223 Quick Question! How Should I Manage Quick Questions?

The bane of your existence. The quick question. Oh, it's. This is an easy one for you, so I'm just going to send it over and expect an immediate response. What do you do when those just become too much and you find yourself sitting all day in front of your email answering quote unquote, quick questions which are notoriously hard to like, bill for. Because just the fact that the client's calling it a quick question means their perceived value of it isn't very much. It's like a lose, lose situation. We're gonna run through some interesting ideas there along with how to start capturing your expertise to enable maybe some more scalable ways to manage these quick questions. We're jamming on some ideas for value added services for your firm and can you buy a tax firm without being a tax pro? Let's talk about it. Okay, come on in. It's Q and A Friday. Question from painter CM in the YouTube comments. Hey Jason, question for you. I run a very heavy advisory focused firm, maybe 15 clients, producing around 100k in revenue. Do you have any advice on how to manage the difference between general emails and advisory focused scheduled meetings? I've got myself in a situation where I'm spending too much time emailing people instead of scheduling formal calls. Lot of things wrapped up in there. We all deal with the quick question and that can be a really frustrating thing to capture. I jotted down some thoughts of my own, actually. First thing I'm going to do, I want to bounce this one off of Delphi. So the, the AI clone that I've created for myself that is trained on all the episodes of the podcast. Because this is a tricky one that I don't know that I've ever directly like outlined. Here's the ultimate framework for managing little questions because I honestly don't think that there is like a perfect answer to this. But let me bounce this off my clone here and it may actually give us some ideas for how to approach this in a practical way. So. So let's throw the question to my clone here. Okay, so I get a bunch of quick questions from my clients and they're kind of hard to bill for because the client thinks they're going to be quick, but they're not always quick and I don't want to nickel and dime them. But where I've ended up is I waste all of my time on emails and just spend my whole day in the inbox rather than doing like live advisory meetings, which is more what I enjoy doing. Any tips for how to manage this oh boy, do I feel you on this one.

It's like you're speaking my language. Here's the deal. Managing those quick questions without letting them take over your day is all about setting boundaries and expectations. First off, consider batching those quick questions into specific time slots. Tell your clients you have office hours for these types of inquiries. That way you're not on call all the time and they know when to expect a another thing, leverage technology. There are tools out there that can help you automate some of the responses or direct clients to resources that answer their common questions. And remember, it's okay to remind clients that while you want to be accessible, complex issues require more time and yes, billing. It's about finding that balance and communicating it clearly. Have you thought about how you might implement a system like this in your practice?

Not bad. The office hours. So I actually like have some bullet points for how I was going to answer this and the office hours might be better than any of my ideas. Evidently that's a thing I've talked about at some point because it actually found a citation for me talking about this. It vaguely said there are tools out there that can help you automate some of the responses or direct clients to resources. That's we're going to talk about. But first, that's kind of what I have some ideas around is how to use Delphi, this clone thing internally to help team members help you answer questions. But thoughts on that that office hours approach. The main like rule number one here is to have a rule right? Like, like I feel like my clone's first response is always, it's about boundaries and setting expectations. And I'm like already annoyed by that. But that's just like me to say that any rule is better than no rule. I don't care if it's any of your time so that you can bill it for them. Like any rule is better than no rule and clients need to know what to expect. The reason that clients get mad when you send them a $80 invoice for a tiny little meeting or a tiny little question that you answered is because they didn't expect that as an expectations problem. It might be a dumb way to run your firm to do that, to nickel and dime people that way. But the reason it makes people mad is expectations weren't in align. So I could, I could see a world where you're like, we do live advisory meetings every week or every month or something like that. And everything that falls outside of that, that we don't cover live is going to fall into my office hours where I will work through these questions. Does it ultimately solve the problem if you still can't get through all those questions and office hours? Maybe not. But there definitely is value to batching that work, to trying to like, machine gun through it all at one time. Did I say machine gun through it? Machine through it, no guns necessary. The other thing that that does is helps the client to understand when you will be responding to emails so they don't pester you and follow up if they haven't heard back. If they understand that every Thursday afternoon you respond to client emails that are, you know, the quick questions, then that's handy. That gives you a system throughout the week where you can either drop that into the quick question bucket or drop it into the next advisory call bucket and at least then you have a time and a place for managing those things. Now a few thoughts specific to this question because the commenter. Commenter shared they run a advisory heavy practice and basically they're spending too much time, they said, too