228 Should Accounting Firms Let Clients TEXT Them!?

These days you got enough, man. You got enough to worry about. You got folks just flooding your inbox, people calling you. If you have an office, people banging down your door, why turn on another communication channel? Oh, oh, I know what I would love to do. I would love another thing to manage in addition to prioritizing across my practice management system in my inbox and the stuff that just came in the mail and the people that are coming into my door. So why even like wade into text messaging, into Slack team chat, stuff like that? Should you even let clients talk with you via those channels? It's Q and A Friday. We're covering a bunch of stuff. We're covering that. We're going to be all over it. We're going to cover how to determine who to delegate tasks to, some ideas for value added services. Unbelievable story from a guy that I met on a flight recently. Not a big deal. I flew recently. Not not a big deal. Okay, how to manage outstanding requests to clients and what to do when your boss gets just isn't ready to take a step into the future. But you are. How do you manage that? Come on in. It's Q and A Friday. Let's do it. Welcome to Q and A Friday where we talk shop on all things running. We little we little baby accounting firms, not we little baby. I say small and my as small as like 10 million and under which is still pretty good sized business. Okay, this one was from Herman in the comments a couple days ago. Texting clients. This is, this is the the question slash comment. Texting clients. I've been fighting a long time with the idea of using slack with clients. Slack is like Microsoft Teams discord, that sort of thing. But not sure if this is a good idea. Did you use slack with clients when you were running your practice or any other firms that you came across that did afraid of creating another channel that is even harder to manage than email as rightly you should be because opening up a new communication channel like it is hard to put that genie back in the bottle, particularly if it is a channel that is tied to you and hard to delegate, hard to get help with. And Team chat is generally that sms in some cases texting or messaging it can be that way but but not necessarily if you're careful about it. Bigger picture, what acceptable channels do we take information in via? This is something that on a whole firms have been trending towards locking this down more just because of the sensitive nature of like what we exchange with clients. There's a question of like is it even a Good idea to do SMS with clients because that's just like an unencrypted communication channel. There's a whole security side to this. That is a pretty compelling argument to like the majority of this needing to live in, you know, the portal side of your practice management app or whatever that interface is between you and your clients. That being said, my practice and the way that we were building was pretty white glove and trending to be more white glove because I'm just of the opinion that as the productized solutions get better, as AI makes those things better, the tools and the robotic solutions are going to continue coming up market really aggressively. And so I always shy away from getting too restrictive with clients. Sometimes that bit me, so sometimes I wasn't rigid enough. We would be very accommodating. And there were some clients that understood the value of that and were willing to pay for it and some who wouldn't. So it's as with most things running accounting firms, there's very few like absolute right and wrong answers. If you do let people text, you understand that that's a pretty premium offering. And if you let some people do it, doesn't mean that you need to let everybody do it. And just starting with text, which interestingly, texting is a pretty American thing. Elsewhere, almost everyone is just using like messaging app apps, WhatsApp, you know, stuff like that in the US like carrier SMS messaging. Take care to do this responsibly with a solution like Open Phone, a VoIP provider where other team members can get access to those messaging channels. The last thing you need is a communication channel that is just between you and your clients that can't be delegated, where someone else can't come in and like pull a copy of that message and put it where it needs to go. That's the trap that a lot of folks end up in where the, the firm owner gives their cell phone number out to a whole bunch of people and they can never quite recover from that because if it's just your phone number and the only place those messages go is your personal device, it's really hard to get help with it. We've talked in the past about ways around that. In fact, real quick, because a bunch of people now are going to say, how am I ever going to find that? This is the job for Jason Bot, our AI assistant. Jason Bot. Here's the prob is I got a cell phone and I gave it to all my clients and now they just, they call, they text. I don't know how to get out from under this mess, I'm not gonna give my personal device over to my team to help, like, delegate some of this messaging stuff. What do I do to get out from under my own cell phone number? I sure have. You have no idea. Tell me more about this. How do I. How do I split off the business stuff from my personal stuff? Real practical. How do I do it? Ooh, ah. Ooh. Warmer. Okay, listen, I thought. I thought that was gonna be a shortcut to a concise summary of some things we've covered in the past, and it was not. You lose today, AI. If you're stuck under your cell phone, get a. Get a voip provider. Open Phone's my favorite. Basically, they give you a phone number, a new business line. You tell everyone that has your personal number, all your work people, all your clients that have your. Have your personal number. I'm changing phone numbers to this. You don't even say, I'm moving my business numbers over here. You just say, I'm changing my phone number. You will never reach me. And they have to reach out to that other number. Now you can set up, like, custom notifications for that other number where it will only ring through to your phone, like from 8 to 5 or something like that. You can pull other team members in to see calls, to see messages, to even respond to messages and all that. That is the best hack I have for how to get out from under that self, that personal cell