221 How To Build The First 1 Person $10M Accounting Firm

Sam Altman recently said that it won't be long until we see the first billion dollar company that is run by a single person, courtesy of AI. And it got me thinking. One, how is that possible? That's absolutely wild. But two, could an accountant do that? How far could we push this? Maybe we start with something more humble. Million dollar firm, one person, I'm sure somebody out there is probably already doing that. But $10 million firm, one person, is it possible? And by exploring like going through this ex, what I think it does is actually shine a light on the types of work that grow exponentially as opposed to grow linearly, and the ones that will keep making you more and more money without you having to keep piling additional inputs into it. So let's do this little thought experiment and see how we could get to building a one person, $10 million firm. Come on in, let's talk about. This is just wild to me and maybe a signal of the end of times. Sam Altman said in an interview and my little group chat with my tech CEO friends, there's this betting pool for the first year that there is a one person, billion dollar company which would have been unimaginable without AI and now will happen. He went on to say, there's going to be a new phenomenon where CEOs and founders are going to be so excited to get up and go to work with much smaller, much more performant, much more culturally strong teams. The venture capital guy that was interviewing him said, I don't know many people who don't believe this. Pretty wild to think about the notion that AI is going to actually enable additional scale on top of what software already offers. Like in theory, software is kind of the perfect thing to sell, right? Like you write the line of code once, that product can run forever. But the implication here is all that stuff that takes more time and more people, the adjacent things AI can seemingly handle for you. The analogy they use is spinning a number of plates. You like start a plate space and you only have to come back to it every now and then to keep it spinning. And maybe you'd expect that From Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI obviously has a lot to gain by people being really excited about what AI could bring us. But I honestly don't know that people are talking about the absurdity of all of this enough. You may have seen in the news last week, Microsoft and OpenAI are building a 100 billion, 100 billion dollar supercomputer. They're going to call it Stargate because nerd, the Goal will be to complete it in 2028. The idea being that maybe this is like the first AGI that they're able to build within this. AGI being adjusted gross income. No, AGI being artificial general intelligence. And it's going to get really tricky exactly how general intelligence gets defined. But most people can agree AGI is, is when AI can like go off on its own and discover novel things independently, like medical discoveries that humans have not been able to figure out, that sort of thing. Right now, AI is assisting in discovering new things, but this is like more of an autonomous version of that. And I mean, there's a really high percentage of tech folks that think within the next decade we will have AGI. And when we have AGI, like we're talking about big things, like ultimately getting to a cure for like massive diseases, that sort of thing. And I don't know that it's getting enough play. In Joe Biden's State of the Union recently, AI came up. He said, we'll cure cancer with AI, but then he said we'll also ban deep fakes. And a lot of, a lot of what he talked about was around like the scary aspects of AI. And if it's ultimately going to be powerful enough to let you know, single people create billion dollar companies to solve the world's problem, why is this not like a bigger thing on like the political stage? Like, why is this not the space race? It's interesting. I actually ran the numbers. The cash that the Soviet Union poured into the space race in today's money. A hundred billion dollars. Almost exactly the money Microsoft and OpenAI are going to put into Stargate between now and 2028, $100 billion. In the past, what would have been like the government stepping up and being like, we need to get to this first. Now it's like Microsoft is gonna get to it first. It's kind of weird. And if you like pair all this back to get really practical and be like, okay, but how does somebody actually make like a super profitable company out of this? One of the best visual examples I've seen of the power of this is Devin. This one came out maybe a month or so ago. If you read my newsletter, you may have seen it. It's basically a totally autonomous AI agent with kind of a novel user interface. And I'll walk you through what that looks like. But this is an AI agent that works on its own and is going as far as completing jobs on upwork as if it were a human. And that feels like a tipping point that is significant because if I go out and I put a job on Fiverr and I have very specific requirements about what I need to be done. On the one hand, I'm like, if a bot comes in and does it, my initial reaction is that's going to be annoying. But, like, the more I think about that, I don't know that I actually care. Like, some projects are gonna require some dialogue and some back and forth and some iteration, and maybe I want a human in the loop there. Maybe the AI can do that just fine as well. But you think about, I mean, the accounting and tax work that's out there on Fiverr and Upwork. I know a bunch of pros who started grinding on Upwork and Fiverr doing work for pennies on the dollar, because you gotta start somewhere. But we now have agents like this that are good enough to do, like, computer programming tasks on Fiverr and actually complete those jobs. So the way Devin works