238 The RIGHT Way To Build An SOP In An Accounting Firm

Today on Jason Daily, we're talking about the right, the right way to build an SOP inside of your accounting firm. Do I do video? Do I stuff it in an ugly word file? What if I gotta change it down the road? You know that SOP that was good for like 30 seconds and then something changed and then it immediately went out of date. That old chestnut. We're talking about how to manage things when there are like exceptions and not letting exceptions dictate the entire process. A couple other cool tools that people shouted out this week that I wanted to draw attention to and some wild, like AI, like making phone calls for you. And just how do we like lean into tech in a way that still feels personalized and how AI is sort of challenging some of this. Like where do, where do firms slot into the future that is increasingly automated without becoming too impersonal? Right, right. Isn't that just so hard? Oh my gosh. Oh my gosh. Come on in, Take a seat on the davenport and let's talk about it. Okay. Sops truly a three letter word. Your accounting firm's only as good as your processes, and your SOPs are only as good as they are the moment that somebody needs to use them. But the reality is SOPs are like constantly evolving. How do you hold your team members responsible for keeping them up to date? And at a very, very basic level, what is even the right format for an SOP? We've all seen that three ring binder, right? That's got all the SOPs, all the processes. For whatever reason, when people carry it, it's hugged like clutched to their chest. There's probably post it notes sticking out the sides of it these days. Here are my thoughts on like, what is the right format for an sop? In a perfect world, it lives where the work happens, like embedded in the task. If it doesn't work that way, it's. It's frankly not the end of the world. But I like yo yo'd between a whole bunch of different SOP formats in my firm. From the beginning, like when we were at peak loom, it was like, oh, we just, we have to have a video for every single little thing. And so you'd shoot all these little looms for how to do each of these tasks. And most of them were shared things like a task that we do for all of our month end closes or something like that. And then occasionally you would shoot one that was like a one off specific to that client. But that loom, the video was novel because it was a screen share and so like there's nothing, I think quite like a screen share and a cursor to show somebody how to do a thing. Man. Like if you've ever gone through, we all have the fist fight of trying to explain to somebody over the phone how to do a thing that's on a computer. That's just not the move, buddy. In fact, even in a physical office, I would regularly zoom with people that were like seven feet away from me so that they could see my screen without having to breathe on the back of my ears. And so being able to show something like in the wild, like in the context of the app, that's really, really powerful. But if you've gone like fully down this rabbit hole of making videos, you know what a pain that can actually be. Because it's like I'm of the mind that a video is the best way to show somebody how to do something the first time. But maybe the worst thing, to show somebody how to do a thing every time after that. Because if you got to scrub through the video to find the little part of it that is relevant to what you're doing, that's just annoying. And the other problem is because these things change so much, it's really hard to change a video. Like if you've got a. And this is also an argument for making these things more bite size, these sops smaller, like a single SOP that's like a 40 minute video. Holy geez. Good luck finding anything in there as opposed to making these more bite sized. But with any type of video, updating a video is nigh on impossible to like just change one bit of it or change what the screen is showing. Like unless you've got some, some editing powers, it's just, it's a pain. And this is where ye olde word document with a whole bunch of screenshots starts looking better. Right? You know those word docs, that was probably how you built the thing that got printed and put into the three ring binder. This is where that approach probably makes more sense. And so if you think about the support articles you see online for like Intuit or something like that, a support article for a very commonly searched thing will usually have a video at the top and then like step by step text instructions under that. And, and if you are like me, you only ever watch the video if you like don't know anything about the process as a whole. And if it's something in the accounting software, I'll pretty much never watch the video. I'm like skimming down through the bullet points to get to the answer that I want as quickly as possible. And that's the better long term version of an sop. So the first time somebody needs to learn how to do a thing, I think a video probably makes the most sense. But then after that something more text based makes sense. And so what is, what is the best marriage of these two things? This discussion came up this week as we were talking about two types of tech. One, Loom. Specifically, if you're not familiar with Loom, basically you can record yourself doing things, record your screen. It's just a really quick and easy way to record, like how to make a payment online or how to invite you to your QuickBooks file, stuff like that. L O M.com as free. Loom recently launched a AI feature that will create an SOP based on the script of your video. And so it's just a text SOP where it takes all the things that you said and it builds it into like a bullet document of all the different steps. And that's pretty cool. And it gives you effectively what you may see on like an Intuit support page where there's a video above a bunch of bullet points. Now it just kind of generates that bullet point document automatically for