237 How To Get Down to 40 Hours Per Week!

So you might have heard Geraldine Carter released a book for accounting firms about how to get down to working just 40 hours. Geraldine's a coach for accounting firms. What she does full time. And I recently had a really cool conversation with her that I want to share about not just getting down to 40 hours, but how to even get down to 25 hours. What is that a thing? It is. She's actually coached a bunch of people through doing this. So without further ado, here's Geraldine Carter. Let's taco bout it. Come on in. Here's Geraldine. Okay, I got Geraldine Carter here with me. Geraldine, if somehow there's people in the universe that don't know everything about you, give them like the, the 30 second intro.

Okay. So I live in Idaho. I have an engineering degree. I was a tour guide for a luxury travel company for 10 years. Started a company with a co founder run, ran that for a bunch of years. Basically was in charge of the money and the operations. And then in my third stage here, I am a consultant and coach for solo single owner CPAs who are doing typically half a million in top line revenue, helping them get their hours down to 40, then 25, then 15. 45.

15. Oh, wow. Okay. That sounds like most people's path to accounting. A whole bunch of other things and then accounting. I think we first met on your podcast. I think that's how we first connected.

Yes. Yeah. On mine. Yeah.

Let's plug that straight off the bit. What's your podcast called again?

Business strategy for CPAs.

Okay. I remember coming away from there, not having ever met you before, but having like one of the most fun times I've had on a podcast where I was like, this person is super smart. You get a. I don't know if you've experienced this. You get a disappointing number of podcast interviews where you come out of it and you're like, okay, they didn't know anything about me going into it. I'm not sure they know anymore. Now, hopefully that was useful to somebody.

That happens. I think. You know, podcast hosts are also people too, with lives and want to record something that's meaningfully, meaningfully useful, but sometimes already know the content and ask questions they already know the answers to, which I think is useful. But I think it's more interesting when we ask questions we don't know the answer to. Because then, you know, you and I, as the host, we both learn things, which I think is more beneficial for both of us plus the audience. So. So I'm a believer in you. To people about Stuff, I don't know. But it takes a little vulnerability, because you got to reveal to everybody that you don't know everything about everything.

Okay, so you just wrote a book, Came out not that long ago. What's the book called?

It's called down to 40 hours. It's a roadmap for CPAs to end overworking without giving up revenue.

Okay. Wow. So I like to ask this question of folks that write books, because I think for most of us, writing a book just feels like this impossibly monumental task. But also, there's an element of, like, who. Who am I to write a book? Like, what do I really know? So who are you to write a book? Like, how did. How did you get here? This is your first book, right?

My first book, and hopefully not my last. Now that I've written one, I'm like, ooh, I kind of have. It's like having the travel bug.

Okay, so how did this all come together? Like what? I don't know. What did you grapple with through the process and all that?

So, well, who am I to write a book? You know, I felt all the imposter syndromes, of course, especially, you know, who am I to write a book for an. For accountants when I'm not even an accountant? And I get hives at the very mention of. So I had all the. You know, I had all the imposter syndrome thoughts, but I also knew that the work that I was doing with my clients was making a big difference. And I know that because they tell me, right? And they would say things like, oh, my God, I finally feel like I can breathe again. And breathing's useful, so that's. That seems valuable. And they go from working 55 hours a week or 65 or, you know, in some cases, 75, and they're just buried under a pile of, you know, 1200 returns and followed by extensions, and being able to help them dig out of that is really, you know, I see the results, and it's also really meaningful and enjoyable. And I started just seeing the same kind of patterns and challenges again and again and again. And I thought it would be really helpful to people if I could get all these answers in a book so that they could get access to the material at a lower price point on their own timeline, when they're ready, et cetera. And when I started writing it, I. There was a lot of chatter about subscription, and I thought the book was going to be zero to subscription. But then when I built my program, my mastermind for CPAs, and then when I, when one of my clients said, if I could just work a 40 hour week, that would be heaven. And I was like, oh. I was like, you guys don't want to make more money, you guys want to work less. And that's when I realized that my people don't care about subscription, they care about working less. And I was like, I'm scrapping the type of the title. It was zero to subscription. And I'm like, nope. We're taking a left hand turn and we are writing the book down to 40 hours. And we're going to help CPAs go from working stupid crazy hours to working in air quotes, normal hours, whatever normal is, and doing it in a way that's not stressful and doing it in a way that doesn't blow a hole in their business, that doesn't, you know, rock the boat and get water over the gunnels in a way that doesn't freak them out. How, like, how do we do that with CPAs? And once I saw that that was what they wanted, then, then it became really clear what to write because I then it was just my own work. Then it was just answering all the questions I get on the daily. So that's when the whole like, that's when you got to do the heavy lifting or get the dirt under your fingernails of actually doing the writing. That's the hardest part. Once the writing is done, then it gets easy again and you get to do the fun stuff like the COVID and the blurbs and all that. So it has like, it's not easy in the middle. It's really hard. But, but it has been worth it in countless ways. Not to mention the ways that it's already been helping people, you know, here at home and also in various countries around the world. So it's already having an impact and that's really cool.

