231 Building A Fully Scheduled Accounting Firm

What does it mean to take your accounting firm from a firm that is an order taker, a firm that just does stuff whenever clients bring you stuff to do to the opposite of that one that operates on a schedule. You've got capacity lockdown. You are executing to a plan of your own design rather than one dictated by all your helter skelter clients who all like to make a run on the bank right before the deadline. And. And before you know it, you're the one paying the price for that, right? We've been exploring this all week. Last two days we've heard stories of folks who have made this transition. Today we're just doing a brain dump of every version of this that we've seen. So you can think about how you want to piece together your own version of this and do what makes sense for your firm. So come on in, let's talk about it all the ways you could build a fully scheduled accounting firm. All right, first thing to consider here, what exactly is it that we are scheduling, right? Are we scheduling intake? Are we scheduling delivery? Are we scheduling a certain day or a certain time where a thing has to happen? Are we scheduling a date range where over the course of that date range something needs to happen? Examples from other folks that we've heard from this week. Jacob. I believe what they schedule is actually like a delivery timeframe, like a completion timeframe, which I have to think means you then from that back into some sort of deadline for when you need to get all the documents in from the client. So I believe in their case, what they're actually scheduling is a timeframe where they're planning to deliver and they need the client to be available for questions, basically like scheduling a block of their team's time. Right. To like actually do the work. Brenda, how, on the other hand, I believe what her clients are scheduling is the intake day, like the day that they need to have all their documents in. And then beyond that, there's some expectation of how long it will take to turn it around. I think that's right. Correct me if I'm wrong. People go out to calendly, they pick a date. I believe that is the date in which they say they will have all their documents in. Vince. They're doing things a quarter at a time, so it's not quite as granular. I think that basically means the whole thing happens within that quarter. So the expectation is you're gonna get your stuff in and the firm's gonna then get that stuff out the door just sometime within that quarter. And Then Ann, it's interesting, she said basically there's a two week window during which the return has to get done, otherwise it gets extended. So that includes time spent trying to coordinate questions back and forth with the client, maybe trying to gather additional documents that are missing. But if I understood that right, there's basically a two week window during which it has to get done. So not, not too dissimilar to how Jacob does it. Basically what they're doing is scheduling the availability of their team to do the work. And if the project goes past that threshold, then it gets extended, they circle back to it later in the year. So what you're scheduling, it's worth being really clear about what is the expectation of the client in that time window. Are you scheduling a delivery date, an intake date? It may not be enough to say that I just expect you to have all your stuff in by this date. You may need to also say if we're planning to turn it around, then within two weeks of that date I also need you to be very available during those two weeks. We are in exchange also going to be very available to work through these loose ends. So try to get as clear as possible about exactly what it is that people are scheduling and by extension like what you're going to expect from them, not just after they've given you all the information, but when you have follow on questions. Canadians staring down the actually just got past the 430 tax deadline. No extensions in Canadia, they always like to flex that. But the problem here is largely the same. I haven't run a Canadian firm, but if everything's coming due on 4:30, if you're not careful, everybody gives you all their stuff kind of at the last minute at the same time. And that's what we're trying to avoid here is ultimately all this is, is trying to better manage the cyclical nature of accounting and tax work that comes due basically on the same due date. And so that's obviously a lot of compliance stuff, regulatory deadlines, we're trying to chunk that up and kind of manufacture our own deadlines because if we don't clients, on average, not all clients, but many clients will leave it as long as they can to get it done before the deadline. There's just something human nature there. And so then step two of what people do is they're like, okay then then I'm going to give you a cutoff date that's a month earlier. Well then every single person gives you their stuff on the cutoff date. And I don't know that you've solved that problem then. So any sort of buildup where you have that big, like, drop dead date with a whole bunch of clients, we're just like breaking up the time that we have to do the work into days or weeks or months or quarters or whatever it is to manufacture those deadlines. And we can do this internally. Like, what's to say we need to actually involve the client in this process? This is the best way to chunk up, you know, big piles of work is to just kind of have a general plan for how much do we need to get done, you know, week over week to ensure that by that big deadline, we are where we need to be. The problem in our line of work is oftentimes our ability to get the work done depends on the client getting us all the stuff that we need to do the work right. So whether this is US Tax deadline, whether it's something else, we're working backwards to set expectations for when our clients will have our full time and attention. Now, one of the