is in a single user interface where you can watch Devin work. And I actually think, at least right now, there's a lot of value in us being able to see what agents are doing for us. If we're going to trust an AI agent to do a task, at least initially, you want to have some oversight and some ability to, like, interact with it to get it back on course. But the way this app works is basically four quadrants on the screen. The top left is a chat interface where you talk with the agent and give it instructions. The top right is a window where it writes code. The bottom left is a web browser where anytime it gets stuck or needs to troubleshoot something, it'll actually Google it and, like, go look up help documentation and figure out exactly what the problem is. And then the bottom right is a console, like, like the output for your code, like, where you can print information, like, try to debug problems, that sort of thing. If you think about what this could look like in an accounting context, your top left could be chat. Your top right could be an accounting file. Bottom left could be web browser for, like, looking up help documentation for QuickBooks or troubleshooting some sort of specific issue it's running into. And the bottom right could be, like, your work paper files. And the agent can see all these things at once as it's trying to complete a job. And you can see it working across all of your different apps. And that's really powerful, obviously, because agents will work while you sleep. In some situations, they'll do things much faster than humans. And you can spin up as many agents to be working at the same time as you want. So if you create an agent that can reconcile a QuickBooks file, you now theoretically have the ability to reconcile an infinite number of QuickBooks files at once. And that's the premise here of, well, if somebody finds a really compelling problem to solve, we now think that the tech is to the point where they could build a billion dollar business thanks to AI. And I mean the immediate reaction is like, how are you gonna defend this business? Then ultimately like, couldn't somebody else come in and teach it the same thing? And really the same logic here applies to most products. It may be eliminating a bit of a barrier to build the product, but you look at a company like Ramp, which grew unbelievably as a kind of a card management solution, well, why didn't somebody just copy Ramp? As it turns out, there's, there is more to it than just being able to build a thing. Accountants know better than anybody. It's not enough to build something that maybe gets a specific job done. Like we need to consider, well, where does this app bump up against all of our other apps and how does it impact the way that my client uses the tool versus the way that I use the tool? And so it's very contextual and it's why accountants, like I always get really excited when accountants start looking into building software or going to work for software companies to actually build the things we really need. So would it be possible to do something similar in an accounting firm? How would you build a single person, billion dollar accounting firm? That's a little hard for me to get my head around something that astronomical. But some thoughts why a firm could do this. These AI agents and OpenAI is actually said to be releasing their own agent tool similar to Devin this year. That's going to be absolutely wild. So reasons why a firm could potentially do this. Agents will soon be able to do repeatable tasks on our own computers with reasoning built in. So the same way that you would walk an intern through how to do a task, you walk an AI agent through how to do a task and it can kind of reason through little hiccups that it runs into. But then once you've shown it how to do that once, it can do that an infinite number of times. So it means there's next to no incremental cost and next to no incremental effort for you to do that thing anymore. If it's something that's largely the same for every client or something where you can sit somebody down and say here's how to always do it. And it's not relying on this arcane experience that you have. There are a lot of things that rely on that experience, but there's also a lot of things that don't. Entering a W2 into your tax software, putting the bank statement where it goes in the workpaper file and annotating the PDF, theoretically it now takes us no more time, costs us virtually nothing to do these tasks that we can explain to an AI agent. And that absolutely changes every firm. Now reasons why it's probably not realistic for an accountant to build a single person billion dollar firm. You can't truly automate everything that a human wants from you. Right. Like there's the whole relationship management aspect of managing clients and in my experience, what they're looking for doesn't quite fit into a nice tidy box that you can replicate across every single client. I still think most clients are going to hit a point where they need to talk to a human being like they need to felt that they need to feel understood. That's one thing that language models aren't great at yet. You can have a compelling conversation with them, but you know, it's not real and there's something there that's, that's missing. Like there's some seasoning there when it's not a real conversation. And maybe the best analogy I can make is AI got better at chess. Say AI computers got better at chess than humans a long time ago. But we don't sit there and like watch chess matches of computers playing against computers. That's not interesting. What is interesting is the best humans in the world playing against each other. And there's some aspect of like these really nuanced conversations, particularly around things like entrepreneurship, which can be like deeply personal. There's something that I don't