much time emailing people instead of scheduling formal video calls. First thought I had, consider the user's preference. It sounds like your preference is to handle this stuff during meetings, but that might not be the preference of your client. So if they keep emailing you, that could either be that maybe the recurring meetings don't happen frequent enough and they can't wait until the next meeting to get an answer. Could mean they just prefer emails to live calls, which that's a lot of folks. That's probably me. It's very rare that I'll get on a meeting with someone cause meetings most of the time aren't necessary. So be mindful of the fact that it might actually be a client preference thing. Now at the end of the day, you are number one, first and foremost, what, what you can handle, what you can sustain is what matters most. But then after that, be mindful of like, am I meeting my client where they want to be met? If my clients just want to email, how do I feel about that? Was that something that maybe we could have vetted better when we were onboarding clients? Just to be clear about the fact that like, hey, we're gonna do 95% of this stuff on live calls. You good at that? Is that how you work? If not, then maybe they're not a great fit. Right? This is a great example, one of those things that you just learn about yourself when you do it. And this can also change over time. So just be mindful of how you may not be aligned with your client. In that regard, because you really want to do that stuff in live meetings looks like a degree of that. They want to do an email, which is fine. Like there isn't a right answer there. You can run a business doing that either way. Second thought I had was really just a reminder. No advice is too small to not capture in some way. There is no threshold under which giving advice can just slip through the cracks. The reason that anything is quick for you is because you've been doing this stuff for years because of the expertise that you have that your client doesn't have. So even if it's a quick answer for you, it doesn't mean it should be cheap. And as you know, it often doesn't mean that it's actually quick. If it were truly an easy question, your client would have figured it out on their own. But they didn't. They came to you. Third thought, client experience of nickel and diming is awful. I don't want to bill somebody 50 bucks for sending a quick little question. This is where uh, sometimes if it's beyond a certain threshold, some sort of recurring charge for like that advisory relationship makes sense. This is where I probably align with, you know, the value billing folks who say, you know, think about billing more for the relationship than for like specific work items. This firm, I think they already have people on retainer, sorry on. On advisory monthly recurring. So for them it may just be an issue of I'm spending all my time emailing and I don't want to do that anymore. How do I overcome that? Sounds like they're probably already getting paid for that work. So that's more of a question of, of how could I get help or not a money thing just like how do I get out from behind my computer? It sounds like is this person's what they're struggling with. Idea number four, consider free resources standing up. Free resources that people can use to self service. In my experience, the better your free resources, the more permission you feel like you have to charge for questions for quick stuff, for whatever it is. I learned this lesson during COVID when all of our clients needed help with all the same things at the same time. When it came to, let's see, when it came to the ERC program, I think it was we charged top dollar for all of our support for this stuff because people needed the help and we could only do so much of it. Like we absolutely could have price gouge like astronomically we didn't. But we also didn't want to do this stuff super on the cheap because the reality was it was pushing all the normal work that we usually get paid for, like off the table. So I learned in the process of doing that that even then, even during COVID we felt perfectly fine offering several like premium service tiers. But the reason we were okay with that was because we made like the best free resources in the game. So we almost felt like that gave us permission to, to then, you know, charge more of a premium for when we are gonna do that more hands on service. Because we've already given people a way to do it themselves and if they're going to choose to not do it themselves, they don't wanna take the time to figure it out, then yeah, I'm fine charging you a premium for us to do it for you. So depending on the nature of these questions, if a lot of these questions are similar across your clients, you see in recurring questions, think about whether there's some free resources that you could develop that those folks could use. Thought number five, just don't do email. If you don't like email, don't do it. We, there's a lot of like arbitrary boundaries we put on ourselves about how we have to run a firm. Like if somebody despises email, you can run a firm without, you probably have to have a couple of team members to make that work. But when it comes to how you manage your clients, that's just the expectation that you set on day one. So don't, don't let yourself be tricked into thinking that that is not the case because that's absolutely something that can be negotiated and in fact in some cases is a detox that many of us need to actually figure out. Well, what happens if I didn't respond to email? Does everything burn down? Who would I put in charge of managing the stuff that comes into the inbox and how would we set up controls around that? That's a really, really healthy exercise. When we did that email inbox management episode, I mentioned it like, what if you didn't look at email for six weeks? What if sounds nice, right? But going through that, it forces you to create a system for managing your email inbox. And if you actually went through and you did that and you didn't look