you based on the things that you say in the video. Probably want to double check that it's accurate and capturing everything that you want to capture. But that makes it way easier to have both a text version and a video version of an sop. So on the one hand we got Loom doing this now, and that's pretty cool. On the other hand, I pointed out that the last tool I had this like, shut up and take my money moment with was probably Scribe. And Scribe is a Chrome extension where you hit record and then you click all the steps of what you're doing. And it takes screenshots of every single thing that you click and type into. And each screenshot has a little header of like what the instruction is. Like, click on the next button, type your address into this field with a screenshot. And I've always thought Scribe was kind of the ultimate SOP because it combined some of what was nice about video, being able to see the user interface and what you're supposed to be doing along with a text description. And we also talked about Whale, which is an alternative to Scribe. And frankly, there's a bunch of Scribe alternatives out there. Now what the tool is isn't as important as like, what is the ultimate, best layout for an sop. And I think where I've landed On this is video is great to start, but can be annoying longer term. But the shorter the video, the better. Worst case scenario here is you got people scrubbing through like 30 minute videos for an SOP. Like that's just a pain and it's almost so high friction that I don't know that people will really follow it because they don't want to have to watch the entire video to be able to do their work. So video is great for the first pass. After that, some sort of text version is good, like what Loom's doing automatically now. But what I think is actually even better is something like what scribe does, where it creates screenshots of every step in the process and you can change the labels and the text to describe what's happening. I think that more like scribe visual approach is better for every single time somebody is going to go through the sop, except for the very first time where you get the video and you have somebody probably explaining more of the context around why you do it the way that you do it. So my SOP docs probably look like having a video at the top and then having, you know, a scribe or something like a scribe embedded just below that. That's kind of the best of both worlds video. And then step by step I can change a single step in the scribe if I need to. Like if the process changes, that's really easy to do where that's harder with video. I think that's probably my favorite version of an SOP right now with the runner up being a video with just like text bullet outlines. Now the bigger problem with SOPs beyond like the inside baseball of like, oh, what's the right format for an sop? The bigger problem is that most of them just haven't been willed into existence yet or they're wildly out of date. And it's like sitting your team down and saying we need SOPs and we need them to be up to date. And is not enough to get your team to make really good SOPs unless you've got a bunch of wildly organized on top of it folks working for you. And my experience to get people to invest in SOPs and ensure that that stuff was up to date. It has to somehow be part of the feedback loop of how they're incentivized, how their performance is measured. I've called this out several times now, but one thing Chad Davis shared on the podcast in the past is the notion of having like kind of these secret, secret shoppers that will go around and be respons doing A month end close once based on the SOP documentation. And so in any given month you don't know if one of your files is going to get pulled. And so it's up to you to ensure that those SOPs are always up to date so that they can do that close without your input. And then as part of the year end or quarterly or whatever that review cycle is, their ability to complete those month end closes based on your SOPs is factored into your performance. And you hear that and you're like, oh dang, that's really, that's like so smart. Is an example of a system solving for the problem of human beings just not being great about staying on top of SOPs. It's always like the first thing to fall off the list, right? Of all the priorities. It always gets kind of deprioritized. And maybe it's a product of capacity and us not giving our team members enough time to do everything that it takes to keep a file in proper shape. But there has to be a built in feedback loop there to ensure that they're not only creating those SOPs, but they're refreshing them on an ongoing basis. Any SOP is better than no SOP. So even if it isn't in the perfect format or if there isn't a video or something like that, anything's better than nothing. I would say the, the biggest enemy that most of us deal with is just not having that SOP to begin with. And frankly, compared to, I mean I had some days, I had some weeks where I was the guy chopping together that thing in like a word file where you're typing text and taking screenshots and then it all gets printed out and put in a binder somewhere. And then who knows where that word file ever went. And then, oh, I'd done this before. And then somebody has to change something. And you scan a page out of that three ring binder and then you like mask, you put like a white box over the. That's changing and then put that scan into a new word file and move things around. Don't try to shame me, okay? That was just how we did things back in the day. That was process the binder. The binder knew all. And that funny, the notion of like running and running an entire accounting firm according to what a three ring binder tells you. That's the, I mean the reality is that stuff still exists. There's a lot of people that are listening to this right now saying get the H off my lawn. I love my three Ring binder. And you know what? More power to you, man. As we were just saying, any process is better than no process. This episode it is sponsored in part by liveflow. Liveflow 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 pnl, 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. LifeFlow 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 LifeFlow. Check out the link in the show notes. Today's episode sponsored 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 it 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. And they're running a big fat sale right now. Use the link in the show notes, you 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 going to do the work before the due date. Right. That's probably my favorite thing about ookoo. 