234 Shortcuts That Will Transform Your Firm

You take two different firms, they can be developing at wildly different rates. And I'm not talking about the rate at which they're, like, adding clients or doing more work, but the rate at which they are, like, developing, growing, getting better, getting more profitable. The rate at which they're learning and experimenting. We probably all had this person that we, like, came of age working with, the guy that's like, Marty, you have 20 years of experience or one year of experience 20 times, you know that guy. Well, accounting firms do the same thing. They stagnate. They even regress sometimes. So today we're running through the things that developing firms are doing to shave years off of the learning process of trying new things and how they differ from the firms that are not doing that. So come on in. Let's share some tips to stop wasting time to work on the important stuff, you know? You know what I mean? You know what I mean? Not unlike our own, like, kind of personal development. If you. If nobody inside of an accounting firm is pausing to consider, is this ultimately the best way that we can run our firm? Before you know it, you look back and years have passed, and you're like, what did I just do with the last three years of my life? I don't know about you. I can have months go by that way sometimes where you just get into a rut of doing what you do every single day. And sometimes, honestly, sometimes it's fun, sometimes it is not. But before you know it, you look back and you're like, man, I just wasted how many of my years, you know, building wealth for somebody else or solving everyone else's problems at my own expense? And this is, admittedly, maybe the hardest part of running small firms is separating what the firm does from how to better run a firm. And this usually comes from a place of, you know, the founder being a technician. And they enjoy doing the work. And then they start a firm and they learn that it becomes about everything but actually doing the work. And oftentimes from this passion for doing the work, there can be a lack of attention that goes into the actual business itself. I honestly think some of the most technically capable people who are truly pushing the boundaries of what's possible and doing great work for their clients, some of those folks are running the very worst firms, which is kind of the opposite of what you'd think, right? You're like, we run accounting firms, and so we take pride in doing accounting or bookkeeping or tax or whatever it is. We take pride in doing that at a very high technical level because Cause it's ultimately how we compare ourselves to each other is our technical capabilities. And it's why, you know, continuing education gets the lion's share of the attention, like technical stuff, when that technical stuff ultimately is never gonna be what gets you home for dinner. It's an entirely different skillset that is managing the firm itself, making hard strategic decisions and begging, borrowing and stealing ideas. And so that's kind of what I wanna run through here is I've got nine ways to basically fast track the development of your firm. There are examples in my past where we made big wrong decisions that cost years and we didn't do the thing that we needed to do because of a bad reason, only to go and do that thing five or 10 years later. And genuinely, had we done that when we knew it was the right time to do it, we would be so much further along. So let's jump in here. Number one, curate your information diet. This is a big thing in firm running, but in just how we program our brains, whether you like it or not, we're genuinely programmed by the things that we consume. Like the media that we consume, it gets into you, it affects the ways that you think. And it can be things as simple as like lately I'm like, man, I just gotta get, I gotta find some new inspiration for healthy stuff to eat. And I started following a guy who puts out really good, super easy healthy meal stuff. And it just changes what I think about. Like the fresh ideas that I have are now totally different. And the notion of making something healthy that's actually exciting is now actually much easier for me because this person is now part of my info diet. And if we're not careful to curate exactly what is in our info diet, I think the default that most of us end up with is just a whole bunch of stuff from our software vendors. And like, it's worth acknowledging, the marketing departments of our software companies, like those people's jobs is to, to get attention year round, put out content that people will engage with. And because it's not usually coming from a place of deep expertise and experience, oftentimes it's, it's kind of surface deep. Like there's not a lot, not a lot of meat to it. But inevitably it's also through the lens of what that product does. So reporting company, they're going to teach you about, you know, how to sell advisory and the value of all that Payroll company, your payroll software company, they're gonna teach you about, you know, how to build more profitable payroll engagements. But all this stuff is coming through the lens of what that vendor does. Not necessarily. If you zoom out of all of the things that I could be doing in my accounting firm right now, like, where was the one thing I should be focusing my time on? Oftentimes what software vendors tell us to do is like additive is like additional stuff, new stuff, and that's not always the answer. And if you just can just assume that the actions you'll take and the frame of mind that you'll have will be a product of what you consume, then how can you strategically stack what sort of stuff you want to consume? Right. Who are the people that you look up to? Who are the folks who you have, you know, trust in to where there's not a, you know, concerns over potentially incentives. And I don't want to, I don't want to beg on software companies because some of them put out really, really good, really helpful content. A lot of them don't, but some of that stuff's really good. But you can assume that ultimately your decision making