phone that folks won't stop calling. I'm going to be honest, that's the first time our AI assistant has kind of crapped the bed. His first suggestion was slacker teams, buddy. That ain't what slacker teams is. Bad robot. So whether you're coming from a place where you are crushed under a cell phone that maybe you shouldn't have given out in the first place, or whether you're considering doing it for the first time, letting somebody text you. The solution is the same that has an app that will run on your phone and let. Let calls to that number ring through your personal device, but with boundaries where you can set up, you know, like you can set it to automatically go to voicemail when you're busy on your calendar or something like that, or set it to not be able to ring after 5pm that sort of thing. But then your team members can log in online and see calls. They can see text messages and all that. At that point, honestly, it's not all that much different from email. It is just one more thing to manage. Now, the problem with all of these Things is if all of your clients all want different things, then that becomes really hard to accommodate. In some situations it's if you're working with a specific niche, let's say, you know, creators or gaming or something like that, you may be in a niche where all of these people use a certain platform, like Discord is what I'm thinking for these examples. If all of your clients have this other channel that they prefer, that's a great reason to meet them there. Because all the other schmoes running like general accounting firms, they're probably going to be like, that seems like a lot of work. And I don't want one more channel to manage where you're going to be like, this is where my clients live, this is where I need to be. So kind of, it kind of depends in that regard. But again, as with all things from running there, there isn't a right answer here, an unaligned answer. If you're going to be a super turnkey, super productized automated solution, you probably don't have a lot of room for flexibility. If you're trying to be super white glove and bend over backwards for your clients and they're willing to pay top dollar for this, absolutely. Let them talk to you however they want to talk to you with the big asterisks. Be thinking about security now. One real world example of where I did begin working with clients over Slack, we had a growing number of dental clinics that were using Slack for internal messaging for kind of ops related stuff. And these dental clinics, we were doing like kind of full back office stuff for them. You know, bill pay, cash planning, payroll and benefits, accounting and tax. But a service that we rolled out that was actually really good, that we could charge top dollar for, was we would manage a user inside the company Slack called Payroll and Benefits, that was the user's name. And anyone on their team could message with that. And our team was on the other side of it. So questions about pay stubs, about needing to change this or that, that stuff comes up all the time. And by giving the employees a direct channel, what we saved their leadership team from having to do was having to be the mouthpiece to route all this stuff to us. Because normally that's what they do, right? You have an employee that has some sort of issue, they tell the ops manager or the business owner or something like that, and then they parrot that to you, you tell them and then they have to go and like figure out the issue and communicate it to the employee. That's what made this great, is we could solve those problems with employees directly without inconveniencing the folks who didn't want to touch this stuff. And as a result, it went from like framing the service as like, I don't know, it was, it's like all work that we're already doing actually, because the owner is coming to us saying, I need you to change this or that or answer this question. And then I'll go tell them, like, it's all work that we're actually already doing. But when we said have them come to us directly, all of a sudden they're like, yes, please. Thank you. You're going to save all of us a pile of time. And we generally wouldn't go into doing one of those for less than 1000 bucks a month. And so we're talking about a grand to field, I don't know, to two to five employee questions a week that are usually just trivial things like folks not understanding how to read a pay stub. Like that was. That was the bulk of it. But their team loved it because they could come straight to the horse from whence mouth the answers were bequeathed and the owners could be removed entirely from the process. And this team, these dental assistants, they didn't have email addresses like in a dental clinic. These people don't sit in front of computers, so, like, they're not giving emails and stuff like that. But this was what they used for messaging. And so this made a ton of sense for that service. But what it wasn't was a way for the client to get in touch with me. So the answer here is it. It depends. I've actually talked with firm owners who are like all in on the Microsoft suite and all of their clients just have to work with them through Microsoft Teams and that's the only way that they can work with them. A lot of folks are doing this with their practice management system now, where the only way that they message is via their practice management system. You could do the same in a team chat app and Slack and Microsoft Teams and discord. It's more of a like an overall kind of strategy question and how you want to manage this. But there is a big spectrum of how accommodating am I going to be of the ways that the client wants to work with me versus how am I going to like lock this down for my own workflows? And to be totally honest, while it is, the idea of locking it down for your own workflows is really appealing in theory. Where I always landed with this was the little bit of added admin Work to funnel all this into a common process, Even though it came into a bunch of. Via a bunch of different channels, the little bit of incremental admin work that this caused us was pennies relative to the perceived value that our flexibility could command in terms of fees. That's not gonna be the same answer for everybody. If you're. If you're a man. If you're a solo practice owner, you probably gotta lock that stuff down because you're just gonna end up doing, like, a