252 Running A Firm AND Staying Married!

Imagine successfully running a firm and maintaining your personal relationships.

Is that even possible in this economy? I'm chatting today with my buddy Michael, who once laid out like the smartest, most well thought out approach to managing the ongoing negotiation of what it looks.

Like to be an entrepreneur without like shelving the family and your partner and just like setting expectations there in a healthy way.

Because if you are an accountant and subject to tax times of extreme work, you're not the only one that impacts buddy.

Okay.

And that's what we're talking through today. Michael's got kind of a framework he's.

Settled into that I thought was just really smart.

So come on in.

Hope you enjoy. Michael. Michael Myhouse. Thanks for being here. You want to give people like the 30 second intro if they haven't met you before.

Yeah. So I started in public accounting because I grew up poor and I wanted a stable career.

Is that literally it. It was one of those like, oh, accountants, I'll always have a job.

I kid you not. That was the words I said in my head. I started out as a management business major and I had this breakthrough moment of nobody's going to hire a 22 year old manager for anything. Yeah. So then I literally switched to accounting and I said, they've got jobs. I know they're going to have jobs. And it's my bailout. I'll always have an employable skill for bailing out. And that was my literal logic as a, you know, whatever. I was at the point 18 year old, 20 year old made that decision. So I did that. I started at a, like a mid tier regional firm, stayed there for 10 years, accidentally started doing retirement plan audits during the summer, ended up taking over the practice. I saw an opportunity that I think was being taken advantage of. So I left two years ago, started firm and that's where I'm at now on the Internet. Yeah.

You're kind of like running the perfect shop in my mind. So you just do EBP audits, right?

Yeah.

Which nobody seems to want to do.

Nobody. Firms give. Like most of my work comes from firms because they want a friendly referral relationship. Oh my gosh. They don't, they don't want people who could potentially steal other client relationships. Meaning, oh, they'll get the 401k audit and then they'll also do the contract CFO work or their tax work. I don't do anything that. And they have no desire to do any of that. So they're. I'm a safe partner. Yeah. I'm a Safe space for them.

What's your team look like these days? Is it just you?

No, I have a part time, more technical person that I just do on a highly paid hourly basis and then a full time admin, which really helps.

Okay, what does a. I mean, because itty bitty firms usually shy away from all forms of audit. What does a typical engagement fee look like? Like the annual cadence of what you do for a client.

Yeah, so it's one off as part of like an annual compliance package. So the majority of my work gets concentrated from May to October, but I can smooth that out a little bit. I have some off year end plans, meaning anyone that's not a 1231 retirement plan, which most of them should be. It's easier. You align with payroll. I have some of Those that are six 30s. I have some that are in February, some September. But the majority of the work gets done for my calendar year ends from May to, to October. And they're high ticket, which is what I love about this structure. And so my average fee is probably like 11 to $13,000 per audit.

Oh, bless your heart. What a great firm. Do you like shout this from the mountaintops or are you like, man, I got a good thing going here.

That's what I love about it. Yeah. So I've met four other people running really similar shops and there's just an enormous amount of camaraderie because there's so much work to do. There's no like hoarding competition. There's no, you know, I, me, me, me, I got to keep all this stuff because I think there 85,000 of these audits out there annually. And you need to do maybe 30 to have a pretty good living in most places in the United states. You know, 50 or 60 if you want to be really ambitious or you're trying to buy a house someday in California. But other than that. Yeah, we're just all friends because most of the people I know who started are full in two years. Their firm's the size they want it to be in, in one to three years. Wow.

And so if anybody's listening to this and going, that sounds interesting. Where did your initials initial connections came from, come from for referrals? Was that past firms you worked for?