counterarguments you get here is like, my clients aren't going to want to wait to give me their stuff until later. I think it's important to understand they don't have to. The only thing that we're really assuring is if you have all of your stuff in by this date, you will have our attention over this time horizon to try to get this thing done in a quicker turnaround. So they could still give me the stuff three months earlier. That's totally fine. What we're getting to is like, here is when we've carved out dedicated capacity just for you, and we're going to be on top of your stuff and turn it around quickly. Okay, what block, like, what sort of, you know, time range are we talking about scheduling in? It could be anything on a spectrum, really, from a single day to a quarter. In some ways, a bigger time horizon is looser and more flexible. Just know that the larger you go on that block of time, the more you're still probably going to have to manufacture your own milestones within that. So, for example, let's take the example of Vince, who we heard from yesterday, how they're approaching things by quarter. If I told my clients your work has to get done in Q2 and kind of leave it at that, then I've probably just traded the tax deadline for a June 30 deadline, and then everybody brings me their stuff on June 20. So even within that, to ensure that your team can actually get all of that work done, you're still going to have to be mindful of getting enough out the door each week to ensure that you actually get all the Q2 work done. And so if there's, if there's a upside to shorter time horizons, it's that that's kind of built in, right? Like if everybody has a week or a couple weeks or something like that, then that's all super clear, like what everybody's supposed to be working on. When I think Vince even said they do eos and they have like, like kind of weekly expectations for how much work somebody ought to get done. So they have a version of that that's just something to look out for. If you do do a longer time block, it's going to mean you probably within that need to do some planning in your team to make sure everything's on track across the quarter. You know, bigger blocks through the, through the eyes of your clients may feel more generous. Maybe it feels a little less restrictive to say you have to do it within this week and instead just say, like, we're going to do it sometime within this quarter. But I would encourage you not to get too stuck on like how generous something feels. If you're going to make a big change or a switch to scheduling like this, I think you're probably better off doing what you think is going to be best long term, like right away, rather than like baby stepping into something more granular each year. Now, if there's a good reason for you to baby step into it, great. I think what I'm saying is, if the only reason is that you're afraid of clients being bent out of shape, I don't think that that's a reason to baby step into it. One thing nobody talked to did is like months. Every client just having a month, right? There's something nice and simple about that. It's like, you know, a field in your practice management system. I imagine every version of this is going to be like a custom field in your practice management system. So each client has that month or that week or that quarter or whatever it is. So your clients understand this is the month that you're working on my stuff. It's up to me to get you all my stuff before that month. Otherwise I may lose my month. And then the next thing you can do is actually start building adjacent planning around like the months that you work on a client. So for example, for March clients, in what month do you then do tax planning or what week do you do tax planning for May clients? And what month or week Do I do like an annual kind of tech stack review for them, like accounting, tech stack? If there's other services that you do, you can actually build all of your other capacity planning off of like that core month. And maybe it's not even. Maybe don't even call it a month. Maybe there's a different naming for it. We're going to actually going to talk more about this tomorrow, which is totally focused on how do I roll this out and the client messaging and all that. We're talking about scheduling here, but that's all kind of inside baseball. What does it mean to the client, like from the other side? How are they? How do we want them to be thinking about this? And so however you organize these clients into cohorts, it probably impacts not just this core project and this one big deadline, but potentially even how you manage other types of work throughout the year, because you've already got them nicely bucketed. Right? And so if I'm going to do tax planning for these people, and we're gonna do that through November and December, then maybe each of these cohorts is a week in that tax planning schedule. Right. So this actually serves as a structure to not just get this work done, but also build other projects around it. This episode is sponsored in part by Copilot, the most flexible portal you can imagine for your clients. One of the hardest problems managing a firm right now is you got all these different tools with so much overlap, right. That do like some of the same things, but some different things. Almost all of them also want to have a whole like, client facing experience. Like, bro, how many portals you expect me to put in front of my clients? I'm gonna have a hard time asking them to log into like eight different things. And even if it's just a magic link kind of portal, when you're sending them to like umpteen different magic link login things. And they all look completely different. I know, just kind of weak sauce, you know. If only there was a portal for your portals. Wait, what? Somebody write that down. What's that? Oh, that's what Copilot is. It is the one portal to rule them all. Give that client a slick, consistent client experience, a single place to get all the goods. That's because you can customize it to look like whatever you want to look like, even different from client A to client B. You can embed other stuff into it, bake it right in so that they're logging into Copilot, but some of the stuff that they're seeing is actually from external apps and they recently launched an app marketplace which is like third party apps. You can hire a developer to build you something custom that will live in your portal. It is like a portal platform that you can build on and make it whatever you want it to be. Pretty cool. That's copilot. Check out the 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. 