225 Rethinking Delegation in Accounting Firms

Today we are taking some lessons from some of the most leveraged people in the world who are just delegation gods doing things on a scale that we could not even possibly imagine with our tiny little accountant brains. That's not very nice. But I want to look at some extremes to give us some ideas of what's possible. Because you know what? I just, I couldn't hang in a 40 person firm managing 40 people with was like the most challenging thing that I ever did. And some people like see that and they're like, wow, that's a big impressive firm, Jason. But there's people out there that are overseeing like companies with tens of thousands of people. And I'm not sure if there's like a linear relationship between the number of panic attacks that you have at a 40 person company and at a 10,000 person company, but if it is, dog my panic attacks would be having panic attacks. So let's open our minds. Not that we all need to be delegation ninjas and you can't keep stuff to yourself that you love doing. Let's just get those creative juice is flowing and look at all sorts of different forms of delegation to see if there is anything here that floats your nice little accountant boat. Come on in the boat. Row, row, row. Do they say row when they're like there's a person shouting something to get them all to row in sync? I don't know if they're yelling row or if they're yelling something else. Okay, I've been thinking about this a lot lately. Committing to a good idea is a product, oftentimes of seeing other people do it and find success with it. Like somebody can sit you down and be like, hey, listen to this. And all the logic makes sense. And you're like, yep, all the logic makes sense. But oftentimes you can't get over the hump until you see a number of other people having success with it. And this is the power of being an accountant or an entrepreneur that is plugging into stuff online. Because when you see other people that do what you do online, you can see them having success. You'd be like, oh, that's an interesting thing that I had never considered. But once you see, you know, 20 people talking about delivering stuff to clients over loom videos, then you're like, no, that actually does make a lot of sense. I could see how that's valuable. Or something that's really getting hot right now. Like fully transitioning a firm to completely scheduled work. Every bit of work that's done has an intake date and A delivery date. Shout out to Brenda Cannon, who's like trumpeting that horn big time. I feel like it's catching on if I can get everything together for it. I'm going to try to dedicate all of next week to that because it's a really, really big thing and there's something there for, for accounting firms, for tax returns, for bookkeepers, for everything. It's, it's more about like taking the reins and being in complete control of capacity and, and your whole annual cycle in an accounting firm rather than just man hanging onto the bowl and getting bucked off at the end of every day and then having to get on the next day. It's like, I would like to take a vacation in two months time. Does that fit into the schedule? Well, yes, it looks like we can, we can shift this and that, but that's not possible if you just do all the work whenever it gets there and you tell the client like, yeah, we'll get it. Committing to a new idea much easier when you can see other people having success with it. And so this is just a bunch of different versions of delegation that I've collected and seen out in the wild, some of which may jive with your approach. There were a couple here that I got really excited about that I'm like, yes, that is like a better version of my job if I can get there. Okay, anybody remember Rob Dyrdek, the fantasy factory guy from back in the day? He's a think boy now. He's got a podcast, actually a reasonably solid podcast. Though it's kind of hard to imagine taking advice from him because your mind just goes back to like all the things that were in Robin Big and Rob Dyrdek's fantasy factory. And you're like, really? That's the person that I'm listening to now. But this first concept that you only ever talk like if you're the big boss, CEO, firm owner, whatever, that you only ever have to talk with your GM or with your chief of staff, whatever their name is. Basically there's one person that you work with, so Rob Dyrdek, what he does, they've got like a portfolio of companies. The only person he works with is his chief of staff. And his job is basically to coach his right hand person, his chief of staff. And so this means if there's something that's come up in the business, this. And they're kind of almost the liaison for the rest of the business and there may be part of you now that is like, well, I'm not that kind of person. I'm not going to lose track of my roots and be that guy. And I would argue the problem that most of us have is that we have put no boundaries around what we do. There's absolutely nothing in the business that you won't step into. And that is a, I don't know if it's like a kind of blue collar sort of pride, like I'm not above anything sort of thing. I, to me, I think this is different. I've, I'll be honest, I've grappled with this because I don't want to be the person who is above something. But the