framework will be a product of what you consume. So be very intentional about what things you do consume and don't consume a second one. This is especially relevant for earlier career folks and somebody who's maybe considering starting a firm, get relevant experience. A lot of folks like thinking about starting a firm doing this thing over here when they do this thing over there. Like maybe they're doing audit, they're thinking about doing tax. You got to get relevant experience. I can't recommend enough. Going to work for a firm that you admire, that you respect, just to learn how the sausage is made, what the reality is behind the scenes that will honestly shave years off how you build your own firm. Not that you're going to build it the exact same way, but like seeing exactly how it's done and an example of it that is relevant to what you're trying to build. And that's the important thing here is, you know, another two years experience in audit is never gonna get you any closer to running your own tax firm. So if you're doing something new, get experience, but ensure that it's experience relevant to what you think you want to do. Because even if you go down this path and you find, oh, I actually don't like this, this doesn't seem like a ton of fun. That is a great thing to find out now rather than later. Now, this doesn't mean necessarily going to be an employee for the firm. Like it could be as simple as doing some contract work for a firm. Maybe that makes more sense if you're like building that side, hustle to critical mass to go do your own thing. But like, shoot a cold DM to someone that you admire and be like, hey, I'm. Here's the, like, here's the reality. I'm launching my own firm, but I'm not there yet. And I want to work with someone who I can learn a lot from before I do my own thing. Probably not a long term thing, but is there a version of this where I can come and like, help you on contract in a way that's mutually beneficial and you're going to learn a ton, like getting experience with that firm? I'll occasionally hear folks who are like, kind of allergic to going and working for somebody else's firm because they're so fervent about doing your own thing. Working with somebody else's firm does not mean that like you're not then going to have a unique spin of your own. Like, any information here is good information. And it's why even when you run your own firm, the best thing that you can do is go and talk with a whole bunch of people who also run firms to figure out what they're doing. The version of your cool, unique spin on a firm where you've digested all the various ways that other people do things. The version where you have all that context is way better than the version where you just have blinders on and go out and reinvent the wheel from scratch. Right? Like that's what we're trying to avoid. That's how you shave years off your journey, is picking up those tidbits from other firms. Number three, if you're going to do a new thing, start with a framework, start with something off the shelf. For example, Ryan Lazanis, I think in his community future firm Accelerate, he's got a lot of like, templates and resources and kind of just like swipeable stuff. For here is the system to build a firm to a million dollar practice. Now does that mean that's exactly how you gotta do your, like, run your whole setup? It absolutely doesn't. But starting there is a much more informed place to start than starting from scratch. Last week we were in Florida speaking at the PASBA spring conference. Pasba's example of another community where they've got a whole bunch of kind of, you know, procedures and they're pretty opinionated on, like, here is, here's the way to run a firm. And I will say in my, my earlier days when it was very important to me that I was the snowflake that was doing everything differently. I would get turned off by those more opinionated systems when, honestly, I probably should have done the opposite. I probably should have ran for those things, tried to understand why they're set up the way that they are, and then go from there. Cause that's just a much more informed way of doing your own thing. And it starts with probably being less precious about your own ideas. We get stuck on thinking that we know the best way to do it, or even what the best looks like through our own, like, limited lens of our experience. And to open yourself up to a framework, a different way of doing it means, like, getting out of your own way and not clinging to your own ideas quite so much doesn't mean they're not valuable. Just means, like, you got to temper them with. The reality is there's a whole lot of people that have done this a lot longer than I have that have tried almost everything under the sun. What maybe do I not know yet? Because there might be a very good reason why this thing that I'm considering, nobody does. Again, it doesn't hurt to have that additional context right. This episode, it is sponsored in part by Live Flow. Live Flow puts your client reporting on autopilot because you can sync any old report out of QuickBooks to Google Sheets or Excel. I say any. Every report that I've ever tried to run from QuickBooks, you use live Flow to sync that report out to your favorite spreadsheet app. But then that's just where the fun begins. You can, like, move stuff around, like move the cells around and they'll continue syncing from the accounting system. You can use a different sheet and point to that, like the cells in the report. So you can build your own, like, custom reporting suite that's actually being fed live data from QuickBooks. And it means whatever reporting that you are running for your clients, LifeFlow is gonna support it. Even if it is just like, boring old balance sheet, boring old P and L, whatever, sync those into specific sheets in a workbook. But then, like, build your own, like, KPI summary or aggregation of, like, you know, the most important things that you want your client to pay attention to. All of that inside of a single Excel workbook, Google Sheets, whatever you want. And it means you're not subject to just the reports that QuickBooks will