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Another thing to consider is does the client schedule it or do you schedule it for the client? Brenda, who we heard from Monday they have their clients schedule via a calendly link and that calendar like drops on a day and a time and it's kind of like an event almost. And they tell clients and all the means all the different ways that they can. Like this day is coming up, this day is coming up. Pay attention. This is where you're gonna book your thing. In fact she was even sharing some statistics on Twitter that was like a massive percentage of people had booked within 24 hours. Which I actually love. That actually manufactures some like urgency and scarcity and motivates people to actually pay really close attention to something and take action. But that's an example of your clients doing the scheduling. I think we heard from Jacob that they do the scheduling. They tell their clients when they're. When they're going to do it. I think Ann also said that they decide ultimately where those clients land. And even if you are the one deciding, it's not to say that your client input can't impact it. It's just, what's the starting point? Are we going to default to us deciding or them? A lot of folks, when they start this, like, they generally, if they are going to do the scheduling, they generally schedule things more or less where they went out the door the previous year and kind of massage that to maybe be a little bit better for them and smooth it out where they can. But this can also be as simple as, you know, you just making the plan for the whole year, leaving it open for some negotiation with clients if they have a good reason why they need to change it. So pros and cons of letting the client schedule, a positive is it kind of becomes a bit of an event in a way that could be fun in a way that could also be frustrating for folks too, if they don't get what they wanted. So that could maybe be a pro and a con. You're giving clients maybe a feeling of control a little bit more by them picking the date and you're maybe helping them to feel heard. Especially if they're maybe not super excited about this new plan. If it feels like you're just making this, like, hard change for them and they don't get a say, then maybe letting them schedule gives. Helps them to feel a little bit more like they have control. I thought it was interesting this year, Brenda said they added a I didn't get the date I wanted form so that once folks scheduled it, they weren't happy with the date that they had. They have kind of a relief valve where folks can say like, this isn't what I want. And it's not a. It's not a guarantee that you're going to be able to accommodate it. But at least the client has been heard at that point, which is probably better than somebody just being mad and you not knowing about it. Potential cons to letting clients schedule, maybe you just. You don't want them to have that control. There's benefits to you having that control and being able to stage things how you want to stage them. If you let clients do it, you have to design some sort of interface to Let them do it. So, like, how do they do that? What are the mechanics? What's the system they use to actually do that? Scheduling. You're gonna have to have some sort of plan for that if you let them do it as opposed to if you do it like you're just. I don't chuck it on a calendar and Excel or like you just get to design that however you want to. Potential con of them scheduling, will they do it according to need or according to convenience? I suspect by default, clients are going to be thinking more through the lens of convenience. What works for me. Whereas you may have very legitimate reasons for why you want folks to file like, certain times of the year. Like, my big business clients I coached to file as late as possible so that we had as much planning time the next year so that we could optimize any decision making for the filing based on what we already knew about next year. So those people, if I got a big business that comes in and tells me they want to file in February, I'm like, dude, this isn't the play. Like, this will probably actually end up costing you money by trying to rush and get it done just because it will feel good to get it done. So if you're doing can be a little more led by need as opposed to maybe the client who's just going to pick, you know, it along the lines of when they would like to have it done. I think we, we could probably overthink this one for perspective. Like new clients. New clients always offer great perspective. What's a new client going to say if you pick the time frame for them and not them? They're gonna be like, okay, cool. Like, probably we'll have absolutely no concerns about it because that's just the process. They might say, like, I have this reason why it would be good to do during this timeframe and we can probably accommodate that. That'll be up to you at that point. But new clients are always like a nice, like breath of fresh air. Because so much of our process change is just annoying for clients because it is change. And so we look at it through the lens of how much is this going to annoy my clients, rather than looking through the lens of is this better? Right? Because shouldn't that be what matters in the end is what is better. But it's really hard to see that through the filter of how is this going to inconvenience the clients and are they going to like this more or less than how it used to be? So a lot of this stuff I Don't know that we need to fixate on that much. The messaging toward to clients is going to be around how this is beneficial for them and how this will enable, you know, quicker turnaround times and that sort of thing. 