229 How Firms Are Moving To Fully-Scheduled Work - Part 1

Gang, come in quick. I'm so excited for this week. We are devoting the week to maybe the biggest new trend of 24 and accounting firm running. Moving to hyper scheduled work. Not just sitting there and waiting for people to bring you stuff and then you're like, okay, I guess we'll do it now and we'll get it to you whenever. Instead, planning out your month, planning out your year, getting super granular about capacity so you can, you can take back control of your life. Tell you what, a lot of us right now, we need it. We need just this. Now. I could rail on and on about, oh, this is the best idea. But what we're going to do today, we're going to hear from two people who have done it. Pioneers. They're going to tell their story. It's not about me, it is about them. The good, the bad, what worked, what didn't work. They're going to tell us all about it. And let me tell you, I've heard them is really good stuff. You're not going to want to miss it. K okay, come on in. Hurry up. Come take a seat. Okay, first up, Jacob Oberlander. He is the very first person that ever turned me on to this whole notion of like scheduling your year. We talked about it in my account community like maybe three years ago or something like that and funny how this stuff works. He turned me onto it. I got super excited about it. I talked about it and we're going to hear from a number, number of other folks who heard about it from me and they're like, stole this idea from Jason. I'm like, that's what you think? Stole this idea from Jacob, who probably stole the idea from somebody else. Frankly, I'm going to let Jacob take it away. He's going to tell you all about how they run their firm now on no overtime while still being a wildly profitable firm. And how he is like, it sounds like living the dream.

Hello, my name is Jacob Overlander. I'm the founder and CEO at Oberlander and Company. We are an accounting firm, a team of seven. What we do is we have three departments. We do traditional accounting attacks. We do a level above that is fractional, cfo, FP and A. And on top of that, personally what I enjoy doing is advisory, business advisory type of work. When we started out approximately 12 years ago, it was just managing the work out of the inbox. So the task was just whatever emails I had in my inbox. And for tax returns we simply used Excel. That was our way. That's the way we did things after that our next fix was we wanted to have I think when we hired our third employee we moved to Trello. That was sort of some of management system. There was no real schedule, there was no even. We had enough capacity so that wasn't even an issue. So that wasn't even a big deal. We didn't even think about scheduling at all. And later on we moved to a full fledged accounting based project management system. Now in terms of scheduling the way we do now is we pre schedule our tax season. That came after a while we start seeing that we need to find a way to manage our work better. Now what our pain was at the time I realized I went through the classic disillusionment at my previous firm. I Remember working until 12:00 clock at night during busy season and I promised myself that I'm opening my own firm and that's never going to happen again. I'm going to work 40 hours, maybe a few extra hours during tax season. But after a while and that went well for you know, the first two or three years. But after a while as we took on more work that was. We figured that we can't just, you know, go on be reactive and things will just fall into place. We felt that there is a need that we have to be proactive. So we came up with the system of scheduling in terms of tax service in terms of when we will work on the clients. I am not sure how we got to that idea. I don't remember. I probably read it or heard it from someone. But the way we work in terms of tax work is that we schedule everyone the month, when they will, when we will work on the client. So we give the leeway to our team to choose when they will work on a particular client. They have the option. But what I will do is I will review the list for them at the beginning of tax season and they will notify the client. Meaning let's say if the work for this client is scheduled to be worked on in May, they will get an email in April just telling them we scheduled to work for May. This is when we're going to work on your tax return. In terms of overall scheduling, what we do with clients is we teach them that everything is scheduled when they have a meeting. The way I work, I only work with the calendar. I started out with calendly. Later on I moved on to. Once I felt I saw that it's actually working I. I went on to a different system that's integrated into our CRM and we saw a tremendous amount of adoption by our team members and by clients. The problem that made me realize that I really have to focus on scheduling was when I found myself working 60 hours a week. I remember having headaches just like. And it was so busy I couldn't even afford the time to go to the doctor. So. And I pushed it off. You know, I went to check out myself but there was nothing serious about. There was nothing serious, you know, nothing, nothing wrong with me. But I just realized that I have to. I can't just do the same. I read