run. It means you can get people access to information without them having access to the QuickBooks file. See where I'm going with this? Lot of helpful things you can do with that. Just getting them access to, like, part of your QuickBooks data, sync it out to a spreadsheet. Just give them access to the spreadsheet. LifeFlow is the peanut butter to your QuickBooks jelly. Ooh, and they even do consolidations now. Roll up a whole bunch of different companies with different charts of accounts handles it pretty well. Learn more about LifeFlow. Check out the link in the show Notes, Today's episode sponsor in part by ukoo. Have you ever been frustrated with the state of billing and practice management systems? How the features, usually they're pretty light and obvious and honestly, sometimes just like don't even do what you need it to do. So you gotta run this whole separate billing tool alongside your practice management system. Ookoo has gone super, super deep on billing, among other things. It's a full blown practice management system, but whether you do hourly recurring, whatever types of work you do's got the flexibility you need to make the magic happen no matter what. They're running a big fat sale right now. Use the link in the Show Notes. They got a 50% off discount campaign going until the end of June. Half off and 90 day money back guarantee. What do you got to lose? You don't like it, 90 days, they send a man to your house, he's gonna give you that money back. Is that how it works? That might not be how it works. Listen, my favorite thing about uku you may have seen, I did a sponsored demo day for them. Uku spelled uku. If you haven't seen it, check that out on YouTube. My favorite thing, and they never tell me to talk about this in the ad copy, but. But I always do anyways because I love it. They have maybe the best view I've seen for like planning out your week. You have all of your tasks and your tasks have due dates. Right? And we're all used to what that looks like. You know, a view of overdue tasks that's a mile long, but they have a view that is like entirely dedicated towards planning when you're gonna do your work. And so like with a view of the whole week, you can organize what tasks you're gonna do, what day. And this is a day that's totally independent of the due date. Your teammates can do the same. So when Tina's out unexpectedly, you can see Tina's planning, you can see what she actually planned to do. Most of these systems just have a due date and that's it. But that's not really enough to like figure out when I'm going to do the work before the due date, right? That's probably my favorite thing about Ooku. Okay. You want to take advantage of that, that half off thing? Use the link in the show notes. It's pretty cool. Check it out. Number four, when you're making a software decision, please don't make decisions based on what software salespeople tell you. Talk with your peers, people who have used it, people who decided to go with the alternative option. Why did they do that? The more people you can talk to when you are considering a software change. This is one of the biggest potential black holes of time that can just disappear. I've told the story before. We got some big practice management decisions wrong back in the day in my firm, like pre Internet days for me, before I had any sort of a network I could bounce these ideas off of, made a big, big, bad decision on practice management systems that genuinely cost us between two and two or three years and like well into six figures of, of costs and waste and all that. And it is a decision that I would have never, ever, ever made had I talked with anyone else who had gone to that tool who had considered the other options on the market. But we made that decision based on what a bunch of salespeople told us. We also made the decision based on integrations. And boy, do I have opinions about integrations. By and large, integrations serve a marketing purpose and not a ton else. Do we all want all the tools that we use to integrate with everything else? Like, yes, of course we do. Absolutely. But you all know not every integration is made the same. And I would say the majority of the time an integration does not quite live up to what it was promised to be. But what people do is they'll go to the landing page for a tool and see, okay, does it integrate with this other tool that I use? And if it does, great, and there's nothing wrong with that. But if it doesn't, they're like, this tool isn't for me. Then when it's like, no, the most important thing we need to ask is, does this tool do the job well? Like that is. That is the number one thing. There's maybe a few exceptions here where it's like, you know, a bill pay tool where there's a massive volume of bills that need to be synced back to the accounting system. Like, that is a very important integration. But in general, the most important thing is does that tool do the job well? But unfortunately, people will go out and they'll see, does it integrate with my system? Oh, it doesn't integrate with my system. And then they'll go and pick an alternative tool that does integrate with their system. That oftentimes is a far inferior tool. And in the case of us changing practice management systems, we totally got duped by integrations. We. And it was the salespeople pushing the fact that, like, oh, we're the only tool that integrates with these other things that you use. And by extension, we're like, okay, well, then I guess that's the only tool for us not giving any credence to the more important question of what's the best tool for the job. Because as much as I hate moving system from moving data from system A to system B, that is not a hard thing to solve. That is a thing that humans are capable of. Does it suck? Yes. But it does not suck as much as using the wrong tool for the job. And I totally fell victim to this. And had I. Had I known folks I could talk with to help season my decision making when I was making that, like, software change, I would not have made that mistake. And if. If you don't feel that you're able to do this, usually this is a network problem, which