problem with not being above anything is you then the person for everything. And I guess it, I guess it all boils down to like how you treat above. It's not that you are like too good for something. It's that this is my job. And for the same reason that I employ people to do very specific jobs and the expectation for them is not to be an expert in everything, but to be an expert in this specific thing. It is then unreasonable for me myself to expect to be able to do anything for anyone. And if you have a bunch of different things going on, maybe you run, you know, multiple businesses, the extreme version of this is all of your time is going into your right hand person and that's it. Now this makes sense in the situation where you have a lot of other stuff that you do. So like in the case of Rob Dyudek using stuff like that. And so it isn't realistic that he can run all aspects of the business. So to try to take as much as he can off of that, he's got a single person that he works with. Now if you are like transitioning out of the business and you want to hire a GM to kind of run most of the firm for you, maybe that's another version of what that looks like where you can go do other stuff or you're just going to not work and you're bringing somebody in to run the business. That's basically a version of the same thing. But I call this one out specifically because for most of you right now, like that's, that's completely unthinkable, right? Like you're dealing with 10 people coming to you with anything and everything. You're telling me that I could be so high and mighty as to be like, I just work with this one person on technical stuff. Now my experience in running my firm and getting out of the client work and doing a lot of delegation, ultimately I, I What I struggled with was not just jumping in and getting involved in things that I shouldn't get involved in. And so the reality was there's a good number of people in the firm that I didn't do work stuff with originally. When we created those boundaries, it was kind of weird. But eventually, over time, it actually got better and enabled me to kind of just like, be friends with them or at least be friendly with them. Almost more like a weird uncle, rather, this sort of relationship where the person was like, I don't get, should I bring this thing to them, to this to him, or should I bring it to somebody else? That was kind of an odd thing to negotiate initially. But eventually, when there was like an actual, like, clear hierarchy there and clear expectation of what lines of communication ought to look like, it got. It got easier. Number two, assign everything in the business a subject matter expert. In the context of an accounting firm, that means every client needs a go to expert that's not you. And every piece of software needs a go to expert that's not you. Every technical group around, like, technical stuff that your firm does, stuff falls to you because someone else doesn't own it yet. And oftentimes we will look at ourselves as peers with the rest of the team, where it's like, okay, the team will do this and this person will do that and that person will do that and I do this, like, and you'll try to bite off something of equal size to what the rest of the team does when that's wildly unfair to yourself. You're trying to be like, fair to the rest of your team and carry your weight or something, something like that. But your job is not the same as everybody else's job. And honestly, they would probably tell you that too, because when something slips through the cracks, like, it goes to you, there is work that comes with being an owner that nobody else is subjected to. And it's kind of like, I don't know, probably most people's objections with the first point that it comes from a place of, I don't want to call it like virtue signaling, but it comes from a place of, like, wanting to be the everyman, the every person you know, not be above anything. And so I think maybe the unlock here is how do you find a way to establish boundaries and systems and all of that stuff without being, you know, too good for something, you know, without something being below you, without coming across that way. And that probably ultimately just boils down to how you treat people like how you deal with the other humans in Your business, if you act like there's, you know, people below you, then you're going to come off that way no matter what. But usually we look at all the things in the business and we're like, okay, this stuff is going to be mine. And then this is this person's, this is that person's, this is that person's. And I guess what I'm saying here is, what's the matter with nothing being yours? That's ultimately where I got to, by the end of. Of running the accounting firm was the goal was for nothing to be mine. And so that started with client work. Everybody's clients. You know, every client had an account manager, every app had a subject matter expert internally, every type of technical work had an expert. So that anytime a question did come to me, I could be like, okay, who's the right person for this? And route it to the correct person, or pause and think like, oh, you're right. Like, we don't have the person for this yet. Let's figure out how to make a person for this. And oftentimes we struggle with the notion