That's part of it, yeah. So that really helps. It honestly came from understanding an approach to marketing. Instead. I learned how to do business development kind of peripherally from the partner that hired me. He did contracting. He did a niche only for contractors. So construction contractors, typically large public works construction contractors. And the unique piece about that is when you want to go bid a $10 million freeway project or some sort of military housing project, you need to have a performance bond, meaning you go bankrupt or you don't manage the project well, the bonding company will come in as insurance to make sure the job gets done. And in order to get bonding insurance, you need to have a reviewed financial statement. So who's going to be the first person that knows that your client needs a reviewed financial statement? It's probably a bonding agent who's going to be helping out to underwrite that policy. So they'll find firms that they enjoy working with. They'll have financial statements that look the way they want, that have the disclosures, they're looking for detail. They, they know their quality is good. And then they would refer a ton of work. So I just took that mentality in my firm of who's the first person to know that this benefit plan may need an audit and how do I connect with those people and meet their needs?

Essentially, yeah, who is that? Is it a firm that they're working with or somebody else?

Yeah, it can be that. So it can be the traditional firm. So I, if I go to a tax only person, for example, and they have a client and they know that I won't compete with him, that would be a good example. My best has been investment advisors. Because an investment advisor is typically serving a plan that values higher levels of service, they want somebody to help them. They're really concerned with compliance and often they want to partner with people who can do or provide that higher level of service too for the audit. So what that looks like is they'll help the client establish the plan and as part of an investment review, they'll say, oh, our participants are now over that threshold. And they'll say, I know somebody that can help. Or they'll typically, because the investment advisors have to have fiduciary duties, they'll include you as part of a three, maybe a three group bid package. But I always at least have that. And then other times they've been, hey, we've gotten two bids and they're both 20k. Can you beat that? And it's like, absolutely. So. So a lot of the times that's how it comes in. Third party administrators, very common, direct wholesalers. So Empower has direct sales salespeople, adpf, direct salespeople, Transameric, all the big shops. So you make friends with everyone. But that's honestly the hardest part to explain about business development and maybe why people don't ever say it as clearly is it's a lot of luck. And what I mean by that is exactly this. My biggest referral source came down this very convoluted pathway. I did a little content thing with a Transamerica salesperson. It was a little LinkedIn Live where we answered questions asked the auditor. I think we had 12 people concurrent on the session. Tiny. Maybe like 80 views post live session. In all 80 views. I met one investment advisor from that who introduced me to three or four people at his firm. And they've been a massive source of referrals from this. And so something that felt like, oh, if you're going for mad numbers, or I want to be some sort of content God, you know, 11 concurrent is not doing it. And at the same time, it ended up being the most probably lucrative contact I've ever had for my firm.

That's crazy, man. That's a wild thing about the Internet is we get so caught up on, like, not doing numbers, but you never know who's watching. And that random person that stumbles into it. That's cool.

Yeah, you only need one or two hits, so volume helps. If you're getting 2 million eyeballs on your content, that definitely helps, but you don't need that many at all.

Okay, well, forget about all that, because what we want to talk about today is family stuff.

Exactly.

You, like me, have a family of your own.

11.

Okay, so this was like 15 months ago. Now, more than that, in my account community, somebody shared just kind of some very real, like, vulnerable tax season, busy season. How do I maintain my marriage? Like, work out a balanced negotiation when the job is demanding. And you swooped in with, like, the most thoughtful framework for this that I've ever seen. And in my head I'm like, wow, Michael's put a lot of thought into this. He's probably got this hanging up on the wall in his house. But evidently this was just like a 2am brain dump of all the things you've done wrong.

Well, I've thought about it a lot, but this is the first time I put it into two words. And I think we discussed this before, is that sometimes I just have a moment where my brain says, I'm going to present you something, and it's going to be in finished form, and it's going to happen all at once. And the rest of the time, I'm going to be totally adding, and you're not gonna get anything done, but in those rare occasions, you're gonna get something good.

Dude, I can relate to that.

Today's episode is sponsored in part by LifeFlow.

Let's talk about consolidations and how every accounting platform short of like mid market ones that have built in consolidation stuff.

Every accounting platform seems to make this.

Harder than it needs to be. QuickBooks Online hello.

Do you know that I actually run a whole bunch of companies in QuickBooks Online and often needs to report them together. Do you know this gang? Super easy way to do this roll up live flow. They got this super cool like built in consolidation support where you can roll up companies whether they have the same.

Chart of accounts or not. We actually did a five minute demo day of this on my main channel. If you haven't seen this yet, it's pretty cool.

It's like the most simple visual approach.