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. Okay. Managing by exceptions. This came up a couple weeks ago. We talked about like setting a standard expected turnaround time for clients in your firm. Like when a client reaches out to somebody, they should know what the normal response time ought to be. Whether it's you, whether it's a member of your team, why those expected response times should not be the same. And how if you are as accessible as everybody else in your business, how can we expect clients to go to anybody but you? Right? They're just always going to go to you if you're the one that's most available. And so we got a comment. Do you really want a client to wait four days for an email response from you when they have a major opportunity, like selling a business? So client's got a situation where like they're down to the wire, got some urgent stuff going down. Are you really going to make that person wait four days? And the answer is a resounding no. You shouldn't, like, you ought to like, try to make yourself available for them so that you can help them work through this. But here's the thing is that is not a reason to not make the standard, you know, less than four days, right? That isn't a reason to make the standard more urgent. Because if we look at all the different places in our business where these exceptions come up and these urgent things come up, if we built every single system to handle the most out, like the biggest outlier scenarios, that system becomes inherently wasteful, right? Because even if we say like, yeah, no, no, four days is unreasonable, well then we think of a scenario where it's like, well, what about this situation where two days is unreasonable? What about this situation where they got to run a termination payroll same day so everybody needs to be available all day, every day. The solution here is not changing every single system to handle the exception. The solution is to have a system for the exceptions. So for example, if I'm the big boss and I'm the hardest one to get a hold of, and let's say there's like a week long expected turnaround time, which is pretty long, how would we handle an exception like this? Honestly, for me, it would be as simple as the person that was helping me gatekeep, I'm going to loop them in and say, hey, Jim's in the process of selling a business business. If he calls, let him through. Or if he's got to get on a thing like give him my urgent scheduling link or something like that, right? So like, let's just create a way to handle the exceptions rather than building our entire firm around the fact that there will be outliers and there's a hundred examples of this and all sorts of different things. Change management, you know, is, is a big one. Somebody's looking at going to, you know, an online proposal tool and they're like, well, what about the 15 clients we have that don't use a computer? And that can oftentimes be a rationale for not making the change at all when that change might be better for 95% of the client base and most importantly, maybe better for that next great client that you want to attract. And I spent, I probably spent a decade in a firm up against this, as I'm sure many of you have, where you're the, you're the idea guy, the idea person, and you're like, oh man, we got to do this, we got to do that, and these clients will love it. And there's always one partner that's like, yeah, but what about, about Tom and Tina and Steve and Janice? They're not going to, this isn't going to work for them. And what you end up with is this business is perpetually hamstrung by your like Luddite laggard. And I say, I say let it layered because oftentimes it's, it's, in my case it's like tech related, but you're hamstrung by these outlier folks who can't work in the new system. And when we were talking about moving to scheduled work last week, what I love is that everybody we talked with pretty much called out that like, not everybody's going to fit into this model perfectly and we're totally cool accommodating. Like the fact that I'm still going to have clients who only pay things with paper check because they don't know how to use a computer or something like that. The fact I've got a few of those clients doesn't mean I shouldn't make the change and doesn't mean I need to kick those clients to the curb. The reality is we can work with those people, but they're the exception. And for me, it was actually a really big unlock once I'd gotten my head around the fact that I'm like, oh no, everything I do doesn't have to work for everybody because there is no such thing. Like, nothing that you do will work great for everybody. And so it's okay to, to build a process for the exceptions for urgent stuff. For example, we did bill pay for a whole bunch of people. And every engagement we agreed to how frequently our team would be processing bills, but inevitably something urgent would come up. Right? You've got, you know, somebody misplaced the water bill and all of a sudden we got to pay this thing like right away. Is that a reason to have people on the clock, around the clock, monitoring for bills to come through, it isn't. So what we had was an urgent channel where we had an agreed upon expectation of how frequently we would do this thing. And if anything came up where that wasn't going to be frequent