95% of this stuff. I think the right answer is for you to do what is going to be best for you and your team. Okay, what tech to use? How do you actually do this if you stand something up and let. Let the clients schedule it. I'll be honest, I don't have a great answer here. I know Brenda's using Calendly that's like connected to Airtable and doing some stuff on the back end. I was poking around in my Calendly last night and like vanilla built in Calendly with, with the event types that it offers, you can do some janky stuff where there's like time buffers and you know, maximum number of events per day and per week. But still when people hop in, I think they're going to be selecting like times on days, which is a little bit goofy and like, not really what it is. This is almost more like a, I don't know, like a, like a booking system as opposed to like a specific scheduling thing. But scheduling tools are maybe the closest thing we have to that. I poked around looking at some other scheduling tools. Cal. Com is another good scheduling tools, that tool that has a lot of flexibility around event types. Admittedly, I don't know the perfect way to set this up for a client to come and schedule without doing something really nerdy with like, you know, Airtable and having folks, you know, select from a list of available dates and Airtable or like Jotform for example. Jotform will let you have form options that have like an inventory count behind them. Oh, this may be a good way to do it. Airtable doesn't do this. Jotform, which is another great form builder, you can basically sell stuff on Jotform if you want. And the items that folks can select from can have a limited inventory count. So let's say I'm going to do this on months. You know, I could have 50 months of February and 40 months of March, 30 months of April, whatever it is. And then when people go and select those things, the inventory count has reduced and eventually they run out. So any sort of form builder with inventory handling actually, now that I think about it, ought to work fine. Maybe that's the logical alternative to like a traditional scheduling tool if, if that doesn't ultimately work for you and Then the last thing to have a plan for, actually, that whole, like fiddling with tools and all that stuff may be an argument for scheduling yourself rather than letting your client schedule. I do appreciate Brenda called this out and called this out. Some aspects of this are going to be work, like, I don't want to make it sound trivial to like stand this up, like tracking this and tracking the projects and all that. There's. There is some work to it and like, somebody has to make sure that we are hitting our timeframe for when certain clients need to be done. There's the managing, the communication with clients around what the timing will be like. That's potentially additional work. But the main thing we're trying to get away from is a bunch of start stops on clients trickling information in the status checks. I can tell you in my firm, what ended up happening was we would give people kind of an expected turnaround time of a few weeks. And as soon as you're getting out to a few weeks, people start checking in, hey, we're getting close, we're getting close, we're getting close. And then when it gets to four weeks and then five weeks and then six weeks, you end up in this place where everybody is checking in and wanting status updates and you're just apologetically like, yeah, no, sorry, we just don't have it done. We don't have it done. And the problem just gets worse because you're wasting all your time managing these status updates. So there is some work that goes into the managing of the schedule and the timing of getting things done. But we are hopefully making that time up in the form of other headaches while also delivering just a better service. Like, you bring your stuff into this in this timeframe and we're gonna turn your stuff around in a week. Like, that's fantastic. Like, that's really good in most cases. Okay, last thing I got here, we're thinking through and then I've got just sort of a brain dump of other odds and ends. Last big thing to think through here. What's the penalty for non compliance? There has to be. Well, I don't know. Does there need to be teeth in non compliance when you give people a timeframe and a date where they have to deliver their stuff within that timeframe, do you trust people to be adults or do you make it clear what the penalty is for non compliance to force people to be adults? I wish the answer was the former and you could just trust people to be adults. And honestly, this might be the move is you just trust people to be adults. And if they can't be adults, then like, they're, they're probably high on the list of kind of chopping block clients. Right? So that's a completely valid option here, is you just tell people this is the rule. And when people say, well, what happens if I don't follow the rule? And you're like, no, that, that is the rule. Following the rule isn't, isn't an option. Sorry. So you could go that route or you could say, here's what happens if you don't get this thing in time for the deadline. You know, like in Brenda's case, I think they have to basically go out and reschedule, which means they're going to get probably a date at kind of the very end of the train. Just be sure to have a plan, especially if you're the big boss, because as soon as you roll something like this out, your clients are going to go to the rest of your team and try to make like asks of them and be like, yeah, but could you really, could you sub me in? Me in there? Oftentimes, maybe even things that they're afraid to ask you, they will ask your team to see if they can get the team member to do it. So your team has to have like crystal clear boundaries for what's allowed and what isn't allowed. So at the very least for your team members, like either have a plan for what happens in the case of non compliance or just be really clear that it's like, no compliance is the only option here. And if you don't comply, we're not going to be happy. 