you just got to have a really clear expectation for here's the way that we expect this stuff to get done. And that may cover 20% of the process and may cover 100% of the process, but there has to be a clear expectation for it. This is what has to be done on every single file, whether it's tax file, accounting file, whatever it is. So that's number one. And then two, you got to actually hold people to that standard. And that's another thing that accounting firms will fall down on is you'll have maybe very important people or senior people or tenured people or something like that who refuse to uphold the standard. And at that point, when you can't hold those people accountable, what's the, what's the point of even having the standard, right? And so this can be problematic with, you know, legacy teams with more traditional folks that don't see the value of systems. It can be an issue with kind of mixed families. If you're coming into a firm where some of the folks working for you may not have been your hires, that can be a real, a real messy thing because you've kind of got them like their loyalties may lie with somebody else or they were brought into the firm under different pretenses. And those people kind of like, have to decide who they're ultimately going to hitch their wagon to. But if you're doing both those things and somebody's not following through, then it is what it is, you know, and it doesn't need to be a personal thing. Just like the way that we work with clients, like, the less we can personalize the employee relationship, the better. Like, there's a way to be human without everything being personal to them, without it being about them, and instead it being about the work. We talked about this with review points recently. Like when somebody bombs a file and they got a whole bunch of review points, we're reviewing the work, we're not reviewing the person. So there's a way to depersonalize this, to say, like, hey, here's the job and here's what I need done, and you're not doing it. So it's not a fit. And that is what it is. And they. They may have, you know, 100 different reasons for why they. They don't want to do it that way. And it's worth understanding that, because where people bump up against that, like, there's probably a degree of that that needs to come into the feedback for what that process looks like as a whole. But if you have made a really clear standard, and two, you have people that will not uphold that standard, then you honestly, I don't think you have any choice but to let them go. Otherwise the standard becomes meaningless. Right? And it doesn't mean there shouldn't be reflection there to be like, is this standard correct, or is this standard necessary? But ultimately, when you're running a firm comes down to you and your vision. You're ultimately the person that's going to make the final decision. You need to roll all those things up. You need to take into account what those other folks say. But ultimately, it comes down to you. One trap here can be having tunnel vision just for what the people within your firm will tell you. That was a really helpful thing for me, being able to zoom out and talk with other firm owners as I realized just how much of our systems and the way that we went through things were a product of the people that we had and oftentimes kept us from getting the people that we wanted, both from a staffing standpoint and even from a client standpoint. So sometimes we can get a little too stuck in the status quo. And then all it takes is, like, one hire who is so enthusiastic for, you know, those processes and doing things through that new paradigm. It can actually energize the team, and then you're reminded, oh, yeah, this is what I've been looking for. Like, this is what my team needs. And that's always a really exciting time when you find that person. But it sounds like you did the right thing. Kind of a sucky part of being the big boss, right? 1. Follow on to that AI avatar episode we did last week. I'm still blown away by how good that thing is, how accurate its responses are, and, like, true to me, somebody followed up on Twitter, basically said it can summarize and reframe your content, but could it do the research and bring real life experience and connections like you would? And the answer is it certainly can't. And this is maybe the thing that I think we missed most with these AI avatars. And for some reason, this is human nature, we just immediately jump to neener, neener, well, you could never do this. And we end up in this loop of, like, trying to prove something to a machine that honestly couldn't give a hoot. And it makes the conversation about stuff that actually isn't helpful. Like every time somebody posts, AI is never going to do this. First of all, you've got no idea. It probably will someday. Second of all, who cares? Like, what? Why does. Who are you arguing with? The future feels like a losing battle. Yeah. Like, the AI won't do things as good as me. It won't make new connections. But I would also challenge you on this. How often in the course of doing your work are you really pushing that noodle to the limit and learning something new as opposed to, oh, I already know all this. I'm just following the steps and, and applying that client's specific questions and circumstances to all the stuff I already know, man. I mean, I don't know what the time split is from learning entirely new things to applying what you already know. But I don't know about you. I mean, that's probably 95.5 for me. Like, it's very rare that I'm actually learning something new from scratch much more often than I'm applying what I already know to a client's specific circumstances. So if you think about what these AI avatars do, they will be as good as all the context that you've given them. And so they are going to have blind spots. They are going to be limited when it comes to connecting ideas to fill in gaps of things that maybe you haven't covered. That being said, they're increasingly good at reading between the lines to take adjacent point A and adjacent point B and connect them into an answer. For C. Interesting. In the tool we demoed Delphi, there's actually a slider for that. How aggressively do you