To consolidations I've probably ever seen. You can theoretically roll up like an.

Infinite number of companies, which means you.

Can also do things that are actually kind of consolidations in disguise, like benchmarking, like monitoring a whole bunch of my clients books all in one place. All the clients that you have, you know, QuickBooks access to. Imagine seeing all those things actually side by side live updating where at any point in time you could hop in and see related or unrelated clients books in a single place. That's actually like a function of consolidations. I would never ship those financials off to somebody, but that might be very helpful for my firm. I know my practice. We did a bunch of like group like 20 plus company things and the consolidation was so hairy that we would just do that reporting very infrequently. Whereas getting this set up with Live Flow, you set it up once and it actually will continue live updating, even adding columns into the future, for future months. So you set it up once and you can pull that consolidation anytime.

Pretty cool. Would have changed how we did consolidated.

Reportings in my firm for sure. Learn more about that one. Check out the link in the show notes.

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Okay. This, it has sections and subsections. I'm just gonna cruise through this. So five bullet points here on discussing expectations. This is like so practical. In fact, can I just. Can I put the text of this in the show notes? Do you mind if I do that?

Absolutely, yeah, go for it.

Okay. So first and foremost, it says discuss expectations. Number one, how many hours, slash night, slash weekends do you think is sustainable to work? Come with a number and ask her insight in this context. I think it was a. I think it was a guy talking about his relationship with his wife.

Could be your partner, whoever it is, husband and wife. So of course there'll be very different relationships for everyone here. So. Right. This is just the original context was husband or wife.

Yeah. So how many hours, nights, weekends do you think is sustainable? Come with a number and ask their insight or perspective. So basically start with like. And I think the context here was going into busy season. Start with what I think my plan will be and then that's like the kind of the first offer that you slide across the table.

Yeah. Buy in. Ultimately, if you're a partner or spouse to someone in the accounting profession, you understand or you should after a couple of them, that things can get hectic for portions of the year. And good partners, I think, recognize that and will allow for it. I remember reading a book about marriage. That said, it's okay for things to be crazy. It's just not okay for things to be crazy all the time. And so how do you manage that expectation of. Here's the period where things might go crazy. Here's when that's going to end, and what's it going to look like in between that?

Is this something that you revisit? Like, in your case? Like, do you circle back to this? Or is it like a stuff isn't right right now, let's sit down and do this.

I would hope you could prevent it. And I think proactiveness will get you the best results. But you could always have the partner just have the permission to do that too, say, hey, sit me down after, After I've eaten dinner. So I'm okay. I cooled off from the day. Right. Not angry and just use these words or use these phrases. Emily and I, so Emily is my wife. We. We've talked about that before. Sometimes I have been accused of being defensive at times, and so. Which is very true. I. I'll tell her, hey, use this phrase.

Cause I'll just the way you. Just the way you said that makes me think that you are defensive.

Yeah, I'm so defensive. And so I told her, use these phrases to get past the defensiveness. I was like, these trigger words. My brain remembers trigger words really well. So use this phrase. I'll remember, hey, this means I have to listen and not immediately start debating you, because I did. I did speech and debate. So that's the other part of the defensiveness is it's, it's just trained into me. So. Bless her. Poor thing.

Yeah, we never had, like a standing, like, cadence to review this stuff, which probably, in fact, we should probably still do now. I like to tease my wife that I'll bring things up in our next quarterly review, like okrs and stuff like that.

Who's reviewing who? Right?

No, that's the joke. But we almost. It would almost be good to have like an annual summit, an on site for. For you. For you and the partner to kind of like have a space to hash this stuff out. Okay, second thing you had listed here. Discuss distribution of household responsibilities. Oh, boy, I've gotten burned here. Oh, my wife doesn't listen to this.

There's research out there that couples mutually.

Agreeing on who is responsible for what is most important or for what is more important than perfectly fair. 50. 50. So you're not trying to get to 50. 50. You're trying to get to something that.

