220 Turning Client Problems into Profitable Services

Nothing makes you question everything quite like working with that client who's an absolute knucklehead, and then you see how much money they make and you're like, what? Why am I doing all of this? Somewhere along the way, I made a huge mistake. I read a book so that you don't have to. It's called Million Dollar Weekend by Noah Kagan. You share some takeaways from this book. It was a pretty decent read, but particularly relevant to this week, where I'm kind of, like, zooming out, getting our head out of the weeds to think about. Of all the things I could do, am I focusing my time and effort on the best things for me, of all the things my firm could do, are we focusing on, you know, the right services, solving the right problems? There's times for zooming in and executing and getting really into the nitty gritty. But if you do that too much, what you'll find is you lose perspective to actually ensure that you're working on the right thing to begin with. So that's what we're talking about this week. And today we're talking about Million Dollar Weekend, the surprisingly simple way to launch a 7 fig your business in 48 hours. So come on in. Let's launch a business together. Now, this one will come easy to the entrepreneurs among you. If you're wired like me, you totally geek on this stuff. And you love the fun of, like, bouncing ideas around and ideating for, you know, the technicians among you who got into the game of accounting because you love doing the work, you're probably like, that sounds like just a lot of stuff that isn't what I enjoy. For the managers among you, it's probably just overwhelming because you're thinking logistically, oh, good, more responsibilities. That's just what I wanted. But hear me out. I think all of us from time to time need to, like, zoom out enough to reassess and be like, okay, here's where I am as a person today is all of my effort going into something that I'm enjoying, something that's taking me to a place that I'm going to enjoy even more. Oftentimes, we kind of get sucked down a trap that looks a lot like being the hero for everybody but yourself, unless you take this time to pause and consider everything that's going on. And there is no greater proof of how low the bar is to finding success than some of the clients we work with. With not all of them. I worked with a lot of really smart clients, but, boy, did I work with a Lot that were on the other end of the spectrum as well. That was. That was probably one of the most shocking things to me. When I first started out, I started in tax work. So, like, from day one, you see into that person's financial setup in a way that oftentimes, like, not even their spouse does. Like, it's a very. Especially tax is a very interesting relationship. There's a greater degree of transparency there than they have with just about anybody. But straight out of school, I was blown away by how much money people made. Like regular old people to find out that guy drives a Camry, but he's absolutely loaded. But also just consistently not, I don't know, mega impressed when I sat down and chatted with him. And maybe it's because we see success from afar and we put these people on a pedestal, which can kind of serve to be like, well, they are this and I am not. And in a way, it kind of gives you permission to maybe just like, turn that part of your brain off or think, no, like, that could never be me. Heard something really interesting from a musician, Jacob Collier, the other day in a. In an interview. And he's like a young guy that makes unbelievable music. And he says the most like, framing he. He most dislikes about himself and his work is the notion that he is a prodigy, because he says all it serves to do is kind of put him on this pedestal that makes him feel, or what he does feel out of reach for normal people. And the reality is he is normal people. He was raised in a home with two parents who were musicians. He was surrounded by music all of his life in a way that maybe some people weren't. But the process to get there is the same for everybody. And the great news about that is you and I can be total knuckleheads and still manage to find success in spite of ourselves. And that was my first takeaway that I had noted here from the book. Here's a quote. But the fact is, ordinary people start profitable businesses every single day. You don't have to be rich, brilliant, or super experienced. But you do have excuses. Quote continues here. But you do have excuses that have held you back in the past. Businesses start with very ordinary people. And most of the folks that you talk with who found success, I suspect if you had talked with them in the beginning, they would be even less impressive. Right? Because they're not down that path. Like, they haven't figured it out, as it were, as much as anyone figures it out. And this isn't to, like, dunk on Every entrepreneur out there, it's more like, I think I probably glorified this to this stuff too much in the past. Maybe it's an, maybe it's an age thing, maybe it's a knowing, more successful people thing. But the more you see into that, I feel like, I feel like the more mechanical it gets and the less it becomes about the tactical and this and that and the more it becomes about just your framework for how you go through life, how you find time when you seemingly can't, how you consider excuses and like analyze them for what they are. Not that they are invalid, but there's also those internal voices that aren't always going