that, well, I do this now because they're not going to do it as good as me. And sometimes it's just that they will do it different. Maybe not the way that you would, not necessarily better or worse, but oftentimes it just is, they will do it worse. This episode is sponsored in part by Live Flow. Have you heard the news? Hear the big news? Live Flow now will sync your QuickBooks data to Excel. And if you're a longtime listener of this podcast, you have sat through, let me tell you, you've sat through a lot of ad reads about live flow syncing QuickBooks data out to Google Sheets. And if you're not a Google Sheets users, you've been like, jason, what the h, man? I don't use Google Sheets. What gives? Well, good news now. All Those reports and QuickBooks that you just love that you think about when you go to sleep at night that you carved into the, into the partition on that, that bathroom stall wall in high school, all those QuickBooks reports, you can now sync to Excel with Live Flow. Big day, fam. Big day means if you already got a sheet that you love, you can make it smart by connecting it to the actual accounting file. Either sync data in once or set it to sync on an ongoing basis. Think of all the data that you got living in in QuickBooks that's kind of just captive there and somebody has to log in to see it, that you can instead sync out to a spreadsheet that you could give like a different set of people access to. People are using it for everything from like managing month end closes to like giving a board access to giving employees access to specific information without giving them access to the QuickBooks file to working around like user limits and the licensing. Pretty cool. And now it works with Excel. Yay. Learn more about Lifelong in the link in the show notes. This episode is sponsored in part by Copilot. You ever struggle with client portals that just. They're just not quite what you need? You know, they like, they don't have all the stuff you want or you want to tailor them or even want it to look different for client A than it does for client B. Check out Copilot. It is like a hyper flexible portal platform. They kind of. They call themselves actually a platform rather than just an app because what they want is for you to build the portal of your dreams on top of it. Super customizable. Even change what it looks like by client or by. By client group. And they recently launched an app store. So like custom integrations, like stuff built on top of the of the portal itself. They got a whole library now, stuff that you can pull into it. Or actually hired a developer to build something like completely from scratch to augment your client portal experience. How cool is that? Like theoretically you can build just about anything into there. Connect it with like third party apps. Copilot's got a great API, so you can even wire up some of your own stuff with, you know, zapier, make that sort of thing. Because we all know what it looks like to have like a disjointed client portal experience or ask them to jump around to a bunch of different places. Nobody likes that. It makes you look bad. Think about it. You want to level up that client portal. Check out Copilot link in the show notes. And so a big part of this is getting to be okay with it being worse. Because yesterday you are worse. When you are in their shoes, man, you are way worse. You might have actually been a lot worse than they are at this stage of like doing things. And they're not going to get there until like they've had the chance to do it. And in the day to day that might look like sitting in a meeting with your team and hearing things where you're like, pretty sure that's not going to work. I'm pretty sure that that's not the way that I would do that. And at that point in time you got two options, like do you jump in and be like, nope, I know best. We gotta do it this way. This is how you do it. Or do you. Do you let it ride, as it were? And obviously, if it's a big, serious thing, like, there's situations we're gonna have to jump in. But I think more often than not, the right thing to do is to let the team take the lead. Because if you jump in and interject, in many ways, you are, like, depriving them of the opportunity to go through that experience themselves. And it might be an experience that you went through in the past, and that's why you are the way that you are now. But if you just program everybody around you to make decisions the way that you make decisions, what they miss is all the rationale for those decisions, like, why you make any of those decisions. So I don't know that that's actually better to just try to, like, program these people based on outcomes without any of that context. And the other bummer thing that you miss out on then if you are just trying to program everybody is the fact that not everybody's going to end up in the same place. And that's great. The fact that there might actually be a better way than you would have done it. Which leads to number three, which is a really hard thing, honestly, for small business owners. Number three, that we need to think more about hiring and how every problem in your firm is actually a people problem. There's not a single thing in this world that you are the best at. You are not an Olympic gold medalist at anything. Sorry. But