the book, the. The book that I read at that time was free to focus. And it gave me a whole different perspective how to manage your work and your life and how to. I restructured my whole day and it's more of a lot of things that we introduced, which is batching what you work in the morning, what you working as they do. Even with our team members, they complained that I don't give them enough time. Since we need to do scheduling. I have more time to work with my team. They will also go through the same process when one of my team members, when they want to review a tax return with me, they will batch a few open questions and they will book time on my calendar. They have internal calendar so they will have more access to me than external clients. But still they will still go through the same process as well in terms of communicating this with the clients. With newer clients, it's easy. We give them actually a cadence. We will tell them is when they sign up, we will tell them that normally we divide our engagement between proactive and reactive so they know they're getting reactive conversations in November, December. That's when we will reach out to them to do the pre tax season planning and then the given month when we will work on tax return, those are proactive that we do with every client. We have some clients that we do quarterly. So they know that this is the time of engagement, this is the time that we will reach out to them. And then in the engagement they know reactively, you know, they can reach out to us whenever they want if they need any help. So what I learned is being. Being proactive and being. Setting clear expectations. That's the key word that I would say, setting clear expectations. Clients know that that's the way we work. We schedule. There's no 911, there's no emergencies. That's the way we work. It works because we are super responsive throughout the day. We are in the office nine to six. That's our you know, our hours, they understand that we are super responsive throughout the day. But after 6 o', clock, you know, that's, or 5 o', clock, depending on each team member. That's, you know, nothing happens after that. Even myself, typically I wouldn't even pick up a phone call after that if it's business related. In the past, I wasn't so strict about client texting me, sending me WhatsApp messages. We completely stopped that. The way we were able to stop that is that I was guilty. We were guilty of sometimes if it was difficult to reach a client, we felt it's easier to send them a message on text. We stopped doing that. So the clients know that text is not our way of communicating. If a client will send me a question on WhatsApp, I would reply with my calendar link. That's the way I would reply. If it's not. If someone, the phone at my desk doesn't, doesn't ring, it's turned off. If you want to work with me, it will always be on the calendar. But typically, really the way we set up is that everyone has their. We did assign everyone to a direct contact, so they will always work with their direct contact. The way we were able to shift the work from me to my team was whenever a client would call me and I would take the call, I would always tell them that so and so is your direct contact. Let them get, let me get them on the line so they know that I will never discuss a tax situation, an accounting situation, whatever it is, without having that person on the line. So they learned that that person has to be available. Now they will call their direct contact and if need be, they will conference me in the line. If I'm available, then I'll be the third person or my team member will tell them, you know what, that's a good question. Let me discuss it with Jacob and I'll get back to you today. Our system works like a breeze. Honestly, I don't even get how people are struggling with this. I think it's just, it's hard with the beginning, but now it's just second nature. We don't, we don't, we, we, we just, we don't do overtime. Never ever. 40 hours is pretty standard even throughout the busiest time of the year. I like to. Our deadline is always the day before. We always finish extensions. April 14, our last tax attempt. We try to submit them by September 14th. So we're always super on top and the clients know that and they come in honestly. By now, many of the clients that come to us are people who are sort of messed up, but they're willing to help themselves. If a person is, you know, just a chronic procrastinator, we. We can't help them. But most people in the middle, they're willing to work on themselves, they are willing to get help, then we can help them. How do we deal with clients who fail to respect those deadlines? Usually we're not super stringent on that. We're not so strict about it. We will most of the time let it slide. But as I said, if it's a person that over time we realize that they have no. They will just miss deadlines. We will either outright let them go or price them out. We're really on top of pruning clients every year. I think that's part of the conversation when we annually, when we review the client list. And that part of the rating, the way we read our client, the way we rate our clients, is how responsive they are. And really the bottom, you know, the people in the bottom, we may let them go or as I said, price them out.