I don't know, feels fair 100%. And it's more just having agreed to it. So it might be okay if one spouse never ever washes the dishes, for example. And it might be okay if somebody says, oh, I love doing laundry. That's just always going to be my thing. It's cathartic for me to sit there and fold and watch a TV show. And so I don't think it's about straight up equality because there's periods of time where stay at home person or the working person is going to have more like harder times. And so it's just figure out the cadence and agree on it and that that can change. You know, our life substantially changed between kid one and two. And so cadence absolutely changed, especially in the early period of having the infant versus when they're more self sufficient.

I find you also come into a marriage specifically on household responsibilities with wildly different norms. Like my wife's father. We're going deep on this one now. My wife's father was like not engaged in just about anything, but he always took the garbage out for some reason. And my wife was like, buddy, women don't take the garbage out. And I'm like, hang on, I haven't heard this before. And my dad wasn't really involved either, but like my mom did everything. And that was one of those things where it was like, no, you just, like, you just kind of a jerk if you don't do that. And like, had we not sat down and had that conversation, I'm like, wow, we like, I never would have processed all of this that way.

And it's subtle because if you don't verbalize those things, what's happening in the back of your head is, oh, you're not living up to what man should do. You're not living up to what a woman should do. And it could be totally nonsensical because what a man or a woman does in a relationship, for example, with me and Emily could vary differently from our families of origin. But it's. You have those expectations built in and you need to define as partners what's the new normal. It could be I want to model what our parents did. It could be I want to radically overthrow what our parents did. All that's fine. There's no right or wrong. It's just, what do you agree with? Because I agree my everything about my wife's upbringing, we just had very different upbringing. So we've had to talk about everything. Not just domestic stuff. It's just like, oh, how do vacations look like holidays? Having child Rearing all this. And it's helpful the more you talk about it. Like, wait, let's lay out the ground rules. Okay, we got, we got to go deep into the lore here. Tell me about your childhood experience of this vacations.

That is a great one. I feel like everybody's childhood vacations were wildly different. There's a great podcast, Seth Meyers, the late night host guy, him and his brother do a podcast, family trips with the Myers brothers, where they just have celebrities on and they ask them about their childhood trips. And my favorite is just like hearing all of the different ways that the fathers just lose their mind at some point.

I feel that deeply and I feel like there's so many experiences you start to feel deeply once you have kids. But there's just a point where you're like, I've loaded the stupid car. I'm driving this traffic. I paid for the stupid hotel. And just every then you finally snap, you hold it together and then it's just like one cup of grape juice on the floor and you're. You lose it.

Number three, discuss expectations of family time and couple time during the period, how many dates, family outings, dinners, et cetera, to stay connected. Do you still have that as like a. Do you have like a standing expectation of that?

This was really helpful. And it's a humongous shout out to her in laws and my parents are great too, but her in laws come over or watch the kids every Monday. They call it mental health Mondays because it's a good day for them. And so we flip flop between. We have like a life group through our church and then we also have date night. So we'll alternate. We do one week, we do the life group and then one week we'll go out and do a date night out somewhere, which has been awesome. We've loved that there have been periods where we didn't do that. And I also want to totally recognize that not everyone has family available to help. It can get really expensive to do, to do childcare. So we are incredibly blessed in that sense.

So number four, discuss how you will course correct when things get off track. Accountability from another firm owner, from another friend, another mentor. So that's like you having someone external, not your partner, to hold you accountable.

Yeah, both could probably work. I think sometimes when you have a partner referee you, it makes weird dynamics happen. I think if you're like, I'm now your parent, I have to tell you to work less or clean up your dishes. It just doesn't feel good. So if you can have external accountability. Why not? It could be as simple as like, hey, I'm going to use this time tracking software. I think Logan tweets about that a lot. Use that and then just have a report hit your inbox that says oops, you went over the time. It could be that easy that, you know, robots keep you accountable.

Number five, write everything down and track your metrics from above. During busy season, I struggle with like making a KPI dashboard out of my marriage. Like that's. My mind always goes to that thing and my wife is not wired that way. And I, it's. That's great. I like, I'm glad she's not wired that way. But I do sometimes struggle with like how do I balance the way that my brain tracks things versus what is not spreadsheetable?