to be helpful to you, right? So like that awareness. And some people just have this framework where for whatever reason they're. They're churning through this stuff at a different rate. And as with most things in life, it's volume that usually develops skill more so than quality. Not the quality doesn't matter. But most of us don't optimize for volume. Like we're on that default path, playing the game on the track that we're on. Get to partner, get to manager, build a more successful firm, hire a big team, whatever that is. We're on that default path and kind of like along for the ride. Another big theme here, particularly as most of us have plenty of things to do, we're not really looking for new stuff. Second big thing I called out here, look for reversible opportunities. So given two ideas, the one that's not a big commitment to anyone involved, that's the better idea. All else being equal, this is where sometimes recurring revenue businesses can be a bit of a trap is there's an implicit assumption there that you can continue to deliver X, Y or Z. But if you're starting out a new business and you've got people paying you for a year of service out of the gate, if you're not totally sure that that thing's going to make sense long term, or if there's factors that are even outside your control about that business, you want to take care to avoid the ones that you can't easily back yourself out of. It's not. Say there isn't value in commitment and like giving it your all and all that. It's that some things are going to be more reversible than others. And that's something to keep a lookout for. Third note I had here just seemed like fun exercise. We've talked, I think we did a past episode on like how you build adjacent businesses around your accounting firm, and I'm, I'm a big, big advocate of that One guy we talked with, Mitchell Baldrige, has built a cost seg business adjacent to his real estate accounting firm. Totally makes sense, right? Go. Goes hand in hand. There's a. A need there from his clients. This is from the book the now not how challenge. Ask one person you respect for a business idea. This is a quick way to get a business idea. You're gonna do it for yourself and realize the power of starting now. You'll realize by acting in the moment, you feel great about yourself and build momentum toward your dream life. Drop somebody a message. Hey, first name. I'm trying to come up with some business ideas right now. You know me well. So I was wondering what kind of business you think I'd be good at. Now, part of what, like, makes this sort of book and this sort of methodology more interesting is that when you run a firm, you already have the relationships and you already have a such a deep understanding of the problem. So much more than some random person that's trying to create a solution. You know, look at yourself as an accountant and the frustrations you feel with software vendors, for example, who may not have an accounting background, and you're like, wow, y' all just don't get it. We lose perspective of how much we just do get and when we see into our clients businesses, how much we've learned from the way ways that their businesses work and what pains keep them up at night. So my mind, it seems like we are, like, kind of perfectly suited for this because we're already plugged into that network of successful people who would be buyers. We already have an intimate understanding of what the problems are. But I love the notion of just asking somebody so to frame this through the lens of an accounting firm, the whole ask a person you respect for a business idea. I can think of a few clients who. This would have been actually really fun. I probably would have framed the ask as, hey, we're. We're just thinking about how we can go deeper with some specific clients. Could be probably, like new service lines. Can you help me think of some ideas of things that we could do that don't even fall within the traditional box of what you would expect from an accounting firm. And I don't necessarily want to, like, frame it for them so that they give me an answer that aligns with what I'm thinking. That's kind of the beauty of this is I just want to hear what they're going to say because it's probably Going to be founded in a very first principles of this thing hurts for me and I would happily pay somebody to do it. So they may come back with something like, I know, wealth management or, you know, being able to roll more of that stuff up under one roof. They may throw out just a painful problem that they have in their business that you may not have been aware of. Could be something completely of left field that surprises you. They may say, I wish I was as good as you on video. And you're like, what the heck man? I'm not good on video. And your mind immediately goes to, well, that's not an accounting thing and that can be a trap. I think I try to avoid that at all costs because to me, the most interesting accounting firms out there are the ones doing things that don't fall into the normal accounting firm box. They're more like a, like a management company, like a business solutions company for a very specific type of person that has specific needs and particularly as bookkeeping and tax prep and all that stuff is, is known and being further automated and ultimately commoditized to a degree. I love looking for the problems where there isn't a commoditized solution. And because we're able to get so deep into specific industries and problems, we can see small nuanced problems that people will