230 How Firms Are Moving To Fully-Scheduled Work - Part 2

We're back. Part two, folks sharing their story of transitioning their firms to fully like intensely scheduled firms, taking control of their capacity and their workflow and their lives. Their lives. We're hearing from two more folks today who are in kind of different situations to the folks we heard from yesterday. Each have awesome stories to tell. Let's quit talking about, Come on in, pull up a chair, let's do it. Okay, first person, we're here from, Vince. This one's super interesting because Vince is like halfway through this process. He started doing it this year. He's not out of the woods in any way. He's got some things he's concerned about, unsure about how it's going to go. But let's not sugarcoat any of this. Like, don't just look at the people who, you know, nailed it and love it. Like, there's going to be some dark days where you doubt yourself. And so great to hear from Vince here who's like right in the middle of it now. They scheduled their clients by quarter basically, which is really interesting to me. Brenda, who we heard from yesterday, they scheduled based on a specific day and that's an intake day. Jacob, I think they scheduled theirs based on was it a week or two weeks? Vince more the other end of the spectrum. They're doing it by quarters. So Q1, Q2, Q3. And you're going to hear from him how that's going, how he's feeling about it so far. So super interesting. Check this out.

So to tell you a little bit about us, my name's Vince Porter. We are Porter & Co. CPAs and we cater to high net net worth entrepreneurs and real estate investors. So we do a lot of tax and accounting work for big multifamily syndication groups and a lot of high income business owners and things like that. So we've got a team of 15 and we have three core services that we do which are tax planning, tax compliance and accounting services, which we probably need to rename managed accounting or do something to kind of spice that up other than just traditional bookkeeping. But those are the kind of our three big core services staff of 15 that I think I mentioned. And what I do when I'm not working is absolutely bang out your podcast and listen to all of that. That's really enjoyable. I think I emailed you and shot your message, told you that I liked listening to it on my commute. But obviously other than that I'm managing my five kids. We've got a whole plethora of children at our Disposal from second grade all the way to a senior in college. All right, so what did we do before we did the non scheduled stuff? Well, I gotta say that the scheduling thing is brand new this year. I, you know, I've obviously ripped it off from you and from Brenda and some other people I've seen on realize and tax Twitter that are doing this. But essentially I've been doing this for, for 20 plus years. I am in my mid-40s, so I took over my father's firm in 2005 after spending a few years at RSM and then jumping over and taking over my dad's practice and essentially buying him out along the way. So here I am. And what we did for all of that time period was really, you know, just kind of let the clients dictate when they get their work here. And for the majority of that being tax work, it was really reactive, more than proactive. And I think it really hit me over the head, you know, after doing this for so many years when you said, you know, we've always. If all your clients drop your stuff in on February 1, it's still going to take you till the end of October to get that work done. Even though we kind of throw out a loose guarantee of a four week turnaround, it's really hard to manage that four week turnaround time when, when you've got a lot of work in here that you're just kind of reacting to. So in the past we would set like a February 15 deadline for March 15 work or March 15 for April 15 and the same thing goes for the September and October deadline. So we were absolutely reactive and we would have the same clients, so we would know who is good with extensions, who we get done over the summer. But after last year we had so many returns that got piled up in the end, it created a lot of problems for, you know, missing some things, just scrambling to get work out and, and we spent the fourth quarter saying we really have to get this figured out. So, so that's kind of what pushed us to this is to try to even out the work in what we're calling Q1, Q2 and Q3. And our quarters for this are kind of broken up. February to April is the first quarter and then May to July is going to be the second quarter and August to October is our third quarter. So we communicated this to clients by really just we knew these big multifamily syndication clients are always pushing to get stuff out by March, May, April 15th. So that's a big majority of what we do. So we kind of already got that set out and then we have our other clients that already kind of come customized into that. But for the rest of the people, our real gap becomes this summer time frame, which hopefully for our Q2 clients is a lot better. Because what's happened in the past is we do so much work in the tax season that we get a little burned out or let other things lapse. So we spend this summertime period catching up on other things. And then you fall into the trap where all the staff's taking