whole ton of admin work. Maybe. Maybe that's the answer. I don't know. If you do wade into a new communications channel, there has to be a really, really good reason. It has to be that a lot of clients are asking for this, and people will truly value it. And maybe we only make that possible on, like, a premium tier that we want some folks to upgrade to. Like, maybe that's a good rationale. Oh, you want to just text with us? Like, look at this premium tier where you're paying another 400 bucks a month. It's got to be something that you're jazzed about, not just, like, a convenience thing for a couple of clients. Or it has to be something new that's really compelling. Like, this service that we rolled out that was super profitable. Like, that was where a new channel totally made sense, because it was a. It was. It was the most obvious channel through which to deliver that service. But definitely be careful. I mean, it's. All it is is, like, here's a cell phone number, and you've just opened a new can of worms, and that can happen. I mean, I know, like, we've all. We've been there. I'm in an office at a client's place, in an office with a big, really impressive new client. Everything's great. They're all super happy. And he's like, awesome. What's your sell? And I'm like. And I just rolled right over, and I gave it to him. And then whenever he called, I didn't answer it. So I'm not sure which was actually better at the end. But you are right to. To consider that strongly, Herman. Like, be very careful wading into that. 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 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. Makes you look bad. Think about it. You want to level up that client portal? Check out Copilot 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. 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 could source accountants with experience working at US or Australian firms familiar with tools like Xero, QBO and Dex. Also recruit specialist roles, team leaders, tax specialists, administrative assistants. Thought experiment. What if you had an executive assistant for the first time this tax season? Just. Just throwing it out there. What would they do? Start at that email video I did on the main channel recently. Get help with that stanky old inbox. I digress. Team up recruits these talented folks for a flat one time fee of 4,000 US American dollars. That's it. 4K one time. Somebody at Robert Half just did a spit take. Robert Half reference. We ever going to 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 Tim Hunt. Okay. Freedom Folio commented earlier this week. How do you determine which team members are suitable for delegating tasks? To like you, I tend to delegate quickly, but I've discovered through experience that not all team members are prepared or willing to handle extra responsibilities. I've seen people be bad at this. You darn tootin. The fact that you're willing to give somebody a thing to do does not mean that they're necessarily prepared to do that thing right now. I don't know, it's hard to. Different people could hear this question very different ways. And so just to acknowledge straight off the top, there are people that I've worked with and a lot of people out there who have way too short of a fuse and way too high of an expectation of folks to read their mind. Right? So we don't, we don't want to be that person. The one who's like, you couldn't just like mystic your way into figuring this out all by yourself? Like, you're dead to me. This is common sense. Common sense, that's my favorite. Like old timey accounting. Accounting. I'll say it. Accounting guy ism. Like in my head, it's this old white dude who's, who's been doing this for decades. And then an intern comes along and doesn't do something the way that they thought they would do it. And he's like dumb. That's just like, turns to his colleagues with, with 10 years experience. He's like, that's just common sense. Right? And they're all like, yeah, no, yeah. It's like, okay, look to your left, look to your right. Both these people have 10 years experience. You have a hundred years experience. Nothing about what you know is common sense to this new person. So when it comes to delegating, we don't want to be that. We don't want to be the person that's just like chucking stuff to the side and not, not doing enough to explain exactly what our expectation is. Right. And a side note here, getting help with delegation. Delegating delegation, as it were. This is actually a great hack here. I shared in the past, I had a member of my team who is this, this new guy who is great at documentation and what his senior did, another member of my team was, I mean, just like so hilarious in retrospect. What a, what an introduction to the profession. And so that's sort of sitting with someone that was pure waste. But pulling somebody in to See how you do a task or even letting them do this asynchronously. So you're going to do a task they're going to do no matter what. Hit record, start recording your screen and you've got that 30 minute thing captured. Have somebody else take a first stab at documentation and then you review it. You will find that is 10 times easier than you having to motivate yourself to document it from scratch. It really is. So don't be afraid to get help with getting help. Every time you hear a new idea or something like this from this podcast where you're like, oh great, that's really cool. You're listening to it and you're like, this is exciting. And then you get to the end and you're like, who? I need a nap. I have a job already, I'm tired. I don't want one more thing to do. And so I actually, I really encourage people. If there's something you're excited about, the best thing you can do is share it with another person in your firm and, and say, take the lead on this or help me with this. And that can be really helpful. So delegation. Who, who are the right people to delegate to? No matter who you're delegating to, the better the expectation is and the more clearly it's outlined, the better the result will be. So that's just regardless of who it's going to. Let's try to do a really good job of documenting exactly what our expectation is when we delegate that thing. And you don't have to do it all yourself. Get help. I don't have a. I, I don't think I have a perfect answer for you here. Freedom. I can, I can say what my approach