pay well for that are maybe so small that like a startup's not going to go after that. But like, and we've talked about it before, the. Our little solution we came up for like, you know, reconciling the cash deposits of, of dental clinics and how this was a weird kind of unique to them problem. They didn't want to give somebody on their internal team access to all the information they need to be able to do that well. So we came in with a solution and folks paid like 500 to a grand a month for it. It was not a hard thing. We could fulfill it with administrative people, but it was a really painful problem for them. It was kind of sort of related to accounting, but not really. And we were able to market around the notion that we understood this very specific for dentist problem and we have a solution for it. And so then that, that rare problem that we understand, like that becomes an asset for our firm that attracts people. But if you're thinking about like new service lines and businesses, that sort of thing, that's exactly what I'm looking for. What's a big pain for my client right now. And this new service line may very well become the anchor for a cool niche firm. You learn that like, oh, this type of beekeeper has this very specific problem and we are a great solution for it. Could build a whole frickin firm around that problem. And the more rare the problem, the more compelling that is. Everybody has tax and accounting problems. So even if I'm a a beekeeper tax pro or a beekee bookkeeper. Ooh, that's a mouthful. There's a whole ton of other bookkeepers out there too, and they're gonna say, well yeah, of course we can do your beekeeping business. And they may not be the experts in the space that you are, but until you're solving rare problems that only you solve, then they're still kind of substitutes to your service, right? So that could be a really interesting exercise to bounce off a couple of clients. What's something more that we could do as we're doubling down and going deeper with specific clients like you? This episode is sponsored in part by Live Flow and Gang Lifflow just shipped Excel support. Yippee. So previously Live Flow was for bridging Data from your QuickBooks file to Google Sheets and it now works with Excel. Hold for applause. Basically a way to like extend QuickBooks to do so so much more. Because QuickBooks has its own usage limits and like user access is not very granular. So having A bridge between QuickBooks and your favorite spreadsheet is kind of augmenting QuickBooks in many ways. Whether it's like doing advisory work with a client, whether it's giving very fractional access to maybe only specific data. Like say you got a director of marketing and they need to see everything that hits the ledger under marketing, but nothing else. Never in a million years is like QuickBooks. User permission is going to let you do that. Whether they're internal team members, whether they're external stakeholders, or gives you a super easy way to give granular access to stuff from the accounting file and even keep it updating live from the data in the accounting file without having to like spill the whole beans. Give them access to everything. LifeLoad's been doing this for several years with Google Sheets, and now you can do it with Excel too. Go check it out. Link in the show notes this episode is brought to you in part by Team up, helping you recruit top Filipino accountants without any ongoing monthly fees. The difference between Team up and all the other offshoring options. So Team up helps you hire staff directly. No middleman. You work directly with your new hire in the Philippines. Hire the person, not the company. Guys, gals, gang. Here's just a few reasons to hire directly. You have access to higher level talent. Makes sense. You have complete control over team culture and training. They keep 100% of what you pay them and it's a lot more affordable for you so you can retain your team for the long term. Team up can source accountants with experience working at US or Australian firms familiar with tools like Xero, QBO and Dex. Also recruit specialist roles, team leaders, tax specialists, administrative assistants. Thought experiment. What if you had an executive assistant for the first time this tax season? Just. Just throwing it out there. What would they do? Start at that email video I did on the main channel recently. Get help with that stanky 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 Timo Next. We've talked about this a bit. There's a they devote some time to considering what your freedom number is. And he defines his freedom number as basically like what's my monthly nut? Like what do I need to get through life? This isn't like a big aspirational to have the massive home and the kids in private school and all these things. It's like what do I actually need? Because if you had freedom from work, most of us would actually be perfectly okay getting by with a lot less. Which is really a weird sort of contradiction that we live with. Like the fact that many of us have found success beyond like success that maybe we ever would have expected. But we keep working just as hard. Even though if you'd asked yourself five or ten years ago what's my freedom number? You've probably blown past that. And it's not to say that that I don't know that that freedom number won't ever change. But I think if you don't go through the exercise we've talked about this in the context of starting a firm. If you don't, don't go through an exercise to say this is what I want