Okay, so how far down the path did you get for this completely different book before realizing that wasn't the book that you wanted to write?

I had probably written the outline and maybe two to three draft chapters. So in terms of total workload, knowing what I know now, I'd probably done 10% of the work. It felt like I'd done 50.

But had you not started down that path, you wouldn't have found the better book to write, right?

Maybe, maybe not. But certainly I'm a believer that answers become clear when you get in motion, that the way to find the answers is to just get started and stop thinking.

Boy, ain't that the truth. So for, for folks like deciding where to spend their time. Books in 2024, books themselves don't really seem like a way to make money. Like, what made it worthwhile for you in your business? Like coaching firms, what made it worthwhile for you to do this?

Yeah. So not to think about it as a direct money maker. Right. The, you know, the 10 or the 16 or the $3 or whatever that you make in royalties, like that's not going to be the primary income generator. But what it does for me, number one, is change how I view myself in the accounting space. Because I think of myself as something of an outsider. Like, what is an engineer doing in the accounting space? Like, why am I here? Like, is it even okay that I'm here? Like, is it okay, will you guys let me in? And being able to write not just a book, but to write the book for accountants and CPAs to get out of the habit of overworking and go down to a 40 or 25 or 15 hour work week and say, no, look, it is like this, do it like this. Not that there's one answer, because there are many answers, there are many ways to do it, but it's absolutely doable. And this whole overworking and stressed narrative that has been woven and spun for years for accountants isn't true. It doesn't have to be hard, stressful, overworking, et cetera. So to write the book, the book and be like, no, it's like this just changes how I, I think how I show up for people, especially for my clients. Like even today in Mastermind, just getting like, no, no, no, we are not doing it the old way, we're doing it the new way. And then also, you know, for other people to wouldn't either. They're not prone to buying video courses, they're not prone to group programs. They're not going to invest in one on one coaching because it's significant investment to be able to have access to the content in a way that is dirt cheap, instantly available and always in their back pocket. Just makes it so that the base of the pyramid, the square footage of the base is that much bigger. And then hopefully, you know, if I can convince enough people that this is a viable way that they decide to take bigger steps for themselves in terms of reshaping their accounting practice. Yeah.

What do you say to folks who grapple with the notion of giving too much away, like even just down to writing social media content, folks will be afraid of like, oh, this is the secret sauce or something like that. How did you grapple with that?

What is the Way to give away as much as free for possible and get well paid to do it right. And it's not, here's why is because knowledge is not the same as implementing. You can have all the knowledge in the world, but most people can't implement. It's too much. It's too many decisions, it's too fraught, it's too uncertain. It feels like feeling around in the dark. Even if you have the answer, it's still just too scary to do by yourself. So I'm not concerned about giving away all the knowledge. If there are people out there who can implement with the knowledge, awesome, go do it. I'm here for the people who want, who want the knowledge, who need to be convinced of the theory but then need help actually making the rubber meet the road. I think giving away the knowledge for free says, look, come over here and I'll help you do it. If you just want to know how to do it and you can do it yourself, great. But if that's not enough, come over here. I got you so much.

These days it's about discovery too, where like these folks aren't even going to know that you exist. Like if you don't put this stuff out into the wild and even if they're is like a tiny component of cannibalizing, I don't know something that you would have done for somebody. And I don't even know if that's real at all. Just like putting it out like that's ultimately how folks are going to find you too, right?

Yeah. It's way easier for the word to spread with something small like a book because it's really easy to recommend a book to a friend. But it's a whole different thing to recommend one on one private coaching to a friend. You're not going to do that.