No. That's so hard. Clint. I think it's Fiore, the business guy on. He sells businesses on Twitter. Business broker. He has an amazing, I think he calls it like his year in review. And he tracks all these KPIs because you're right, you can go through the motions and go on a date and be on your phone or have your mind somewhere else or sit there with your kids but be worrying or just not present. But I think you can at least start with some numerical stuff. So he has some really interesting numerical stuff of date nights or one on ones with the kids or maybe I think things like weekends without the phone, various things like that. So it can be a good starting point. But if it's more just these are some high level things like for every morning I'm gonna spend a half hour playing with my kids and my phone's gonna be in my bedroom some. It could be as simple as that. I think you can go mega KPI or not.

You've got another section here. Look at the business with two bullet points. One, look honestly at your client list now. Now that you have an hours per week figure in mind. And then two, give your business a uh, the. The realized special. Raise prices, fire clients, hire more help, or do all three. If you're understaffed, proportional to the work you need to do, nothing else will be able to prevent a repeat of last busy season. So that's more like a kind of capacity planning. Is this realistic with the boundaries that we set?

Yeah. And it's hard, especially if you're a firm owner because things are directly tied to your bank account. And for me, for example, my jobs are mostly infinite margin. So it's very hard to look a bit in the face. And say, I don't want $10,000 more in my checking account. So that's the pull against what you're doing. And it's very hard to do or to fire clients, which means I'm now having negative, you know, thousand dollars per tax return in my bank account. I think the answer is you have to have something greater in mind when looking at these sorts of things. So you have to have a vision of what you want and you got to fit the business into that life vision of what you want. Because otherwise the business will always balloon, I think, to fill whatever space you give it.

It does.

So what is that box? Is that box A? Here's how much money we need to make. Is that box A? Here's how much time you're allowed to work. Like, what defines the boundaries of that box?

I think it's helpful. And this gets. It goes deep. Everything goes deep. That's what's so hard about these discussions. But I think it's good to sit down with your partner and say, what sort of lifestyle do we want? A simple example is if we want to live in the nicest neighborhoods, drive the nicest cars, go to the nicest schools, we can't say, oh, we're also going to work 10 hours a week and have like a low key job. I just, I think it's very hard to achieve those things. So I think step one is to figure out, hey, what lifestyle do we want with these trade offs? And then you say, okay, what financial income do we need to reasonably meet that? And that was the metric I did, is once you get to that point where it's, hey, here's our agreed upon lifestyle, here's some margin. Once you hit that number, I think you need to very carefully examine any expansion of the business or at least agree on it. That's how I would think about it. If you wanted to be overly simplistic, it's much more complicated than that. But if you're saying we need, you're in a high cost of living state. We need 200 grand to feel comfortable. And you're at 225. I think it's good to ask, do I need to bring on more business and grow exponentially after that point?

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I want to circle back to that. We've got one more, one more bullet point here that's like genius that I want to call out and then I want to circle back to that like boundaries and how they evolve. One other thing you had here that people are absolutely going to swipe from the show notes and just copy paste to their partners. You said buy back you, your wife, whoever it is, your partner's time. He said we have all, he said we have all the rule except for the chef. Without the chef. You put kind of a dollar price to what this is for you and says probably saves 50 hours a month. But you've got a list here of basically all the ways that you're buying back your partner's time twice a month, house cleaner twice a month, yard guy, pest control, instacra, instacart, doordash. You mentioned home chef. You've heard of people paying for someone to come once a week to cook meals for the week. Said it was about 150 to 200 bucks a week. And then he said if your wife is the primary caregiver for the kids, consider part time nanny during the week. If she works, consider additional help during late evening or early morning when you're working or on the weekends. Any other thoughts or ideas that's developed since then on ways that you can buy back time? I'm a big fan of that.