at email for six weeks, it would be like a forcing function to make you build the systems that are possible. But we're not taking the time to do now. And so much change happens because of that, because we were forced into doing it because we're going on a vacation and, and we need this or that. And then you do it. And you're like, well, shoot, why didn't I do that a year ago? Sixth thought might just be a capacity issue in disguise. If you're not able to get to everything that you want to get to. It probably sounds like a capacity issue if you just don't like sitting in front of your computer and writing emails. That's just a question of how can I get help with this? Or how can I set a different expectation with my clients in the beginning to say, like, hey, my thing, like, what I really enjoy and what gets me fired up and maybe even what I see works best is to have these conversations live because they can be much more contextual. So as with most things, it's. It's a matter of setting expectations. With clients. It may be something that you've just learned in the process, like, okay, this current setup isn't going to work and so you need to change things on the client. And that's perfectly okay. You can set the policy that, you know, going forward, office hours are going to be Thursday afternoons and that's what I'm going to do. My best to respond to these emails. If they aren't really small things, I'm going to toss them into the, into the advisory bucket and we're going to chat through it next time we talk live. This episode is sponsored in part by Live Flow and Gang liflow 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 are 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'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 tup, helping you recruit top Filipino accountants without any ongoing monthly fees. The difference between Team up and all the other offshoring options. The team up helps you hire staff directly. No middleman. You work directly with your new hire in the Philippines. Hire the person, not the company. Guys, gals, gang. Here's just a few reasons to hire directly. You have access to higher level talent. Makes sense. You have complete control over team culture and training. They keep 100% of what you pay them and it's a lot more affordable for you. So you can retain your team for the long term. Team up and 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 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 Now. Interesting thought on this and the talk I gave today at this conference. There's quite a bit of discussion about these these kind of AI clones like being able to create a avatar of your expertise. So what you heard from earlier is a clone I created with a tool called Delphi Delphi AI. It's trained on all the episodes of this podcast. It's shockingly good at giving true to life answers because it doesn't generally say new things. It just goes into everything that I've ever said and fetches the most relevant stuff to answer a question. But if we think about the quote unquote quick questions we get from clients. Imagine if all the quick questions you've responded to in the past were part of some sort of assistant. Imagine. I mean this is obviously very hypothetical. Imagine if you had been running a daily podcast for the last year and a half, answering all sorts of quick questions from your clients. You would have a super rich assistant here that you could use to help you out, that an assistant could use to help respond to questions. Maybe a team member who's like kind of halfway there but doesn't have the confidence to always know exactly the right way to answer a question. But with a little bit of support, like with this assistant and then being able to see the most relevant things you've said in the past, maybe that gives them the confidence to be able to handle more of those inquiries themselves. I think I shared before a really interesting thing that the email client Superhuman has shipped. It basically pre drafts responses for you now. So every email that you get from someone, when you open it up there's like three buttons. So it's like do you want to go to lunch next Tuesday? There's a button that says yes, there's a button that says no, there's a button that says propose a different time. And all the button says is just those simple responses. But it has pre drafted a response that in a nutshell is that yes, no or propose a different time. So when you open up the email, I can click yes and it gives a one line response. It's already written, Boom, you can send it. It's pre drafting these responses. And I think that's pretty novel. I think that's actually a great idea. If we think about that in the context of accounting firm running. What an amazing feature for your practice management system to have. So that when the client asks for a copy of last year's, last month's month end close or last year's tax return, you know you've got these pre populated options that are like here you go. And it went out and it grabbed the file from the file system. A response that says I can't do that or it's not done yet. I don't know. I don't know what the other responses would be in that case. But it means you're literally never writing an email from scratch again. That's really interesting. But why that's really valuable in a practice management system for accountants is because it has all the context. So that thing that drafts your email is only going to be as good as it is true to how you would respond and will only be as good as as all of the information that's been provided with. Which leads to the question I think most people have about this totally. I can supersede the value of that. Maybe it's something I could even stand up and have it be client facing. That'd be pretty cool. So they can get that question immediately. But I don't have that body of context. I'm not that documented. How do I get there without burning the next 14 months of my life doing a daily podcast? Because, listen, I can see how that may not be for everybody. Honestly, it's a good