Yeah, yeah.

So the book has a sort of like underbrush just like burns and spreads easily in the underbrush. And it's a low risk sort of recommendation. So it has like, it almost self perpetuates, like it promulgates by itself. It's kind of wild because it starts to take on a life of its own that you're like, whoa, I didn't see that coming.

I would almost argue too that books do this in a way that's different to anything else. Like recommending a great book is almost like, there's almost something like not aristocratic about it, but it's like, it's kind of like a real, I don't know, it feels more impressive than recommending a YouTube video, you know?

Yeah, because it says that you know who you're talking to. And like, I found this thing and I found it before you did because I'm the cooler kid and I'm more plugged in. I mean, it's not really that, but it's kind of that. And, And I know that this thing will help you because I had this problem. I read the book. It made a huge difference to me. You, I know you have the same problems. Dear friend who's an accountant, read this book I know will be good for you in the same way. And it's just. It's like giving a gift, right? It's like you get something when you give a person a thing, you get the joy of knowing that you've given somebody something of value.

This episode, it is sponsored in part by Live Flow. Lifflow 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 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 going to support it. Even if it is just like boring old balance sheet, boring old piano, 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? A 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. Live Flow is the. 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 Lifelo. Check out the link in the show Notes Today's episode sponsored in part by uku. 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 it just like don't even do what you need it to do. So you got to 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. And 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 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 going to do your work. And so like with a view of the whole week, you can, you can organize what tasks you're going to 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 gonna do the work before the due date. Right? That's probably my favorite thing about Ookoo. Okay, you wanna take advantage of that, that half off thing. Use the link in the show notes. It's pretty cool.

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Okay, I know everybody's like, enough of the inside baseball on books. Jason, just tell me how to get down to 40 hours. I don't think I was ever down to 40 hours when I was running firms. I don't think I ever quite got there. I got close. I know you do coaching with a ton of folks. Obviously you've talked with even more folks over the course of. Of writing the book. What are, like the. I don't know, what are the high points, like, the biggest traps folks are falling into to get from where they are to 40?

Yeah. So it's like not. It's not even quite a trap, the first one. It's more just this thing they didn't know that they needed to know. Just like your clients come to you as a tax person, they're like, tell me all the things I don't know that I'm supposed to ask you about. And one of those things for accountants is understanding value and really appreciating what this nebulous intangible thing is that your clients are actually buying and giving you dollars for. Because if there is a trap, it's thinking that work and hours makes money and it doesn't. That's not where revenue comes from. I get that. I say this all the time. Thinking that revenue comes from clients is like thinking that time comes from your watch. I get that it looks that way, but it's not that way. Your revenue comes from the value that you create for your clients, and you capture the value that you create with effective pricing. So the second piece, if anything, is that there are lots of pricing tools. There's not just one. Yes, there's value pricing. Yes, there's flat rate. Yes, there's charm pricing, there's surge pricing. There's a lot of different tools that we can use. And having a basic understanding of which tools to reach for in your drawer of tools, making sure that you're reaching for the proper one for the situation that you're in. So to make this concrete, it'd be like, you know, if you want to open a can of beans and you reach in your drawer and you pull out the channel locks, they look the same, but they don't do the same thing. Similarly, if you want to loosen a bolt and you reach for the can opener, like, they look the same, you squeeze the thing, but it's not the same tool for the same reason. And if you get mixed up with pricing tools, it's just not going to work. And oftentimes the accountant will blame the tool. Like, can openers don't work. But that's not how that is. You just need to know how to use which tool in which situation, and then the third thing is really focusing on just maximizing efficiency in your accounting practice. And inefficiency was rewarded by hourly billing. The more inefficient you were, the longer it took, the more money you made. But once you understand that your clients are buying a result and an outcome and it's your job to deliver on that desired result that they have, then it becomes obvious that it's infinitely worth it to maximize efficiencies and just get stuff done as fast as you can, even if it's done at the speed of light with technology and software. And your client doesn't care if it took you 15 minutes. They don't need to know. They just want what they want, which is usually clarity around their numbers of money. They want to understand what's happening to the money in their business. They want to be less stressed about money and they want more time. Right. It's like not this totally. It's not in. What they want is not infinite, right? What they want is contained. More money, less time, less stress, more clarity. So if you can provide those things, if it took you 15 minutes, even faster, all the better, right? But getting. Changing that mindset that we're here to create a result for clients, not do work for them, I think is the mindset that takes the longest to come around.