know that AI ever totally replaces when it comes to the need for an advisor. Who knows, maybe that's old timey thinking and that ultimately goes away. But then the third reason why a firm maybe couldn't do it is wouldn't someone like, you know, an intuit or something like that build something like you're building just even better? And I think the answer there is for like the general solutions for the problems that everybody has, the answer is probably yes. But for my clients that have nuance problems or for myself when I want it done a different way, nobody's ever gonna come down to that level of specificity to do every little thing just the way that you want it. So there will be like much better solutions for the industry, for the tools that we use within our firms. But it's still hard to believe managing a whole bunch of clients. I mean, think how many clients it takes to get to a billion dollar firm if you're looking at it through the lens of relatively normal pricing. This episode is sponsored in part by Liflow and gang. Liflow just shipped Excel support. Yippee. So previously Lifeflow 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 permissions going to let you do that. Whether they're internal team members, whether they're external stakeholders 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. LifeLow has 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 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 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 Open 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 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 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. So in a world of billion dollar single person unicorns, like what is the place for the little guy for the person doing the old timey accounting firm like service business? Honestly, I think the answer is probably pretty much the same as it is today. Like we already have productized solutions out there who promise to do all this stuff purely with product. And sometimes they do and sometimes there's human beings behind the scenes like assisting the process. But right now there's still a really big gap between productized solutions, the impersonal solutions and like going and working with a professional. Now AI will continue to make those productized solutions better, but I would argue as those tools get better, so too do the tools in our space that we use to support us get better. And that the best of both worlds to me is a pro that's enabled with killer tools but is still a pro and can still do the human things. I mean that seems like what everybody's going to want. Now there, there may be cost barriers to getting to work with that pro and that's where the product solutions right now are great is the reality is the cost of entry to work with pro today is too high for many like early business owners and so they're relying on those productized solutions that aren't quite as good. But the best of both worlds to me, man, it seems like an AI enabled pro like that seems like the win for everybody. But to get back to the exercise at hand, what does an absurdly profitable accounting firm look like? Well, it probably looks less like a service business, right, and more like selling products. So diversifying into product income where possible. The stuff that you can sell over and over again without lifting a finger and doing additional work. The stuff that works while you sleep and makes money while you sleep and doesn't require a human being to make some inputs and deliver a thing. But at the end of the day it is still worth considering. No human is going to out productize a product like I'm not going to out TurboTax. TurboTax or probably not out. QuickBooks Live. QuickBooks Live. So I'm not. I don't wanna get in that race to the bottom and make it less personal. That's a losing battle. So the one thing that we have that products will never have is you, is your identity and the perceived value of your identity. So he said, I really can't imagine a way that you get a firm to, you know, a billion dollars because of the absurd client volume that something like that would require. Right? But even if you take that down from a billion whatever number you take it down to, what you find is what ends up driving all of your pricing. And the value of everything you do, whether it's services or selling products or anything else, is the perceived expertise that you have. The perception on the spectrum of nobody's ever heard of you before to your, I don't know, pick a person. Grant Cardone. Cardone, whatever his name is. Some like, you know, really impressive, Tony Robbins type, influential person. That identity and that value in them, having that trust in you, that's something that we will always have, that products will never have. So what does it look like to build a crazy profitable firm leaning into this? And what it actually looks very similar to is what people would consider a traditional creator business now. So to be a quote unquote influencer. This started as like, influencing stuff, started as like brand deals on Instagram. Now it's kind of matured around a fairly standardized set of things that most creators do to make money. To give you an example and to think of this through the lens of, okay, what crosses over to accounting firms here and what doesn't. Ali Abdaal, a British YouTuber I've talked about quite a bit every year he does a video that breaks down how much money the company made and across all these different segments for the year, we with the goal of ultimately showing how they got there and making this feel more accessible for people. If you don't know Ali, he was previously a doctor, totally has gone away from that to just do the creator thing. So if you're thinking, well, I have an accounting firm, that's great, but the accounting firm can really be like