to make every year for the next three years, then you end up on this like perpetual hamster wheel. Not necessarily doing anything in particular, just doing more. And this is where like you stop firing clients because you're like, oh, well, that client's like a free hundred dollar bill on the sidewalk. Why would he walk away from that? Because you're just trying to do more and more and more. You're not thinking through the lens of what's the best way I can get to this. Here's my freedom number and here's the most chill, most fun, most enjoyable way to get to that. And I'd argue most of us, I don't know, probably still don't have that freedom number, like, regardless of the stage in life you're at. The author talks in the book about like in his 20s. He's like, this is a very small amount, thousand bucks a month for housing, thousand for food and travel, thousands for savings and investment. So as Freed number in his twenties was three grand a month. And so he's looking for the most enjoyable way to get there, basically. And the reality is there's a million different ways to get there that are all like, efficient to different degrees and fun to different degrees. So even if you're there already, is there a more challenging, more fun, like, new angle on this that can spice things up a bit? This is where momentum probably works against you. You've been doing things a certain way for so long, you have clients doing this and that, and you've got all this steam going in this direction. The notion of pulling your head out of that and doing something totally different, that's really challenging. Some folks can do that, some folks can't. If you're more entrepreneurially minded, that may be really exciting for you. But if that's not you, a lot of these business ideas are like the ultimate kind of accelerant for the stuff that you already do. They're that adjacent service that is like the peanut butter and jelly. It goes perfectly with the accounting, it goes perfectly with the tax to where now that client could never imagine going to somebody else to solve that problem if they didn't also do the other things that you do. So even if the notion of doing something new is spooky parrot back to we already solve all sorts of random problems for our clients and get sucked into like, oh, what do they need to do to hire an employee in this state for the first time? Like, we are constantly going down those rabbit holes. Are there some of those pains that a bunch of our clients have in common that we can build cool solutions for? What's a rare pain that we can be a rare solution for? I think I have a freedom number right now. It's different than it used to be, but I've actually been thinking about that a lot lately. How to make sure you're not doing things just to do things, and instead how to be curious about new things. To find maybe a better way to get to the same place, or a more enjoyable way to get to the same place, or an opportunity to, you know, something that will create opportunities for other people as well. If my, if my freedom number was five grand a month, and I can make five grand a month running a jackhammer until the day that I die, then I hope that's something that I super enjoy. But the fact that I was able to get that gig that reached my freedom number doesn't mean I should put my head under a rock and not like, keep thinking about, like, where am I going with all this? Am I still enjoying myself? Is there another way to get there? Fifth and sixth notes I have here are about developing your Ask Ask Muscle. Noel Kagan has the thing he brings up a lot in his content the notion of just getting. Getting comfortable with uncomfortable asks. Because so much of starting a business is just being willing to ask somebody for something, ask their opinion, ask if they would actually pay for this. The exercise he always comes back to is the next time you're in a coffee shop, buying a coffee, when they hand it to you or when you're paying, ask for a 10% discount. Just be like, hey, thanks, could I have a 10% discount? And it just is so cringe, right? And they're going to be like, no. Or let me ask my manager. And 99% of the time they're just going to say no. And you'll be like, okay, thanks. Have a good day. But the value of having done that is like, I don't know, you are maybe a little more willing to like, make that uncomfortable. Ask. Willing to risk looking dumb in front of other people. His the story of like, his father, it's really interesting. Immigrant family. I think he was selling copiers or something like that. And he went to work with his dad at one point and it was just rejection after rejection. And he was like, I absolutely can't handle this. And couldn't get his head around how his father wasn't like, crushed by this. He talks about framing things as rejection goals. If you're doing something hard and trying to see if folks will engage with something, he says. Rather than the framing of trying to get X number of sales, consider the opposite. Trying to get to X number of rejections, knowing that with each rejection you're going to get a Little bit better at this. And if you optimize for volume, that's probably the best way to ultimately get more sales. This is something that I think gets increasingly hard as you find success. As you're not doing door to door sales, you're not cold calling people. And like, I think the further down the path of success you get, the more you're like, I would never do that. But even if you're not working in a call center, even if you're the big