is. That's the next one, you know, invest in building a network. Number five, invest in building a network. So you always have someone to ask. And you're like, I don't like networking. I'm an introvert, man. I'm an introvert, too. Like, I don't. I totally get it. The whole just, like, scummy notion of going to a networking event just, like, made my skin crawl. I would never do that in a million years. Thankfully, these days there's different ways to network with people, and it is genuinely as simple as, like, there's a community of people that tune into this podcast every single day. There's a community that lives down in the comments. If you're thinking about a tool right now, drop a comment under this video and be like, has anybody switched to this? And people will reply and say, we considered it. We did this other one instead. We did the switch. Here's what's great about it. We did the switch. Here's what's not great about it. And that is all golden information. Even if it doesn't change your ultimate decision, it gives you more information with which to make a good decision. Right? So as we're thinking about how to build an even better network for you, I'm of the opinion it all starts with being visible, being out there. The vast majority of people on social media and all of that will lurk and never engage. They just consume they don't engage. I think this is the biggest upside of being visible is the relationships that you make. People start seeing your name on a regular basis. Like, you start building friendships there and you have people that you can ask, and that's a great hack. Turn up on social media consistently. Social media isn't about what you have to say to impress the world or get likes or anything like that. Social media is about being part of a community. Like, that's why I still. For every one thing I post, I'm in someone else's replies ten times. Because that's what social media is. It's about engaging with folks and, like, learning about them and, like, making actual, like, real human connections. Conferences, nothing beats in person still. Like, you're going to meet a bunch of smart people at conferences, not being afraid to send a DM or hop on a zoom call with an Internet stranger. I just did this yesterday. I DM somebody. I'm like, man, this is really cool. You want to talk about this sometime? And we just hopped on a zoom call for a half hour. I mean, I had so many great things in my life have started from that. My wife started from that. Don't be afraid to, like, I don't know, there's. It's funny when I see in my kids, like, their social insecurities, how adults are the exact same. There's a very real fear of being the first one to make the move. You know, like, you're kind of vibing with somebody online and this is all. This is all professional, okay? So don't, don't even, don't even start going that way. But there's somebody that's like, man, this. I think we could be friends. But it's a. You're real scared to be the one to make the first move because you're like, ooh, what if they. What if I get burned? What if they say no? Just do it, man. What do you got to lose? What do you got to lose for some random Internet Internet stranger ghosting your dm? Really? Like, is that the worst thing? And if you think about, you know, being more willing to do that over a longer time horizon, the reality is you're gonna make a munch more friends and relationships and all that. Once you've got all those people that you can, you can tap for those software questions or whatever it is, it makes all this stuff just so much easier. Last idea I had for, for building a network is find a way to give back. There's a tremendous amount of satisfaction to be had from service, from helping people. And just in the course of going through that, like, you're gonna meet folks, other folks who are giving back as well. And it's just about building a little community of people that do the same thing that you do, rather than the only people you talk to every day being like your employees. And that's not, you know, a balanced relationship. Right. Number six, join or create a mastermind group. I've shared this before. Like, my favorite thing ever is just sitting in a room of folks or virtual room of folks who do exactly what I do. Like, I got a great support structure at home, but nobody in my personal life runs an accounting firm. So, like, they just. They don't have that context. And to be able to hang out with a bunch of other folks who do is a really rejuvenating thing from the standpoint of them having a deep understanding of the stuff that you struggle with, but also being able to, like, pour yourself into them in their situation. Like, that can be really, really energizing to actually supporting others. Number seven, put a greater premium on your time. Maybe easier said than done, but it is funny, when you talk with different people, clients are the same way, people doing seemingly the same thing. People will assign wildly different values to their own time. And I've found that you're almost never going to get burned assigning an uncomfortably large value to your own time, because usually that means hiring somebody faster to do the work, pulling in an expert rather than trying to bumble through it yourself. And most of these decisions to jump to the shortcut, even if it's maybe a little bit more expensive, all of these decisions for you have a compounding effect over time, as you find success, you're earning money. But ultimately, what is the point of that money unless you can use it to buy back time? Like, that's sort of the trap that we can fall into is when you're early in your career, like, oh, I got to do whatever I got to do to earn money, and then you have money. Oftentimes more money than that punk kid that was trying to get money could have ever imagined you having. But then what do you do with your money? Do you hoard it? Do you never spend it to get time back? Like, there's gotta be a payoff there somewhere that's better than trading in the Camry for Alexis. I've shared some tips on, you know, how to get out of your own way and free up some time in your accounting firm. Giving