want it to read in between the lines? Right now I've got it turned all the way down to pretty much just only regurgitate the stuff that I've already said, because that just seems like a logical place to start, right? Until you get a little more trust with it. But, yeah, it won't be as good as you. And that. That's great news for now. But what it comes down to is what that good metric means, how you define good. Because many people would define a good accountant as one that's available because they've been trying to get a hold of their accountant for the last week. And so from that standpoint, it's very good, right? It's immediate. Imagine having somebody that will call you back, answer your. Answer your phone call every single time, and immediately give you answers. That's pretty good. And, you know, a common thing I always tell juniors who are coming up is don't be afraid to say that you don't know. I actually appreciate it when I'm talking with, like, professional help who's like, you know, I think I know the answer is, but let me make sure and let me, like, put some more thought into this. That's okay. And if the avatar can do that, that's then not looking too dissimilar to the way that a human supports them. The biggest thing right now with the whole AI avatar thing is it just hasn't been normalized. People aren't sure where to plug it in. So I think where it may start. And now in my team, this is definitely the case. It's starting internal. Like, we're using it as. As a resource across a huge body of information. If I'm going to do a new podcast on this topic, where have I talked about that in the past? What things have I already said? Do I want to build on those? Do I want to remind people of those? If I'm going to go do a blog post about a specific topic, if I want to outline a book, I mean, imagine how helpful all this stuff is. As we talked about in that episode, it's only as good as you are documented. So it works great for me right now because I've got a big body of context. And we went through some ideas for, like, you know, meeting transcripts, recording how you advise clients, stuff like that. That can kind of enrich that. But in order to use these avatars more like, I don't know that Anybody's super comfortable with like standing up a paid version of this right now. Like, it's just feels kind of too early. Maybe that's the future. I don't know. Like maybe that becomes a big part of how we interact with influencers. Is like the social media platform have like a built in AI chat thing that can see all their content and you can talk with them. Maybe that's the future. Maybe. I mean that literally goes as far as like that context feeding into an AI agent that helps you run your accounting firm, helps you build processes, help you, helps you actually do the work. Like there's another version of this where it's somebody spending 200 episodes talking about how to do bookkeeping in QuickBooks. And all of that context creates a killer AI agent that is like clicking around the screen and doing different things. So it's like hard to know exactly how this context will be used. Right now. The way that we're making use of it is on internal stuff. If you're going to start kicking the tires with it, that's probably what I would recommend. First of all, start capturing meetings. Start building that library of meeting transcripts. It's something you will never regret having even if you don't use them right away on day one. But when it comes to how you advise clients and giving your team access to a version of your expertise. And how would, how would Tina answer this question? I think that's really valuable, particularly if you extend that to like marketing for your firm. Like how you put out blog posts and social media posts and all that. If it can be really closely tied to the things that you actually, actually say, that's really interesting. This episode is sponsored in part by our friends at Acre. If you have not heard about Acre yet, all it does is it gives a sick, sweet new skill to your QuickBooks. All you do in a QuickBooks online description, you type for the period, start period, end period, and it posts accrual entries covering that whole date range. If this is a payroll journal entry that straddles month ends, you say the work period and it will automatically post a journal entry. If it's a sales contract, an invoice for 14 months, you know how much bloody work that is. Post every single journal entry, do the recurring thing, set up a spreadsheet to tie it out. Oh, and then it changes and you go delete all those things. Accruer one word, accruer all you do, you type in the description for the period, start date, end date, you might have to have a 2 between the start date and the end date that posts all that stuff automatically. And if you got to go back and change it later, it'll do all that too. You change the date, it'll wipe out the old ones. Update it to be correct and then when you log into Accruer, it gives you a schedule of all of your accruals. Plop that baby in the workpaper file and you got an easy thing to tie out to. Simple as that gang made by a bunch of accountants because it was a thing that they needed. Hop over to their website to do a demo. Demos are just 20 minutes. Or skip the demo and sign up directly@accruer.com with code Jason Daily One to try for just a dollar this month. Oh my gosh, $1. Code Jason Daily won't do it. I'll put the link in the show notes. Go use that promo code. What do you got to lose? Today's episode is sponsored in part by the folks at Cloud Accountant Staffing. How's this resume sound for you? This is a real resume. Let's do a tax one this time. 4 years US tax prep experience LACERT ProConnect CCH Access Taxdome carbon tally for QuickBooks Zero experience 1120 1120s, 1040, 1065. They've done it all. This is a real resume from cloud accountant staffing where you can hire the accounting team of your dreams from the Philippines. This person's got looks like last four years doing US Tax and another three years beyond that working with western companies sounds pretty darn good, right? Well maybe they just cherry picked that one. Maybe they're not all that great gang. Here's the thing with Cloud Accountant