a force multiplier for some aspects of running a creator business. So Ali's 2022 video about all the different ways he made money, I'll run through the 12 different revenue streams to talk about, like, is this relevant to accounting or not? First revenue stream, YouTube AdSense. They made 653k from YouTube AdSense. These are the ads that play during YouTube videos. The only people that make meaningful money from YouTube AdSense are mainstream, huge audience channels. And for most of us that's not a channel we need to be building. Like I can't build that channel. There's four and a half million videos uploaded to YouTube every day now. So ask yourself, are you good enough to float to the top of that four and a half million or are you good enough to float to the top of the five people that post videos for beekeepers each month? Eh, Finance or tax videos for beekeepers each month. That's the game I wanna play. Cause I know I can do a lot better in that one. Now that channel, it's never gonna be huge. So you're not gonna make a meaningful amount of money from AdSense for perspective, my main YouTube channel, about 15,000 subscribers, all targeted towards accounting firm owners and accounting firm leadership. I've had monitor monetization turned off on it for a while, but if I had it turned on right now, I would make maybe $900 a month from it from YouTube AdSense. So YouTube AdSense for accounting firms probably doesn't make sense because we're never going to be running these mega scale channels. Second, he talked about Amazon affiliates. They made 44 grand from Amazon affiliates. This is when you share something and link it to Amazon down below via your own like special effect affiliate link. Somebody buys it and you get a share of what they bought. This only really works if you're mega high volume or mega high ticket if you're selling like big expensive camera gear or something like that. Funny enough, Ali Abdaal, who's a productivity YouTuber, former doctor. Their biggest source of Amazon affiliate revenue was a video he made about his skincare routine. What in the world is this guy doing making a video about his skincare routine? Who knows. But it went viral and accounted for most of the Amazon affiliate money that they made that year. And it's just like face lotion, there's like five or six different products and they linked them all via Amazon affiliate. That one's probably not us. Third, revenue stream affiliate programs that are negotiated. So interestingly so they made 235k on that in 2022. Interestingly, he said that he prefers affiliate programs to sponsorship deals because what they'll do is they'll fall in love with the product and then they'll reach out to the company and negotiate their own affiliate deal. And I'll be honest, that kind of got me thinking because in my business I've always shied away from affiliate deals because I don't want people to think that I'm gonna make money by recommending something as opposed to a sponsorship. The ad music is playing. You know, in that little universe, we are within the scope of an ad, right? And everybody knows how that works. Outside of that, it's me. And you can make the argument that, like, are you still really going to be independent? Are you going to. Are you going to not say something that may make a sponsor of that video angry or something? The reality is maybe there's a little bit of that, but I've always thought there's a lot less there than you get with affiliates, where you have all these things that you can sell and you try to pipe people through buying that thing just because it's going to make you money at that point, like, you're not giving true independent information. But maybe I've got this all wrong because he said they actually prefer affiliates to sponsorships because they only do affiliates for the stuff that they love and stuff they actually use. Maybe I'm being too pessimistic about that, that people are going to ultimately abuse it, but I thought that was interesting and totally relevant. In our case, if you're in a niche, let's say you're doing construction and you've got, you know, a CRM or an ERP or an LOL that you use and you swear by that one, and it's like the very best one. Then like, when you bring in construction clients, get them on it and like, get affiliate revenue from that. I don't have a problem with that. Relay bank does affiliate stuff. When we were working with Bench, back when I had my firm, we did some affiliate stuff with them. Affiliates still going to be a volume game. But some of these industry softwares are so expensive, they can make a good amount of money without, like, sending a whole ton of people their way. Because if these things are 100 bucks a seat or something like that, and you're on for some percentage of that, either in the first year or even indefinitely, you can actually build a meaningful amount of revenue from that. So this one actually thing is super relevant to accounting firms, especially if you're working within a specialized industry and you have tools that you recommend for people. Number four was their YouTube sponsorships. They made about 600k from that. Totally inbounds for accounting firms. Same sort of thing. If you've got tools that you like, products that you like, you have, if you're running a niche firm, a very, very focused audience. I mean, if you're a beekeeping firm, the people who watch your content. There's going to be a lot of people that want to get in front of those people that have things for successful beekeepers. And if you've never sold a YouTube sponsorship before, that may feel like out of reach, like odd, like how could I ever actually do that? It's easier than you think. And it's one of those things that nobody thinks they're ever going to do until one day they just do it. Number five, podcast brand deals. Pretty much same thing as YouTube