I think we're in. We're in an echo chamber where this is more normalized than it is anywhere else. And you talk with folks who are offline and not plugged into this sort of thing. Like the norm for not only accounting firms, but professional service firms is still hourly billing, right? So when you get that client in the door where that's all they've ever known and they don't even. Maybe they may think that's all there is. Like it's just hourly billing and. And they're going to come to you for X hours of work, that sort of thing. So then they end up benchmarking you against the last guy, the last person, and whatever their rates were. And that sort of thing is. Is there like a degree of education that's necessary with clients who haven't experienced this before? How do you navigate that?

So if somebody's coming to you and they are benchmarking you against the last guy, would say that you have a marketing problem. And if you have a marketing problem, you probably have a positioning problem. And if you have both those things, you probably don't know or have clarity around who your ideal buyer is. If you're being benchmarked against other hourly. We gotta do a 180 around what your business is actually doing, who it's serving, and what they get out of working with you. Once we fix those problems and the positioning becomes around the results, like we help female business owners understand their money so they can make better decisions in their business. Now you've made a clean break from any comparison to hourly. Because a person who wants. Who is a female business owner who wants to be able to make clearer financial decisions is going to put you in a whole different camp. And she's not going to think of clarity around her financial decisions as something she can get by the hour. So for the person who feels like they're being benchmarked, we need to fix a bunch of upstream problems first in order to solve that downstream problem.

Yeah. With the goal of ultimately being one of one or not comparable to those other solutions.

Wait, say that again. What? Ask it again.

With the goal of ultimately being one of one and not comparable to the person across the street.

Exactly. In a blue ocean by yourself, you're the only one available who provides the thing that you provide.

Marketing's almost like a four letter word for accountants.

Totally.

And it's consistently anytime I put marketing into a video title or podcast title or anything like that, they're like, steer clear, man. Not a chance. I got enough clients.

Yeah. Oh my God.

This. I'm asking mainly for myself here. How do you get people to like baby step into that and get excited about it? Like, where do they start experimenting?

So I too try to steer away from the word marketing because it's like all the hackles go up and I get it. When I was an engineering student, I totally looked down my nose at marketing because I thought it was for the ones who couldn't hack it. I will admit my intellectual snobbery around that and boy, was I wrong about the value of marketing. But baby steps. I start with. I start with pain dream fix. Because it's a really simple. It's three simple words to remember and it doesn't require that you know any marketing. Right. So we just identify what pain are your clients in, what do they want instead of what they have? And what is your contribution to getting them from where they are to where they want to be. And the pains are really straightforward. Assuming you're business owning clients, they don't understand what's happening with their money. They want to be able to make better decisions. They're totally guessing. They put a finger in the window, make business decisions. They don't know if they have money to hire staff. They look at their bank balance account, their bank account balance. You know, they're like bouncing business ideas off their spouse. If their spouse is doing the bookkeeping, the books are maybe a mess. They've all like, all the same problems, right? And what they want is to understand their money. They want to, like, they want to be able to talk to a real human about their numbers and their money without judgment, without feeling like they're being judged or dismissed or whatever. They, they want to be able to better understand what's happening. They want to be able to look down the road at, you know, is anything going sideways that if I knew about it now, I could head it off at the pass before it got really bad. The things that they want are really simple. So that's where I start with my clients is let's just pick a couple of great clients, figure out what pains, like what are they struggling with, what do they want instead? And then when you work with them, how are you going to improve their situation? I'm going to meet with a monthly, I'm going to give them clean books. I'm going to help them understand what their P and L is telling them. I'm going to give them a cash flow forecast so they can see what, where things are going. And I'm going to give them access to Slack or whatever so that if they have quick questions, they can ask me and we'll put a time on the calendar so we can get their question answered. Super simple, right? We don't need to flood your ideal buyers, your prospects with, you know, 50 pages of accounting jargon. So Pain Dream Fix is a really simple place to start. It's the simplest place to start and it works almost every time.