staffing. You don't pay a dime until you hire somebody. So you can go hop on a call, you can talk through your needs. They will cut their recruiters loose. Go find some folks that could be a great fit for you. You can go through the resumes, you can interview them and you're only going to spend a dollar. Once you have found somebody that you are jacked about, that's it. Worst case scenario, you get some experience going through the process. You have the chance to ask a bunch of ignorant questions about, you know, doing this for the first time, building your offshore team. Whether you're looking for tax pros, accounting pros, they can help you find what you're looking for. Not to like be overstated just how much big foreign regional firms and and the industry has invested in the Philippines. There's so much great talent over there. Now I've shared before, when we started hiring folks in the Philippines, it completely changed the strategy of my firm. Got some really, really good people. Like I said, you got nothing to lose. Check out the link in the show notes below. Book a call to make sure you get back to it. At the very worst, you learn something. The very best, you hire a killer employee. Right? So check that one out in the show notes. Question from a person who's on the. On the doing the old teeter of considering starting their own firm. It's funny, we get a lot of these, like, transitional questions of what's the right way to transition? And there usually isn't a pretty answer. How do you communicate to. To my partners at the firm that I want to work on so and so clients. I'm asking because I'm a senior accountant and realizing I want to start a firm specializing in this type of client, but feel shady not letting my firm in on why I'm asking to work with this type of client. What's the solution, people? Some of these questions are too hard. I don't know what the answer to that question is. I can give you my general rule of thumb that I always tell people. If you can let the firm in on your plans, generally it's better for everybody. Some people will freak out about this. They'll almost certainly be annoyed in the beginning. I think most people appreciate the transparency. If you do share your plans with them, nobody likes to have that bomb dropped on them. Now there will be really awful people who then make your life miserable or fire you or get defensive or something like that. And maybe that's a reason to not do this. Ultimately, you're the only one looking out for number one. So like, it's a time where there's a degree of selfishness that's required. I can say for everybody that I had worked with. I mean, I worked with some, some awesome people, but I worked with some people who were not awesome. I would say in every situation I've been in the past, I would have been able to have that conversation with them a couple months before leaving and they would have. They would have appreciated it. They would have been pissed and I would have gotten cussed out in a few situations, but they still would have appreciated it. Like I had enough of a relationship with them. Whether you tell them that before or after asking to go work on a specific type of client, hard to say what the right answer is there. Either way, I would say ask to work on that client. You got nothing to lose there. What are they going to Say no, but then put some thought into how transparent about this should I be. In a perfect world, you are transparent and that's genuinely better for everybody. Talked to the few people in situations where they even did that and the firm ended up letting them take a few clients. That's like the gold scenario and kudos to those firms. Definitely not going to be the case for everybody. Right. But I would say in this case, yes, go ask to work on those clients. I think there's a way that you can do that that isn't necessarily deceptive. Why do you want to go start a firm for this type of client? Well, that's probably the same reason that you just. You want to work on those types of clients, but then give some thought to. Like how transparent about this should I be. I can tell you there's not a firm owner listening to this podcast who would not appreciate the person telling them ahead of time. That doesn't mean that it's always the right thing to do because there are a holes out there who will punish you for that, which is unfortunate, but definitely worth thinking about. I do think folks will generally be biased towards not doing that in situations where there's probably more scenarios where they could have done it. Did that make sense? It's a scary thing to do. So I think we're biased to do it less than we probably should. And hopefully that's not me being too much in the employer's camp. Feel like I've actually been dunking on the employers quite a bit lately. But generally like every scenario, every professional sort of step in your life, the fewer bridges you can burn, the better. Like it's a small world. You'd be surprised how things come back around. 1. Follow on to Google Reviews, which we discussed a couple of weeks back. Are you allowed to put that on your website? What? Are you allowed to put a Google review from someone on your website without permission from the reviewer? So somebody goes out, leaves a review for you and can I then put that on my website? The answer is no. Google actually is like big ol, like on their main page about Google reviews, it's big. This is not allowed. They say reviews are the property of the reviewer. Which is ironic because it's all like public information. And on your Google my business page, like, my initial reaction to this question was like, well, yeah, why wouldn't it be? It literally lives on this public page over here. Why could I not put it on my website? But here's what they say. User reviews belong to the person who wrote them. Even if they're written on your business's listing. You must must obtain consent from the reviewer if you want to use customer reviews of your business for your own marketing purposes, such as on your website or in print or digital ads. So unfortunately the answer is you have to ask the person for permission to put that review on your landing page. Interestingly, there's an