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 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 Live Flows 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, 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 account 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. Live flow. It's a good way to get them out to your spreadsheets be it Google sheets or now Excel. They support. Pretty exciting. Learn more about Lifelo. 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, 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 right now 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. Okay? Last little dump of odds and ends. I have this labeled toppings. I'm not sure what that means. It's just kind of a bunch of other random concepts around this to maybe think about charging differently by period. That is charging more in the busiest seasons or offering a discount in the slower seasons could make sense. I've shared before, I have some struggles with discounts and charging premiums. There's a little bit of a risk that seems to make your fees negotiable, which they absolutely cannot be. Your fees need to be your fees. So maybe there's a bit of a risk there that it makes it negotiable. Also, anytime you charging people extra for a fast lane or something above and beyond, there is a risk that it entitles that client to be particularly demanding of your staff in a way that isn't healthy. So I generally shied away from this because I don't want the client to swoop in and drop a check and feel entitled. Like we don't, we don't want that. Now is charging a premium for like specific timeframes going to cause that? I don't know, just something to think about. I mean, in any other business you would have surge pricing. Like should we be different? I don't know any other business. Somebody who sells products, you know, buying flights, you know, Uber is the example folks always go to. Genuinely, pretty much any other type of business people are going to do surge pricing seasonally. Are we like clutching our pearls and being too old timey by thinking it's unreasonable for firms to not also do that? Maybe honestly consider how urgency and scarcity can be built into the process. One thing I love about Brenda's scheduling is there's a real sense of urgency there, right? People are motivated to get what they want. If you need something from a client, oftentimes we have to manufacture some sort of urgency. That's what a lot of this scheduling thing is, is just manufacturing a totally made up deadline so that you can get the stuff in the timeframe that you need it. Right. But oftentimes we will ask things of clients and then when they don't do it right away, that can be frustrating. I've been paying more attention to, you know, other examples of this in the wild booking flights, for example, they tell you there's one left at this price. So it's not even an inventory or an availability thing. It's the next one is going to cost more than this one does. So if there's certain behaviors you want to encourage, see if there's a way to like use urgency and scarcity to get folks to do that. Do you need to do the whole thing all at once or do you start with the easy ones? Ann actually brought this up. I think it was Ann, start with the folks who, you know, won't have a problem with it. One hard part of doing a whole thing all at once is the people who will complain the most that you have to have the most conversations with. Like that will be those sticky clients will be 80% of the conversations that you have. And you're still learning and you're still figuring out exactly like we're pretty sure that we're going to do this and you don't quite have the talk track down because you're having these conversations for the first time. Right When I moved our traditional fully after the fact hourly billing firm to everything being priced up front and sending folks through, you know, proposal software and adding a payment method and all that stuff before the engagement even started. And we went, we went from very traditional, probably didn't even get an engagement letter signed a lot of times to you have to complete this proposal, agree to pay us this price and sign your engagement letter before the project starts. That was a big transition for 1800 clients who crossed the whole spectrum of very legacy to not even having a computer, to being like a software company. So how do you do that across, you know, a client base that diverse? In that case, it was absolutely the right move to do it in phases. And you start with the folks that you don't think you'll have a problem with. Because with each phase in our case, we refine the process a little bit. And by the time we got to the sticky folks in the end, we had the talk track nailed. We had an entirely different level of confidence in how to communicate what we were doing and how to handle the fringe scenarios and all that stuff. So it might make sense to walk into it. If there's a downside to doing that, it's that if it's a deadline like income tax that is on an annual cycle, it's just going to take longer to transition. And that might be annoying or frustrating, but also like, give yourself some grace. It's fine for something to take a few years if you know that it's the right thing to do. Where you get in trouble is if you have this big, long time