boss, there's a million versions of this that we bump up against every single day. Maybe it's asking somebody to be a guest on your podcast, maybe it's asking somebody else if you can go on their podcast to get some exposure. And if we can desensitize ourselves to that rejection, we are more likely to take steps every single day that are going to be to our own benefit because we are not blocking ourselves by the fear of rejection. We did an episode not that long ago on the power of cold DMs. DMs are a great example. Like, or a cold email, literally, what do you have to lose? They don't respond. They say no, but still we don't do that. We don't make that ask because we're afraid of maybe them not responding or reading it and being like, I'm not going to respond to that, or afraid of them saying no. It's like, man, you are not. Like, you did not go backwards. You had nothing to lose There something I had here. Just an interesting tidbit. Follow ups. He talks quite a bit about follow ups and how most nos are actually not nows, but they reference a study that shows if you initially get a no, your follow up ask is twice as likely to get a yes. There's probably a lot of situations here where we don't follow up enough whenever we do make asks. If you consider all the asks that you've made when somebody tells you no, I suspect 95% of the time we're not circling back to be like, how about now? Or this? Or that has changed, maybe you should reconsider. Usually it's like, no, you put your head in your hands and you move on with your life. But if we can get over that, to make that follow up ask, you'd be surprised how you can kind of kick things off again. I've found this a ton in the people who buy sponsorships in my content. Like, if you just take a little bit of time to do follow ups, it makes a massive difference because we're all we're all kind of fighting for somebody's attention span. Ultimately, anytime we're asking for something like that person can only do so many things and we have to somehow get to the top of that list. And the reality is man, people are going to have days, people are going to have weeks, and six months from now they could be in a totally different place. So again, it comes back to like, ultimately, what do you have to lose by making that request besides it being uncomfortable. This episode is sponsored in part by Keeper. Keeper was my 2022, I think tool of the year. I do like an annual year end YouTube video. My favorite new stuff of the year. Keeper's hard to explain. It's not really like a practice management system. It's like a task management system. Had a baby with the accounting ledger because it pulls all the accounting data like into the platform. So the way that most people use Keeper is you'll have a bookkeeper like reconcile the bank statement in qbo. Also works with Xero now, but you have somebody reconcile the bank statement in QBO and then the entire rest of the month end closes managed from Keeper, which is like a single hub for managing all of your closes. So the accountants generally aren't actually getting into QuickBooks anymore or they're managing it all from Keeper where it's doing like anomaly detection and making sure you actually are getting W9 from people. All these cool things that are built directly into the platform and then if you need to change transactions because they're all there inside of Keeper, you just change it inside of Keeper and all that stuff Syncs back to QuickBooks now since then they've shipped all sorts of stuff like reports and like client facing portal. They just shipped receipts recently too so clients can just chuck receipts in there. A very unique product because it lets you see the status of all of your month end closes in a single place like in this grid view that talks to QuickBooks so can see like what's the locked period like all these things where normally you'd have to log into QuickBooks to see it. It's all managed in Keeper. Pretty cool. I'm supposed to send you to the link in the in the show notes. Don't do that. I did a demo day, a sponsored demo day for them on my YouTube channel maybe six months ago. It's like a five minute crash course on what it does. Go YouTube search Jason stats Keeper. That'll tell you what you need to know and then come back and click the link in the show notes. 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 pick 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, account 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 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. This was a fun example. Number eight start with the customer but get right down to business. So like be very customer centric and how you evolve an idea. Don't fall in love with something just because you think because you think it's a good idea. Like listen to the customer. A dog walking idea here. So they're exploring an idea for a dog walking app. First they call a checks three people who have dogs and ask them to pay you to walk their dog. So right away ask them for money. That was another common theme Here is you generally wait too long to actually get people to cut a check. And oftentimes people will be like, yeah, that is a good idea. But then when it comes time to actually get the wallet out and pay whatever that's going to be, a lot of those people drop off. I think we've all got stories of that in running accounting firms where you're like doing a dance with somebody for a couple months and they're like, here's what it costs. And they're like, what? And you're like, why did I just waste