abundance of tools that will give you embed links for all of your Google reviews. Google doesn't do this natively. They don't give you a way to embed your reviews on your page. But third parties have done this now where you get like a little iframe and you can embed that little module on your website and it'll show show Google reviews. I don't know if they are smart enough to let you just hand pick specific ones like the ones where you've gotten permission or if it just embeds all reviews. Seems like that may not be a great thing because somebody could come through and leave you a crappy review and then there it is front and center on your website. But unfortunately it looks like the answer is yes, you do have to ask for permission. Automate with Josh shared something in the comments that reminded me of a really dumb thing that I did or something that backfired on the. On the episode about deskilling, he said, I view year end files as a bouldering route. You get to do with the team, identify the difficulty of the different parts and assign to the person who can do that difficulty level. I can tell you one thing I did that that blew up on me here. When we went through our process of for the first time value pricing over a thousand annual tax returns that we did, it involved like bucketing. In the past we just hourly build all this stuff. It involved bucketing all these projects into these like levels of complexity. Basically. Basically. And so we had different levels of complexity and they would get handed out to members of the team to try to optimize the whole deskilling thing that we were just talking about. So you don't have really senior people cherry picking the easy returns just to feel productive. You know what I'm talking about. Meanwhile there's nothing for like the lower level people to do or they're getting stuff that's way too hard, that's taking them forever. So the goal was to better match the complexity of something with the capabilities of a person. And I actually think I view this differently now. That may still be worth doing. But the bigger thing and where my mind goes to when I think descaling now is actually like a different dimension of difficulty and more. Carving up those projects to delegate the simple parts of any project, easy or complex. So if you take five tax returns, five month end closes, five advisory calls, whatever they are, on a spectrum of one really easy to five really hard. Oftentimes in most types of work that three to five, the harder projects, they still share all the same elements that the easy projects do. There's just some hard stuff piled on top. And I think the bigger opportunity is how do I carve out the core aspects of all those engagements that can be adminified, that can be simplified, de skilled. And what I got wrong as we were going through this kind of reconfiguration of how the work got done was every project had a difficulty, but the entirety of that project went to that person. So you know, a tax return example of this may be like they have a trust or like a big property sale or something like that. An accounting equivalent of this may be that like they've got some gnarly accrual or this awful integration with this other platform where you got to pull information in, whatever that really hard thing is that makes it a five, you still gotta do all this stuff that like precedes that, right? And so I would put that entire project on the five, the person that was capable of the five, and they would do all of the menial, dumb things that were really, really easy that anybody could do. And then the last 10% of the time would go into that hard thing. And so the bigger opportunity that I look for now is what are the common things, the easy common things. I'm going to start at the bottom. What are the common things that all these projects share? And how can I get the admin team or entry level people to come in and support that across all projects? Easy and hard. Because for most types of work, those really hard projects share the same core simple aspects that the easy projects do. And so it's almost more of like a horizontal dimension to look at delegating aspects of all projects, rather than like this vertical dimension of okay, is this project hard? Then the entire thing goes to my most technical people. And so that could look like a centralized team, like a pool of people that does all of these things for all of your projects. Like it's like an entry level status, like this amount of pre work where they can knock that out. It's stuff that we generally think of as technical work right now, but doesn't require tax or accounting expertise, is largely administrative, that can be done by a pool of people. Or it can be done by embedding admins into teams of technical folks so that when the technical person gets to this project, they can hand all those simple aspects off to that admin person. This one can be a little harder because it can be harder to pry that project out of the technical person's hands. As opposed to the more pooled approach where it's a like pre work status so that that gets done before they're even allowed to touch it. Sometimes that can be easier. If it is hard to like pry that project out of their hands or if they're like, I just want to do easy stuff right now. I go back and forth on like how we always struggled with this. Are we okay with that? Like the notion that you've got these like burnt out really technical people and they're like, can't I just do something easy? And it's like, well, no, what's the point of you being a really high level person? But then it's probably just a symptom of a bigger problem. Maybe you just need to go outside or stop working or it probably means you worked too many hours last week. It's probably a bigger, like, bigger problem like that. Right, that's it for this week. You got questions, drop them down in the comments. If you listen in on the podcast feed, there should be a link to the YouTube video in your player. You could pop over and drop a comment on the video if you're in the uk. I'll see you at DAS next week. US Tax pros. You are so close. Almost there. I'll see you next week. We're gonna be shooting from London. I think I'll see you there. It.