was, which as we went from a very legacy firm to a more traditional firm where a lot of that responsibility got delegated down off of what was formerly the partner layer. And that is the partner layer. L A I R Step one for me was assigning the champions of technical, specific technical matters, each of the tools that we use. So everything, every single app within the firm had an owner, somebody who was the guru. And if they couldn't give you an answer, is their responsibility to go out and find one. And so that was, that was step one assigning responsibility for all of those domains. And that enabled a lot of delegation because anytime something came to me about any of those domains or apps, I had a person that I could send that, that question or that problem to. Like there's an owner for this and it's not me. I'm going to send it there. Same thing for clients. So getting every client having an account manager that was not me. So client specific things could go to them first as well. And there's going to be the easy delegation here is when there's a very obvious person that already is kind of that tribal champion of that thing, right? Like where they, they, everybody naturally looks up to them and already kind of goes to them whether they have permission or not for those specific topics. So those people, you know, unite them, they're the, they're the, the first ones that you say, okay, you're now the owner of this. But when you do that, it makes it more glaring where the gaps are, like what things still need ownership and where you don't have the right folks on your team to fill that void. And my best advice is to like, do that. Do the really hard work of finding the people you need, because the people that you need are going to change over time. Like if you're shifting what the firm does, if you're changing, especially if you're moving responsibilities around a lot, sometimes you can find that if a firm looked one way for a decade, it's probably collected the people that work great within that system. And if you try to like make a hard left turn and change that, you can't assume that you're going to have all the right people on board to make that happen. So when it comes to assigning like the champions of all these domains within a firm, make the obvious placements and then figure out a plan for filling the voids after that, you've got all the stuff that kind of slips through the cracks, right? And so that's where you consider, like, why is this stuff still bubbling up to me? Like, what are, what are the areas where we haven't been able to assign a champion yet? I found in the course of designating champions, you had folks that rose to that and folks that shied away from that. And in that process you found folks with an appetite to take on more who are like, yeah, give me this, give me that, like, give me the next thing. And that would inform kind of the subsequent stuff that we would send their way. Depends on the size, the size of your firm. I had a team of about 40 at this point. So these sort of like champions were kind of like mid level folks. Definitely not like staff entry level, but they were more mid level folks. In the question, you called out folks who are prepared and folks who are willing. Those are two very different things. If somebody is not willing, I'll be honest, I don't have an. I don't have a huge. I don't know. People work in different ways, but it's, it was very hard for me to work with folks who cannot approach, work with like a certain level of energy as a big thing I looked for as a big component of culture fit for us was like, can you meet the energy of kind of the bar that we're trying to set? And so I probably don't have an abundance of patience for folks who may not be, you know, willing to grow into something new. Not everybody on my team was. And like, they just had to be okay with the fact that like there's going to, just going to be some stagnation here. Then like if, if you don't have an appetite to grow into new responsibilities, like that role is pretty much going to stay the same. And the reality is in an accounting firm, as, as the world around us is changing, an accounting firm itself cannot stay the same. So it's not realistic to like let someone stay in a seat without changing for a couple of decades, I don't think anymore anyways, if it's, if it's an issue of are they willing to do it, that's going to be hard for me to handle. If it's a wish, an issue of are they prepared to do it? I try to rely very little on someone's past experience or natural aptitude and as much as possible try to build a system that is foolproof, that is dummy proof. The more foolproof that system is, the less expertise it's reliant upon. And that was kind of the name of the game for me. So how can we build a system that is so good that new hires can come in immediately, contribute and do what is generally considered highly technical work at a high level? And I think that's possible, the better your systems are. So there will be folks that you work with where no matter what you do, it just falls on its face like that. That's, that's life, that's reality. There are people trying to delegate things who are too quick to let folks burn and ask too much of them to try to figure out on their own. So I don't, I don't want to be that guy. But in the middle there is like a systematized firm with a really good documentation with a lot of people that are, that are willing to help out where you can like foster folks to be willing to ask maybe embarrassing questions and stumble through that delegation process. You do have to be really mindful of things like why are we coming back and going through the same thing for a third time? Like that's something where I'm going to put a lot of pressure on that person to be like, we can record this conversation if we need to. Like you can take notes if you need to. But like in this moment, understand that your job is to capture what it is that you're being trained on so that we can document this as clearly as possible. Not just for you who's going to do this right now, but for whoever the next person is who does it. So there are certain things like that where it's like if, if they're coming back over and over again for the same things. Yes. Like you have to, you have to like set an expectation. And the sad truth is I do think sometimes, particularly if they are senior folks, good people, let's