enough, it was up to the client to put it in the urgent channel. We had a process for this. And anytime something hit the urgent channel, the appropriate people would be pinged immediately to go out and process that thing. Maybe the most like, painful, glaring example of this for most of Us is the old inbox. The old email inbox. That's right. I'm coming for you. Roll up the. Roll up the sleeves. Get the gloves out. Look into my eyes. Why is your email inbox open all day? That outlook, that Gmail, Why is it just hanging out on that seventh monitor? Is it because something urgent might come in and you don't want to miss it? Okay, I've gone too far. Your feelings are hurt, but you know what I mean, right? Monitoring an inbox all day is like the hat wearing a hat of inefficiency. You're going to make yourself less efficient by having this thing perpetually up distracting you in the event that something might come in that is urgent. And so for me, like, as I've shared before, my process was I've got a person that monitors my inbox for me and they're going to let me know if anything's urgent so that I'm totally good just doing email once a day and then closing it and not having it up and distracting me the entire day. Good example of not letting the exception manage the entire process. Right. And many of these things ought to help get you back to a place of calm and of. Of being able to plan better and have control over your own time and your own attention, especially if you're the big boss. Like, the reality is a really nice part of this is we can hire people to help us with that. You can have the people whose job it is to be the firefighter, to be on call, to be hyper available so that you can then, like, focus on. On deep work and the stuff that's energizing for you, that you enjoy doing. Most that got too personal. Jason, that got. Okay, you took it too far for a Friday. You know what I'm getting at? Just look out for those exceptions and not letting them dictate the entire thing. Okay. Sheila Paulus dropped an absolute bomb in the comments of the the podcast episode. That was like a round of about a roundup of a bunch of cool tools. Sheila said, I can't live without my quote, a ruler for Windows app. And I went to this website. It is incredible. It is exactly what you think it is. It's a ruler that you just put on your screen that moves all around. You can spin it. You can just leave it straight and horizontal to, like, help you track, like, reading long bits of text. You can have multiple rulers. You could put custom skins on your rulers. To be clear, these aren't like physical rulers. It's like an image of a ruler that's just on top of all of your Windows on your computer. It's free too. I love this. This is so cool. This. I don't know, there's something like really, really cool and like analog about this app. A ruler for Windows and like all great things. 80% of people hearing this are like, why would I ever use that? 20% of people just pulled over the car on the highway and are going to be late to drop off because they got to get their laptop out and install this right now. A ruler for Windows. Pretty cool. Okay, I want to share this with you. I shared on social media. It is a clip from a stand up set, a stand up comedy set that just felt like it hit a little too close to home for accountants. I'll play this for you here.

Smartphone images. Don't get me started. Here are pages 1, 3, 5 and 7. An image file type you've never seen in your life. At HEIC just sent you the parts of the doc that you needed to see.

That just hurts, right? Hits pretty close to home, huh? Wanna know something wild? That whole audio clip was made with AI. In fact, I'm gonna play that for you again now that you know that here it is again. Because it's almost more amazing when you.

Know that smartphone images. Don't get me started. Here are pages 1, 3, 5 and 7. An image file type you've never seen in your life. Just sent you the parts of the doc that you needed to see.

Isn't that wild? I mean the sound of the room and the sound of like the chuckles in the background, that just blows my mind. I put it on social media and a bunch of people were like, haha, that's funny. Nobody commented about it being AI. Honestly, it didn't even really matter that it was AI. It's just wild how true to life that was. And I was in London a few weeks back where I did a talk on AI and a lady after that AI talk I saw was later sharing on LinkedIn that she was using one of the tools I referenced in that talk to create videos of herself, to generate videos of herself saying, delivering a whole bunch of like technical subject matter. So the tool she was using was called hey Gen H E Y Gen. It's a tool that I use maybe six months ago to like create a visual clone of myself. That was really convincing. My wife couldn't tell the difference between the real one and the fake one. Justine Bateman retweeted me and I got the whole I got super AI canceled by a bunch of creative people. But the tool is called Heygen. And what this lady was doing specifically was they had a whole bunch of, like, written content of guidance for either specific clients or on, like, a high volume of very specific things where they wanted these short little videos. And she is not super comfortable getting on video. And it's not always realistic for you to get into hair and makeup and get all. Get everything all set up the way you need it and be looking, you know, tippy top. Some of us just get out of bed and it's this way. But that's not everybody. That's a lie. I just spent two hours in a makeup chair. But she's using hey, Jen to generate videos of herself saying this thing and me not knowing this lady. They looked. I mean, they looked like videos of a person saying those things. I genuinely don't think that her clients will know that it is a AI visual. And the way that that tool works specifically is. Is you give it footage, like, you know, the video of me doing this podcast, for example. You give it footage like