PTO for their summer vacations, clients are doing the same thing, taking kids out to things. So the summer becomes a little bit slower and it creates that back end headache, which is even worse than your tax season things. So we've really been communicating hard to our second quarter clients into our project coordinator whose job is to go out and procure this work, to really go get this stuff done. So I'm really hoping that we can get more work done over the summer that's going to help alleviate that back end strain. You know, what we're learning is really we've only got so many returns to do. We've got a metric in place in our office where our staff members on the tax side are responsible to get five returns done a week. And we really follow the EOS model and traction and that's really been transformative to my practice. So seeing those numbers really helps to see what staff is more productive or which staff are struggling and then try to drill down and see what might be going on there. But what it really does is it allows us to see, okay, what is our actual threshold for what Q1, Q2 and Q3 would be and really kind of help put clients in each of those. But I think kind of what we're learning is just because we put a client in Q1 doesn't mean they're going to get their stuff to us no matter how long we get. So we've got a few of these clients that we identified to do in Q1 that we didn't do that are now bleeding over into Q2. I a little concerned that if that happens more here in Q2, it's going to create a back end struggle for Q3. So that's something we're going to have to look for and be cognizant of. So I mean, I think going into that, if clients want to get their stuff in here early, obviously we kind of have a communication with them of certainly if we have capacity, we'll allow for that. But really Q1 and Q3 or our, if you want to compare it to Uber, our surge pricing areas, we will not allow for a discount in those periods because we have so much work to do. So if a client, if we've got the capacity to get in there, we will tell the clients we will do the work, but we're essentially going to charge them what we call a rush fee. And that's just an additional fee on top of their already quoted fee. So that it gives us, you know, the motivation to work a little bit harder on that if it is creating overtime for our staff. I gotta be honest, I don't have a solution for what clients are doing if we're not getting it in here on time yet. That's, you know, something we're going to kind of try to figure out to get done. But really what we've done is we segmented our clients, like I said, into this Q1, 2 and 3. So my project coordinator only contacts Q1 and Q1. And right now we're going after all the Q2 work and she's only contacting them. And then here, starting in May and into June, we'll start getting after our Q3 clients to get all that stuff in. And that's better than what we used to do, which was a blanket email to our entire client base of say, hey, get your stuff in here. And then we were kind of at the mercy of whoever gave us their stuff. And if, you know, way more clients needed, sent their stuff in than what we had capacity for. It creates a expectation problem of clients think they can get their stuff turned around in two weeks or four weeks. But we got a lot more stuff coming in. It creates a lot more issues for us. So that's what I hope the scheduling helps out with. And it seems to be working pretty well right now. You know, I think in looking at all of this, what really helps us out is being able to forecast what this work is and build for capacity because, you know, you're always going to have some attrition, some clients are going to fall off or some clients are going to move. But, but we've got, you know, fortunately we've got a good pipeline of new clients coming in that, you know, if they fit our criteria and we want to work with them, we can, we can replace them. So we've got to be able to facilitate that.

And.

So when we're building out our metrics for Q1 and Q2 and Q3, we've got to build in a little bit of Leeway to allow for some premium clients to come in. So if we want to service them, they're willing to pay our fees. And if it's a rush fee, if it's in one of those periods, then we can do that and facilitate that. So I think, you know, like I said, we're new to this. It's, we're still kind of learning on the go. We're not, we don't have a perfected system down right now, but I think it's going a little bit better. Well, I know it's going better than it used to. I certainly seemed to go well in this first quarter. We got probably for us, I think about 350 returns was our projection. I think we got pretty close. We got to around 325. So for us I felt like that was fairly well, we'll see how Q2 and 3 goes. But you know, I appreciate all that you're doing and everybody that's sharing out there. I just gotta say that, you know, the kind of the candor and the transparency that CPA firms have out there now, certainly with realizing what you're doing on your podcast is really refreshing. It's something that has not been done in the past and it's, it's really refreshing to kind of get with like minded people and see what other people are doing and kind of take bits and pieces of what's working for them and, and try to implement it in our practice.