Yeah, we've talked about something where it's not necessarily even buying back time. It's going to be allowing reallocation of time. So my, we were talking about this beforehand is my wife decided to stay at home with the kids and so we've talked about potentially hiring. I think the term's like a mommy's helper. And so somebody would come in and just be an extra set of hands. Like when your baby's like throwing an entire plate of food on the floor and your toddler just hit their head and it's chaos and lunchtime and that time it's really nice to have a second set of hands. And so I work from home so thankfully I'm often able to go be that second set of hands. But on the days I'm not, it would be nice to have someone there just for a couple hours a day or maybe 10 hours a fold laundry. Hey, could you switch over that, go heat up a bottle. So that's one way where now my wife could spend more time with the kids as opposed to on administrative, just household things. In terms of buying back time, I only really do things the easy way is maybe what I mentioned and I told you I wanted to write a post about this. But for example, I only buy convenient parking at airports now. I don't do cheap lots like date night. We're valeting, it's going to cost 15, $20. But it just, you roll into a date night like not stressed out about trying to buy in downtown San Diego parking and it just feels way better and higher quality clothes or tools or anything that you just don't have to think about. Again, that's been really helpful. And I mentioned to you I grew up again, I want to be very careful. I'm Kevin. I had a house and I had food. So in so many respects, I was incredibly wealthy my entire life. From a US centric standpoint, I grew up relatively poor. And so I've had to rethink a lot of those mindsets as we go. So I used to like, this is a true story. I would sit there in costco for like 15 minutes. I'd like do a per dishwasher pod calculation of which one is most optimized price wise. And then you sit there and you say, wait, I buy one of these every six months. So if I say $2 every six months, I just spent 15 minutes of my time to do that. And so I just give myself a permission to not think about a lot of things that are very minor. $5 purchases, anything like that. It just really helps clear your mental space.

Well, I think most people listening to this are probably thinking, aren't the pods always more than the liquid soap?

They are the convenience. That's the best part too. I had those liquid soaps explode all over. They're messy. Like it dribbles down the thing. So that's the beauty again, you're. You're min. Maxing them. Maybe it's $0.02 more per dishwasher load. And if I want to go super crazy and do two dishwasher loads a.

Day or you put the, the hand dishwashing soap into the dishwasher and then just get the foam is shooting out of that thing. I was dating a girl in college and ruined part of their hardwood floors and their kitchen by doing that. They left the house and it just like pumped foam across the whole kitchen floor.

Yeah, that's just like a disaster comedy movie scenario. Was that the end of the relationship, the hardwood flooring.

It wasn't soon after that. I don't think it was related, but it was very much a Meet the Fockers type of situation. If we can, let's wrap up by doubling down on the first world world problems here. And this won't be relatable for everyone by any means. The struggle of, like, you set out to do this thing and you find success, and maybe you were even thinking ahead in the beginning, and you're like, here's what success is. Like, here's. Here's the financial lifestyle that we are kind of aspiring to. Here's where we want to get, but then you get there. What happens? What happens after that? What's next? Is it okay to raise the bar? Like, is. Are we missing the point? Why did we set the bar to begin with if we do?

Yeah, that's a tough one that deals with existential questions. And I think the short answer I would warn anyone about is, as soon as you get there, it will not be enough. Yeah. A simple example is that Emily and I are looking to buy a house at some point this year, and we're.

Like, frustrated, like, oh, all these houses.

Are just out of our price range. And I sat there like, wait a second. That's because we just increased what we wanted. At first. It was like, oh, we need this number of bedrooms. Like, whoa, it'd be so nice to have a pool. And, oh, we only want these neighborhoods. So you just have this mental creep. And so I'd say very carefully consider for what purpose you're going after things. And so I actually deleted Twitter off my phone because it's very hard for me. Objectively, things have been going well for my firm. I'm really excited where they're going. And going on Twitter just makes me feel like total failure because, like, oh, my gosh, I'm like, mid-30s. I have no house. I only have one business. There's been zero figure exits in my.

That's what you get from Twitter is.

It makes you feel like a failure.

I'm probably on the wrong algorithm. It's just like, the algorithm's like, let's beat down this dude. Yeah. No.

Wow.

And it all depends. Your brain, like, goes towards that is what it comes down to. But then I look at my life, and I have a guy that is just a good friend, and he's so wise. In three hours, I was just talking to him how I was feeling frustrated about, like, oh, I wish I would have gotten the crazy Covid housing Prices he said, michael, you're living a dream life. Like you control your work, you get time with your family, you live in a place you want to live. So if you thought about that way, like, nope, I was too busy complaining. And so he was just so helpful to point that out. So I think having a good idea of what you're doing and why is really helpful. And having goals outside of that non monetary is really helpful. Like I want to be involved with my kids more object, more specifically, I want my kids to want to be with me when they're adult and they don't have to be with me. And so a lot of what I do is oriented around that. So if it's this idea of like, oh, you could make slightly more money or you could be with your kids for the rest of their lives in an awesome relationship, like that helps to orient those questions.