Man. How, how just inspiring is that. I will say Jacob's been doing this so long that he makes it, like, sound trivially easy. And you can tell that he, at this point, he kind of doesn't know anything else, right? He's like, and honestly, why would you do it any other way? 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 shelfie 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 happens. Like, you see the people who have had bad PM experiences. Firm360, 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 firm 360 phenomenal support even in there. Like G2 capterror 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. Having a rough day, a 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. Hmm. Burn 360 link in the show notes. Was that a bad ad read? You get the. You get the idea. This episode is brought to you in part by Team up, helping you recruit top Filipino accountants without any ongoing monthly fees. The difference between Team up and all the other offshoring options. So Team up helps you hire staff directly. No middleman. You work directly with your new hire in the Philippines. Hire the person, not the company. Guys, Gals, gang. Here's just a few reasons to hire directly. You have access to higher level talent. Makes sense. You have complete control over team culture and training. They keep 100% of what you pay them and it's a lot more affordable for you so you can retain your team for the long term. Team up could source accountants with experience working at US or Australian firms familiar with tools like Xerocubio and Dex. Also recruit specialist roles. Team leaders, tech tax specialists, administrative assistants. Thought experiment what if you had an executive assistant for the first time this tax season? Just throwing it out there. What would they do? Start at that email video I did on the main channel recently. Get help with that stanky ol inbox. I digress. Team up recruits these talented folks for a flat one time fee of 4,000 US American dollars. That's it. 4K one time. Somebody at Robert half just did a spit take. Robert half reference. We ever 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 team up stuff I loved. All superheroes have a great origin story of some sort of awful, traumatic thing. You'll actually notice that theme as we're hearing from people this week. Jacob that was working ungodly hours for a firm and saying, I'm going to go start a firm and never ask people to do this for me. That's pretty great. That's very noble. I love the framing of proactive versus reactive. That's been a recurring theme with folks that I talked to. In their case, they choose the month that they're going to do the work for the client. So the client doesn't dictate it. The person who oversees the account decides on what month. And they tell the client he called out the book. Free to focus. May have to check that out. Interestingly, it gave him more time to work with his team. Kind of common complaint. Team members want more access to the big boss. I know that was definitely a problem with me. Moving to a more structured approach to getting work done gave them more of that capacity. He said, it's incredibly easy with new clients because they don't know anything different. And, man, there's so many things in our firms that we're afraid to change. Where if you told a new client that was the way it is when they came in, they'd be like, okay, but we don't change it because we're so afraid of what all of the current clients will change, like, what they will say. And. And as a result, we never change it, even though we know it's a better thing to do. And you've got new clients coming in every day. And like, now you're gonna have to retrain every single one of those new clients that are coming in and making the problem worse. They're not super stringent when folks don't make deadlines. That's probably the biggest objection I hear from folks is like, what if they just. What if they don't give you their info when they're supposed to? Or what if they don't follow the rules? It sounds like Jacob's crew. They take it into account. It's actually like a factor when they're scoring clients at the end of the year. But, like, they're not gonna get you Know, super, super illegal about, oh, you day here, a day there. Okay. Brenda Cannon, if you've been hanging on Twitter, get ready to hear more about how she's transitioned to scheduled work. She is a, she's a champion on Twitter for this now, which is awesome. Like, that's how this stuff works and what leads to really positive change for people. Jacob was a champion for this. That's how I learned about it. I became a champion for this. That's how Brenda learned about it. Brenda now is like turning tons of people on Twitter onto this. Like every post she's doing on this just has so much engagement. So many people who are jumping in and saying, yeah, like I did this, it's awesome. People who are like, I can't understand how this or that works. And every time you have one of those conversations, you demystify it for them. Absolutely love it. Brenda's gonna run us through their process, how they've transitioned the last couple of years and where they're at with all of this.

Hi, this is Brenda Cannon with Cannon and Associates. At Cannon and Associates, we do tax prep, accounting and tax plan planning and tax advisory type services for small businesses and their owners on a monthly fixed fee. We do still have several 1040 clients that are not on a monthly arrangement, but we are trying to move towards mainly businesses and their owners and all clients being on a monthly fixed fee. At our office we have two full time CPAs, one part time CPA, one full time accountant, and two full time admin. When I am not working, I love to garden and do all things creative. So before we started the scheduling thing, like many tax firms, we asked our clients to turn their information in like for business pass through entities. We asked them to give us their tax information by February 15th and we would have their return prepared by March 15th. And then for the 1040 clients, we asked them to get us their tax documents by March 15 and we would have their return prepared by April 15. The problem was we had no idea how many clients would give us their information by March 15th. So no way to control that workflow. I think it was four years ago on March 15th. Approximately 105 clients gave us their tax documents on that one day in addition to the clients who'd given us their tax documents prior to March 15th. And then I remember the week leading up to the October 15th deadline in 2021. I worked 95 hours that week leading up to that deadline because of clients who waited until the very last minute. This isn't healthy. And that is what triggered