the good news is it means there's a person out there who can do every single thing that you do better. At the end of the day, your job is to be you and, like, use your unique collection of talents to the best of your ability, make a rad place to work, treat people well, and all of that. But the great news here is that there isn't anything that you can't hire for. There isn't anything that you have to perpetually be the best at. And there's a lot of pressure there when you're carving up responsibilities in the firm, like, your responsibility. Oftentimes the way people perceive this is, like, you have to be the best at everything. You have to, like, maintain dominance over all these different domains, when what that actually does is just suppresses everything to never be any better than you. And I don't know about you, buddy. I got blind spots. I got stuff that I am no good at, a lot of areas where I need help, and I'VE worked with people before who thought that, like, opening this door was this slippery slope and this thing where it's like they're going to be entitled, you know, to something, or they're not going to think they need you anymore or they're going to lose respect for you or something like that. It's like the world is not that one dimensional that somebody is going to be better than everyone else at everything. Like, there's an absurd number of things that go into running an accounting firm. So it makes it so hard. It's easy to look at other businesses and be like, boy, that just looks so much more simple. And a lot of it's probably just because we don't know the nitty gritty of those other businesses. But if you're starting an accounting firm, I mean, you're doing so many different things on top of really hard technical stuff. I've got actually another episode kind of half drafted of like, what are all the different things we could hire somebody to do in our firm so that we don't have to do them? From, like social media management, to managing the building that you work in, to doing the accounting for the firm. There's so many things where we just, we defaulted into it from day one and we never paused to be like, oh, do I actually have to be the one to do that? Because we perpetually undervalue our own time. Until you start biasing towards leaving yourself extra time, you will never not be overloaded. Right. Because we'll always underestimate how long everything will take and how much work everything will be. And so if you plan out all of your time to be like, well, this is, you know, I'm planning 100% of my capacity. Sorry, bud, you're at 150% when you do that. So it actually takes coming in and being like, okay, this is going to be like a 70 percenter to come in, then at like 100%. And then there's the whole additional padding of what does it look like to actually do it well and, like, do it to the best of your abilities. Right. Oftentimes we're in this perpetual cycle of being so on edge that everything just becomes skin of the teeth, the bare minimum. And that's when even worse stuff starts happening. I mean, I've been in situations where that comes up where you're not as engaged with the team as you need to be. And not investing in the team and giving them feedback and instead of giving all your attention to your clients, and, boy, is that a recipe for disaster. The salesforce guy, Mark Benioff. Mark. Whatever it is, he says a CEO's top job is recruiting, is attracting folks to come work for the company. I don't know, there's a lot of different types of CEOs from like product CEOs to more like people facing to just like marketing CEOs even. But every, I mean every problem in a business is a person problem, right? But oftentimes we go to like, oh, what do I need to lean, what do I need to learn and what do I need to spend a bunch of time on to solve this problem? When if you're thinking higher leverage and through the lens of delegation, we probably ought to be thinking about them more through the lens of people problems. Okay, number four, have an actual org chart and follow it. In my 40 person firm, we were transitioning from a legacy practice that had a traditional like partnership owner structure. We had on average five partners. Everybody just reported to those five partners and they were doing technical work and managing people and all that. But to buy out those partners and then expect to be able to run the same business with two partners, what you're left with is a massive void in the middle where a 40 person firm would have more structure. Now you just ripped out a whole bunch of bosses and everybody's like coming to the two parents looking for answers. We've got the same problem here around not being high and mighty and not wanting to be like you're above anything and so you want to handle everything. I'm going to run this cool like new age flat organization. It is a recipe for overwhelm, for ending up having way too much stuff on your plate. Honestly, I think it is, it is a, like a sign of maturity and acknowledging one's own limitations to refuse to be like, nope, I'm sorry, I can't do that anymore. We have a really talented person on our team that can though. And every time that people go to that person with that thing, they're getting better. Like you are giving them an opportunity to grow. We've done some past episodes