This episode is sponsored in part by by Tech Guru. I'm in Florida right now at an accounting conference. And you know who else is? I think I probably spoiled it already. Tech gurus here, they're here exhibiting at a conference, an IT company. You know why? Because they understand accountants, they value them. They go around hobnobbing at stuff like this, having conversations about, you know, computer things and whatever IT is that IT companies talk about. But the main thing is that they are focused on us and our problems and the tools that we use and the best way to get that IT stuff handled so that we can focus on the important stuff, which is not it. Now, any old run of the mill IT shop, they're not going to understand your needs. Same way that Tech Guru does, right? You think about all the other accounting firms. Tech Guru's working with the best practices that they see and develop. Working with those firms. And then your firm joins the squad. You better believe you're gonna benefit from a bunch of the stuff they've learned with working with other people. Right? Who you using for it right now? Huh? Let me take a quick look out the window. Nope. I don't see them here. They're not here. Okay. That's why you should use Tech Guru. Cause they're here. And I think that about sums it up. Okay. Tech Guru 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 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 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.

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 gonna 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. You threw out something earlier that you said 25 hours or even 15 hours. And somewhere there's somebody sitting on a lawnmower right now going, look at these two out of touch people who don't run accounting firms. Telling people what to do as if they know. Yeah, okay. The final frontier. Getting beyond 40. What does that look like? What stories do you have of folks finding success with that and how do we all get there? Myself included?

So I do want to address the dismissers and I'm all for healthy skepticism and walk me through your math and show me your formulas and everything. But there, especially on the Internet, can be some amount of dismissing and like, oh, that's a lifestyle business and that's not a real business or isn't that cute for you? Or how queen or whatever and I'll show you the money. Come over here. We are doing it. And the thing that really bums me out about it is that the sort of arms crossed like ah, like not the ones who were genuinely curious, like really I don't believe it, but like the ones who are dismissive are the ones who actually miss out because we're doing it. I have clients who are doing it. I've worked with people who have gone down to five hours a week and gotten out of the day to day. It's totally possible, it's totally doable. It just takes shifting your mindset from one of I have to do all the work. Work is the worst thing you could possibly be doing, which is hard to get your head around when for so long as W2s, as you know, high school students, college students, we are told, we are drumbeaded with the message in America of work hard and you will get there. The sort of American dream thing. But what got you here will not get you there. And what got you here is in the way of you getting there. We have to let go of the idea of working to create revenue. That's great for your W2s, but as a business owner, stop working. Because when you bring your hours down, what happens, and I see this across my clients, is that they are calmer, they think more clearly, they make better decisions, they look farther down the line, they plan ahead better, they execute in a way that is more smooth, they do less in air quotes like failure work where you have to fix mistakes and dumb things because you were moving too quickly or somebody on your staff was moving too quickly and it takes four times longer to fix it than to slow down and do it once the right time, the first time, so they waste less time, they have more time to themselves to just be quiet. And in that time, they use that time to think about the problems in their business to solve those problems. And when you solve the problem, you then have to go and implement it in your business. And it never works right the first time. So you've got to watch it, follow up with your staff who are doing it, make sure, like massage it until it works. And that's how you get your hours down is by Getting your hours down, which sounds obvious, but in getting your hours down, you get out of the work and you think more creatively about how to create value. And that's where the revenue comes from. And you price effectively. You get your hours down. I don't need to tell you, your revenue goes up, you work a lot less. It's really simple, but it isn't easy. And I watch my masterminders do this. And it typically takes about a year to reshape an accounting practice if it's a full one with, you know, a 55 hour a week. CPA takes about a year to get down to 40, 35 and be sane and calm.

So a lot of this is like the trickle down from understanding what your clients pains are, like the clients you actually want to work with, like your good clients. What is that? Having that conversation, I think is spooky for some folks because they kind of haven't like breached that. Almost letting somebody inside your business. And that is maybe a little uncomfortable. What does that like from a very practical standpoint, what does that conversation look like? That's like, am I asking a favor of that person to get them to give me feedback? Like, how do you navigate that?