us to want to do something different. On one of your podcasts, you mentioned scheduling your work, and that sounded so wonderful to me. I was on an airplane in November of 2022, and I was just sitting there thinking about this, and I had my new remarkable tablet thing, and I had a calendar template on it, and I was just drawing squares in each day on the calendar and thinking, how can I. How can we figure out how many returns we can prepare per day? So when I got back to the office, I ran a report in our firm360 practice management software. It allows you to budget time for each project, which we had done that. And so I was able to run a report and kind of figure out the average time it takes to prepare a tax return. So we started there, and we use the Calendly app, and we had one calendar set aside just for this. And Chad Davis was so nice to help us work on a process with the Calendly app and make and Airtable so that when someone picked a date there, that date would move over to airtable. It would load to air table. So we knew which clients had picked a date and which clients still had not picked a date, so we could track that. There are some kinks with that process, and I'm working on a solution for that. So on this calendar, we had so many spots a day, and early in the year, like the month of February, we had more spots available each day because the clients that would have their tax documents ready earlier in the year are usually simpler tax returns. So we figured we could have more prepared, we could prepare those faster. These spots on the calendar were available through the third week of September, and we had about 10% more spots available than we had clients, just so we would have plenty of available spots on the calendar. So in early January, we sent an email to our clients briefly explaining this new process. Then about a week later, we sent another email to our clients explaining this in more detail and announcing that we would send the calendar out on January 31st at noon. We also sent a text to our clients asking them to please read the email that we had sent and again telling them that we are sending a calendar out on January 31st at noon. Before sending the calendar out, we did contact our older clients who aren't able to use technology, and we asked them to pick a date, and we just preloaded their names on this calendar so they would already be set up. So then on January 31st at noon, we sent the calendar out to our clients. We asked them to pick a date on the calendar and when picking that date to consider when they most likely will receive all of their tax documents. And they need to pick a date that is out far enough so they will have all their tax documents. And if they did pick a date and they didn't have all their tax documents, they would have to pick another date. And by that time, so many dates would have been picked. And so it would be likely that their date would be further, way further out on the calendar. But our clients really did a pretty good job picking dates that were appropriate for their tax documents. Also, we were pretty lenient with our clients. If they were a day or two or maybe three days late getting their tax documents to us, we kept them on schedule. It didn't mess us up. We, in most cases, hadn't gotten to their tax return yet. Some clients were not happy because they found out they would have to file an extension. And so I, for some clients, I just gave them, I just called them and we talked about it. And I explained that it is impossible to get all the tax returns prepared in that small window of time. Some people have to be extended and they don't want their tax preparer to be overworked and not getting enough sleep and to not have a well rested brain. And so after having these conversations, they were fine. They calmed down. We did last year lose about 70 clients, and at the time, that was about 10% of our clientele. I don't know if it was because of the calendar or because of fee increases. It was probably a little bit of both. What we did learn is that the clients that liked this process are clients that, that we really like. They are the clients that are organized and the clients that read instructions and follow instructions. These clients liked this process and they liked that they had a deadline for themselves and they liked that they had a more specific date when their tax return would be completed. So this year, when we sent the calendar out, what we did different was we spread the dates out a little bit more. So not as many spots available during tax season, but. But more spots available per week during tax season than not during tax season, but not as many spots available during tax season as the year before. And this is because I have a goal to get to a point where we can work where I can work five days a week and have weekends off. Also this year, our calendar ends the third week of August, so we have plenty of time to meet the September 15 deadline and the October 15 deadline. Another thing we did when we sent the calendar out this year was we sent a form with the calendar that says it's called I didn't get the date I want. And so clients who didn't like their date could fill out this form. Form. And if we were running ahead of schedule, then we could move some people up on the calendar. And we were able to do that for some clients. Some clients that would have been extended. We were actually able to get their return prepared before April 15. We are also going to send this calendar out again in the fall, probably in September or October, and have dates available through December. And for clients who already aren't scheduled for a tax projection, we're going to ask them if their income has, if something's changed, if their income has increased substantially, if, you know, let's do a tax projection so that you're prepared, you know, on taxes before next tax season. For next tax season, we are going to send the calendar out in early December instead of January so that if a client gets a date that requires them to have an extension filed and we haven't done a tax projection, there's still time to do that before the end of the year. So what I've learned from this is that I have more time to work on tax returns now and I have plenty of time to visit with my client about their tax return as needed. And I have time to do like non tax things like deal with correspondence or I helped a client get some things set up. They were starting a new business. I went to their office, spent a half a day helping them get some things set up. So I just have more time to do more non tax things during tax season. And clients appreciate that. So I feel like this is definitely a win for our firm and I feel like it's a win for our clients.