two months of my life? Anyway, so first they call or text three people right now who have dogs and ask them to pay you to walk their dog. Second, turn out, none of these dog owners have problems walking their dog. You discover that the real problem is finding dog sitters when they're traveling. So third, ask for their next travel dates and have them pay you a deposit. Boom. You wouldn't have gotten to number three had you not started number one. And if you were so married with number one that you went out and you built a mobile app for dog walking and all these things, you're gonna end up even more committed to that idea because you've already sunk the money into it and you're like, further down the road. And the hard thing here, and you'll see this on social media, the hard thing here is access to the person that has the problem. And you'll see this in the wild all the time with software developers who are like, hey, we're, we're thinking about going to do this or that and the accounting space. Could we just pick your brain for a few minutes? And you're like, you sure can't. Because a group of developers said, look at accounting. That seems like low hanging fruit. Let's go talk to some people and figure it out. You, on the other hand, you've already got access to all the people that have the problem. You already have a relationship with them. You have their trust. I think you can do this in a way that doesn't violate that trust. I don't want to get too like salesy about this. I just want to frame it as like, how can we continue to solve meaningful problems for you? And like be an even better resource for the business that you're building. And inevitably that comes down to like making an ask like, okay, you thought this was a good idea. Will you pay X for it? If so, I'm going to send over an engagement letter. Another cool story here shares the story of a content marketing guy that was working for HubSpot, who wrote this big like mega guide for some sort of marketing efforts. And it got really popular. It was super relevant for what he was doing. So he went out. This is Noah, the author, hired the guy who wrote this article and said, come build this for me. So he set up like their lead funnels and lead magnets and all that for one of his businesses at that time. And some of the coolest things I've seen accounting firms do has actually been when they pull in non accounting people who may be somewhat influential folks in a space and they come develop a resource for them or go to work on like some specific problem that the firm is trying to solve. So if you think about the type of people that you, that you work with and maybe one of these people is even a client, you got these little pockets of, you know, if it's beekeepers, great. These little pockets of folks with similar interests, maybe they're in a shared industry where you've got kind of a concentration in your firm. Who are the folks that those people are looking up to? Like, who are the thought leaders in that space? Maybe it's a podcast host or a social media influencer or something like that. In the world of social media, there's this notion of audience hacking that is piggybacking all of the interest there is in someone else to put together something that ultimately gets you exposure. And this is where I think influencer marketing is still very undervalued. Obviously I'm biased there, but who in that larger circle just beyond your firm, who could you pull in to like make something cool for your firm or make your firm stand out because you're working with, oh my gosh, this person who's in my space, who I really respect that like audience hacking, but through the lens of an accounting firm, that's really interesting. So like, the next time you read something where you're like, man, that's really smart, or you hear a really good podcast or something like that, think, would the people who already buy things from me benefit from hearing from this person and learning from this person, do they maybe already know who that person is? So my association with them could be beneficial? If so, like, see if there's a way you can put them to work. Not like come be an employee, but like think through some limited scope project that you could do together. Oftentimes when we consider doing something like that that may be valuable for the firm, you look around at the squad and you're like, well, who's going to do it? I don't have time to do it. So that's not going to happen. When as we talked about with that Barbara Corcoran story a couple months ago, man, perception is reality. And so if you can hire somebody that already has the exposure or is already perceived to be the expert, that person is, is super valuable because of that perception, whether it is real or not. That's why I kind of have a theory that like, in the not too distant future, a bunch of stuff's just going to consolidate around like these little kind of micro influencers. You take software, like increasingly saturated bunch of tools doing the same thing, you can't really tell the difference. All else being equal, if there's somebody you trust and respect that's attached to one of those things, probably going to buy that thing. You look at a client who's like, well, I've got money that I need to invest somewhere. I need somebody to like be my financial advisor. I don't really have a horse in this race, but, oh, this other person I trust, my accountant, they work with this group or maybe they do it in house. Like that to me is influence. That is being an influencer. You're