on org charts how you can approach building an org chart from 0. I did one with Chad Davis that I'm really proud of where it's like. And he grew up firm to over a hundred people. We kind of explore like, what are all the different ways that you could grow from 0 to 10 and, and pretty much every, every window up to 100. But highly, highly recommend an org chart. I may. I much prefer traditional org charts to a traditional partner structure. I think Org charts are better suited for, like, getting the people within the team, all the different types of support that they need. I think you can incentivize people a little better in a traditional org chart. Everybody knows the problems with that regular partner setup. You got people without super clear responsibilities, like the partners or the managers, while also doing all the client work. But it's like ultimately not anybody's single, singular, focused job to like, think about the people on our team and our systems and all that. And until it's somebody's job to do something, like, it's just always an afterthought, right? Number five, get an assistant. Oh, this is. We're getting punched right in the. I'm too good for this bone now, right? Heard a podcast interview with a guy recently that said he has to answer to three people in his life. His executive assistant, his house manager, and his gm. And I thought, boy, does that sound lovely. This was like a single bro in his 40s. And you know what? I don't know that it's. For me, I'd rather interact with more people than that day to day. But I do think we are probably a little too stuck on getting assistance when you are at your limit. The reality is, unless you have some sort of assistant, I am very convinced that a huge percentage of the things that you do each day are beneath you. Beneath you from the standpoint that they are not leveraging the fullness of your capabilities. And the email inbox is just example number one. If you look at everything that comes in the email inbox, maybe 10% of those things are actually, like, require the level of touch that you can provide. Everything else is like, nope, yeah, sure, I'll fetch that document for you, Jim. I mean, let's just like, let's just double click on that. A client asking for something, asking for a document. If you run an accounting firm, especially if you run a team, of all of the things that you could be doing to make your people better, to make your business better, more profitable, to take care of yourself, work things aside, all of the experience and expertise that you have to offer. But you're going to spend time going into a file system to send a file to someone. I just want to let that sink in. And you're either like, I can kind of see that, or I sound like a total a hole right now. But if you don't value yourself and your time, who will, right? And the client is asking you to do that thing because you've never shown them that there's any other way to do it for it to get done. You've never said, like, well, here's an account manager that can do it for you. Or meet Tina, my assistant. Meet Steve, my assistant. You're going to be hearing from him more. He just helps me out with stuff like this. And your assistant, they're going to do a whole lot better job of it than you are because you're too busy. You're under the gun. You're going to be annoyed when you get that request. As opposed to an assistant who can just jump on it. That's better. Stop clinging to that thing. Now for the 10% of things that require the richness and fullness of your expertise, sure, hang on to those things. But everything else, if that thing doesn't require everything you're capable of doing, then someone with more time and more capacity is going to do it better. They are, because they're not living on the ragged edge like you are. 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. Firm 360 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. 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. Firm 360. Put a 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. 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. 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 Zero, 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 U.S. american. American dollars. That's it. 4K one time. Somebody at Robert Half just did a spit take. Robert Half reference. We ever going to get Robert Half to sponsor this podcast? 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. Okay, last one, number six. We talked around this one a little bit, accepting that you don't need to be an expert. I'll tell you a story. I ran a firm that was historically a tax firm. Eventually we ended up about 5050 tax and accounting and tax software for US tax firms like there's just an astronomical number of inputs. And so the notion of changing tax software, it is terrifying for someone that does taxes because you got to relearn just all these ridiculous things and honestly takes years to get up to the proficiency level that you are with with another platform. Before, well, we switched tax softwares and it was a big freaking deal and it was wildly inefficient for the first couple of years and it was rough because you had people that literally had in our firm that had 25 years experience on one tax platform and we thought I know what we'll do, we'll switch