Man, he's fighting the good fight, right? Still like tbd, how it goes. Tell you what I loved about that one. Sharing your story when it's not like, I mean it's, it's easy to share wins. I don't know something usually. But Vince is like, yeah, I think this is going to work, but we'll see a mildly stressful spot. You know, you're trusting the process, you think it's going to go the right way. So good on you for being, you know, transparent about that. Not really sugarcoating anything. Family firm love that. You see so many of that folks taking over, taking over family firms previously in the past they would tell people loosely, it'll be like a four week turnaround. And that was kind of what we told people was like three to four weeks. And honestly sometimes it would be three to four months. Every now and then you'd get simple ones and you'd like bang them out in a couple of weeks. But at that point, honestly you're just guessing and as soon as you cross that threshold of, of it's taking Too long. Oh my gosh. Are people burning down your phone lines? And then when you have 100 clients that are late, like, things almost just feel like they grind to a halt. So those three quarters, they treat February through April as quarter one, May to July as quarter two, August to October as quarter three. Super interesting. This may even be a way to, like you could. In some ways, it's kind of baby stepping into it, which might be wise because you could always get more granular down the road. Right? He said Q2 is where you make hay, like in a tax firm. Yeah, Q2 is where things really bog down. So how do we pull more stuff into Q2 if you just solve that problem, like, mission accomplished trick, charging rush fees for Q1 and Q3. Interesting. He's got a project coordinator, somebody whose job it is to just like crack the whip, follow up with clients, make sure things are happening on the schedule that they need to. A lot of you, when you hear that project coordinator, you're like, oh my gosh, in my dreams. Wouldn't that be amazing? Somebody that just has the job of ensuring that everything gets in all the stuff that we need. They built in leeway to their capacity to allow for adding more clients. Very important to do. I think we usually underestimate that. And he mentioned people in the past in this profession haven't shared like this before. Like that. This is a. And it's cool, like to zoom out sometimes and acknowledge that this is a unique thing that we're doing. And you know, the folks this week are contributing to in a really cool way. And you know, I've shared before, virtually all of my ideas are stolen from other people. And this one is a great example how. I first learned about this from Jacob. But we're doing something cool here, you know, by sharing the journey. And Vince, Vince, you are helping out a lot of people by sharing your journey. Everybody here to be totally open about this stuff. It truly makes a difference. Over a thousand people listen to this silly little podcast every single day. How many of those folks are going to go? And now, I mean, we've heard from some people. This is genuinely, in fact, Ann, who we're going to hear from next. This is a genuinely life changing thing for her that kept her in the profession. This episode is sponsored in part by firm 360. 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 happens. 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 with 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 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. Firm 360 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 gist. 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 teamup 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 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 Timo. So Anne Irons Anne's been sharing a bunch of really smart stuff on Twitter. I mentioned how Brenda's been kicking off a lot of discussions around this scheduled work. Anna's always there helping people, answering questions and you can tell she's super convicted that this was the right thing for her. Really cool story and just seems like a super, super smart approach what they're doing now. So check this one out from Ann.