There's something about hearing people have success. I don't know, maybe we're all sick of being talked at and like educated. There's something magic about just hearing people be like, here's what we did, what worked, what didn't work, and why. We now like this better. That's kind of just a better way of learning this episode. It is sponsored in part by, by the fine folks at Live Flow. Interesting Live Flow use case we've been talking about, you know, how do you get in front of a more specific type of client? And I shared that story of Barbara Corcoran putting out reports like industry reports, and that boosting their reputation just in the most ridiculous way because it's like they were the same business yesterday that they are today, but everybody got that report in their hands. And they're like, wow, you're the go to for this and that. Well, it's hard to see all of your clients like financial information in one place, right? You got to drill down into every single QuickBooks file, whatever. But with Liveflow's consolidations functionality, you can actually connect to a whole bunch of different files and roll them all up into a single spreadsheet. Which means like you could set up custom alerting, custom benchmarking or if you were to put together say I don't know, a report of some sort of like aggregate metrics, trends, that sort of thing. Let's say you got a new, little, new little beekeeping niche that maybe you're working on. I said bees beekeeping. Let's say I got 15 of those clients right now and I want to put out a little report and I could roll up those 15 into some consolidated reporting. I look for some trends. If I see some trends, ask that client if they want to, you know, be interviewed and be a part of this report. And it is all because LifeLow's consolidations feature lets you roll up a bunch of different companies whether they have the same chart of accounts or not. I did a five minute demo day if you haven't seen it yet on YouTube. But pretty cool showing off the consolidations feature. Just a super quick visual like the cleanest way I've ever seen. Like most straightforward UI for doing big complex consolidations. There's a lot of good information in those accounting files and it's in some ways like it's kind of trapped in those ledgers. Lifelow it's a good way to get them out to your spreadsheets via Google Sheets or now Excel they support. Pretty exciting. Learn more about LifeLow check out the link in the show notes. This episode is sponsored in part by Right Networks Gang. Exciting news here. Now I know tax season just ended and you need a great, you need a great place to rest and recharge. You know I love technology and how it can elevate the accounting profession. So today I want to tell you about right now. It is a brand new conference I will be a part of in Austin this May. It's designed for accounting tax professionals. Right now is where you can connect and collaborate with thought leaders and an established peer community to learn all the ways you can grow your firm. And the Speaker One lineup amazing. You got worldwide AI sensation Dr. Radica Dirks, the innovative folks from RightWorks plus leading accounting experts coming together to give you the tools, insights and secrets to make your firm all it can be. Hello, I'm speaking. I didn't make it on the list in the ad copy. That's an outrage. And right now you can save 15% on registration when you visit rightworks.com rightnow and enter the code STATS15. That's STATS15. It's all happening May 14 through 16 in Austin, Texas. You won't want to miss it. I'll put the link in the show notes along with that code. I'd love to see you there. Come hang in Austin. Stuff I loved in there. She mentioned they had a. They had February 15th and March 15th cutoff dates. The firm I spent most of my life, and that was the rule for us for a decade. And we thought that that solved the problem of setting clear expectations with clients when, boy howdy, it sure didn't, because we still didn't have any control over when we could actually get the work done. Brenda said at one point, 105 clients provided their docs on March 15 because that was the cutoff. Which is just. I don't mean to laugh, and hopefully Brenda can laugh at this. In retrospect is just a comic indictment of that approach, which is. Which is almost virtually everyone's approach now, is to do that, just set these cutoff dates. But this is the problem with it, right? If everybody makes a run on the bank, man, you are hosed. It doesn't matter what the cutoff is March 1, April 1, whether it's for 1099 work, whether it's for. You know, a lot of people that listen to this pod are not in the United States. Whatever your version of compliance is, whatever that deadline is, any just hard cutoff date, that's not taking control of the schedule in the States. Like the ultimate kind of final, final tax deadline is October 15th. And so most firms, they're kind of working on things pretty much throughout the year until October 15th. And info trickles in throughout the year. And I'm convinced that if every single one of your clients had all their information ready to go on January, January 1, and gave it all to you then, or let's say February 1st, the problem here is you would still finish all of that work in October. Maybe you could get it done earlier because you got it all in at once. But if everybody gave you their work in February, they wouldn't be excited to be hearing from you in August. And that's the problem here is when you don't have control over intake, you don't have any control over when it goes out the door. Brenda also Has a hero backstory working 95 hours because clients waited until the last minute. That's the accountant version of like drinking something radioactive and developing a superpower. I