to another one. It'll be great. Now at the time it was just me and my partner that owned the business. My partner, he was involved in all aspects of the transition of learning the new tax offer and all that stuff. And he was one of those people who always said I never want to be like not know how to do the work, how to not be involved in the work, he thought. And he had like, you know, other antidotes in his life where as soon as that person got out of touch and couldn't do the thing, they were no longer as good of a manager of that thing. And they kind of, you know, lost their teeth, you know. But when that tax software changed, it was when I was making a big push to get out of client work. Actually happened right as we were getting into Covid. And I'm like, somebody has to, like, take this by the horns and, like, steer the firm through Covid relief. And I didn't learn the new tax software. All I had done the previous 15 years, maybe 12 years was tax prep. That was what I did. The only, only skill I had to contribute to society. And we changed tax software and I didn't learn it. You want to talk about flapping in the breeze now? I could talk like clients all day long because I knew how it all worked. Like, I didn't have any concerns about that stuff. But I couldn't prepare tax return. And it was because my job, and this kind of goes without saying, my job was no longer to prepare tax returns. I had 40 people working for me. Even if I did keep preparing tax returns, I wasn't going to be as good as everybody else in the firm because I had other responsibilities. I was going to spend just a teeny bit of time on it. At that point, the folks who spend 100% of their time preparing tax returns, they should be better than me, and I should listen to them. I should lean into that expertise. We're probably still pretty, I imagine, split pretty even on where you land on the. I always need to know how to do the thing versus I'm okay letting go of the thing. In fact, we may even lean a little more towards I still need to know how to do the thing. But let me tell you how liberating it is to not know. And the big. The eye opening thing for me was, was like, why are we employing so many people? If I have to be the best at everything, what's the point? What, like, so many situations where something comes to you and you're like, we got 40 other people that work here, and I'm the only one that can solve this problem, or do I always swoop in to solve this problem? So they brought it to me the next time. And so what happened through this transition, as you may expect, is everybody went to my partner for all that stuff. In my case, I had to, like, force the issue of, I'm not going to be an expert in this anymore. So we have to dedicate someone who will Be the expert now, is there an absolute right answer there? I don't really know. Would it have been problematic if both of us didn't learn it? Maybe. Was that a jerk thing for me to do that, like, ended up putting a lot of that stuff onto him? I would say no, because he and I had very different responsibilities. Like, I was the one leading strategy in attracting talent and all that stuff, getting our pricing up to, like, much more reasonable levels. It's just a question of challenging what your job is within a firm. I probably got too far into the episode without saying this. There is definitely a. A level of, like, toxic delegation, and a lot of it is trumpeted on social media, where it's like, almost like a degree of shaming if you're not willing and capable of delegating anything and everything. When it's like, no. Honestly, like, the best part of running a small firm is I kind of get to pick and choose the stuff that I want to do still. And a lot of us really enjoy this work. And that's not a bad gig to have a thing that you enjoy doing that people will pay you really well to do. But I'll tell you what was the most rewarding thing for me about running a firm was growing the people that came to work for me and being able to see them on year one and see them on year five and be like, wow, that person has so much more, you know, career options now. Like, their trajectory is completely different because we invested in them. And I talk a lot about how hanging onto the clients that you had on day one in your firm, hanging onto those clients forever because you don't want to lose track of your roots, actually keeps them from being great first clients for someone else. The same thing is true when you're clinging to all those responsibilities within a firm. You are robbing someone else of the opportunity of being able to own something, being able to take charge of that thing, because you're the expert. And so a funny thing happened when we transitioned this legacy firm to a more traditional or chart structure. And I really aggressively, you know, went out and put into these people hand. People's hands responsibilities for the first time for many of them in decades, because the traditional partnership structure uses the partners as gatekeepers. And so the people that are doing the work that you just want them in the back of the office just doing the work, like, is generally what this looks like. And for me to flip the script them on this, then on the same group of people and be like, listen, you've done this for 20 years, you know, this