So first of all about our firm. We have the way we're structured. It's me, I have an admin who's been with us for three years. I have an accountant who I just promoted to senior accountant. He's been with us for three years as well. And I also have an ad, an intern that I'm hoping to bring on as a full time employee once he graduates. He wants to become a cpa. We work with small business owners. We do monthly accounting. We do not do payroll. We used to do payroll. That's gone now for reasons. We do tax work. We do tax planning. We want to get out of the 1040 business for standalone 1040s that aren't related to businesses. And as a matter of fact at this point we're only taking referrals for that type of work. We do have a minimum price. That's another thing that we changed two years ago. So I'LL get into the list of things that we changed. But what it used to look like really is probably a lot like most small firms, right. You know, before COVID especially, we did whole bunch of 1040 work. We would pretty much work with anyone that came in the door. Not. Not anyone. I've been around for about 21 years now as a firm owner. So I've been through the whole. When you're first starting out, you take anybody because you're not busy, and then you learn that that's probably not a great idea. Covid hit. And I think what we all learned is that the small firm model really doesn't work when something goes sideways. At the time, I had about 430 and most of them were 1040s. So I'd say probably 70 entities and maybe 360 1040s. And you know, it had been building over all the years. Right. They keep adding more stuff on our plate. And it got to the point where I was like not having fun anymore. Right. I feel like I'm not any different from any other firm owner. We weren't having fun anymore during COVID And I made the decision at that point I was either going to not do this anymore or I was going to make some drastic changes. A whole bunch of things kind of came into play at the same time. But. But we in my firm made a lot of changes all at once two years ago. So some of the changes that we made in addition to scheduling, right. We. We instituted a minimum fee and we raised our prices significantly, like 20, sometimes 30%. We were significantly undercharging some people. I had legacy clients that I had brought on from another practitioner who sadly passed away, but she had been charging way low fees. And this was, you know, I had not brought these people up to our. Even our standard fees. So that was something that really needed to be fixed. And Covid kind of sent that sideways and it just, it needed to be done. So that was one thing. Another thing we did was the scheduling, which I'll get into in a minute. Another thing we did was pay upfront. I was spending all this time chasing people for money during COVID Another thing we did was, although we don't require using our portal, we instituted using a portal to deliver documents. What it looks like now is we have way fewer clients. And it wasn't because people left because of the scheduling, although that was part of it. I think for some clients, a lot of it was a pay up front. And a lot of it was, I'd say probably a Small part of it was a pay up front. A lot of it was our price increase. And at the end of the day, we. I did a client count the other day. We have 234 clients right now. 188 are 1040s. And I have 46 entities, which is significantly less than we were working with. Probably roughly half. Right. I bill more. Our gross sales are more. So it can be done. And I'm not a genius. Like, this is not like none of my ideas were original. I pulled ideas from here and there and everywhere. Excuse me, and put them together in a way that worked for my firm. And that's what I would recommend to anyone else who's thinking of making these changes. Make the changes that you want to make, that you're comfortable with, that you think will fit your client base. Jason, I actually stole the scheduling idea from you. I watched one of. I don't. I don't even remember what it was, but you were talking about, why are we letting clients dictate when we do our work? That's ridiculous. It is ridiculous. Like what, What, What? Why are we doing that? So it looks a lot different here. What we used to do, similar to other firms, I think, is, you know, when clients had their information ready, they would drop it off or send it in one way, shape or form, right? They would come in, they'd call for a meeting. They'd come in and meet with us, hand us documents, you know, unopened mail over the table. And sometimes, which is also ridiculous to me, or they drop off, or they'd mail in, or they'd electronically send it to us however they felt like it, and we would start the work then. We had no idea what the volume was going to look like. We had no idea when that was going to happen. And usually it happened right before the deadlines. Because human nature is, if you have a deadline, and not everyone, but in general, if you have a deadline, nothing really gets urgent until that deadline looms. So here we are after the fact. We've made all these changes, and now we schedule our clients. I know that Brenda Cannon does it differently. She lets people schedule their meetings. We don't. We schedule them and we tell them, this is when you're assigned. And I'll get into how we got there as well. We assign them a time frame. They give us their stuff shortly