consuming thing that didn't end up being the right thing to do, that's where it gets really costly for it to take a long time but there might be some wisdom in starting with the folks who, you know, won't really have a problem with this. This man, this whole thing pairs really nicely with explicit document request lists. Talked about this in the past. What a big fan I am of using requests, specifically request functionality within software to get really explicit about all the things that you need from someone so that that system then auto follows up with them until they provide all those different items. Particularly in US Tax prep, I think this is one of the biggest productivity unlocks that you can do is in the slow season, have the juniors put together very explicit lists of what's needed. No, the prior year organizer isn't enough. That's not a complete list of the stuff that you need from the client. Load that into your practice management system or whatever system you're using for requesting documents. And then, you know, say this is a, for me, a March client on, you know, say 30 days before their time period starts, you set those requests to start following up with them. And so the client starts getting reminded of outstanding requests. And there's, you know, 25 things there and they submit each of those things to the request. And as long as there's ones outstanding, it will keep following up with them. This whole scheduling approach goes hand in hand with document requests. In fact, as we're going to talk more about tomorrow, you could even frame this whole thing not as like a scheduling thing, but as a, almost a document management thing where like there's going to be request deadlines because each of these requests can have a start date and an end date and a deadline and customized reminders and all that. That just fits in really nicely with this whole process. Requests. I mean, for me, requests, the huge thing there is you're eliminating the need to follow up with people when they haven't given you what you need. I mean, one of the aspects of administrative aspects of making this switch that we discussed is who's making sure that the clients are actually getting us the stuff that we need in the timeframe that we need. And if software can do that for you, that's a huge win, right? If the due date of the project and all that, if it's all they're like scheduling is all baked into the practice management system and the reminders they're getting on the requests and all that, A lot of that admin is automated for you, and that's across a whole client base with a huge number of documents and all that that you need, man, that can be a massive savings. Last everything, honestly, everything ought to be Flexible still make a system, but don't make a system that can't accommodate someone's specific needs. We talked about Ann accommodating folks who don't use computers. How do you take payments from them on your proposal? Like it's okay to flex for those people. Folks are gonna have situations that come up where they genuinely need to change the timing of when something gets done. It's fine to accommodate as needed. Jacob mentioned it's generally not a big deal for them to accommodate folks like they, they plan some capacity in there so that if somebody needs something pulled up, like no problem, we'll pull it up for you this year. So while it's really important to have a clear system and a clear like standard and expectation, it's also totally okay to flex that expectation. So as you're building the capacity and planning and all that, it's worth building some wiggle room in there, right? Not only for new clients, but also for having to shift some of your existing clients around if needed. And so much of this we, we think about it and we worry and we're like, oh, here's all the objections that they're going to have. And sometimes those stinker clients will be annoyed when you first do it. But it's usually like a phone conversation and they're cool, right? Like so much of this, if they can just hear the human on the other side and have a conversation about it, usually everything's fine. To do that with all of your clients is a lot. We heard from Ann that they had actually mandatory 15 minute meetings the first year when they made this change with all their clients when they were doing intake, they changed a lot more than scheduling. In that case they were doing like, you know, upfront proposals for the first time and fees increased quite a bit. So there was a lot kind of rolled up all at once. But don't be afraid to hop on a phone call to smooth something over with somebody that, that, I mean a really big percentage of the time that kind of just makes the problem go away. Okay, tomorrow we're talking about how to actually roll it out, get the messaging nailed. That's honestly the blocker for us usually is how we are afraid of the rollout being perceived, not the thing itself and whether the thing is better. Usually what we get stuck on and why we don't do it is because we're afraid of the rollout. So tomorrow we're just talking rollout, how to nail the messaging, what this looks like from the client side, which is completely different than this Inside Baseball that we're talking about. Oh, scheduling is better for my firm. This and that. That's not a reason for your client to be excited about it. So how do we get clients excited to engage in the process, see the benefits for them. And then Friday, we're doing a big old Q and A roundup. I already got a bunch of questions coming in on some of the more fiddly aspects of this. So we're going to knock out all those on Friday, probably give you some some new ideas, even, like, adjacent things that we haven't already discussed. Right. That could get you to a version that works even better for you and your clients. Fun Week, man. I'm super enjoying this. Thanks for coming and hanging today. Keep the questions coming if you got any, and I'll see you tomorrow.