sponsorships. Number six, email newsletter. This may be the lowest hanging fruit for firms here on sponsorships. That beekeeping weekly newsletter could totally get a brand in on that social media. Sponsored posts maybe merch. Merch is again one of those things that only really works at a massive scale and is also a lot of work because you got to deal with quality control and logistics and all that. Kind of hard to make money on merch. Like nobody wants to pay 50 bucks for a T shirt, 40 bucks for a T shirt. So that one only really shakes out if you have huge scale. So that one's probably not for us. Nine digital products. If you got a following, this is one that makes sense. I think we've talked before about Justin Welsh who's selling one and a half to $2 million a year in digital products. He's got like one or two products on LinkedIn and Twitter. All he does is post there every single day and people go and buy that product. He doesn't have to lift a finger. And they're like 90 minute courses. That's it, super easy. From 100 to $300. All he does got two courses. Talks about problems around those courses on social media every day. That is his whole business. That is his life. He's running it by himself. So digital courses, absolutely inbounds for us. 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 a 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 close is 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. 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 it 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. This episode is sponsored in part by firm360. You may have passed the deadline, but do you have the right tools headed into next year? It's change season man, where you revisit what worked and what didn't work. And I'll tell you the minimum point of entry for an accounting firm these days is a solid cloud practice management system to keep all the goods, all the goods in order. My firm 360, they're just that they're doing it all in one place. Project management, document management, client management, E6 time and billing, advanced reporting. We did that roundup last year of like 14 leading cloud practice management systems. Firm360 is on the list and way ahead of the curve, specifically on time and billing has always been kind of a weakness of cloud practice management systems. Firm 360 in particular put a ton of thought into that. A lot of the other PMs like still you got to bolt on sort of other adjacent tools and you end up having like split data in this system and then the other data over here in this billing system. Man, you want that all in one place. Makes your life so much easier. If you are sniffing around new PMs check this one out. Firm360 put a link in the show notes number 10. They made $778,000 in streaming royalties from Skillshare. So if you ever heard of Skillshare, it's a video streaming platform where you can make videos and put it on there and they'll actually give you a revenue share based on how much people watch your videos on there. And there's probably some equivalent to this in these niche spaces. I know I actually get approached about this stuff pretty frequently about me putting my content onto paywalled platforms. And as part of that you're gonna get some sort of deal where there's a revenue share where part of that comes to you. So that might actually be relevant to firms. 11th source of revenue for them. Self hosted courses. Not sure how those are different than digital products. Maybe digital products are just like a PDF or something and this is like more of a course. They made 180k from that totally relevant for firms. And then 12 their largest source of revenue. Cohort based courses. That is you only accept like you do several rounds of it per year and you let a certain number of people into each cohort and that cohort goes through it together. They made 1.8 million in 2022 on cohort courses. So he has a. It's called the part time YouTuber Academy and basically people pay between three and five grand to come and learn how to start building a YouTube channel part time. And there's a guy who five years ago didn't have a massive following, was doing something completely different. People only know him from silly Internet videos. And they'll now come and pay 3 to $5,000 to go through a cohort. They did almost 2 million on that in 22. I think they did even more on it in 23. So how do we pull some aspects of these into running an accounting firm? I can tell you if you're trying to get to a revenue number of like could I do a million dollar accounting firm with this? One mistake that we make is because we can't imagine it at the destination. Oftentimes we don't start when the people who got to that really impressive figure, man, they could have never imagined it early days either. And so for some of these things, like you just have to have the conviction that you're like, this is a scalable thing that I'm pretty sure will get more profitable over time. So I'm just going to start. That's absolutely how my business has worked. My online community for accountants like that started in a really small, humble thing where I'm like, I'm just going to make people pay so that they have some stakes to be there. And it's not like another throwaway free community. But it did not at all start from a standpoint of like, this is going to be a legitimate business. I was running a $5 million accounting firm at the time, but over time, like, it grows and it grows and I still remember selling some of my first sponsorships for pennies. And it grows and it grows. And these things, unlike, you know, a service business, these things are more akin to like exponential growth. They're not truly exponential, but they're not linear. And service businesses by and large are going to be linear. You're going to continue hiring people to do the work. You're making money largely at a