before that time frame begins. We give them the option to book a meeting that week if they want to. If they don't want to, that's fine, too. We do their work that week. And some of it sometimes spills over into a second week. And then if the work isn't completed and the client doesn't have the information that we need, or they're not responsive to our questions, at the end of that second week, we're doing extensions. It might be February 20, it might be March 3, we're doing extensions. Then we are not waiting until April 10 to do extensions anymore. Not happening. Telling the clients about all of this. So how you deliver this message is super, super important because clients don't like change, right? They like to do things the way that they always did it. And they expect you to be at their beck and call. We sent a letter. We like literally mailed a three page letter, or I think it was like three, maybe it was four page letter. We sent an email, same exact information, and basically it went like this. Hey, client, we're making all these great changes. We thought really hard and we've been working really hard behind the scenes. We've done all these technological changes to make things work more smoothly. And this is how it's going to benefit you. And then we went through like, okay, upfront billing. We're doing upfront billing because we pretty much know what your tax return is going to cost. We've worked together for a while, and yes, we are increasing our prices. But we want you to know because what's one of the most common complaints? I didn't know how much my return was going to be. And then they complain about the price after the fact. This way, if they don't like the price, they know up front and they know they can go somewhere else if they choose to do so, or they can have that argument with me up front if they choose to do so. So, you know, hey, we're letting you know up front how much your tax return is going to be. There's no more black hole mystery whatever of finding out at the end, right? People liked that. Some people squawked about that. Some people did not like paying upfront. And some people left because of it. And okay, that's great. You don't fit. Sorry, we don't want you to stay anyway, so. So that was part of it. We also raise our prices. I mentioned that, but the scheduling piece. So what we did was we told them, all right, so we. A lot of times it's been a struggle to get the work done all right before the deadline. And what we've done is we've looked at, and this is what we did the first year we looked at when they filed the previous year. We have our E file records. We sorted them by date and we literally took the first, I don't know, 20, 30 and assigned them to our first week of work. Right. And we said you're, you know, and this was a separate communication, but we told them up front this is what we were going to do. We're going to assign you a time frame. We're going to ask you to provide all of your documents in that timeframe and then we're going to dedicate that time frame to your work. We will be very responsive to your, any questions that you have, we expect you to be very responsive to us. If at the end of that time frame we haven't finished your return and we're not making any progress forward, we'll be doing an extension for you at that time. I will tell you the feedback I got. I don't think I had anyone complain about that. The scheduling was not the reason anyone got mad at me that year. People like having a deadline. They like having a deadline that's not just some nebulous government deadline. Right. April 15th is your deadline. Well, when do they start thinking about the April 15 deadline? March 25. Right. So if I'm telling them your week is March 3, they're thinking about that at the end of February. Oh, all these documents that I got, I need to have that all ready for Ann by March 3rd. Right. It's not April 15th anymore, people. The feedback that I got, and I didn't get feedback from everyone, but the feedback that I did get like having a deadline. I like knowing that you're working on my return. And the best thing, it's fast turnaround. The first year we were still working through it. It was probably two or three weeks turnaround, which is great compared to dropping stuff off at the end of February and getting it back April 10th. The other thing that does is people aren't calling and asking where's my stuff? Do you have everything you need? What's the status? When will you have it done? I got maybe five status calls and emails this year. Five out of 234 clients. Okay. That is life changing. I am not fielding focus. Let's face it, it's a waste of time to be giving these status updates. Yes, people need them, but what if you eliminate the reason that they're even asking? That's what we did. They're gone. I don't, we don't get them. So in addition to the mailing and the email, I had a mandatory 15 minute Zoom call or in person meeting or sometimes a phone call, but usually it was a zoom and I would sit and I would. And everyone had to have a meeting. Not all of my clients have a meeting every year. I'll be honest, some of them don't want to see my face. They're happy just emailing me or calling if they have questions. There are others that we're always in touch. But that year we had mandatory meetings and every single person, same message. Look, we made all these changes. This is how it's going to benefit you. These