say, quote unquote, good people can let the wrong folks hang around too long. I mean this was, I mean I. Whoa. I've got so many examples of this coming into a legacy firm. The HR person was the wife of the previous managing partner. We had a, an admin lady who had been with the firm for over 40 years. So what am I going to do? Come in and fire these people? Like some of these things are harder than others. This is, for me, it is. It's not unlike what we've come back to a couple times this week. The notion of I'm okay actually being really premium if I'm giving away a lot of value. Like we did this in Covid relief, super generous free resources to help people do it themselves. And then if they wanted us to do it, it was, it wasn't because they couldn't do it, it's because they just didn't want to. And then we're going to charge top dollar for that. We talked about this through the lens of like self service support. If we have a bunch of free resources where people can get to the answer themselves and that's all really rich and really well done. I'm probably going to make my response times like expectations for how long it takes my team to respond to clients a little bit longer because you have everything that you need right there. I'm not going to feel bad about making that longer because we've invested in a really good self service version of this. The way that I approach delegation honestly is not too similar. I'm going to be extremely willing to meet people where they are and build really good documentation and take the time that is required to brain dump this process. Onto someone else and recognize they're not going to get it perfect on the first try. And there's going to be a lot of things that I'm not going to think of that I never communicated. I was not very good at that. But I'm going to balance, like, being very nurturing in that regard to then having a very clear expectation that if this is what we discuss and this is the way that it needs to be done, then we're going to stick to that. And if we've, like, taken the time to go through it, like, that's the rule. That's what it is. And so I had. I've had some of those conversations where I invested a bunch of time in this happening. And in the end, it felt like it, like, wasn't captured or at. Like the person didn't think ahead to, like, make sure that they weren't going to miss any of those details that I'm going to have, like, less patience for. Right. But again, like, lean into, like, can we record this? Like, just shower that person with as much resources and redundancies as they need. Because the stuff that's just flying out of your mouth, 80% of it absolutely is going to fly over their head the first time they hear it because they're overwhelmed and because they don't quite know the nuance yet until they've done it themselves. So try to get them all the resources that they can or that they could possibly need. But then, like, balance that with, like, you can do this. I know that you can do this, and I need you to do this. That's a whole lot of talking around what is a. Admittedly a hard human thing, but we've all seen the people that we don't want to be in this situation, right? And on the flip side, we all know how frustrating it is to feel like you've been not walked on, but, like, for that person to not take that seriously enough or not give it the level of attention that it needs. Because giving up, giving up your own responsibilities, that's hard. Like, that's. That's a thing that was your baby and you're now trusting somebody else to do it. And you want them to do it with even more veracity than you do it. Okay, let me just tell you about this story. Meeting this guy on a plane. So chat with the guy next to me on plane. He's got a software startup, his last software company. He starts telling me about it. The guy's in commodities, logistics, so giant, like, cargo ships, but they don't ship big containers, they ship commodities. So like 20,000 tons of coal. Been in this kind of industry his whole life. A past company he built. What they did was they were a database of all sorts of information about ports all around the world. The giant ports that these ships come into. Information like how wide of a ship can it facilitate? How, how deep is it? Where it comes in to like know that like will your ship actually fit all sorts of limitations around like time when you can come in all sorts of different types of fees, like the equipment that they have there. To know that if it can facilitate, to know if they can like do what they need it to do. Normally for a person to get this information, they have to literally call these ports. And this was about 15 years ago and maybe this has gotten better. I suspect honestly it hasn't. But normally to get this information you have to call these ports and because they're all around the world, you've got all sorts of issues with oftentimes language barriers with time zones and having to leave messages and getting people to follow up and then the clarifying questions. And the service he built was just a massive centrally managed database of all of these ports. And you could subscribe to get information to this info. You get access to this information. And I'm like, that's interesting. Doesn't sound particularly hard. Sounds stupidly profitable. I asked him, how many ports are we talking? He's like, about 2,500. And I'm like, and how many data points? He's like, honestly, not that many. I was like, and how often does the information change? And he's like, he was British, so I think I would have to bleep what he said. But the answer was, was not much. And I was like, so this was like a spreadsheet. He's like, yep, he sold this company for north of $10 million was what I could gather. And it was cash flowing millions, millions a year. And it's such a great example of a dumb valuable business. And how he was like the only one that could do that because he knew the unique problems that the folks in those like doing those sort of logistics had. And last week we, in the Q and A, we talked about a question, a person considering, like rounding up information for clients on reporting requirements for all these different local locales, like in, in a state. I think it was, I think it was Washington state. I, I shared a story of I had this Colorado client where they did mattress sales, retail mattress store and all the sales tax was calculated based