Yeah, I was part of this was probably shaped by my upbringing and money was just, it was, you know, very central to the conversation to, you know, to the extent that mom would let me pick a cereal. But it had to be under, you know, X threshold. And it was like they were pretty regularly communicated, like just the kind of the constraints and so did you order cheap menus?

Cheap, cheapest menu items when you went to restaurants? Yeah.

Oh, for sure.

How long did that take you to break that?

Not as long as I would like to admit.

No, that's perfect. Hey, sooner than better. It's good. It's actually better.

My wife was completely the same way when we met. I had to talk her up from buying clothes at Target instead of Walmart. Like she was just blown away by it. But yeah, the, and it was something just like a, like a white shirt or something like that. And she's like, we're at Target. And she's like, no, I just saw the same thing in Walmart the other day. It's like a buck 50 cheaper. I'll just, I won't get this. And I'm like, you know what? I, I think we can, we can swing it. But no, it's probably a product of like how you're raised. And so you end up like success ends up being the, the yardstick is like, what was the constraint when you were a kid? How, how can you overcome that constraint? But I've found what's useful for me to kind of take my eye off the money ball is like you said, you just gotta have things that you aspire to do that aren't monetary. Which sounds incredibly obvious to say. But when we're like, entrepreneurially focused. So much of, like, my headspace is just always thinking work stuff, business stuff, what could we do different and better and all that, rather than, like, having the balance of service and like, all these different things that you can also aspire to do.

This was one of the. I'm. I hope I didn't steal this from somewhere. I probably didn't, but if I did, I'm sorry, I apologize. But I had this thought of, like, money is a tool. And I know I did steal that from somewhere. That's not unique. The next part is, hammers are great. There's like, rubber mounts for flooring, there's framing hammers, there's pneumatic hammers, there's all this stuff. But after a point, you've got enough hammers, and if somebody took you into their garage was like, hey, come see my tool collection. And they had like 8,000 hammers and that was the only thing that they had, you would be like, wow, this is insane. Like, you don't need that many hammers. You have plenty of hammers. And if they told you, I'm going to keep buying hammers because they're great, then we'd all be able to see that. And I feel like that's what money is is. Money is a tool. It's an awesome tool. It does help to a point, but after a point, there's just plenty. And so what do you actually care about after that?

Yeah, and the. Then the social media platform keeps telling you that you need to find more hammers.

Oh, yeah, they've got courses for hammers. You can drop ship hammers to other people.

Oh, that's awesome, Michael. Thank you for doing this. I'm gonna swipe this whole thing and stick it in the show notes. Where can people find you out in the wild?

So I'm on Twitter. That's place where I'm most active. And again, I have a million things I want to do. I have the camera equipment mostly set up. I would love to start a YouTube channel.

Oh, baby, now we're talking.

Yeah, but it's time. So Twitter is going to be where you're going to find me the most. If I. If you're between cycles of deleting it and cleansing my soul, then I'll be posting. So.

All right, cool. Thank you, Michael.

Thanks, Jason.

Wasn't that great, man?

Michael's one of those people where you.

Talk to him and you're like, oh.

You'Ve clearly thought about this a whole.

Lot more than I have. Let's just steal your ideas for how to do this. This was a tough one for me.

I had a bunch of kids while.

I was running my firm and starting to do kind of all this other stuff. The video stuff that I do now. Easier said than done, but some great takeaways there. I put the full text of the original write up that he did in the show notes. Highly recommend you check it out. There's something in there for just about anybody, and if you've stumbled into some.

Pearls of wisdom, either through a moment of transcendence or through getting egg on your face, please drop it in the.

Comments and you might just save somebody's marriage. I'm just saying.

That's it for today.

Thanks for coming and hanging.