excuse to start doing some sort of content if you aren't already. If you do an email newsletter and you do a little write up in there every single time, like start building that into something like this assistant that I'm using here, like capture that thing that you wrote up. These are assets that you're going to have forever if you do some sort of, you know, internal team training around some subject, grab the transcript of that, throw that in. Frankly, it's, it's a, it's a really compelling argument for, for just doing a better job of capturing our expertise. And I think we get caught up on the production of it all and like, oh, I'm not a podcaster and this and that. And the reality is clients just want to hear from you, they want to learn from you, they want to see your face more. And you want to start capturing this expertise, right? Because you can see the value of, of being able to collect it all in one place. So don't overthink it. This can literally be a voice memo where you just do a brain dump. You're like, I've explained S corps to these people so many times. Here is the whole like self employment tax versus fica, Medicare on payroll. And like why a lot of people will say you should go escort, do a brain dump that for 10 minutes. Like, boom, you got it documented. If all you're ever going to do is plug it into a chat assistant like this, it doesn't even have to make sense. It doesn't even have to be like, your words don't have to be good because the chat assistant makes the good words on top of the context. As we are heading into the age of like AI enabling faster answers and all that, there's gonna be really good assistance out there, like bots that people can go and ask questions of. But just like we've talked about the constraints here, those will only be as good as the context they're being fed. And I think this is a great time to start building that context for you so that you always have it right now you can repurpose it as, you know, social media posts. We talked about examples where I take my podcast transcript, I throw it into Claude AI and I say pull like 10 cool non obvious takeaways from this. And I've basically done this twice where I've posted basically verbatim the output of Claude Tinker with a couple small things each time. But the output was really good and the concepts it's pulling are from my podcast. Like it's not just AI making it up. And the two times I've done that, the first one had over 160 likes on LinkedIn. The second one had over 280 likes on LinkedIn. And what I loved about that one was over 15 people in the comments directly quoted something from what it generated. They took the exact quote, like because it was really powerful to them, and put some sort of reaction to it. And that exact quote, that's not something that I said in the podcast. I explained the concept and I ran through why I feel that way and my long winded stammering manner that you're familiar with. But then AI made the words to like make that so much more concise and so much more clear and people loved it. And so should we feel weird about that? Is that wrong? Like, I don't think so. It was useful. Like, isn't that kind of all that matters in the end? So even these awful little voice recordings, these voice memos that you could just do on your phone when you want to do a brain dump, those are the seeds of content, of something useful, of something more polished. But if we never capture anything, then we're never going to have that assistant would, that would really like operate like you do. And that assistant, specifically in this example of answering quick questions, could end up being really valuable. I wanted to throw this out as a comment from Bill Albuquerque, A value add idea I've had but haven't been in a position to try out for a while, has been handling state, county, city sales, slash revenue tax reporting for businesses that operate or sell things in a lot of different areas. The idea would be to capture which places they need to file reports, in what frequency, have a system to set up the tasks and all that. While I figure all that sounds annoying and fiddly, I figure it would be at least twice as annoying for the client. So I figured someone in that position would be really eager to work with us or a firm that offered that service. Totally. If it's a painful pain, absolutely doubly so. In a world where all the firms they're comparing you to do the exact same services, even if it's something they're marginally interested in, where they're like, yeah, that's smart, I could see how that could be useful. And that's going to make the difference between them choosing you and them choosing that firm that just has the template templated landing page that says we solve for peace of mind. I can tell you this jogged my memory of, of a good version of this that I did and a bad version of this that I did. So I worked with a mattress company in Colorado. Colorado assesses sales tax based on the delivery destination. They have a state level sales tax, they have a special district level sales tax, county level sales tax and city level sales tax. And so the store is in one location, but every single delivery is in a different location. Which means the collection of sales taxes you collect on each sale is truly different on virtually every single sale. And for each of these reporting bodies, like each city, special district, all that, they all have their own way that you have to submit this tax. And some of these are like old websites that are a decade old that are so janky that was stood up by somebody's kid at some point and have like a blinking hyperlink of grab the PDF here. Others have like online portals where then you gotta manage that login. They have like different due dates, different reporting cycles. There's every single jurisdiction has their own thresholds for if you're over this amount, then you gotta do it quarterly versus monthly. It was truly, truly awful. One of the most disgusting things I've ever done for a client. And we started doing this for their business from day one. And before long they complained about how much it was costing them. So I said, I would absolutely love to remove this from the list of things that we do for you and I'm happy to let you do it. And a quarter later it came back to us and we had to redo the last quarter. You know, that old story. So that was an example of something that was truly painful that we were doing for folks. It was also an example of what we talked about last Q and A Friday of like, okay, how do you manage when a client doesn't appreciate you anymore because you've made it so seamless for them that they no longer feel the pain? I honestly, I still don't know a perfect, a perfect solution for that. 