fixed rate. And so the path to making more money is usually doing more of it. Now we definitely charge more and there's a lot of ways around that. But if you run a newsletter and you're an accounting firm and you start selling sponsorships on that newsletter, maybe there's a brand that you like to work with and their audience aligns with your audience and you come to them and you say, hey, do you want to pay 200 bucks to sponsor this newsletter? Is that a life changing amount of money for you? Probably not. But the really cool thing about this type of media is it doesn't really have a ceiling like that price. And so if it's $200 this month, there's a good chance it's going to be twice that in four months and twice that again in another four months. And a couple years down the line, you're running a newsletter and charging thousands of dollars per week to write this little newsletter that goes out the door. And you were going to do the newsletter whether it had an ad or not. And it's that sort of thing that like other aspects of service businesses struggle to replicate. Like those are the really exciting scalable things. So let's start really small. What does a one person firm look like that has some components of a creator business? Let's say we wanted to get to $20,000 per month. So 240k per year, single person, not a bad gig. I'm going to only have five clients. They're going to pay me two grand a month to work with them. So I'm going to make ten grand a month on client work. That's half of my $20,000 a month goal. I'm going to run quarterly cohorts around, you know, crash course for X specific type of person. I'm going to be pretty conservative here. We're going to do this four times a year. Fifteen people are going to join each cohort. We're going to charge them 1500 bucks and an annualized over the entire year. That works out to $7,500 per month with some sponsorships on video, podcasts, newsletter, whatever, you make up the difference. Another couple of grand a month and you're to $20,000 a month. Only working with five clients. And the cool thing about this business to me is call that year one or year, whatever it is, the next year, you could keep working with those same clients. You could take maybe your favorite people from the cohort that you did, maybe pull a couple of them in as clients at higher rates than the clients that you already had. So the client work could keep getting profitable. But all the other stuff is absolutely going to get more profitable as your reach grows. The sponsorships are probably going to be 2x what they were the previous year. The cohorts are probably going to be 2x what they were the previous year. So if we just double the cohorts and the sponsorships, you're now doing largely no extra work, maybe a bigger cohort as a little bit more work. I guess it depends on how you set it up. Maybe there's more, you know, support that you got to go through with that or something like that. But if your cohorts and your sponsorship business has doubled, you're now looking at nearly $30,000 per month with really doing no additional work. It's just a product of you growing, of your reach growing and you finding more people by being consistent with that messaging. Now, if you look at, like, the arc of, of Ali Abdul and like, honestly, the things that I've done in my business, the wild thing is it doubled that year, but then doubles again the next year, and then it doubles again the next year. And so if you get to, like, the goal of, okay, could you have a $10 million firm that only a single person ran? What's going to make that possible is people having an absurd level of trust in your value. Because even at a $10 million firm automating the heck out of a bunch of client work, there's no way one person is going to do that. Like, that's just going to require a huge volume of clients that one person can't manage. So the workaround there is, you have this Cardonian or Tony Robbins, like, this incredible level of trust with a Specific audience where they will pay really well for things and maybe that' be a client. But at this point you're probably doing the accounting or the tax work, like for fun or just to keep plugged into the game. Because the really scalable stuff that you can pull a bunch of people into with no incremental effort, like that's what's going to get you to the big revenue numbers. So what does a $10 million firm looks like? Probably looks like doing as much client work as you want to, obviously at top dollar. But digital products, you're probably leaning hard into that. Let's say $2 million for digital products. That's what Justin Welsh is doing now. What he does is products around creating better social media content. And it's pretty good and it's, it's general so anybody can use it. So that's a big audience. What you're going to be selling with your digital products is much, much more nuanced and it is for a, a buyer with much more money. They're successful business owner. And so you're not going to be selling digital products for 300 bucks. You're going to be selling digital products for 2,500 bucks. You know, you're selling frameworks, maybe more. And again, this sort of thing feels absurd and ridiculous until you've done it. But the reality is it starts with, would somebody buy this PDF for $50? And it turns out, oh my gosh, they would. And then another person does, and then another person does and then you make a new version, you're going to charge 100 bucks, or maybe every time somebody buys it, the price goes up a dollar and then three years go by and you're selling this stuff for an outrageous rate and you look back and you're like, this is wild. This is unbelievable. So digital products gonna be a big part of it, but I think the main meat of it is going to be cohorts. You run four cohorts a year. If you're charging $5,000 for somebody to be in your