on the destination and so you had to calculate tax for the city, for the county, for the special district, and for the state. I think it was those four according to the destination. So pretty much every sale was a unique combination of all these different sales tax calculations. And only the state tax was paid into the state. Everything else was managed by the city, by the county and all that. And so they all had like websites and PDFs, all these different things, different frequency requirements. And so a listener to the POD comment, and I'm thinking about rounding this stuff up to make a resource for my client. And as this guy's telling me about this stupid port business, I'm like, gosh dang it. I'm so mad that that's like just such a great business. But my mind immediately went to what we talked about last week in the Q and A where the guy's like, could I centralize this stuff for my clients and would this be valuable? And it's like, yeah, the answer. The answer is most probably. But then the other answer is oftentimes you make something within your firm that's very valuable for someone that on a more macro scale is actually probably valuable to much, much more people. And your firm almost becomes the incubator for something that could launch and take a life. Take. Take on a life of its own. Probably not take a life, but like that, that payroll service example that I just shared of like creating a payroll and benefits user inside of a client's Slack file and us managing that for them. There's probably a pretty rad standalone payroll business. Did I just say rad payroll business? There's probably a pretty cool like payroll business where you just do payroll for clients who will pay top dollar to have you like manage an admin inside their Slack. You can even sell like a frame it as like a Slack extension. Like we manage all of this stuff for you. You interact with us via Slack. That might be the only interaction you ever actually have with these clients is. Is over Slack. The employees can get in touch with your team directly over Slack via this user. That's something where it's like, oh, my clients would really like this, but my actually have viability as like a larger business. Particularly if you figure out the industries who that's a great fit for and have the money to pay like you know, starting at 1500amonth or something like that. Have the money to pay really well for a service like that. And I was just having this conversation with the guy, I was so I came away so bullish on like the knowledge that we have that normies don't have. You see all the ignorant things non accountants say about the accounting profession online that just reminds you of how little they understand about the nuance of what we do and how much of the value of specializing and being like, okay, maybe I will just work with dentists is not just in the value of that surface specialization of dental, but is in the fact that when you walk through that door, there's several more doors and you're like, oh, here's like another level of niche deeper. And with every layer of depth you go, there's all these unique, really painful problems that you can build cool solutions for, either in the context of your accounting firm or even as like an adjacent business. As I've, you know, grown to my my old age, the things that get me most excited these days are dumb old industry problems. The irony is when you get super, super niche, it's so valuable that maybe you don't need a ton of people anyways. I just loved that because I love the hyper, hyper specific problems and how just landing on one of those cannot genuinely change your life. It's what keeps me inspired. Just like thinking about accounting firms all day and like, super plugged into like just this space and not getting distracted and looking at other stuff. This episode is sponsored in part by firm360. You ever been big boyed by a software vendor? Like, you're like, hey, I really need this thing, or this thing's totally broken and I need help. And they're like, let me, let me shuffle you over to here, let me get back to you on that. And it eventually becomes very clear that they have either no interest in helping you or disagree entirely with everything that you're saying and are not going to do a thing about it. This becomes more of a problem. In my experience, the bigger a company gets the old, like, not my problem sort of thing, man, does that get frustrating, especially when it comes to like your practice management system that is the core of your accounting firm. Like, to feel like, I've invested all of this stuff and we've like dumped all of our company data into this tool to now just like get the shaft like that. There is nothing worse than getting burned by your PM provider. And man, it happened. Like, you see the people who have had bad PM experiences. Firm 360. I know a good number of folks in the wild that use firm360 and it's admittedly really hard to cut through the noise on practice management systems to know like, oh, what's good at this what's good with that? The one thing you consistently hear about firm360 phenomenal support. Even in there. Like G2 Capterra reviews in the past, I've read some of those for ad reads and the common thread that you see is like a next level support. So if you are overwhelmed with PM options, frankly, five years ago there were very few Cloud PMs that were worth using. Today there are so many more. If you're in a spot where you're feeling like, man, I'm just overwhelmed with all this. But at the end of the day, you want to make sure they got your back, man, they're going to be there for you with whatever needs you have. Have a rough day, the warm glass of milk at the end of the night. You never know. Listen, all I'm saying, Support is important. Firm360 is good at it. That's not even in the ad read. That's just what people tell me. So if you're looking for a practice management system that cares about you as much as you care about what you do. Firm360 link in the show notes. Was that a bad ad read? You get the. You get the idea. Okay, we'll rapid fire these last two. Peter is absolutely falling off as elliptical at this point. I'm having too much fun today. Okay, from a comment, they're trying to basically track what clients. Historically they've tracked which clients they've reached out to and are waiting on in Google sheets. Like they track a list of who are we needing