Yeah. Plus it's a little vulnerability, vulnerable. Because it requires that you recognize that you perhaps have not been delivering to your client at the level that they might have liked. And that doesn't feel good. But we need to go through it because it's so worth it to know what your clients are really wanting from you, that you might not be delivering at the full level that they're looking for. So there are lots of ways to do this with. So I recommend for my clients that they pick out a handful of clients that they have a really good relationship with. They've either been working together for a long time, or there's just a natural, like we work well together. And offering, hey, you know, this is not a sales thing. I'm working on making improvements to my practice and I really want to hear from clients about what it is that they're looking for that would make a difference in their life and their business. Would you be willing to either grab lunch or get a drink or a cocktail or go for a walk, whatever suits you. 30 minutes. And stick to the time. You know, don't take more than you've agreed to and ask them a series of questions? There are a whole ton. There's a great book on this called the Mom Test by Rob Fitzpatrick. Because if you ask the wrong questions, like garbage in, garbage out, you're not going to get great answers. Rather than give you the list of questions, I would just recommend to viewers that they just go get the book and highlight, like, read through for all the questions that you need. But you really just want to ask your clients about what would give you five hours back every single week, what would give you an hour back every day. Where are you struggling in your business in a way that's really killing you? What is it that you don't know that if you knew, it would make a big difference? And what have you tried that hasn't worked? Because you want to find out if they really care about this problem enough to actually have tried to solve it. So that question in particular reveals to you whether or not they even care to solve the problem. Is it a meaningful problem if they have, it also signals to you how much money they may or may not have spent on a solution, which then helps you decide, like, oh, they're only willing to spend $15 on this problem. So maybe this isn't a product. Maybe I don't want to develop a product right here.

Right.

And it gives you, like. But if they've spent $50,000 trying to solve the problem, it tells you that it's a painful problem and they want it solved. And it also tells you what hasn't worked but has not worked. So that gives you a lot of information about what you might try to build that would actually solve problems and be worthwhile for them.

What did you. What was that book that you called out? Something Mom.

Yeah, the mom test.

The mom test. Okay.

Yeah. Because your mom will always be nice to you is the premise. She won't tell you the truth. So you want to learn how to ask questions where you will actually get to the truth. It's kind of a goofy name for a really valuable book.

Okay, one other question I want to bounce off here because this isn't. This is something that I've always struggled with, like how you guide people here for the folks for whom building a more profitable column accounting firm is like, priority number one. Like, the path is usually getting out of the business, getting out of the work, working on the business itself and all of that. But you got a good number of folks that run small firms who, like, love doing the work, right? And I think they kind of hit a wall when they hear stuff like this because they're like, what is the version of this for me? Because I kind of want both. I want control and flexibility, but I also love doing the work. Like, is there a version of that? Where they can do both or is that like a fool's errand? What do you think?

So I don't think it's a fool's errand. It's figuring out what is most important to you and looking at the trade offs and with this way or that way. So if you love doing the work, but you don't love being a business owner, but you own a business, just know that what you're choosing is you're probably going to choose 30, 40, 50 hours a week of work because you're going to position yourself as a hired pair of hands. You're going to get paid something close to by the hour, whether it's 100 or 200 or 300 or something, but you're not going to make an effective hourly rate of $1,000 an hour. If you position yourself as a hired gun, a hired set of hands, that's okay. There's nothing wrong with that. But just know that that's what you're, you're likely to be trading off. If you're willing to learn the skill set that is required of being a business owner, then suddenly it opens up a whole bunch more lanes. A possibility. You can go the staff route and you can buy hours low and sell them high. You can, you can keep it small. You know, me and my bookkeeper and I do high level advisory for high six and early seven figure businesses. It's not a ton of bookkeeping. You can still do some of the work but you do more of the review and less of the monkeying data. Or you can. I see this especially for people who've been doing it for 20, 30 years. They don't want to do any review, nothing. They just want to do advisory consulting and they can just go the expertise route, package and sell expertise, become a consultant if you will and go that way. So there's no right or wrong way. It's just understanding what you are choosing and what trade offs you are making and liking the reasons for making those trade offs.

Yeah. Love it. Geraldine, thank you for doing this.

Happy to. Thanks for having me.

Let's ride this promo pony out of here. Where can people find you? Let's point them somewhere to learn more about what to do.

So I've got my feet in the stirrups. We mentioned the podcast business strategy for CPAs. My website is geraldinecarter.com I linger a little on LinkedIn. Just search Geraldine Carter and they can get my book on Amazon down to 40 hours or they can buy it at my website geraldinecarter.com book.

Is that the better place to buy it? Your website doesn't make a difference.

Doesn't make a difference to me. It's easier for international buyers if they go via my website because then they get the international links.

Cool. Thank you, Geraldine.

It was fun. Thanks, Jason. Always great to be with you.

Take care, Sa.