that, but then you give it text or you give it audio, and it creates a video that will go with that. You know, basically does the lip sync of them saying that thing, and it moves you around and you do little gestures and all that. So her process was, we have all these documents, all this written stuff already. I'm going to record myself saying all of these things and then let the tool create a video of me saying those things, and then we distribute those videos to our clients. And the interesting thing here is just that I think we don't really know what to feel in regards to that. Right? Like, we don't. Like, I think we're all kind of torn. Like, boy, that's a cool, like, mega high leverage thing. The notion of doing that on a massive scale. But then you're like, is that wrong? Like, should I disclose it was made with AI? Are people going to be bent out of shape if they found out? Does it make it worse if it, like, is secretive? Or does that even matter? Like, is it ultimately just. Was it helpful or not? Is that all that matters? This episode is sponsored in part 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 Guru is 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 gonna understand your needs. Same way that Tech Guru does. Right? You think about all the other accounting firms. Tech Guru is 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 because 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. So Team up helps you hire staff directly. No middleman. You work directly with your new hire in the Philippines. Hire the person, not the company. Guys, gals, gang. Here's just a few reasons to hire directly. You have access to higher level talent. Makes sense. You have complete control over team culture and training. They keep 100% of what you pay them and it's a lot more affordable for you. So you can retain your team for the long term. Team up could source accountants with experience working at US or Australian firm. Firms familiar with tools like zero, 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. And there's so many examples of this. Another Honestly, really big one Matthew Patrick shared this on LinkedIn and actually chatted with him about this at, at PASBA last week. They're experimenting with this tool called Air AI. AIR AI. And it is a AI phone rep that's like really, really compelling and really hard to tell whether it actually is AI or not. And so I asked them what they were using it for and they said they're still just kind of doing some testing right now around like event follow ups and info gathering. But the thing is like man, it's this tool area like it is, I mean very nearly indistinguishable from an actual human operator. And they've got a whole bunch of examples of, of calls where folks didn't even realize it. And we're coming into this like wearing our thinking cap of like is this real or not? The reality is the average person answering a call, they're probably, maybe these days they suspect it a bit because we do get a lot of robocalls, but they're not going to be as they're going to, they're not going to place as much scrutiny on it as we would. Right. And so is this a good thing or is this a bad thing? Should we be shying away from this stuff? Because ultimately this is what differentiates us from, you know, the productized solutions, like the large scale stuff. Interestingly, I think, I think what is normalized is a moving target over time. And one example is just client portals. The whole like asking a person to log in or passwordless also like just magic link, click through the email. But the whole narrative around portals seems like for a long time it was, well, my people don't want yet another place to go and have to remember how to log into it. It's like, is that, is that really realistic anymore? Because literally every service we use, every single thing we have is associated with a login. So is it fair that you know, a professional services firm shouldn't have the same and lean into the benefits of the same? And at one point it was like, well this, this is like feels low touch, like it's not premium. But I think that ship is kind of turning where people value an element of self service and they're like, yeah, no, I can understand how you would waste your entire day just following up with people if you didn't have software doing that for you. And so that whole how you exchange information or request stuff from clients, I think that tide is turning a bit where it's becoming normalized and it's not feeling like a discounted thing or something. Like that. And in the very near future, I mean, there's a huge percentage of our, of our emails that are going to be written by AI, even emails that can, you know, automatically reply and maybe even attach the document that the person's requesting or something like that. Obviously, loads of privacy things to figure out there before you could totally cut it loose. But if you, if you follow the email thing through to the ultimate conclusion of, well, my email assistant is just going to email their AI email assistant, and then they just go back and forth and it's like, what's the point of all this stuff? The reality is, if I've got an, like an email assistant that can email somebody else's email assistant and that thing immediately gets me what I need and returns it to me, that's a win. That's actually great. Again, privacy stuff to figure out there. How do you set the boundaries and all that. But that's actually a good thing where people will appreciate that I just made our life easier there. And so I think, honestly, a lot of this is going to be dictated by what becomes normalized. Like, what is, what are people's perception of this sort of thing. Because if you're standing up a firm that's supposed to be like white glove, like kind of a premium thing, nobody wants to, like, be kind of thrown through this super automated process. I've always thought that, like, you know, the touch points and the interactions, kicking off a project, delivering a project, that