everything in your firm an owner, technical subject matters, software, Tools, all that, give all of that stuff an owner in your firm that isn't you. It takes some pressure on you to be the hero and the final decision maker on everything. Um, there's someone, Tim Ferriss podcast the other day. Indiscriminate action is actually procrastination. So indiscriminate action that is being so fast to just do everything and work your tail off. And where I, where I see this most frequently in accounting firms is folks that are just so head down in client work that there's like, this is, you know, indiscriminate action. They're just going to take on every single client project and do everything and try to get as much done as possible as if this is like the highest output version of them, when in reality this is like a form of procrastination because that work's gonna be there either way. But if we never pause to consider how the work gets done and how we can do it better, then in many ways we're kind of hiding from the change that oftentimes we know that we need. And this is where years of your life can, can slip by as you solve everyone else's problems at your own expense. I went through this with somebody that now works on my team, trying to encourage them to lean into delegation more. And as I gave them higher level tasks and like tasks that were incentivized, like where they actually had incentive to like go out and like crush these things that ultimately make the business money, they very quickly like reassessed, need to grow, grow, grow type of person at all. There's a phase of my life where I was that way, but I'm. That's definitely not me anymore. But I think on a whole we are usually biased to undervalue our own time and it holds us back from growing and learning and pulling in experts. This episode is sponsored in part by Copilot, the most flexible portal you can imagine for your clients. One of the hardest problems to manage in 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 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 a slick, consistent client experience. A single place to 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 TeamUp, helping you recruit top Filipino accountants without any ongoing monthly fees. The difference between Teamup and all the other offshoring options is that 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 can 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 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. TeamUp 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. Number eight. Be quicker to make reversible experiments so the whole one way door versus two way door thing, if it's a one way door and you can't go back, for example, you're going move a big old team to a new practice management system. I would argue in many ways that's a one way door. I guess it's kind of a two way door, but it's not something that is trivial to reverse. One way doors are tricky and you need to spend a lot of time thinking about whether you're making the right decision. And oftentimes if it is a one way door, with some thought, you can actually find a two way door version of it. Two way door being we can go down this path, but it's not a big deal if we go back. So two way doors, like yes, like think about whether it's the right thing to do, but ultimately make a decision quickly because by going through that door you're going to learn a bunch on the other side of it. Like it's, it's the process of going through that that ultimately teaches you rather than being paralyzed with indecision and learning nothing. And this is where two way doors are great. You can do a quick experiment, learn in the process, and then decide where to go from there. Embracing failure helps here. Not being so afraid of something not working that you won't test things. Also getting to a change cycle tighter than a full year, that's a really hard thing with a lot of accounting firms is of the processes that we do are on a full year cycle. And if you can only experiment and test something once a year, it means the time it takes to like iterate through multiple ideas is really painfully long. So if you can find a way to run smaller tests during the year, particularly if they are two way doors, things that are reversible, that could be trying to get clients to use a portal or a different. You know, we talked about scheduling last week, maybe starting with a small, a small subgroup of your clients to see how that goes. Clients that are quicker to lean into these reversible experiments. They're just going to know more. They're going to be fundamentally better equipped to make the next decision. Because with each of those experiments you learn. Last one, number nine here, just pair your work back to higher impact activities. You know, the whole Eisenhower matrix thing, it's like a two by two grid. On one axis you've got urgent and not urgent. On the other axis you've got not important and important. And we spend a lot of time on things that are not important, oftentimes even things that are not urgent or spending time working on things that are important or urgent for somebody else, but not for you. I lost years of my life not being focused enough on my own business. I was so fixated on how can I be the best that I can be for everybody else's business that ultimately my business, like, paid the price for that. And this is where sometimes some, you know, more extreme constraints can be helpful to focus us on what's truly important. So each day, if you could do one thing, one thing that three years in the future, you would be proud of you for doing that day, it would be something that would impact you longer term, be beneficial. If you could complete that one thing each day, what would it be? It's probably gonna look different each day, but what it's not gonna be most days is solving a problem for somebody else. And I don't know about you. When I was running a firm, for most of my years, when I would get out of bed in the morning, the first thing I would think about is somebody else's problem is how do I get this thing done for them. And sometimes I was a product of