thing in and out, we're going to come to you now. You're going to tell us what's the right way to do it. And for some people, that was terrifying. But for a lot of those people, once they'd had time to process that and realize it wasn't anything to be scared of, and for the first time actually believe in themselves that they knew that better than anybody else, it was like an entirely different person came alive. It was as if the last couple decades of their career was stagnated. And then you give them responsibility and they're like, oh, I am more than just a number cruncher. And it was amazing. Some. Some people, like, like, went from being folks who would never speak up or do anything to. To all of a sudden being, like, leaders within the firm, stepping into this void. And, man, that was so cool to see. And there was nothing that made me more proud of running a business than seeing people, like, find themselves and, like, build that confidence. That was really, really cool. But it would not have happened had I not gotten out of the way. Now, I don't think that there's, like, an absolute right answer for, like, the ultimate guide to delegating and accounting firm or anything like that, because I think a lot of it should boil down to, what do you enjoy doing? And the answer to that may be different today than it is five years down the road. But I don't. Like, what's the point of running a cool small business like this if somebody else is going to tell me all the stuff that I have to delegate? What I get excited about is seeing the interesting ways that other people delegate to challenge my assumptions of what's possible and be like, yeah, I can see how other people are into that. That's not for me. But then I see this other thing and I'm like, oh, dang, that's actually a great idea. I would love to get that off of my plate. I probably could hire somebody for that, or I probably could make this person that I already have the subject matter expert for this thing. And that would make my life better. And because I got that off my plate, I would do a better job at these other things that are actually more important to the overall health of the firm and my own wellbeing. It's funny, people are just wired very differently in their approach to delegation. It's much, much, much easier for some people than it is for others. But then there's other people that just don't want to give that stuff up because they Enjoy it. And I think that's also okay, too, if you think about, like, solo firm owners. And I know there's a lot of solos that listen to this as a solo, you're inherently doing a whole lot of stuff that's just an unavoidable part of running a small business. Right? Like, there's certain things that just have to be done that are totally unrelated to the doing of the work. I know that I am wired in a way where I just wouldn't want to do that stuff. It's. It's very easy for me to delegate fast now. I'm probably too far on that end of the spectrum where I will do it too fast and not give it as much attention as I should. But even through the lens of solo, like, there are fractional things that can still be delegated to a virtual assistant to a contractor who can help that sort of thing. I can speak for myself, as when I came out of running the firm, I was like, you don't screw this up. You got a good thing going. This was post running the firm. The worst thing you can do is go out and hire a whole bunch of people and stress yourself out from having to manage all these people and be like, right back where you were. Don't do that. But I can say now, being 16 months removed from the firm, and I have done some hiring, and I've basically got a team of four now, but it's been a slow build. Very intentional, like, really careful about who I was picking up. And it's just. It's just better. Like, it's. It was done in a much more intentional way. And because I had the, like, bandwidth to be able to do that, slowly, I honestly started coming out of the firm going, I'm just gonna be a solopreneur now. Like, that's all I want to do. But over time, I've changed, and I have started carving that stuff off. So this looks a little different for everybody. It can also absolutely change over time. And it should, as you're like, you are changing and investing in yourself in different ways and learning new things. It's not like giving up, you know, to, like, change your approach. There's very few hills worth dying on. I always think it's funny when people are, like, so just, like, absurdly opinionated or will just die on this hill. Like, the beauty of learning and investing in yourself and all that is just that it all changes you. Change what you are passionate about, changes your interests, the opportunities that you're exposed to. You meet a new person and it's like, oh, I could take my firm in this direction, you know? And that may completely change the right answer. And that is the coolest part of, like, running a firm that you have control over is the fact that you get to create that reality. It can also be the most, like, painful part when you're like, I did all this to myself, but I'll take freedom. Right? Like any good American. Thanks for coming and hanging today. You got any tippy top tips on delegation, drop them in the comments. I'll see you for some more fun tomorrow. SA.