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 of 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 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 click the link in the show notes. This episode is sponsored in part by firm360. You made it past 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 firm360, 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 was 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. Firm360 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. That was the story of us, I think, doing something well versus the bad version of this. I was super into this idea. We had like something like 1500 tax clients and oftentimes folks would get a notice from the IRS or, or not get a notice from sort of tax agency because maybe they changed addresses or something like that and this, this thing would like come up and kind of get them by surprise. Like all of a sudden some things are going to get levied because they weren't getting the notices. And like there's kind of this big confusion. Well, most of these taxing agencies have ways that you can set up online access and see like account balances and stuff like that. So I had the idea for like this monitoring service. I'm like, oh man, people would love, love it if we were like, hey, we're on it. We're checking this every single month. We're on top of it. We'll let you know if there's anything. And I'm like, okay, like how much work is this going to be to manage this for every client every month? Like, how much could we reasonably charge? Because my thinking was we have a, it was at the time a high volume tax business where most of these people we just saw once a year. And it's like, would this be a meaningful amount of money if you could charge $20 a month or $200 a month or however much it would have to be? Like, would this be a meaningful amount of money? And what I eventually learned was no amount of me thinking it was a great idea meant that it was actually a pain for my clients. If I ask my clients, do you want this thing to like sneak up and surprise you? And they're all like, oh no, that's like my nightmare. And then I'm like, is this a thing that you actually worry about and think about? And they're like, nope, can't say I do. And so they're not like excited to pay you for this thing that isn't actively a pain for them. I will say we talked about this a little bit earlier this week. We're sitting here like doing all this dreaming of like, what's a What's a cool, novel service that I could offer my clients? And sometimes that yields useful things, but the better thing to do is just ask. That's actually stuck with me from that episode we did earlier this week. Think of your favorite client or a client that you've got a good, just got a good relationship with. And you go to them and you're like, we're trying to double down on more clients like you. What's something more that I can do for you? What's a pain that you have? It might be something you expect. It might be something totally off the wall. And this is the way that like people approach software as well. Like, it's not enough to be a know it all and come in and say like, nope, here's the perfect way to do it. Like, you talk with a whole ton of users and you build something that's amazing for a hundred people. Or they love it so much that they're gonna tell all their friends about it. And it starts with like, what do they need? And oftentimes, because we see what people get wrong, we can get really opinionated about, no, here's what you need. And oftentimes they do need that. And that's like something that we have to communicate the value of. And that can be an uphill battle. But ultimately what they're going to be excited to pay for is the pains that they're feeling. And it's why oftentimes they don't do the things that we want them to do, even though that we know that's the right thing to do. Sometimes it's hard to get them to follow our advice because doing that thing is not something that's like actively a pain for them. So the whole advisory relationship, like, it requires some give and take. Like they do need to ultimately take your advice and, and not get themselves into a spot that you then have to resolve because they didn't take your advice. But we can't also be blind to the opposite side. We can't just sit here and give them orders all day long. We gotta look out for those pains. Cause those are like golden opportunities. And so it's got me leaning more back towards if you really wanna come up with something value add, just ask, ask a whole bunch of people. Because oftentimes, like this whole monitoring thing, you'll have an idea that you think is novel and you'll sometimes even fall in love with the business of it. Like, a lot of what I loved about it was like, yeah, it seems pretty useful, but it's like Ooh. This is recurring revenue from clients that we don't have recurring revenue from right now. But that doesn't make it any better of an idea. Right? So the North Star here is probably that it has to be grounded in like a. A pain that a bunch of your clients share. And the more specific the type of client you have, the more specific and similar their pains are gonna be. Jason, I've been following your content for a while. I'm considering buying a tax firm, but don't have experience doing taxes. However, I could find someone who does. Well, what do you think about the