influencing people's decision making. And particularly as there's more misinformation out there and folks just don't know what to believe, you're going to attach yourself to people that you trust. Like, I know I do. I've got folks I consume stuff from and that totally impacts my buying decisions. Last note I had here was some interesting ideas around optimizing your email list. He said, you know, every email list he's ever built, there's been a three step progression. The first step is a welcome email that gives a little bit of context about like what they just signed up for, but also asks, what could I do to provide value to you? Like, it opens a conversation and it's the last line in a small email. And that line is bold. So this person is interested, they're engaged, they opt in and immediately get an email asking how can I help you? As a great way to like, like start building an actual relationship with the person on the other side of that newsletter and for you to get really helpful feedback. So that's the first email that goes out. Second, and so these go out like automatically a few days after the previous one. Second email is asking them to send you a connection request on LinkedIn. Why not? That's actually really smart and gives you a little more access to, to I guess their bubble and makes it more likely they're Going to see that stuff that you put out. And so like the network effect of doing that over a long period of time, it's pretty big. And then the third email in the sequence is like the first one. That is the meat of what they subscribed for. Like you're giving real value there. And then at that point, like that kind of journey is over and they're handed off to like the normal pattern of emails going out. I've never gone to that level of effort. I probably should. Creating some engagement with those emails actually helps the indicators that could lead to your messages going to junk as well. So, like people actually reading them, people engaging with them, replying to them, all of that helps the deliverability of your emails. But that was an interesting tidbit. If you're building an email newsletter list for your accounting firm, it's a very small scale thing. So oftentimes maybe we shy away from doing bigger lift stuff with something like an email newsletter because you're like, no, I'm, I'm looking for scale here, man. I just want to send this thing out to a hundred thousand people. It's like, no, you're not. Who are you kidding? You run an accounting firm. These dorks are signing up to an accounting firm newsletter. Let's not lose perspective of that. The best thing you can do is pause and like start to like, build a bit of a relationship with this person. To me, that's what like networking looks like these days, is learning about the people out there, being able to make connections for them down the road. When you talk with somebody else and you're like, oh yeah, I've actually know a guy that runs an app for dog sitters. And the more those connections you can make, like, the bigger your network gets. So I really enjoyed this book because it kind of, in some ways, it kind of made business fun again for me. Like the play of business, like what was really appealing about it when I was in school, it's like, well, anything is possible, but the further down a path of success you get, you kind of get tunnel vision just for, I don't know, the current paradigm and the things that you're doing. So all that is to say, you can still go to do something wildly different, but in the context of an accounting firm, there's a lot of really cool stuff you could bolt on to what you're doing that may not be the traditional accounting or compliance firm sort of stuff stuff. And if you're not sure what that could be, ask, don't be afraid to ask. The most profitable things in my accounting firm were not tax prep, were not bookkeeping. It was the other stuff we figured out around that stupid stuff like cash reporting, like these things that were less technical than all the work we were doing that was getting commoditized. We could charge way more for that. And then if that client was like, should I go somewhere else or what would it cost for me to have my stuff done somewhere else? There really aren't any alternatives because what we're doing is like, very uniquely suited for them. And it's this like innocence and openness to, I guess, new concepts like that that we kind of lose, which is kind of a bummer. And like, we started with there are times to zoom in, to go deep, to focus on the technical. But there's gotta be times to zoom out too, get that perspective and be like, okay, like, what do we. What do the next few months look like? Is this the best use of my time and the things that I'm capable of? Because that's a moving target. Which is, which is great news. If you got any entrepreneurial ideas, like stuff you're considering, that's like, who am I to do this? Or you wouldn't do this in an accounting firm? Like, you got something crazy off the wall, drop it in the comments. I would love to see it. I love that stuff. I love the more off the wall accounting firms out there. The last thing we need is another accounting firm that solves for your peace of mind. Oh, baby. How about a. How about like a dog sitting accountant? You come over, you watch the dogs, you go through the shoebox of receipts. Hear me out. No, wait, hear me out. You go through the shoebox of receipts. By the time they get back from their trip, everything's all done. And you watched the dogs while they were gone, Okay?