think. Yeah, she mentioned that she saw me talking about work scheduling. Isn't it great how this works? I take credit for that when I just stole it from Jacob. Sidebar. We've been talking about online communities lately. This is kind of how online communities work. You get a bunch of smart people together and then they share ideas with each other and they're like, gee, thanks for making this community, Jason. And you're like, you're welcome, I guess. And the reality is, like, it only happened because of you. Like, this is why I'm so into the idea of accounting firms launching their own online communities is because as much as we try to, you know, slough that off and be like, it wasn't me, it was you. Smart people working together. If you can be the one to create that space, in many ways, it was you. Like, you are the reason that that that exchange happened in the first place. I thought it was interesting they have more slots early in the year because generally the only folks who can file early in the year have more simple tax returns. In the transition process, they like mega over communicated a bunch of different messages, texts. I also love that they have a date. When the count, the scheduling calendar drops, it's like March 31st at noon. And they tell everybody this is when it's happening. I don't know of another thing in an accounting firm that is like a proper drop that like people can get hyped about. You could have a countdown and all these things. That's just fun. High stakes. High stakes for sure, but fun. Brendan squad too. They're flexible. Like, if folks are missing a few days here, they're not a big deal. They lost 70 clients, about 10% of their clients. They also increased fees, so it could have been due to fee increases. Scheduling combination. Of the two, the clients who liked the new process most were the organized ones. The folks that loved it were the ones who were responsive who would get their, like, stuff put together in an organized way. And aren't those the people that you want to keep happy if the people who object are not the organized ones? Almost seems like a good filtering mechanism, right? The second year they had a form A I didn't get the date I wanted form. That's interesting. Where folks could like, say, like, I, I'm filing later than I want to or something like that. And then if a slot opened up, they would try to pull them into that. That's probably a good way to help people to feel heard if they're frustrated about the date that they ended up with. And then this is really smart for tax firms. Next year, they're looking at sending out the calendar in December instead of January so that folks who get a post extension date, they can ensure they do year end planning for it to calculate extension estimate before the end of the calendar year. So rather than the scheduling calendar going out in January, pulling that up to December, and then for the folks who got dates after 4:15, they're gonna make sure that they run an extension estimate for those clients before they get into the heat of busy season. That is super smart. I absolutely love this. I thought it was so valuable to hear people's stories. We're doing the same thing tomorrow. We're. We've got two more people who have done this who are going to share their stories with a little bit different perspectives, which is great. Like, we want to kind of enrich our understanding of this so that we can pull together a version of it that makes sense for us, having leaned into the experience of other people who have done it. We're doing this again tomorrow and some really cool stories. And then Wednesday, day after tomorrow, we're gonna run through all the different versions of this that I've seen. How could you set up this scheduling thing just from scratch? What are all the different ways you could do it? And then Thursday. And this is maybe the biggest thing we're gonna talk about. How do you transition? Because it's one thing to have a super cool, rad killer system, it's another thing to get the transition right. You don't wanna tick a bunch of people off. And in reality, it is the transition that keeps people from doing this to begin with. Right. You're afraid of the response from clients. Even if you think it's a good idea. The thing that keeps you up at night is that transition. So we're going to dedicate Thursday to that. Friday is going to be a Q and A of like all the little niggly things about like the process where it's like, yeah, but what if you bump into this? What if you bump into that? I've already collected a bunch of those questions from conversations on Twitter that usually Brenda is starting. If you have questions, please pop them in the comments. Even questions for the folks that you've heard from today. Drop them in there. We're going to do a massive question roundup at the end of the week. That's probably just getting more into the nitty gritty. And last, can we say a huge thank you to Jacob and Brenda for doing this. This is just such a great illustration of the value of. Of sharing your journey of putting stuff out there, of not being competitive. The only reason maybe that this week is even happening was when it was. Cause I originally discussed this with Jacob, and I was like, dang, that's really smart. I became the mouthpiece for that. Now Brenda's going out and hyping this stuff up, and, like, we're all like, I think we have kind of a duty to pay that forward when our business is built on stealing great ideas from other people, Right? So huge thank you to Jacob and Brenda. Got two more wicked smart people that we're going to hear from tomorrow to get an even more kind of complete mental model of, like, okay, what are all the things that I need to be thinking about? Can't wait for that. And I'll see you there.