are how, these are things that we're using, these are the tools that we're using and these are the reasons why. And these are, this is the way that's going to benefit you. So, you know, feedback about the turnaround time was great. The feedback about the scheduling was great. But we also made other changes and that kind of contributed to dropping some clients that were not no longer a good fit. Right. So a lot of our lowest price clients who were price sensitive dropped off. Hence I bill more as gross now than I did before with half as many clients. What else? There's a ton of upfront work that goes into this. Not going to lie. Take what you think you're going to need for time to get all of this set up and triple it and then you'll probably be around on point. We had to go through the list and figure out who should be scheduled when. That first year we used ignition practice. Ignition Ignition. That's how we get paid up front. We use that for our engagement letters as well. Life changing. I am not chasing people for money now. I mean, every once in a while I find someone who, like one of my non tech people who don't sign online, we're printing off like engagement letter for them to sign in person. And sometimes I don't collect a check because it's outside of the process. Right. So it is what it is. But there are 10 of them instead of 430 of them. So getting that all set up was a lot of work. Right. But also saves 20 times the time that was invested up front and it's saving it ongoing. We used a different portal this year. We used Financial Sense also. That helped us automate our reminders to clients and it also helped us. One of the additional changes we made in year two was that we used Financial Sense and we went through every single client on the 1040 side. We haven't done it for the businesses yet. We went through every single client and literally created a document request for them. Okay. W2 from IBM, you need a mortgage statement from, you know, whatever mortgage company you had investments with Morgan Stanley, you had Merrill lynch, you had a Bank of America interest. Like we literally listed out all of their documents that they needed. Because also, what is the other question that you get from people? Do you have everything you need? What do I need to give you that I got a ton of positive feedback on because I'm gonna. Financial sense is great. And I know this isn't like a plug year technology conversation, but we were able to put that together, automate the reminders. And then also, you know, the reminders that go out are, here's your list of open items. So everybody knows what's still open on their side. And once they've completed that, the turnaround is very quick. Like we are being told that the last piece of information came in and we're working on the return fairly quickly and getting it out to them before they have the opportunity or need to follow up with us and, and ask us for a status. Right. So that is also life changing. So that's just my little plug for that piece of my tech stack. I would say, if I had some advice for people who are thinking about doing the scheduling process is have grace with people who don't fit in the box, right. There are some people who are going to resist. There are some people who won't understand it at first and will struggle with the concept. Just be kind to them and help them along. And there are some people who will never get on board and you can decide yourself whether you want that relationship to continue or not, whether they're a good fit for your, for your business model or not. Some of the results that came from, from doing the scheduling and, and I can't tell you how important this has been for my firm. I'm able to schedule out the work that I know my people can complete in a reasonable time frame. So I worked way more hours than I wanted to work. My goal was 55, maybe 60. I hit 68, I think was one of my longest weeks. And I average, I averaged like 59 for all of tax season. I think I went Back to like January 1st through the end of the middle of April. That was more than I wanted to be working. I wanted to target like 59 to 55 to 60 for every week. My staff did not work more than me. I worked the most hours, so my staff were working maybe 55 tops. I don't think anyone had a 60 hour week at all. So from a staff standpoint, this makes Life so much easier how the process actually looks on the inside of the firm. The client is scheduled for, say they're scheduled for next week. We ask them to have all of their documents in by Friday of this week so that we have time to look at everything before our meeting and so that we can tell them at our meeting if we have questions, if there are missing documents, we can go over anything that we think that came through on their questionnaire that we need to follow up on or get more information on so that that meeting is productive. We're not kind of flying by the seat of our pants and going, oh, well, you know, here's all your stuff that you're just handing me right now. I should know that every document is there. So that's, that's kind of the first piece of it. So we have an opportunity to look at the documents. We have an opportunity to, to put together questions. And quite frequently, especially in the beginning of the season, we've been able to complete a first run through of prepping the return. So I'm having meetings with clients and I'm saying, okay, it