cohort, which if you are a super premium name online, that's not a lot of money. It's quite a bit less than like your Simon Sinek and a lot of the kind of big premium names do. But again, these are general names, so theoretically you can charge even more because it's within a specific domain. But we're going to charge 5,000 bucks. We're going to have 400 people per cohort. We're going to do that four times a year. That gets us to 8 million. So now we're up over $10 million a year. Now is that unthinkable having 400 people pay you $5,000 to go through a cohort four times a year? It probably is. And that's why I don't think we have anybody that is a single person, $10 million firm runner yet. But what's interesting to me about this is the question of how would you get there? Or would you get there by doing more client work? Probably not. So if we're not wild about the status quo and we want to keep growing the firm in a way that feels more scalable, why are we doing more client work? Is there something else that scales better, like these creator business type of things? Is there an adjacent business that I could build alongside of it? This is more of a traditional business, but my clients have a problem that this business can solve. You can build a killer accounting firm and make really good money just doing the accounting stuff. But there's also a way to like blow past that by thinking outside the box and not getting trapped within the normal paradigm of what do accounting firms usually do? Who gives a hoot what accounting firms usually do? I've got customers with problems, I've got people that follow me on social media with problems that are happy to give me money to help them solve those problems. And AI is probably going to be a force multiplier for us, just like it will be for everybody else. I don't know if you can really get to a one person, billion dollar accounting firm. That's probably not realistic. But when you manufacture some constraints and you start thinking like, okay, this firm has to make this much money with one person, it makes it really clear what stuff they should be doing and what stuff they shouldn't be doing. If you've dabbled in the creator stuff at all, man, keep exploring it. I cannot stress enough what a killer business it is. And so the reality is now I run a creator business for the accounting firm owner niche. Like that's how I would explain what I do to a non accountant. And if you are on the path to specializing your accounting firm, you can run a killer firm for that group. But it's also really compelling to start like thinking down the creator path. And if you're already like leaning into social media and creating content for these people, you're already doing it. So let's copy from more traditional creators how they monetize those businesses through affiliate partnerships with products that you love that you keep selling your clients onto. By asking one of those Brands. Hey, my newsletter is gonna go out to a whole bunch of people that are like really premium people that you wanna get in front of. You wanna pay 500 bucks to sponsor this week's newsletter, Start thinking about the things that those creator businesses are doing, and it's gonna like, pile on some pretty great incremental revenue to the things that you're already doing. That's kind of the beauty of it. And I can tell you, for me, when I started thinking outside the box like this, this was, it was really energizing. It was like, oh, I don't just have to like settle into this profit margin and just add a person, add a client, add a person, add a client. It was a path to doing even more with even less. And it's not to say the creator business is like perfect and there aren't downsides to being really visible and that you can't burn out if you're really focused on content all the time. But in a world where things are becoming increasingly productized and buyers want to have a relationship with their service providers, like they go online to learn things and they want to learn from you, this kind of hybrid firm creator business just makes a ton of sense to me. You can be their trusted person online that they're learning from while running a firm and building adjacent products like digital products and cohort based kind of courses for folks that you wouldn't normally consider to be on your client list. They're kind of in that next band, but they may actually be the best buyer to take your firm to a different profit level. Obviously, you know, I'm a big fan of things that will work while I sleep. I am a. I have fully drunk the Kool Aid. There are thousands of hours of my content consumed every single day without me doing anything. And people say things like, you're going to do a daily podcast that feels like a lot of work, but imagine spending thousands of hours with people every single day, right? Obviously that's impossible, but if you could do that, it would open up all sorts of things and opportunities and relationships and all that. And that's the beauty of creating things that will continue to build your business. You know, two years after you make that thing and somebody stumbles into it, right? So a billion dollar accounting firm with one person. I don't know about that, but I do think there's ways to escape the traditional, like, profit and margin structure of firms as we see it today to get to something even better. If you're curious about the whole creator business thing, have any questions along those lines. Drop a comment below. I try to super encourage people when they're thinking down this path because it's. I mean, it's opened up so much for me and I enjoy it so much. But everybody struggles with the idea of, well, that's not me. I'm an accountant. And it's like, nobody is that person until they just do it. So get in touch if that could be you. Highly recommend. I'll see you in the next one.