owner having no tax experience to manage a tax firm? Thank you. It can be done. In the past, we did an interview with Patrick Dichter, who has bought several firms. Even though he doesn't have a technical background, he can make it work. The reality is most firms, when they grow beyond a certain size, when you start it, yeah, you're doing all the technical stuff. But many firm owners, once they grow beyond a certain size, remove themselves from the technical stuff and they just oversee the people that get it done. And eventually you have to trust your technical people to actually be doing things correctly when they go out the door. So it absolutely can be done. I would probably question more why. I do think a lot of times people will come into the space and be like, oh, this seems. I don't wanna say easy, but it seems like something I could. I could do. And I think it usually takes people by surprise. I've yet to see the example of the external bro who's like, oh, I'm gonna roll up all these accounting firms and I need to. We got this figured out. We got some new technology and they come in and they just crush it. I've yet to see that example, but you've probably seen somebody say that a hundred times, right? That they're just like, oh, somebody just. Why doesn't somebody just do this? Because like most things in life, it's not as simple as it seems on the exterior. Before going through on that, I would try to make some friends who run tax firms, maybe, like, spend a few days shadowing people, like, get more of an understanding of what the day in and day out of that looks like. A big thing. Patrick Dichters shared that he underestimated was just the struggle of change management. Accountants are not always going to be super excited to adopt some new policy or something like that. You also got to look out for buying a small practice where the owner is doing a bunch of the work and manages all the relationships, like to me, those businesses are almost valueless because they're overseeing all the relationships. And then you take that person out of there and it's like, what are you, what are you buying? Like, those clients are going to be like, do I really want to work with a brand new person or do I just go somewhere else? Maybe they will be so lazy that they will stay with you and not like, restart the whole discovery process. But at that point, all you're probably doing is like buying some staff, which admittedly has value, but you're also buying inertia. You're buying the inertia of the way that things have been done, which almost without like, question will not be the same things that you want to be done. And that's maybe the hardest part of buying small firms, whether they're tax or accounting firms or anything else is inevitably you probably have your own vision for how that thing ought to be run. But you're coming into a mixed family. The previous person hired all these folks, so they may not necessarily align with your vision. The clients came under a completely different regime, under a completely different, like, understanding of what operations were going to look like. And that almost certainly won't align with what you want to do. So they are very real challenges with rolling up a firm. It's not hard to find clients right now, and that's made at a harder market for folks trying to sell firms I think is oftentimes organic will be cheaper. But I still don't know that it's a bad idea in this person's situation. Because to be totally honest, if I were gonna get back into firm running, and I have thought about it, tease, tease. If I were to get back into firm running, can you imagine how good the content would be? Here's the thing. That's why I think about it. And that's probably a terrible reason to start an accounting firm. But think of how many people. Oh, if we just. What if we built a firm from scratch and we documented the whole thing, wouldn't that, like, demystify it for even more people? And it would be. I don't. Don't. Stop it, Jason. What was I saying? So in this person's situation, buying a firm may not be the worst gig because it can actually help you cash flow rather than start from zero. So if you went out and you bought a $500,000 book of business and you're paying x percent of it out to the previous owner for however many years, you can buy that and still cash flow just fine and make some money and over time, you could phase out every single one of those clients. But for somebody that's just getting started, usually the issue is how am I going to make my first dollar? And frankly, an acquisition still isn't a terrible way to make their first dollar. In fact, Logan Graff was dunking on acquisitions the other day saying, why would you ever acquire clients when you can just add them organically and it's much cheaper? Logan Graff started his firm by acquiring a book book of business from somebody else. And for him, I think that was actually a good move because he didn't have a side hustle going. He could start from day one with some revenue. Doesn't mean they have to be your forever clients. I'm just thinking, how am I gonna pay the bills like six months at a time? And in that case, an acquisition can actually make sense. But also, there's a degree of, like a tax business. Of all the things somebody could do, why a tax business? And that's maybe, maybe a bigger conversation. That's all we got time for this week. Keep the questions coming in the comments. As I've shared, this is my favorite day of the week as our last London episode. That's too bad, right? London's been a lot of fun. Much more travel on the way. It is going to be like the Jason Daly roadshow the next couple of months. If you listen to this on the podcast feed, don't watch the YouTube video. Man, are you missing out on some vibes. I'm sitting on a. Ooh, how detailed do I want to get here? It is a white leather couch in a hotel room, and I don't, I don't think I need to say any more. I'm, I'm justifiably sketched out. But that's the fun of shooting on the road, is you never know what you're going to get right. Sa.