looks like we have all of your documents. It looks like we've got all our questions answered. Do you have questions? Yes. You have questions about this, that and the other thing. And I can tell them, well, okay, now that we've had this conversation and we know that we don't have any open items, we've done the first pass of your return, subject to review, but this is what it looks like next steps are. And we have that return out to them that day or later or the next day, and they are blown away by that. They're blown away by that. Can you imagine having having returns out to somebody a day after you meet with them? That's what we're doing. Not every single time, but on a regular basis. It's not unusual for that to happen. If we're not able to get all of the, the open items answered, or if there are documents that people just can't get, they left a job, didn't get a W2 and they don't have it yet, and they have to go back to the old employer. Like, we will work with people if that's this, if that's the case, if somebody just isn't responding to us, the end of that second week, the extension gets done and we're, we're having conversations with them all along. I will say this. If you think your clients are going to be mad about doing this scheduling and you're worried about how they're going to take it just the first year, Just roll it out to clients that you would be okay if they didn't stay. Right. The clients that maybe you were thinking about, that they might not be a good fit for your. For your firm anymore, or clients that you think are just so easygoing they're not going to care. You're just going to go ahead and roll it out. Then you gain confidence, right? And then you roll it out to the ones that you think might have a problem with it. I'm going to tell you, like I said, probably two or three times already, I had almost no negative feedback about the scheduling process. Almost nothing. People were happy to have a deadline. They were happy that they got faster turnaround. They were happy that they got our attention for that focused period of time that they got our attention. They were always able to reach us. They were always getting an answer back very quickly because we were focused on that cohort of clients for that time period. One of your questions was, what if people want their stuff earlier? And we haven't really run into that. I don't know. Like, I would. If somebody got an assignment for, like, their time frame was in March and they wanted to get their stuff done or, you know, wanted to get their stuff done earlier, I would welcome that. Like, I'd be all over it. I just move them up. We do have people asking for later time frames, and we do limit that. We limit the movement the first year. And I tell you one more thing, then I'm going to be done. I'll let you not listen to my rambling anymore. The first year, we were a lot more flexible with people in terms of moving their. Their assigned week, if you will. And what we ended up with was a whole bunch of people in that last week of March who had rescheduled from, like, earlier in the season. So we kind of put the kibosh on that this year and said, you know, we're only rescheduling. We have this time frame for reschedules. And once that time frame is gone, I think Wednesday is from 2 to 4. And that's how I. We never had the regular people have that time frame available to them. So that's how I knew they were a reschedule, which is important information. Wednesdays from 2 to 4, once that time frame is gone, you're. You're going on extension. We can't, like, we can't accommodate further pushback of that because unless there's a really, really, really good reason that someone needs their return, you know, Every once in a while you have that. Anyway, this was super fun and let me know if you have any other questions. Thank you, man.

How is that for a crash course on how to do this stuff? And just super inspiring this episode. It is sponsored in part by the fine folks at Live Flow. Interesting Live Flow use case we've been talking about, you know, how do you, how do you get in front of a more specific type of 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 gotta drill down into every single QuickBooks file, whatever. But with Live Flow'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 can 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 Life Flows 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. 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 lineup a dash amazing. You got worldwide AI sensation Dr. Radhika 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. Anne's superhero breaking point. Covid. Getting into Covid and just ending up in this impossible situation. She's like, man, I am out of here or I'm going to do something completely different. A 21 year firm owner who then just goes and rips off a whole bunch of band aids all at once. Imagine having a way of doing something for 21 years and not being so prideful as to be unwilling to be like, I'm doing this wrong and let's throw out the kitchen sink. We got to totally, we got to find a totally different way to do it. And said, she's not a genius. No original ideas. Pulled a bunch of ideas from different people and integrated them in a way that made sense for her firm. Isn't that just the way to do things? Some, some gems on deadline psychology. Nothing gets urgent until the deadline looms. Ain't that the