things from so that we can keep following up with them and when did we last follow up? And when I first read this, I'm like, you tracking this in a spreadsheet? What in the world? But I can tell you what we did and my firm was not track it and thus not follow up until like three months later and you're like, you know, you're sure, right? You darn tootin. They haven't gotten us that stuff back. Good luck with that Sentence transcript maker. We didn't track that stuff at all, like who we were waiting on. And as a result nothing happened with it. So some form of tracking, even if it was manual, probably would have been better. But particularly the frustration here is with the firm owner that the team does not always follow up. So should we be putting all this stuff in spreadsheets? Like, how do I get them to follow up? Step one, there needs to be a rule. Rule number one is to make a rule, your team needs to know exactly what the expectation is and then you have to hold them to it. So what is the rule? Are you supposed to follow up every week, every couple of days, every month? What is the standard? Start there and then honestly, if you're thinking about how to track this stuff, some practice management systems make this a little bit easier. I was just shooting a, we did a demo day, a sponsored demo day on the YouTube channel that went live two days ago on Wednesday for Client Hub. Say it's pretty funny. We did like some silly stuff with like this magical character and it was kind of ridiculous. But they have, you know, basically I think it's a status for all their jobs that is, it's is waiting on the client and there's even a dedicated view where you can see all of the projects that are waiting on clients and they're in like a Kanban board. But the columns are how long you've been waiting for the client. So like the first column is I don't know, zero to three days and then after that is, you know, a week plus or something like that and actually visualizes how long you've been waiting for all your clients. I thought that was super smart. And then you can do like batch reminders for an entire category or for all those clients or something like that. So initial like suggestion on a solution here is some practice management systems actually handle this pretty well. So if you have a built in way to track this stuff, start there. If you don't, sometimes honestly the best place to start tracking a new thing is in a very manual way. Because the mistake we can make is to build this big, complex, impressive automated thing when you just like push this thing out of the barn and then you find, oh, we actually need something completely different. And now it requires rebuilding all of this stuff. So I'm totally fine with the super manual approach, especially if you're still figuring out how we want to track this. But the biggest trap here is usually either there isn't a super clear rule of exactly what the expectation is, when should people be following up. And then second, not everyone is held responsible. And so as long as you have folks, and this is usually like the old lung in the teeth, sort of tenured, tenured professor on campus. Like they're like, I'm not actually going to do this as long as you have folks like that that you aren't holding accountable. Everyone else sees that and they're like, well maybe I won't do it then. So you gotta make a rule, gotta hold everybody to it and don't be afraid to track it in a Dumb manual way. Especially if you're still like figuring out what is the best way to systematize this thing. Then once you got that nailed down, like, see if there's a practice management system that can kind of accommodate that system. It's a good question, though. Follow ups, like follow ups are the bane of an accounting firm's existence. Last one here. This will either warm your heart or make you die inside a little bit. We're looking to stop using QuickBooks because they're forcing the online version and my boss is not open to that. We have over 300 businesses that we do payroll, bookkeeping and taxes for. What would be your recommendation on software? Oh, the easy thing to say here is my recommendation is new, new Software, anything but QuickBooks Desktop. Here's the thing, everybody's living in their own reality, like within, within kind of what they know. And there are a lot of folks still who will die on QuickBooks Desktop or some other desktop software. And the reality is it's because nobody's proven to them that there's anything, anything better yet. And for a lot of these folks, they built their career, they built super profitable businesses for decades on a tool that now Intuit's no longer willing to sell them. And I can understand how that is frustrating and scary and all that. Honestly, like in the case of this, this firm and where things are at today, they're like, I don't, I generally don't know that there's a business to be built on QuickBooks Desktop. I have a hard time seeing that working. It doesn't mean that you couldn't, if you really want to stay desktop, that you couldn't go and find another solution to do something similar. But things to look out for just in general without like, you know, without zooming straight into this example in particular, things to look out for. Oftentimes we can find ourselves fighting that which is inevitable, like over some sort of moral win that will never come. Like taking, taking this stand that is ultimately for no one in particular besides ourselves, because we just don't, we just don't like the way things are going. And there's times when that is right. Like there, there are times when like doing the right thing is, is still doing the right thing, but fighting over, you know, the fighting with the, the third biggest fintech company on the planet and taking some sort of moral stand like that, that's probably not the move. We see this every year. Intuit pisses people off and accountants don't leave. So my question would be if you're so mad about Intuit, about forcing you to the cloud. Why is your entire business still built on Intuit products? There's this, there's like this uniquely the American problem where we think we are glued to Intuit and there's no other solutions. You can run a killer firm on no Intuit products. I took a $5 million practice fully off of anything intuit. 