stuff is important, that it remains human. But basically everything in the middle there, I'm happy to automate, but I can't ultimately, like, lose total touch of that sort of human connection there. And maybe that's the golden rule here. You know, when you're starting something, when you're delivering something like that, like, you need to be looking into each other's eyes one way or another. But it'll be really interesting to see what becomes normal. I've also seen some more firms testing an AI assistant on their landing page for lead gen. In fact, I talked with, I've talked with a couple marketing agencies now that are helping firms set this up. Not unlike what we've talked about here, where we've got AI Jason now that's trained on all the past episodes of the podcast. And AI Jason is, is not as good as me in terms of an absolute answer, but is way better than me on availability, on stamina, on the fact that it can be having 100 conversations with different people at the same time. And it's a great example of one of Those things where it's like, yeah, this seems useful, but it's sure kind of weird right now. Like Delphi, the company that I use to create my sort of AI clone, their whole business model is built on people being able to charge for access to these chat bots and then they take a commission based on that. And frankly, to me, right now, paying for access to a chat bot that is a likeness of somebody else feels really icky right now. Maybe that'll change over time, but right now that just seems really weird. I can't think of anybody in my life that I would do that for where I would pay for access to some version of their expertise. If it's like searching across their knowledge base, something like that, that could be helpful. But as more firms are putting this stuff on their website, it's going to be really fascinating to see what the perception of it is, how we toe the line between doing really cool, progressive stuff without like losing touch of the human relationship. And the worst case scenario, like doing things the same way as these very productized high volume firms where you then get lumped in with these people that are like, setting the floor of the market on pricing and all of that. Like, we can't go whole hog on automating and getting out of touch with the actual people because then you just end up like these volume firms. And it's virtually impossible to make money when you're doing, you know, $250 a month bookkeeping projects. So it'd be fascinating to see like, which aspects of this become normal. The whole, like making videos of yourself saying stuff, honestly, like the tech is already there right now to where, honestly 95% of people will not realize that it wasn't you that sat there saying that thing. And so it honestly might be to the point where that's useful, where you've got like interesting applications for that. There's a lot of things that I do. Like if I think about this podcast now we chop up these things into shorts and put them on social media. I could train an AI on me. The visual of me sitting here in this chair today wearing a blue shirt, talking about stuff. And honestly, we could probably come back and run all sorts of stuff through this AI version of me's mouth and post these clips to social. And the vast majority of people, I don't think will realize that it's not me actually saying that thing. But today we're so fixated on what's real and what's not real that I don't know yet that it matters, right? If you are stealing someone else's likeness and doing things with it, obviously that is bad. That's problematic if you're doing it with your own likeness. Today, I'd argue we're still so fixated on is that right or wrong and will they tell if it's real or not that we're almost not even considering. Like, is it useful? Did it just save somebody some time? Like, will they appreciate that we sent them that thing or not? I don't know, man. It's like a whole new category of tech and we're just like, still figuring out what's in bounds and what's not in bounds. For myself, I'm extremely, just very, very cautious with this stuff. Everybody always makes jokes about, like, oh, this was he's actually an AI. Is he even real? And the reality is I like, virtually never do AI stuff. Like, I don't really use it for writing. And anytime that I do, I'm generally sharing it, unless it's like a very innocent sort of thing, like this, you know, little stand up thing, that sort of thing. But I'd be lying if I didn't think it changes the future of content creation. You know, the notion of how you make videos and helpful things for people. We talked about Ryan Lozanis and his podcast. Literally using an AI voice generator for his voice talking on the podcast. Is it as good as the real deal? Like, maybe not, but people are still listening to the pod, so it doesn't matter. And should that impact even how you develop your podcast if you did one? Interesting times. We're definitely ahead of the curve here. And the folks tuning into this podcast, we are definitely like, you know, ahead of the curve in the accounting space. And so we kind of have to be mindful of that. The fact that we're in a little bit of a bubble where folks are going to be more accepting of this than the average person out there. But fascinating to think about how, like, if one of these things lands, say AI phone calls or the, the AI chat bots that are based on your expertise, if one of these things lands and becomes normal, like, it completely changes the model for how you run an accounting firm, for the services that you can sell, for how you gather information from people, like, it changes a lot. The big question is, like, what's going to become normal and what are people going to be comfortable with? Thanks for coming and hanging this week. You got questions, drop them in the comments. Q and A Friday is my highlight of the week. Every single week. Those questions you share. Genuinely like, help so many people. So keep them coming. I'll see you next week.