truth? And so by giving clients like more practical deadlines, where if you get us your stuff by this time, we can be super responsive and we can turn it around really quickly, as quickly as effectively one day in some situations. Holy smokes. She even said within two weeks in their first year, which is phenomenal for a tax firm. If you're turning things around within two weeks, that deadline imposed on their clients, which is different than like the actual government deadline, is a useful, like lever like A lot of their clients, it sounds like, actually appreciate that. Some smart things there too about the framing of how this will be great for you, the client, not just for us and our business, but how this will be better for you. The fact that this is going to mean we can turn it around much quicker, man, everybody will love that. The fact that we're going to be hyper responsive for you during this window of time and you have our full attention, that's. I mean, that's the big thing in client service. People don't want to feel forgotten. They want to feel like you are in their corner and working hard for them. And you can frame all of this change as, yes, we have to do this for, for the business, but we're also convinced that this is going to be a fundamentally better thing for you. Last note I had here being flexible, giving, she said, have grace with people who don't fit in the box. Helping non online people being willing to handle the exceptions. The folks who aren't going to accept the, you know, the ignition proposal online, they're taking paper checks and how sometimes those are the last payments to get tracked down, but now they're taking 10 paper checks instead of 430. And this is a great example of where you think about a change and your mind immediately goes to the people who can't fit into that change. And the trap is to then not do that change because it doesn't work for a few people. And the cost over years and decades of not making those incremental changes is astronomical. Rather than being like, this is now the better way to do this and it's not gonna work for a few of these people and it's okay to accommodate them. Like, I'm not the. I'm so not the extreme, like has to be perfect, totally nailed down. Every single client has to do this exact same thing. Like, man, that's just not how the world works in my experience. And you could force that, but like, I don't know, like I don't wanna be a jerk like that. And there's a, there's, you know, it's like anything, there's a line there where it's like, that's too much. But I would love to, for example, switch my firm to say ignition to automate, you know, taking payments. I would love to do that without having to fire all of my elderly clients just because they can't accept a proposal online. Like, we can find a happy medium here. There's no need to be like that extreme about it. That was, man, that was just a masterclass. And thinking through all the fiddly little details. Again, I cannot thank enough the folks who participated in this and were willing to share their stories with us. You just helped so many people and took them from a level of understanding that was, you know, maybe interested and exciting to actually pretty deep. I try to really push people. If you're thinking about a big, hard decision, find a bunch of people who have done it and pick their brain. And that's admittedly hard because you may not know the people who have done that. You may not feel like you have permission to ask and get them on a zoom call. But, man, we just got four people who totally spilled the beans on what they did right, what they did wrong, stuff that's still up in the air even. And everyone now that's. Listen to this. Like, we just. We collectively have a much more mature understanding of that because these folks were willing to share. So thank you, thank you, thank you. Awesome stuff. Questions, Pop them in the comments. Like I shared yesterday. Friday, we're going to do a big old Q and A roundup and feel free to get into the nitty gritty. Feel free to get in the nitty gritty, like, detailed stuff. How does this or that work? And also feel free to be like, I still don't get it. I still, like, what's the value? Like, what am I stuck on? You want to disagree? That's good. Like, the more we get that stuff out there and discuss those sort of even fringe points, the more we build, like, a more complete understanding of what's good about this, what's bad about this, there's bad stuff about this, and how to find the happy medium that's, you know, going to help you determine what makes sense for your client base. What a fun week, man. I've had so much fun with this. Tomorrow we are going through all of the different versions of this that I've seen. So I want to run through, just give you a whole bunch of ideas for how you could set this up for yourself, because there are a bunch of different ways that you can do it. That's what we got on the docket for tomorrow. Day after that, we're talking about the transition. Because that's. That's go time, man. Like, that's where it all goes sideways and what actually keeps us from making the change. Not that we don't think it's a better idea, but that we're afraid of what that messy transition could look like. And then Friday, we're just doing a big old Q and A to get into all the fiddly aspects of this. So fun. Thanks for coming and hanging today. I'll see you tomorrow.