1800 clients. We did it. You can do it. I know a lot of people around very profitable firms that don't use anything Intuit. I'm not like mega anti Intuit these days. The reality is Intuit is building really good consumer solutions. And so the company's just kind of flipped, like they are consumer first rather than pro first these days. And that's just, that's just how it is. But I got to think, like, for myself, what's the best for my firm? What's the best for my clients? And the answer there is generally going to be, where's the investment going? The reality is very little investment has gone into any desktop products in the last 15 years. And a lot of cloud apps just stink. And there's a lot of really bad things about QuickBooks Online. That desktop still just does way, way better. But to use a sports ball analogy to a degree, we gotta skate where the puck's going. Because if nobody's investing in making the tools that we're using better, but then the firm across the street is using all the tools that are getting all the investment, that's also not a situation that I want to find myself in now. I want to feel really good about the companies that I'm partnering with, that I'm. That I'm working with. That's. That actually is very important to me. It's one of my favorite things about conferences. Learning about the people behind the scenes, the people actually running the products that I use every day who are real humans. I can take a lot of pride in working with people that I enjoy. And so if you haven't found that yet in your firm, see if you can, like, because there are solutions providers going about this stuff the right way, with the exception of US Tax software. That's always just the big asterisk on everything, right? But to bring this back to some, some change management things we were discussing earlier this week. You can't always hold people, you can't hold them responsible for maybe what they don't know and what they haven't been exposed to yet. Who was it? Somebody said it really, really elegantly in a LinkedIn comment. I gotta Find it, because I know they listen. John Sanchez said this on LinkedIn. Very well said. He said leveling up by finding peer communities online is iron sharpening iron. I realized this fact when I began having conversations with other professionals that weren't collaborating online. It's almost like you're talking a foreign language to them. It was a wow moment for me. This has 100% been my experience. I will talk with folks at conferences and assume that they know certain things. And then they tell me they're like, I'm not really on LinkedIn or Twitter or YouTube or anything like that. And I'm like, okay, that's. That's why they don't know about these things. And I take for granted the fact that I'm like, well, everyone knows this or that. The reality is that. That they don't. And can you. I don't know, can you maybe blame them for, like, hiding under a rock, maybe? But the reality is the people you bump into each day, like, they're a product of what they've been exposed to. And if you want somebody be. To be as convicted as you are about that thing, hit rewind to try to understand, why am I so convicted about this thing? This is one of the highest and best uses of my YouTube videos, is convincing people of your position. And it's helpful and they're logical, and somebody can see the merit in it just by, like, kind of walking through the steps and being like, yes, it makes sense. But once they know a few firm owners who are successfully running a firm on the cloud on and moved off of QuickBooks Desktop or whatever that example is, once you know people in the wild who are doing it and finding success, then it gets way, way easier. And in this example, this is a. This is a person who commented on a video who's watched. Watched some of my videos, and they now have the job of going back to their boss who does not have this context, and they're like, how do I climb this mountain? That's hard, man. But the best advice I can give is, is back into, why am I so convicted? And how can I get my colleagues that same exposure? And it is why next week. What a great segue. We're devoting next week to getting our firms to a place where the work that we do is more kind of scheduled, taking control of capacity rather than sitting back waiting for the stuff to come in and then trusting that it'll go out on a timely basis. A lot of really powerful changes that I've seen come from this. People talk about it a lot with tax work. But for pretty much any type of accounting firm work, moving to a very intentional scheduled year has tremendous benefits when it comes to taking back control of your own life and how much you want to work, when you want to take that vacation and all that. And we've talked about it on this podcast a lot, but something I'm going to do differently next week, I'm going to focus on telling the stories of others and letting them tell what their experience was. Some's gonna. Some experience can be good, some's gonna be bad. And so it's not even necessarily to convince you of a thing. It's to enrich your perspective. Because it's one thing for me to tell you what the right thing to do is. It's a whole nother thing for me to enable access to a bunch of people with real life experience. Like, you're sitting down across the table from them and they're walking you through the nitty gritty of how they did it. That stuff is gold. Right? That's what gets me excited. That's what next week's gonna be all about. And so as we are coming up with these. These great ideas and all that, like, we just gotta recognize our headspace is in a wildly different place than most folks in this profession, and by extension, the folks that you work with every single day. And so generally, they are not the problem. It's very easy and maybe human nature to be like, why can't you just think like me? When the reality is we're all programmed by the things that we consume, and what you're consuming is probably very different to what they're consuming. Right. So with that in mind, next week it's going to be a bunch of folks, like, sharing their experience, transitioning a firm to a more sort of scheduled, intentional setup. What went well? What didn't go well. It's going to be great to get your questions along the way, too. And we'll feed all that into a Q and A next Friday. That'll be kind of a slightly different format next week. I'm looking forward to it. I'll see you there bright and early Monday morning. Bye, gang. See y'. All. Sa.