like, over committing myself. And I had, I had told these people I would, I would do this stuff for them. And I was, you know, a person of my word, didn't want to let them down in that regard. I felt a duty to do that stuff that I said that I would do. But before you know it, three years have gone by and you're perpetually over committed and you've just poured all of yourself into everybody else's problems at your own expense. And then you look back and you're like, man, what have I done lately that like, was for me or was for the business, which is ultimately like the big thing I have more of a duty to than all of my clients businesses. So like, what's a, what's a version of this that you could be comfortable with? Maybe it's once a week, Maybe it's once a week committing to yourself that I'm going to complete one big important task for the business each week. I was able to get myself out of, out of client work fully. And that was a hard process that took a while. I've talked with firms down to less than 10 employees who have done this, where the owner has gotten completely out of client work. So, like, if there's a. I think the size threshold that people have in their heads of how big you have to be to make that possible is much smaller than we generally think that is pretty small firms like, you can still get yourself totally out of the client work, but that's not realistic for everybody. And where you're at today, and that reality is that's like a baby step thing that you do a little bit at a time to eventually get out. But everyone, if you run a firm, has to be committing sometime to the firm, not just to client stuff. So is there a version of that that you could commit to that is like, I'm gonna write down one big important thing I can tackle each week. That's not a client's problem. It's my problem or my opportunity. It has to do with building my business and not somebody else's. And the irony is, with that selfishness of I gotta put my own mask on first, it usually means you actually do a better job for all the people you support anyways. The ways that we let our clients down oftentimes are a product of us not taking care of our own stuff, like not getting capacity sorted out, not getting the right people onto the team. Our failings when we, when we don't always deliver for our clients are usually a product of our business not needing to be where it needs to be. And so the solution there isn't to add another mile to the extra mile that we're going for clients. The solution is how do we carve out some more time to think about the business itself. I'm going to play actually a, a reel from Alex Hermosi. Even if you're not an Alex Hermosi person, this was really good. Okay, here's the real beginning.

When you're an entrepreneur, you have no money and you have lots of time, and so you have to learn everything in order for anything to get done. But once you have a little bit of money, you buy other people's time. It's not even buying their time from a labor perspective. I want to buy the time you put in before here. I want to buy the 10 years of experience so that I don't have to make the mistakes that the two other companies you worked at made. I want you to come in with those solutions so we can start at year 10 of your career rather than at day zero of mine. In the beginning, when you're entrepreneur, you have no money.

That's kind of what this is all about, is how can I pick the brains of everybody else who've spent 10 years on this thing so that I can start on year 10 instead of starting on year 0? Right. And no matter where you are at in the journey, that may sound like a new Firm owner thing. It's absolutely not. It's a every firm thing. There are umpteen different aspects of running firms and some of those you will be progressive on and some of those you won't be. But other people and other firms are at all these kind of various levels of development. And it's why I think almost everyone has something to learn from almost everyone else. And early in my career I was the guy in year zero who was like, no, no, no, no, no, no. I got this all figured out. I'm going to, I'm just going to sit in my garage, sit in my office and change the world from here and do this cool novel stuff. And we did like, we did some cool novel stuff and it was all very creative, but it was with zero context of what everybody else was doing and had massive blind spots. You don't know what you don't know. And had I applied all that creativity to a framework that was supported by a bunch of other people and what they knew and their framework for running firms, what I came up with would have been even better because I still wanted to do my own version of this. Like that's a really rewarding part of running a firm is like pulling together the unique combination of things that you can get really excited about and work great for your clients. And the fastest way to get there is not by thinking harder about it, is not by working another late night for your clients. It's about finding the people and the ideas that can get you there, that can shortcut you so that you're starting with like that year 10, not starting with year zero is why people that like engage with stuff like this and on social media and all that are just like, you see it, you see how, how much further ahead these folks are and the thinking is as compared to the offline folks. And my hope is that we get more offline folks to be online folks. I personally had way more fun when was when I became an online folk. I made friends, I found other folks who did similar stuff to me and just being able to share ideas was, was so energizing. Like I said, that could start as simple for you as dropping a comment if you're stuck on something. If you're thinking about a piece of software, something like that. Drop a comment below if you're listening. You don't have anything like that top of mind. Skim the comments, see if there's a way that you could add value to something that somebody else is going through and you can be that year 10 person for someone else. That's at year zero, right? All right. Thanks for coming and hanging today. We'll see you tomor Sam.